they use animals to test. Usually after a dozen years or so have passed, something survives, and then it’s deemed safe. But until then, no one goes in the death holes.”
”Sounds like they learned about these places the hard way,” Ilona says.
Everyone turns toward her, as if her statement is obvious.
“I mean,” she says, “they have a protocol and a name for the phenomenon. So that means that these holes repeated, and then after a while, they needed a way to deal with them.”
“Ilona’s right,” Bridge says. “A culture doesn’t name a phenomenon if it’s extremely rare. And it doesn’t create a protocol if the phenomenon happens once every hundred years or so. How many of these have there been?”
Lentz shrugs. “I didn’t talk to him all day.”
“But you found out a lot,” I say, wanting him to continue. “Does he think it’s odd that these places eventually become safe?”
“No,” Lentz says. “He says it validates his theory, that some kind of gas or something builds up and then explodes. It then dissipates over time, and the hole becomes safe.”
“If there was gas, it would be released into the atmosphere, contaminating the area around it,” Gregory says. “Did he find that?”
“He’s only had two death holes to study since this became his expertise. But the records don’t show any areawide deaths.”
“Because,” Ilona says, “they clear the areas when a death hole appears. You told us that.”
“History tells us that,” Carmak says.
“I’d like to know what happened the first time a few death holes appeared,” I say. Because it doesn’t have to be a gas. It could be a field. An expansion of a stealth-tech field—a different kind than we experienced in the Room of Lost Souls, but an expansion nonetheless.
Still, I don’t say that. I’m still not willing to admit this place is tied to ancient stealth. We haven’t seen stealth tech act like that.
Or have we?
I turn to Gregory, whom I hired because he once specialized in stealth tech. He was one of the government scientists who tried to reverse-engineer stealth tech with Squishy.
“When you guys were trying to re-create stealth tech in the lab,” I say to him, “did you get some localized expansion phenomena? Something that would resemble what’s going on here?”
He sighs. He hates talking about that time. What Squishy told me in as little detail as possible was that in the two hundred years the Empire has been trying to re-create stealth tech, the program has lost ships, materiel, and people.
When he remains silent, I add, “Squishy told me that a lot of people died while she worked on the program. I assumed they got trapped in the stealth-tech field. Is that what happened? Or were there ‘explosions’ to use Lentz’s word? Did the field expand unexpectedly?”
“C’mon, Boss,” Roderick says, “we’ve already seen that. In the Room. The way the station just kept getting bigger.”
“But that looked like it was falling out of the field,” Mikk says. Even though he gets impatient with scientific theory, he does remember it. Sometimes I think he’s too smart for the rest of us, which is why his patience with people who establish fundamentals before they get to the point is so short.
“Greg?” I ask. “Did it suddenly explode?”
“‘Explode’ is the wrong word,” he says. “Sometimes it would expand. It would be concentrated in one area, like air going through a tube.”
“Or a narrow field coming up through the earth,” says Stone.
Even though we’re not on the Earth, no one corrects her. We know what she meant.
I sigh. “This isn’t evidence, you know.”
“It’s another piece,” Ilona says.
It is that.
“Can you get more information from your friend?” I ask Lentz.
“I can try,” Lentz says. “I can ask him to lunch or something. But we have to be really informal. He can lose his job.”
“Hell, why don’t you just hire him, Boss?” Mikk says. “That’ll take care of the cloak-and-dagger stuff.”
“I’d like to know if he has something to add before I do,” I say.
“Besides, hiring him might cut off his access to these death holes,” Ilona says. “It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the Vaycehnese are protecting the reputation of their city, and they’re doing it at great cost.”
“Cities do that all the time,” Carmak says. “Governments lie. They don’t want the bad stuff to get out. That’s normal.”
“But sometimes it’s just there.” Cesar Voris, one of the historians, speaks up for the first time. He’s one of my new hires. Carmak recommended him because he’s an expert in this