“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.