City of Ruins

SEVENTY-ONE

I know enough from any time period, any military vessel, any vessel at all, to know that I shouldn’t be on this cockpit. I should be in some public area, away from the inner workings of a vessel I don’t comprehend.

But the captain has brought me here as more than a courtesy. He knows he is giving me a gift.

I stand near the door and marvel. The first time I saw the cockpit of a Dignity Vessel, it was an image taken by my divers, grainy, filled with particles that I didn’t entirely understand, the furniture and equipment piled against one wall, as if some field had pulled it all there.

Then I dived that ship, and tried to rescue one of my dead teammates, stuck in a stealth-tech field, his face mummified behind the cracked mask of his visor.

In a Dignity Vessel.

I had once tried to imagine what these places had been like in their day.

This is their day. It’s mine, too.

The equipment is bolted down, just like I knew it would be. And where there was a fist-sized hole in the Dignity Vessel I dove, there’s some kind of control, something that I recognize only by its black casing. That’s where part of the stealth tech is.

The walls in front of me—all of them—are screens.

There’s a captain’s chair in the middle, but the captain isn’t sitting in it. He’s standing beside me. The lieutenant is on the other side, and God bless her, she’s translating.

Four other people are in the cockpit, including a woman who had been sitting in the captain’s chair. She looks at me with great curiosity, but doesn’t say anything. A small woman up front grins at me. I can’t help but grin back.

The tall, thin man who had been with us on the surface has moved to the console nearest the black casing. He looks grim, miserable. He’s the only one who doesn’t look up as the captain speaks.

The screens in front of us show the room itself as if we can just reach out and touch it. The equipment looks fine.

The captain says something; the screens opaque, but not enough to completely block the whiteness that engulfs the entire room. When the whiteness fades, the image crisps up. But there is no more equipment. It’s gone.

“What was that?” I ask the lieutenant.

“We got rid of anything your people can study,” she says.

“They’re not my people,” I say, and then realize I sound churlish. “So thank you.”

She nods and smiles.

The captain puts his hand on my shoulder. “Now,” he says in his language, a word I’m beginning to recognize. Then he changes to my language. “We go.”

My breath catches. I get to see the Dignity Vessel in action.

The screens blank out. The whistle fades, and I don’t hear the thrum of stealth tech at all. The ship shifts slightly, as if we all collectively tripped over something and righted ourselves at the same time.

The screens turn back on, and I am staring down at Wyr. It’s blue and brown and green, with the mountains rising through whitish clouds.

I’m very dizzy.

“What did you do?” I ask.

“That’s our . . . drive,” the lieutenant says, using that word I can never seem to catch. “You call it stealth technology, but it is so much more.”

Clearly.

The captain’s hand is warm on my shoulder. Companionable. It feels like he’s holding me up. Maybe he is.

He says something to me, softly.

“He wants to know the coordinates of your ship,” the lieutenant says. “So we can rendezvous.”

I give her the coordinates. The sooner we’re away from Wyr, the better we’ll all be.

I look up at the captain. “Thank you for saving my people,” I say.

“Thank you for saving mine,” he says through the lieutenant. “We would not have escaped foldspace without you activating the repair room.”

“Foldspace?” I ask.

He smiles. “I will explain if you let me. When we get away from your Empire. Can we return to your base?”

I smile at him. I was going to ask him to come with us, but he’s already thought of it.

“I’d love to show you our base,” I say.

He keeps his hand on my shoulder, and we stand inside the cockpit of his Dignity Vessel, watching on the screens as we move through space toward Nobody’s Business. As if this ship is conventional. As if we haven’t already had a grand adventure.

As if standing with a man who was born five thousand years ago was the most natural thing in the universe.

Maybe it is.

There is so much that we don’t understand about this universe. So many mysteries.

And I was right all those years ago, when I first saw the Dignity Vessel.

Mysteries are fascinating.

They lead us to places we would never expect to be, help us discover things we never even knew existed.

I lean into him just a little. A legend made real. A man, above all. On a ship that shouldn’t exist. In a place we don’t belong.

Heading home with us.

Heading home. With me.