Chapter 10 Anseris Station

The colony's public record said that the first landing on the basin floor had happened twelve years ago, when Aphelion Dynamics surveyed the ground, certified it, and dropped the first dome. Delyth had read that record a hundred times. It was a founding myth with the shape of a certificate, and it had never once occurred to her to doubt it, because there was no reason a person would doubt the day her own house was built. What she found, when she went looking with Wim in the deep archive at four in the morning, was that the record was not wrong so much as careful, and careful records are the kind that leave a person standing in front of them with nothing to hold. The founding flight was logged as *Landing One — Anseris Basin*. But under the landing logs, in a layer Wim's instrument-pool credentials could open and hers could not, there were four *preparatory* entries, and each one was stamped with a different date, and each one named the same site in the same hand: *Anseris Station*. The earliest was forty-one years old. "Forty-one years," Wim said. "This colony is twelve. There was something here before us." Delyth sat back and let the number do its work. Forty-one years was two generations of survey, four charter cycles, the whole span of a career. The station had been built and occupied and sealed and forgotten before the first dome of Anseris had been welded, and every person who had signed the document that erased it was either dead or retired and comfortable, and the document itself was still sitting in a box in a basement, waiting for someone to open the box. "There was a station before us." Delyth scrolled down, and the record kept giving, because a record built to be forgotten is built with doors a careful reader can open. The preparatory flights had surveyed the basin, drilled a pilot well, and sealed a permanent outpost against the wall of a large natural cavity — the same cavity, at the same coordinates, that she had found under K-7 with a sled and a cable. The outpost was active for six years. Then, in a single quarter, it was listed as *decommissioned*, its personnel *reassigned*, its structures *consolidated into the subsurface*, and its designation retired. Retired. The word sat in the file like a stone in bread. She had spent a year believing she worked at the beginning of something. Anseris was young; the colony said so in every briefing, and youth was the whole of its pride and the whole of its excuse. Nothing here had history. History was for Earth, for the old wet cities with their layers of ruin under the pavement, for places where every street was built on something older. Mars was supposed to be the opposite of that. Mars was supposed to be clean, a single layer on bedrock, the first page of a story nobody had written on yet. And now she was reading a page that had been written before hers and then torn out and then papered over, and she could feel the whole illusion of newness coming off the walls like paint in a damp room. "There's no decommissioning report," Wim said. "I've looked. There's a line that says a report exists and a box that says where to find it and the box is empty." "Because it was never filed, or because it was removed." Delyth looked at the four dates and at the coordinates that matched her radargram to the tenth of a meter, and the whole shape of the last year rearranged itself around her like a floor becoming a slope. "Anseris is built on top of a station that was built on top of a cavity that was sealed and erased. The Highline Program isn't drilling new ground. It's re-entering the ground somebody already opened, and it's pumping water down there to fill it, and once it's full the cavity is gone. Filled. Ice and rock and no way in. If you fill a hole with a station inside it, then in ten years there is no station, there is no cavity, there is no record, there is nothing but a solid block of ice where a question used to be." "It's not just hiding it," Wim said slowly. "It's erasing it. Permanently. With water." "With the colony's water," Delyth said. "They're using the future they sold us to bury the past they don't want us to find." She sat back and stared at the empty box where the decommissioning report should have been, and a smaller, colder thought arrived and would not leave. Water that carried a tracer did not come from nowhere. Somebody was paying to move that water, and somebody wanted to know exactly where it went once it reached the cavity, which meant the cavity was not simply a grave. It was in use. Something in there, forty-one years old and sealed behind a hatch with four faded characters on it, was being opened, and emptied, and sold a piece at a time, and then filled over so that no one would ever ask whose it had been. "Who were they?" Wim asked. "The station. Who were the people?" "I don't know yet." Delyth closed the terminal and pocketed the card. "But I know what will tell us." "What?" "The station itself. There's a hatch down there with writing on it, and there's a record of who built it, and one of those two things is still in one piece." She stood. "We've been treating the cavity as a thing to map. It isn't. It's a room. And rooms keep their own accounts for a lot longer than people do." She went to the door, and stopped, and turned back to Wim, who was still sitting at the terminal in the dark of the archive with the four dates glowing on the screen in front of him. "We can't prove any of this from up here," she said. "Everything I have is a radar echo and a copy of a file and a photograph of a wall. Deller needs a sample with a chain of custody and a time on it. She said it and she was right. The only place a chain of custody begins is inside that room." Wim looked at her for a long moment. Outside, the corridor lights came up on schedule and threw a thin line under the archive door, and in the thin line she could see the dust moving. "You're going to go down," he said. It was not a question. "There's a cache locker above the water line in the records room, and the survey sheets and the data core are in it, and the company is going to fill that cavity with water and seal it and call it progress." She stood. "If we don't go and get them, then in a month the only proof in this basin is going to be a set of copies in my jacket and a flash of a wall on a calibration card, and a set of copies can be argued with by a lawyer and a card can be called an instrument fault. A door with a date on it can't be argued with. A sealed station with six names in it can't be argued with. That's the difference between a fact and a rumor, and I have spent my whole life on the side of the fact." "I'm going to go down," Delyth said. "And I'd rather not go alone, and I'd also rather you said no." ---