City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,57

activation beam, the anacapa, pulling in anything within range.”

He frowned. “The system’s not built for that, Mae.”

“I know,” she said. “But the first communication—if you want to call it that—that registered on our system was their anacapa.”

He thought for a moment. Mae was thorough. He knew what procedures she would have run, but it was his duty to ask about them anyway.

“You don’t think the damage to our systems prevented us from storing the communication?” he asked.

“I’m hoping that’s the case,” she said in a voice that told him she didn’t believe it. She thought that the communication hadn’t happened.

“But?” he asked.

She took a deep breath. “Ever since we arrived, we’ve been trying to communicate with the sector base. I’ve redoubled the efforts since it became clear that we wouldn’t go out into the base for a while.”

“And?” he asked.

“And we can’t do it. We can’t reach those consoles out there, even though we’re only a few yards away. Either whatever’s broken on our side interferes with communicating with them, or something’s wrong on their side.”

“Or both,” he said.

“Or both,” she agreed.

“You’ve looked at the scans of the consoles,” he said.

She nodded. “They’re in rough shape, Coop. I’ve seen it before.”

“You have?” he asked.

“In our training. We had to take some ancient equipment and cobble it into an existing system. The ancient stuff had been in good repair. It was just old. The readings you got off the systems out there, they look a lot like the readings we got from the ancient equipment.”

“I assume you double-checked those readings,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I don’t have raw data. It was a school project.”

Meaning it was more than a decade ago, and she’d jettisoned the information, if she ever had it.

“Ancient,” he said, thinking of her precision with words. “Not old?”

“Not old,” she said softly. “Time ravaged.”

“Could other things cause that?” he asked.

She shrugged. “You need to ask a real scientist or a very experienced engineer. My specialties are communications systems of all types, and I remember that one. I could be wrong. I probably am—at least about this.”

“I trust you, Mae,” he said.

She looked down. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

He wanted to put an arm around her, pull her close. But he didn’t. She was going to have to recover her confidence on her own.

“I’d like you to take some of the team off the general repairs. I want them to focus on communicating with the section base. If you have to cobble something together, then do so.”

She raised her head slowly. The frown still marred her forehead. “Do you think we won’t be able to go out there and do some work in the base?”

“I don’t know when the first team will leave the ship,” he said. “I want to be prepared for everything. The more work we can do from in here, the happier I am.”

She took a deep breath. “All right,” she said. “I’ll make sure we figure out how to talk to the sector base.”

“And it can talk back,” he said.

“Oh, it’ll talk back,” she said. “I’m just not sure we’re going to like what it has to say.”

* * * *

THIRTY

T

hey bring in a vehicle like I’ve never seen before. The Vaycehnese have special equipment for dealing with tunnel collapses and cave-ins and people trapped below ground.

The guides couldn’t request it until they knew we were alive—a stupid rule, I think. But Bridge explains it to me.

The entire city’s in chaos at the moment. A death hole has opened in a far section of Vaycehn, a section that has never seen death holes before. This death hole is huge, and it has swallowed an entire block. The rescue efforts are concentrated there; the bulk of the equipment is there.

The rest of the equipment is reserved for just this kind of emergency, but it gets prioritized. The equipment goes where human life is threatened first—where the Vaycehnese know that human life is threatened—and then it goes to the other areas.

We weren’t a priority because they hadn’t heard from us.

No one had until I started climbing out of that damn hole. The angle of that opening made voices from below impossible to hear. And there were no guides with us. Apparently, they had been waiting on the surface until an hour or so before we were scheduled to leave. Then they returned below.

So when the groundquake hit, our guides were above ground and nowhere near the opening. Ilona has no idea if they even tried to find us. She