City of Ruins

TWO

I travel to Vaycehn reluctantly. I don’t like cities. I never have. Cities are as opposite from the things I love as anything can get.

First, they exist planetside, and I try never to go planetside.

Second, they are filled with people, and I prefer to spend most of my time alone.

Third, cities have little to explore, and what small amount of unknown territory there is has something built on top of it or beside it.

The history of a city is known, and there is no danger.

But I’m going to Vaycehn on the advice of one of my managers. She has a hunch, and I am funding it, although the closer we get to the city, the more I regret that decision.

I made the decision because I’m learning that a single woman cannot manage an entire corporation on her own. I used to run my own wreck-diving company, but I hired people when I needed them and let them go when the dive was over.

Now I oversee hundreds of employees, with dozens of tasks before them. I need to learn to trust.

Even in the area of exploration.

Especially in the area of exploration.

And I find that to be the hardest of all.

Vaycehn sprawls along a great basin on the eighth and most centrally located continent on the planet Wyr. Wyr is tiny and warm as far as planets go. It exists in the habitable zone near its star but is a little too close for the bulk of the human population.

The planet does have plenty of air and edible indigenous plants. A lot of farming communities have sprouted in its arable sixth and seventh continents. But the planet’s only major city—as cities are defined in this part of the universe—is Vaycehn.

I’d heard of Vaycehn decades ago. Everyone who works in antiquities, history, and collectibles has. Vaycehn boasts the earliest settlement in this part of the galaxy. Its history has continued, uninterrupted, for at least five thousand years.

The city has moved several times, but its footprint remains in what the people of Wyr call the Great Basin, a dip in the planet’s surface so deep that it’s visible from space. That dip provides shelter for the storms that buffet Wyr, and it also has temperatures twenty degrees lower than surface temperatures anywhere else on the planet.

The perfect location for both an ancient and a modern city.

A place I never thought I’d go.

Until now.

My team and I fly in on six orbit-to-ground skips, and land them in the spaceport at the edge of the Basin. We’re in the City of Vaycehn, but it doesn’t look like a city here. There are buildings, and a lot of dry brown ground. We’re only on the ground long enough to disembark from our skips and sign them into their ports. Then we get into the six government-owned hovercarts that were, Ilona discovered, one of the only ways to travel in Vaycehn.

We left my ship, Nobody’s Business, docked on Wyr’s orbital business station. The Business has a cloned identity, one we adopted when I became a fugitive inside the Empire, and that’s how the Business is registered with Wyr. Fortunately no one seems to care who we are, so long as we spend money planetside.

We’re spending a lot of money to come here. I look at this visit as an experiment; I’m not sure our search for stealth technology should even include land. All of the stealth technology we’ve discovered so far has been in space.

But Ilona thinks differently. She has hired the ground team—with my supervision—and she believes in this project.

I do not.

In fact, part of me wants this project to fail spectacularly. Then I never have to think about land-based operations again.

The hired pilots fly us into the Basin. I sit behind the copilot, separated by a clear wall. I almost wish the cockpit was blocked off so that I can’t see what these people are doing.

These pilots aren’t one-tenth as good as I am. They make tiny mistakes that would kill them in the tight situations I’ve flown through.

But they know the Basin, and they’re cocky. They come in too fast, going deep at the beginning of the crevice that marks the Basin, and get too close to the stone walls for my comfort. I grip the armrests so hard I’m probably leaving indentations.

I hate cocky pilots, particularly ones whose skills clearly aren’t up to an emergency. Should the wings of the hovercart nick one of the stone walls, the craft will spin out of control. From my vantage, I can’t see any automatic overrides that will prevent such an accident.

And I don’t have time to break through that clear wall ahead of me, hit a few buttons, and stop the craft from spinning before it crashes.

If something happens, I’d go down with the craft, just like everyone else.

The bumpy ride makes it hard to enjoy the scenery. Behind me, the main team—Ilona, Gregory, Lentz, and Bridge—talk about the mission ahead.

They are all scientists and researchers. Never before have I brought them to a site without examining it first. They’re excited, thinking that maybe they’ll be able to be actual explorers.

Maybe by their definitions, they will.

But I’ve also brought a full dive team as well as some archeologists and a few historians. And I’ve brought the Six. They’re scattered throughout the other craft because if one of these things goes down, I don’t want to lose all of our most valuable people.

We land on a wide patch of empty ground. Other hovercarts are parked in the distance, and large buildings outline the empty middle.

I’m glad we have a lot of room for the landing. We still bounce on the ground’s surface—something I would never allow one of my pilots to do— and it takes several seconds for the rocking motion caused by the bouncing to cease.

The doors open, and I sneeze as planetside air filters in. Planetside air has unfamiliar scents—-in this case, both sweet and dry.

Most of the air I breathe is recycled. It has a faint metallic edge, and sometimes a warning staleness. I’m used to that. I’m not used to air that has a taste, air that tickles my nose and makes me feel a little light-headed.

This air is also warm. I’d been warned that Wyr was a hot place, but I’d also been told that Vaycehn was one of the coolest locations.

If this is cool, then I don’t want to visit any other site on the planet. I’m already sweating as I step off the craft. The metal railing of the makeshift stair is warm beneath my touch, even though it’s only been in the light from Wyr’s sun for a few minutes.

Heat shimmers across the pavement in little waves that look like turbulence before a planetside storm. I’ve already decided I don’t like it here, and this is only the first of thirty days.

Ilona is already talking with our guides. Ilona is slight, with black hair that looks almost blue in this light. She wears it tied back, but some strands have come loose in the wind. She brushes at them as she speaks.

The guides—all male—watch her hands. The guides’ uniforms make them easy to identify. The uniforms are brown with red piping. Sleeveless, with shorts instead of pants. The men wear sandals on their feet. They also have their hair cropped so short that their scalps are visible.

“Well, this is going to be interesting,” says a voice beside me. I turn to see Mikk, one of my best divers. He’s not built like a man who space-dives. He has too many muscles because he does a lot of weight work to maintain his bone structure. He’s also large.

Most divers are small people with such delicate bones that being on a planet with normal gravity will hurt them. I’ve left some of my best divers behind because I don’t want them subject to the planet’s g-forces. Unlike me and several others, those divers grew up in space. I’m landborn and can handle gravity. I just don’t like it.

Two divers and one of our pilots are getting off the second craft. So is Julian DeVries, one of the Six. He’s tall and broad shouldered. Out of all of my team who have landed so far, he looks the most out of place. He’s wearing a blue silk suit that has to be too warm. But aside from removing the coat and slinging it over his shoulder, he doesn’t seem affected by the heat at all.

“You think those people know what they’re doing?” Mikk asks me. He’s still looking at the guides.

“I think they know how to take us to the caves,” I say. “I suspect they’ll get us to our accommodations with a minimum of fuss, and I hope that they don’t have too many regulations to follow.”

“What about canned speeches?” Julian says as he joins us. “I loathe canned speeches.”

Mikk frowns at him. “Meaning what?”

“Guides,” I say. “They usually have a small spiel about the history of a place.”

“Which we theoretically know,” Julian says.

“Emphasis on ‘theoretically,’” I say. “It’s always good to listen to the stories and the myths and the legends. You can learn a lot from them.”

Mikk gives me a nervous glance. He used to pooh-pooh the idea of the importance of myths and legends until he dove the Room of Lost Souls with me. Then he learned how oddly accurate legends could be.

“You don’t think we’ve tapped everything,” he says.

“I don’t think we’ve even started.” I watch as the third hovercart eases down. If only we’d had that pilot. He, at least, is cautious, using the craft to hover before landing, just like it was designed to do.

This machine lands close enough to swirl dust and dirt around us. Mikk covers his eyes, but Julian merely adjusts his suit coat so that it blocks the worst of it.

When the engines shut down, Julian continues as if the conversation hadn’t been interrupted at all.

“That ride in was bumpy.”

I nod.

“I have a hunch things are more dangerous here than we planned.”

He sounds like he’s been involved from the beginning. But he hasn’t been. He has no idea how dangerous we think this is.

Five years ago, the city suffered a groundquake, and an entire section of old buildings fell into the caverns below, revealing caves no one had ever seen before. Like many ancient cities, Vaycehn has an underground component— old transportation routes, basements, and quarries where the original buildings were dug out of the rock. Supposedly, these new caves are different, structured with walls. They look like someone had built them purposely and then forgotten them.

When Ilona requested the visas to travel and work in Vaycehn, she was warned that the underground caverns were unsafe. The Vaycehn government denied her requests several times—and not because we were using false identities. Our identities, while fictitious, are impenetrable.

Any time we enter the Empire, we run the danger of being arrested. But we’ve been in and out so many times that we know no one is tracking these identities. We know we’re safe, so long as we don’t attract any notice.

As for Vaycehn, the problem was the city government itself. It didn’t want us in the caves. We finally had to sign waivers protecting Vaycehn from liability should any of us die. We also had to sign confidentiality agreements; we couldn’t run to any form of press—whether it was Vaycehnese, Wyrian, or systemwide—and tell the story of our explorations beneath the city.

What little off-planet income Vaycehn made came from tourism, and the government was afraid that negative publicity would destroy that tiny trade. Our guarantee that we would not do anything to harm their tourism industry got us into Vaycehn. I hope that we do not stay long.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth hovercarts land in a perfect row, as if they’ve practiced the maneuver. The engines shut off in unison, and before long, my entire team has gathered around me.

I have never brought so many people on a single exploratory mission. Thirty, plus equipment. Keeping track of all of them will be difficult, particularly when I have duties of my own.

The team knows the risks.

But I’ve learned over the years that knowing the risks and living with their consequences are two very different things.

THREE

I used to work for myself. I ran my own wreck-diving business out of my ship, Nobody’s Business. I specialized in historical wrecks. I’d dive them, but I wouldn’t salvage, believing that history should remain intact.

My first encounter with a Dignity Vessel taught me the dangers of intact history. That encounter also changed my life.

Now I run an organization so big that I don’t know the name of everyone who works for me. We operate out of a space station that orbits one of the planets in the Nine Planets Alliance.

The Alliance sounds more official than it is. In reality, the Nine Planets Alliance is a kind of no-man’s land, ignored—at the moment—by the Enterran Empire. Right now, any imperial ship that ventures too deep into Nine Planets territory gets destroyed.

Someday, the Empire will think it important to fight back.

Fortunately, that day hasn’t come.

Although I might be the one to provoke it.

The Empire and I are both searching for the secret to something called stealth tech. It’s a lost ancient technology, something no one entirely understands. The Empire has learned how to re-create it, but in order to do so, they need bits of actual ancient equipment, and so far, they can only take that equipment from Dignity Vessels.

Our mission, at least at the moment, is to find any Dignity Vessels in this sector and keep them out of imperial hands. Right now, we have four Dignity Vessels in various states of decay docked to the ring on our space station. We have parts of two more on a nearby ship—a decommissioned imperial military science ship that we bought through a proxy at auction.

I let my own team of scientists work on stealth tech. I’m in charge of finding more. Stealth tech doesn’t just exist on Dignity Vessels. We’ve also found it in a place called the Room of Lost Souls that we believe to be an ancient abandoned space station, though we don’t know that for certain.

We don’t know much for certain.

What we do know about stealth tech, though, is that it is deadly. It has killed three of my friends.

It also killed my mother.

It didn’t kill me, because I have a genetic marker that allows me to work inside stealth tech with no ill effects. The Empire has discovered thirteen of us with that marker.

Six have chosen to work with me.

We find, learn about, and will ultimately re-create ancient stealth tech. Then we will sell it to governments other than the Enterran Empire, in the interest of keeping the balance of power within the sector the same.

If there’s ever any serious deviation from that mission, I will shut us down and disband. I see no other way.

Vaycehn has sixty-five hotels, the best of which are in a ring around the city’s center. We’ve booked two floors in the Basin, one of the oldest and grandest of the hotels.

I saw to this part of the trip personally because I knew what I wanted. I wanted a hotel that wouldn’t mind thirty guests who arrived nightly covered in dirt and mud; a hotel that would cater to our every whim at any hour of the day; a hotel that would be able to provide secure communications off-planet since we would be so far from our ship; and a hotel that would guarantee our privacy from any inquiries not just during our visit but for years afterward.

I have the penthouse suite in the west corner of the top floor: six rooms, including a conference area, a kitchen, a bedroom suite, a “guest” bedroom, and a private sitting area. I’m going to need all of it.

We will have our meetings here. Some of my staff will set up the replay equipment in the conference area. I’ve already ordered the hotel staff to remove the furniture from the guest bedroom so that I can put some dedicated computer equipment inside.

I set up that equipment alone. I am the only one who knows how it works, and I want to remain that way. Usually I set up equipment like that in my own bedroom, but this is a hotel, not a ship. I can take advantage of the room.

From the conference room, I have a view of the city below. It sprawls. Buildings crawl up from the ground as far as the eye can see. Humans live and work in each of those buildings. Hundreds of buildings, maybe thousands. And if I think about that too much, I get claustrophobic.

I think the staff of thirty that I’ve brought with me is twenty-nine people too many; if I think about the millions who’ve settled here in Vaycehn, I will drive myself crazy.

Still, it’s a pretty place. The basin walls rise up around the city itself like the walls of a space station. Sunlight falls on ruins in the distance—one of the many abandoned sections of the city.

Those sections have been explored by historians and archeologists through the ages. Vaycehn is one of the most studied areas in this sector of the galaxy.

As I stand in these windows and look at the orangish light settling on the rooftops below me, I realize that layers are visible before me. If I squint, I can see the Great Ages of the city just in its architecture, and that makes my heart pound.

This is not one of the Great Ages of Vaycehn. Now it is merely the largest settlement on Wyr. The city itself has several million inhabitants. But in some of the more populous sections of the galaxy, there are permanent space bases that boast a similar population—and those are sprawled over a greater area. Attached by warrens and cubbies and gangways, those large stations were once small stations that joined with others for the sake of power or wealth or sheer greed.

Vaycehn became a city because of its location. It remains one because it has done several things: it has preserved its history; it serves as the center of trade for this small region of space; and it has the longest-existing continuous government in the known universe.

Ilona thinks Vaycehn is a major source of stealth tech.

I don’t think stealth tech can exist on land. I think the technology is too unstable, and too dangerous.

And even if it did somehow manage to exist on a planet, there is no way that the stealth tech could have remained hidden for thousands of years, only to reveal itself in a dramatic and frightening way just a few years ago.

Ilona argues differently. She says that since stealth tech originated on Earth, it was probably invented on land, and there were safeguards for working and living with it.

Maybe so, I have said in response, but in no way would those safeguards exist so many light-years away from the home planet, in a place those ancient Earthers could not imagine.

I feel safe in my argument; I have had several direct experiences with stealth tech. Ilona has not.

But she does have one small point in her favor.

The Six.

They all—and me, so really, we all—are built-in safeguards because we can work with stealth tech and survive.

The Six are in my conference room, along with the rest of the team. We are mapping the morning strategy session. The Six are Orlando Rea, a quiet, bookish man with a surprising amount of gumption; Fahd Al-Nasir, black-haired, dark-eyed, timid; Elaine Seager, a fit middle-age woman who hangs to the back of any group; Nyssa Quinte, skinny and tough, who should be my best diver, and is not; Rollo Kersting, a charming man, very fond of his comforts; and of course, Julian DeVries.

Our guides—who are not here—already know that we are not average tourists. Ilona spent an hour after our arrival explaining that we will not follow the same path as the other archeologists.

One guide has already threatened to quit. I’m sure others will as well.

The key point is whether or not we can legally work on Vaycehn without the guides.

I assign Ilona to discover that piece of information. She makes a note, while I continue directing the staff.

We will have six teams, composed of a diver, an archeologist or historian, a scientist, a pilot, and one of the Six. I will head a seventh team, and what I don’t tell them—but which becomes clear as I make the assignments—is that my team will have the best people from each division. I’m going to work the site just like everyone else, and if there’s a discovery, I want it to be mine.

Only two teams will go down with the guides each day. The other teams will explore the city, interview residents and experts about the city’s past as well as its legends, and investigate the fourteen deaths that preceded us. So far the Vaycehnese government does not want us to discuss those deaths with the locals. But I have promised Ilona that on my days off, I will fight that prohibition in the name of safety; I will say that unless we know what happened, we cannot know what went wrong.

I don’t know if that will work—I’m a diver, not a diplomat—but it’s the only argument I can come up with that the local government might back. From all the work we’ve done off-planet, the only conclusion we can come to is that no one knows what’s been happening here since the ground collapsed.

The collapsed section is visible from the conference room window. The section is a black smudge near the convergence of the basin’s two steep walls. I glance at it as I speak, pausing occasionally to wonder at the darkness below the surface.

When I finish laying out my plans, I open the discussion to the team.

Lucretia Stone, one of the archeologists, says, “I don’t understand why we need pilots on each team. The guides will drive the hovercarts.”

She’s squarely built, with muscular arms and legs. She’s worked all over the galaxy, on some of the most famous digs in recent years. That she signed on with us is surprising until you get to know her history; she’s lost five digs in the past ten years to imperial interference. She likes the fact that we’re not part of the Empire.

Signing on with us was as much a political statement for her as it was a personal one.

But this is her first off-site, on-planet work for us, and I can already sense how much she dislikes not being in charge.

“I’m not going to run this like a dig,” I say. “I’m running it like a dive.”

“A space dive?” She frowns at me. The other two archeologists look to her for guidance. In the past few months, they’ve all gone diving with me because I insisted. But it was tourist diving on established wrecks.

Even then, the archeologists were terrified. To them, space suits are something you wear in an emergency, when the ship you’re riding in loses its environmental controls, not something you don voluntarily to go into abandoned ships in the emptiness of space.

These people are, perhaps, the exact opposite of those of us who have spent our lives diving. The archeologists love the firmness of the ground beneath their feet. They understand gravity and they love to sift through dirt.

We prefer to float, and dirt is something dangerous, something that can clog our oxygen supply and damage our suits.

Not for the first time do I feel a slight hesitation. Maybe I am configuring these teams wrong. Maybe I should dump the historians and the archeologists and the geologists for people who understand dangerous free-floating situations.

Because if I’m wrong and Ilona is right, we will be in a dangerous space-type situation underneath the city of Vaycehn. We will need every bit of diver’s creativity that we have.

“You’re running this like a dive.” Lucretia repeats my words with a touch of incredulousness. “We’re going to suit up and everything?”

I nod. “We’re bringing our suits. That’s why I want an experienced pilot on the hovercart. It’s too bad the Vaycehnese don’t allow other vehicles inside the site. I would prefer something with more maneuverability and power. But they’re afraid that something with that kind of thrust might cause more collapse.”

“They have a good argument,” says McAllister Bridge, one of the scientists. He’s a slender man with long fingers and the glittering eyes of someone who has had expensive reconstructive eye surgery. “If you’re not sure what’s down there, you don’t want to do anything that could potentially shake it up.”

“The walls have held for five millennia,” says Roderick. Roderick has been with me since our mission to the Room of Lost Souls. In the intervening years, Roderick has piloted us out of some very tight situations. When I met him, I didn’t like his style, but now I trust him almost more than I trust myself. “They’ll probably hold for five more.”

“Except in the area that collapsed,” says Bridge.

“That’s something we need to find out,” I say. “How many other collapses have there been in Vaycehn’s history? And were any of them followed by deaths, just like those of the archeologists?”

Fourteen archeologists have died in Vaycehn in the past few years. All of the archeologists were working in the oldest parts of the city. And none of their bodies have ever been recovered.

That alone intrigued Ilona. But the fact that some claim the bodies vanished intrigues her more.

“You’d think information on collapses and deaths would be in the databases,” Julian says. He’s not a scientist or an archeologist. Until the Empire found him, Julian was an accountant in a small firm on Zonze, one of the most populous cities in the entire sector.

“Not if Vaycehn has always been as secretive about its problems as it has been about the fourteen dead,” I say.

“I don’t think they’re being secretive.” Ilona sits close to me, her fingertips tapping lightly on the tabletop. “After all, I was about to find out about the deaths.”

“Because most of those people were well known in their field,” Stone says. “If they came here and disappeared, it would be more suspicious than if they died.”

One of the other archeologists, Bernadette Ivy, nods. “We all know the risks of working underground. We don’t think twice when someone dies at a dig off-planet.”

Then she stops because we’re all staring at her. We all don’t know the risks of working underground. Most of us only know the risks of working in space.

“What risks?” Tamaz asks. Tamaz has also been with me for years. He sounds tentative, which is unusual.

“Ground collapse is one,” Ivy says.

“Probably the biggest one if you’re in a cave,” Stone says.

“Then there’s cultural issues,” Ivy says. “Sometimes the local population hates it when you touch something sacred—and you had no idea it was sacred.”

“Local laws prevail in some of those cases,” Stone says.

“Except in digs that are sanctioned by the Empire,” Ivy says, and then she bites her lower lip.

“Okay, so be honest,” Tamaz says. “The work you archeologists do is mostly safe, right? You don’t die if you make a mistake.”

He stated it like a sentence, but it was really a question. A nervous question.

“That’s right,” Stone says. “Mostly we don’t die when we make mistakes.”

“I mean,” Tamaz says, “if your clothes rip, you’re fine. You don’t usually need extra oxygen or some kind of gravity boot to keep you on a path or—”

“Enough,” I say.

Ivy’s cheeks are flushed, and Stone actually looks angry. I don’t want my people comparing their specialties. It does no good.

Tamaz bites his lower lip, as if he wants to say more. But he doesn’t.

I continue. “I think we get the archeologists’ point. Because those fourteen deaths occurred over time instead of all at once, they didn’t look that suspicious.”

“Exactly,” Stone said with a glare at Tamaz. “It just looked like that particular dig in Vaycehn was a treacherous one.”

“It took Ilona to put some of the facts together,” I say. “Like the fact that the dig itself didn’t collapse. These people died in a perfectly clear area.”

“And some of them,” Ilona says softly, “mummified in the short hours they were inside that area.”

Mikk shudders so violently I can see it across the table. A few of us have seen this before. Mikk saw it at the Room of Lost Souls. I’ve seen it more than once. First with my mother, then with one of my divers on the first Dignity Vessel I found, and finally, at the Room of Lost Souls.

“If you work this like a dive,” Stone says, going back to the original topic, “then we could lose a lot of archeological data. We need to spend time with each patch of ground, examining the layers of soil for evidence of—”

“You’ve only gone on tourist dives,” Tamaz says. “A wreck dive forces you to spend time in each section. You have to, or you really will die.”

An edge in his voice makes me hold up a hand. “I’m sorry to say that the in-depth archeological information is less important than the stealth tech. But you knew that when you signed on.”

Stone leans back in her chair.

“If we don’t find any tech,” I say, “then you and the other archeologists can stay if you want, and do some real fieldwork. The rest of us will return to base.”

“But there won’t be any more funding, will there?” Stone asks.

I’m paying for everything. Or rather, the company is. As a result, any discoveries we make will be the company’s, as is any information on how those discoveries were found.

“Whether or not the funding will continue depends on what we find.” I think, but don’t add, that it will also depend on how easy Stone is to work with now that she’s on-site.

“It seems strange to go into a dig with a preconceived notion of what we’ll find,” Stone says.

“Oh, spare me,” Bridge says. “You always have a notion of the area’s history before you go in. You know that the early colonists stopped somewhere nearby or that someone settled the area before the Colonnade Wars. You have a hunch or you wouldn’t dig in that area in the first place.”

Stone glances at him sideways but doesn’t answer. She’s finally realized that her comments haven’t made her popular with the group.

If she’s like me, she really won’t care about that.

But I’m slowly learning, as I’m managing more and more staff, that people actually care what others think. Sometimes that’s even a motivation for misbehavior.

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. I will have to remind myself repeatedly that the very structure of this excursion is an experiment. And that will require some flexibility on my part.

“My team goes first tomorrow,” I say. “I want to know exactly what we’re facing.”

And whether there’s any hope that Ilona is right.

FOUR

The first morning dawned clear and hot. I almost regret my order to bring our suits. The very idea of pulling mine over my sweaty skin makes me shudder, even though the suit’s environmental controls will probably give me a more comfortable day than the natural environment of Wyr.

We meet our guides just outside the collapse zone. The Vaycehnese have not rebuilt this section of the city. Instead, they put reinforcing walls around the hole and have removed the debris from below.

Signs plaster the few remaining nearby buildings, warning of danger and proceeding at your own risk in almost every language used in the sector. The roads are all blocked off, and floating signs higher up warn that the drivers of any unauthorized flying vehicles will be subject to search, arrest, and crippling fines.

Five guides sit beneath the first set of warning signs. All five are men of about thirty, wearing uniforms and the same expression—a reluctant wariness to take even more researchers to the grounds below.

But Ilona’s work yesterday has paid off. We have permits to work the site for the next six months if need be. And as part of the agreement, the months are measured in Earth Standard, not Vaycehn Normal, which is nearly ten percent shorter.

Still, we don’t need five guides for six people. I’m about to tell them that a few can go home when their leader walks over to me. He’s a big man tending to fat, which surprises me. Most of the people I see can’t have extra weight, either because of their constant space travel or because they dive. He has a mustache that somehow narrows his face.

“Before we take you below,” he says, “we will tell you our regulations.”

He speaks with an accent. He brings a music to Imperial Standard, as well as a precision that I rarely hear in speech. He pronounces each word carefully, as if he’s afraid he’ll be misunderstood.

“First,” he says, “regulations require five guides, no matter how small the tour group is.”

I want to correct him. We are not a tour group. But he holds up a pudgy hand, silently instructing me to hold my questions until he is done.

“The five guides have different skills. We are required by law to have two pilots, two trained medical personnel, and one area specialist. I am the specialist. The medics have badges on their arms….”

In spite of myself, I glance at them and see that the two men in the middle—the only two in any kind of good physical shape—do have small round insignias on the biceps of both arms.

“…The pilots are the only ones licensed to fly the hovercarts. In case the pilots are disabled, we will send for another licensed cart operator to remove the team. Under no circumstances may anyone not licensed fly the carts below.”

I do not nod at this. I can think of a dozen circumstances that would require one of our pilots to fly. On this team, there are two of us who could handle the flight—me and Roderick.

Right now, Roderick is standing very close to one of the carts, inspecting its tiny pilot array, his body almost vanishing in the brightness of the light.

The guide continues. “You may not touch anything without official permission. You may not—”

I wave the documentation at the guide, which startles him into silence. Now I feel the need to correct him. “We’re not a tour group. We’re scientists. We’re here to study. We will touch.”

He takes the documents from me. The Vaycehnese government prefers everything in triplicate: computer files, like the rest of the sector; hardcopy files, which is just plain odd; and a video agreement, in which both parties verbally acknowledge they’ve entered into a contract.

The hardcopy files—the actual documents—must accompany us everywhere.

He studies them, then hands them back to me. “I do not think ‘study’ is advisable. You will look only.”

“We will look, touch, dig, or do whatever we need to,” I say.

His cheeks are flushed, which makes his eyes seem extra bright. “The last study group did not do well below. I am opposed to this action.”

I shrug. “It’s your laws that state we need guides. Either find us someone who is not opposed or take us below.”

His flush is even deeper. He hands the documents back to me. He’s about to speak when Bridge comes up beside me.

Bridge looks at the guide but says to me in a loud voice, “Maybe you should tip him.”

The guide straightens his shoulders. His face is so red now that it looks painful. “We are not allowed to take gratuities.”

He makes the word “gratuity” sound like it’s obscene.

“Then I think Boss here is right,” Bridge says. “You do your job or find someone who can. Because you’re wasting valuable time, my man.”

The guide nods once, then walks back to his group. He talks to them softly, waving his hands as he does so.

I turn toward Bridge. “I can fight my own battles.”

“Oh, believe me, I know that,” he says.

We’ve had a few run-ins of our own. I realize after he speaks that he’s never taken control from me before, unlike Stone, who dislikes anyone else being in charge.

“But,” Bridge says, “this is a male-dominated culture. I figured it might be better to go with the cultural norms rather than lose the morning fighting against them.”

It’s my turn to flush. I knew that the culture was male-oriented. I’d actually warned my female staff about it, telling them to let a lot of gender issues slide because of our cultural differences.

The guide pilots head toward the carts. The medics grab their gear.

“You want to act as liaison between me and the so-called specialist?” I ask.

Bridge grins. “Not really. But I’ll do it for the sake of getting this operation under way.”

“Good.” I sigh. “Tell him that we’re in charge of how fast we move, what we examine, and what we touch. We set the pace, not him. If we have questions, he answers. If he doesn’t like it, he can—”

“Find someone who does.” Bridge’s grin grows. “I got that.”

He walks over to the leader and speaks to him just as carefully as the man spoke to me. They clasp elbows—a sign of agreement among the Vaycehnese —and suddenly all the problems evaporate.

The guide directs us to the carts. He frowns when he realizes how close Roderick stands to one of them, but says nothing.

The carts are strange contraptions. They hover and fly just like the large enclosed hovercrafts that brought us into Vaycehn do, but they have a more limited range. Theoretically, they have more maneuverability, but they don’t look like it to me.

The tops are down, revealing one pilot seat up front and three bench seats behind. The top is crumpled behind the bench seats, ready to go up if the pilot needs it.

The carts might be maneuverable, but I wouldn’t pilot one without the top up all the time. A quick dodging motion might cause a passenger to get clipped or worse.

I wonder if I should mention the tops when the guide leader presses a button on the back of the nearest cart. A hinged trunk opens, revealing more storage space than I would have imagined.

“For your gear,” he says to Bridge.

The other team members—Mikk, Ivy, and Dana Carmak the historian— dump their gear into one of the carts. Dana is a strawberry blonde whose skin is already turning bright red in the heat.

I make sure I’m in one cart and Roderick is in the other one. We both sit in the first row behind the pilot’s area so that we can jump into the pilot seat if necessary.

The morning has grown even hotter. Sweat runs down the side of my face and gathers in drops on my chin. The guides have brought bottles of water and salt tablets; apparently the heat is a problem for many of the groups they ferry below.

My cart has the local pilot, me, Mikk, the guide leader, a medic, and Bridge. The rest of the team has found its seats in the other cart.

“Before we go below,” the guide leader says from behind me, his voice amplified by some kind of system I can’t see, “let me tell you how this place was discovered. A cave-in…”

I tune him out. I know this part of the history. The others watch him as he waves his arms toward the remains of destroyed buildings below us.

The entrance to the caves is black. The opening is wide and arched. The structure itself is curious. What little I’ve seen of Vaycehn architecture shows an affinity for layered construction, bricks placed on top of bricks, sections placed on top of sections.

But the arch seems to be one smooth piece of blackness, shiny in the headlamps of the carts waiting to go in.

“We’ve known for centuries that some of the earliest settlers lived in this part of the Basin,” the guide was saying, “but we never knew exactly where. Not until this latest cave-in showed us an astonishing set of ruins.”

The word “latest” catches my attention. Both Ivy and Bridge glance at me. They caught it too. But we seem to decide as a group not to interrupt the guide—or perhaps they are waiting for me to interrupt him.

The guide has a spiel. I’m going to let him run through it. If I have other questions, I will have Bridge ask them later.

When the guide finishes, the carts rise simultaneously. Our pilot nods at the other pilot, who then goes into the archway first. We follow at a reasonably safe distance, although I do notice that the air—which had smelled faintly of some kind of flower—now smells harsh with a chemical afterburn.

I ask our pilot about raising the cart’s top, but he doesn’t even turn around.

“We’re not going far enough,” he says.

The lights from the other cart reflect against the black wall ahead. That darkness I saw was part of the construction, not a darkness of an unlit area. The cart hovers for a moment, then eases downward as if it’s going into a shaft.

It disappears. The light on the far wall is diminished by half, and I can almost see the materials.

Our pilot eases our cart into the archway, and immediately the air cools. The afterburn smell is gone; here the air is tangy, almost salty, as if there is an ocean nearby.

I don’t have time to reflect on that. I barely have a chance to look at the walls around me before we descend.

The descent is slow. We are going down a shaft. The pilot holds the cart at a steady speed. If it weren’t for the reflections of light on the smooth walls, undulating in a strange wave, I would think we aren’t moving at all.

There’s almost a feeling of weightlessness to this slow descent. I feel a pang. I understand weightlessness. Even though I’m landborn, I’ve spent most of my life in space. The idea of going down a shaft into the dark ground, the weight of an entire city above me, makes my stomach clench.

Finally, we reach the bottom of the shaft. The shaft opens onto a large chamber with the same smooth black walls. Only here there is lighting, and it looks like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s bluish, recessed into the smooth black wall, and seems to coat everything.

My skin seems paler than it ever has. Paler, with a touch of blue. The light seems almost cool—the opposite of that harsh sun above. I blink and realize that my eyes don’t hurt for the first time since we landed on Wyr.

The carts hover next to each other.

“Normally,” the lead guide says, “we continue forward down various passages, giving the history of this place, but you are in charge here.”

Then he looks at me with such contempt that I start. He waits for a moment, studying me.

Finally he says with a bit of annoyance, as if I haven’t answered a question, “What would you like to do?”

There is nothing in this chamber except the lights, the walls, the ceiling, and the floor—all made of that black material.

“I think we should disembark,” I say.

The guide’s lips thin.

The carts lower and my team climbs out. The pilots remain, letting the carts hover. The other guides get out slowly.

Ivy immediately heads to the walls, slips on a pair of gloves, and touches the surface. I’m busy trying to keep my balance on the slick floor. This material is as smooth as it looks—maybe even smoother.

The other team members gather around me, awaiting orders.

I’m watching Ivy.

“You didn’t build these, did you?” she asks the lead guide.

“No,” he says. “We think they grew.”

Mikk starts beside me, but I’m not quite as surprised. I knew that some of the caves had walls that were “grown,” but I thought they were made of a recognizable stone. I figured the caves would be natural caves, with natural caverns created by water, time, or more cave-ins.

“Grew,” Ivy repeats. “This doesn’t look like a natural material to me. Is it native to Wyr?”

Bridge tries to walk to her. He slides and nearly falls. One of the guides crosses his arms, looking satisfied.

They don’t like us, and they resent our presence. I’m not sure if that’s the typical attitude Vaycehnese who work with tourists have—I know I had it when I ran tourist dives—or if their resentment is directed at us for altering the format of the tour.

“We don’t know if it’s native,” the guide says.

Bridge puts on his gloves as well. He pulls a small device from his pocket. I haven’t seen it before. He holds it close to the wall.

“You don’t know,” he says conversationally. “Does that mean you’ve seen this before?”

“There are other places below the city that have black walls,” the guide says, then hastily adds, “and they’re not open to the public.”

We’re not public, but I’m not going to remind him of that.

“What makes you think it grows?” Bridge asks.

The guide licks his lips. Two of the others look at him and shrug. He tilts his head just a little.

“This chamber wasn’t here before the collapse,” he says.

We are all looking at him now.

He flushes under the scrutiny and looks from one of his men to the other. But they say nothing. They let him tell us.

“The collapse revealed stone walls, like the Basin walls,” he says.

I get the sense that he’s choosing his words carefully, possibly revealing more than he should. That flush of his is telling; if nothing else, it shows us all how uncomfortable he finds this topic.

“After the first day, the black threaded through. No one noticed it right away, but the images taken of the site showed it. We went back after…”

He let his voice trail off. He gives the other guides a helpless look. They look away from him.

Curious. Has no one asked about the black walls before?

Bridge has his hands behind his back. He’s watching the lead guide as if he were a test subject. Ivy has taken her hand from the wall and is surreptitiously glancing at her fingertips, as if they make her nervous.

“After what?” Bridge prompts. “You went back after what?”

The guide swallows. “After the room formed. We examined each day’s images. It grew over the stone. All this black. It just grew.”

“Into this chamber.”

He nods.

“And the shaft we came down?” Bridge asks.

The guide thins his lips but nods again.

“But it didn’t continue along the surface?” Bridge had noticed that. I hadn’t.

“It stops about a centimeter from the lip of the shaft,” the guide says.

No one says anything for a moment. I’m feeling a little dizzy, which could be the unexpected information or it could be the unusual climate. I make myself drink some water and take several deep breaths.

Bridge is frowning. It’s a look of concentration, as if he’s trying to absorb everything the guide is telling us.

Ivy has started to rub the tips of her fingers. Dana Carmak walks over to her and, after putting on some gloves of her own, removes Ivy’s, placing them in a specimen bag. Then she hands Ivy some extra-strong cleaner.

The guide doesn’t seem to notice. He’s watching Bridge for some kind of reaction.

“I take it your scientists have studied this,” Bridge says.

The guide nods.

“What do they think happened?”

He shrugs.

One of the medics steps forward. He has been watching Ivy. “Our scientists say it’s not harmful. We’ve brought hundreds of people down here. No one has gotten ill. No one has had black grow on them. It doesn’t seem to leave the cavern.”

“And it goes all the way back?” Bridge asks him.

“All of the caves have it,” the medic says.

“All of the caves on this side of the city,” Bridge says.

“No,” the medic says. “All of the caves in the Basin.”

I feel my breath catch. Mikk glances at me, apparently trying to see if I’m following the discussion. He doesn’t seem real sure about it.

But Mikk knows more about relics and history and shipwrecks and diving. He has never professed to know much about science.

“But you said there was no black when there was a cave-in.” Roderick has joined the discussion. He’s looking at the leader. “Have you seen it grow before?”

The guide looks trapped. “I haven’t, no.”

“But there have always been stories,” says the medic. “Quarantined houses because they accidentally punch through the subbasement wall, and then the entire lower level is subsumed.”

“What do you mean lower level?” Bridge asks.

“The subbasement. The basement. Anything below ground.”

“But the black stops when it gets above ground?” Bridge asks.

The medic nods.

“Even if that above ground area is protected by a roof or shade?” Bridge asks.

The medic nods again.

“Is this simply rumor or do you know this as a fact?” Bridge asks.

The medic rubs his hands together. It’s his turn to give his colleagues an uneasy glance. “Fact,” he says. “My grandparents lost their home to a quarantine when I was a boy.”

“So you’ve seen the growth before,” Bridge says.

The medic nods.

“How come you don’t study it?” Bridge asks. “You needed to study science to have medical training. Why didn’t you branch into a study of the cave walls?”

“That’s not a course of study,” the medic says.

I frown. I’m not quite sure what Bridge is getting at, but I’m finding the path there interesting.

“The walls aren’t a course of study,” Bridge says.

“That’s right.”

“But don’t the local geologists want to know about this? Or do you think it belongs in the biological sciences? Maybe bio-chem?”

The medic seems confused. The lead guide steps in again.

“We are a small city,” he says. “We don’t have the scientific resources available to people from other places.”

“Surely you could have brought them in,” Bridge says.

“It’s a natural phenomenon,” the guide says. “Nothing more.”

And with that, he has clearly closed off his part of the conversation.

I’m trying to review the data I’ve studied about the Vaycehn ruins. I remember mention of growth on the walls, but not this. And I seem to recall that the implication was that the growth preexisted the discovery, that it didn’t grow afterward.

“Is the material removable?” I ask Ivy. After all, she’s the one who has been studying the tips of her gloves, where she touched the blackness.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“We’ll take a sample,” Bridge says. “Not just here, but at the top. We’re at a disadvantage, though. We’re to look for a certain kind of tech, which is a higher form of physics than we’re familiar with. I don’t think this is.”

I appreciate Bridge’s discretion. He doesn’t mention stealth tech in front of the guards.

“Because this stuff grows?” Roderick asks. “Or because it stops near the surface.”

“Certain fungi won’t grow above a certain level. The different environment on the surface doesn’t allow the growth.” Ivy is still rubbing her fingertips together, as if she’s afraid of what she touched.

“Yeah, but to grow that fast…” Mikk lets his voice trail off when several of the others stare at him. “Right? Nothing grows that fast.”

“Bacteria does,” Ivy says. “So do a lot of other natural organisms. You just don’t encounter most of them in a vacuum.”

Meaning that those of us who work primarily in space are ignorant of what we’re facing here. Which is probably true. Although I knew that many things grow quickly. Just because we work in space, doesn’t mean we haven’t encountered deadly bacteria or viruses that run through a space station in a matter of hours.

But I’m staying silent through this discussion. That’s one of the many management tricks I’ve learned. I hire the best I can find. I have to trust them to do their work, which is what this speculation is.

Bridge turns back to the lead guide. “Was this room shaped like this, then, when the blackness came?”

The guide shakes his head. “This was a—” He pauses, as if he had been about to say something forbidden. “A certain kind of cave-in. The blackness covered it and created the shaft. That’s why no one came down here for years. They were afraid they’d get trapped inside.”

“But the growth stopped,” Bridge says.

The guide nods.

“After the chamber was formed.”

The guide nods again.

“Fascinating.” Bridge glances at me. His eyes seem brighter than usual. He’s excited about this.

“We’re spending our day here?” I ask him.

“I think this is important,” he says. “We need a lot of samples.”

I try not to sigh. I want to go deeper, to see what’s ahead. I just want a sense.

Then I realize that he doesn’t need all of us for the samples. “You and Ivy and Roderick stay here. I want Dana and Mikk to accompany me farther into the tunnels. I want to know what’s ahead so that we can plan.”

This is not how a dive would work. On a dive, we would all stay together and let the person whose work takes precedence take charge of that part of the mission.

But my archeologist, scientist, and historian don’t know that. Only Roderick and Mikk do. They’re looking at me in surprise, but they say nothing. They know this is a different kind of exploration.

“You,” I say, pointing to the lead guide. “You’ll join us, along with you—” I point to the medic who told us about the blackness “—and whatever pilot you feel is necessary.”

“It’s not accepted protocol to break up the group,” says the lead guide.

“But it’s not accepted protocol to stop here, either, is it?” I say.

He nods once, reluctantly.

“We’re trained for dangerous situations, just like you are. We’ll take every precaution we can. And we won’t be gone long.” I say that last for the three I’m leaving behind.

The guide looks at the other two members of his team helplessly. They say nothing. He goes to the cart I rode in on and climbs aboard. After a moment, the medic joins him.

Then I get in, followed by Mikk and Dana.

“Where are we going?” the guide asks with that bitterness he seems to reserve only for me.

I give him my most level look. “We’re going to the edge of the section where the fourteen archeologists died.”

FIVE

The group stirs around me. Apparently they think I’ve just contradicted myself. I say we’re going to be safe, and then I suggest something reckless.

But I’m not going to justify anything. I need to see that site to know what we’re facing. I won’t get close. I doubt the lead guide will let me very close anyway. He seems a lot more cautious than I am.

I’m paying so much attention to the negative reaction from my team, I almost miss what the lead guide is saying.

“They didn’t die in one place.”

We all turn toward him.

He looks pleadingly at Bridge. “We do not always know where there is danger.”

Bridge raises his eyebrows as he looks at me. He’s asking if I want to change my mind.

“If we’re looking at the same stuff we’ve seen before,” I say, unwilling to use the words “stealth tech,” “then we need to know where it begins and ends. We have to map it.”

Mapping is a big part of diving. The more we know, the more detail it’s in, the better off we are. I realize as I say that we need to map that I’m moving myself back to a more comfortable, familiar position.

Apparently, I’m more on edge than I realize.

“Surely you have maps of the places you know are dangerous,” Bridge says to the guide.

“Of course,” he says. “We all carry them. We do not want to accidentally go down the wrong corridor.”

“Good,” I say. “Then we’ll be safe.”

“Don’t get close,” Bridge says, but it’s more for the guide than for me.

Still, I nod.

Roderick lets out the breath he’s been holding. He comes closer to our cart. “Maybe I should go with you,” he says.

I understand the implication. I’m the only one of this group who has the marker and can work in stealth tech. I’m also the only pilot on the mini-mission. If I’m somehow disabled, then the entire group has to rely on the Vaycehnese pilot, who clearly doesn’t have the skills Roderick and I do.

“I’d rather have you close to the exit,” I say.

He nods. He understands. He has to be here and be ready should we need to get someone out quickly. He knows I’ll contact him if I can.

We all wear small communicators around our ears. A single tap, and we can speak to each other. I’ve already tested to see if mine works down here. It does, although I’m not sure I can contact the others back at the hotel.

“You cannot talk her out of this?” the lead guide says to Bridge.

Bridge laughs. “Me? She’s the one in charge.”

“And that,” the guide mumbles loud enough for all of us to hear, “is why no one should ever listen to a woman.”

We all ignore his protest. Instead, I tap the top of the pilot’s seat ahead of me.

“Let’s go,” I say.

As I do, Mikk says to me, “Should we suit up?”

The guide hears. He turns toward us. “In your space suits?”

Mikk isn’t looking at him. Mikk is watching me.

“We have air here. We have cool air here. Drink your water and you will be fine,” the guide says.

But Mikk is waiting for my answer. They all are.

“We’re not going inside the area where they died,” I say. “We’re just going to figure out where that area is.”

“Those areas,” the guide says again. “There is more than one.”

“Still,” I say to Mikk. “We’ll just look. We won’t go deep.”

He sighs, but nods, then settles back in his seat. The pilot still hasn’t moved.

“I guess we should go, then,” Mikk says.

The guide hasn’t said anything. He’s still looking at me. “We cannot see all the death sites.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“They overlap,” he says.

I frown. I think I know what he means, but I’m not sure. The measurements of the station that houses the Room of Lost Souls have changed in the intervening years, as if the station is growing. Squishy, my stealth-tech expert, theorizes that the station is slipping out of one dimension into another.

If we are looking at stealth tech and not some localized phenomenon, then it would be logical to have the areas where the dead were found encroach on other areas.

“Show us what you can,” I say.

“From a safe distance,” Bridge adds.

That surge of resentment is back. But he hasn’t said that because the guide will listen to him instead of me. He’s said that because he wants me to be as careful as possible.

“I do not go close to those places,” the guide says. “I have warned my tours against them.”

And he’s trying to warn me.

“Let’s go,” I say, and this time the guide gives the order. The cart moves forward, deep into the chamber, the strange blue lights reflecting off the cart’s surface like sunlight on the edge of a shuttlecraft.

We pass four corridors before turning down one. Mikk is using his wrist guide to record all of this. I’m doing the same. Carmak is watching everything as if she’s never done anything like it before.

I guess, if you don’t count the tourist dives I’ve taken her on, she never has.

“Do you have a spiel for this part of the tunnels?” I ask the lead guide.

He swallows hard, and then nods. After a moment, he leans forward. “We do not know how to date these,” he says. “The blackness looks the same throughout, but the lighting is different.”

He sweeps his hand upward. For the first time, I notice that the lights have changed from that cool blue to a frosty white. The air is even cooler here, to my relief.

I’m almost beginning to feel at home.

“Our own history says that the first settlers found these caves. They used them as a base while building the first city of Vaycehn.”

“Which means that someone was here before them,” Carmak says.

The guide looks at her. “We believe these tunnels have grown,” he says. “We believe they are natural.”

He says that with the conviction of a devout man who has just heard something potentially damaging about his own religion.

“Even the lights?” Mikk asks.

The guide shrugs. “We think some early settlers may have put them in.”

“Like you put in the blue lights in the chamber,” I say in my most agreeable tone.

The guide looks down. I feel a surge of excitement. They didn’t put in the lights. The lights formed when the black smoothness formed.

“What kind of records are there of that first settlement?” Carmak asks. “Did you find actual evidence of their existence?”

She can barely contain the eagerness in her voice. The guide hears it and smiles for the first time.

“We found a lot of evidence,” he says. “You can find it all re-created in the City Museum of Vaycehn. The section on the first settlement takes up an entire floor.”

“What did you find?” I ask. “Furniture? Clothing? Equipment?”

“Yes to all,” he says. “We found so much that the museum staff is still cataloguing.”

“I’m sure there are items that can’t be catalogued,” Mikk says. He’s gone with me on many dives since the Room of Lost Souls. On the Dignity Vessels we’ve found, we’ve recovered all kinds of things, from spoons to devices that make music with the touch of a button.

He’s always been fascinated with those things, and he seems fascinated now.

“Yes,” the guide says, only now he’s leaned back, reluctant again. Does he think we’re going to loot their museum? Or does he simply not want to talk about things he does not know for certain? “There are hundreds of items we can’t identify. The City Museum has hired experts to evaluate these things.”

Experts. He says that as if we’re amateurs. I suppose, on some level, we are. We don’t care about Vaycehn or even Wyr history. We care only about the possibility of stealth tech in this place.

The guide suddenly sweeps his arm toward yet another corridor. “Down there,” he says. “The first two archeologists died down there.”

We are hovering in the corridor we’ve come down, several meters from the entrance to the other corridor.

“How close can we get?” I ask.

“This is close enough,” the guide says.

The pilot’s hands are gripped tightly on the controls. His knuckles have turned white.

“How far away did they die?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” the guide says, frowning at me.

“A meter? A kilometer? How deep were they in that other corridor?”

“Seven meters,” the medic says.

The guide glares at him.

“My father was on the recovery team.”

“They got the archeologists out?” I ask. We’ve had to abandon a corpse to stealth tech before we knew that I could brave it and survive.

“No,” the medic says. “But it was clear they were dead.”

“They were mummified, right?” I ask.

The medic nods. “He says he’s never seen anything like it.”

“Have you?” Mikk asks.

The medic closes his eyes. “Four times,” he says softly.

I put my hands on the side of the cart and ease out. The floor is slippery here too. I have to hold onto the hovering cart to get my balance.

I hate that part of gravity. I want to float to my destination, not walk toward it on unsafe surfaces.

The guide grabs my wrist. “I can’t let you do this.”

“I’m only going to the entrance,” I say.

His grip remains tight. “No,” he says. There’s real fear in his voice. “I told you, the areas change. If we’re wrong about where it begins, it will kill you.”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Mikk says. “It can’t kill her.”

The guide stares at him for a moment, then looks back at me. “It kills everyone.”

“I’ll be careful,” I say.

He shakes his head. “I cannot be responsible for your death. If something happens, I will blame your recklessness. I will say you were warned and you ran away from us and we couldn’t catch you.”

“Cover your ass as best you can,” I say. “I have nothing against that. And if I’m dead, my reputation won’t matter at all.”

Mikk grins. The medic has gone pale. The guide looks ill, but he lets go of my wrist. His fingers have left red marks on my skin.

I resist the urge to rub it as I walk cautiously down the slick corridor. It feels even colder closer to the ground. The lights come on as I move—thin, white things that somehow manage to cover every centimeter of the place.

I am listening as much as observing. The active stealth tech that I have been near makes a series of sounds that my brain interprets as music—usually choral voices singing in harmony. The weaker stealth tech sounds like humming, and the tiny stealth tech I’ve encountered—my father had a working bottle experiment—had a sound so faint that I had to strain to hear it.

But I did hear it.

At the moment, I hear nothing except my own ragged breathing.

It takes longer than I thought it would to reach the branching corridor. I stop at the opening. There are no lights, and it is so dark down there that the hair rises on the back of my neck.

At least in space there is an ambient light. Nothing is ever completely black. Not like this. If I walk into that darkness, I will effectively disappear.

I try to remember. Did the lights come on as the cart approached an area or when the cart was already inside? I have a hunch the cart’s lights covered a lot. Maybe it was a motion sensor that made the lights come on.

I take a deep breath of that wonderfully cool air, then stick my hand into that corridor.

Behind me, I can hear the guide shouting. He doesn’t want me to do that much.

I wave my arm around, and after a moment, rows and rows of lights flicker on. When one is triggered, the others get triggered as well. I wager they get triggered at some set distance.

These lights have a rose tint to them. The area looks less black than a deep red, thanks to the lighting. That redness is oddly welcoming. I have a hunch we’re getting closer to the heart of these caves.

I keep my arm in the corridor and make a point of moving it so that I can continue to see. Deep in the corridor—maybe seven meters ahead, maybe farther—I can see shapes. I’m not sure what exactly. They might simply be reflections on the shiny walls, although my mind reassembles those shapes into furniture or boxes or tables. All seem plausible. But for what I know, those shapes could also be debris—

Or other bodies.

I pull my arm out before I have a chance to reflect on what I’ve done. The lights remain on for several seconds before they flicker off. The farthest away disappear first—a nifty design that won’t leave anyone in darkness too long.

My heart is pounding. It takes me a moment to catch my breath. I feel like I sometimes do when I stumble on a very important wreck.

I wait until I make it back to the cart to say what I’m thinking.

“We’re diving this.”

Carmak nods. The guide looks scared. Mikk grins.

“You saw something,” he says.

“Oh, yeah,” I say. “I saw a lot of somethings—and I want to know what they are.”

SIX

The problem is that of the people with the markers, I’m the only experienced diver. The others have had training, of course, or they wouldn’t have gone into the Room of Lost Souls when my father begged them to. But the Room is an empty place, without a lot of obvious dangers.

None of the Six have the ability to dive a dangerous area. None of them know how to do an excavation, and I wouldn’t trust any of them—no matter how smart—to attempt one even in full gravity.

By the time we have our nightly meeting, my mind is full of half-completed plans. I don’t tell the others what I’m thinking; it’s too early. But I have a hunch we’ll be here quite a while, excavating the areas where the archeologists died.

I also have to set up an emergency evacuation plan. The longer we’re here, the more risk we run of getting discovered by the Empire. I talk to Ilona before we start the meeting. I have her lay out plans for a quick escape.

Essentially everyone must head for the ships in the spaceport as quickly as possible. We’ll decide at the time (if there’s time) which equipment to take and which we trash. And Ilona and I must drum it into everyone’s brains that if an emergency evacuation gets called, we all leave immediately, no matter what we’re doing.

“You think it’s stealth tech now, don’t you?” Ilona says as we finish moving chairs in the conference room.

The hotel staff has covered the table with specialty dishes as well as fresh fruit, vegetables, and crudites. We are going to eat a Vaycehnese feast, something the city is famous for. Glasses of sparkling water line the sideboard behind me.

I had the staff remove the wine the moment I arrived. I left all the beverages with caffeine and a single jug of local ale for the team members who cannot survive without their evening alcohol. But I make sure there isn’t enough for anyone to get drunk on.

I wanted to limit the food, too—overeating is just as bad when you’re trying to do something athletic—but I couldn’t do that without mining the feast. I have to trust my team to have some sense.

Ilona grabs one of the yellow-and-brown spotted apples that Vaycehn is known for, then sits on a chair near the head of the table.

“Well?” she says to me. “Are you convinced?”

“Let’s say I’m more convinced than I was,” I say. “There are a lot of strange things in those caves.”

“Not all strange things in the universe come from stealth tech.” Roderick has just come in the door. He stops when he sees the food spread as if he hasn’t eaten in weeks.

“I know that,” Ilona says with irritation. “But these are probably caused by it.”

“Probably not,” I say.

They both turn toward me.

I smile and grab one of the spotted apples for myself. “But we are going to wait for the others before I tell you what we found.”

The remaining members of the team straggle in. To my surprise, my team arrives before all the other teams are complete. My team looks tired— Carmak in particular, even though she didn’t do much physical work—and a few have wet hair from showers.

Ivy’s hands are scrubbed raw. I didn’t realize how upset she is from that simple touch. I would think that an archeologist, used to working in soil, would be used to touching strange and possibly dangerous things.

She sits across from Ilona. As the rest of the team filters in, they grab fruit or a slice of bread. A few pour themselves ale—although none of the ale drinkers are my divers or pilots. They’re used to remaining clean during a mission.

The drinkers are primarily the Six, the historians, and a few of the scientists. I’m glad I’ve left only one jug of ale because it’s gone quickly. Rollo Kersting, one of the Six, pours the last dregs into a coffee cup and turns to me.

“You should ask for more booze next time,” he says.

Mikk stifles a laugh. Roderick turns his chair away so that his grin isn’t apparent.

“I should,” I say in mock agreement.

Kersting’s name fits him. He is rounder than the others, although he manages to stay in shape. His chubby cheeks and tufts of brown hair accent the roundness. His love of beer is the reason for his extra weight. Much of what we do on missions with Kersting is designed to keep him from that extra glass with dinner.

Kersting doesn’t notice. He slides into the nearest chair and eyes the covered dishes.

“We have a lot to report,” I say. “The hotel has thoughtfully provided dinner. Let’s serve ourselves, and then conduct the meeting over food.”

I don’t have to tell people twice to grab plates. Fortunately the hotel was wise enough to repeat the same courses on both ends of the sideboard. Everyone dishes up platefuls of food, then returns to their seats. I take a small bit of each dish. Nothing is recognizable.

I set my plate in front of the head of the table, but I don’t eat. Everyone else tucks in.

I give the overall report of what’s below, spending quite a bit of time on the black walls and the strange lighting.

“I wasn’t able to see more than the first death area,” I say, “but it looks like the Vaycehnese haven’t let anyone back there. There’s a lot to be excavated.”

Tamaz lifts his head when he hears that. “We’re going to dive,” he says with a smile.

“We are,” I say. “But we’re going to run this like any other mission. Mapping first.”

“I would think there’s also a problem.” Kersting has finished his ale and taken a glass of sparkling water. “If the guide is right, then that stuff is in a stealth-tech area.”

“Possible,” I say. “It’s something we’re going to have to work out.”

Because if it all is truly in a stealth-tech area, then I’m the only trained diver. The Six will have to dive with me, and that will be like taking tourists on a dangerous deep-space dive.

“What I’m most interested in tonight are two things,” I say. “I want to know what the rest of you discovered in your researches today. And I also want to know if the scientists have any early thoughts on the black stuff. First the black stuff.”

Bridge glances at the other scientists. He’s the one who spent the most time with it today, the only one who could really postulate anything.

Still, I like the way he included the others, even if it was only with just a look.

“It’s really preliminary,” he says. “We took a lot of samples, not just from the chamber they took us into, but from the area around the top, any edge that we could find. Then I went deeper into the chamber, away from the collapsed area, as far back as the cart pilot would let me go without your approval, and took some samples there.”

“I’m assuming they’re different,” Stone says. A few of the others glare at her, but she ignores them. I may be in charge, but Stone is going to pretend she is.

“That’s the surprising thing,” Bridge says. “With a cursory analysis from the equipment we brought with us, they’re not. It’s the same material—and here’s the curious thing—it’s the same age.”

“Meaning what?” Mikk asks. He’s always the one who is the most impatient with science. He only wants to know how to use it, not what makes it work.

“I have no idea. I’m not even sure what we’re dealing with,” Bridge says. “The components are unbelievably small and not something we’ve seen before.”

“Infectious?” Ivy asks, rubbing her fingertips together.

Bridge gives her such a look of annoyance that I wonder if she’s been asking him that question all day. I don’t know why she’s so worried. She wore gloves.

“I don’t know if they’re infectious,” Bridge says. “Certainly not in the sense that we understand it. But something that small and powerful might do some harm if it gets into the lungs. I think until we know what we’re dealing with, we wear masks.”

“Lovely,” Stone mutters.

“Are the guides right?” I ask. “Is this a natural material?”

“Not on any world I’ve been to,” says Bridge. “I’m guessing and we’re going to have to do studies, but I’m pretty sure these are man-made.”

“That magically appear when a wall collapses?” Carmak asks. She seems to have perked up now that she’s eaten and had some coffee. She actually sounds intrigued now instead of overwhelmed like she had late this afternoon.

“Yes, possibly,” Bridge says. “They formed quickly, reinforced the collapsed walls, and created the shaft where there was none. And then there’s the matter of the lights.”

That catches my attention. The lights fascinated me from the moment we went below.

“What about them?” Stone asks.

“They form too. And they seem to respond to some kind of stimuli. In other words, they turn off when they’re not needed.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s a motion sensor of some kind,” I say. I explain what happened in the corridor.

“Built into that black stuff?” Mikk asks. “This stuff is sounding more and more amazing all the time.”

“Why shouldn’t it be?” Ilona says. “If the same people who built this built stealth tech, then of course this is amazing. Stealth tech is.”

“Amazing in how fast it kills,” Roderick says.

Both Mikk and Roderick, who saw a member of our team die in the Room of Lost Souls, loathe stealth tech. They’re here to conquer it, not learn everything they can about it.

“It’s amazing how it works,” Ilona says primly, as if she disapproves of their attitude.

I’m still not sure we’re dealing with stealth tech here, but I am sure that whoever made that black stuff had more scientific knowledge than we could pretend to have.

Since our science is the best it has been in thousands of years and we don’t understand this stuff, that means it’s ancient science. The ancients knew so much more than we ever will. I constantly find myself in awe of them.

“We’re here to find out whether or not those fourteen archeologists died in stealth-tech accidents,” I say. “Aside from my discovery today, did anyone learn more about that?”

“It’s hard to find information,” says Gregory, one of the scientists. His narrow face is wan, and I wonder if he’s getting much sleep. He doesn’t like travel, although he’ll do it when he has to. He’s always the last to volunteer for an away mission and the first to volunteer to go home.

“None of the officials want to talk to us.” He’s playing with his fork as he speaks, turning it upside down, banging the end, and then repeating the procedure. “They wouldn’t even point us to the scientific labs around here.”

One of the other scientists, a slightly overweight man named Lentz, nods. “I finally gave up and went to the universities. Vaycehn has three, and they’re all well known. I wasn’t allowed to contact any of the science departments directly, although in the cafeteria, I ran into a scientist I knew from a few conferences. He says they’d love to meet with us, but Vaycehn has regulations about sharing potentially difficult information with outsiders, and so in order to have a formal discussion, we’d have to spend months going through channels.”

“I hadn’t heard that part about channels until today,” Ilona says before I can ask her why we haven’t gotten all our permissions lined up.

“What does ‘potentially difficult’ mean?” Bridge asks.

Lentz smiles. “I asked that, too, and he answered me. Anything that could interfere with the tourist trade. The caves are the primary example because many of them are in the oldest areas of the city. People love to visit the ruins.”

“One-point-two million visitors a year,” says Gregory, “and those are the official ones.”

It seems he has gotten the tourist lecture too.

“We’d be considered unofficial, even though we have a guide. We’re not here on vacation.” Gregory sounds surprised at that, as if he doesn’t understand the limiting of the word “tourist” to vacationer alone.

“Was your friend able to tell you anything unofficial?” Bridge asks.

Lentz’s grin grew. “Well, two old friends, you know, we’ll talk about anything.”

My breath catches. Lentz got some information.

“And we did. We talked about our friends, our colleagues, our research.”

Stone sighs, as if she wants him to hurry to the point.

He leans back in the chair and puts his hands behind his head. “My friend is researching the death holes.”

Lentz has everyone’s attention now, and he seems to be enjoying it.

“It seems that the Boss’s guess was right. Others have died here, all through Vaycehn’s history. In fact, one of the reasons the city center moved so much was to avoid the holes.”

“There are that many?” Stone asks. “I thought there were only a few.”

“All through the city’s history,” Lentz says, “areas just collapse. It’s not the weight of buildings or the ground above that causes it—although sometimes that happens too. But there are entire death hole areas in the Basin. That’s why some of the ruins are off-limits to tourists, and that’s why some of the history of the city is vague.”

Bridge has steepled his fingers. I’m wishing I knew more detail about the five-thousand-year history of Vaycehn, like how often the city center moved and where.

“He thinks there’s a scientific reason for all of this?” Carmak asks. Her eyes are sparkling. She’s not the same woman who was in the field this afternoon. “Besides a geologic one, I mean. Because the histories say that Vaycehn was initially built on unstable ground, and the oldest colonists had no way to know where the stable ground was. They searched until they found an area that could support their city.”

“Sounds plausible, doesn’t it?” Lentz says. “Until you remember that humans aren’t native to this place. The colonists had enough scientific skill to travel through space, then colonize this area and begin to farm it. You’d think they could figure out rudimentary geology.”

“Science doesn’t always follow a linear path,” says Ilona, but she’s frowning. She’s thinking about this.

Both Mikk and Stone are restless. But I’m fascinated. I have to force myself to eat some of the food on my plate. Not even the tastes are familiar, except on a basic level—bitter, sweet, salty, bitingly spicy. I pick at what’s before me, then push the plate away.

“Well,” Lentz says with a small shrug, “whether or not you agree with the premise for his research doesn’t matter. He started the work because he didn’t believe his own country’s history.”

I’m glad Lentz is the one describing this. Gregory doesn’t have the people skills, and Ilona is too invested in Vaycehnese life.

“He dug through old records and found a lot of the basic stuff you’re talking about, Lucretia. He found the measurements, as well as stuff on whether the ground is stable, whether or not there’s bedrock, how deep the solid layer goes before they find ground water, all of that kind of thing.”

”And?” Mikk isn’t even trying to mask his irritation at the way the scientists present things.

“And,” Lentz says, “the old studies confirm what he suspected.”

”Which is?” Mikk asks.

”That these death holes appear in solid ground. The catacomb of caves here were created by the phenomenon that creates the death holes. And it’s ongoing.”

”Like volcanic activity?” Stone asks. Now she’s intrigued.

”Not quite,” Lentz says. “Because there’s always a history of volcanic eruptions in the past.”

”Maybe a groundquake, then,” she says.

“On an unknown fault line, maybe?” Carmak asks.

I shake my head. Even I know this. We have the capability to map tectonic plates from space. There are no unknown fault lines on any settled planet.

I’m about to say that when Lentz shakes his head.

”It’s more like an explosion from underground,” he says. “With a directed charge, made to create a hole in the surface above.”

”Have they gone down to check what causes the explosion?” Bridge asks,

”Initially,” Lentz says. “Which is why they’re called death holes.”

“Because the investigators mummify,” Mikk says,

Lentz shakes his head. “Because the investigators vanish.”

”Vanish?” I frown at him. He’s enjoying dragging this out. “What does that mean?”

“It means that they’re never found,” he says.

”Does anyone search for them?” I remember how reluctant the guide was to let me down the corridor.

”Not after the first one or two don’t make it back,” he says. “Then they use animals to test. Usually after a dozen years or so have passed, something survives, and then it’s deemed safe. But until then, no one goes in the death holes.”

”Sounds like they learned about these places the hard way,” Ilona says.

Everyone turns toward her, as if her statement is obvious.

“I mean,” she says, “they have a protocol and a name for the phenomenon. So that means that these holes repeated, and then after a while, they needed a way to deal with them.”

“Ilona’s right,” Bridge says. “A culture doesn’t name a phenomenon if it’s extremely rare. And it doesn’t create a protocol if the phenomenon happens once every hundred years or so. How many of these have there been?”

Lentz shrugs. “I didn’t talk to him all day.”

“But you found out a lot,” I say, wanting him to continue. “Does he think it’s odd that these places eventually become safe?”

“No,” Lentz says. “He says it validates his theory, that some kind of gas or something builds up and then explodes. It then dissipates over time, and the hole becomes safe.”

“If there was gas, it would be released into the atmosphere, contaminating the area around it,” Gregory says. “Did he find that?”

“He’s only had two death holes to study since this became his expertise. But the records don’t show any areawide deaths.”

“Because,” Ilona says, “they clear the areas when a death hole appears. You told us that.”

“History tells us that,” Carmak says.

“I’d like to know what happened the first time a few death holes appeared,” I say. Because it doesn’t have to be a gas. It could be a field. An expansion of a stealth-tech field—a different kind than we experienced in the Room of Lost Souls, but an expansion nonetheless.

Still, I don’t say that. I’m still not willing to admit this place is tied to ancient stealth. We haven’t seen stealth tech act like that.

Or have we?

I turn to Gregory, whom I hired because he once specialized in stealth tech. He was one of the government scientists who tried to reverse-engineer stealth tech with Squishy.

“When you guys were trying to re-create stealth tech in the lab,” I say to him, “did you get some localized expansion phenomena? Something that would resemble what’s going on here?”

He sighs. He hates talking about that time. What Squishy told me in as little detail as possible was that in the two hundred years the Empire has been trying to re-create stealth tech, the program has lost ships, materiel, and people.

When he remains silent, I add, “Squishy told me that a lot of people died while she worked on the program. I assumed they got trapped in the stealth-tech field. Is that what happened? Or were there ‘explosions’ to use Lentz’s word? Did the field expand unexpectedly?”

“C’mon, Boss,” Roderick says, “we’ve already seen that. In the Room. The way the station just kept getting bigger.”

“But that looked like it was falling out of the field,” Mikk says. Even though he gets impatient with scientific theory, he does remember it. Sometimes I think he’s too smart for the rest of us, which is why his patience with people who establish fundamentals before they get to the point is so short.

“Greg?” I ask. “Did it suddenly explode?”

“‘Explode’ is the wrong word,” he says. “Sometimes it would expand. It would be concentrated in one area, like air going through a tube.”

“Or a narrow field coming up through the earth,” says Stone.

Even though we’re not on the Earth, no one corrects her. We know what she meant.

I sigh. “This isn’t evidence, you know.”

“It’s another piece,” Ilona says.

It is that.

“Can you get more information from your friend?” I ask Lentz.

“I can try,” Lentz says. “I can ask him to lunch or something. But we have to be really informal. He can lose his job.”

“Hell, why don’t you just hire him, Boss?” Mikk says. “That’ll take care of the cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

“I’d like to know if he has something to add before I do,” I say.

“Besides, hiring him might cut off his access to these death holes,” Ilona says. “It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the Vaycehnese are protecting the reputation of their city, and they’re doing it at great cost.”

“Cities do that all the time,” Carmak says. “Governments lie. They don’t want the bad stuff to get out. That’s normal.”

“But sometimes it’s just there.” Cesar Voris, one of the historians, speaks up for the first time. He’s one of my new hires. Carmak recommended him because he’s an expert in this region of space. He specializes in ancient history, but he loves modern as well, and he spends his off time studying. I’ve never had another employee work quite that hard.

“What do you mean, ‘there’?” Carmak asks.

Voris shrugs. He’s a big man with a shock of white hair that makes his brown skin seem even darker than it is. His eyes are very black and very alert.

He looks directly at me. “You said to find out what we can about the death toll in the caves, so I did.”

“We couldn’t find anything,” Gregory says. “No one’ll talk.”

“That’s right,” Voris says. “But we’re interested in information. History, when you come down to it. So I went to the City Museum.”

“The director wouldn’t talk to me,” says Ilona.

Voris folds his hands together and waits until the others stop speaking.

“The City Museum of Vaycehn,” he says like the teacher he used to be, “is an amazing place. It has a great library, and so many fascinating exhibits, I doubt anyone could see them all in the space of a month.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mikk says. “Don’t tease us with information and then not give it.”

“The thing is,” Voris says as if Mikk hasn’t spoken, “the exhibits cover the history of Vaycehn as accurately as possible. There is a quick viewing area that the tourists usually go to, and indeed are directed to, being told that the rest of the place will take most of their trip to see.”

Mikk sighs impatiently. I grab another spotted apple and turn it over in my hands.

“But if you go in with an agenda, you can see quite a bit. I decided my agenda was the caves. The longer I was there, the more I realized I needed to know about the way the city center changed location all the time.” Voris raises his bushy white eyebrows and looks at all of us, individually, before going on.

Now Stone sighs.

But Voris doesn’t seem to care. “So I wandered, found an old ruin actually brought into the museum intact—that was interesting—and then found that each display has an information button. You push it and a holographic guide tells you everything you want to know and a few things you don’t. If you push it twice, you can get a hard copy of the transcript, and if you push it three times, you can download that transcript to your own personal system, so long as you sign a few waivers promising not to use it for profit in any way.”

“What did you learn?” Mikk asks.

“That the fourteen archeologists were mentioned for precisely the reason that Dr. Stone said. Because they’re famous throughout the sector and it would look bad for them to just disappear here.”

Stone nods. She clearly feels vindicated.

“But,” Voris says, “I also learned that hundreds of Vaycehnese have died over the centuries in those so-called death holes. And for generations, the caves were off-limits to the Vaycehnese because people would die in weird little pocket areas.”

I take a bit of the spotted apple. It’s sweet and sour at the same time. I could easily become addicted to these things.

“There’s even some images of the first mummies—people they found in those pockets and then removed. There’s an entire section of the museum dedicated to the mummies of Wyr.”

Ilona lets out a breath of air.

“My God,” Bridge says.

“You’re kidding,” Lentz says, but it’s not because he believes Voris is lying, but because he’s stunned that Voris has learned this.

“You think your colleague knows?” I ask.

“I have no idea,” Lentz says. “I’ll ask him tomorrow.”

“He probably does, but doesn’t associate it with the death holes,” Voris says. “The reason the City Museum is there is for the schools. Children parade in and out of that place on assignments all the time. The mummies are one assignment, but they’re considered a mystery. Are they the first humans who came to Wyr before the colonists, or are they native? People connect certain areas of the caves with the mummies, but not the death holes themselves.”

“But you just said that the fields in these death holes recede,” Mikk says to Lentz.

Lentz nods. “I think the people who get trapped inside move away from the area where they entered. They lose oxygen or something—I don’t know—and they die. Then when the fields recede, someone goes in and finds a mummy—not where the person originally vanished, but farther inside.”

“That’s a theory,” Stone says.

“But a good one,” Ilona says, mostly because it reinforces her stealth-tech idea.

“Wouldn’t the Vaycehnese figure out that these phenomena are related?” Mikk asked.

“Not necessarily,” Voris said. “We’re looking for something specific. They’re all looking at the various peculiarities of their home.”

“Some of those peculiarities are just accepted,” Ilona says.

“Research blindness,” Bridge says. “That’s why we try not to have preconceptions.”

I sigh. I am starting to hate that word.

“We have preconceptions,” Ivy says. She is still rubbing her fingertips together. “Maybe they’re clouding our vision, too.”

“Maybe,” I say, “but let’s listen to Cesar. I suspect he has more to tell us.”

“Oh, yeah,” Voris says. “Because there’s a modern mystery to this place.”

There are a lot of mysteries on Vaycehn, more than I want to solve, simply because I want to get away from this hot, gravity-filled planet.

“You mean besides the fourteen archeologists?” Stone asks.

“Sixteen,” Voris says. “There were sixteen.”

We’re all staring at him now. He has a slight smile on his face, and his black eyes twinkle. He looks both impish and pleased with himself.

“Sixteen?” Stone says. “We would know if two others were missing. It would be big news.”

“It wasn’t big news because they were postdoctoral students,” Voris says. “They were working on some project of their own, hoping for recognition, when they just disappeared. The guides say they never came out. They hadn’t followed instructions, had gone into an off-limit area, and disappeared.”

“Like the guides were warning us about,” Ivy says nervously.

Bridge glares at her again.

“Yes,” Voris says. “Maybe that’s why. I’m thinking we should talk to the guides, try to find out how many of their noncompliance tourists have died in those caves.”

“Do that,” I say.

“Before we start your dive?” Stone asks, as if I’m the one who has suggested something out of line.

“No,” I say.

“But what if this isn’t stealth tech?” Stone says. “What if you’re right and this is something else?”

I shrug. “Then we might die.”

Five of the Six gasp. But the divers nod. They know the risks. We face them every time we dive.

“You knew that when you signed on with us,” I say to the five. “That’s part of what we do. We take risks in dangerous places. You signed waivers.”

Half the team looks at their empty plates. Gregory takes more food, as if eating it will protect him.

I half expect someone to say that waivers aren’t the same as realizing the risks. I’ve had tourists tell me that when I take them wreck diving. Then I would keep those tourists in the ship, not allowing them to dive.

But to my team’s credit, they don’t complain. They know what they signed up for, and they’re not going to back out just because the risk has become real to them.

“You think it’s stealth tech now, don’t you?” Ilona asks me.

I’m not willing to concede that, at least not yet. But I do give her this: “I think the chances have gone up. But this could be something else. Maybe the Vaycehnese are right. Maybe this is a localized phenomenon.”

“That makes its own lights?” Bridge asks.

“There are stranger things in the universe,” I say. But not many. Things that act man-made generally are.

“Should we track the deaths?” Ivy asks, clearly not wanting to go back into the caves.

I shake my head. “The historians need to find out about Vaycehn’s earliest settlers. Take Cesar’s advice. Go to that museum. See what the prehistory stuff says. See if you can find evidence of what’s been forgotten.”

“If it’s forgotten,” Stone says, “then no one will find it.”

I smile. My business has always been about handling forgotten things.

“Forgotten doesn’t mean invisible, Lucretia,” I say. “Forgotten sometimes means misunderstood.”

“Or ignored,” Ilona says.

“Or buried,” Bridge says.

I nod. For the first time, I’m enjoying this project. I’m even looking forward to the work below ground.

Maybe that’s because diving is my element, whether it’s underground or in space. Or maybe it’s because I finally believe we’ll discover something.

Stealth tech or not, there’s something here. Something old. Something interesting.

Something unexplained.

SEVEN

The dives are both easier and more difficult than they are in space. We can walk through sections, but we have trouble reaching the ceiling, where those magical lights are. We don’t float away from the area we’re examining, but we can’t pull ourselves forward, either. We have to walk, to view everything from a single perspective.

I am frustrated and fascinated. I hate the feeling of gravity, but I love mapping.

We take each section bit by bit. We examine each area for changes. The guides watch as if we’re crazy.

I bring most of my good divers down—at least in the beginning—to train the Six how to do real wreck diving. The guides have precise maps of the areas in which the deaths occurred—not just the sixteen recent deaths, but all of the deaths since the Vaycehnese started exploring their own cave system.

The guides show us these things, not to help us, but to discourage us. They want us to know how dangerous this place is, just so that we’ll give up and go home.

Which we don’t.

The deaths intrigue me. There are a lot of them—so many deaths, in fact, that the Vaycehnese forbid actual exploration by anyone and only allow tourist visits of the extreme edges. It is a sign of the Vaycehnese prejudice against foreigners that they allow any of us down here at all. Our lives are less precious than the lives of locals.

If they lose a few of us, they seem to believe it doesn’t matter—so long as there isn’t a section-wide incident. It is known throughout the section that the caves are dangerous, and anyone who goes down into them is taking a risk.

The guides think we’re foolish in our dive suits, standing in front of a smooth black wall, taking notes and talking to each other in jargon. I’m happy for the suits. Much as I hate pulling them over my sweaty skin, I love the suit’s automatic environmental controls. If it isn’t for the gravity, I can almost believe that I’m back in space, diving a particularly unusual wreck.

It takes us nearly two weeks to explore the “safe” areas of the caves. By then, the Six have learned the routine. They’re still rookies, but they’re better than they were.

On the first day of the third week, I dive with the Six. We’re going to the area where the postdoc students died. It’s farther away than the areas where the archeologists have died, and Ilona argues that we should explore those areas first.

But in the time between our meeting and this dive, the historians have learned what the postdocs were working on. The postdocs believed that some kind of force created the caves—some kind of field that is part of the planet’s interior, a force that expands and just as quickly contracts. That force comes upward, like geysers on Earth or the spitting rocks of Fortuyuna.

Planets shift and change. They’re living creatures, like we are, only older, larger, and slower-moving. They adjust their comfort levels, and that causes volcanic eruptions or groundquakes or an occasional eruption of steam. Those adjustments, no matter what they are, release a lot of pent-up energy.

These postdocs believed that Wyr had a unique way of adjusting its own comfort level, a way that released energy that could be farmed. My scientists are still examining the research, trying to understand why the postdocs made that assumption, trying to figure out the energy readings (if any) that the postdocs took before they died.

But the fact that they were trying to take energy readings is more than enough for me. If the postdocs were right, then there is some kind of natural field down here. If we’re right, there’s a man-made field.

And if Ilona is right, that field is stealth tech.

So only the Six can move forward from now on.

Because we’re in an environment that’s not as hostile as space, I load the Six up with extra equipment, things I wouldn’t make them carry into a real wreck. Lots of holocameras, lots of flat vid, lots of scientific sampling equipment.

I assign Kersting the job of sampling the walls every meter or two. I make DeVries record everything. Orlando Rea is the only one of the Six who shows an aptitude for exploration, so he’s at my side. The rest must map each square meter before moving forward.

Rea and I do something I would never do in space: we explore sections of the corridor without normal backup.

I call them cursory explorations. We walk ahead to see if we find anything interesting.

We finally find something interesting about one kilometer from the place where the postdocs died. The black walls here are pitted. For the first time, the shiny black material looks old.

We bring the entire team forward, and as three of them map, DeVries records, and Kersting removes core samples, Rea and I continue down the corridor. Only now we’re going a meter at a time, using our own equipment to film each section.

I have a slight headache, which could be caused by the stress of the dive. But I pay attention, because sometimes the sound that accompanies stealth tech starts as a vibration—a throbbing, one that could, in the right circumstance, be registered as an irritation rather than a noise.

The lights here are gray. That irritates me. The other lights come from the spectrum—blue to red—but gray doesn’t fit. Finally I grab an equipment box, climb it, and wipe at the lighted area with my glove.

Something flakes onto my suit, and that section of the light turns white.

The lights here are covered with flaked bits of wall. For the first time, I’m happy for the suit. I remember Bridge’s comment from that first day: Something that small and powerful might do some harm if it gets into the lungs.

We all stop and take samples of everything—the air, the ground, the walls, and the lights. We haven’t been able to remove the lights from the walls—the lights are truly grown in—but we scrape the surfaces. Just like we scrape the ceiling and the floor.

When we come out with our flaked treasure, we use hazardous-procedure techniques to remove our suits. We have no idea how dangerous that flaked stuff is—if it’s dangerous at all.

The flaking worries everyone but me. I’m finally happy to see something new and different. I was becoming afraid that we’d explore hundreds of miles of caves and find nothing except lights and black walls.

I know now that such a worry is silly. We’re going to find something. I know it as clearly as I know my name.

We’re going to find something, and we’re very, very close.

EIGHT

It takes two days.

We map that flaked corridor centimeter by centimeter. We examine each part of it.

Our scientists determine that the flakes are nothing more than particles that have come off the walls, just like I thought. Only they’re able to date those particles by comparing them to the samples taken from our very first day.

The particles are at least four thousand years older.

I say at least because Bridge says at least. He really can’t predict. When he presented the data, he reminded me that the older sections of the wall— those that formed years ago—showed no more aging than the newer sections. So he has no idea—the scientists have no idea—how long the walls stand before they start showing evidence of age.

He makes his guess based on the historical record. He knows that we have found areas that are at least three thousand years old with no sign of aging at all.

The corridor here is murky—we’ve disturbed so many particles that the air is gray—and a day ago, we started to get readings that reminded me (and Roderick and Mikk) of readings we got near the Room of Lost Souls.

My headache remains, but now I know it comes from stealth tech because I hear a low humming, as if voices are harmonizing softly. Three of the Six hear it as well.

Something is here, something strong. I almost wish it wasn’t so I can bring in a real dive team. It’s clear that the Six are out of their element. DeVries, Quinte, Seager, and Kersting are tired. Rea and Al-Nasir wonder why we have to pay so much attention to detail.

They think the minuscule is unimportant, and their impatience infects me.

I take Rea down the corridor two meters farther than we should go. I take him because that part of the corridor remains dark.

“Maybe,” he says as he turns on the lamps built into his suit, “the wall lights are completely covered in particulate.”

“Maybe,” I say, but I don’t think so. I have already trained my headlamp at the top of the wall, where the lights usually bulge out. I see no bulge. I see nothing to indicate lights at all.

I stand in the center of the corridor and wave my arms, thinking maybe the motion sensors will pick up something, but they do not. All I manage to do is swirl the particles even more. It’s as if we’re in the middle of a dust storm.

Then the light from my headlamp catches something directly in front of me. A movement. My heart starts to pound.

“Did you see that?” I ask Rea.

He turns, training his headlamp in the same direction as mine. The movement repeats and I realize it’s a reflection.

Something is blocking the corridor.

“Let’s check it out,” he says, and starts forward. I catch his arm.

Now more than ever procedure is important.

“We map,” I say, and I can hear his sigh echo through our suit comms as well as through the air. We map, we go slowly, we figure out what’s ahead.

It takes two more days before we understand that what’s ahead is not the end of the corridor, as some of the team speculated, but a door.

A door.

An old, old door without warnings, markings, or lights.

Just a latch that no one has turned in at least four thousand years.

NINE

I‘m going in with you,” Roderick says.

“Me, too,” Mikk says.

They stand outside the hovercraft, their suits already on. The guides watch us like we’re the science experiment. The Six stand in the corridor, holding their equipment like shields.

Roderick and Mikk have seen that. They know that the Six are frightened, and they know that frightened divers make mistakes.

They also know that I’m eager, and eager divers make mistakes as well. A different set of mistakes, but mistakes just the same.

“No,” I say. “You can’t go in. We’re getting readings that remind me of the Room.”

“We never really tied those readings to stealth tech,” Roderick says.

“And these readings are significantly different,” Mikk says. “The group has been studying them for more than a week.”

“They’re similar,” I say.

“They’re similar the way light and sound are similar. They’re both waves, but they’re not the same thing.” Mikk’s education is showing, and he doesn’t even realize it.

I shake my head. “That’s a specious analogy. These readings are similar in ways I don’t like. It’s as if this field is fresher than the one near the Room. Or more active.”

“Or stronger,” says DeVries. He’s come closer to us, apparently wanting to hear the argument. “Whatever’s down that corridor, it’s powerful.”

“And it might be behind that door. The source. Think of that,” Roderick says.

“I do,” I say. “Then I remember that through another door was a seemingly empty room where both my mother and my friend died. I don’t want to risk both of you.”

“What if this isn’t stealth tech?” Mikk asks. “Then we’re risking all of you.”

“It’s stealth tech,” I say. “I can hear it.”

They look at me. No one except the few of us who can hear stealth tech understands what I mean. Not all of the Six can hear it. I’m not sure what the difference is, but it’s an important one.

And I think it’s a good, nonscientific way to recognize stealth tech—at least for people like me.

Someone behind me drops an equipment box. We all jump. The sound echoes in the enclosed space.

“Risk is what we signed on for,” Rea says. He has gained a lot of confidence in the past few weeks. “We’re going in.”

“Maybe we should tether,” Mikk says to me. “So we can pull you all out if there’s a problem.”

I shake my head. “If there’s a problem, then the tether might decay before you realize we’re in trouble. I’m not sure how far the field extends. It might only be a few meters, but it might be more than that.”

Mikk frowns at me. He’s right. We need some kind of backup.

I say, “Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll station two divers at the first junction. Two more near the door, and then three of us will go inside—provided we can open it, of course. If we can, one will remain near the door, recording, while two of us start mapping.”

“I don’t like it,” Roderick says.

“I know,” I say because I can’t say what I’m thinking, which is, I don’t care what you like. This is what we’re going to do. “It’s our best option.”

“Your best option,” one of the guide says loudly, “is to go home.”

That would be true of most anyone else. But I have no real home. Just a mission.

I’m not sure how the others feel, and I’m not going to ask them. They did sign on, and they will do the work.

And I hope—no, I pray—that each one of us will come out alive.

TEN

Age and time have warped the door shut. It takes all five of us to pry m I the edges away from the frame, but once we do, the door moves with surprising ease. I pull on the lever, and the door squeals open.

As it does, lights go on. Red lights at first, flaring like warning lamps, and then they turn green before they fade to white.

Lights turn on in the corridor as well—along the floor, though, where I hadn’t thought to look. A quick check makes me realize that these lights are recessed. There was no way to locate them under the flaked particles until they revealed themselves.

The lights coming on scared the two at the junction. They use the comm to see if we’re all right, and I reassure them. Only after we sign off do I realize they also want to know what has gotten loose. They’re so untrained they think someone else has turned on the lights, not that the door triggered them.

I bite back irritation and peer inside.

What faces me is not a room, but a cavern. And it’s not empty. It’s filled with equipment. Old equipment that’s slowly powering up. I can hear the whines as it restarts, see the lights on the consoles flicker on, watch as screens sparkle to life.

Rea curses.

DeVries makes a sound of awe.

I make no sound at all. I’m staring at the wording on the floor.

It’s in Old Earth Standard, a language I’ve been learning because it’s the language of the Dignity Vessels.

I flick the comm inside my suit, hailing Roderick and Mikk. I’ve never tried to communicate from this deep in the corridors before, and I’m not sure when the two men will get the message—if ever. But I have to send it.

“It’s a gold mine,” I say. “But you have to stay away. I’m pretty sure now that we’re in a stealth-tech field.”

And if we are, that message could be lost to time. Or it could be delivered in a blink of an eye.

“Ilona was right, then,” Rea says.

I nod. And stare. And wonder how the hell I’m going to keep this secret from the Vaycehnese, and their tourist board, and their publicity machine.

Because the moment they announce a grand discovery, then it’ll go out through the sector. Eventually the Empire will figure out what’s here.

Eventually, they’ll try to take it over.

And then we’ll have the fight I’ve been expecting. The fight I’ve been preparing for. The fight I want to avoid as long as possible.

The interior of this chamber is huge—too big to be called a room. It goes on as far as the eye can see. The ceiling is domed. The walls, the floor, everything is covered with that black material, and here it hasn’t flaked.

We continue to follow the rules, mostly because I’m scared of the traps that lie within. I think of the way the lights came on, and I wonder what else we can trigger—and if that trigger will be harmful, even to those of us with the marker.

I make Kersting take samples from the walls and the floors to see why this area is different than the exterior. I want as much information as possible.

To that end, we plan to map and record every centimeter. We won’t make it in one dive—this place is bigger than some cities. We also won’t touch the consoles—I’m afraid of triggering something—or the screens. We just look and wave our cameras over each section; then we describe.

For the first time, I miss the scientists. I want their on-scene analyses, something I won’t get until we go above ground.

We’re timing this dive, like we time all the others, even though I want to stay for the entire day. No one knows the effect of stealth tech on people with the marker, so we are limiting our exposure.

Ivy suggested this the night before we got in the door, and I agreed with her then. I knew I wouldn’t once I was inside, and I was right. Even though the field readings—whatever they are—are stronger than anything we’ve ever seen, I don’t feel any effects.

Neither do the Six.

But they’re not experienced, and I tend toward the gids—something that happens when oxygen is low. There is no one to monitor us but ourselves, always a dangerous situation, and if we all get the gids, we will make bad choices.

The bad choice that looms is my own. I want to go deep into this chamber. I want to see how far it extends. I want to know everything about it now, not weeks from now. I want to know what it is, what it’s used for, and why it was abandoned.

For now, I have to satisfy myself with what I can see from the area near the door. Two dozen consoles, linked screens along the walls, and chairs built into the floor.

There is nothing in the middle of the chamber except clear floor—no stains, no markings, nothing. Around the consoles, instructions written in Old Earth Standard in large letters. I recognize only one word.

Danger.

I would have expected nothing less.

The consoles seem uniform except for one about ten consoles down. That one I can’t examine yet. From a distance, I note that it’s bigger and has more buttons, but that’s all I can see.

That the consoles have buttons surprises me. There are flat areas, like we have, areas that imply a touch command. But the buttons suggest that to make things work, someone must press them or move them or toggle them, which I think is terribly inefficient. Over time, the switch itself can decay and make errors.

Another reason not to let anyone touch the consoles. We do record as many as we can from top to bottom, examining the sides and the casing, lingering on the words so that the team outside this room can translate for us.

After we finish the first and second consoles, we’re out of time. As I stand, the screen above me flickers to life, and I worry that we’ve somehow turned it on.

What I see is an image of space. At least, I believe it’s space. I’m not sure where or when, for that matter. I don’t recognize any of the stars. I have never seen the placement.

“What the hell is it?” Rea asks from behind me. I turn a little, about to explain, when I see what he’s looking at.

He’s looking at a different screen—the one over the big console. Numbers scroll across it.

“I can’t record it,” DeVries says. “Can I get closer?”

“No,” I say, but the word is hard to utter. I understand his impulse. I want to record too.

Screens farther down the wall have activated as well. One shows the corridor we just left (at least, I think it’s that corridor), and another shows blackness growing on some rock.

I curse softly.

“What’s the matter, Boss?” DeVries asks.

“I just want to get closer,” I lie. I don’t want to tell him that I think we’ve done something here, something that might be irreversible.

My stomach is queasy and I’m feeling light-headed. I get that way when I’m nervous. I also get that way when I’m low on oxygen, before the gids start.

I still hear the humming, but it seems more focused—not singing, exactly, but concentrated, as if someone has compressed the sound.

“We have to go,” I say.

“But it’s just getting interesting.” That from Kersting, who usually hates the long dives.

“It is,” I say, “and it’ll be interesting tomorrow. Maybe by then, we’ll know what some of these readings say.”

The entire team groans, but they obey. I make them leave the chamber single-file. I pull the door closed behind us, then press it to make certain that it shut tightly. If that door is a protection between the corridor and the chamber, I want it at full strength.

Then we walk down the corridor. The moment we get past the area where the postdocs died, I send all the information from my comm links back to Mikk, with instructions to have him leave immediately and get the downloads to the scientists.

The other downloads can come out with us. But we need the scientists working hard before our evening meeting. I need some sense of what’s going on here.

I need to know if we’ve done something wrong.

ELEVEN

I think this is where they built the Dignity Vessels,” Ilona says. She’s set up a holoreplay system in the large conference room, and she’s actually using an old-fashioned pointer to tap an image of the center of that chamber.

The rest of the team is scattered around the table. As usual, the hotel has given us a fantastic spread of food. If I’m not careful, I might actually gain weight on this job.

“Dignity Vessels came from Earth,” Ivy says. “Everyone knows that.”

“But we’ve never been able to adequately explain how they got out here,” Ilona says. “Maybe the specs were brought here, and the vessels were built here.”

“Underground?” Bridge asks. “Not likely.”

“Maybe there’s another way out,” Ilona says. “From what I can guess, that chamber is deep in the mountain. Maybe there was an opening like the one we went down, and maybe it closed.”

“Or maybe this place has a different function,” I say, “one we haven’t yet figured out.”

Ilona shakes her head. “The words ‘vessel’ and ‘assemble’ are everywhere.”

“And so is the word ‘repair,’” Gregory says. “Maybe this is just a maintenance hub.”

“Have you found the phrase ‘Dignity Vessel’ yet?” I ask.

“No,” Ilona says. “But it’s only a matter of time.”

I look away from her. “Anyone recognize that section of space that appeared on the screen above us?”

“We can’t even pinpoint it,” Bridge says. “It’s not in our database or in the Vaycehnese’s or in the sector’s either. It’s unknown.”

“And the numbers?” I ask.

“You didn’t get a good enough look for us to examine them,” Ivy says.

I know that, but I had hopes.

“What about the console? Any idea what it does?”

“The words are shorthand,” Ilona says, setting down her pointer and returning to the place at the table. “Like we would have on a child’s console. ‘On,’ ‘Off,’ ‘Start,’ ‘Stop,’ that kind of thing. But nothing that suggests what comes on or what starts and what stops.”

“The intriguing word is in the middle,” says Gregory. ‘“Open.”‘

“I didn’t find that intriguing,” Lentz says, speaking up for the first time since the meeting started. “What I found intriguing was the blinking light over the word ‘automatic.’ Isn’t the entire place automated? What does that mean?”

I lean back in my chair. “I don’t know. I was hoping you guys would know by the time we had the meeting.”

“This isn’t guesswork,” Voris says. “We must be precise. You know that, Boss. You’re the one who drilled that into us.”

Once again, the soft-spoken man makes the best point. I sigh and get up. I can’t sit long.

“We know that the team has suffered no ill effects from the dive,” Roderick says.

“That have shown up yet,” Ivy says. “We don’t know what long-term exposure does.”

I nod. I’ve had us checked by medics, our biologists, and several scanners, in addition to the Business’s decontamination chamber. So far, we’re fine.

I’m still not willing to risk a longer dive. But I’m going to violate space rules. I’m going to let all of us dive again tomorrow.

“We’re going back in the morning,” I say.

Roderick shakes his head. “Boss, you know that’s risky.”

“I think we activated something. If we wait the standard two days between dives, we might not know what got triggered,” I say.

“Maybe saving yourselves,” Ivy mutters.

I let that go. For the first time in one of these meetings, I look at Stone. I expect her to take command, but she doesn’t. She’s watching something on her handheld and taking notes. It’s as if this meeting doesn’t concern her.

And, at the moment, it doesn’t. She can’t go into the chamber. She’s effectively shut out of everything.

“I’ll keep tomorrow’s dive short,” I say. “But I’m planning to go in every day until we have an idea what’s going on.”

“You saw the word ‘danger’ on the floor, right?” Mikk asks.

I nod. “But we don’t know what it refers to. And we know how old Earth systems work. If the Earthers believed the chamber was dangerous, that word would have been on the door.”

The historians immediately concede the point. The others shrug, all except the Six, who watch me with something approaching fear.

“Come on,” I say to them. “Enjoy this. This is probably the most important discovery any of us will ever make.”

“And we can’t even investigate it,” Bridge says.

I look at him. He’s sitting with the other scientists. They seem frustrated.

“You can’t do good science with recordings,” he says. “We need to be hands-on.”

“I know,” I say. “But I don’t know how to get you there until we determine if that field reading we’re getting is not stealth tech.”

“It has to be,” Ilona says.

“It doesn’t have to be anything we already know,” I say. “The sounds are different. And we’re not sure about the technology. We have to be careful.”

“I think we’re being too careful,” she says.

My cheeks heat. “I think it’s bad policy to determine what something is in advance. We need to go slowly.”

“I am not disputing that,” Ilona says. “Just your interpretation of existing data.”

I shrug. “Right now, we’re all guessing. And I can hardly wait until the guessing ends.”

“Me, too,” says Ivy. “Because I keep looking at that word, ‘danger,’ and wonder what you’re dragging the team into.”

“The Boss always takes us to risky places,” Roderick says. “If you don’t like it, you can leave.”

But Ivy remains seated. So does everyone else, including—to my relief— the Six.

“Okay,” I say. “A short dive tomorrow. Maybe after that, we’ll have some answers.”

TWELVE

The chamber looks no different when we return. The lights are still on.

The numbers run on that screen ten consoles down the wall. The screen above me shows that weird spacescape. The consoles glow.

I am more convinced than ever that we shouldn’t touch anything. But now I’m willing to fan out just a little. I let Rea handle the middle of the room with DeVries beside him. I send Seager and Kersting to the space to the right of the door. They’ll never make it to the far wall—not today—but at least we’re moving.

After about an hour, I look up from my examination of the second console. Something has changed, although I don’t know what it is.

Then I realize that the screen above the first console has gone dark. I stare at it, and realize that I’m wrong. The screen isn’t dark. It’s showing complete blackness.

The dark screens have a different look and texture. This one is showing a view of someplace completely without light.

In spite of myself, I shudder. Then I glance at the other screen—the numbers screen. I can’t tell for sure, but it looks like they’ve changed too.

I turn toward the rest of the crew to tell them and see Rea a few meters from me in that broad expanse of floor.

He must catch something in my body language, because he says, “It’s easy to map a floor and emptiness.”

I nod. He’s right, of course. But he’s doing something besides mapping, something that he stopped doing as I turned.

“You were moving funny,” I say. It’s just a guess, but that’s the sense that I had, that he was making odd movements.

“Flapping my arms.” There’s a smile in his voice. I wish I can see his face. “I figure if our movement triggers the lights, maybe my movement will trigger some lights buried in the floor.”

“What’s in that floor might be what the ancients called danger,” I say.

“Or not,” he says. “So far, I have had no results.”

“Well, stop it,” I say. “Just map.”

He sighs, but lets his arms fall. He’s going to listen.

I start to turn back toward the console when the air waves. Like heat mirages. The air is actually rippling.

My breath catches. I turn toward Rea and realize that the rippling is stronger near him. Has he created it? Or is something happening there?

“Rea!” I yell. “Run!”

He doesn’t seem to understand.

“Get out of here!” I yell.

The others head for the door. I do too. Rea moves a little slower. The rippling gets worse. He looks like a video that’s falling apart. Then he slides out of the area and gets to the doorway.

Something whooshes behind me.

I whirl and blink, unable to believe what I’m seeing.

A Dignity Vessel is parked in that broad expanse of floor. An intact, clean, vibrating Dignity Vessel.

I murmur something—a curse maybe, or just a sound of awe. I’m aware of making noise, but not of what kind of noise I’m making. Rea pushes up against me.

DeVries says, “Oh, my…”

No one else speaks.

“Was there something solid on that floor when you were there?” I ask Rea.

He shakes his head.

“I was standing there,” he says. “I would’ve been crushed.”

The ripples. That Dignity Vessel became visible. We just saw the transition between stealth mode and nonstealth mode. Or something like that.

I glance at the numbers screen. It has stopped on the last set. Nothing runs. Then I look at the other screens. The one that had gone black now shows a black room with little white figures in it. Human-shaped.

It takes me a moment to realize those figures are us. We’re seeing ourselves in our suits staring at the screen.

Looking away from the camera. Which has to be on the Dignity Vessel.

It wasn’t in stealth mode in this chamber. It had been somewhere else until a little while ago. Somewhere with that strange patch of space.

“We triggered it,” I say.

“What?” DeVries asks.

“I think we summoned it back here.” I make myself record everything— the screens, the changes in the console.

“What do you mean, we summoned it?” Rea asks.

I shouldn’t say this, with all my lectures about theories and suppositions. But I do. “We entered the chamber and it came alive. When it did, it must have sent some kind of message—maybe that someone is here. Maybe that the chamber is functional again. It called the vessel here.”

“Called it home,” DeVries says softly. “Ilona was right. This is where they were built.”

I shake my head. “She’s right about the stealth, and she’s right that Dignity Vessels are connected here. But look at this chamber. The vessel fills this part. There’s no room to build. This is an arrival port or a maintenance unit.”

“Or both,” Rea says.

“That’s why the danger,” I say. “No one can stand where you were. There’s not enough warning to get out of the way.”

No klaxons, no bells. I glance up. The ceiling didn’t open. Nothing changed except the vessel appeared here.

“I’ll bet there’s a death hole on the surface,” I say.

“Above us?” Kersting asks.

I shake my head. “Maybe around us. Behind us. Horizontal. Taking some of the force of that extra stealth energy.”

“That’s what death holes are?” Rea asks.

“It’s a guess,” I say. It’s all a guess. Until we can examine everything.

I walk forward. A functioning Dignity Vessel. Probably with some kind of homing program, some way to come back here to this base.

If our entry has called one vessel home, how many others will come?

Maybe not many. Of all the Dignity Vessels we’ve found, none have been functional.

This one is, by some miracle.

This one is.