City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,91
the collar of his suit. He wasn’t nervous about going in; he was excited.
Finally, after two-plus weeks of ordering everyone else to take action, he was taking action, too. Real, physical action.
Lynda replaced him as acting captain. If she ordered him back inside the ship, he would have to listen. He didn’t mind. He saw envy in her eyes when she reported to the bridge.
She knew how he felt about moving around; he had a hunch they all did.
He was the last one into the airlock, and he went by himself. He was last as a concession to Yash, who demanded that he protect himself at all costs.
He listened to the airlock door latch behind him. The required seconds between the latching of the interior door and the opening of the exterior door felt like hours to him.
He would have to pace himself. He wanted to run through the entire base, checking on everything and maybe catching a ride to the surface.
He wasn’t going to, of course. He knew better. But the impulse was strong.
As he stepped out the exterior door, down the small steps that extended whenever the door opened, he glanced at the base’s main door. He wanted the outsiders to come back. He wanted them back the moment the ship’s exterior door closed.
Then he would go talk to that woman, knife be damned.
But no one came in. Just Rossetti’s teams, moving to their assigned places
Rossetti herself walked across the sector base floor and turned on the interior lights, lights the outsiders had thoughtfully turned off before they left.
In addition to gathering information, Coop had instructed everyone to leave the equipment running. He also instructed them to leave a couple small things—a partially eaten apple and a mug of coffee.
He wanted to let the outsiders know that people were inside the Ivoire. Subtle was the best way to do so.
He stepped into the base proper. It smelled different. It had the same some-what sulfuric odor that Sector Base V had always had, but it also had a musty smell of decay. The scent, old and dry, not mildewy like he would have expected from Venice City’s hot climate, made the hair rise on the back of his neck.
The conversations from the other team members echoed in the emptiness. The base felt bigger than it actually was. Bigger and lonelier.
The last time the Ivoire had been here, there had been two other ships in the bays.
He walked under the Ivoire, deliberately tracing the outsider woman’s steps. She had known where the hatches would be—or at least it seemed that way. She had also released the latch on the door four separate times.
Fortunately, Dix had programmed the doors to guard, so no one could get in without using a weapon.
But the woman’s ability to release that latch caught Coop’s eye. He hadn’t mentioned it to the bridge crew—he would later, during a briefing— any more than he had commented on her ability to find the hatches.
He was convinced she had touched a Fleet vessel before. Her actions belied his earlier supposition that the outsiders had never seen a spaceship before.
They had—or, at least, she had—and they had seen a ship from the Fleet. They had been close enough to it to know where the lower hatches were.
He checked the sides, saw no knife marks, nothing except a glove print near the hatch’s release on the far side.
He smiled. Maybe that meant she spoke Standard. Maybe he would have someone to talk with, after all, someone to tell him the history he had missed, the things he needed to know.
He hoped so.
But he wouldn’t count on it. He needed to find out information on his own.
He walked to the far end of the sector base, crossing landing pad after landing pad, trying not to think of the openness and the emptiness.
As he walked, lights came on just ahead of him, revealing consoles covered in unbonded nanobits and even more, sending up a dust cloud along the floor. He coughed once, thought of returning for his hood, then changed his mind.
Instead, he headed to the personnel quarters, storage, and the emergency lift.
It took him nearly fifteen minutes to reach the far side of the bay. When he did, he pulled off his glove and put his hand against the door leading into the personnel quarters.
For a moment, the door stayed dark, and he wondered if the recognition lock had broken. Then lights came on, revolving slowly around his hand.