Kristine Rusch - City of Ruins

“If they’re anything like the Dignity Vessels of legend,” I say, “they get to know people before they make decisions about them. They’re trying to get to know us now. We’re not going to make any threatening moves. I suspect we’ll be fine.”

No one speaks for a moment. Then DeVries looks at me.

“Don’t you think something is off here?” he asks softly.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I mean, we’ve always heard about a fleet, but we’ve only found individual ships, and they’ve been old and ruined. Now we have an intact one. Do we even know this is the original crew? Or maybe these people are another group who have hijacked that ship, and don’t know how to work it.”

A chill runs down my back. I’ve been so excited to see a working Dignity Vessel that such a thought has never crossed my mind. And I’m usually enough of a pessimist to see problems like that.

“It’s a possibility,” I say. “But they can clearly operate in a stealth-tech field. So they have the genetic marker, at the very least.”

“Which means what, exactly?” Mikk asks. “Maybe they’re like your father, ruthless in picking their crew members, letting the ones without the marker die.”

“Maybe,” I say, “but I keep coming back to their military precision. Thieves usually don’t have that.”

“Neither do wreck divers,” says Tamaz with a grin.

He doesn’t know how accurate he is. I felt like a bumbling fool when I saw the care the ship’s crew used as they came down the stairs.

“We’ll figure this all out,” I say. “It’ll just take time.”

‘“Time,”‘ DeVries repeats, as if he didn’t want to hear that.

“Let’s just hope,” I say, trying to keep the group calm, “that the crew of that vessel is as patient as we are.”

“Who says we’re patient?” Kersting asks, and everyone laughs.

I laugh, too, but I really don’t find the comment funny. I’m not feeling patient. I’m not feeling patient at all.

It took Perkins nearly two weeks to figure out the outsiders’ language with any kind of precision. During that time, the engineers repaired the anacapa and most of the weapons systems. Other repairs remained, but none to the major systems. Coop sifted through much of the information pulled from the repair room’s equipment, but he didn’t come up with any more information than his team was finding.

He repeatedly had communications contact Venice City, but didn’t get any response. He mapped the underground caverns around the repair room a second time. The entire complex was much bigger than it had been the month before.

And as the remaining sensors came back online, he had his team see what they could find on the surface.

There was a city in the narrow valley, just like there had been for decades. But the city was no longer in the same place. Instead, it was scattered along the mountainside, far away from the city center that Coop had visited several times.

All of these pieces of information didn’t add up to anything coherent, not yet, which made talking to the outsiders all the more imperative.

The number of outsiders never changed, and although Perkins asked the woman what their group was called, she never got an answer she understood.

Perkins was understanding more and more, however, partly because of the outsiders themselves. After a few days, the man showed an increasing ability to speak Perkins’s language. It took Perkins another day or two to understand him because the man mangled every single word he tried to say. It was almost as if he was familiar with the language in its written form, but hadn’t ever spoken it.

At least, that was Perkins’s hypothesis. Coop wasn’t so certain. If the outsiders could read Standard, then how come they hadn’t heeded the warnings written all over the floor in the repair room? How come they seemed surprised when the ship nearly crushed one of them?

Still, Coop wasn’t the linguist, and he had to rely on Perkins’s expertise to figure out what was going on. In less than two weeks, Perkins decided that the language the outsiders spoke was a form of Standard, but so changed by time and distance, as well as influence from other cultures, as to be practically unrecognizable.

The fact that the man could speak her language, though, didn’t bode well, as she told Coop in one of their briefings.

“Sir, I think all of this means that we speak an old and possibly forgotten form of their language. One that is no longer active, but lives only in archives.”

He felt a chill run through him. “How long does it take for a language to change like that?”

She shrugged. “There are instances of that happening within a few hundred years of no contact.”

“But?” he asked.

“But generally, it happens over many centuries. Five, six, seven hundred years or more.”

He stared at her. It was within the realm of possibility. They had gotten the ship to talk with the equipment in the repair room, but hadn’t gleaned any more information about the time factor. Some of the scientific tests had come back that the equipment itself had aged several hundred years, but, as the scientists said, some of that could have been due to the proximity of a working (and possibly malfunctioning) anacapa drive.

“They can’t be from the future of Venice City,” he said. “Their suits aren’t as evolved as ours.”

She shrugged. “They’re from our future somewhere. Somewhere they acquired our language. Then they lost touch with us, and the language changed, as languages do.”

“It’s time for me to talk to them,” he said. “Can you clearly translate for us?”

“If we do it in the Ivoire,” she said. “I need the computer and our linguistic team to back me up.”

He thought about that for a moment. He had always envisioned the meeting to take place inside the repair room. He hadn’t wanted the outsiders in his ship.

But he understood Perkins’s point. And he needed the information now more than he needed to protect the ship’s secrets.

Not that it had a lot of secrets from the outsiders. They had access to similar equipment in the repair room, and they clearly hadn’t understood that.

“All right,” Coop said. “Set up an appointment.”

“Yes, sir,” Perkins said.

“And I don’t want her whole team in here. Bring her and the man who speaks the language into the briefing room. You and I will talk to them.”

“All right, sir,” Perkins said, and looked relieved. Everyone on the Ivoire was nervous. Everyone wanted answers because, as Dix told Coop, they were making up worst-case scenarios the longer this went on.

Coop had been making up a few on his own.

Initially those scenarios had involved being stranded in Sector Base V forever, but now that the Ivoire was getting repaired, he knew that wouldn’t happen. Now he just had to figure out where he would take his crew, and when.

And for that, he needed to talk to the outsiders.

We have been struggling against the language barrier for more than two weeks. Every day seems the same; we go below, go into the room, and separate. Al-Nasir walks to a small table that the Dignity Vessel crew set up on the second day, sits down, and talks to their lieutenant, doing his best to understand her while she does her best to understand him.

The rest of us scatter and look at the equipment. Only now, we each have someone from the Dignity Vessel shadowing us. They watch what we do, not that we’re doing much. We’re afraid to touch the consoles. We still don’t understand them.