City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,45
getting filled in once they’re formed?” I ask DeVries,
“No,” he says. “From everything we know, they stay open.”
“That’s when the black stuff appears,” Rea says unnecessarily. I remember that as well.
“If the ship caused it,” Kersting says, “you’d think the damage would be worse here.”
“What’s this ship?” Quinte says to me.
“In a minute,” I say. “There was no damage here at all?”
“No,” Al-Nasir says. “Nothing.”
“Did you feel the ground shift or shake?” I ask.
“No,” Al-Nasir says.
“Hear anything funny or loud?” I ask. ,
“We couldn’t even hear you until you came out of that door,” Quinte says, as if it’s my fault. “We’ve been trying to reach you since this thing happened.”
I nod. “Seager, tell them what happened inside the room. We need all of us working from the same information.”
I don’t listen as she explains the ship’s arrival, Rea’s near-death experience, and the strangeness of the room. Instead, I step into the nonstealth part of the corridor again.
DeVries comes with me.
“You don’t think we time-shifted, do you?” he asks. “I mean, what if the stealth field from the ship was so powerful that it reacted like a bubble, changing the way we experience time?”
“If that were the case,” I say, “then the debris wouldn’t be here. The passage of time doesn’t do this.”
At least I think that’s true. I know so little about ground and gravity and the way that things work on a planet.
“Fahd,” I say to Al-Nasir. “You’re sure the black stuff reappeared on the wall while we were in the room.”
“Convinced,” he says. “We did what you said to do. We’ve recorded everything.”
I smile despite the difficulty of the situation. “Well, that will help.”
“Lapsed time was the same, then?” Rea asks from behind me.
“We don’t know,” Al-Nasir says. “We stayed inside the stealth-tech field. It seemed like time was passing at the same rate both inside and outside, but how can we tell?”
I increase the power of my comm link. “Mikk? Roderick? Are you out there?”
“If time passed differently, they could be long gone,” Rea says.
“In the Room of Lost Souls,” Al-Nasir says, “time sped up inside the stealth field. We should only have been gone for minutes.”
“That’s true,” I say, “but this might be different. The ship itself might have caused our timeline to slow down. We don’t know if the time changes are different in different environments.”
“We can’t blame it all on time,” Kersting says. “In the previous explorations, those of us with the marker haven’t moved on different timelines. When we work in a stealth field, time remains the same for us as it does for people outside the field.”
“It only speeds up or slows down if you don’t have the marker,” Quinte says, with a bit of relief.
But I don’t feel relief. Because they’re right. And if the ship didn’t change our time field, then the silence at the other end of the comm link has another explanation, one I like a lot less.
“You think the tunnel collapse is so severe that the rock is interfering with our communication?” Al-Nasir says.
I almost shake my head, but catch myself. I’m not going to let them know what’s really worrying me. If the walls collapsed all the way along, then Mikk and Roderick aren’t answering us because they can’t.
Because they’re buried under layers of rock.
* * * *
TWENTY-TWO
A
n hour passed. The outsiders did not return to the room.
Coop paced the bridge, checking on his team’s work. Dix bent over his console running multiple scans of everything he could think of. He was comparing the readings he had taken of Sector Base V a month before and the readings he was getting now. Occasionally he’d run a hand over his narrow face, a nervous habit he didn’t realize he had.
Coop didn’t like Dix’s nervous tic any more than he liked the images he kept staring at through the open screens. The particles had settled, but enough of them still remained in the air to remind him of dark snow.
Yash ran the data she had received from the outsider woman’s glove. Time and time again, Yash got the same result: the glove was not as developed as anything on the Ivoire. The technology of the outsiders was, she said, not as sophisticated as the technology of the Fleet.
Which didn’t make sense to Coop. The Fleet had colonized Venice City. If the Ivoire had gone backward in time, the sector base wouldn’t even have been here. There would have been no signal to respond to.