第5章 The Second Rig

Wim Dray was twenty-four, three months out of his apprenticeship, and he had the specific competence of a person who had been raised by machines and trusted them more than people. He calibrated the colony's instrument pool, which meant he had keys to every sensor in the basin, and he had twice, without being asked, corrected Delyth's antenna gain on a shared console, which meant he noticed things he was not required to notice. She found him in the instrument bay at the end of the day, elbow-deep in an open accelerometer housing, and she told him she needed a favor and did not tell him what kind until he agreed in principle. "That's how favors work," Wim said, wiping his hands. "You get agreement, then you reveal the felony." "It's not a felony. It's an unauthorized survey." "That's a felony with better manners." "Then you'll want to be careful how you read the sled log," Wim said, and closed the housing on the accelerometer with a click. "I can make the instruments say whatever a maintenance run would say. I can't make the ground say something it didn't." He looked at her the way a person looks at a question he has already decided to answer. "You found something under K-7." "I found a hole where the model says solid rock." "The model is a document. Document says rock, ground says hole." Wim wiped his hands on a rag and stood. "I've never once seen the two agree for a whole season. Usually it's the document that's late, not wrong. This one you think is wrong." "I don't think it's wrong. I think it's been made wrong on purpose." She had not said it out loud before, and it landed in the instrument bay like a dropped tool. "If I'm right, then someone in this colony has been changing the ground on paper for a decade, and the hole at K-7 is the part of the ground that hasn't been changed yet. I want to photograph it before it is." Wim was quiet for a moment. Then he picked up his jacket. "Nine o'clock," he said. "I'll bring the good antenna and a bad attitude." They went out on the third night, in a rover logged to a maintenance run and a spare sled borrowed from the instrument pool, with the moon low and the sky the deep black it only got when the dust had settled out. Delyth drove. Wim sat beside her with a tablet on his knees and watched the instrument bus while she walked the sled down the same coordinates she had walked a week before, slower this time, letting the antenna stack its passes. At the second hour, Wim said, "Stop." She stopped. The rover's fan dropped to a hum. "There's a power signature east of us," he said. "Not on the grid. Somebody's running something heavy out past the ridge." "How heavy?" "Rig heavy. Compressor plus a mud pump plus a heater bank. That's not a maintenance run, that's a drill." Delyth looked east. The ridge was a black line under the stars, and beyond it there was nothing she could see, and there was nothing unusual about that. Mars hid its work well. "Godwit is supposed to be on the eastern pad, and the eastern pad is where Sabra got reassigned. Maybe it's Godwit." "Godwit is on the schedule for the eastern pad, yes. But the eastern pad is four kilometers from that signature. This is closer." They drove toward it without lights, which was slow and unpleasant, and a kilometer past the ridge they found it: a rig standing alone in the dark, unlit, its derrick folded down to half height, its cables running into a hole in the ground that had been bored through ground she had walked and mapped and sworn was solid. There was no floodlight, no marker pole, nothing that would show up on an orbital pass. There was a casing head, six inches of steel pipe with a valve on top, and a flexible line running off into the dark toward a tank farm she had never seen on any map. Delyth put her glove on the line and felt it. It was warm, and it was moving. Not much, a faint vibration you would miss if you had not spent a year learning what a pipe sounds like when it is working, but it was there, the tick of fluid under pressure, and it went away from the hole and out toward the dark, toward the tanks, toward whatever the tanks were for. "Wim," she said quietly. "Put your hand here." He did, and he was quiet for a moment, and then he took his hand away as though the pipe had been hot. "That's water," he said. "That's a lot of water." "That's the colony's water," Delyth said. "Going somewhere it isn't supposed to go, in the dark, at night, with no log. That's what the whole of it comes to." She stood up and looked at the empty rig and the unlit tanks and the black ridge behind them, and for the first time since she had crouched over the radar she felt something colder than fear, which was certainty. "We're not standing in a survey anomaly. We're standing inside a theft." Delyth crouched by the casing head and read the stamping with her headlamp turned down to its lowest setting. It was a company part number and a batch code, the same batch code as the casing on Rig Tern. "Wim," she said. "How long has Rig Tern been running a night shift?" "It hasn't. Tern does days. I'd know, I recharged its batteries." "Then this is a second Tern, or someone's lying about where Tern is. Either way, somebody has been drilling K-7 in the dark, and nobody filed a log, and the hole is still open." She stood and looked at the line running toward the tank farm. "And they're not just drilling. They're moving something." Wim pulled the power telemetry onto his tablet, and the numbers there were a document all by themselves. For eleven nights, current had been drawn at the eastern substation in a signature that matched a drilling rig, and every one of those nights the official log showed the substation idle. Somebody had been paying for those nights in a way that left no accounting, and machines did not lie about power the way people lied about paper. She had built her whole career on that difference. People edited records. People relabeled a void as a nodule and moved on. But a substation could not relabel the current it had drawn, and a pipe could not pretend the water in it was somewhere else, and a radar pulse could not be talked out of the echo it brought back. The company's paper could lie, but the colony's metal kept its own diary, and Delyth had spent a month learning to read it, and tonight the metal had finally answered a question she had not known how to ask. Delyth walked the sled's radar over the second hole three times, and on the third pass the antenna found a tube beneath the casing, running away from the hole at depth, running east toward the tank farm, running through rock the model called solid. She recorded it. She recorded everything, and she could feel the whole shape of it now, one picture made of a dozen separate lies, all of them telling the same story about the same hole in the same ground. "We should go," Wim said. His voice had gone quiet. "There'll be a patrol. There's always a patrol when there's a rig." They drove back under the same black sky and returned the sled before dawn, and Wim did not ask her what she was going to do and Delyth did not tell him, because she did not know, and because she had already asked him to risk enough. She had one new thing in her sample rack before the shift bells rang. On the second pass, at the edge of the tank-run trench, she had scraped up a palmful of spill where the line had leaked, and it was the same faint brass color as the seam in her core, and it was waiting in a sealed bag on her bench for her to find the courage to run it. ---