Kristine Rusch - City of Ruins

“Boss?” Kersting sounds nervous. “Shouldn’t we get out of here?”

I don’t move. I want to explore every centimeter of this vessel. “What are you afraid of, Rollo?”

“What if there are, you know, creatures in there?” He offers that last as if he believes it and is afraid we won’t.

“Creatures?” DeVries’s voice has a smile in it. “ Creatures?”

“You know.” Kersting sounds terrified now. Terrified and embarrassed.

“There’s probably a better chance that we’ll find bodies rather than creatures,” I say. Or worse. An entire contingent of legendary heroes from the famous Fleet.

I shiver, just a little. Not from fear, but from anticipation.

“Bodies? How would they get here?” Kersting asks.

“We triggered something,” Rea says.

“So?” Kersting asks.

I glance over my shoulder. The four of them are huddled near the door, as if the ship terrifies all of them, even DeVries, who sounded so mocking a moment ago.

“So the ship could be automatic,” Rea says. “This place is.”

“You’re not going to go in there, are you, Boss?” asks Kersting. I can’t tell if he wants me to stay out so we can leave quicker, or if he’s afraid of what I’ll unleash.

“Not yet,” I say. “We need to figure out what this is, when it is, and what is inside.”

“We only have ninety minutes left on this dive,” Seager says.

Ah, ever practical. I start to say So? then stop myself just before the word emerges.

So… the rules are mine, and if I’m going to maintain any authority over this crew, I need to follow my own damn rules.

“Yes, we do,” I say reluctantly. “We’re not going in today.”

“What if it’s not here tomorrow?” Rea asks.

I nearly take a step backward. I hadn’t thought of that, either. I’m so used to historical wrecks that something just as intriguing, but new, challenges my assumptions. This ship arrived, which means it can leave any time it wants to.

“Then we need to get as many readings off of it now as we can,” I say.

“Are we staying longer?” Rea asks. He wants to as well. I can hear it in his voice.

Stay, and explore, and get tired, and then confront danger. It’s a recipe for disaster, and I’ve had enough disasters in my career, disasters focused on the unknown.

“No,” I say. “We leave in less than ninety minutes. But we’ll come back after ten hours. If the ship isn’t here, we’ll leave again, but if it is, then we’ll start our explorations.”

“Explorations?” Seager asks.

She sounds even more nervous than Kersting. The real thing—a real ship, something dangerous, more dangerous than a tunnel under a mountain in an old city.

Finally they are being faced with the realities of their unique abilities. And at least two of them don’t like it.

I can replace them with the other two, who are still standing in the corridor, unaware of what’s happening behind this door. Maybe they’ll do better.

“We’re going to run this like a regular dive,” I say. “We’ll map before we go any farther.”

“Map?” Kersting says. “Have you looked at how big that thing is?”

“It’s no bigger than the Dignity Vessels we have back home,” DeVries says with even more impatience.

“It seems bigger,” Seager mutters.

“It does,” I say. “I think that’s the effect of the closed space, but let’s make sure. The Room of Lost Souls changed sizes. The Dignity Vessels may have come in different models. After all, the exterior on this one looks different from any we’ve discovered.”

I look at them. They haven’t moved away from that door. It’s as if the door is a lifeline to them, a lifeline to a world of theory and supposition, a world they’re used to.

This is the future, and it terrifies them.

It thrills me.

I beckon them. “We need readings, and we’re running out of time.”

DeVries sighs audibly, but comes toward me, followed by Rea. Kersting hesitates for a moment, then comes as well. Seager brings up the rear, looking not at the ship, but at the space above it.

“How did that ship get in here?” she asks.

“Good question,” I say. “I have a hunch we’ll have a lot more questions than answers, at least for a while.”

“You’re comfortable with that?” she asks.

“Boss thrives on it,” DeVries says, as if we’re old friends. Or maybe he just understands me.

I do thrive on questions. I have enjoyed being on Vaycehn more than I thought simply because there are questions here, historical questions as well as scientific ones. This cavernous room excited me, and I was willing to spend weeks exploring it.

But this ship excites me more.

A living Dignity Vessel. An active Dignity Vessel.

Think of all we can learn.

I hate working in atmosphere. I want to float around the ship, investigate all four sides of it, all at the same time.

The shape is the same as all the other Dignity Vessels we’ve found. It’s rather birdlike, with a narrow front and a wide middle, but from where we stand, that wide middle is massive. Beyond it, the ship tapers a bit, but I know that from experience, not from investigating this ship.

The height impresses me the most. Maybe that’s why I want to float to the top, so that I can feel as if I’ve conquered this thing. Right now, it looms over me.

We’re not even going to be able to walk around it. We only have sixty minutes left. I’ve barely made it a few meters. I take readings, I record, I look.

The hull has damage. A lot of damage, in fact. Something has scored the side right near the place where, on the first Dignity Vessel I’d ever found, a hole punched its way toward the bridge.

I remember because that hole was my first warning about stealth tech. My team sent a probe into that hole—following procedure, just like I’m insisting here—and the probe got stuck.

If my team had tried to enter the Dignity Vessel through that hole, they would have gotten stuck in malfunctioning stealth tech. As it was, one of them did get caught in a stealth-tech field inside that bridge, and he died.

He mummified in a matter of hours. I used to think that was the first time I’d seen anything like it, but of course it wasn’t.

The first time I had seen it, I had been four years old, trapped in the Room of Lost Souls with my mother.

My mother, who didn’t have the genetic marker.

My mother, who died, just like any other unprotected person in stealth tech. She aged rapidly, entering a time field that sped up her future, but left mine alone.

Left me alone.

My father pulled me out. My father, whom I later realized had sent my mother into that field to test her. To test me.

The man was, even then, working to figure out stealth tech.

He became the lead imperial expert on stealth tech. He had managed to use me at the Room of Lost Souls to get his position with the Empire, and in doing so, he killed a friend of mine, just like he killed my mother.

My team—everyone in the company, really—believes that I’m funding stealth-tech research as a vendetta against my father. It doesn’t matter that he probably died in an explosion. They think I’m always going to act on some kind of revenge cycle, determined to destroy anything that old man might have created.

I don’t think my stealth-tech research is a vendetta. I think it’s the only way to maintain the balance of power in the sector.

I have tried, over the years, not to think about what would happen once we understood stealth tech.

Now I’m faced with a working Dignity Vessel, which has arrived inside a cavern with a stealth-tech field, and I know I’m near a breakthrough. I may actually be looking at working stealth tech.