City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,31
asked.
Venice City, the latest settlement. “Latest” was technically accurate, but the location, on the most remote planet in this sector, had been settled fifty years before Coop was born. At his first visit here, on his tenth birthday, he had thought the city old.
His father had laughed at that, telling Coop there were places in this sector that had been colonized for thousands of years. Human habitation, his father had said, although no one knew where those humans had originated.
The Fleet, everyone knew, originally came from Earth, but so long ago that no one alive had seen the home planet or even the home solar system. Earth felt like a myth, something rare and special and lost to time.
The base looked dimmer than usual. The equipment seemed smaller in the emptiness. Some lights were on, but not many. And the bulk of the base disappeared into the darkness.
“Is something wrong with the screens, then?” Coop asked Yash Zarlengo.
She had left her station. She had walked up to the nearest wall screen and was investigating it with her handheld, as well as with the fingertips of her left hand.
“I’m not reading any problems. These images are coming from the ship’s exterior just like they should be,” she said.
Coop frowned and wished, not for the first time, that the original Fleet engineers had thought it proper to build portals into the bridge. He would like to do a visual comparison of what he saw on the wall screens with what he saw out the portal.
But he would have to leave the bridge to do that.
So he snapped his finger at the most junior officer on deck, Kjersti Perkins. She didn’t even have to be told what he wanted. She nodded and exited.
Perkins would have to walk three-tenths of a mile just to get to the nearest portal. The bridge was in the nose of the ship, completely protected by hull. The original engineers had thought the portals were for tourists, and didn’t insert any until the ship widened into its residential and business wings.
But Coop couldn’t just worry about what was outside the ship. He also had to worry about what was inside the ship.
“Give me updated damage reports,” he said.
“Nothing new,” Yash said, which was a relief. Coop had been expecting more damage all over the ship. Normal activation of the anacapa drive often revealed weak spots in the ship, and this activation had been anything but normal.
It had been desperate—more desperate than he ever wanted to admit.
Fifteen days of drift—full engine failure, at least on the standard engines. The anacapa had worked—it had gotten them there, after all, wherever there was, which none of them could exactly figure out. It seemed like they’d moved dimensions just like they were supposed to, but something had gone wrong with the navigation equipment, confirmed by scans.
An asteroid field where there shouldn’t be one. A star in the proper position, but not at the proper intensity. A planet with two moons instead of the expected three.
Nothing was quite right, and yet a lot was. Coop hadn’t even wanted to think about the possibilities.
He hadn’t dared.
He’d set up the distress beacon, the one tied to the anacapa, so that it could reach any nearby bases, and prayed for an answer.
Which hadn’t come.
So he’d increased the scans. The Ivoire hadn’t been able to move yet—not with a regular drive, anyway, although repairs were coming along, as the engineers said—but everything else seemed to be working.
They should have gotten a response from two different bases: Sector Base V and Sector Base U, which was at the very edge of their range. Not to mention Starbase Kappa, which—according to the records—wasn’t that far from here.
Nothing. He’d left the signal on, but had checked it and had asked the science whiz kids in the school wing to work the design for a new signal, something a little less formal, he said, and he’d told their teacher what he really wanted was for them to build a new signal from scratch.
Just in case the old one had been damaged in the fight with the Quurzod, and somehow that damage hadn’t registered. He couldn’t spare the engineers to do the work. He needed the students more than he ever had before.
He hadn’t told the teacher that, but she clearly figured it out. She looked grimly determined and told him the kids would get on the project right away.
They were only half done when Dix caught the edge of a reply.