Chapter 14 The Last Tank

The front was three hundred kilometers wide and it was coming in like a wall, and the colony's weather office had raised the basin to condition two, which meant outdoor work only by exception and every exception signed at the director's desk. Delyth did not have a signature. She had an old survey suit that had been written off and left in the deep locker two winters ago, patched but functional, and she had Wim Dray, who had kept his instrument-pool keys and his standing and who had spent the last two nights quietly moving spare batteries and a cable reel into a locker he could reach without crossing a checkpoint. Getting out of the dome under condition two was the part that would actually decide the night, and both of them knew it. The gates logged every opening. The pressure doors ran on a schedule the maintenance system watched, and a pressure door that cycled without a work order was the kind of thing a colony noticed the way a body notices a strange pulse. Wim's solution was small and almost honest: the instrument pool ran a calibration vent cycle every night at nine, a real cycle on a real schedule, and the vent opened onto the maintenance yard where a person could be standing with a rover and a locked equipment case and a reason to be there, as long as the person did not mind the cold and did not mind the company of the vent's own noise. "The cycle runs forty minutes," Wim had told her over a shared terminal, two days ago, not looking at her. "After that the vent closes and the yard is dead and anyone in it is on a camera. So we can get out. Getting back in is the part we'll have to improvise." They had spent an hour improvising it, and the plan they had was thin in three places and one of the thin places had her name on it. Delyth was fine with thin plans. Thin plans were made of the things that were actually true, and she had spent a month in the company of plans made of things that were not. She also had Corrinne Deller, and she used her first. The auditor was in her temporary office with the ledgers open when Delyth came in with a folded copy of everything and set it on the desk without preamble. The night schedule. The tank manifest. The humidity series. The pump logs. The photograph of the nameplate, and of the six names on the wall, and the four empty dates in the archive. Deller did not reach for the folder right away. She looked at Delyth first, and the look was the look of a person who had spent her whole career being handed documents by people who wanted something, and who could tell the difference between a document and a confession. "You went into the ground," Deller said. "Your file says your suit privileges are under review and you have no survey clearance. Which means you went into the ground in a suit that isn't issued and on a night that isn't logged, and you brought me back something the company can call a fabrication if it ever finds out you broke three rules to get it. That is the only part of this I cannot protect." "I know." "Then you understand why I need the object and not the file." Deller opened the folder and began to read. While she read, the storm came up against the glass and made the small office feel like the inside of a drum. Delyth stood at the window with her hands behind her back and watched the basin disappear a shade at a time, the ridge going first and the eastern flats going after it, until the only thing left visible was the landing pad and the pad's edge lights burning small and orange in the murk. Somewhere out there, past the last light, a line of tanks was waiting in a yard that did not appear on any map, and a pump was holding its schedule, and a hole in the ground was swallowing the colony's future one liter at a time, and the whole thing was going to be finished before the sky cleared. That was the fact she kept coming back to. Not that they were stealing. That they were nearly done. Deller read for twenty minutes and did not say a word, and when she finished she closed the folder and put both hands flat on top of it. "This is enough to open a formal inquiry," she said. "It is not enough to win one. An inquiry is a machine that answers to calendars and signatures, and it will be answered by the company's own reconciliation, and the reconciliation will say what reconciliations always say, which is that the numbers were provisional and the rest is a misunderstanding. What makes an inquiry survive is an object. A thing under seal. Something I can hold up and say, this is not a document, this is the ground itself." "Then I'll bring you an object," Delyth said. "Tonight." Deller looked at her, and the careful, deflating caution of a career auditor and the anger of a person who had just read six names she was never supposed to see fought a brief war across her face, and anger won. "Then I will hold the file and I will not sleep, and I will file the distant copy to Earth on the priority channel at dawn whether you come back or not," she said. "And Doctor Amaral. If you are going out to that hole tonight, do not come back with nothing. Because after tonight there will be no second attempt and no station left to attempt it in." Delyth went back to her quarters and laid out the stolen suit on the cot and checked every seal by hand, twice, the way she had been taught in a wet country a long time ago by an old survey instructor who did not think much of machines and thought even less of optimism. Outside, the storm covered the ridge in a brown haze that the lights could not reach through, and the pressure kept falling, and on the manifest in her pocket the last tank of the last fill was scheduled to move off the eastern pad at midnight. She had six hours and a patched suit and one friend willing to go down a hole with her in a dust storm to steal the truth out from under an ice sheet, and she had spent her whole life believing that the ground did not lie, and tonight she was going to find out whether a person could trust a lie to hold still long enough to be photographed. She wrote one more thing before she went, and she wrote it in the notebook and not on a terminal, because a notebook was the only archive in the basin that nobody knew how to edit. She wrote the date and the hour and the name of the station and the six names on the wall and the fill schedule and where the objects were and who had the copies, and at the bottom she wrote the only line that mattered, which was that the record was complete and where it could be found. If she did not come back, the notebook would. That was the whole of her insurance, and it was a better policy than anything the company wrote, because it did not depend on anyone staying honest, only on someone eventually being curious. She checked the seals a third time. Then she called Wim and told him to be at the south locker at nine, and to bring the camera, and to bring rope, and to say goodbye to no one, because goodbyes leave records. ---