"It really is impressive when you think about it," I said, looking up and around and really taking everything in.

"What's impressive when you think about it?" Varis asked, turning and hitting me with the sort of look that said she knew I was up to something and the other shoe was about to drop with one of my jokes.

And she was absolutely correct on that score.

"All the redecorating the empress has done down here," I said with a shrug. "When you really think about it, the ability to totally rearrange a city like this but have the city still be mostly intact despite the fact you're using nuclear weapons to do the rearranging? That's got to be an impressive feat."

"It wasn't the empress who did this," she said.

"The empress. Empresses past. Whatever."

I paused and moved around a giant support strut that had been flung into the ground. I was really going to have to figure out what these support struts were made of and how the livisk got them to survive nuclear conflagrations.

"It's a pity you weren't making entire buildings out of whatever you made these support structures out of," I said, reaching out and running a hand along one of them.

Greasy dust came off of the thing, and I rubbed it between my fingers. Then I reached down to rub it on the ground, but the ground was covered in the same shit. Which had me rubbing it off near the bottom of my uniform pants instead.

Varis looked at the spot where I'd wiped the stuff off, her mouth turning down in distaste. Which didn't surprise me after the big deal she made about getting blood on her uniform.

"Sorry," I said, hitting her with a sheepish grin.

"I suppose it can't be avoided," she said, letting out a huge sigh as she looked up and all around us. The cavernous ruins of an ancient city loomed over us. "This whole place is covered in the dust and debris of a nuclear holocaust from long ago."

"That's right," I said, looking around at the buildings and frowning.

We weren't even on the highest level of the Undercity. It boggled the mind that there were multiple cities they'd just built over. I could see ancient looking antigrav plates that were still fighting the good fight keeping everything on the "surface" up where it belonged.

Some of that emotion must've come through the link. She turned and cocked her head.

"What?" I asked.

"You're staring around and thinking of something."

"I've been accused of thinking something in the past," I said. "But what do you think I'm thinking about right now?"

"I think you're looking around and thinking how ridiculous it is that we keep rebuilding the same city on top of the old one over and over again, and then we keep knocking it down," she said, and now it was her turn to frown as she looked around at our surroundings.

I could also feel the dissatisfaction coming through the link as she looked around at all those buildings.

"I think you're telling on yourself with what you're projecting onto me," I said, following her gaze. I stepped up next to her and put an arm around her side. Which had her pressing against me. That felt good. "But yeah. It is pretty stupid. The knocking it down every few generations thing. Not necessarily rebuilding it. We have a lot of cities on earth that we've been building on the ruins of the old ones for a long time now. Rome comes to mind. Or Seattle."

"I've heard of this Rome, but Seattle?" Varis said.

"There's at least one whole level of city in Seattle they built over using similar techniques, though I think they had a lot more support struts and a lot less antigrav since that tech was still expensive when they did most of the rebuilding," I said. "It also bought the big one in a similar fashion to how Imperial Seat keeps getting knocked down."

Varis started moving again. I figured that was my cue to follow her through the remains of the fire and the flames. As I looked around I could just imagine what this had looked like while it was happening. Walls of fire moving through the buildings and destroying anything living in their path.

Though apparently the livisk were good enough at making building materials that large chunks of their cities were surviving these nuclear blasts. That wasn't how things had worked on earth in the past.

"Have you ever visited this city of Seattle?" she asked.

"Yeah, I have," I said. "The parts they built over are remarkably well preserved. A great example of early twenty-second architecture."

"Do they have similar building technology to what we have here on Livisqa?" she asked, arching an eyebrow as we picked our way through a small tunnel of debris that was the only way to move towards the reclamation mine.

I could see the reclamation mine off in the distance. The fighter exploding had sent me flying a good distance, sure, but it wasn't so far that I couldn't see the massive mine with the columns of smoke rising out of it. Especially since we were close to the bottom and I could see the various levels of the inverted cone they'd built into the city below, and the spots where some of that inverted cone was starting to move out into the rest of the Undercity.

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"Not really," I said. "Your cities seem to have a remarkable resilience to nukes."

"Some of the buildings have resilience, yes," Varis said. "We've managed to work in alloys that were discovered from some of the Ancient technology we found at the bottom of the city."

"So there really was an Ancient city down here once upon a time?" I asked.

I paused for a moment as we suddenly found ourselves staring at a large dark crack in the ground. I looked down into the thing, but it seemed to go down into nothing. Which meant I had no idea how deep the thing ran.

We were near the bottom, but supposedly there was a whole other level of city beneath us, after all. I didn't want to find out how far down that crack went by stepping into it.

Of course that wasn't much of a worry since it was only like half a meter across. I picked Varis up around the stomach and moved her over the thing easily enough, then hopped over it myself. I tried not to shiver and think about what kinds of things might be lurking down in that darkness.

How close were we to the bottom layer of the Undercity?

"There supposedly was," Varis said, starting at a brisk pace again. Which didn't seem like a nice thing to do considering I'd just broken my leg, but I was feeling a lot better now. Like we're talking I wasn't even breaking a sweat. "Supposedly finding access to a trove of Ancient technology in a city that hadn't been destroyed by the wars that broke up their ancient empire was what allowed us to go to the stars in the first place."

"And start mixing it up with all your neighbors?" I asked, thinking about all the species that had been subjugated by the livisk in the several millennia since they took to the stars before humanity was out there to stop them from doing bad things.

Like those aforementioned cat people I kept coming back to? The ones that had whole sections of the Galactic Net dedicated to Rule 34 content that was basically just a repackaging of the same cat girl bullshit that'd been lurking on the darker corners of the Internet since the thing was first invented?

They would've simply been invaded and subjugated as another subject species for the glory of the Livisk Ascendancy. Assuming they didn't put up so much resistance that they were considered too difficult to leave around and they were eliminated.

The livisk were hardcore when it came to their relations with other alien species they felt were within their territory. With the big problem being they thought any system they could see from the surface of one of the planets they'd conquered was their territory.

Right up until they met humanity and got a swift kick in the nuts. Or maybe the ovaries? They did have an empress, after all.

"Something like that," she said. "Though I'll note we haven't been nearly as big on the conquest thing in recent years as we were in the past."

"So is that your people getting soft, or is that because you've run up against a couple of species who don't like your whole conquest shtick?"

She turned and hit me with a look. I could tell she didn't like this line of questioning, but that was tough shit. She was going to have to face the things her people had done at some point.

"And humanity is any better?" she asked.

We paused as we reached a spot that suddenly had a view that looked out over the city all around us. It was a breathtaking view, and I'm not just talking about the way Varis's backside looked in her tight uniform pants. Though admittedly that was one big part of why the view was so impressive.

No. I could see the twisted and broken city laid out before us, and just like Imperial Seat up above it seemed to keep going and going.

I also almost thought I could see the roots of the imperial palace off in the distance. It was so large that it went down into the very roots of the city. Touching down onto the bedrock that existed far below Imperial Seat that allowed them to build so many tall towers once upon a time.

Something about it having the same sort of bedrock as Manhattan back on earth. I'd read up on that in the man cave when I was trying to figure out ways to blow the place up. The problem being it was so damn big and heavily armored that even if someone knocked out the shielding it would still take a few nukes to take the place out.

"So does your Seattle look like this?" she asked.

"No, nothing like this," I said. "Like I said, your methods for building stuff are way more impressive than anything they had on earth in the first half of the millennium."

"Oh really?" she asked, turning and hitting me with the faintest hint of a smile. "So you're saying we're better at this sort of thing?"

"I don't know if bragging that you're better at building things that withstand nukes because you're always blowing them up with nukes is something to brag about, but sure," I said. "The people who built the original version of Seattle didn't exactly build to survive nukes. They barely built it to survive a volcano, which could've been bad if Rainier got pissy."

"Rainier?"

"Big volcano," I said. "Anyway. Back then they didn't think it was possible to build something that could withstand a nuke."

"Really?" she asked. "We've known that's possible for some time now."

"Yeah, well ancient man didn't have Ancient technology, and we only dropped two nukes and stopped because we thought it was such a terrible weapon," I said.

"Nonsense," Varis said with a sniff. "A weapon is useless if you don't have the intent to use it."

"Yeah, well there was an asshole in the early twenty-second who thought the same as you livisk think about strategic nukes," I said. "He ended up letting a war that'd been cold for the better part of a couple of centuries go hot because the fucking Russians are always trying to act like they're a bigger deal geopolitically than they actually are because they built a bunch of nukes once upon a time and then shit the bed economically. They've never forgotten about that."

"They sound like a fascinating culture," Varis said.

"I'm sure a livisk would think that," I said. "Stalin could give lessons to your empress. Anyway, the only reason Seattle was still around for people to visit the ruins under the city was because that war happened long after all the initial targeting information had been fed into the missiles in the middle of the twentieth century. By the time they got around to actually firing them, the information was so far off or the systems so far degraded that most of them exploded in their silos, and most of the rest missed. The nuke that hit Seattle actually landed on the side of Mount Rainier. Which thankfully didn't set it off, but it did hit the city with a glancing blow that didn't knock over the skyscrapers, but rendered it uninhabitable until they rebuilt."

"So nobody was really harmed?"

"A lot of people were harmed," I said. "Which is why it's a damned fool thing to use those weapons. Though the Russians did discover that the United States hadn't been skimping on nuke maintenance and updating coordinates. The U.S. got their hair mussed, but no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. The other guys were sent back into the Stone Age."

"Fascinating," she said.

"It is fascinating, if you're into history," I said.

"Which you are very much into. I know you, Bill," she said.

I stared at her. She stared back at me. I grinned.

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?"

"Am I?" she asked.

I leaned in and hit her with a kiss. It was a thorough kiss. The kind of kiss that communicated just how much I was enjoying myself. When I pulled back she looked surprised.

"What was that for?"

"For actually enjoying me rambling about history while we go for a stroll through a destroyed city. This is oddly nice," I said.

It was unfortunate that we had to fuck up a rescue mission to have this date night in formerly irradiated ruins. But now that we were here? I was going to relish this moment alone.

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