City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,81
group of caves in which none of my team has died.
No one died. Not here.
Not yet.
I rub a hand over my face, then get out of bed. My legs are so sore that it feels as if they creak when they move. I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard that same grinding noise I heard from the Bug every time I move a limb.
I stagger to the bathroom before getting sick.
I haven’t told this team that someone could die. I haven’t said a word, like I usually do on diving missions. I have believed what other people told me. I believed that being on the ground was safe.
And I am wrong.
My God. Sometimes you become your parents without even realizing you’ve made the transition.
I get up, splash cold water on my face, and turn on the shower.
Tonight’s meeting is going to be different than I planned.
Tonight’s meeting might change everything.
* * * *
FORTY-ONE
C
oop stood in the center of the captain’s suite, hands clasped behind his back, studying the walls. He had the screens on. He was staring at images of foldspace.
The captains’ suites in all of the Fleet vessels were located in the same place and had the same basic structure. Five rooms, including private galley. The suite also had a full kitchen plus dining area that had doors that closed it off from the rest of the suite. The head chef used the full kitchen to prepare meals for the captain’s private guests whenever he chose to have a dinner party. He didn’t do that often, so that part of the suite rarely got used.
He’d learned to cook while in school and usually made his own meals in the private galley. One of those meals cooled on the table behind him. He didn’t feel like eating, but he knew he had to just so that he could keep up his strength.
The living area smelled of roast beef. The beef was not really beef; it was something that the chef had found on Ukhanda that approximated beef, but cooked properly, it tasted of beef, something Coop usually loved.
He had made a meal that he usually couldn’t ignore, and here he was ignoring it.
That showed, even to him, the level of his distress.
He sighed and made himself turn his back on the wall screens, if only for a moment. He was as shaken as his crew at this news-—which, he had admonished them, they couldn’t tell anyone else. Not yet.
Five hundred years in his own future, a thousand.
He sat at the table and listened to the chair squeak beneath him. He picked up his fork and stared at the beef. Potatoes—real potatoes, grown in the hydroponic garden on board the ship, along with three varieties of lettuce for his salad, and the carrots he had cooked with the roast. A small bowl of strawberry compote waited for him to finish the main course.
He twirled the fork. He had no appetite. This had happened to him before, when he knew he had to divorce Mae. As his mind had accepted the new reality, his stomach twisted in knots and refused sustenance, as well as sleep.
He’d been finishing his captain’s training at the time. His instructors figured out what was wrong and forced him to eat.
A captain of a flagship vessel in the Fleet couldn’t afford human weakness. He couldn’t afford to lose his appetite. He couldn’t afford to lose sleep.
He couldn’t afford to collapse.
Coop ate a bite of the beef. The gravy coating it had the proper amount of richness, just a hint of exotic spice from a community that the Ivoire had visited during the first year of his command.
The memory made him smile for just a moment, until another thought collided with it.
That community was gone. Changed. Different. Even if he went back (and he wouldn’t have; the Fleet never went back), he wouldn’t find the couple who had taught him how to grow that spice and helped him transplant the tiny seedlings into a pot to take with him to the hydroponic garden where, it turned out, the botanists had already taken some of the same plants.
He chewed, swallowed. Took another bite. Tried to swallow past the knot in his throat.
Nothing in those images of foldspace told him how the Ivoire had gotten here. For two weeks, he had looked at the unfamiliar stars, the strange ridges of light, the area of space that had defied matching a star map, and he had figured out nothing then.