Kristine Rusch - City of Ruins

The failsafe had been designed to prevent exactly this kind of problem: a ship, arriving in an empty base, could get trapped. If the anacapa didn’t work, and the corridors leading to the surface had collapsed, then the ship— and more important, its crew—wouldn’t be able to escape above ground.

The human failsafe was necessary because no one knew—even now, after generations of using the drives—how long an anacapa could survive without maintenance. There were some in the Fleet who believed that an anacapa drive would remain functional long after the human race had disappeared from the universe.

The human race hadn’t disappeared. The anacapa drive still worked. But something had happened in the repair area. Something bad.

“Should we go out there, see what went wrong?” Perkins asked.

No one answered her. She specialized in communication. She spoke fifteen languages fluently, another forty haphazardly, and had a gift for picking up new languages all the time. She wasn’t as good as Coop’s former wife, Mae, the Ivoire’ s senor linguist. But Mae had come back from her experience with the Quurzod damaged. As she healed, she worked on the communications systems, not on the bridge.

“We can’t go out there yet,” Coop said. “We need to know what we’re facing.”

“You think the base was attacked?” Dix asked.

“Possible,” Coop said. He didn’t want to reveal his suspicions any more than that. He wanted the bridge crew to explore all options. “Let’s figure out what’s going on here before we make any moves.”

“Sir?” Yash sounded strange.

He glanced at her.

She was pointing at an area on the wall screen. A woman walked toward the ship’s exterior. The woman was thin. She wore a form-fitting environmental suit of a type Coop had never seen before. She had cylinders attached to the belt on her hip and what looked like a knife hilt.

He could only get a glimpse of her angular face through her helmet.

As he watched, she reached out and put her gloved hand on the Ivoire ’s side.

“Is she the one who attacked us?” Perkins asked.

“We don’t know if the base was attacked,” Coop said.

“But it’s been abandoned,” Perkins said.

“There could be a variety of reasons for that.” This time, Dix answered her. But he didn’t elaborate and neither did Coop.

But Perkins wasn’t dumb. Just inexperienced. “So is that woman part of a repair crew?”

“I don’t think so,” Yash said. “I don’t recognize her suit.”

“It could be special hazmat suits from Venice City itself,” Anita said.

Perkins’s eyes opened wider. “Hazmat? So it’s toxic out there?”

Coop shrugged. “We don’t know anything yet. All we know is that we’re here, nothing is as it was when we left, and a woman is in the repair room. We don’t even know if it’s a woman we’ve met before. I can’t see her face clearly, can you?”

“No,” Dix said.

“But she’s human, right?” Perkins asked.

“What else would she be?” Yash asked with a touch of impatience. The Fleet, in all its travels, had never discovered an alien race, not as the Fleet defined it, anyway, which was a nonstandard, unexpected life-form of equal intelligence to humans.

“I don’t know,” Perkins said. “That woman looks weird.”

Perkins’s voice held an edge of panic. She’d felt responsible for the Quurzod disaster, even though the fault didn’t lie with the linguists. She had held up well during the fifteen days in that unrecognizable area of space, but she must have been clinging to the thought that everything would be fine when they reached Sector Base V.

And now everything wasn’t fine. It was enough to break a more experienced officer.

“When was the last time you slept, Kjersti?” Coop asked.

She looked at him sideways, understanding in her eyes. She knew that he had caught the beginnings of panic in her voice, knew that he was about to send her to her quarters.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Go rest,” he said.

“Sir—’”

“Kjersti,” he said. “Go rest.”

She straightened, recognizing the order. “Whom should I send to replace me?”

“No one,” he said. “Not just yet. I’ll send for you if we need anything.”

She nodded, thanked him, and left the bridge.

The others watched, knowing they were as tired, as worried, and maybe even as panicked. They just had more experience and knew how to push the emotions away.

“Are we getting any readings on the environment out there?” Coop asked. “Any idea at all why that woman is in an environmental suit?”

“Everything reads normal,” Yash said.

“But that stuff floating around her,” Anita said. “What’s that?”

Coop didn’t see floating material. The entire repair room looked dim to him. Clearly Anita saw something. But she was closer to the wall screen.

“Maybe that’s the hazardous material,” Dix said.

“We don’t know if it’s hazardous out there,” Coop said. “Perhaps the suit is just an excess of caution.”

“Why would she be cautious about a base underneath a mountain?” Dix asked.

“Tunnel collapse?” Anita said.

“Sometimes planets themselves create a hazardous environment. When they built Sector Base S, they encountered a series of methane pockets,” Yash said.

Everyone looked at her.

She shrugged.

“We had to study base building in training,” she said. “Sector Base S is a cautionary tale. We actually learned how to build without exposing anyone to underground surprises.”

“They weren’t building anything here,” Coop said.

“But a groundquake, a volcanic eruption, an explosion on the surface might hurt the integrity underground and cause something like Sector Base S encountered,” Yash said.

“Wouldn’t methane show up in the readings?” Anita asked.

“I’m not trusting anything we’re getting right now,” Yash said. “Some of the damage the Ivoire suffered is pretty subtle. We’ve only been focused on the major stuff. Once we look at everything, we might discover that some of the things we think are minor are more serious than we initially thought.”

Coop had a hunch all of the damage on the Ivoire was major. But he had been operating from that principle from the beginning. He had been relieved when the trip through foldspace to here hadn’t completely destroyed the Ivoire.

“Any way to hail that woman?” Dix asked.

Coop had just let his linguist go. He wasn’t going to try to contact strangers without a linguist on deck.

“See what readings you can get off the base’s equipment,” he said to Yash.

“I’ll do what I can,” she said. “A lot of the equipment is still inactive.”

“Inactive?” Coop said, startled. “Shouldn’t it be dormant?”

That was the customary thing to do in leaving a base. If the area was safe enough to leave the anacapa drive functional, then the equipment around it needed to function as well. It had to remain dormant so that the touch of a human being could bring the equipment up on a moment’s notice.

“Yes, it should be dormant,” Yash said. “But these things were shut off.”

“And the anacapa remained functional?”

She opened her hands in a how-should-I-know gesture. “Right now, nothing’s working like it should.”

“Is that because of a malfunction in the Ivoire?”

“Honestly, Coop,” she said, dispensing with the “sir” now that Perkins was gone, “I have no idea. I won’t know until I get out there and investigate.”

He looked at the wall screen. “None of us is going out there until we know who these people are and what the hell’s going on.”