Boneyards (12 page)

I
am already nervous. Nervous and out of practice—not with flying a skip. I do it all the time. But with the crowd.

Eight people inside the skip, talking, moving, laughing. I try to concentrate on piloting. Coop sits beside me, hands resting on his knees so that he doesn't touch the controls.

We agreed that I'd fly the skip. When it comes to skips and single ships and the
Two
, I'm the best pilot we have. When it comes to gigantic vessels like the
Ivoire
, Coop makes me feel like a beginner.

But we haven't counted on the distraction of the crowd.

Theoretically, this skip, which is the latest model, is built for ten people to travel comfortably for short distances. For long distances, the skip can hold four, two in each cabin.

Four is about my limit, long or short. I can keep track of everyone and I can pilot.

But we need eight—including me—down on that surface, so we all pile in. No sense in having two skips, especially when the landing area is small.

I'm not out of practice piloting. I'm always taking a skip here or there. Sometimes I simply run a piloting program at its highest, most difficult level. I take skips to wrecks to see if they're Dignity Vessels; I visit abandoned space stations; I'm always on the move.

No. I'm out of practice handling distraction. I haven't had this many passengers in a skip since I was running tourist dives twelve years ago.

We've just gone through the atmosphere, and I'm going to need to concentrate. I've run the holographic model of our landing site and I've read the topological maps, but something feels off to me, as if I'm not seeing something.

“Tell everyone to go to the other room and strap in,” I say to Coop.

He gives me a startled look. There really is no reason to strap in on a skip, especially a state-of-the-art one like this. The inertial dampeners are spectacular, and the gravity doesn't change. Even if the skip bobs and weaves, turns upside down, or suddenly loses altitude, we won't feel any effects inside the skip. Our floor will remain a floor, our ceiling a ceiling, and our balance will be perfect.

“Do I have to say please?” I snap.

He gets up, corrals them, and heads them to the other room.

I could explain to Coop that the conversation is ruining my concentration, but that's only partly true. I am feeling claustrophobic and uncertain, and that's just not like me.

I have never seen mountains like this. They loom large ahead of me. The information running across the cockpit tells me that they're sixteen kilometers high, and a couple of the peaks are even higher.

We've already mapped out a path through the peaks that sounded good when we were on the
Two
, although Stone kept making a face. Once she even said, “You're not taking into account the reality of mountains.”

Coop shrugged. He said, “Boss has flown through much tighter spaces,” and I have. But in space itself, not on land, where I have to deal with a different external environment.

Of course, the skip compensates for all the changes—if it didn't, we couldn't fly it down from space—but I'm a hands-on pilot. I usually do everything manually. It keeps the job fun, challenging, and it's saved our asses more than once.

But as those mountains approach and the readouts in front of me look very different from anything I'm used to, I realize that flying by feel is simply not possible here.

I set the automatic controls and remove my hands from the control panel just as a proximity alarm goes off.

My heart pounds. I should have expected the proximity alarm. The mountains themselves will cause half a dozen of them because we're essentially flying into a box. Our speed decreases, but even so, if we hit a mountainside, nothing can save us. We will die. The proximity alarm warns of that.

Coop comes back in and sits beside me. He glances at my hands, then at the controls.

“Do I have to strap in?” he asks, and I hear some humor in his tone. He has figured out why I wanted everyone strapped in, and that it has nothing to do with the actual flight.

“Only if you want to,” I say as the ship banks around two peaks. We're flying in a space so narrow that there's barely six meters of clearance on either side.

“Oh, I trust you,” he says. “Or should I say that I trust the skip.”

I glare at him.

“I thought you were flying this because you're the best skip pilot…?” Now he is grinning.

“The best skip pilot knows when she needs to rely on the equipment,” I say primly.

He clutches his hands together. He doesn't like the autopilot either, but I note that he hasn't volunteered to take the controls—which is something he would have done if he felt the need.

Our speed has decreased to a crawl as we enter the canyon itself. It's small, and it's not really box-shaped. Its edges are more like triangles, although there is a large center area.

The skip has stopped completely and hovers. I search the ground for our landing spot. From space, we found an area that looked large enough for us that wouldn't send us into a pile of pine trees or on the river's narrow edge.

But what we can read from space and what we see on the ground are sometimes very different things. I see three bare patches, but only one is level enough for the skip.

I retake the controls and slowly lower us to the ground.

From the back room, I hear applause.

Coop's smile has become a grin. “You clearly scared them.”

“I didn't mean to,” I say. But I realize now why they were worried. The only reason to strap in—at least from their point of view—was because I was worried the skip would crash.

“Don't tell them the real reason,” he says so softly I know they can't hear.

I grin back at him.

“Don't worry,” I say. “I won't.”

I
t takes nearly an hour to unload all of our equipment. Lucretia Stone has given us specific instructions so that we can set up everything correctly. Instructions, it turns out, that we wouldn't have needed if we had been able to perform the proper scans.

There is no loose stealth tech down here, no readings at all that would show that someone without the genetic marker would be in any danger. We find no death holes either, and nothing on the surface that indicates trouble.

We find nothing on the surface that indicates a city either. The floor of the box canyon is covered with dirt and tangled vegetation, most of which I can't identify, and trees—hundreds and hundreds of trees.

Some trees are familiar. I've seen pine before on other planets, and they're mixed in with trees I've seen, trees with leaves, but then there are trees I haven't seen before, with silvery bark and reddish leaves. A few have ropy leaves—or are they vines?—hanging from branches.

I am stunned at the diversity near us because it wasn't evident as we came in for our landing.

This flat area where I've landed the skip extends for one square kilometer, which is good, because we need all of that space. From the ground, the box canyon looks huge. From the air, it had seemed small and terrifying.

The other part of the box canyon that astonishes me is how high the walls of the canyon are. I know of space stations that are bigger, longer, and wider, but no single room inside the station has walls like this, walls that extend as far as the eye can see. I know there's a sky above; I can see it, vaguely orange and pale pink, but I have to tilt my head all the way back, making my neck crack as I do so.

But our work isn't above us. It's below us.

We set the equipment in three different areas, forming a triangle exactly the way that Stone has told us to. Julian DeVries supervises the equipment setup. Archeology has become a hobby of his, or so he said on the skip, and he styles himself our resident expert.

He looks vaguely expert, in his brown pants and corduroy jacket, his hair combed back. He loves being in charge, even though he rarely gets a chance. He doesn't have the degrees that Stone does, nor does he have her authority, but he seems to know what he's doing.

We would all rather look around anyway.

It's cold here, and there is no wind. I'm surprised at the cold. I hadn't even bothered to look at the temperature before we arrived because I assumed it would be warm. The last mountainous area where I spent any time was Vaycehn, where we found Sector Base V, and that area was stiflingly hot.

For some reason, I believed that the Fleet would pick warm areas for its sector bases. I hadn't asked Coop about it, of course, nor had I done any research. I had simply done what I tell my divers not to do: make an assumption about an area we're going to explore without doing the proper research.

Not that we're really going to explore this. If we find anything, we'll return to the
Two
and figure out what to do next.

I did note the cold before we left the skip, and took a jacket from my emergency clothing stash. I'm glad that I have it; I fasten it closed and stuff my hands in its pockets.

I'm standing with Orlando Rea near one of the first pieces of equipment that DeVries set up. The equipment—which has some big fancy name that I really don't care about—is probing belowground. Not that Rea and I need to pay much attention to it. It will function on its own for a good fifteen minutes before we have the information we need.

Instead, Rea and I are looking across this valley, which slopes downward from here. The ground rises and falls like small swells, and in the distance, boulders stand like warning beacons, letting us know that the mountains around us are active and could crush us if they really wanted to.

Coop and Yash walk toward us. They helped set up another bit of equipment. Coop looks purposeful. He has already stopped and spoken to Rossetti, who is still tinkering with the third piece of equipment. Seager and Kersting hover near Rossetti, like people awaiting instruction. Since Stone trained us all in equipment setup, the fact that they're hovering like that tells me that Rossetti prefers to do this work herself.

She stops, listens to Coop for a moment, and then looks around, as if she can't quite believe what he's telling her. Rea hasn't noticed the interaction, and I don't say anything to him.

Instead, I watch Coop and Yash climb across a row of prickly little plants that seem to be growing out of rock. Coop gives me a grim look as he gets close, and I can't wait any longer.

I walk over to him.

“It was here,” he says.

“The city?” I ask.

He nods. “Yash ran a test of her own.”

She's clutching one of their handheld devices, some kind of scanner that's so much more sophisticated than anything the Empire has. She's given the specs to one of our engineering departments at Lost Souls, but we don't have the devices yet because we don't have access to all of the materials.

Some of these things that the
Ivoire's
crew possess have become more precious over time.

“I ran the composition of the soil,” she says, “with a special eye to things unique to the Fleet.”

I have learned in the past five years that the Fleet develops some of its own materials.

“The nanobits that we use for building have a particular signature, especially after they degrade,” she says. “There are faint traces in the soil.”

This news seems to have depressed Coop, so I can't help asking, “You're sure?”

“Positive,” Yash says. “We're in the right place.”

I scan the area. I see no evidence of a city. No ruins, nothing. “Where was it, then?”

“About ten meters beneath us,” Yash says. “We'll be able to map its footprint, just like Stone says.”

“But there's no way to know what happened to it,” I say.

Rea, who has been quiet until this point, looks around pointedly. “I think it's pretty clear,” he says. “If cities change the way Vaycehn changed—you know, with no one remembering its exact history—then eventually, the city probably needed supplies from the outside. Getting out of this canyon has to be work.”

“That's one theory,” Coop says.

“But you don't agree,” I say.

He shrugs one shoulder. “There's no
anacapa
signature anywhere that we can find. And we also learned from Sector Base V that the
anacapa
drive in a properly shut down base can last several thousand years.”

“That's how they were designed,” Yash adds.

“Yeah,” I say, “but not everything works the way it's designed. Let's see what we can find.”

The three different equipment points are doing three different things. One is mapping the footprint of the city underground. The one that Rea and I helped set up is searching the nearby mountains for an opening that will lead to Sector Base Y. The third is mapping the tunnels beneath us, hoping that they will lead to the sector base.

The equipment will give us answers. That's what it's designed for.

And, I'm trusting, that's what it will do.