Mercury answered, “He seems honest and intense—a scientist who pays attention. He’s done some Traveling and he goes by the name Haze.”
“Looters can be looters or they could be the rival xenarchs who follow us around like carrion fowl. Could he be allied with them? Will he tip them off to what we found today?”
Mercury was good at reading people and Sake knew it. It was one of the reasons why some occasional accidents were still worth keeping Mercury on the Pastfinder payroll. Mercury shook her head. “No. He’s disinterested in the clay walls, sand sweepings, or even the hole in the wall.”
“What really happened?”
“First the scaffold fell down.” Full disclosure. “I think it was my fault.”
In the other room, they heard Gerro say, “Yes. There’s a mechanism inside the wall. It isn’t a section that fell in. It retracted.”
“The frame is perfectly square,” said Ria. “To the millimeter.”
“There’s one like it in Polar Site C3. It’s thought to have been a ventilation shaft intake. But that one is stuck open. This mechanism is complete and functional!”
Mercury understood their excitement. “The scaffold fell inward. It hit Haze but didn’t even touch a wall.”
“What did touch the wall, then?”
Mercury recognized a teacher’s inquiry. That was what Sake was, among other interesting things—a professor at the University in the interstellar city-state called Wendis. Suddenly Mercury had an insight, and with it the answer. “There are theories that the Old Tellan culture was built around communication with musical sound. Music to us, meaningful utterances to them, if true. When the scaffold hit the floor, it made a pure tone that reverberated through the Site, more like a tuning fork than a crashing noise.”
Tai’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “A recent paper described some of the sound waves thought to operate Old Tellan technology. By dropping pieces of the scaffold on the floor, Quit can reproduce and analyze the sounds it creates.” She gave Mercury a long serious look. “I’m not inclined to trust matter around you, not with probability skewing in unpredictable ways. But I trust you.”
With the gift that made improbable things happen around her, Mercury was different from the other Pastfinders, a kind of an alien, but Sake trusted her to be as good at what she did best as the rest of them were. Not for the first time, Mercury felt a rush of gratitude for having a place to belong while traveling among the stars.
Tai said, “Tell Haze Tel-Hazon what you think he needs to know while he’s here. But keep your communicator on tonight. I’ve decided to put out the bait to bring the looters into the open. I don’t want him caught in crossfire.”
3 Sandbox
Silk had erected an old but well-functioning tent in the west corner of the station’s courtyard, as out of the way as possible given how crowded the station was. Haze thanked her. She pointed out a part of the courtyard’s dirt floor outlined in yellow tape. “Don’t go there. We’re keeping it clean for laying out findings. Supper in half an hour.”
Haze had time to explore the view from the station. Semicircular, the station consisted of two levels, the lower one enclosed in modern, strong walls, the upper level an observation deck. A flight of open-air stairs went up to the deck. Both ends of the deck, east and west, were sheltered under an overhang in the rift wall. Below, where their courtyard extended under the overhang, the Pastfinders had stored equipment and supplies, including a couple of blue transport crates.
Haze made a mental note to check the contents of those crates, if in fact the Pastfinders had found anything worth transporting. The larger crate was sizeable. Given today’s discovery, they might cut out the hole, including most of the wall around it, and it would fit in that crate. That begged the question of whether their copter could lift the crate, heavily loaded, to E-Prime to get it offworld from there. In any event, from here Haze saw nothing that the Planetary History Division would want kept on Tellus, much less any biota to protect.
The Pastfinders also had a land vehicle, one with fat wheels and a glass-domed compartment for the occupants. It had treads folded up inboard of the wheels and it looked like a sand-crosser. He wasn’t surprised to see one of those here since the two Sites were separated by a river of sand. Turning around, he studied the long view in the clear air. He recognized the high wall of Site B, on the other side of the plain’s braided sand channels.
The setting sun flared at the west end of the Rift. Night flowed through the Rift like the water that would soon replenish the river. At first the darkness left an area in the middle of the plain untouched. That area was at least ten meters higher than the sandy channels around it, elevated for some unknown geological reason.
Silk spotted him on the deck and waved him down into the courtyard for supper. To his pleasure, Mercury pulled up a camp chair next to his. The supper Silk served up was generous. She explained that they were finishing up their perishable provisions. “We can’t come back until the river stabilizes. The less payload we have to haul out of this rift the better.” That confirmed his guess that the Pastfinders wouldn’t haul out anything that wasn’t of real value to them.
The Pastfinders animatedly discussed the hole in the wall, now thought to be an old and miraculously still-functioning intake in a ventilation shaft. Mercury deftly shifted the conversation to some of Haze’s old adventures in the wilderness on Faxe. His encounters with sparkspiders in the forest of Faxe made for an interesting tale. So did the time Haze’s research partner found a colony of shockthreads in a pool of water by slipping in and having to be rescued and his heart restarted. That got appreciative remarks from his listeners. Refreshingly, they seemed to understand that alien life-forms were not just decorative; they could be deadly, and humans couldn’t always tell the difference.
This was a wildly disparate group of people, Haze thought, watching their faces as he told his tales. He couldn’t remember ever being around a field crew this diverse. But he felt at ease. Mercury listened to him with real interest in her eyes, a smile playing around the edges of her lips. The neck of her field shirt dipped down far enough to give him a tantalizing view at which he carefully did not stare. He was not in the habit of sizing women up as sexual partners from the get-go. But Mercury made such thoughts come to him insistently.
Over the last spoonfuls of milk pudding for dessert, Svetlana Tai said, “Let’s show Haze the sandbox crate!”
Mikal and Jud went under the overhang to drag out the smaller blue transport crate. They put it squarely in the area taped off for the inspection of archaeological findings. Mikal pried up the lid. “Have a look,” Tai invited Haze.
The crate contained stratigraphic cores, loose grains of sand, and shrink-wrapped packets. On top of everything else lay some neatly labeled pieces of twisted metal. Haze raised his eyebrows. “Those are parts of the failed scaffold.”
Mercury told him, “This is supposed to be findings from the riverbed, artifacts and fragments we found and cataloged ahead of the flood. Except there weren’t any. This crate is blank cores of sand and junk we need to get rid of, salted with a few fake artifacts. Real artifacts are valuable. We suspect because of what could be in it, this crate may disappear in transit.”