Chapter Fifteen
LAST CHANCE TO SEE
DESILVOCITY
(AKABASEGLISTER)
THEPLANETGLISTER
It was dark in the cargo transfer center, and cold, and quiet. There was a little light from the one viewport by the main cargo airlock, cold fingers of sunlight just fading behind the far-off hills as the local sun set. Not that outside day or night mattered inside the burrows and tunnels of DeSilvo City. Oskar DeSilvo ran the place on a standard Earthside twenty-four-hour clock that had no relation to Glister’s own day-night cycle.
You could see out from the cargo transfer center, but from few other place. There were only a handful of topside structures in DeSilvo City, fewer still with viewports, and it was rarer yet for anyone to bother looking out the windows. There wasn’t usually much to see, and what there was was infinitely depressing.
Soon there would be even less chance to see out, once DeSilvo’s robots set to work burying and camouflaging this entrance, along with all the others.
Two figures stood in the center of the big, shadowed compartment, the air cold enough that their breath came out in puffs of fog. Neither was dressed warmly enough, but then, neither intended to be there long.
“All right,” Norla said, “we’re here. Tell me what you’ve got, from the top. And tell me how you found it.”
“What’s the point of how I found it?” Yuri demanded.
“If you want to get yourself a pilot, there’s plenty of point,” Norla replied. It was bad enough that she was listening to Yuri Sparten, spy, as he claimed the moral high ground. Worse still, she found herself almost agreeing with him and with his plan. But she would be damned if she was going to let things get so bad that she let herself be hurried into a plan like his without beingsure. “Tell it to me again. Starting with how we’ll even be able to get out the door without being stopped.”
“First off, DeSilvo can’t possibly be watching everything.”
“No, but his ArtInts could be—and they are.”
“And then they pass it all on to him, and nothing is done unless he decides to do it. The ArtInts can’t act on their own. This place is a totally top-down operation. Nothing gets done unless he tells the ArtInts to do it, either with a standing order that covers a period of time or else with a specific order to cover a specific event. And they haven’t received standing orders on how to handle us.”
“And how the hell do you know that?”
“Simple. I asked some of the ArtInts—and they answered me. He hadn’t given them any directives that said something like ‘Don’t talk to strangers.’ They answered all my questions very fully and clearly. They have almost no security programming. They’re here to maintain DeSilvo City, and to cook and clean for DeSilvo, and to build whatever damn-fool machines he orders up. They’re watching—but they aren’t briefed to react in any way. If Ashdin was right about the original purpose of this place, then it was going to be populated by DeSilvo’s loyal and trusted employees. It wasn’t designed as a prison, and the ArtInts aren’t programmed to treat us like prisoners who’ll likely try to escape.”
Unless the ArtInts who told you that were programmed to lie about it,Norla thought. But no sense pursuing that sort of paranoid reasoning, or they’d be paralyzed by fear of imaginary dangers. “Point taken. DeSilvo might have decided not to bother programming them for that kind of work. After all, where, exactly, would we runto ?”
“Right. Besides, if we do get caught, what’s he going to do? Lock us up? Weare locked up. He hasn’t said we can’t leave—he’s just let us assume it.”
“You’reassuming he’s going to feel the need to play fair,” Norla said. “Even if he’s left the rules fairly loose so far, heis the absolute ruler here. He could be completely arbitrary about it. Why should it matter to him whether or not he said we could leave? Why is he going to be bound by your splitting hairs about what he has or hasn’t said? He can punish us arbitrarily at any time for anything—or for nothing at all. Who’s going to stop him? Who are we going to appeal to?”
“Granted—in theory. In practice—he needs us. All of us. For what, I don’t know yet, but I do know he needs us. Does he really believe that he could get Admiral Koffield’s willing cooperation after torturing us for trying to escape?”
Norla nodded. It was a reasonable argument—but it depended on DeSilvo’s acting rationally, and in his own best interest. How hard did she want to gamble on that?
“What about our people?” she asked. “If we ask Admiral Koffield about this, he’d say no in a heartbeat.”
“I’m not so sure he would,” Yuri said. “But you’re right that he might well say no. So we don’t ask his permission.”
“That sounds closer to being childish than being ethical,” said Norla. “That’s not the sort of game I want to risk playing with the admiral.”
“You meanRetired Admiral Anton Koffield? Or is he evenretired ? He must have been declared legally dead once theDom Pedro IV was listed as lost with all hands. Either way, he’s not on active duty and has no legal authority to command, even in the Chrono Patrol. Besides,you’re notin the Chronologic Patrol. You’re an officer on a civilian vessel. Show me how he has any legal authority over us, or any legal right to dictate our behavior.”
“If I was worried about legalisms—and maybe I should be—I’d be talking about what Captain Marquez would have to say about all this.”
“As far as Marquez goes—we’re not aboard ship, we aren’t standing watches, he has assigned us no duties and given us no orders. He doesn’t even control his own vessel anymore. DeSilvo controls it. Plus, the ship’s current registration is under the name ‘Merchanter’s Dream’ withme as the captain—all fraudulent, plus it lists Marquez as my first officer under an assumed name. He’s in six kinds of violation of the law. What’shis legal authority to control us?”
“I’m not sure,” Norla admitted. “But if we decide to act on our own this way, and we get away with it, we’ll show the rest of the crew that there are no consequences to their actions. Our people are under a lot of pressure right now. If crew discipline gets pulled too hard, crew cohesion is going to start unraveling—and that gets us killed, lots of ways. We’d have come all this way, and been through all that’s happened, for nothing. Do you really want to risk that?”
“I don’twant to risk it,” Yuri said. “But Ihave to. If there really is a diehard habitat out there—hell, for all I know, they’re family! It could be. Even if they’re not blood relations, they’re Glisterns, and so am I. The only difference between us is that my family managed to get out in time, and theirs didn’t.”
“If they even exist.”
“If they exist,” Yuri agreed. “But if they do exist, and they’re that close, and we could help them, and we don’t—the group, the colony, the habitat, will die out, sooner or later. You know what it’s like for diehards. If they exist, they’ve been hanging on for something close to a century, fighting every day of every one of those years just to survive. If they exist, they’re second, third, maybe fourth generation by now. If wedon’t help them, then all of whatthey’ve been through will be for nothing.”
Norla looked at him thoughtfully but did not answer. He was speaking with far greater eloquence than she had ever heard from him.
“If they exist,”he repeated. “Let’s find out, one way or the other. Maybe they were never there at all, and DeSilvo’s just playing games with our heads. If so, we can call him on it. Maybe there was a colony, and it died out forty years ago. If so, there was nothing we could have done—but we’ll have tried, and we’ll know. Or maybe theyare there, and we can find out how many of them there are, and what kind of shape they’re in, and what they need.Then we can go to the others with real information,” he said. “Let’s go find out.”
Norla looked at him and sighed. She knew Yuri had won. It would be impossible for her to say no.
Yuri played one more card. “This could be our last chance, our only chance, to go see and find out,” he said. “Once DeSilvo tells us what the grand plan is, my guess is we’re going to be busy. Way too busy to slip away without someone stopping us. Maybe we’ll even leave Glister, and never come back.”
“All right, all right. Let’s leave all that for the moment,” she said. “Show me how you found it.”
Yuri pulled out a datapad, set it down on the top of a waist-high equipment locker in the center of the room, and started showing her imagery. “I started with the name, and what DeSilvo said about the location. Last Chance Canyon, seven hundred miles south of here. We brought down copies of most of our data files from theDom Pedro IV when we landed—including the imagery from our planet scan.”
Norla nodded. Upon arrival, theDom Pedro IV had gone into a close-in polar orbit of Glister, such that the ship tracked over a different swatch of the planet with each orbit. They had spotted DeSilvo City easily—mainly because Oskar DeSilvo had done everything he could to make sure the place was noticed. But they had scanned the remainder of the planet, just to be sure.
“So, anyway, here are images of the area due south of us, centered on a point seven hundred kilometers from here.” Yuri brought up pictures of a frozen and all-but-featureless wilderness of ice, snow, and bare rock. “What I’ve got here is the integrated data from all of our overflights—the infrared, the visual, everything, merged into one set of image files. Now, we didn’t get anything at all on infrared of our scan of the area in question,” he said. “Nothing at all that looked anything like a nonnatural source. At first I thought that meant there was nothing there. DeSilvo was just messing with us when he said there was a colony. But then I realized that heat would be thelast thing diehards on Glister would waste. They’d be very well insulated and use every kind of cogeneration system they could to squeeze every last bit of energy out of heat sources. There’d still be some waste heat, of course—second law of thermodynamics. But where would it go?”
“Maybe there was no infrared signature because there was no waste heat because there was no colony producing it,” Norla said.
“Or maybe we just didn’t see it. Don’t forget theDom Pedro IV isn’t a spy ship or anything. It’s got pretty good sensors, not top-of-the-line stuff. We had to do some adapting just to configure them for the planet scan.”
“Fair enough. But still, we werelooking for that size of installation. And even a smallish settlement would throw a lot of heat, no matter how efficient it was.”
“I know,” Yuri conceded. “I knew about all that, but then I got to thinking. I’ve read up a little on diehards. They usually work pretty hard to keep a low profile. They hide as much as they can. So they’d hide their waste heat output as much as they could, design things so that would happen. So—what would dissipate heat energy very quickly, and continuously, so that it wouldn’t have a chance to accumulate and raise the temperature enough to register on a medium-grade sensor scan from orbit?”
“I don’t know. Magic, maybe. Yuri, all this isn’t looking for the colony. You can’t see them because they’re not there, not because they’ve got some superadvanced high-powered cooling system.”
Yuri smiled. “But that’s what I was going to tell you. Theydo have that kind of cooling system. It’s called ‘wind.’ ” He worked the datapad and brought up the images he wanted. “I told myself, if they’re in a canyon, they must be there for a reason. They’d have picked a spot that had some sort of advantages for them.”
“Unless they just stayed wherever they wound up by chance and remained there because they felt stubborn.”
“I doubt it. As I said, I’ve been doing some homework on diehards these last few days,” Yuri said. “There have been studies. The groups that survive are the ones that do something sensible about their situation. They might be crazy enough to stay behind deliberately after an evacuation, or unlucky enough to get themselves stranded—but from then on they’re sensible enough to do some real engineering, hunker down in temporary shelters while they scout locations and build themselves a permanent base. So my guess is they found a place that would do them some good, one way or another. Like this one.”
The image on the datapad zoomed in on one area, centering on a canyon system shaped like an upside-down capital “T,” with the horizontal arm running almost exactly east–west, and the vertical arm pointed due north. “It took me most of last night to find it,” he said. “That formation is 720 kilometers southeast of here. That’s a good enough match with DeSilvo’s description that I was a little suspicious of it at first.”
“So what good does a T-shaped canyon do them?” Norla asked.
“The prevailing winds average about thirty kilometers an hour, due east,” said Yuri. “Canyon effects would probably amplify that quite a bit in the upper reaches of the east–west arm of the canyon, and give you a lot of turbulence in the region where the two arms meet. The part of the north–south arm farther away from the east–west arm would have much gentler wind conditions and be well out of most of the heavier weather generally.”
“So what good does all that do?”
“Wind power,” said Yuri. “Inexhaustible, always-there power. The wind generates electricity, and you can store or use the electricity however you want. Low-tech, maybe, but a lot easier to maintain than other power sources. The same wind can blow away your waste heat through radiators. If they placed their habitat in the shallower part of the north–south arm, they’d get direct sunlight coming in from the south. That gives you a chance to hang solar power collectors, plus you have shelter from the prevailing winds.”
“Sounds great,” Norla said. “So why can’t we see them?”
“We can,” said Yuri. “If you know what to look for, and you look hard enough.” He zoomed in closer to the central area of the canyon. “There. This is from the daytime pass images. Very regularly spaced shadows being cast on the canyon floor. Each one like a dandelion—a long stalk, a fuzzy head. I read those as windmills. Rapidly spinning vanes supported by a central pillar.” He flipped to another image. “This melt pattern in the ice downwind of the north–south canyon. I didn’t see anything like it in any of the other canyons, but it’s very prominent. There’s a flow pattern, as if something were melting the ice, and it was refreezing almost at once. The wind is doing the cooling, obviously—but what’s causing the heating? Note the pattern of very dark spots justabove the melt pattern. Waste heat dumps? Trash dumps? And there. Right in the center of the north–south canyon, right where there’s maximum exposure to direct sun—there’s a very regular pattern of hexagonal shapes, right in the best spot to aim solar collectors. You can see that the hexagonal shapes are all distorted in the same way. It looks like they’re tilted, down and to the left, each by the same amount. Work out where the sun is above the horizon, where theDom Pedro was, figure the angles, and tilt a regular hexagonal by the resulting amount—that’sthe shape you get!”
“You lost me,” said Norla. “What does all that mean?”
“It means those are regular hexagonal panels aimed straight at the sun!”
Norla looked carefully at the images, then, just as carefully, looked at Yuri Sparten. She honestly couldn’t tell, from either examination, if he was for real. She could, if she tried just a little, imagine that she saw whathe saw in those images, and she could even allow that his interpretation was more or less reasonable. But it could just as well be flaws in the detectors, artifacts of whatever image enhancers he had used, natural patterns that chanced to look like something regular and artificial, or maybe even something less than that—random noise on the images, with just enough chance regularity that the human eye could force into the patterns it wanted to see. Or maybe he had spotted something, real structures, made by human beings—but made before Glister collapsed and having nothing to do with imaginary diehards.
“You can’t tell for sure, can you?” Yuri asked, studying her face as closely as she was studying his. “You can’t say for certain whether or not I’m imagining the whole thing.”
Why deny it?she asked herself. “No,” she said. “No, I can’t.”
Yuri nodded. “Which leaves us back atmaybe, ” he said, his voice quiet and intense. “Suppose we leave it at that?” he asked. “Then what?”
“What do you mean, then what? That would be the end of it.”
“I suppose,” he said. “But it might not.” He tapped his fingers on the datapad. “How soon would it be until you started wanting to see these images again, just to get another look? Just to besure there was nothing? And how sure would you be then if you aren’t sure now? And suppose maybe DeSilvodoes lock things down tomorrow. Or maybe he packs us all aboard theDom Pedro IV and hauls us off somewhere. How will you feel when you want to see the images again, even though there won’t be any chance to do anything about it?”
She stared at him, eyeball-to-eyeball, then blinked, literally and metaphorically. “All right,” she said. “We’ll go. Just this once I let you play mind games with me. Try it again, and you lose. Clear enough?”
“Clear.”
“We go out. We do a flyover. A careful flyover, in case they don’t like strangers and don’t mind shooting them down.We don’t land. If there are five hundred freezing diehards right below us, and we have five hundred blankets,we don’t land. We don’t get curious and change our minds over the site. If we can’t tell for certain if anyone is alive, just from a flyover, but we see a hatch we could open and check,we don’t land. We get information. We bring it back and tell the people here about it. No heroics. Is that all clear?”
Yuri grinned. “Yeah, sure. All clear.”
But she could tell that he was only hearing the words he wanted to hear, just as he had only seen on the images what he wanted to see.
“All right,” she said. “Now show me this aircar you found.”
“It’s over here,” he said, setting off through the dim recesses of the big chamber. Yuri led her off through the jumble of machines and vehicles that crowded the floor of the cargo center. “Here,” he said at last. “This is it.”
Norla didn’t speak. She walked around the stubby little craft, studying it carefully. Judging by appearances, the aircar was a Glister precollapse model that had been swept up in some general salvage run made by one of DeSilvo’s larger land transport vehicles. Itseemed to be intact, but that was a long way from a flying vehicle she’d be willing to trust her life to on a fourteen-hundred-kilometer round-trip flight. “Yuri, this thing has to be at least a hundred years old. Literally.”
“I know,” Yuri said.
“And it must have been sitting in some pretty rough weather for a long time, too.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Yuri, staring at the beat-up old craft as if he had never seen anything so beautiful. “But what’s it matter? Either it works, or it doesn’t.”
“I can tell you right now, it doesn’t work,” said Norla. “Somethinghas to have given out on it since the last time anyone flew it. And it’s not either-or. Suppose itsort -of works—and then sort-of breaks down, halfway back from our flyover?” But still, she had to admit, at least to herself, it did seem to be in fairly good shape—and aircars were built to last. And the idea of flying again, of getting out, of seeing the landscape, was starting to appeal to her.
Besides, she reminded herself, the aircar had been in a deep freeze for something like a century. She had been kept in cryostorage a lot longer than that when DeSilvo sabotaged theDom Pedro IV, andshe was still in working order. More or less. It might be about time for her to have her head examined, for example. Instead, she found the release latches on the car’s forward access panel and popped it open. She peered inside and nodded thoughtfully. Not too bad, really. “We’re going to be on this job for a while,” she announced. “Maybe a day or so. We’ll need tools. And let’s go get some warmer clothes on before we start.”
It was closer to three days before Norla slammed the last access panel shut and stepped back from the aircar, at last satisfied with the vehicle’s state of repair.
“We’re done,” she said. “Give it a try.”
Yuri climbed into the passenger compartment and flipped the main power switch. The display board lit up smoothly, all systems green. “Nice work, Norla,” he said. “Very nice work indeed.”
“Not bad,” she allowed, wiping her hand on a rag. Not only had the job taken longer, but they also had to avoid attracting attention.
All of them—Koffield, Marquez, and the rest—were marking time, waiting for word of how the issue of Ignition had been resolved, one way or the other, on Greenhouse. All the ship’s company had been through a lot in recent times, and fortunately, Marquez saw no reason to assign a lot of busywork. Everyone had a light work schedule. But even if they didn’t have much in the way of official work to do while DeSilvo was in semi-seclusion, they still had to show up at mealtimes and make an appearance in the evenings, and do so without obvious signs of having spent half the night sweating and cursing over a recalcitrant levitation unit.
After getting a few quizzical glances and odd smiles, it dawned on Norla that some members of the group had noticed that the two of them were both missing for hours at a time, and that at least some of them had concluded that she and Yuri were carrying on a torrid affair. Her first reaction was to blush violently in embarrassment. Her second thought was to wonder what Admiral Koffield would think. Yuri was so much younger than she was! But her third thought was that it made an excellent cover story. The etiquette of space crews was to be very respectful of privacy. The others would not ask any awkward questions. Better still, no one would dream of looking for them, or trying to find out what they were doing.
And so she had left it alone, not even telling Yuri what she suspected. He would want to burst in at the next meal and deny it all at the top of his lungs, and that would spoil everything. Better to let it alone. The way that she probably should have left the aircar alone. But it was too late now.
“So let’s go,” Yuri said.
“Not just yet,” Norla said. “One: We need some sleep first. It’ll be a long flight. Two: We need to make sure we have provisions enough for the trip, plus a good flight plan so we can get there and back. Three”—she gestured toward the window—“it’s the middle of the night out there. We have to wait for daylight.”
Yuri’s face fell as he looked out the window, but even he had to concede the point. “All right,” he said. “But we leave as close to first light as we can.”
“We will,” Norla said. “We will.”
Norla was thinking ahead to the end of the flight, toward the end of the day. She had no desire to try to find DeSilvo City in the dark.
For that matter, she was far less sure than she had been that shewanted to find Last Chance Canyon, whatever the lighting conditions. But she was committed. It was far too late for such worries.
On the other hand,she told herself,it’s never too soon for regrets.
“In the morning, then,” she said. “Let’s get some sleep.”