“I don’t think a door has ever opened in any Old Tellan ruins,” said Mikal.
“Something malfunctioned the sound sequence.” With a wary glance at Mercury, Quit very carefully pushed buttons on his box. “It was recorded,” he whispered.
“Remember what can open on its own can close on its own,” Silk reminded everyone. She already had a flashlight. It revealed a passageway which was the size of the door and inclined down in the form of steps not proportioned for human strides. Ten of those steps down, though, there was a break in the stairway. The break looked at least fifteen steps wide, and the god only knew how deep it was.
The men started feverishly constructing a bridge, partly made from the fallen scaffolding. Mercury watched from the next room. She felt sure they didn’t need any more wild luck right now.
The entrance to Site B was set in a wall at the mouth of a canyon. It was square and large enough for Hopper to drive the sand-crosser through. The edges of the entrance were deeply weathered. However it had functioned in the ancient past, this entrance was not going to roll shut without warning.
The canyon behind the entrance ran deep into the Rift Wall. Near the entrance, ruined clay buildings stood on both sides of a dry stream. Rocks and boulders marked where the stream had once run out of the canyon. It had once been a tributary of the valley’s river. The Lees got busy in the ruins at the lowest level, near the complex entrance. The returning river was likely to flood this area.
Haze looked for plants and animals. There were few and none he didn’t expect. High in the throat of the canyon, though, he saw sunlight picking out shards of color. He went to investigate. Tai went with him, saying that no one should wander away alone, a sensible field rule. Hopper stayed with the Lees.
A wide path switchbacked up the canyon walls. “This seems rough for a road, even an ancient one,” Haze commented to Tai.
“The Old Tellans were shorter than we were, but wider. Foot path is the best guess and that it’s as wide as their feet were spaced apart.”
Haze wondered what they’d looked like, those warlike old ones. Precious little was left of their civilization, not much but weathered walls.
The path opened out at a vantage point over the canyon. Haze looked down at the canyon floor, encouraged how far up they’d climbed already. He hadn’t been in the field for several years. But he’d kept in shape and it was paying off.
Gerro and Ria were busy down there. The Lees were slender but tough. They were natives of a cloudy spinning world, yet not fazed by the heat and endless desolation of this place. Tai hired good people. A wild thought skittered across his mind. He hadn’t heard about Tai having biologists on her starfaring archaeological team. If not, maybe she needed one. Maybe she needed him.
He had a feeling that Mercury would never fold her wings to land on any planet for good. But that was how long he wanted Mercury. Forever. Rightly or wrongly, Haze never fell in love without meaning for it to last forever. Not that it had ever worked out that way for him before.
And for him, leaving Tellus was out of the question. His work was here.
“What do you see that I might not?”
Good question, he thought, another a sign of a good expedition leader. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Do the Lees always work this hard?”
“They know how to pace themselves, but this is our last chance to see this site untouched by the incoming water. This is a hard site to get permits for. We’re good, though. Most offworld archaeologists who’d like to poke around here are either lightweights or no better than looters, and your Planetary Authority knows it.”
A fair enough assessment.
At the next wide place, he drank from the water bottle Silk had issued him. Tai pulled out her binoculars. He suspected she liked seeing friends and foes more than views per se.
The view itself was what interested him. They had climbed higher than the thick outer wall across the canyon. The Rift lay in full intense daylight, pale sun on pale sand, Hopper’s hill invisible because its color was so like that of the plain. The opposite Rift wall was shadowed. The Rift didn’t run perfectly east to west, though it was close. Except at high noon, curtains of shadow fell on parts of the walls.
Tai suddenly said, “If this is a temple complex, I’m a wombat. It was a military installation. With gun placements here, they could fire all the way across the plain, the outpost on the other side protected from accidental hits by being in the Rift wall. Pity that the Old Tellans warred themselves to extinction and even blew up their moon. Presumably, one side occupied the moon and other side decided that was intolerable. Ready to go on?”
Around a turn of the path, it opened into a high, narrow, sunlit gorge. The floor of the gorge was green with plants growing around a small spring. With the rill of the spring only putting a slight edge on the quiet, it was a peaceful place. Haze knelt beside the spring. “Water here is a miracle.”
“You aren’t the first to think so.” She gestured at the gorge wall. There was a recess in the wall, square and blank. “Unlike all those buildings below, we think this was genuinely religious, a place for some kind of votive or offering.”
The ancient offerings hadn’t kept the Old Tellans from going extinct. But maybe the offerings, gifts, or votives had just been about recognizing the miracle of life itself.
The sun’s light moved from minute to minute. Soon a shaft of sunlight slanted through the shadows above the spring. Color showed up again, an irregular pane of blue. Haze carefully moved that way. He found several colored panes, positioned to catch the sun at different moments.
“What are they?”
“The excretions of glassmaker bugs.”
“Bugs?” Tai sounded incredulous.
“So-called, but these may be some of the biggest on the planet.”
In front of his foot, something that looked like a rock bigger than his fist scurried away, darting back and forth. “Yes,” he said reverently. “Glassmaker bugs, here because of the spring. Their panes attract their prey, which is flying insects.” One of the panes was cracked where it trapped a sizeable, crumpled insect. “Toxic winged insects that sting,” he added. “Maybe the Old Tellans liked having the glassmakers around or even made accommodations for them, to keep down the scorpion-flies, as the ancients on Earth made houses for birds that ate mosquitos. This is a healthy population of glassmaker bugs. I’m glad it’s well above the level of the new river.”
“Hopefully the stone from space won’t shift the geology and make the spring go away.”
He felt that his mind had slipped a gear. “What stone from space?”
“That’s how TARC is going to take out the dam. Didn’t you know? They’re going to drop a small meteorite on it, one of the pieces of the moon.”
His shoulder hurt. He gripped it. “Given the existence of springs in the Rift, I could have made a stronger case for a slow release, a method that wouldn’t risk shifting the geology and making springs dry up. I don’t know why that wasn’t brought to my attention.”
“Might have made no difference. My guess is that breaking the dam with a space rock neatly makes the point that TARC can put a rock anywhere it wishes, including onto Disunionists if any crop up on Tellus.”