City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,18
curious thing—it’s the same age.”
“Meaning what?” Mikk asks. He’s always the one who is the most impatient with science. He only wants to know how to use it, not what makes it work.
“I have no idea. I’m not even sure what we’re dealing with,” Bridge says. “The components are unbelievably small and not something we’ve seen before.”
“Infectious?” Ivy asks, rubbing her fingertips together.
Bridge gives her such a look of annoyance that I wonder if she’s been asking him that question all day. I don’t know why she’s so worried. She wore gloves.
“I don’t know if they’re infectious,” Bridge says. “Certainly not in the sense that we understand it. But something that small and powerful might do some harm if it gets into the lungs. I think until we know what we’re dealing with, we wear masks.”
“Lovely,” Stone mutters.
“Are the guides right?” I ask. “Is this a natural material?”
“Not on any world I’ve been to,” says Bridge. “I’m guessing and we’re going to have to do studies, but I’m pretty sure these are man-made.”
“That magically appear when a wall collapses?” Carmak asks. She seems to have perked up now that she’s eaten and had some coffee. She actually sounds intrigued now instead of overwhelmed like she had late this afternoon.
“Yes, possibly,” Bridge says. “They formed quickly, reinforced the collapsed walls, and created the shaft where there was none. And then there’s the matter of the lights.”
That catches my attention. The lights fascinated me from the moment we went below.
“What about them?” Stone asks.
“They form too. And they seem to respond to some kind of stimuli. In other words, they turn off when they’re not needed.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s a motion sensor of some kind,” I say. I explain what happened in the corridor.
“Built into that black stuff?” Mikk asks. “This stuff is sounding more and more amazing all the time.”
“Why shouldn’t it be?” Ilona says. “If the same people who built this built stealth tech, then of course this is amazing. Stealth tech is.”
“Amazing in how fast it kills,” Roderick says.
Both Mikk and Roderick, who saw a member of our team die in the Room of Lost Souls, loathe stealth tech. They’re here to conquer it, not learn everything they can about it.
“It’s amazing how it works,” Ilona says primly, as if she disapproves of their attitude.
I’m still not sure we’re dealing with stealth tech here, but I am sure that whoever made that black stuff had more scientific knowledge than we could pretend to have.
Since our science is the best it has been in thousands of years and we don’t understand this stuff, that means it’s ancient science. The ancients knew so much more than we ever will. I constantly find myself in awe of them.
“We’re here to find out whether or not those fourteen archeologists died in stealth-tech accidents,” I say. “Aside from my discovery today, did anyone learn more about that?”
“It’s hard to find information,” says Gregory, one of the scientists. His narrow face is wan, and I wonder if he’s getting much sleep. He doesn’t like travel, although he’ll do it when he has to. He’s always the last to volunteer for an away mission and the first to volunteer to go home.
“None of the officials want to talk to us.” He’s playing with his fork as he speaks, turning it upside down, banging the end, and then repeating the procedure. “They wouldn’t even point us to the scientific labs around here.”
One of the other scientists, a slightly overweight man named Lentz, nods. “I finally gave up and went to the universities. Vaycehn has three, and they’re all well known. I wasn’t allowed to contact any of the science departments directly, although in the cafeteria, I ran into a scientist I knew from a few conferences. He says they’d love to meet with us, but Vaycehn has regulations about sharing potentially difficult information with outsiders, and so in order to have a formal discussion, we’d have to spend months going through channels.”
“I hadn’t heard that part about channels until today,” Ilona says before I can ask her why we haven’t gotten all our permissions lined up.
“What does ‘potentially difficult’ mean?” Bridge asks.
Lentz smiles. “I asked that, too, and he answered me. Anything that could interfere with the tourist trade. The caves are the primary example because many of them are in the oldest areas of the city. People love to visit the ruins.”
“One-point-two million visitors a year,” says Gregory, “and those are the official ones.”