City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,111

surface. Then the nanobits coat that hole, and a new part of what she calls the caves are formed. The problem is that no one on the surface knows when or where a death hole will happen. Holes just open up and suck people and buildings into them.”

“My God.” Coop understood the phenomenon the woman described. It was the way the base got built. The base engineers would pick a spot, then start the nanoprocess on the surface, guiding it with their equipment and burrowing into the ground or a mountainside or wherever the base was supposed to go. Then the nanobits would coat the surface, so that nothing could leak or fall or create problems.

The system was supposed to remain self-repairing, even after the shutdown, so no one could get trapped in the base. But it wasn’t supposed to malfunction. It wasn’t supposed to do this.

“How long has this been going on?” he asked.

The woman shrugged. “Throughout Vaycehn’s known history.”

Someone shut down the base wrong, or something went awry and never got fixed. He should have been horrified—maybe he was, beneath it all, beneath the shock of five thousand years—but he was actually a bit relieved.

“We can fix this,” he said to the woman.

“Good,” she said, and he actually understood that word. Then she spoke a bit longer, and Perkins had to translate. “Do you mean you can stop the problems here on Vaycehn or can you help us with the malfunctioning Dignity Vessels as well?”

Dignity Vessel. That term still startled him. “One problem at a time. We can stop the death holes.”

“Then you need to know something else,” the woman said through Perkins. “The worst death hole in centuries happened when your ship appeared.”

He frowned. That made things more complicated. The problem was tied to the anacapa, as he had thought initially.

“My engineers will need to see this, and all the records,” he said. That would also get his people on the surface, gathering history so that they could figure out what exactly happened to Venice City.

“There’s one more problem,” she said. “The people of Vaycehn don’t know that you’re here.”

Something in her voice made him stop. He looked at her, really looked at her. She was worried now, maybe even frightened.

“Why don’t they know about us?” he asked.

She glanced at Al-Nasir. He was biting his lower lip so hard that it was starting to bleed. Something was going on here, something Coop didn’t understand.

“We’re a group of scientists, explorers, and academics,” the woman said. “We’re here to study the phenomenon. You were a surprise.”

“Clearly,” Coop said.

“Politically, this is all complicated,” she said.

He shrugged. “Why should that matter to me?”

“It shouldn’t, I guess,” she said. “You can come and go as you please. But I would request that you don’t leave until we figure out how to solve the death hole problem.”

Coop nodded. “We will,” he said. “It won’t take much to fix it.”

“Good.” She sighed. “Otherwise, the minute you leave, more people will die up there.”

“That seems to make it more imperative that they learn about us,” he said. “They’ll know that their long-standing problem will be solved.”

“But it will create a new one,” she said, “one that might cost infinitely more life.”

He sat back down and waited for her to explain.

* * * *

FIFTY-NINE

H

ow do you explain five thousand years of history succinctly? How do you describe the sector as it is, without sounding overly dramatic? I glance at Al-Nasir, who looks terrified. My heart is pounding hard, my mouth dry. I somehow did not expect this to be an issue.

I didn’t expect any of it, really. For some reason, I thought the Dignity Vessel was a modern ship, with modern experiences, part of the Fleet that continued on and had somehow got called back here.

I didn’t expect the captain’s shock at five thousand years. I expected him to be surprised by distance, yes, but not by time.

The captain sits across from me, his emotions now so deeply under control that his features are smooth. He watches me with those intense blue eyes. The lieutenant keeps glancing at him, as if she can’t tell his mood either.

All my study of history has taught me that there’s a right side to history and a wrong side. No matter where these people are from—somewhere far away, but part of our timeline, or somewhere from the dark and distant past, brought here through that malfunctioning stealth tech somehow, in a reverse of what happened to my mother and my