The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (42 page)

“How long has this base been abandoned?” Coop asked.

Bridge crossed his arms and leaned back, as if he expected to be consulted on the question. The woman ignored him.

“We don’t know exactly,” she said.

“But you have a guess,” he said.

“No, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t guess.”

He appreciated that. “What do you know?”

She took a deep breath. Her face was filled with compassion. She turned to Perkins.

“I hope you can translate this accurately,” she said.

“I’ll try,” Perkins said, or at least, that was what Coop thought she said. Some of the words in the outsiders’ language did sound familiar. He understood now why Perkins had been so cautious. Sometimes familiar words led to greater misunderstandings than unknown words.

“What we know is this.” The woman spoke slowly, obviously doing so to make it easier for Perkins to translate. “The city of Vaycehn is the oldest known city in the sector. Vaycehn has been here, in one form or another, for five thousand years.”

“No,” Coop said before he even realized he had spoken. He made himself breathe. Maybe Perkins had mistranslated. “The city above was called Venice. Venice City. It was the first settlement ever on Wyr.”

Wyr was the name the Fleet had given this planet.

“Wyr.” The woman repeated the word without waiting for the translation, and then nodded. “Yes. We’re on Wyr.”

“Venice City,” he prompted.

“The oldest known settlement here is in the area with the worst of the death holes,” the woman said. “It’s five thousand years old.”

“So far as our records show,” Bridge said, “this place has always been called Vaycehn.”

“Bridge, enough,” the woman said. There was warning in her voice, and a toughness to her posture. Coop was beginning to understand why they called her Boss. He wouldn’t want to make her angry.

“There’s no record of Venice City?” Coop asked.

“None,” the woman said.

“Sir,” Perkins said. “The way that language morphs, and the way that these people speak…”

Coop looked at her. So did Bridge. No one was translating for the woman called Boss, at least not yet.

“Venice City could be mispronounced, mangled, changed over the centuries through pronunciation errors,” Perkins said. “It could have become Vaycehn.”

“That’s supposition, Perkins,” Coop said. “We’re trying to figure out facts here.”

She nodded once.

But he understood her all the same. She thought—Bridge thought; hell, the woman named Boss thought—that Vaycehn had been here for at least five thousand years. If Vaycehn was a settlement placed on the ruins of Venice City, then Venice City had been built even longer ago.

The very idea made Coop’s mind hurt.

Five thousand years. How did one month become five thousand years?

“Are you sure you’re translating the numbers correctly?” Coop asked Perkins.

“The computer is confirming them,” she said.

“But you programmed it,” he said. “Could you have programmed it wrong?”

Her expression remained impassive. No flashes of anger, no sense of doubt. “Anything’s possible, sir,” she said.

Then she turned to Bridge and said something in his language.

He responded in his bad Standard. “Boss is talking about five thousand years. Fifty one-hundred-year cycles.”

Coop’s stomach clenched. He was glad he had his hands clasped together. He didn’t want the others to see them shaking.

“You’re sure of that?” he asked.

Both Bridge and the woman nodded.

“My God,” he said, and stood up. “My God.”

He walked over to the sideboard, his heart pounding. Five hundred years would have been a disaster. Five thousand was an impossibility.

Except that the
anacapa
drive in the station was malfunctioning, creating something called death holes. The
Ivoire
had all kinds of damage as well. Together both
anacapa
drives—one clearly malfunctioning and one that might be—had rescued the
Ivoire
from that fifteen-day death float, and brought it here, where it could be repaired.

But it could never ever rejoin the Fleet.

Not even if Coop wanted it to. Not even if he could figure out how to traverse foldspace to reach some point in the Fleet’s trajectory. The errors he would make in a two-hundred year timeline would make it just barely possible to catch up to the Fleet. The errors he would make in a five-hundred year timeline would make it impossible to catch the Fleet.

He couldn’t even map the distance between the
Ivoire
and the Fleet with any kind of accuracy. Not over five thousand years. Not even with a working
anacapa
and foldspace on his side.

The Fleet might as well be a legend.

And the
Ivoire
had just become a ghost.

He didn’t look at Perkins. He wanted to maintain some kind of emotional control.

He needed his own people on this. Although he knew what they would find. The evidence had been there already: the language, the unbonded nanobits, the condition of the equipment.

He made himself focus.

“So you’re from Venice City?” he asked the woman as he turned around.

The woman’s expression was filled with compassion. She had an idea of what he was going through. He didn’t want her to think of him that way. He didn’t want her to feel sorry for him.

“No,” she said. “I’m not from Venice City. I am not from Vaycehn either.”

That surprised him.

“What are you doing here, then?” he asked.

Bridge started to answer but she glared at him.

“We came because of the death holes,” she said.

“Came from where?” he asked.

“The Nine Planet Alliance,” she said.

It meant nothing to him, just like she had known it would.

“Did Venice City—Vaycehn—hire you to solve this death-hole problem?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Then why are you here?” he asked.

“Because we’re trying to understand your technology,” she said. “It’s littered throughout the sector, and it’s killing people.”

Killing people. Coop shook his head. Killing people.

It was taking a moment for words to get through his brain. He was in some kind of shock. Unexpected harsh news did that.

News that led to grieving.

And he would have a lot of grieving to do. He had lost not just his friends, but his entire world.

He made himself focus on the woman’s words. He was the commander of this ship, and in his training, he learned how to get past a shocking fog. He learned how to operate even when everything seemed like it had gone wrong.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The technology is killing people?”

The woman nodded. “The energy field. It kills. I know of hundreds of deaths attached to it. I’ve personally witnessed three caused by the field.”

“Such as the field you detected down here,” Coop said.

“Yes,” she said.

“And you came here anyway,” he said.

“That’s my job,” she said.

“What’s your job, exactly?” he asked.

“To find this technology. To figure out how it works. To shut it off. And if I can’t do that, to destroy it.”

Perkins’ eyes widened in shock. She was prone to panic. Or maybe she was already feeling her reaction to the five thousand years news.

Coop had to trust her to translate as best she could, but he couldn’t look at her. Not any longer.

“Were you going to destroy this base?” Coop asked the woman.

“As I said,” the woman said, “we had just found it. I was excited by the equipment, and the fact that it worked. I hoped we might learn more about your technology.”

“Technology.” Coop frowned. “All of our technology is killing people throughout the sector?”

“No,” the woman said. “Just the energy that radiates from this place. We call it your stealth drive. I gather that’s not correct.”

So she saw the look Coop had given Perkins when the term was first used.

“We do use the technology to hide the ships, yes,” Coop said, not willing to lie to this woman, but not wanting to tell her everything.

“Why would you need to hide them down here?” Bridge asked.

This time, his question was clear. Or maybe Coop was just getting used to his terrible accent.

But Coop chose to ignore him. If the woman was in charge, then Coop would talk to the woman.

“I don’t understand,” Coop said. “How does the technology kill people?”

She sighed, then looked at her hands. She turned to Perkins and said something. Perkins nodded and said to Coop, “She wants to tell a story. I’m not going to translate word for word, but I’m going to wait until she’s done and then tell you as best I can.”

Coop nodded.

The woman spoke for about five minutes, her voice rising and falling. As emotions crossed her face, she looked down or turned away. Bridge watched her, clearly as fascinated as Coop. Perkins’ attention was divided between the woman and the translation coming through the computer. Her intense concentration seemed to cause her to miss the emotions flowing through the woman’s body.

But Coop saw them all. He saw fear and deep sorrow. He saw loss and loneliness. He saw anger, anger so intense that the woman’s entire body tensed as she spoke of it.

By the end of her tale, she had calmed herself again.

But Coop knew now what drove her. Rage, fueled by a catastrophic loss. He didn’t know what kind of loss and he didn’t know what, exactly, had made her angry, but he did know that those emotions were what moved her forward, what got her through the day.

Finally, the woman stopped. She nodded at Perkins.

Perkins took a deep breath.

“Let’s hope I get this right,” she said.

“Do your best,” Coop said.

“There is a place in this sector called something like the Room of the Missing Spirits. Or the Place of the Lost Ghosts. I’m not certain of the exact translation.” Perkins glanced at Bridge. He didn’t help her. Maybe he didn’t know those words in Coop’s language. Maybe it was one of those concepts that didn’t translate well.

“She thinks it’s an abandoned space station,” Perkins said. “It’s been there from the beginning of recorded history in this sector.”

Coop’s cheeks warmed. Starbase Kappa was in this sector, and it was older than Venice City.

“This place has a low grade version of the energy signature that is here on Wyr. She went there as a child with her family. Her mother died there, becoming one of the ghosts.”

Coop looked at the woman. She was studying him, as if gauging his reaction. He wondered if she understood more of the language than she could speak.

Probably. That was his experience with other languages. He could understand some of them and couldn’t speak them at all.

Perkins continued with the woman’s story.

“She was very young when her mother died. Decades later, she encountered the same kind of energy in an abandoned Dignity Vessel that she was exploring. Only she didn’t realize that the energy was the same until after one of her crew died. She lost another friend when he went exploring the Room of the Missing Spirits. Now she has made it her mission to find this energy and prevent it from killing anyone else.”

That was a much shorter version of what the woman said.

“You’re sure that’s all?” Coop said.

“She used names and dates,” Perkins said. “I felt they weren’t as necessary.”

Coop nodded. He hoped he would be able to hear the woman’s unadulterated version some day.

“How come the energy has killed her mother and her friend but not her?” he asked. “Did they go to the wrong spot?”

Perkins translated the question.

The woman glanced at Bridge, who looked upset. He said something that sounded negative, but the woman shrugged and turned back to Perkins, speaking slowly again.

“Apparently, most people who enter the energy field die,” Perkins said. “But some people are immune. It would take some hefty translation work for me to understand why. She’s using some pretty specialized terms here.”

“She’s one of the people who can survive in the field,” Coop said.

“I guess so,” Perkins said.

“
Ask her
,” Coop snapped.

“Yes,” the woman said before Perkins could ask. Then the woman pointed to herself and then to Bridge. She swept her hands out, then held up five fingers, probably indicating the others in her group.

Explorers. Scientists. People with an ability to survive which others didn’t have.

That was the dynamic of the group. They weren’t military. They were thrown together for a common purpose. Which explained Bridge’s behavior. He was in charge of things elsewhere and not used to taking orders, although he was trying.