City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,40

imagery—Coop had seen some of it as he had walked past Dix’s station. “We’re coated with those particles and we didn’t bring them with us. So they’re inside the base.”

“We need to get that stuff off the ship,” Yash said. “We don’t know what it is and whether or not it’s doing additional damage.”

“We can’t do anything as long as those people are so close,” Coop said. He didn’t want to accidentally kill the outsiders.

“How do we move them?” Dix asked.

“We don’t,” Coop said. “They’re wearing environmental suits. That gives them some kind of time limit. Their oxygen won’t last forever.”

“What if they’re just using some kind of filtration system?” Anita asked.

“Not likely,” Yash said. “The woman has cylinders on her hips. Those looked like extra oxygen to me.”

“You’re guessing,” Anita said.

“It’s an educated guess,” Yash snapped.

Coop glared at both of them. Nerves were getting frayed. He was going to have to relieve this crew relatively soon, even if they didn’t know exactly what was going on.

“What kind of readings are you getting from the particles?” he asked Yash.

“Nothing definitive,” she said. “But I’m not sure how well the ship’s exterior sensors are working.”

“Test the exterior sensors on the woman’s glove,” he said. “Tell me what it’s made of.”

Yash nodded. Coop moved closer to the woman’s image, as close as he could get without pressing his nose against the wall.

“I don’t recognize the material,” Yash said, “although that’s not unusual. It’s composed of. . .”

She listed a series of ingredients, talked about how they combined into some kind of microfiber that had incredible tensile strength, and went on at great detail about how effective such material would be in an environmental suit.

Coop paid only the smallest amount of attention, enough to absorb the important information but lose all of the details. The upshot, as he understood it, was simple. The environmental suit, while thin, would work in space and be quite effective on short trips. But the suits on the Ivoire were vastly superior.

Yash concluded with, “If that suit’s indicative of this culture, then these people are technologically inferior to us.”

Which meant that they were far behind developmentally—at least, that would be how the Fleet’s playbook called it. Coop didn’t always agree with that. In some senses, the Fleet was far behind everyone else. The Fleet was operating on technology built by generations many years in the past. Yes, the engineers knew how to maintain the technology and how to replicate it, but they hadn’t really developed anything new.

At least, not on their own.

They had developed additions to the Fleet based on technology they’d discovered as they’d traveled through the stars.

“You can tell all that about the suit,” he said to Yash, “but you can’t tell me anything about the particles.”

“I can’t tell you why those people are afraid of them,” Yash said. “They seem like flakes off the equipment in the repair room or maybe some nanobits floating free.”

“What would cause nanobits to float free?” Anita asked.

“Serious damage to the base,” Dix said.

“Or some kind of decay,” Yash said. “Something that made the bits’ bonding fail.”

“Some kind of microscopic weapon?” Coop asked.

“I don’t know,” Yash said. “I’m going to have to test with actual particles.”

“So we’re going to need some samples,” Coop said. “Since these folks don’t believe that the particles will hurt their environmental suits, we can assume our vastly superior suits will do just fine out there.”

“You don’t want to use one of the small probes, then?” Dix asked. Clearly that was what he had expected, probably what he would have ordered if he had been left in charge.

“I want a quick grab,” Coop said, “maybe an airlock test for particulate toxicity, and then I want to explore that room.”

More important, he wanted to check the equipment, see the records, figure out what the hell happened here.

“So what are we going to do?” Anita asked. “Are we going to go out there and introduce ourselves to these people?”

Coop shook his head. “They probably don’t even know we’re here—”

“Don’t know we’re here?” Anita said. “C’mon, Coop. That woman’s been exploring the surface of the ship. She clearly knows we’re here.”

“She knows the ship is here,” Coop said. “She doesn’t know that we’re in it.”

“She’d think this thing is automated?” Anita asked.

“Why not?” Coop asked. “The base looks abandoned. That group of five people probably activated the beacon that brought us here. Face it, Anita, if we were all dead, the ship would have come without our guidance. It’s