City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,6

a pilot, and one of the Six. I will head a seventh team, and what I don’t tell them—but which becomes clear as I make the assignments—is that my team will have the best people from each division. I’m going to work the site just like everyone else, and if there’s a discovery, I want it to be mine.

Only two teams will go down with the guides each day. The other teams will explore the city, interview residents and experts about the city’s past as well as its legends, and investigate the fourteen deaths that preceded us. So far the Vaycehnese government does not want us to discuss those deaths with the locals. But I have promised Ilona that on my days off, I will fight that prohibition in the name of safety; I will say that unless we know what happened, we cannot know what went wrong.

I don’t know if that will work—I’m a diver, not a diplomat—but it’s the only argument I can come up with that the local government might back. From all the work we’ve done off-planet, the only conclusion we can come to is that no one knows what’s been happening here since the ground collapsed.

The collapsed section is visible from the conference room window. The section is a black smudge near the convergence of the basin’s two steep walls. I glance at it as I speak, pausing occasionally to wonder at the darkness below the surface.

When I finish laying out my plans, I open the discussion to the team.

Lucretia Stone, one of the archeologists, says, “I don’t understand why we need pilots on each team. The guides will drive the hovercarts.”

She’s squarely built, with muscular arms and legs. She’s worked all over the galaxy, on some of the most famous digs in recent years. That she signed on with us is surprising until you get to know her history; she’s lost five digs in the past ten years to imperial interference. She likes the fact that we’re not part of the Empire.

Signing on with us was as much a political statement for her as it was a personal one.

But this is her first off-site, on-planet work for us, and I can already sense how much she dislikes not being in charge.

“I’m not going to run this like a dig,” I say. “I’m running it like a dive.”

“A space dive?” She frowns at me. The other two archeologists look to her for guidance. In the past few months, they’ve all gone diving with me because I insisted. But it was tourist diving on established wrecks.

Even then, the archeologists were terrified. To them, space suits are something you wear in an emergency, when the ship you’re riding in loses its environmental controls, not something you don voluntarily to go into abandoned ships in the emptiness of space.

These people are, perhaps, the exact opposite of those of us who have spent our lives diving. The archeologists love the firmness of the ground beneath their feet. They understand gravity and they love to sift through dirt.

We prefer to float, and dirt is something dangerous, something that can clog our oxygen supply and damage our suits.

Not for the first time do I feel a slight hesitation. Maybe I am configuring these teams wrong. Maybe I should dump the historians and the archeologists and the geologists for people who understand dangerous free-floating situations.

Because if I’m wrong and Ilona is right, we will be in a dangerous space-type situation underneath the city of Vaycehn. We will need every bit of diver’s creativity that we have.

“You’re running this like a dive.” Lucretia repeats my words with a touch of incredulousness. “We’re going to suit up and everything?”

I nod. “We’re bringing our suits. That’s why I want an experienced pilot on the hovercart. It’s too bad the Vaycehnese don’t allow other vehicles inside the site. I would prefer something with more maneuverability and power. But they’re afraid that something with that kind of thrust might cause more collapse.”

“They have a good argument,” says McAllister Bridge, one of the scientists. He’s a slender man with long fingers and the glittering eyes of someone who has had expensive reconstructive eye surgery. “If you’re not sure what’s down there, you don’t want to do anything that could potentially shake it up.”

“The walls have held for five millennia,” says Roderick. Roderick has been with me since our mission to the Room of Lost Souls. In the intervening years, Roderick has piloted us out of some very tight

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