Authors: Christian Cantrell
"There's something I forgot to tell you," Cam said.
"What's that?"
"I'm glad you're alive."
"So am I," Arik said. "And I fully realize that I'm an idiot."
"I'm the idiot for letting you go out there without more training. How did you let your air get so low? You didn't notice the big red blinking alert right in front of your face?"
"I committed the ultimate EVA sin. I got lost."
"How can you get lost when you're surrounded by over 200 10,000 lumen diode strobes?"
"It turns out they're only useful if you can see them."
"Should I have mentioned that? I assumed it was self-explanatory."
"How much time do you have?"
"Just a few minutes. Tell me what you found."
"Hopefully I can do better than that. I should be able to show you."
Arik loaded the V1 schematic into his modified version of the vector model viewer. He zoomed in on the dock.
"Ok, this is the dock, and here's the airlock." He zoomed out a few levels and began to pan. "Here's the outside wall of the Public Pod, and this is right about where I left the rover, right?"
"Looks right."
"I got turned around and started walking in this direction..." He panned away from V1, and this time, the model did not freeze.
"What the hell is that?"
About 200 meters from the public pod, there was a thick red line segment.
"I was hoping you could tell me."
"I have no idea."
"It's some kind of a wall."
Arik zoomed out until they could see all of V1. The wall formed a meandering perimeter around the main structure and the ERP.
"You walked all the way out there?"
"Apparently."
"And you actually saw this thing?"
"I was standing right in front of it."
"Could you tell what it was for?"
"No."
"How tall is it?"
Arik tilted the view and zoomed in on the section opposite the airlock.
"25 meters. Jesus."
"That can't be right. What's it made out of?"
"It looked like it was mostly concrete."
"That's impossible. If it was concrete, it would require regular maintenance. Who's maintaining it if we aren't?"
"That's a good question. Maybe we didn't build it."
Cam looked at Arik. "Then who did?"
"I don't know, but think about it: it's far enough away that nobody would ever find it unless they were either looking for it, or they were lost. You spend 14 hours a day in the Wrench Pod, and you've never heard anything about it. Yet someone obviously put a huge amount of work into building that thing, and someone also seems to be maintaining it."
"Are you suggesting there's someone — or some
thing
— on Venus that we don't know about?"
"No," Arik said. "Whatever's out there, someone here knows about it. And someone here knows about the wall, too. Otherwise it wouldn't be in the schematic. But it's being kept secret. I had to modify the vector viewer to be able to see it."
"What's that right there?"
Arik panned a few meters, re-centered, then zoomed in. "It looks like a door. I must have been right next to it."
"Two and half meters wide. That's big enough to get a rover through."
"So what's your theory?"
"I don't have one. I agree it's strange, but maybe it's just a wall. Maybe the Founders built it to prevent wind erosion or something."
"It's big enough to keep out a lot more than wind," Arik said. "And it doesn't make sense that you didn't know about it."
"There's a lot about the Wrench Pod I don't know yet. Maybe it just hasn't come up."
"Maybe. Or maybe nobody else in the Wrench Pod knows about it, either. How much concrete do you have in the warehouse?"
"Not enough to maintain something like that. We hardly use any concrete anymore. It deteriorates too rapidly."
"Well it looked well maintained to me. I didn't see any cracks in it, or any rubble or debris on the ground. Is there anyone in the Wrench Pod you trust enough to talk to about this?"
"No way," Cam said. "At least not yet. I think we should keep this quiet."
"I agree."
"And whatever you do, don't go back out there."
"I have to check on my experiments."
"
I'll
check on them," Cam said. "You have to promise me, Arik. I can't be responsible for something happening to you. We'll figure something out, but for now, you
cannot
go back out there."
Arik hesitated. There was much more to do than just observe. There were dozens of additional experiments that needed to be performed, possibly even hundreds before he started seeing results. They needed a new technique for mixing and delivering the seeds and crystal catalyst solutions, and they needed to find new areas where they could work without being discovered. There was no way Cam could take on a project like this in addition to his other responsibilities. Arik knew that the pace at which he could work through Cam would be far too slow to yield results before he had to give up and get back to AP. But he also knew his friend well enough to know that there was no way Cam was going to concede.
"Ok," Arik finally said. "You have my word."
O
nly new wrenchers were assigned inventory duty. Cam had managed to avoid it, but with every week that he wasn't chosen or managed to talk his way out of it, his odds deteriorated. Arik knew that sometime in the next six weeks, Cam would be asked to spend his days roaming the warehouse with a polymeth tablet and a mass scanner, lost among the towering racks, pallets, and stacks of material. For seven straight days, as long as none of the rovers broke down, he would have no reason to be anywhere near the dock.
While Arik waited, he built a device which he could think of no better name for than a "plug gun." The barrel was a long transparent piece of pneumatic tubing which he salvaged from a scrap heap. It had a plastic stock and rubber recoil pad which fit against his shoulder, and a large empty wire and steel frame on the top which was designed to accept an environment suit cartridge in order to provide the gun with power and air pressure. There was a small loading port in the bottom for inserting shells, and an ejection port in the side for dispatching them once they were spent.
The plug gun was designed to be held against the shoulder with the muzzle pressed firmly into the ground. It was a double action design: the first sucked a plug of dirt up into a chamber where it was mixed with seeds and a crystalline catalyst solution from a borosilicate shell loaded through the bottom port, and the second action simultaneously drove the mixture back down into the hole from which the plug came and ejected the glass shell through the port on the side.
The plug gun had several advantages over the pressure washer. It was designed to operate without raising dust or debris so as not to affect visibility, and since the crystals were loaded through glass shells, everything could be premixed in the lab and applied much more efficiently. It was small enough that it could be placed in the back of a rover rather than requiring the trailer, and because the plug gun was so precise, Arik could apply his experiments in a clean, simple, and dense grid.
In theory, the plug gun would allow him to set up just about as many experiments as he wanted. An environment suit cartridge had plenty of air and juice, and since all the solutions were premixed and the process required so little physical effort, it seemed perfectly feasible that he could set at least a hundred plugs in the course of a single EVA. Since this could very well be his last shot at getting outside for the foreseeable future, and his final opportunity to prove the viability of terraforming, Arik knew he had to maximize his chances of happening upon just the right combination of genetic engineering and catalytic compounds.
But increasing his numbers also meant increasing the amount of space he required. Since he didn't want to disturb his experiments by the Public Pod, he would need a new site — one where he could use as much land as he needed, and where he was certain nobody would come across his work. Arik only knew of one place within range which guaranteed him the space and seclusion he required: the other side of the wall.
It turned out that getting through the door wouldn't pose much a problem. Arik was able to locate four doors in the security manifest which did not appear on any schematic. He assumed one was the door in the section of the wall almost directly opposite the airlock, and the remaining three were evenly distributed along the rest of the wall. They were all locked, but Arik was able to fix that without being prompted for so much as a password or biometric verification. Whoever engineered the system had relied on the woefully inadequate principle of "security through obscurity" which held that a system was secure as long as no one knew it existed. The flaws were obvious.
Arik was initially planning on trying to talk Cam into letting him go back outside one last time, but he eventually concluded that it was actually better for Cam to remain staunchly opposed. Despite the amount of time Arik had spent outside, he had clearly proven that plenty could still go wrong, and that there was no way to prepare for every possible scenario. Arik had already accepted that he might not come back, but he obviously couldn't expect Cam to accept that, as well. By Cam prohibiting Arik from going outside, Arik hoped that he would feel that he had done everything in his power to prevent an accident. By blatantly disregarding Cam's instructions, Arik was taking responsibility for his own actions, and, should something go wrong, claiming all the blame for himself.
Arik learned through Cadie that Cam had finally been assigned inventory duty. Cadie told Arik that she wouldn't be able to eat with him that day because she and Zaire were having lunch with a mutual friend in the Code Pod. When Arik said he would use the opportunity to try to meet up with Cam, Cadie told him that Cam was working in the warehouse for the week which was why Zaire was free. She was surprised but pleased to see that her husband was determined not to work through lunch that day. He set an automated away message, closed his workspace, grabbed his cricket bag (which he had started storing at work), and left for the Play Pod. If all went well, he told Cadie, he would be back in a few hours, hot and sweaty from a midday pickup game. It was unusual for Arik to show Cadie any affection at work, so she was caught off guard when he paused on his way out to kiss her and tell her how much he loved her.
No one tried to stop Arik as he walked through the shop to the dock. Since it was never explicitly acknowledged that Cam had given Arik EVA training, there was no way Cam could effectively ban Arik from the Wrench Pod, so Arik got all the same nods and waves from the wrenchers that he always got. His routine was slightly different this time, however; today Arik was carrying his cricket bag over his shoulder, and rather than taking his usual path which brought him right past the warehouse entrance, he took the long way around.
There were other subtle differences in Arik's behavior. Rather than leaving his watch in a locker, he extended the strap and put it on over his environment suit, and instead of hanging up his cricket bag, he laid it gently in Betty's trunk. And in addition to the cartridge he loaded into his e-suit, he propped a second one up against the rover's passenger seat and strapped it down.
Arik considered stopping by the Public Pod to check on his experiments on his way out to the wall, but decided not to for two reasons. The first was that he knew the door he was looking for was almost precisely opposite the airlock, so the safest way to locate it was to come out of the airlock and continue on a perfectly straight path. Although it seemed simple enough to stop by the Public Pod first, then head out to the wall from there, Arik had learned the hard way the virtues of reducing all possible variables during an EVA. Even the most innocuous deviations from one's itinerary could provide disaster with just the sort of opportunity for which it relentlessly and tirelessly waited.
The second reason Arik wanted to get out to the wall as soon as he could was that the door's lock was on a timer. The automated away message that he left before closing his workspace triggered a timer that would unlock all four doors around V1's perimeter one hour after it was activated, then lock them all again two hours after that. Arik had ceaselessly debated with himself the logic behind automatically re-locking the doors; it made much more sense to leave them all unlocked, and to simply lock them manually once he was safely inside again. However, he ultimately decided that he had a responsibility to automate the process. Although the prospect of missing the window and getting locked out of V1 was horrifying, he felt he had to leave the colony as well secured as he found it in the event that, for whatever reason, he wasn't able to make it back. Although there didn't seem to be any danger of letting anything harmful out of V1, Arik had no idea what he might be letting in. Even leaving the doors unlocked for just two hours could be putting V1 at risk.
Arik found the wall easily, and the door was exactly where the schematic placed it. It was a massive slab of metal which had somehow gotten slightly dented near the center. There were columns of bolts through the steel, presumably securing it to further layers of steel beneath with alternating grains in order to strengthen it against warping, and it was hung inside of a metal frame by four bulky hinges. Beside the door, protruding from the concrete wall, was a tremendous wheel which Arik assumed provided leverage against a set of screws and gears in order to move the mass of steel. But not yet. He checked his watch and saw that he still had a little more than 13 minutes before his script removed the locks — just enough time to assemble and test the plug gun.
He walked around to the back of the rover and opened his cricket bag. The components inside interlocked and snapped together easily, and the spare environment suit cartridge slid perfectly into place where it activated inside its frame. He took an empty borosilicate glass cylinder from his bag and loaded it through the bottom port, then placed the muzzle carefully against the dirt and leaned into the stock. When he felt that his leverage and balance were right, he pulled back on the action bar. There was a jolt as the pneumatic chamber instantly filled with dirt. When he pushed the action bar forward again, there was a slight kick as the chamber abruptly emptied and the shell ejected from the side with a high pitched and melodious
ping
.