Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 6 / Chapter 8 –>

Brett stumbled into a sheet of sand on the other side of the exit port. The wind caught him, shoved him to the left and almost tore the screens out of his hand. He set his face to the wind and staggered after Djen toward the MUT. Vernon had remembered to power up the glaring halogen worklamps which ringed the top of the vehicle. It was the only way they would have found him.

He was panting heavily by the time he ascended the steps into the transport cargo bay. Ilam followed immediately behind and snapped the doors closed. Brett sat down and leaned his bundle of screens against the bench between his legs. Djen had taken the time to wrap them in a hard plastic valise for transport, but Brett wondered how effective that would prove given the way he’d flailed from port to transport.

It was not, however, his most pressing concern at the moment. He activated his radio.

“Vernon.”

“Yes, boss.”

“I understand that I only told you to monitor the weather extrapolations, but I thought it could go unspoken that you’d actually notify us before the weather went totally to hell.”

There was a shrug in Vernon’s voice. “Just a squall, Chili. I’ve been out and about in worse. The MUT can handle it.”

“It isn’t the MUT I’m worried about. What’s the proximity of the wall clouds?”

A pause while Vernon checked the latest updates. “About ten kilometers.”

“Direction?”

“Um, moving just a few degrees shy of due west to east.”

Brett thought suddenly of the Two of Staves. The woman in the storm with a sword in each hand. What had Ritter said that card meant?

“You realize, of course, that puts the storm’s leading edge directly between us and home. Have we picked up any shoots?”

“Nothing that’s touched the ground.” It was Ilam that replied, as if he didn’t trust Vernon to give an accurate answer. “But there’s a rather nasty series of vortices developing in the lead cell. It appears to smooth out a bit after the first punch.”

Djen scowled at Brett through her faceplate. “Ilam, what’s the width of that lead cell?”

“About a kilometer.”

Brett understood. He’d usurped her command of the mission, and though he had the right to do it, he didn’t have adequate reason. Crew safety was Djen’s responsibility. He tried to smile an apology to her, but she didn’t see it.

“Vernon, how rapidly could you push us through the first wall?” Djen asked.

“Given terrain and current visibility–”

“Assuming that doesn’t get worse,” Ilam said.

“Right, right. All other conditions staying more or less equal, I could rev the go-getter up to about thirty k and keep her on the road for the most part. Not more than a couple of minutes.”

Djen’s voice took on a strained quality. “But that’s assuming the back end stability remains, correct?”

“Yes, ma’am. And assuming we don’t have to dodge any actual tornadoes. Lots of dips and rills where we’d make the contact, but nothing that would tuck something the size of the MUT.”

“You’re assuming you’d see an actual tornado in time. What’s your visibility like up there?”

“Djen, we don’t have visibility. I’m naving by instruments and terrain projection. That’s included in the earlier computations.”

Brett said nothing, but Djen turned her face toward him, her eyes wide. She mouthed the words: he’s willing to drive blind at thirty kilometers per hour. He resisted the urge to even shake his head. After taking his master’s degree, he’d celebrated by flying from upstate New York to Oregon with a friend in a rented late-model Manderwal Skyram. Somewhere over Oklahoma, they’d hit a wall of thunderheads which he was certain would shake them right out of the sky. The pilot, Ray Thornton–dead nearly ten years now from leukemia–had plowed through the worst of the rain and hail and buffeting violence by instruments and three-dim projection. Brett had never climbed aboard a plane that small again.

Djen continued her assessment. “Ilam, tell me again that there haven’t been any shoots that have touched the ground.”

“Not a one that I can see, but you do understand that I’m looking at the tops of these supercells. I’d have to study the images for some time to confirm that.”

“You’re hedging.”

“I certainly am. As our esteemed Commander frequently says, it only takes one.”

At least he hadn’t had to be the one to say it.

“We need to find a place to weather the front end of this storm,” Djen said finally. “What’s the topography offer us in this sector?”

“Nothing on the map,” Ilam said. “A few leesides of the ridge as a windbreak, but the storm’s going to catch us before long.”

“Vernon?”

After a thoughtful moment of silence, he answered. “I was out this way with Ritter and the hydro crew a couple weeks ago checking out a rift uncovered by one of the recent storms. It’s a hell of a descent, assuming the sand hasn’t filled it in again, but it would give us some cover.”

“What’s the range?”

“Two k northward. Assuming I can find it again.”

“That’s thirty-eight degrees north by northeast,” Ilam added. Then as explanation, “I did nav log on that expedition. Call me anything you want, but not late with my paperwork. Give me two minutes and I can have a digital update with the geo-pos coordinates.”

Djen said, “Get them on the way. Let’s go, Vernon.”

The transport lurched forward as Vernon engaged the drive train, then shuddered and rumbled to growling, belching life as he shifted from solar batteries to the diesel engine. The acceleration was sharp, and Brett had to hold onto the bench to keep himself from spilling onto the floor as Vernon wheeled in a tight circle and shot them off toward the north. The ride did not smooth out as they continued. Vernon jounced the tri-axle frame over seemingly every obstruction he could find.

Ilam came on over the radio. “I’ve normalized pressure in your compartment. You can remove your helmets.”

Brett said, “I don’t think so.”

His ears filled with the delicate tinkle of Djen’s laughter.

#

The site Vernon had described was a narrow rift in the planet’s surface, barely wide enough for the transport to enter without scraping the sides. The angle of decline was not so much a descent as it was a plunge. The MUT launched out over a rock shelf, seemed to fall forever, then landed hard. It’s nose dove sharply and they trundled on with the churning diesel spitting rocks and debris in their wake. Vernon shouted a couple of times as they plummeted headlong down the chute, his voice resonant with pleasure. Brett, who nearly broke his arm trying to keep himself from being tossed on top of Djen, thought seriously about breaching the pilot compartment and throttling him, but the ride was over before he made up his mind. He sighed his relief as they stopped and put his face against the round plastisheen window by the loading hatch.

They were a good ten meters below the surface, and perpendicular to the wind so that the whipping columns of sand didn’t hinder his vision. The rift widened substantially here at the bottom. There was enough room that he could get the doors open if he chose. The brownish rock walls of the defile were jagged and steep as though chewed by harsh winds. The stone had a porous look to it. Igneous, he thought. Old volcanic slabs pitted by sand, then buried beneath it.

“What did you say brought Ritter down here?” Brett asked into his radio.

“After one of the recent storms, Mission Comm HQ transmitted a bundle of images detailing recently uncovered topographical features,” Ilam answered. “There has been some speculation that Archae Stoddard may be harboring some form of aquifer system in this general area. Those are assgasp projections, not our own ideas.”

The Archae Stoddard Global Survey Project (ASGSP) was an ongoing low orbital satellite initiative which mapped the planet’s surface using a variety of radar signals and depth soundings and transmitted updated information to each of the mission sites. It wasn’t uncommon for Mission Comm HQ over at Gobi Station to pass assignments of this type directly along to remote site personnel. Xenohydrologists like Ritter tended to draw their workload much more from Gobi than they did from their own station commanders.

The pursuit of water forms was an ongoing critical investigation. The Sperling Engines hadn’t been designed to produce water vapor with its atomic jiggling at the nano level. There was some concern that repeated exposure to water vapor would eventually rust the machine components. It was preferable to find and secure other sources of liquid water, even in relative trace amounts. The probable location and existence of an aquifer system on Archae Stoddard, much like the aquifer system on Mars in the forties, had been a fount of much conjecture and disagreement over the last few years. More than one political and scholarly career was staked to its eventual discovery.

“I’m assuming they didn’t find anything, because I know a discovery of that magnitude would have come across my desk before it was transmitted to Mission Comm,” Brett said.

Ilam chuckled. “I’m sure the analysis is still pending, Chili. You would be the first to be told.”

“I wouldn’t worry,” Djen added. “The aquifer system on Mars wasn’t discovered above the three kilometer depth. This is just a scratch on the surface.”

“Ritter didn’t take us nearly that deep before gathering his soil samples,” Ilam said. “There’s a series of what seem to be surface erupted geothermal vents about a hundred meters on down this gully. Quite pleasant there and about, actually, if you don’t mind the sulfur residue. The temperature at the one kilometer level climbed upward of freezing.”

Brett craned his neck to watch the ragged strip of sky above the canyon’s rim. He couldn’t see anything clearly beyond the blustering scree of sand and dust, but there was thunder in the clouds which rattled the transport. The wind shrieked as it stumbled over the crevice.

“If Ritter was taking samples, it must be a better situation than the Mars project,” he said. “What’s the update on the weather system?”

“Nasty, and getting worse,” Ilam said. “The leading edge is about sixty kilometers long. It should be passing over us in the next five to ten minutes. Increasing instability toward the fringes. I’d imagine she’ll be putting down shoots before too long, just in case you were curious.”

“What are the wind speeds?”

“Ground Doppler beacons are reading at sixty knots with gusts to seventy four in advance of the wall. I don’t have data from inside the supercell at this point.”

“It’s getting stronger,” Djen said quietly.

Brett looked at her. The transport was a massively heavy piece of equipment, but a cull of straight line winds slicing down the crevice could pick them up and fling them easily enough, especially at wind speeds approaching one hundred knots. They weren’t there yet, but could be in a very short period of time. And that was without the frequent emergence of tornadoes.

He lifted his hands toward her. “It’s your call. I just hold the flashlight.”

“Doppler beacon at the one kilometer mark from our location just registered winds at one seventy plus knots,” Ilam said suddenly, his voice sharp.

“There’s a rope on the ground,” Djen said.

“Satellite radar scan is updating. . .hold on.” Ilam breathed heavily in their ears, short and rapid gasps. “Multivortex structure by initial analysis. Probably half a kilometer in diameter. It’s slow moving, but wending this way and chewing up terrain as it comes. This looks like a big one, Djen.”

“What do we need to descend that vent, Ilam?”

“Just a good pair of shoes. The angle is gradual, no more than twenty degrees for the first thousand meters. That should be plenty far enough. The MUT would fit into the initial cavern, but she’ll not make the turn.”

Djen climbed to her feet. “We’re evacuating the transport. Shutdown the nonessential systems and get back here. Bring the short range radio and the locator beacons. We’ll weather the storm in the vent.” She turned her face to Brett, and her eyes were hard. “There are emergency tubes of air for the suits in the locker behind you. Grab those. And the arclights off the back panel. I want a coil of tension cable and the suit patch kit as well. There’s no reason to take any chances.”

“Will do, ma’am,” Brett said.

A moment later, Vernon and Ilam tumbled through the door from the cockpit and set to work on the exit hatch.

#

The walls of the vent cavern were rugged and dark, almost ebony. Brett played one of the lamps along the surface and the rock glistened from the small crystalline structures embedded in its surface. The floor was stony and strewn with debris–sand, pebbles, larger shards of rock–but as Ilam had promised, the slope was gentle. Their blazing lights made it easy to avoid the occasional jutting rock or outstretched shelf. Despite the presence of the patch kit, they were all wary of incidental contact with any hard surface. The thin and frigid atmosphere could do considerable damage to a biological organism before repairs could be made.

The wind whistled furiously outside the mouth of the cavern and they moved in about a hundred meters in order to hear one another more clearly, even over their e-suit radios. The vent narrowed as they went farther in. Where they stopped, the sides had come together at a distance of ten meters and seemed to hold that as far down the tunnel as they could see. The walls became smoother down the shaft, bored a rippling, concave pattern by ancient rills of magma.

Djen called them to a halt, and they stood toward the middle of the floor, exchanging looks between the dark maw of the tunnel and the brighter maw of the entrance. Vernon dropped the hard plastic case which held the radio and sat on it.

“I’m getting hungry,” he said.

“Don’t you even start,” Ilam responded. “I saw those chocolate wrappers on the dash. At least you’ve had something since breakfast.”

“I have an active metabolism.”

“That’s enough,” Djen snapped. “The storm shouldn’t last more than a few minutes. We’ll be back at the station in time for a late lunch.”

Brett turned to Ilam. “Is that CO₂ crystallization on the walls?”

Ilam looked around. “Silicate ring structure, not dissimilar to quartz. They’re not frozen, they’re rocks, or mineral structures, to be precise. At least as far as I can tell. I’m not a geologist, you know. I just maintain the equipment and write down what they tell me.”

“It just seems awfully dry here.”

“I’m not a hydrologist, either.”

Brett contained a burst of frustration. “But I assume it becomes moist farther along, right? Ritter took his samples from the one kilometer depth, so there must have been moisture. Dampness, something. The temperature surged above freezing.”

“There weren’t pools of mud, if that’s what you mean.” Ilam began to sound annoyed.

“But if you didn’t detect at least concentrations of water vapor, why did he stop? Why did Ritter take his samples from that point instead of deeper along, beyond the mean isothermal line?” Brett went on, no longer talking specifically to Ilam. He was thinking out loud. “If there was moisture to be found, it would be below the 275 Kelvin marker. He didn’t need to look for vapor, because we know we’ve got vapor, it’s just unstable because of the low pressure. But his samples would have still been frozen and may have been gaseous when they did freeze. Why didn’t he go on?”

“Because he tore his suit,” Ilam said. “He tripped over his own boots and gashed the elbow of his suit on a rock. Just the outer layer, but not something you’d want to risk, not when you could reschedule the site and come back tomorrow.”

“He could have patched it.”

“Not when the patch kit was in the MUT a kilometer up.”

“But he didn’t come back, either.”

“That we know of. Maybe he brought Alden on the next go. Maybe one of the hydros kept the log. Maybe he was satisfied with his samples and decided not to return.”

Brett shook his head. It bothered him. Something bothered him, but he couldn’t put a coherency to it that would make it tangible.

Djen said, “If he was satisfied, his results would have been in the daily reports one way or the other. They weren’t.”

Ilam shrugged. “Then he’s still doing analysis.”

“But what kind of analysis would take that long?” Brett barked. He scowled at Ilam before he could reply. “I know. You’re not a hydrologist. I’m just trying to parse this.”

Outside the vent, the wind roared. A blast of ocher dust and sand roiled down the mouth of the cavern, put a halo around the lights they held. The storm seemed to grind above them with a vibration they could feel through the ground and register as a pulse of air as the pressure shifted toward the tornado.

“This dust is going to clog our heat unit exhaust if it doesn’t settle,” Djen said. There was something sly in her tone that made Brett glance up and meet her eyes. “I’d say that personnel safety parameters dictate we should seek better shelter. This storm could sweep on for another half an hour easily, and conditions will only get worse. Deeper in should take care of it, I’d think.”

“Just to be safe, of course.” Ilam muttered. “Not to meddle in someone else’s work. Not to question the performance or motivation of an immanently qualified professional. And you just said the storm should abate in a few minutes.”

Djen smiled. “The original was an incorrect assessment.”

Vernon bounced to his feet. “Ritter’s a constipated asshole. Let’s get him in trouble.”

“This isn’t about Ritter or about getting anyone in trouble,” Brett said. “I’m curious about what he found or what convinced him that further exploration wasn’t necessary.”

“Or you could read his reports when he turns them in,” Ilam said.

“I don’t have his reports. I do have his geothermal vent and time on my hands.” Brett pointed his light down the tunnel. The darkness was thick, almost oily in its consistency. It seemed to slink away from the glare. “It gives us something to do other than sit here. We’ll trundle down to the one k level. If it doesn’t look interesting, we’ll trundle back.”

Brett walked off down the tunnel leaving the others to follow after him.

#

As he walked, he thought about how small she had seemed to him that first time. Memory or exertion or possibly even the dry, faintly stale air circulating inside his suit made him thirsty and he sucked vigorously on the small tube near his mouth, taking a drink from the suit’s reservoir of now tepid water.

It had been autumn then, and the trees had turned from golden and red and hummingbird yellow to crispy brown. Many of the leaves had fallen and they crunched like insectile spines beneath his feet as he tiptoed across the wide field beneath a sparkling, starlit sky. He could see his breath in the air when he paused long enough that it steamed out in front of him. But he didn’t pause often. He hurried over the rolling hills of upstate New York from the old logging road where he had parked his car. Then a running leap so he could catch the top of the stone wall with his hands and scramble over. He fell more than leapt to the other side, rolling topsy-turvy on the grass, where he ended finally at her feet, staring up into her shadow with the points of the stars haloed about her head. She shushed him, though she was the one giggling, and helped him to his feet.

They rippled hand in hand through the denuded orchard her father kept here, really little more than a handful of small trees badly in need of attention. It was a small house set against a copse of dark, towering trees to which she led him. The light in the sitting room cast a shimmering square of illumination out into the yard. The front door of the screened porch banged idly in the cool breeze. With her finger to her lips, Emily led him beneath the glowing window where he could see her father seated at the kitchen table drinking beer over the newspaper. They continued around the back side of the house where she had bribed the country mongrel dog with leftover pork bones, and where she had set an old wash basin on the ground beneath an open window. She stepped up, attempted to slip through, but stuck herself half in, half out so that he had to put his hands against her firm bottom and push her through. He never knew if she had really been stuck there, or if it had been another part of the game to which she’d enticed him. A reason for him to put his hands on her.

He followed breathlessly, up and in, barely missing the lamp with his foot as he tumbled. Inside, the house smelled like plums, sweet and purple. The carpet in her room was thinning, the walls a faded gold pattern indiscernible in the murk. She had told him that they had fallen on hard times, her parents, that is, when she was just a child. Progressively smaller and fewer houses until some form of financial stasis had been established, leaving them with the family home in Savannah and this tumbledown farmhouse usually reserved for summer vacations and mid-autumn escapes. Except this year and the next and as many as it took afterwards, the order would be reversed because her father could manage it and she had accepted the scholarship here rather than in-state tuition at Georgia Tech.

The door was locked, and, she assured him, her father’s shotgun unloaded and the shells hidden in the flour pot. Emily shed her flowing pale robe and was bare underneath. Moonlight through the window struck her pale skin as white as marble. Her strawberry hair shone a glimmering silver and her crisp blue eyes were liquid and round. Between her legs was a tangle of darkness, a shadow he couldn’t penetrate. He stood there, silent and awestruck, only staring at her while she let him. Then she vanished, backward, out of the light and into the great, creaking bed in the corner.

“Quickly,” she whispered to him.

And he was anything but quick. He stumbled out of his pants, had to catch himself on the corner of the bed before he broke his neck. He forgot to remove his shoes first and had to start fresh again. His shirt caught around his shoulders and he actually heard the fabric tear when he strained too hard against it. He spent more than a second debating whether or not he should remove his socks.

But finally he was there; he was beneath the smothering comforter with his head on her stuffed feather pillows. She pressed wholly against him, almost pushing him off onto the floor again. She was warm. Her entire body from toes to forehead was a blast of dry and coiled heat. His body felt icy, prickled with gooseflesh. Because he could feel her. All of her, naked and precious and beautiful pressed against his chest, his thighs, his hips. She was light in his arms, and though he had held her on a number of occasions, it surprised him. She was no heavier than a being made of ether, it seemed to him now. The weight of a pleasant dream. Then she rolled onto her back with her hands laced about his neck, pulled him over her so that he thought he would crush her beneath him.

They were both pleased when he didn’t.

Sometime before dawn he awoke beside her. Her small, warm hand touched the back of his neck. His large and clumsy one occluded the mound of her small, firm breast. He watched her in the first light, breathing through her nose so that her nostrils quivered. He gathered his clothes a short time after and was gone the way he had come before she woke.

Plunging forward into the vivid darkness of the vent shaft, Brett could almost remember the way Emily had smelled to him that morning. Fresh and warm, faintly sweet, like the crust of a blackberry pie when it’s nearly done baking. She had been angry with him later, when they’d crossed paths in the quad outside the chemistry building. He on his way to a lit class; she sliding toward linguistics.

You didn’t wake me.

You were sleeping so soundly.

Next time, you wake me to kiss me goodbye.

That rapid exchange, hardly more than three sentences sealed with a peck and a jog toward different buildings, had nearly leveled him.

Next time. She’d said, next time.

Djen’s voice spoke in his ear. “Slow down, Commander. You’re getting too far ahead. It’s becoming dangerous.”

Ilam’s wheezing agreement. “I’ve already passed my bleeding physical exam for the month.”

Brett slowed to wait for them, but didn’t stop. He must have been sailing. His feet hurt from slapping against the exposed rock of the tunnel floor. There wasn’t much help for it. The vent had just enough decline to it that he leaned back against it, which meant his feet had to keep him at some reasonable rate of descent so he didn’t pitch forward and roll to the bottom, wherever that might be. That meant they tended to flap down in a way that wasn’t entirely healthy for small and delicate bones.

He consulted the ambient thermometer readout on his suit. An amber display slid into view in the upper corner of his faceplate. Almost 272 K. It was getting positively toasty, just as Ilam had said. It was also silent down here. He couldn’t say how far they had come, but his chrono told him he’d been struggling along for nearly half an hour with the bubbled, stony floor and ducking the occasional razor sharp outcrop. No sand from the surface carried this far, and for all he could detect, the raging Archae Stoddard storms that would have brought it had vanished as well. The only sound in his ears was his own breath; Ilam or Vernon’s rare curse as they stumbled.

“Brett,” Djen said.

He stopped, shone his light a bit further ahead, then turned back to his companions. Ilam and Djen stooped over a space in the floor while Vernon lit a patch at their feet with his light. Brett strode back to them.

Ilam pointed. “See these?”

There were a series of small holes in the ground, each roughly a finger-width, excavated in a circular pattern. Brett had walked right over them without noticing.

“Ritter’s samples,” Djen said. She tested the surface with her gloves by pinching at the tip of a frozen stone wave. The edge crumbled readily enough and she sifted it between her fingers. It had the consistency of charcoal, Brett thought.

“So, why here?” he asked. “It looks just like the last hundred meters and the next hundred meters. We’re just above the freezing point at this level.”

“Dry as an old bone,” Vernon said.

“We don’t have the equipment for humidity measurements,” Djen said. “Maybe there’s a trace vapor reading we can’t detect.”

“Then why didn’t he go further? That would make sense for a first set of cores, but not for an only set, not with the vent wide open and waiting in front of us.” Brett straightened and panned his light a full circle about them. “Unless he had a worse malfunction with his suit than the tear in the outer lining. Maybe his air was going bad and he didn’t want to alarm anyone. Something, anything that might have been out of the ordinary.”

Djen pushed herself to her feet and matched the beam of his light down the corridor ahead. “Maybe we should do what he didn’t? We’ve got the air. It might be interesting.”

“It hasn’t been interesting so far,” Ilam said. “And you said down to one kilometer and back up again. We’re here. We saw nothing curious. Now we can go.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Djen asked, turning on him with her light. Ilam flinched away from the glare, held up his hand to shield his eyes.

“Nothing.”

“That’s bullshit, Ilam. You’ve been practically out of your suit since we started down here.”

He lowered his face toward the floor. “I have a distaste for the subterranean, if you must know. Never been comfortable in caves; even the chunnel used to give me the willies, though that may have had as much to do with France as a legitimate phobia.”

“You don’t have any phobias listed in your psych profile,” Brett said.

“It isn’t a diagnosed condition, Commander. Just an aversion.”

Djen took a step closer to him. “You’re avoiding the question, Ilam. What are you hiding?”

Ilam’s shoulders slumped. He shook his head. “Promise me it won’t get out that I’ve told you this. Promise me, Chili.”

“All right.”

“Ritter stopped the team here because of a bad feeling. Those are his words. The descent had begun to remind him of a negative element he had discerned in the reading of his victory hand from the previous evening. He told me he understood the danger the cards had shown him and that we should turn about to avoid disaster.”

Vernon tittered in their ears. “He’s flipped. Oh my God, he’s totally left the ballpark.”

“I beg your pardon,” Ilam groused.

“Ritter, you idiot.”

Brett said nothing. He exchanged a sharp look with Djen, but only enough to jerk his head back and forth so she wouldn’t speak.

“What do we do now?” Djen asked him. “Do you want to go on? To see what there is to see?”

“I’m certain Ritter plans to return and complete his investigation,” Ilam offered, but he didn’t sound very confident. “He wouldn’t just completely neglect a potential water site.”

“But he is in trouble, right?” Vernon asked. “Right?”

“What do you want us to do, Markus?” Djen moved between his line of vision and the other two. She seemed to smile at him, but he couldn’t tell. The glare of her light hid her features. “This is outside the parameters of the mission I undertook. This is totally your call.”

Brett shone his light down the tunnel. It crept on ahead in darkness, appearing just the same as it had the last hundred meters and the hundred before. If Ritter had a reason for stopping here rather than proceeding, he would answer for it. Brett would give him the benefit of his expertise for now.

He said, “We go up.”

<– Chapter 6 / Chapter 8 –>