Blue Remembered Earth (57 page)

‘When do we hit it?’ she asked.

Gribelin stared at the drill for a long while before answering. ‘Sixty, seventy minutes.’

‘When I asked you before, you said it wouldn’t take more than an hour.’

‘I said it wouldn’t take
much
more,’ he snapped back at her.

‘Golem’s fifty kays out,’ Dorcas said levelly. ‘If the hammerheads are going to do anything, we’ll know about it soon enough. Maybe luck’s on your golem’s side.’

‘If we didn’t have to drill here, maybe we could drive out and meet the golem halfway,’ Jitendra said, stamping his feet nervously, as if the cold was starting to reach him through the insulation of his suit.

‘And then what?’ Dorcas asked. ‘Use reasoned persuasion?’

‘I was thinking more along the lines of a reasoned kick in the teeth.’

‘There’s no Mech to stop you, but you’d still be in a world of trouble once news got back to the Surveilled World. And we don’t know that the golem doesn’t have a human or warmblood guide with it.’ Dorcas nodded at the whirring drill. ‘We’ll see this through to the bitter end. It’s not as if it’s likely to be anything worth fighting over.’

‘You still don’t believe we’ll find anything,’ Sunday said.

‘If that box has been down there for a hundred years,’ Dorcas said, ‘then everything I know about the Evolvarium is wrong. And I’m afraid that’s just not the way my world works.’

‘Much as it pains me to agree with the good captain,’ Gribelin said, ‘she does have a point.’

There had been days that seemed to pass more rapidly than that hour. Watching the drill was like watching a kettle. Eventually Sunday gave up and walked away from the site, as far as she dared. Even when she was two hundred metres from the truck, she could still feel the vibrations from Gribelin’s equipment. Other than the rock plume, the sky was clear and cloudless, darkening almost to a subtle purple-black at the zenith. Pavonis Mons was a gentle bulge on the horizon – underwhelming, or would have been were she naive enough to have expected anything more spectacular. She was already on its footslopes. The mountains of Mars were simply too big to see in one go, unless one was in space.

Give her Kilimanjaro any day. At least that was a mountain you could point to.

The vibration stopped. She looked back just in time to see the plume attenuate, the last part of it bannering through the sky like a kite’s tail. She watched Gribelin push the drill back out of the way, nothing in his unhurried movements suggesting that there’d been a fault with the machinery.

She walked back to the drill site. By the time she got there, Jitendra and Dorcas were leaning at the edge of the fresh hole, hands on knees as they peered into its depths.

‘The good news,’ Dorcas said, ‘is that one of the hammerheads took the bait.’

‘And?’

‘It wasn’t a clean kill. The vehicle is still approaching, although not as quickly as before. But it’s damaged, and the other hammerhead may be taking an interest.’

‘Will there be repercussions?’

‘Reprisals? Probably not. Your golem resumed movement before sun-up, which is asking for trouble in anyone’s book.’

‘I hope no one else was hurt.’

‘Their fault if they were,’ Dorcas said.

Sunday took care as she neared the freshly dug hole. It was only about sixty centimetres across, but easily wide enough to become wedged in if she lost her footing.

‘About this much to go,’ Gribelin said, spreading his hands the width of a football. ‘We’ll back off and let the proxy dig out the rest.’

‘Sifters,’ Sibyl said, pointing to two pink plumes on the horizon, sailing slowly from left to right like the smoke from an Old-World ocean liner. ‘We’d best not hang around.’

The truck and the airship backed off a couple of hundred metres. Gribelin’s robot had detached itself from the prow of his vehicle and was now striding across the open terrain. Gribelin had gone into ching bind, otherwise immobile as he drove the proxy to the edge of the hole. It was the same kind of skeletal, minimalist unit that Sunday had chinged on the Moon, constructed from numerous tubes and pistons. It squeezed into the hole effortlessly, folding itself into a tight little knot like a dried-up spider, and vanished down the shaft. A few moments later, gobbets of rubble began to pop out of the opening.
If there’s a booby trap
, Sunday thought,
we’d best all pray it isn’t nuclear
.

But after a few minutes’ further excavation, the proxy had unearthed the box. Deeming it to be safe, at least for the moment, Sunday returned to the shaft and looked down. The proxy had extricated itself, allowing her a clear view of the object. About two-thirds of the upright container had been exposed, revealing it to be of dull, anonymous-looking construction. The size of a picnic hamper, the grey alloy casing was scratched and slightly dented. Sunday made out the seam of a lid, and what appeared to be a pair of simple catches in the long side.

She nodded at Gribelin. ‘Bring it all the way out.’

They retreated again and waited for the proxy to haul the box from the shaft and deposit it on the ground lengthwise, with the lid facing the sky. In all the red emptiness of Mars, it looked like something painted by Salvador Dali: a tombstone in a desert, maybe.

Sunday was the first to reach it. She sent the proxy away, not willing to let anyone else open the lid now that she had come this far. Different on the Moon, when Chama had been the one who had that privilege. Then, she’d barely known what she was getting involved with. Now it was as personal as anything in her universe.

Sunday knelt next to the box. Jitendra was behind her, but the others were still keeping their distance.
Let them
, she thought as she worked her gloved fingers under the catches and applied pressure. They flipped open obligingly, and Sunday had her first real inkling of disquiet. She’d never been entirely persuaded by Dorcas’s argument that a box could not have been under the surface all this time and not be found by the machines. But catches that had been snapped shut sixty or more years ago and then exposed to six decades of Martian cold ought to feel tighter than these.

The lid swung open just as easily. It was only then that Sunday realised she should have considered the possibility that the box had been packed and sealed under normal pressure conditions rather than in the thin air on the face of Mars.

Too late . . . But no: it either hadn’t been pressure-sealed, or the air had leaked away over the decades.

She looked inside. The box contained another box: a lacquered black receptacle with a flower pattern worked into its lid. There was just enough room around the outside of the smaller box to get her fingers in. She reached for it.

And felt something touch the back of her head.

‘It’s not a weapon,’ Dorcas said. ‘We need to be clear about that. I am not holding a weapon against your helmet. I would never do that. What I am doing is holding a non-weapon, a tool, a normal part of our equipment, in such a way that harm could conceivably come to you if I were careless. Which I won’t be, provided you do nothing that might . . . distract me.’

Sunday was surprised by how calm her own voice sounded. ‘What would you like me to do, Dorcas?’

‘I’d like you to let go of that box, the smaller one, and step away from the big box. I’m right behind you, and I’m going to stay right behind you.’

Sunday removed her fingers from the gap between the boxes. She’d budged the small box just enough to feel that it was light, if not empty.

‘I don’t understand what’s going on,’ she said, standing and moving away from the box as she’d been told to. ‘Other than the fact that it feels criminal.’

‘Not at all,’ Dorcas said. ‘Quite the opposite, really. I’m intervening to prevent the execution of a criminal act. In the absence of an effective Mechanism, I’m obliged to do so. Now kneel again.’

‘If there was a Mechanism,’ Sunday answered, lowering down as she’d been ordered, ‘I doubt very much whether you’d be holding something against the back of my helmet.’

‘That’s as may be. But as I said, what we’re trying to do here is stop a crime, not create one.’

‘The crime being . . . ?’

‘The removal of artefacts from the Evolvarium without the necessary authorisation. I’m afraid everything here that isn’t geology belongs to the Overfloater Consortium. You should have realised that before you came blundering in.’

From her kneeling position Sunday looked around slowly, careful not make any sudden movements. She had walked perhaps twenty paces from the big box when Dorcas ordered her to kneel again. The woman was still behind her. Sibyl, the other Overfloater, was holding a kind of pneumatic drill, double-gripped like a gangster-era machine gun. It was heavy and green and wrapped in a gristle of cabling. Gribelin and Jitendra were kneeling on the ground before her, their hands raised as high as their suit articulation allowed.

‘Piton-drivers,’ Dorcas said. ‘We use them to fire anchors into the ground when we need to moor-up during a storm. They use compressed air to drive self-locking cleats fifty centimetres into solid rock. Just think what that would do to common-or-garden suit armour.’

‘I didn’t come to steal from the Overfloaters. You know why I’m here. Whatever’s in that box is family property, that’s all, and it was buried here before the Evolvarium was created. It’s got nothing to do with you or your machines. If I take it, nothing changes. No one gets richer or poorer.’

‘If that’s the case,’ Dorcas said, ‘then you won’t mind if I have it instead, will you?’

‘I said it belongs to me, to my family.’

‘Can you prove this?’

‘Of course. I didn’t end up here by accident. I followed clues, all the way from the Moon.’

‘Then you can submit a claim for return of confiscated property through the usual channels.’ Dorcas seemed to think for a moment. ‘Of course, to prove that you followed those clues, you’ll have to mention that incident with the Chinese, to which your name hasn’t hitherto been linked.’

‘Who’s behind this?’ Jitendra asked.

‘There’s no one “behind” anything,’ Dorcas said. ‘I’m merely asserting the rule of law.’

‘It’s just that you’d only know about what happened on the Moon if the Pans had told you,’ Jitendra said.

‘I’m not surprised,’ Sunday said. ‘If anything, I’m amazed it’s taken them this long.’

‘To do what?’ Gribelin asked.

‘To steal the box from under my nose. It’s been too easy, hasn’t it? They’ve been falling over themselves to help us get this far. Now they’ve decided: enough is enough. We don’t need Sunday to follow the rest of the clues. We can do that on our own, thanks very much, or just not bother.’ She shook her head, disgusted at her own unwillingness to see things clearly until this lacerating moment. ‘Soya warned me,’ she said.

‘Soya?’ Dorcas asked. ‘Who the hell is Soya?’

‘Someone I should have listened to when I had the chance. Not that it would have made much difference. How far could I have got, without the Pans’ assistance?’

‘Maybe I’m missing something,’ Gribelin said, ‘but if the Pans are paying me, why is this shit happening?’

‘Let’s not allow this to come between us, Grib,’ Dorcas said soothingly. ‘We’re both too old for that. You’ve done an honest job and you’ve been paid for it. You had no right to assist in the extraction of materials from the Evolvarium, so you could say that you’re getting off very lightly by being interdicted before the crime could be fully actualised.’

‘I told you what we had in mind. You said nothing about stealing the fucking box from me at the last minute.’

‘Yes, well, that was before I was fully cognisant of the possibilities.’

‘When did they contact you?’ Sunday asked. ‘Was it yesterday, after we’d been brought aboard? Was that why you delayed the dig, when we still had daylight to spare? So you could haggle terms with the Pans?’

‘She’s not going to admit to them being behind this,’ Jitendra said.

‘No,’ Sunday said. ‘You’re right. But I thought they could be trusted – to a point, at least. I trusted Chama and Gleb. I even trusted Holroyd. And if they’re screwing
me
over, what are they doing to my brother?’

‘I very much doubt that Chama and Gleb had anything to do with this,’ Jitendra said.

On an open channel, obviously not caring that her words would be heard by everyone present, Dorcas said, ‘The box is secure. Send down two more crew to pick us up and start prepping for departure. I want to be out of here before the golem leads the hammerheads to us.’

‘May be a bit late for that,’ Gribelin said, angling his helmet to nod eastwards. Still kneeling, Sunday twisted to look as well, keeping her movements smooth and slow. She made out a plume of dust, a bumbling silver glint at the point where it met the ground.

Dorcas cursed, some Martian oath that the translation layer couldn’t parse. ‘I was meant to be alerted!’

‘Nine kays and closing,’ Sibyl said. ‘There’s still time, if we hurry.’

Dorcas prodded Sunday. ‘Get up.’

‘Make your mind up. You just told me to kneel down.’

This time the prod was harder, enough to rattle Sunday’s head against the inside of her helmet. ‘I won’t ask again. Remember, bad things happen out here. No one’s going to bat so much as an eyelid if you don’t show up in Vishniac again. They went into the Evolvarium without an official escort – what were they expecting?’