Chapter Sixteen

A MATTER OF FACT

Somehow, Glister looked even colder from in the air. It didn’t help that the aircar’s heating system wasn’t all it could have been. They weren’t freezing, but they weren’t exactly breaking into a sweat, either.

And there could be no doubt that the world outside looked colder whenyou were cold. The view that scrolled past them down below—ice, snow, frozen rock-strewn wastes—was spectacular, but far from inviting.

Norla checked her displays. They were doing all right, so far. The biggest challenge had been getting the cargo transfer center’s vehicle airlock to cooperate. Norla had been worried that opening it manually would set off all sorts of security alarms. That hadn’t happened—at least so far as they knew—but it had never occurred to her that simply cranking hatches built to handle vehicles far larger than their aircar would take a lot of muscle power.

Now that they were airborne, and already several hundred kilometers from home, she had thought of a whole new worry: DeSilvo’s robots were still hard at work, hiding the exposed sections of DeSilvo City under rock and dirt and ice. Suppose they got around to burying the cargo center airlock before she and Yuri got back?That would be a lot of fun to deal with if they were delayed en route and were making final approach just after sunset.

Never mind. There was nothing they could do about it anyway. Not anymore. The best they could do was to continue forward.

She shifted in her seat and flexed her shoulders, trying to relax, trying to keep from getting stiff. They were flying in their pressure suits with their visors open, and the suits were really too big and bulky for the cramped interior of the aircar. Norla had insisted on the suits, mainly to keep them warm in case the aircar’s heating system went out. But there was also the chance that they would be forced to land and get out of the aircar to attempt repairs or signal for rescue, or whatever. If so, they’d need the pressure suits for more than heating—there was precious little free oxygen in what passed for air out there. Still, the aircar’s cabin was awfully crowded, and getting damned uncomfortable.

Suddenly the aircar was jolted violently from side to side as it banged into a patch of turbulence. Norla held on to the controls for dear life and fought the vehicle back to a stable heading. Turbulence stopped, as suddenly as it had begun. She hadn’t done much atmosphere flying in a long time. She had forgotten howdifferent it was from space flight, how the surprises came at you in a whole different way.

Yuri sat beside her on the right, staring endlessly down at the ruined landscape. She could barely imagine what was going through his mind as he looked down at the planet from which his people had come. Nor, to be honest, did she want to ask him about it. She knew Yuri could turn theatrical at times, and she had no desire to invite a display of histrionics.

Yuri had seemed to growyounger, more immature, in the last few weeks, but Norla thought she understood that as well. He’d been playing the part of a spy, pretending as hard as he could to be harder, tougher, more determined than he really wanted to be. And then his cover was blown, and he was free to be himself again, to do and feel as he wished, and not as he thought a seasoned intelligence agent should act. It sometimes seemed to Norla as if all the emotion that he had been bottling up all that time wanted to rush out all at once.

She checked her navigation system—a grand name for the crude lash-up she had rigged up by wiring together an inertial tracker, the aircar’s onboards, and a datapad. Itseemed to be running with a reasonable degree of accuracy. “We’re getting close,” she said. “Get ready with the cameras and recorders.”

If theirs had been any sort of real reconnaissance mission, they would have had every sort of high-resolution sensor built into the aircar, an ArtInt busily managing all of them, aiming and focusing the cameras, recording the data, shifting scan frequencies, and so on. Not on this operation. All they had was whatever cameras they could scrounge while hoping no one would notice they were missing. Yuri had worked out a series of mounting brackets so two cameras could peer through the front windshield, while he worked with a third, handheld camera. If all went well, they would get at least some sort of general visual and infrared coverage, and Yuri could use the handheld to get detailed images of specific areas.

Unfortunately, the jury-rigged camera mounts were so awkward and took up so much room in the cramped passenger compartment that it would have been all but impossible to leave them in place for the whole journey. Yuri had to spend a thumb-fingered five minutes fumbling around with the clamps and brackets before he had the thing even halfway set up. Then he got out the handheld camera and powered it up. “Ready,” he announced.

“We’ll see,” said Norla, not entirely convinced the bracket wouldn’t fall down. “I make us about five minutes out. We ought to be coming up on the western end of the east–west canyon. I want to do a flyover straight east, flying just south of the canyon. That ought to give the best view out the right side of the aircar. All right?”

“All right.”

Norla peered ahead through the windshield at the cold, hard landscape down below. There! That looked a hell of a lot like the jumbled ice pileup Yuri had shown her from the orbital scans, and the improvised navigation system was in close agreement. She came about to fly due east, brought their airspeed down to about 100 kph, and took them in lower.

She had more or less expected to see it all turn into nothing, to discover all the things Yuri had seen in his scans to be imaginary, a colony willed up out of nothing at all.

But Norla found out fast just how wrong she was. They came in low and slow, the sun high and behind them. They could see everything sharply and clearly. They spotted the first cooling shaft about two kilometers out from the north–south arm of the canyon. A thin wisp of steam curled up from the dark shaft and twisted lazily higher before getting caught and cut to ribbons by the winds in the upper reaches of the canyon. And there was another, and another. A thick glaze of ice had formed on the downwind side of each shaft, frozen waves forever pouring down and forever locked in place.

They passed still another shaft, and another, then one that seemed broken, collapsed, walls of dark and dirty ice engulfing the heat output, plugging it up all but completely.

But then they were at the junction of the two canyon arms, and there was the solar power array that Yuri had half seen, half imagined. Hard by the array, they had just the briefest glimpses of a low round building that had to be an access to the main habitat below. Warm yellow light glowed from the windows of the structure. Norla resisted the urge to slow and turn the aircar to get a better look. She had a very strong gut feeling that they needed to see all of the canyon, from end to end.

The aircar moved on, past the north–south arm, then right past the wind farm that Yuri had imagined he saw on the scans from orbit. The reality was so like what Yuri had divined from the murky images that for one mad moment Norla wondered how he had summoned it into being.

The wind towers—far too grand and powerful to be called mere windmills—marched proudly across the landscape, the massive blades of the rotors turning purposefully, steadily. Any doubts Norla might still have had were banished. Last Chance Canyon was there, and real, and very much still alive.

Yuri was bouncing in his seat with excitement, so much so he was barely able to operate the handheld camera, and Norla was every bit as enthusiastic. This was a find. This was history. When was the last time any of these people had seen outsiders? They had been cut off from outside civilization for generations. Perhaps they had even forgotten the outside world, as it had forgotten them.

“Give me another pass!” Yuri was saying.

Norla blinked, came back to herself, and realized she had been so excited by their discovery that she had flown clear past the end of the wind farm, almost to the end of the canyon.

“Sorry,” she said, and began banking them around. “Let me come about.”

“Come on, Norla! Turn us about. I want another pass over the whole thing before we land!”

Thatbrought her up short. Her sense of excitement was suddenly overtaken by fear as she remembered some of the stories about diehards . . . She stopped the turn and left the aircar at its present heading, off to the southeast. She brought it straight and level. “No landing, Yuri. We can’t take the chance. That was part of the deal.”

Yuri said, “But—but that was before wesaw the place,” he protested. “Turn us around! Now we know—we can see—”

“We can see that there must be people still alive down there,” she said. “That’s all. We don’t know, wecan’t know, what sort of shape they’re in, or how they feel about strangers.”

“We don’tknow that they’re dangerous!” Yuri protested.

“Granted—but we also don’t know if we can trust them. And if we blunder in now, without preparation, without a plan, without reporting what we’ve found first—then we’ll likely not only get ourselves killed, we’ll have made things much worse for the diehards. They’ll be in a trigger-happy mood, and our people will walk right into that when they come looking for us.”If they come looking, she reminded herself. Koffield and the others wouldn’t have much idea where to start looking, and might well take the very cold-blooded decision that it was not worth risking the living just to search for the dead. “Besides, we don’t have much in the way of provisions with us.”

“We’re not going to stay long,” said Yuri.

“We wouldn’tplan on staying long. But supposing the landing went wrong, and we couldn’t take off again? Or suppose they grabbed the aircar and searched it, and decided it looked like we were planning to live off them? The diehards might not feel much like sharing. So no landing. I need your agreement on that. I can’t take any chances that you might try some piece of idiocy like grabbing the controls. I need you to give your word, or else I turn this thing around and head straight home right now. Understood?”

There was silence for a moment, broken only by the hum of the aircar’s levitators and the quiet hiss of air through the vent system. Finally, he spoke. “Yes, ma’am. I give my word that I won’t do anything to try for a landing here.”

“All right then,” Norla said. She resumed her turn, arcing about in a long sweeping S that brought them back on the reverse of their previous course, until they were moving west to east, back down the canyon. Norla slowed their airspeed until it seemed they were scarcely crawling across the sky.

“Lower,” Yuri said. “Lower.”

She brought them down to about two hundred meters up, holding course just south of the canyon’s edge. She could see the first windmill just ahead, coming up slowly. It was a tall, proud thing, the fifty-meter blades of its rotor gleaming in the sunlight.

But then it was as if Norla blinked, and a veil dropped from in front of her eyes. Suddenly, she was seeing, reallyseeing, what was there.

The windmill’s rotor was not turning. Lines of rust and dirt streaked down the blades, and down the tower itself. One rotor blade was pointed straight down, parallel with the tower, and a long red crack ran half its length. It looked as if some sort of scaffold had been started, in an attempt to reach the crack in the blade, but the scaffold had slumped over and leaned against the tower. Ice was caked thick over the scaffold; it was plain that it had been abandoned a long time ago.

Then they were past the first windmill, and approaching the second. It at least was turning, but now that she was looking for such things, Norla could see the signs of wear and tear and piecemeal repairs. Of the ten remaining windmills, only six were in operation at all. Three of the nonfunctional ones were plainly as far past hope of repair as the first. One had lost all three rotor blades. They lay in a broken heap at the base of the windmill tower. Norla couldn’t see any visible damage to the fourth nonworking windmill. It might have severe damage somewhere in its inner workings, or it might be down for some trivial repair. But Norla was starting to get the feeling these people couldn’t afford to forgo a single watt of power generation. Nothing as vital as a power source would stay out of service a moment longer than necessary.

They came up on the north–south canyon, on her side of the aircar, the left. Norla resisted the urge to fly up through it. A tiny voice whispering at the back of her mind told her it would be far wiser not to get too close. She slowed their forward progress to almost nothing, and Yuri leaned around her as best he could to get the handheld camera aimed out her side window.

Norla could see clearly enough, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

Something like a third of the solar array elements weren’t tracking the sun properly. Some of the defective units were simply pointed the wrong way. Others had snapped off their supports, or were half-buried in snow and ice. And now she could see that the central structure, the one with the lights still gleaming from its interior, was only one of a dozen or so buildings. But at least two of the smaller structures had suffered roof collapses, and most of the rest were all but completely buried by the drifting snow.

There was enough damage obvious to almost every human-made object, even from this far off, that Norla was starting to wonder if they had it wrong. Maybe this placewas dead, and the lights they had seen were what was left on after the last of them had died, half an hour or half a century before.

She peered about, seeing if she could see any sign of graveyards—but then her insides tightened up as she remembered that diehards would never think of wasting all the organic material that went into a corpse. They didn’t bury their dead; theyrecycled them.

Just as she had realized she wasn’t going to see any sign of the dead, she saw signs of the living. There was movement—humanmovement—out on the surface. Even before she could focus clearly enough to see them, her hindbrain told her she was seeing, not robots, not the wind moving snow, but humans in motion. There! Three tiny suited figures, just coming out of the lighted structure, gesturing at each other, pointing at the aircar, practically parked low in the center of their sky.

Norla had seen enough. She turned the car hard to the south and throttled up hard, gaining speed and altitude.

“There were people!” Yuri cried out. “We have to go back and—”

“And what?” Norla asked. “We have nothing to give them, but a lot they might want to take.”Like our bodies,for example, she thought, reflecting again on why there were no diehard graveyards. “Too many risks, not enough benefit,” she said.

She waited until they were ten kilometers south and a kilometer high, before coming about, pointing the aircar toward the northwest, on a direct bearing for DeSilvo City. “We’ve got what we came for,” she said again, before Yuri could protest. “We know they are there, and we have proof of it in the cameras. The longer we stay around, the bigger the risk that—”

BLAM! BLAM!

The two explosions lit up the sky, one on either side of the aircar. Norla’s reflexes tried to jump her out of her seat, but her seat belt held her in place. The aircar twitched and shuddered through the sky, half as a result of the shock waves from the blasts, and half from Norla’s reaction. She forced the car back on course, and held it steady for a good fifteen seconds before heading into a slow, steady turn toward the west, until they were headed straight toward the setting sun.

“Norla! Put on some speed! Go evasive!”

“Quiet!” she snapped. “Quit your damned second-guessing. We fly smooth and easy, so they can track us accurately and won’t hit us by accident if they fire more warning shots. Those wereaimed shots, deliberate misses that bracketed us exactly. If they can put two in the sky exactly a hundred meters apart with us smack in the middle, they can put one right where we are. This aircar’s no supermaneuverable fighter craft, and it’s a hundred years too old for me to want to stress it too far. They just told us ‘Go away and don’t come back.’ And I’m tempted to do just that. We’re going to fly west at a nice steady rate of speed for as long as we can, so maybe they’ll think we’re from over that way instead of from the northwest. We’ll just have to hope they’ll stop tracking us before I have to change course. I should have thought of that before we came in, and flown in and out from some other direction than straight from home. Too late now.”

And even Yuri Sparten could say nothing in reply to that.

They flew on in silence. Norla couldn’t help but wonder what sort of reception would greet them on their arrival. They would surely have been missed. Somehow Norla couldn’t help but worry over—and dread—what Anton Koffield would say. Silly, really, when it wasDeSilvo who could punish them, severely, if he so desired—and Captain Marquez who would be more or lessobliged to punish them, if only to demonstrate that he still held authority over them. But it was Anton Koffield she did not wish to face. It was absurd, but she felt like a teenage girl who knew damned well she was going to catch hell from Daddy for staying out too late.

But deep in her heart, she knew that her subconscious was stirring up such minor concerns as a distraction from the real worries, the real issues.

Last Chance Canyon wasreal . People lived there. The place, and the people, were both in bad shape, no question. The amount of visible damage suggested they were near a point of collapse, or perhaps already past it. If they got help, enough help, the right kind of help, and got it soon enough, it might make a difference. But if not, well . . . they wouldn’t last much longer. Not much longer at all.

 

Norla timed her turn back toward DeSilvo City carefully and brought the aircar in for a landing just as daylight was fading. It wasn’t much of a homecoming. An annoyed-looking Jerand Bolt was there, waiting inside the airlock, when they arrived. Bolt escorted them to the main conference room, where Marquez and Koffield were waiting, and left it at that.

The meeting didn’t take long. Marquez ordered Yuri restricted to his quarters while off duty for five days, all meals to be eaten in quarters, alone. Norla, as the senior officer who should have known better, drew a full week of restrictions, and accepted them meekly—even, it seemed to Yuri, gratefully. Maybe she had meant what she had said about discipline and authority.

Koffield, oddly enough, merely looked amused. Had he beenexpecting them to try something?

Marquez at least took the data from the cameras when Yuri offered it, though Yuri was careful to keep a copy for himself. They had proof, and he was going to make sure it didn’t vanish.

Twenty minutes after their return, Jerand Bolt was escorting Yuri to his quarters. Bolt opened the door and hooked his thumb toward the interior. “And stay there,” he growled as Yuri went inside. The door slammed behind him.

There were no locks on the doors, and there were no physical barriers to Yuri’s taking off again. But there were intangible barriers that did the trick just as well.

Yuri’s basic defense was that no one hadsaid they couldn’t go off on their own. Well, he didn’t have that anymore. Marquez had told him, in graphic and degrading detail, exactly what hewas allowed to do, then explicitly banned all activities he didn’t list. Leaving his quarters, except to attend to his duties, without permission, was very clearlyoff the list.

Yuri stared at the door for a moment, then sat down at the edge of his bed. Well, Norla had warned him: A childish excuse would get him treated as a child, and it had come to that. He’d been sent to his room. Yuri could see that. The best he could do for himself—and, perhaps, for the people of Last Chance Canyon—would be to take it like a man. His own self-respect would keep him in quarters, holding him as firmly as any prison bars.

He lay back on the bed and sighed again. Tomorrow, during duty hours, he would face down DeSilvo and demand that the old tyrant do something. What, exactly, he wasn’t sure yet. He had no idea what the Last Chancers most needed. All he really knew for sure after the day just ended was that theydidn’t need target practice.

Tomorrow then. Yuri started to prepare for bed, not in the least sure he’d be able to sleep. But that didn’t matter, he told himself as he peeled off his clothes and stepped into the refresher. He had won.

After all, their host had made lots of noises about wanting to help, about wanting to make some sort of restitution. Well, Yuri had proof now, of people urgently needing help. DeSilvo, guided by his own principles, confronted by the evidence that everyone now knew about, wouldhave to help the Last Chancers. Yuri smiled as the water jets played down on the back of his neck.

He had DeSilvo right where he wanted him.

It was only a day or two later, after everything he knew had been turned most thoroughly upside down, that Yuri had time to think again.

Only then did it dawn on Yuri Sparten: Oskar DeSilvo had undoubtedly gone to bed that same night feeling exactly the same way abouthim .