City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,109
frowns. The captain says her name sharply. She nods but doesn’t look at him. Then she swallows visibly.
My words have disturbed her.
The captain asks her something in their language. Al-Nasir answers, slowly, trying to translate my words.
The lieutenant raises her hand, as if asking for a moment. Her palm is shaking.
She then turns to the captain and speaks rapidly. Al-Nasir leans forward as if he’s trying to understand.
The captain’s frown deepens, and he looks at me. He says something to the lieutenant, clearly meaning for her to translate.
“How long abandoned?” she asks.
“We don’t know exactly,” I say.
She repeats this. The captain speaks. She translates: “You have a guess.”
I shrug a shoulder. This seems momentous to them.
“Please,” he says to me in Standard. “Please.”
That moves me more than I expect. Beneath this show of diplomatic courtesy, beneath the rigid military behavior, beneath the patience of the past two weeks lives panic.
I have just tapped into it.
And I think I’m about to make it worse.
“My guess is based on what little we know about Dignity Vessels,” I say. “We believe they’re legend. Myth.”
The lieutenant translates. The captain looks surprised. He narrows his eyes and looks at me. Then he nods, asking me to continue.
Maybe the mood in the room is catching, because I’m suddenly nervous. “The ships we’ve found are at least five thousand years old.”
The lieutenant doesn’t translate. She tilts her head and looks at me as if I’m crazy. I feel crazy.
“I know it sounds impossible,” I say. “We have no evidence that the Dignity Vessels could travel more than fifty light-years from Earth. But clearly you’re here, and they got here, and something enabled you to get here. But we’ve done studies on all of the ships we’ve found—not just us, but the Empire, too, and we know those ships are at least five thousand years old, maybe older.”
She still doesn’t translate. Her mouth is open slightly.
The captain says her name. She doesn’t respond. He says her name again, then touches her shoulder. He says something else.
Al-Nasir leans into me. “He’s asking her if she needs to leave, if they need to bring in someone else.”
She’s shaking her head. She rubs a hand over her mouth, squares her shoulders just like Al-Nasir did before we got on the ship, and then she speaks for several minutes to the captain.
He repeats a phrase a couple times. I don’t need Al-Nasir to tell me that the captain is asking about my numbers, about that five thousand years.
He turns to me, his lips thin, his eyes steely. He’s not angry. He’s not upset like the lieutenant is. But he’s disturbed and trying to hide it.
He asks something with a great deal of intensity, the words sharp and hard.
“How long has this base been empty?” the lieutenant asks slowly, as if she’s afraid of my answer.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“What do they say in—?” and then she uses a phrase I’ve never heard. Before I can ask her to clarify, Al-Nasir says, “Vaycehn. She’s asking about Vaycehn.”
“What do they say about the base in Vaycehn?” I ask. “They have no idea it’s here.”
The captain speaks without her. “You know.”
I understand him. He’s not commenting. He’s asking. How did I know the base was here?
I try to think of a way to answer him, one that will be understandable without a lot of explaining in languages neither of us completely understand.
“We didn’t know,” I say. “This place surprised us.”
That much is true. I brace myself for the next question, trying to figure out how to explain energy signatures and death holes and all of those problems in a way that the lieutenant and those unseen linguists could understand.
The captain asks his question, and the lieutenant translates.
“How long has—Vaa-zen—been here?” she asks, mispronouncing Vaycehn.
“Here?” I ask. “On Wyr? This planet?”
She nods.
“It’s the oldest city in the sector,” I say, stalling because I know instinctively that he’s not going to like the answer. “Vaycehn has been here more than five thousand years.”
* * * *
FIFTY-EIGHT
F
ive thousand years. The woman who wouldn’t tell him her real name kept saying five thousand years.
The woman watched him, concern on her face. Coop had a hunch she understood more than she was saying. Al-Nasir had his hands clasped, his forehead creased with worry.
And Perkins fidgeted beneath the table, having as much difficulty as Coop, but in a different area. She believed the number.
He did not.
Five thousand years just wasn’t possible. At least that was what his logical brain told him.