Haze was of two minds. He wanted to do his work here. He also wanted to spend time with Mercury. Her eyes looked more luminous than ever in her more solemn face this morning.
Maybe tonight. That idea energized him, even after losing sleep the previous night. He wondered why, today, he felt so unusually alive. Adrenaline and dopamine, he decided. Being in danger and being in love. Still, when he thought back on his recent life and work, it all seemed colorless, if not lifeless. That seemed very strange to him today.
Their party took the sand-crossing vehicle he’d seen under the overhang. The bubble over the main compartment turned out to be clear plastisteel. He was glad of that. The looters had used projectile weapons and left a couple of bullets lodged in the station walls. At least four of the bullets would have lodged in Pastfinders, except that most of the Pastfinders had been wearing light body armor. He was beginning to understand the more irregular aspects of Svetlana Tai’s interstellar reputation.
Hopper drove the crosser expertly, finding stretches of shallower sand with better traction. Where there was deeper sand in the way, he raised the wheels in favor of the traction tread. “Come the flood, this sand will go quick,” Hopper commented. “As in quicksand.”
“Do you mean it’s fine-grained and will turn into a slurry when flooded?” Haze asked. “That matches the plant life.” Thin forbs and low, fuzzy ground cover grew in some areas of the river plain. Here the sand was barren except for tumblesprigs. “My office recommended against an abrupt flood. All of these plants worked hard to be here.”
“I take it your office was voted down,” said Tai.
Haze nodded curtly.
“Yesterday I did learn more about the river restoration project. The dam that holds the lake in will be removed by TARC.”
She meant the Tellus-Albion Resource Corporation. Originally TARC had been a joint effort by Tellus and the nearest other Faxen Union planet, Albion. In the last decade the company had been appropriated by Faxen economic and military interests. It was sometimes known as the Telal Company, but to Haze it was TARC. A four-letter word. Exploiting resources without regard for ecological cost, TARC was the bête noir of the Department of Planetary Protection. He was sourly unsurprised that TARC had a heavy hand in the river release operation.
“Faxe-controlled interests can’t see life if it’s not abundant,” Tai said.
“Sometimes they see even the rich biota on Faxe as just being in the way of resource extraction.” He wondered why he felt vehemently sure of that, when it was contrary to the governing constitution on Faxe.
Evidently his vehemence surprised Tai too. “Sounds like you’re no diehard Unionist.”
“The Union is a fact of life. Tellus is tightly linked into the Union. Without the strong offworld connection, Tellus would be a miserable backwater planet like Estrella. I’m not a Disunionist either, though, and I don’t say that just to not get flagged at security portals. Violently breaking up the Faxen Union is not the answer.”
On Estrella, the Disunionists had destroyed a Faxen installation with an atomic bomb. It had wiped out not only the installation but also an Estrellan town and a thousand years’ worth of terraforming. Haze would never forgive the Disunionists for that.
He had the impression that these Pastfinders listened to him carefully. Well, navigating the politics of the stars and the security portals of Faxen installations mattered to them. So did the presumptive interest of TARC in exploitable resources. The river would be a hydroelectric and transportation resource, and TARC wouldn’t care about exhausted alien ruins in the way.
Hopper turned the crosser to drive uphill. It was the area Haze had noticed last night, an elevated part of the plain. Then, he’d taken it to be a mesa. Now, he realized that the east end of it had a steady slope. Sandstone, not sand, it was rock-firm. It had to have been shaped by the Old Tellans for some ancient reasons of theirs.
At the top, Gerro and Ria hopped out with a piece of equipment.
“I never pass up a view,” said Tai.
Haze got out too. “What’s that equipment for?”
Ria said, “Earthquake sensing. Analyzing how earthquake vibrations travel through the underlying strata might tell us if there are hollow places under Site A. Natural caves are geologically unlikely, but the Old Tellan rock-carving technology was capable enough that there may be underground chambers. If so, they were very effectively sealed off from discovery.”
Until yesterday? Haze wondered if Site A might reveal any more of its secrets in the short time remaining.
“Otherwise they went to a gaudy great deal of trouble just to carve a few rooms out of the rock wall.” Tai scanned the Rift with binoculars. “Having rock-carving equipment in place, it would make sense to excavate down.”
Here in the middle of the Rift, the view in the clear dry air was long. The Rift ran almost straight from east to west. He thought he could even see where the Rift began in the east, at the dam that held in the cometary lake, a hundred kilometers away. A gleam on that horizon was the Faxen installation under its cloudy bubble. In the other direction, to the west, he saw the haze of air above the sea. E-Prime, the largest city on the equator, lay that way, with a shiny thread vertical in the air above it.
Thread is threat.
It was noon. The sun was directly overhead. His shoulder hurt. He winced at the memory of the scaffold falling on him yesterday. He remembered having some kind of bad dream last night.
“Ready to go on?” Tai stood next to him.
His mouth was so dry that he could hardly get out, “Yes.”
Mercury guessed that Rift Site A hadn’t been so noisy in the last ten thousand years.
Quit first tried to duplicate the ringing sound the falling scaffold made when it hit the floor. Then he reproduced it, with melodic variations, aiming his sounds at the walls from a box he carried as he walked around the Site.
One of those sounds closed the ventilation hole. Then opened it again.
The Pastfinders congratulated Quit. “It’s definitely sound-keyed tech,” said Jud, whose technical knowledge equaled Quit’s, albeit with less emphasis on sensory instruments and more emphasis on explosive devices.
Quit then tried different sounds similar to the sounds that had worked—deft technical variations on the theme he was starting to understand. No one wanted to leave the Site long enough to eat lunch, so they perched on the table and chairs, utensils scraping in their dishes. Quit wandered around with his sound box in one hand and a curry bun in the other hand. His box emitted a regular progression of noises.
Just when Quit walked by Mercury, the sound progression broke: an anomalous sound came out of the box. She felt an unmistakable quiver behind the center of her rib cage—where there weren’t any nerves that could create a felt quiver. The sensation meant that her psychic gift was working in a major way. She held up a warning hand. The Pastfinders stopped talking. They all heard a long, deep grating noise.
“Room One,” said Jud.
On the room’s inner wall, where they’d thought there was only the rock of the Rift wall, they found a perfectly square doorway that hadn’t been there before. Box in hand, Quit’s jaw slowly dropped as he looked at it. The space on the other side of the door was lightless. Mercury felt cold air flowing out around her ankles.