Boneyards (3 page)

A
nother twenty minutes go by before we see movement behind those rocks. It only took Coop about ten minutes to go from the opening to that point on the way in, but it takes him almost half an hour on the way back. At first, I think that's because he is carrying something, but it's really because he can't quite maneuver his way out in the same way that he went in.

Stone tries to explain it to me, something about rock angles and protruding outcroppings, but I don't want to think about it. Although as she talks, I find myself remembering all the ruined wrecks I dived in space, and how sometimes going in one direction, avoiding all the pointy edges, was a lot easier than going in the opposite direction.

You can't always see the hazards, and you need to avoid them or you make things worse.

As Coop gets closer to the exit, his face stands out in sharp relief under the lights. Mikk has lowered his arms and turned down the lights somewhat so that they don't blind Coop as he emerges, but they still wash out his skin.

At least, I hope the lights have caused him to look paler than usual. I hate to think that he received even more bad news.

We move away from the opening as he comes through. He has scratches on one side of his face, a ripped sleeve on his environmental suit, and so much dust in his black hair that he looks like he has gone gray.

It takes me a moment—sometimes I can be slow—to realize that the reason his face is so pale isn't the light or his reaction to what he found, but that same dust, which coats him all over.

He comes out and gives me a small smile. Rossetti offers him a bottle of water, which he takes with relief. He sits on a boulder, downs most of the bottle, then wipes his arm over his mouth, smearing the gray dust.

“I was right,” he says. “This base exploded.”

Stone snorts. “You can't know that from eyeballing something. You're making a rookie science mistake. Just because you want to believe something doesn't make it so.”

Coop finishes the rest of the water, puts a cap on the bottle, and hands it back to Rossetti. Then he tilts his head back and looks at Stone.

Anyone else would have used their height to an advantage, standing up and towering over Stone. But Coop doesn't need to. He has that intimidating withering gaze, and once again, he uses it on her.

“We have procedures,” he says, “that are pretty straightforward—”

“And anyone could have tampered with them in five thousand years. I'm sorry, Captain, but you're being unrealistic.”

Coop's eyes narrow.

“Shut up, Lucretia,” I say. “You might know rocks and archeology and how time passes, but Coop knows more about these sector bases than we could ever know after decades of study. And I, for one, want to know what he found.”

Stone's mouth thins as if she has to clamp her lips together so that she can't respond.

“Thanks,” Coop says to me.

I nod and wait.

“Every sector base that's built underground has a standard lift that goes to the surface,” Coop says. “One of the most important aspects of a sector base shutdown is to disable the lift. We do it in a prescribed way, so that the lift stabilizes, so that even if there's a groundquake or some kind of sinkhole, it never opens up the hole we dug for the lift. We don't want some unsuspecting local, five thousand years in the future, to step on our lift and fall hundreds of meters to his death.”

Stone is motionless. He has her attention now.

He certainly has mine.

“The lift in each sector base is in the same place, near the living quarters,” he says. “This base is no different.”

“You found the lift,” Yash says.

He nods.

“And it was never shut down,” Yash says.

“Not only that,” he says, “but part of the lift itself remains in pieces just like that platform over there, as if it was shaken off its moorings and descended rapidly from the top to the ground.”

“That's your proof?” Stone says. “It means nothing. Someone could have forgotten to disable the lift before your people abandoned the sector base.”

“You don't understand,” Yash says. “Our shutdown procedures are exacting. No one forgets anything. These procedures get checked, rechecked, and checked again. The kind of error that Coop is talking about does not happen to a base that's decommissioned. Not ever. Our people might leave a few tools behind or forget an article of clothing. But anything that's dangerous, well, those things get checked so many times that it is absolutely impossible to overlook them.”

Rossetti is nodding as well.

“You're making serious assumptions,” Stone says.

I hold up my hand. “Was the lift in Sector Base V disabled?”

Coop nods. “Exactly in the prescribed way, and completely untouched.”

“How did you open the door?” Yash asks.

I frown at her. “What door?”

“The door to the lift,” she says. “It's keyed to our palm prints. Coop should be in the system, but it doesn't look like any of the technology has worked here in a long time.”

Stone crosses her arms over her chest, as if this part of the discussion proves her point.

Coop holds up his hands. They're scraped and the fingertips are bleeding. “I opened it the old-fashioned way,” he says to Yash with a grin.

She grins back, although I look away. “Old-fashioned” is, in part, a joke, considering how long they've been trapped here, in their future. They can't ever go back to their past. Their engineers and experts spent the first year here trying to figure out if they could replicate the series of events that got the
Ivoire
trapped here in the first place.

The engineers finally decided that they couldn't do it, not safely. They might trap the
Ivoire
in foldspace or in some other more inhospitable time.

They decided—as a crew—to stay in the future. But the pain of that decision shows up in words like “old-fashioned” and in Coop's haphazard grin.

I look at the rubble around me. I believe Coop, which makes me wonder how much of this damage has been caused by time, and how much caused by some kind of external force.

“What kind of explosion are we talking about?” I ask. “Something from above or something from within?”

I ask the question because we've learned that some malfunctioning stealth tech acts explosively. Usually, though—at least in a place like this—nanobits effect repairs as quickly as the damage happens. At least, underground. Above ground, sinkholes form and other damage happens as well.

We've already checked the area for malfunctioning stealth tech. The phrase isn't accurate: we're really looking for a malfunctioning
anacapa
drive. But we use the words anyway because it's a good way to delineate a working drive from one that has malfunctioned for so long that it's built up a dangerous field.

We had to check before we got here, because only the
Ivoire
crew, the Six, and myself could work here if there was still an active and malfunctioning
anacapa
on the premises. There isn't, which is why Mikk and Stone have joined us.

Even though we didn't find any malfunctioning stealth tech before we came down here doesn't mean that at some point in the past five thousand years the
anacapa
didn't malfunction and explode outward. The drive might have been completely destroyed, and the malfunctioning stealth field didn't happen.

So I look at Coop, then realize I should have asked the question of Yash. She's the one with the engineering background.

Coop is looking at Yash too. Stone is about to answer, but this time, it's Yash who gives Stone the withering look.

“Inside, outside, it's impossible to tell right now,” Yash says. “We would have to examine the trajectory of the blast.”

“If there's a single blast,” Stone says. “I've dug bombed-out ruins. Sometimes those places were attacked from outside, and sometimes they were attacked from inside. A few times we knew that the places had been felled by a series of bombs exploding in unison. Rubble looks like rubble looks like rubble until you start taking it apart and examining the details.”

She says that not because she's lording her knowledge over us but because she's giving valuable information. I have learned the differences in her tone.

I say, “I know you've worked many sites.” In fact she's one of the best archeologists of her generation, and only her anger at the Empire has kept her with us. “I had no idea, however, that you'd worked bomb locations.”

She smiles. “Not recent bomb locations, Boss. Ones that go back centuries. The history of the Empire is really a history of warfare. And some of that warfare is tiny and very personal—happening on a building-to-building, town-to-town level. You'd be surprised what I learn when I dig in small areas.”

“You want to dig in here and figure out what happened, don't you?” asks Mikk. He has come to respect her as well. But as usual with Mikk, he's not asking this question so much because he's curious about Stone. He's asking it to guide me.

He just told me that
he
would like to dig in here and explore the area, particularly now that he knows that something interesting occurred here.

“I'm still stuck on inside versus outside,” I say. “If the bombing was external, could it have brought down the mountain?”

“A series of targeted bombs from any point in the Empire's history could have brought down the mountain,” Stone says. “Maybe from any time in human history. I know Old Earth had bombs that could bring down mountains long before it had anything resembling space travel.”

Coop is watching her as if he's amused by all that she's saying. I hope she doesn't see his expression.

“But that lift,” I say. “The way that Coop described it, and from what we see here with this platform—”

“It could all mean nothing, Boss,” Stone says. “You really do have to factor in time.”

I resist the urge to roll my eyes.

“Okay,” I say, trying again. “Knowing what we know about the Fleet—”

And here I nod at Coop. He tilts his head toward me. Now I know he's amused. He probably thinks all of my questions are ridiculous. Sometimes we have interchanges like this, in which he can't believe the knowledge we lack. (Of course, sometimes I forget about the knowledge he lacks.)

“—if an air assault attacked the mountain, the Fleet probably had weaponry within the sector base to deal with it. Right?”

I look at Yash now.

“Generally, yes,” she says. “Or they might have called in one of our ships.”

“Exactly,” I say. “The kind of serial bombing you're describing, Lucretia, doesn't seem likely, given what we know about the Fleet's defensive capability. The attack would have been stopped in its tracks.”

“If the Fleet and its opponent were evenly matched,” Stone says. “Superior technology always wins.”

“Usually wins,” Coop says softly. From my understanding, the ships that fired on the
Ivoire
had inferior technology, but the shot that crippled the
Ivoire
happened at just the right time.

“Usually wins, then,” she says. “I'm sorry to say this, Captain—” and now she turns to Coop “—but while your Fleet has the best technology we've ever encountered, that doesn't mean that you were at the top of the food chain at the time.”

Yash looks at him. He looks at her.

Rossetti, who notes the silent interchange, is the one who speaks up. “Sometimes we were evenly matched,” she says. “But never, in my lifetime, did we come across a more powerful foe.”

“In the history of the Fleet we did,” Coop says. “But they weren't necessarily enemies. We didn't fight everyone. We were pretty well known for our diplomacy.”

Again, he uses that wry tone.

“All I'm thinking,” I say with some emphasis, because somehow the conversation has gotten away from me, “is that it strikes me that an external attack would have had to happen swiftly to completely destroy this base. Am I wrong about that?”

“Again,” Stone says, “we have no way of knowing this. You're basing your conclusion on a series of faulty assumptions.”

“For once, I agree with Dr. Stone,” Coop says. “We don't know. But, for the record, we have weapons that could easily and quickly bring down a mountain. Most advanced cultures do.”

“On the Dignity Vessel?” Mikk asks.

Coop gives him a sideways look. The crew of the
Ivoire
hates the term “Dignity Vessel.” They haven't called their ships Dignity Vessels for centuries, but I can't break my people of the habit. Sometimes, I think, we use the term to stay in touch with the myth.

Something about Coop's look puts me on edge. “The Fleet carries all its weaponry with it,” he says with more patience than I expected from that look.

Which is a long way to say “Of course.”

“I haven't seen anything like that on the Dignity Vessels that we've found,” I say.

The Lost Souls Corporation has five complete Dignity Vessels, although two are rebuilds. I know for a fact that the rebuilds do not have any such weaponry. But I feel odd, standing here in these ruins, discussing the weapons capability of ships I own, capability I didn't realize those ships have.

Coop stands up. He's not going to tell me if the ships have the capability or not. At least, he's not going to tell me in front of the others, and clearly, he hasn't told me since we've known each other. Apparently nothing is going to change right now.