Chapter 9 The Televiewer

The borehole televiewer was a cylinder the size of a thermos, and it did one thing: it went down a hole and took a photograph of the wall, all the way around, with an acoustic head that would work in dust and dark and water alike. Wim Dray had four of them in the instrument pool. He signed one out under a calibration ticket, which was technically true, and drove it south with Delyth at two in the morning under a sky that had no moon and no mercy. The drive was the worst part of the plan and both of them knew it. There was one road out of the south gate and it passed a sensor post, and the sensor post logged every vehicle that crossed it, and Wim could edit the log but not the sensor, so they crossed it and let it log them and trusted that a maintenance run at two in the morning was a thing the colony saw a dozen times a night. Delyth kept her headlamp off and her hands still on the wheel and her eyes on the tape marks at the edge of the graded track, and the rover whined along the dark at forty kilometers an hour with only the faint glow of the instrument panel between them. "You know this is the last clean run," Wim said after a while. "Whatever we find tonight, after tonight there's a record with our names in it, and after that we're not surveyors anymore, we're suspects." "Then we'd better find something worth being a suspect for." They found it twenty minutes later, and the finding did not cheer either of them up at all. The covert hole was still open. Its casing head stood alone in the dark exactly as she had left it eleven nights before, and no one had capped it, which meant no one had yet decided it existed in any record that mattered. She would have to be quick and she would have to be clean, and she would have to not think about what Fehr would do when he found the missing televiewer. "Depth of the collar is nine point four meters," Wim said, reading the drum. "That's where the void starts. I'll run it slow and log everything on the second card so the first card looks like a calibration run." "Do it." The drum turned, and the cable paid out, and on the monitor the wall of the hole went by in a smooth gray ribbon, the machine's lamp throwing a cold ring of light down the bore. Regolith first, fine and dry. Then the ice, pale and even, banded the way she had learned it should not be banded. Then a short run of dark rock. Then nothing, and the ring of light fell into space and did not come back. "Sixteen meters," Wim said. "Below the collar. She's in the void." "Hold the drum. Pan the head." The image swung, and the lamp found the far wall of the cavity, and Delyth leaned into the monitor and stopped breathing. Rock would have been fine. Rock was what she had expected. The wall was not rock. It was metal, dull gray-green under the cold light, and it was regular. Horizontal bands a meter apart. Vertical seams. A line of rivet heads, or something the size and spacing of rivet heads, marching down the wall at a human building's intervals, and then a larger plate, and on the plate a stenciled rectangle of paint so faded the camera could barely resolve it, and in the rectangle, four characters in a font no colony had used in a decade. "Wim," she said. "Is that a hatch?" "It's a hatch." Wim's voice had gone flat and young. "That's not a lava tube. That's a wall." She made him pan again, and again, and recorded the whole slow sweep, and then a third pass at a higher gain, and the picture did not change. A built wall, in the rock, forty meters down, older than any structure in Anseris and sealed under the colonists' feet like a secret someone had buried on purpose and then made everyone forget. The acoustic image was grainy and blue, the way all televiewer images were, and it did not lie. A rock wall on an acoustic image was a wall of texture, mottled and uneven, every fracture and grain showing as a change in tone. This wall was flat. Its tone was the same gray from edge to edge, and a synthetic flatness like that could only come from a material that had been made flat, and the only thing on this planet that made surfaces flat was a machine, and the only thing that ran machines forty meters under a colony was a person who did not want to be found. Delyth looked at the hatch and the rivet line and the four characters on the plate, and the whole weight of the last month rearranged itself around a single thought that she had been refusing to have since the first echo. This was not a cavity that had been discovered and then used. This was a cavity that had been built around, and the building was older than the colony by decades, and somebody had known that when they wrote the founding survey and decided to leave it out. "I want to know why it's sealed," she said. "It's sealed because the people who built it didn't want it found," Wim said. "No," Delyth said. "It's on the wall behind a hatch. It's sealed because somebody wanted it found later. There's a difference. You don't put a nameplate on a secret. You put a nameplate on a door." "Pull the head," she said. "We're done here." They were not done there. They were only done looking with the machine, and both of them knew it, and neither of them said it on the drive back. Wim kept the second card out of its case and inside his glove, and when they reached the dome he did not go to the instrument bay to file the calibration ticket, because there was no longer any version of the night that ended with a clean ticket. "Somebody built that," he said in the rover bay, in the dark, before they parted. "Somebody built a station down there and then buried it, and now somebody's drilling into it in the dark and pumping water down the hole, and I want you to tell me it's not what I think it is." "It's what you think it is," Delyth said. "Then what do we do?" Wim's voice had gone thin, and he was looking at the ground the way a person looks at a floor that has started to feel like a lid. "Because I signed out a televiewer on a fake ticket and I drove it into a sensitive site at two in the morning and I took pictures of a wall I'm not supposed to know is there. I did all of that in one night. Whatever they do to you, they can do worse to me, because you're the one who knows about ice and I'm the one who knows how to make a calibration ticket lie. That makes me the one they can replace." Delyth put her hand on the drum and looked at him in the dark of the rover bay. "Nobody's replaceable who knows how to read a well log. But you're right about one thing. From now on, everything we do has a witness in it. Every file, every copy, every photograph. One of us holds it and one of us files it and neither of us ever holds all of it, so that if they come for one of us, the other one still has a thread." "We find out whose it was," Delyth said. "A wall has a builder, and a builder has a record, and a record has a date on it." She looked at the dark toward the ridge, where the covert rig stood unlit under the same stars. "And a date can put somebody in a room." ---