第15章 Dust Front

The south locker opened onto the maintenance gate, and the maintenance gate opened onto the corridor that led to the ridge, and the ridge was gone. Delyth had worked in dust before. She had worked in weather that turned the sky the color of brick and the horizon into a rumor, and she had learned the rules the hard way, in the way of a person who had once been lost for forty minutes two hundred meters from a dome. You kept your line. You kept your partner. You kept your suit pressure and your heat and your radio, and you never, ever trusted the ground to stay where you had left it. What the front had done to the basin was worse than weather. It had deleted the world. The dome lights ended at the gate and the dark beyond was not dark but brown, a moving brown with a texture, like standing inside a cloud of sand that had opinions. The wind came across the basin in long, steady shoves, and between the shoves it drew back as though to look at what it had done. "You have the line?" Wim's voice came through the radio, thin and close. "I have the line." She had strung the survey tape by hand from the south gatepost out into the brown, fifty meters at a time, the way she had been taught, and she would follow it back by touch if she had to. "Stay on it. If you lose the tape, stop walking and shout." The rover was useless in this. They went on foot, which was slower and colder and had the single virtue of being unlogged, and it took them two hours to cross ground she had crossed in forty minutes in daylight. She had never worked a front on foot and she would not do it again. The storm took her depth perception first, so that a trench two meters wide read as a smudge and a boulder ten meters ahead read as nothing, and then it took her sense of the ground, so that she had to walk by the tape and the tape alone, hand over hand, fifty meters at a time. Twice the wind threw a fistful of grit against her visor and she stopped and waited out the blind second with her hand locked on the line and her breath loud in her helmet, and each time she started again she had to make herself let go of the thought that she could simply turn around and walk back to the gate and be warm and be safe and be wrong for the rest of her life. The storm erased her landmarks and replaced them with worse ones: a drum of old cable half-buried at an angle, a marker pole that should not have been bent, the sudden black shape of a boulder that the radar said was not there and the wind had uncovered since. At the top of the ridge the wind dropped for a moment, and through the brown she saw the lights. Not the colony. The colony was behind her, north, a smear of orange in the murk. These were out ahead, low and small and moving, a string of work lamps crawling single file across the basin floor, and behind them the long dark shape of a tanker train that was supposed to be parked at the eastern pad and idle until spring. "There's the convoy," Wim said, very quietly, as though the wind could carry his voice to them. "Five tanks. Heated. They're moving water tonight, in this." "Of course they are. This is the night nobody can see them." Delyth counted the lamps. Five tanks, five lamps, and a rig light beyond them where the covert casing stood, and a bright blue-white glow at the casing head that meant the heater bank was running at full draw, melting the last of the fill so it could go down the hole before the storm cleared. "They're not even hiding anymore. They've decided the storm is the hiding." They followed the convoy's track along a low swale where the wind could not reach and the dust lay thin, and at the covert rig they found the fill running itself. The night crew was gone, pulled back to the dome before condition two closed the gates, and the rig sat alone with its pump hammering and its heater glowing and its controller blinking a schedule into the dark. Nobody was guarding it. Nobody needed to. The people who built this machine had built it to do its work at the one hour when no honest person would be out to see it. Delyth stood at the casing head and looked down the black column of the hole and then up at the brown, moving sky, and she made the call. "We need two things and we have about two hours," she said. "The company will have people back out the moment the front thins, and the moment they see the tape and the pad and us, it's over. You take the controller. Pull its data core, don't wipe anything, photograph the display and the serial before you touch a single button. I'm going down for the station module and the survey sheets." Wim stopped with his hand on the control cabinet and looked at her. "You're going down that hole in a dust storm." "The fill will seal it by morning. If I don't go now, there is no module and no survey and no station, and all we have is paper, and paper can be explained." She was already clipping onto the drum. "You pull the core. Then you stand at this head and you do not move, and you keep the channel open, and if the cable goes slack in a way that isn't me, you climb down it and you find me." "That's not a plan, that's a sentence with a hole in it." "It's the only sentence we have." She seated her harness, checked her lamp, checked her seals one last time, and began the long, cold descent into the ground. The wall went by her in levels as it always did, regolith to ice to rock, and then the light let go of the wall and she was falling through open air toward the roof of a building that should not have existed, and below her the flood was already moving. She heard it before she saw it: a slow, papery shifting, ice grating against metal, and then her lamp found the top of the habitat ring and the top of the habitat ring was wet. The fill had reached the upper level. A thin, cold sheet of slush moved across the roof of Anseris Station like a tide coming in on a flat shore, and even as she watched it crept a centimeter up the wall, patient and inevitable, and Delyth understood that the company's schedule had been a little optimistic and the station was going under faster than anyone had told the manifest it would. She hung on the cable above a drowned room and did the arithmetic that had kept her alive for a year. The cache was two corridors over and one level down. The water was rising. The cable ended here, at this roof, and if she let go of it she would not get back to it easily, and the tide was already too deep to wade and too cold to swim. "Wim," she said into the radio. "Tell me the controller's out." A pause, and the sound of a cabinet closing. "Controller's out. I have the core in my glove and the display photographed. What's your status?" Delyth looked at the rising water and at the dark corridor beyond it and at the small, wet roof of a building full of the dead, and she made herself answer in a level voice, because a scared voice costs a partner more than a storm does. "I'm going to get wet," she said. "Keep the channel open." ---