City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,75

occasional multicolored line through the center to show that the screens were drawing power.

Coop closed the briefing room door, then took his seat at the head of the table. “What’ve you got?” he asked Rossetti.

She was the only one of the group who didn’t look tired. She sat, spine straight, her small hands flat on the tabletop.

“First,” she said, “we don’t need the suits. Every test we did says the atmosphere inside that room is fine.”

“And the particles?” Dix asked.

“Harmless,” she said. “They’ve been through more testing than we usually do on anything. They seem to be unbonded nanobits, and we’ve all worked around unbonded nanobits before.”

They had. The bits occasionally got into the lungs, but could be removed with little effort. Many of the Fleet’s crew members had no reaction to nanobits at all, and could, in fact, absorb them. It was, one of the medics once told Coop, a genetically desired trait that seemed to have developed in the Fleet’s population over time.

Rossetti glanced at the others from her team, then said, “It would be easier to work in the repair room without the environmental suits.”

Her team had clearly asked her to say that. She hadn’t done any hands-on work, so this wasn’t coming from her experience.

“So noted,” Coop said. He would make no promises without consulting with his best people. “What else do you have for me?”

Rossetti took a deep breath, then pressed her hands against the tabletop. He finally understood why she sat that way; it was a calming gesture, one she clearly needed.

“Do you recall what I told you, sir, when I was on the repair room floor?”

“Yes,” he said, and didn’t elaborate. He hadn’t mentioned it to his team, but he would tell them if they needed to know.

“Apparently, I was right. The sector base had been long abandoned, sir. The mandatory shutdown sequence began one hundred years after we left.” She spoke flatly, as if the news hadn’t bothered her at all. But her splayed hands belied that.

“One hundred years?” Dix’s voice rose slightly. He looked surprised.

But Yash didn’t. Her features remained impassive.

Coop’s heart was pounding. “We left a month ago.”

“Yes, sir,” Rossetti said. “But the elapsed time in the station is at least two hundred years, maybe longer.”

She hadn’t insulted his intelligence by explaining how such a thing could happen. They all knew. It was one of the risks of the anacapa drive.

“You’re certain of this?” Coop looked at the scientists and engineers. What he had initially taken for exhaustion was defeat. And fear.

If their calculations were right, they were at least two hundred years in their own future, in an empty sector base, with a damaged ship.

They saw only catastrophe.

Coop didn’t. If he could repair the Ivoire, he could send her through fold-space to the place where the Fleet might be. His calculations (and theirs) could be as much as fifty years off, but that wouldn’t matter. The Fleet followed a set trajectory. Only battles and meetings with other cultures changed the timeline. Coop’s team could guess the farthest that the Fleet would get on that trajectory, and go there. If the Fleet had already arrived, they could continue until they caught it (which wouldn’t take long). If the Fleet hadn’t arrived yet (which was more likely), they could wait for it to catch them.

The older members of the crew might never see the Fleet again, but the younger members would.

“Two hundred years is manageable,” Yash said softly, clearly mistaking his silence for shock.

“I know,” he said, just as softly, silencing her.

He folded his own hands on the tabletop. He was strangely calm. Now that he knew what was happening, he would probably remain calm until they had a firm plan.

“What kind of evidence do you have?” he asked Rossetti.

She turned to one of the engineers, the only one who Coop had ever interacted with, an older man by the name of José Cabral.

“The equipment itself gives us the timeline,” Cabral said. “The sector base closed one hundred years after we left. A rudimentary staff remained, those who didn’t want to travel with the Fleet to Sector Base Y, which was where this group would be posted. This staff continued to live on the surface, charged with maintaining the equipment at low power levels for the next fifty years.”

Coop nodded. This was standard procedure.

Dix shifted in his chair. The news clearly made him nervous.

“After fifty years without human contact,” Cabral said, “the equipment went dormant. Everything shut down except the touch