hole on the surface,” I say.
“Above us?” Kersting asks.
I shake my head. “Maybe around us. Behind us. Horizontal. Taking some of the force of that extra stealth energy.”
“That’s what death holes are?” Rea asks.
“It’s a guess,” I say. It’s all a guess. Until we can examine everything.
I walk forward. A functioning Dignity Vessel. Probably with some kind of homing program, some way to come back here to this base.
If our entry has called one vessel home, how many others will come?
Maybe not many. Of all the Dignity Vessels we’ve found, none have been functional.
This one is, by some miracle.
This one is.
* * * *
SECTOR BASE V
* * * *
THIRTEEN
T
hey landed smoothly, which surprised the hell out of Coop. The Ivoire had suffered more damage than he ever could have imagined, and yet the venerable old craft had gotten them here, mostly in one piece.
For a brief moment, he bowed his head. He took a deep breath and let a shudder run through him—the only emotion he’d allowed himself in more than a week.
Then he raised his head and looked.
The walls had full screens, top to bottom, just like he’d ordered. It didn’t matter much when the Ivoire transitioned, but now that the ship had arrived at Sector Base V, the walls told him a lot.
A lot that he didn’t understand.
The Ivoire had landed inside the base, just like usual. The ship stood on the repair deck, just like it was supposed to.
The base was cavernous. It had to be. Like the other ships of her class, the Ivoire was large. She comfortably housed five hundred people, providing family quarters, school, and recreation in addition to being a working battleship. Two ships the size of the Ivoire could fit into this base, with another partially assembled along the way.
Not to mention the equipment, the specialized bays, the private working areas.
The sector base was huge and impossible to process all at once.
But what Coop could process looked wrong.
For one thing, no one manned the equipment. Much of it looked like it wasn’t even turned on. The lights were dim or off completely. The workstations—the ones he could see in the half-light—looked like they’d suffered minor damage.
But he didn’t know how they could have. Like all the sector bases, Sector Base V was over a mile underground in a heavily fortified area. No one could get in or out without the proper equipment.
To his knowledge, no sector base had ever been attacked, not even in areas under siege. Granted, his knowledge wasn’t as vast as the history of the Fleet, but he knew how difficult it was to damage a sector base
Although it looked like someone had harmed this one. Because it had been fine a month ago.
Before the battles with the Quurzod, he’d brought the Ivoire in for its final systems check and repair. He had known that he wouldn’t get another full-scale repair for a year, maybe more. Particularly if the Fleet conquered the Quurzod and moved on, like planned. Then the Ivoire and the other ships in the Fleet wouldn’t get the full-scale treatment for five years. It would take that long to build Sector Base W, at the edges of the new sector of space.
He hadn’t planned on ever returning here.
He certainly hadn’t planned on returning here in defeat.
Or what felt like defeat.
And now the base looked wrong.
“You sure we’re seeing Sector Base V?” he asked Dix Pompiono.
Dix stood at the station farthest from Coop, in case the bridge got hit. Dix figured that if as much distance as possible separated them, one of them would survive.
Coop had always figured if the bridge got hit, the entire vessel would disappear. The anacapa drive—small as it was—was located on the bridge itself. If the drive took a direct hit, then the drive’s protections would fail. Half the ship would be in this dimension, half in another—if they were lucky. If they weren’t, the entire thing might explode.
Maybe it was the half-and-half dimensions that made Dix want to stay separate from Coop. They’d never discussed it, and they weren’t about to now.
“It sure as hell doesn’t look like Sector Base V,” Dix said. “But the readings say it is.”
It looked like Sector Base V to Coop. He recognized some of the specialized equipment, built with parts of the indigenous rock.
“We’re in the right point in space,” said Anita Tren. She stood at her post, even though her built-in chair brushed against her backside.
“Have you confirmed that we’re under Venice City?” Coop