On the barren horizon, an enormous cloudy bubble came into view. Everything under the bubble was a Faxen Union facility, representing the interstellar union of worlds to which Tellus belonged. The Faxen Union was centered on, and controlled by, the rich and powerful world called Faxe. He’d once spent time on Faxe doing fieldwork.
Without warning a memory from Faxe came to him. He remembered a silver thread in a cloudy sky. With it came a sense of threat. His heart thudded. He jumped up while the landtrain slowed to penetrate the cloudy bubble. He wanted out.
But when the landtrain stopped, his car abutted a Security Portal. Security was high because of the violent activities of Disunionists. More than ever, he resented it. Disunionism was scarce here on Tellus, historically the most loyal world of the Faxen Union.
His impatience made no difference to the artificial intelligence of the Portal. It scanned his ID and correctly identified him as a scion of an old Tellan family on official business. It asked the usual questions. He curtly gave the usual answers. The Portal scanned his backpack seemingly with more suspicion than it scanned him, but finally released that too.
The Portal directed him to another transportation node. To get there took five minutes’ walk in the cloudy bubble. On the way he felt a flash of irritation at the humid air and the clouds clinging to the inside of the bubble. Trust the Faxens to make their facility’s bubble moist and cloudy, like their lush home world.
Where there was a thread in the sky. A threat in the sky. He walked faster toward the transportation node and broke into a clammy sweat.
Official planetary business didn’t rate a human pilot to fly him to his final destination. An unmanned autocopter waited for him on the other side of the node. By the time he boarded it, the outside air had dried the sweat on his skin.
The autocopter carried him along the Equator Rift: a huge gash of a valley in the planet’s skin. A hundred kilometers west of the bubble, the copter descended into the Rift. Well programmed, it circled down in the calmest air equidistant from the canyon walls. On the slightly wetter north wall, a few green dots signaled springs of water and Tellan plant communities. Good—the offworld archaeologists hadn’t disrupted the native ecosystem, at least not obviously.
The copter circled down for a long time. It autorotated, thick stubby blades spinning almost soundlessly, filling the battery with energy to ascend later. Tellus wasn’t the kind of world on which to use energy profligately.
The Rift was so deep that the atmosphere was thicker down there. The bottom of the Rift had enough air for anyone, really. With approval, he saw that the archaeologist’s field station wasn’t preciously situated under a bubble. Instead it was a compact, semicircular compound with its back to the Rift wall and an open-air courtyard inside. Unlike the Faxen facility—Faxe putting its heavy finger on the balance scales of his planet—the field station had been fitted into the environment with some care. That boded well for his mission here. He didn’t want to discover violations of planetary protection protocols. His concern was for the planet he was sworn and paid to protect.
Landing on a well-marked pad outside of the field station, the copter gave him a preprogrammed five minutes to disembark. He exited with his backpack in under five seconds. It was hot out in the open. In this equatorial land made of rock and sand, hot was how it should be, hot and dry. He felt completely calm now, his unease in the Faxen bubble a nearly forgotten detail in the day.
A woman in field clothes stepped out of the field station. “Dr. Tel-Hazon?”
She looked shapely and fit and more or less his age. Suddenly he didn’t want to be mistaken for a stuffy bureaucrat. “I go by Haze.”
“Is that a Traveler name?”
“Yes, I spent time off-planet, years ago.”
She gave him a bright smile. “Call me Mercury. Sake asked me to meet you.” She gave the syllables of the unfamiliar name equal emphasis: Sa-kay. “She’s away at Equator Prime.”
E-prime was the city beside the sea, at the west end of the Rift. But—“Who?”
“Oh, I mean Svetlana Tai, our expedition leader. Sake is her Traveler name, since Traveler names always mean something translatable into other tongues.”
Haze nodded. He pegged Mercury for a cheerfully talkative person with a high signal-to-noise ratio. He usually got along well with people like that.
“Sake was an ancient strong drink. It’s what people who’ve met her call her.”
“I’ve never met her.” He thought about all of the interstellar gatherings, physical and virtual conferences and symposia he’d attended. “At least I don’t remember having met her.”
“You would.”
Behind Haze, the autocopter started its laborious climb back into the sky.
Mercury was brown-haired, with smooth brown skin. Dark lashes framed her gray eyes and the effect was rather luminous. Her field clothes fit her shapely figure well. On one wrist, a twisted silver bracelet shone in the sun with every gesture she made. On impulse, Haze said, “I’m sure I’ve never met you before. I would remember.”
Oh, my stars and suns. Seldom in her life had Mercury felt an instant spike of sexual interest upon meeting someone for the first time. This was one of those times. Surprise may have factored into it. She’d expected a leathery old Tellan bureaucrat. Haze wasn’t old and dried-up: he was tall, slender, tawny-haired, and had hazel eyes, the green-brown color of life.
She told herself to get down to the business at hand. It was incredibly hopeful that the Department of Planetary Protection had sent a onetime star traveler—that they even had one! Of course it meant changing the explanations she’d planned to slide into the expected leathery old ears. Haze actually had shapely ears framed by tufts of his tawny hair.
Well, she could adapt a guided tour on short notice. That was why Sake trusted her in the role of official greeter. “The floor of the Rift has a wide network of dry channels where an ancient river ran. On the other side of the valley you can see Site B under the north wall. Those ruins are extensive and thought to have been a temple complex. This is Site A, which is much smaller, more of an outpost. Here is the Site’s external wall. It’s old, old super-hardened clay.”
He glanced at the featureless clay wall, his gaze going on up to the vastly more impressive natural wall of the Rift. “Does the Rift wall shed stone?”
That was an astute question. Some people seemed to think that rock didn’t move. Rock could move, and did, sometimes quickly. “Not often, and the wall is protection from stones falling from space.” Speaking of fast-moving rocks.
“Then I’m glad the Rift wall is there,” he said with a kind of intensity like a wire singing with tension.
Mercury liked intense people. This encounter was getting more interesting every minute. “Let me show you the interior of the Site.”
He stepped toward her, a few inches closer than propriety might have dictated. He might just be interested in her too. Oh my stars and suns!
Of course, he didn’t know what she really was. In three days, he probably wouldn’t find out, either, except by accident. A lot could happen in three days that was on purpose. . . .
She told her sexual interest to step back and not be a trip hazard.
Rift Site A had been beam-carved out of the rock of the Rift wall, she explained, with the external clay walls added. That was around the time of early Egypt on Old Earth, ten thousand Earth years ago. In a wetter climate, the walls might have weathered into oblivion. But this part of Tellus had been arid for a half a million years, the onetime river drying up until it was made of sand. Even with terraforming, the clay walls would last for a long time more, unless the rejuvenated river rose high enough to flood the Site. That was not planned but, out of an abundance of caution, it was considered possible. “Our agreement with your planetary government is that we’ll be prepared to evacuate if we have to when the river comes back in three days,” she said.