Kristine Rusch - City of Ruins

“How do you propose we find that out, then?” Dix asked.

“We be patient,” Coop said.

“There could be an immediate threat,” Dix said.

“There could be,” Coop said. “But right now, we’re getting no indication of that.”

“Except an empty base, a stranger in the repair room, and malfunctioning equipment,” Dix said.

“We waited fifteen days to get here,” Coop said, “with a crippled ship and no answers to our distress calls. We were patient. We got here.”

“Where things aren’t good,” Dix said.

“They’re better than they were,” Coop said. “We’re not in an unidentified part of space. In that room, there are things that will help us repair this ship. If we’re patient, we’ll be able to fix the Ivoire and catch the Fleet.”

“If that woman doesn’t attack us,” Anita said.

Coop gave her a sideways look. She wasn’t speaking out of panic. She was just throwing out a possibility.

“One woman? Who happens to be carrying a knife? What do you think she’ll do, Anita, stab the Ivoire to death?”

He hadn’t meant to be that sarcastic. He was tired, too. And a bit worried about what he was seeing here. But no longer worried that the five hundred people in his charge would die on the ship in foldspace.

But whether or not they would die under Venice City was another matter. He was going to take this slowly, no matter what his crew wanted.

“How are our weapons systems?” he asked Yash. He hadn’t had cause to ask since they activated the anacapa to get away from the Quurzod. Nothing had approached them for fifteen days.

“We’ve repaired some of them,” Yash said, “but nothing we can fire down here.”

“Why not?” Coop asked.

“Because the walls are made of nanobits just like the hull of the Ivoire,” she said. The Fleet’s technology was nanobased, with the help of the anacapa drive. The drive powered the technological change on a planet, essentially powering the nanobits that sculpted the interiors of mountains into the best bases he’d ever found in the known universe. “The shots will bounce off. They’ll ricochet until the energy is spent.”

“Damaging nothing,” Coop said.

“Except the equipment,” Yash said, “and anyone who happens to be in the repair room.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“But these weapons weren’t meant to be fired in atmosphere,” she said. “If there’s a methane leak, for example, then we might have another kind of explosion.”

“Or an anacapa malfunction,” Dix said.

“The weapons won’t cause an anacapa malfunction,” Yash said.

“I know,” Dix said. “I meant if their anacapa has malfunctioned…”

“It hasn’t,” Coop said. “It got us here.”

Yash gave him a sideways look. He knew that look. It was one that cautioned him to silence. The two of them had served together since they were cadets, and they had bolstered each other from the beginning.

“You disagree,” he said to her.

“Even a malfunctioning anacapa could have had enough energy to get us here,” she said.

“Great,” he said. “So we’re back to square one. We won’t know anything until we get out there and take some readings. And we’re not going to do that as long as those outsiders are here.”

He walked over to that part of the wall screen and peered at the woman. She was still touching the Ivoire’ s exterior, as if she could gather information about the ship through the palm of her glove.

For all he knew, she could.

Her face was barely visible inside the helmet. He couldn’t really make out her features, but he thought she looked intrigued. Like she hadn’t expected the Ivoire. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she knew the Fleet was long gone.

She tilted her head. It felt like she could see him.

But he knew that wasn’t true. She couldn’t see him at all. She probably didn’t even know he was there.

“What’s she doing?” Anita asked.

Coop shook his head. He had a theory—he always had theories, and he’d learned it was never wise to share them, at least not when he led a mission. Always better to gather information.

Behind her, he saw movement. Four others, huddled near the exterior door, nearly lost in the gloom.

Only it wasn’t really gloom. The woman was teaching him that. Particles floated in the air around her. They were coating the exterior of the ship, which was probably why the base looked so damn dark.

Apparently he was finally able to see the stuff that Anita had been referring to.

“There’s some kind of substance on the exterior of the ship,” he said. “Look at her hand. It’s clearer than everything else.”

Her gloved hand. She had placed her palm flat against the ship. The glove was white, so tight that he could see the ridges in her palm, the bend of her fingers.

She knew nothing about the vessel. None of the outsiders did. From the way they huddled, they seemed frightened by it.

Of course, he was guessing. But they were human, and their body language wasn’t aggressive. It was protective.

“Do you have a visual of our arrival?” he asked Dix.

“I’m sure we do,” Dix said.

“Let’s see it. Center screen.”

Dix floated his fingers over his console. It took a moment, but the screen in the center of the bridge went dark, replaced by the shimmer created by the anacapa whenever a ship was about to arrive at its destination.

The shimmer looked silver, then slowly resolved into an image of the repair area’s interior. The equipment, looking just as odd, the screens over the command consoles, showing what the ship was seeing just like they’d been programmed to do. Redundant imagery at the moment, but useful most of the time. The repair crew could look and see what a ship saw as it traveled to the base.

Sometimes they could even figure out where the damage was because of something coming through the feed.

So the screens were working, which he hadn’t noticed after they arrived. Then he looked at the floor itself. It had yellow lines, outlining the landing area, and DANGER! written all across the face, so that no one would accidentally step on the pad.

Sometimes the repair crew didn’t know when a ship was going to arrive. A vessel’s anacapa drive could shut off and the vessel would appear on the landing platform, not realizing that the ship had just appeared where a human being had been standing.

Someone had been standing there in the feed. Someone wearing an environmental suit similar to the woman’s.

Similar, but not the same.

So this wasn’t a military team, then. Private? They didn’t have matching suits.

The person—a man, Coop guessed just from his general shape—whirled as if in response to someone calling his name. The man hesitated for just a moment—and then he sprinted off the platform, diving toward the main door just as the ship settled.

Coop could barely make out the five people huddled against the door. All of their helmeted faces were turned toward the ship, but none of the people moved.

While Coop had been relieved, while he was trying to figure out where he was and what had happened, they had been trying to figure out what they were seeing.

Eventually, they determined that it was safe enough to approach the ship.

“Thanks,” Coop said to Dix. “That answered a lot of questions.”

And created a whole hell of a lot more.

“Boss?”

I’m standing beside the Dignity Vessel, my glove still pressed against it, staring at the hull before me as if I can see through it.