第11章 What They Recovered

They went down on the fifth night after the collapse, when the patrol rotation put a gap in the southern corridor and the weather held, and Delyth went first because it was her hole and her risk to take. The covert rig's winch was still strung and the casing still open, and the drum took her down in a slow, cold descent through nine meters of regolith and two of shattering ice and then a long, dark drop through open space that made her lamp useless and her stomach climb into her throat. She kept one hand on the cable and counted meters the way she counted everything, and at thirty-eight the cable went slack and her boots found a floor. It was flat. It was flat in a way no floor in a cavity should be flat, and when she crouched and put her glove against it she felt metal, cold and pitted, and she knew she was standing on the roof of a building. Wim came down behind her, and they stood together in the dark on the top of the buried station, on a surface that had been built by people and then covered over by a planet, and Delyth swung her lamp across the wall in front of her and found the hatch she had seen on the camera, close now, with its four painted characters gone almost entirely to dust. Above the hatch there was a plate. It was the nameplate, riveted, green-gray, and when she wiped it with her glove the letters came up under the light one at a time. ANSERIS STATION — HABITAT RING A — AUTHORIZED ENTRY ONLY Below it, in smaller letters, someone had stamped a date forty-one years old and a sentence that had not aged well: *We came to find the water. We stayed to keep it.* "Authorized," Wim said. "There's nobody left to authorize anything." "There's never nobody." Delyth put her hand on the wheel of the hatch. "There's only whoever's holding the pen." The hatch opened, because the company had opened it many times, and the inside of Anseris Station was a long, low corridor that smelled of cold metal and old rubber and something faintly sweet that she did not want to name. The company had been here, and it had not been gentle. Panels had been pulled off the walls and stacked. A tank the size of a small room stood against the corridor with its face cut open and its interior scraped down to bare metal, and the tank was empty, and the pipe that had fed it had been unhooked and rerouted toward the hole above her head, toward the drum and the dark and the colony she had left twenty minutes ago. Delyth walked the corridor with the lamp and the camera running, and Wim walked behind her logging everything, and together they read the station like a book someone had tried to burn. The company had emptied the tanks. There had been water here, a great deal of it, the stored reserve of an expedition that had drilled the same basin four decades before anyone thought to build a dome on it, and the tanks were dry now and the line was pumping outward, and she understood at last what the tracer was for. You put a tracer in water when you wanted to know where it went, and the company wanted to know where this water went, because this water did not belong to the colony. It belonged to a station the colony had been told it did not have, and it was being sold out from under both of them. In the third room there was a habitat, and in the habitat there were bunks, and on the wall above the bunks someone had scratched a list of names with a screwdriver, and beside the names someone else had scratched a date, and the date was the same year the station had been listed as decommissioned. Six names. Six people who had lived in this room and then had not. Delyth traced the letters with a gloved finger and thought about the mechanics of a lie that size. Six people do not disappear quietly. Six people have families, and the families ask, and the asking has to be answered, and the answer has to be written down somewhere, and the writing down is where a careful institution hides its work. The colony had put them on a memorial wall under the words TRAINING ACCIDENT, and the memorial had done two jobs at once: it had given the dead a story, and it had given anyone who remembered them a place to put their grief so that it would stop asking questions. It was, she thought, a very good lie. It had a plaque. Delyth stood in front of the list and let the lamp run along it, and one of the names stopped her, because she had seen it before. It was carved on the memorial wall in the Anseris concourse, under a heading that said TRAINING ACCIDENT, and she had walked past it a thousand times and never once asked why a training accident would need a memorial in a colony that had not yet begun training anyone. "They buried them twice," she said quietly. "Once in the ground, and once in a lie." The records were in the last room, or what was left of the records. The company had come for the archive too, and it had done a poor job of it, because destroying paper in a place with no air is harder than it looks. There were boxes tipped over and files scattered across the floor, half of them burned in a corner where someone had tried to set them alight and had not understood that fire needs oxygen. Delyth knelt among them with the camera and the lamp and began to gather. She photographed the module where it lay, a metal data core the kind built to survive fire, dented but intact, and then she made a decision she did not like. A vial and a sheaf of survey sheets would fit inside her suit and climb a cable with her. A five-kilogram data core would not, not one-handed, not up a dark bore. So she sealed the module and the station's original survey sheets into a sample locker wedged above the reach of any flood, marked the locker's location in her notebook, and left them in the ground, where they would keep, and where she fully intended to come back for them if the ground gave her one more night. She pocketed the vial of native water and the photographs and one thin sheet she could fold flat against her ribs, and she stood in the ruined records room with her lamp making a small hard circle of the world, and she promised the six names on the wall above the bunks that their room would not be sealed with them still inside it. "We have everything Deller asked for," Wim said. "Sample, photograph, time, place. Chain of custody is a hole in the ground and a hatch with a date on it." "We have everything," Delyth said, "and we are standing in the one room in the basin that makes a company executive very, very afraid, and we have been here long enough that someone has noticed we are gone." She looked up at the hole, far above her, a black coin in a black roof, and she began to climb the cable back toward the colony and whatever was waiting at the top of it. ---