City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,15
is still cataloguing.”
“I’m sure there are items that can’t be catalogued,” Mikk says. He’s gone with me on many dives since the Room of Lost Souls. On the Dignity Vessels we’ve found, we’ve recovered all kinds of things, from spoons to devices that make music with the touch of a button.
He’s always been fascinated with those things, and he seems fascinated now.
“Yes,” the guide says, only now he’s leaned back, reluctant again. Does he think we’re going to loot their museum? Or does he simply not want to talk about things he does not know for certain? “There are hundreds of items we can’t identify. The City Museum has hired experts to evaluate these things.”
Experts. He says that as if we’re amateurs. I suppose, on some level, we are. We don’t care about Vaycehn or even Wyr history. We care only about the possibility of stealth tech in this place.
The guide suddenly sweeps his arm toward yet another corridor. “Down there,” he says. “The first two archeologists died down there.”
We are hovering in the corridor we’ve come down, several meters from the entrance to the other corridor.
“How close can we get?” I ask.
“This is close enough,” the guide says.
The pilot’s hands are gripped tightly on the controls. His knuckles have turned white.
“How far away did they die?” I ask.
“What do you mean?” the guide says, frowning at me.
“A meter? A kilometer? How deep were they in that other corridor?”
“Seven meters,” the medic says.
The guide glares at him.
“My father was on the recovery team.”
“They got the archeologists out?” I ask. We’ve had to abandon a corpse to stealth tech before we knew that I could brave it and survive.
“No,” the medic says. “But it was clear they were dead.”
“They were mummified, right?” I ask.
The medic nods. “He says he’s never seen anything like it.”
“Have you?” Mikk asks.
The medic closes his eyes. “Four times,” he says softly.
I put my hands on the side of the cart and ease out. The floor is slippery here too. I have to hold onto the hovering cart to get my balance.
I hate that part of gravity. I want to float to my destination, not walk toward it on unsafe surfaces.
The guide grabs my wrist. “I can’t let you do this.”
“I’m only going to the entrance,” I say.
His grip remains tight. “No,” he says. There’s real fear in his voice. “I told you, the areas change. If we’re wrong about where it begins, it will kill you.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Mikk says. “It can’t kill her.”
The guide stares at him for a moment, then looks back at me. “It kills everyone.”
“I’ll be careful,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I cannot be responsible for your death. If something happens, I will blame your recklessness. I will say you were warned and you ran away from us and we couldn’t catch you.”
“Cover your ass as best you can,” I say. “I have nothing against that. And if I’m dead, my reputation won’t matter at all.”
Mikk grins. The medic has gone pale. The guide looks ill, but he lets go of my wrist. His fingers have left red marks on my skin.
I resist the urge to rub it as I walk cautiously down the slick corridor. It feels even colder closer to the ground. The lights come on as I move—thin, white things that somehow manage to cover every centimeter of the place.
I am listening as much as observing. The active stealth tech that I have been near makes a series of sounds that my brain interprets as music—usually choral voices singing in harmony. The weaker stealth tech sounds like humming, and the tiny stealth tech I’ve encountered—my father had a working bottle experiment—had a sound so faint that I had to strain to hear it.
But I did hear it.
At the moment, I hear nothing except my own ragged breathing.
It takes longer than I thought it would to reach the branching corridor. I stop at the opening. There are no lights, and it is so dark down there that the hair rises on the back of my neck.
At least in space there is an ambient light. Nothing is ever completely black. Not like this. If I walk into that darkness, I will effectively disappear.
I try to remember. Did the lights come on as the cart approached an area or when the cart was already inside? I have a hunch the cart’s lights covered a lot. Maybe it was a motion sensor that made the lights come on.