City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,73

gone would run down its corridors, laughing as they coaxed him into the Grog, the cadet bar. He didn’t drink much—never had, really—so his presence in the Grog was always an event.

He would wake up feeling sad for something he had lost.

Maybe that was what Rossetti was feeling. She had been here just a month ago as well. He had no idea what kind of experiences she had had curing their layover. Maybe those were coloring her reaction now.

But that wasn’t something he could discuss with her on Channel Five or on Channel Three. He would wait until she returned.

At four hours and thirty minutes, he reminded his team that they had to shut down before they returned. He also wanted additional cameras (if there were any) disabled. He wanted the interior to look as much like it had when the others left as his team could make it.

They began their shutdown procedures. In the distance, he saw the lights of the far sector shut off. At least that was working. Then middle section went off. If the team returned quickly enough, maybe the particles would have stopped swirling.

He stood near the wall again, hands clasped behind him. His heartbeat had risen just slightly. He wanted the team to move quicker, although he didn’t say anything.

He wanted them out before the outsiders returned.

At the end of their fifth hour, the exploratory team was all inside the airlock. The lights on the far panels had gone out, and the teams had reported that they had altered the feeds on all the cameras they could find.

The particle storm settled.

Just like Coop, the base seemed to be waiting for the outsiders to return.

* * * *

THIRTY-SEVEN

O

nce the Bug stops walking, its movements become smooth. Paplas positions it over the cave opening. For one heady moment, I can see down the hillside into Vaycehn itself.

Dust still rises from the new death hole, but the dust is now just a blight on the landscape, not the overwhelming part of it. A fire burns a few kilometers from the death hole, the result—one of the hotel staff told me that morning—of damage from the groundquake.

Apparently groundquakes don’t just cause things to collapse, they cause systems to fail. The collapse might ignite a fire or start a flood of water in addition to the damage from the collapse itself.

As Bridge and I look at the city, Paplas adjusts the controls. His hands fly across his control panel, stopping occasionally to grab a lever and pull it. It’s almost as if Paplas himself has dozens of arms just like the Bug does.

Finally he stops moving for a brief moment. He turns his head slightly, looks at Bridge, and says, “Now we descend.”

The Bug’s pod floats downward, almost like a ship. In fact, I would think of it as a ship except that it is not moving on its own propulsion, but being levered down by the legs. Some remain on the surface as the pod eases into the darkness. Others float past us as they make their way down, anchoring those bendable feet on the side of the cave itself.

It’s not quite right to say that the walls have closed in. We just feel closed in because the big black legs take up so much space inside the hole.

I’m also not in control—of the mission, of the Bug itself, of Paplas. So I sit, with my hands clasped, letting someone else do work I would rather do.

I glance at Bridge. His expression is hard, as if he’s willing himself to remain calm.

Paplas is grinning, his hands moving delicately over the controls.

It takes less than three minutes to descend to the cave floor, the same distance it took me half my life to climb up. No wonder I had no sense of how deep we were before. The equipment the Vaycehnese use is so quick and sophisticated that it makes long distances seem short.

The legs work their way down and settle around us. Paplas turns to Bridge.

“Now for the fun,” Paplas says.

Bridge frowns at him, not understanding. I do. Working equipment in a particular setting, even if the setting is ruined and dangerous, can be a great deal of fun.

With a jerk of the pod, Paplas moves the Bug forward. I can’t tell if that jerk comes from a part that needs repair or a flaw in the design. As the Bug flattens itself out to move into the corridor, Bridge says to Paplas, sounding a bit nervous, “I