by Patty Jansen
Everything was very dusty, so maybe it had sat here all that time.
Primitive as the shop looked, I’d noticed that the roof was made of solar panels when I came in. There was a bank of batteries in the corner and I’d noticed a charging station with a couple of differently shaped docks, currently empty. Was that for charging weapons or equipment? It made me vaguely uncomfortable that I didn’t recognise the make.
The shop owner finished his conversation.
He turned around. “There ya go, mista.” He shoved a reader across the counter. “Pilot.” He pointed at the screen with a dirty, yellow-nailed hand. It showed a map of the area, the same as I’d been given by Tamu with directions on how to come here. He dragged it across to where a small local airport was marked on the map. A box popped up on the screen with details of an ID with the CF designation, whatever that might mean. The man’s name was Henri Dubois. CF stood for what? The shop owner pointed. “Pilot.”
I copied the ID to my reader and sent Mr Dubois a message: Are you available for hire?
He must have been bored, because he replied almost straight away. I’m free right now.
Good. I’m coming over.
I gave the shop owner the thumbs up. “Thank you for the help.”
“Hey, what about money?”
“What money?”
“You give me money for getting you pilot.”
“According to my contact, you get money from the people we hire.” Tamu had warned me about this guy’s double-dipping. Seemed she was not quite as dumb as Thayu would have her.
He glowered, but didn’t protest.
Ha. Mr Wilson: one, corrupt officials: zero.
I walked out of the shop, collecting Thayu and Nicha near the door.
It was almost midday and the light was so bright that my eyes needed a bit of time to get used to the glare.
The vehicle we’d hired sat in the blazing sun. Evi sat in the driver’s seat and Telaris perched on top of the curious-looking frame that I presumed was for attaching a bank of solar cells.
Surrounding the vehicle was a sea of kids and teenagers holding out their hands to them, going ferengi, ferengi!
One of them shouted. A number of the youths turned around, and they took off. All the others followed.
Well, what the hell.
I walked across the cracked pavement and climbed into the car. It had been sitting in the sun, and the seats were like hotplates. Ouch, my butt.
“Mashara, what was all that about?” I asked Evi and Telaris.
“That was what I said earlier,” Evi said. “They came out as soon as you were gone.”
“Any idea what they wanted?”
“Mashara couldn’t begin to guess.”
Money, probably.
“I got the name of a pilot,” I told them. “Henri Dubois. Usually hangs around the airport.” I felt like a real bright spark when I said that. Where else would we find pilots anyway? I could imagine Thayu rolling her eyes. Thankfully, she didn’t. I wasn’t in the mood for smart remarks.
“All right, let’s go there, then.”
Telaris let himself slide off the frame and dropped into the back seat. Thayu got in next to me. The gun in her arm bracket made her jacket bulge. Just looking at her made me sweat. It was much too hot for a jacket.
But I was glad for the car, primitive and noisy as it was. With the dry desert wind in my sweaty face, life almost became bearable.
CHAPTER 15
* * *
DESPITE HIS EUROPEAN name, the pilot was a local. Not as old as the fellow in the shop—in fact, I could have believed him to be still a teenager—and quite a bit lighter-skinned, with curly, rather than frizzy, hair and in possession of his front teeth.
He smiled and held his hand out to me. “Henri Dubois. I got your message.”
His Isla was perfect. Canadian, I thought. That surprised me. “I’m Martin Spencer and these are my assistants.” Time to pull out the fake ID. “I’m a geologist for Nations of Earth. We need to go to the Afar Rift Research station. Can you take us there?”
His eyes widened briefly. “The station is dead, mister. Abandoned. No one there. About to go under water.”
“I know. We’ll be making climate measurements.”
“We have only one climate, Mister, and that is fucking hot. It’s dangerous out there. I take you to the coast. It’s much nicer.”
“Nice try, but why don’t you let me decide that? You can either do the job or you don’t and then I’ll go and find someone else to do it.”
He digested that for a moment. Then he asked, “You pay creds or trade?”
“Creds. Three hundred a day, in return for the hire of your time, the plane and fuel. Oh, and your silence.”
His eyes lit up briefly. I could see the greed flash behind his eyes. But he didn’t agree straight away as he would have if there’d been no objections or risks to circumnavigate. Which, obviously, there were.
“Interested?”
“I might be.”
“We’ll be gone for a few days at the very least. You’ll provide our transport. You get paid on arrival back here.”
“You kidding, sir? Most likely, you don’t return. That’s not a safe place where you’re going, and I like to have my bases covered.”
“I think you don’t understand. You’re coming with us all the way. You’ll get to see what we’re doing and get to explain it to the locals. That’s my deal, take it or leave it.”
He snorted. “You play hardball.”
“I need you when we’re there, too. While we’re there, we’ll want you to fly some survey trips around the shores of the sea.”
Another double take. “It’s dangerous, Mister. Because of rogues.”
“You tell me where it’s dangerous, and we’ll avoid those areas.”
He thought for a little while. Nodded. “It will be extra.”
“We can talk about that.”
“Are there any other trips you want to take when you’re there?”
Good. He was weighing up his chances of seeing his money.
“It depends on what we find when we get there. There is an area of hot springs I may wish to visit if it’s still here, and I want to survey the surrounding countryside. Do you want to do it? Because I’d like to get there today. If you don’t want to do it, I’ll find someone else.”
“No, no, I’ll do it. When do you want to go?”
“We’re ready when you are.”
Still another double take. “In a hurry? That will be ex—”
“Take it or leave it.”
He scowled. “Come with me.”
He preceded us over the cracked and dusty concrete. I guessed he needed the job after all.
There was a lot of activity at the airport, with heavy long-range aircraft probably coming in from the north, from Europe. They were big fat things constructed of the lightest carbon-fibre with double-walled, helium-filled frames and huge solar wing areas including expandable sections that would unfold like an umbrella once in the air.
I glanced inside the cargo hold of one of those giant planes. It was filled with crates wrapped in yellow plastic. The black lettering across the side was too small for me to read. Foreign aid? Also, was this where those guns had been found?
“It’s food and things,” Henri said when he noticed me looking at the crates. “Especially because of the election, the rich countries give us lots of things. The president wants to make sure that he has a job after the election.”
I expected Henri’s plane to be some old thing dating from last century. A single propeller six-seater or something like that. The other small pla
nes at the airport were all standard, battered-up models, some of which had to be almost two hundred years old—patched up, hand-painted old rattlers.
It was worse. He had a bloody power glider.
I stared at the flimsy structure thinking, There’s just no way I’m going in that thing, and he was already loading the bags in a shopping basket like contraption attached under the main wing structure. The wing-sails were paper-thin, dirty, but on closer inspection turned out to be a complete solar sail on carbon-fibre movable struts. The cabin was made from a metallic-looking material I recognised as some sort of carbon, with brackets of a light brown alloy I had never seen.
Well, what the hell. This place continued to throw curve balls at me.
We climbed into the cabin. Evi and Telaris behind the pilot’s seat, then me, and Nicha and Thayu elected to sit at the very back.
Nicha, sitting across from me gave me a suspicious look. I guessed he wanted to ask me if I thought that was going to be safe or make a comment on the origin of this plane, but we had agreed not to speak Coldi, because we shouldn’t be advertising ourselves too much.
Henri climbed in, making the whole construction wobble ominously.
The glider hooked up to the launcher, which propelled us to a less-than-impressive speed and I was convinced, glad almost, that the bird wasn’t going to fly. But then there was a soft click and solar sails unfolded from underneath the wings. Dark film soaked up sunlight. Thin material billowed full of hot air. Hot air collected under the wings. I could see it shimmer. The upper surface of the fabric became silvery as the photovoltaic cells activated. Holy shit; it had a nanofilm. The vehicle picked up speed of its own. The single jet engine fired, smooth. This thing was designed for stealth.
Nicha was staring out the window. I could see that look on his face that said that he was trying to figure out some technical detail. He was surprised, impressed. Nicha wasn’t often impressed.
The plane levelled out, giving us a view of the entire city in its dusty, jumbled-up glory. To the right in the hazy distance, I could see the azure blue waters of the ocean. A long pier jutted out towards the horizon, with a couple of behemoth freight ships moored on either side. This was the main importance of this town. This was why everyone tried to control this little speck of land and why everyone was trying to buy up land and warehouses.
We soon left the city behind and flew over a rural area with little green fields and mud brick houses.
Soon after that we encountered the rugged terrain that we had crossed while coming here in the bus.
I stared out the window. The country that glided below us looked alien. Jagged pink-brown hills strewn with rocks. The slopes were steep and sometimes the strata exposed by erosion were so clear that it looked like someone had hewn steps in the hillsides. It was basalt, according to Martin Spencer’s notes, volcanic country, and the area where we were headed contained many active volcanic features.
The only vegetation were little bits of grass in the valleys or the occasional bush. Occasionally, too, there would be a faint dusting of green over the landscape, where some rain had fallen recently. There might be a badly-eroded road, a few abandoned shacks or the remnants of a few fields. The endlessness of it was depressing.
The plane was quite fast but Henri informed us that it would be almost dark before we arrived.
I tried to sleep, but I could never sleep well on flights, so I watched the landscape change underneath us, not in a good way. If anything, the surface became more like the pictures I’d seen from Asto. More hostile, with jagged rocky outcrops poking through sand dunes, with dried up lakebeds having deeply cracked soil, with clouds of dust blowing across the land.
Then the landscape became more alien still. Sharp columns of stone poked to the sky. The valleys were scarred and pitted, marred with vast tracts of saltpans of different colours: bright yellow, green, orange, pink. Quite a lot of water for the fact that we were in a desert.
The earth’s crust was at its thinnest in this region of the world and it was being ripped apart at amazing rates. The Earth’s tectonic plates moved under each other in the Pacific. That was why we always did earthquake drills in New Zealand when I was young. But here was the spot where plates were being ripped apart and new earth formed and cooled. Apparently, geological features moved apart as much as a couple of metres per year. Yellow pools, pink pools, green pools, vents spouting poisonous gas. This was the arse’s end of the world, and the world had been eating beans.
“Interesting,” Thayu remarked. “It’s got the colours of Asto and the steam vents of Barresh. I wonder if it smells as bad.”
“I bet it does.”
I gave her the quick rundown of what I’d read in my notes. The deepest point of the Afar Rift was a good deal below sea level. In 2097, a combinations of the earthquakes that might have been caused by the underground testing of fusion weapons by an Indian company and rising sea levels in the Red Sea was thought to have allowed seawater to seep into the area through underground aquifers. It currently filled an area half the size of England, and was up to twenty-five metres deep and salty as old boots.
Land and the new ocean bled into each other with areas of salt pools and mud flats. We flew over this area when sunlight was starting to turn golden.
The water below us was pink-brown, with pools of green and yellow to the side. The sand dunes that surrounded the water were orange, pierced by jagged pinnacles of rock that pointed at the sky like deathly fingers.
There were several islands in the new sea, and the research centre lay on one of those: a couple of dusty and forlorn buildings surrounded by rocky ground that sloped to the water. It was kind of strange when it came into view. A desolate landscape with a rim of encrusted salt at the water’s edge that had grown over everything on the ground: rocks, a discarded tyre and an oil drum. There was no vegetation at all.
The plane circled over the island a few times and put down on the flat next to the lake. When Henri opened the door to the cabin, a blast of heat came in that was so strong that at first I expected it to be a hot stream from the engine. Except the plane didn’t have much of an engine to speak of, and it was at the top of the cabin, nowhere near the door. I’d expected the water to have a cooling influence, but it didn’t. Holy crap. The heat radiated through the soles of my shoes. I’d have to dial up the adaptation a notch.
We took out our luggage and walked over the sand flat to the buildings that looked even more forlorn on the ground. People had come past in the five years it had lain abandoned and scrawled slogans over the walls. There were remains of a fire on the doorstep, and a couple of empty bottles.
The soil around it was cracked and dry. While walking across it, the crust broke and my foot sank into a layer of soft mud that covered the top of my boot.
“Holy shit, we have to watch this stuff.”
I pulled my foot out. The soft goo was bright yellow.
CHAPTER 16
* * *
THE RESEARCH STATION’S box-like residential building was so hot that it almost hurt to breathe the air inside. We opened the doors and windows, and the breeze that came through was a little cooler, if extremely dry. It stank of sulphur. Everything around here did.
The research station’s air-conditioning was fried. Thayu spent some time trying to get it going, but too much of the insides of the machine had been fused together by an electrical fault, and rusted over because of the salt-laden air.
We inspected the living quarters. Sweat was running down my back, and Henri’s face was shining with it. Evi and Telaris remained on the veranda with the excuse that we needed a lookout.
Thayu and Nicha didn’t care about the heat. I didn’t care too much because I could take an extra dose of adaptation, but I worried about Henri. The station had closed years ago because people h
ad died from heat stress after the electrical meltdown. Henri was our only way of getting out of the place. Yet when I asked him about coping with the heat, he said he was fine, albeit in a slightly nervous way.
We allocated rooms: one for me and Thayu and one for Nicha and Henri and one for Evi and Telaris, although they hadn’t yet come inside. We unpacked our food supplies. Henri looked suspiciously at the packets of red-coded sauce.
He didn’t say much, watching with wide eyes. He seemed too innocent for the type of job he did. I asked him some questions. Yes, he had grown up in Canada, but had left during the North American crisis. There were no jobs, he said, no nothing if you came from the wrong part of town. People were just being shot in the street and their only crime was to be poor. Was it any wonder that unrest had broken out and that people with extremist views on both sides had gone to battle?
He was black because his mother came from Ethiopia so he had gone to stay with his family. He had learned to fly locally. To the questions where he had gotten the money for such an advanced plane, he merely smiled. Crime, I suspected. Smuggling of something or rather. I still wondered what the CF on his pass stood for, but I didn’t ask because I could look it up.
We ate from our rations around the rickety table in the single kitchen-living room. At least us four did. Evi and Telaris seemed to prefer to stay outside. Both the heat and the tense conversation were pressing.
I explained to Henri what we wanted to do tomorrow: survey as much of the shoreline as was feasible and take photographs of the soil and geological features.
He asked if we knew that we would need permission from the local ruler to fly over the shore to the north. I said we did. We planned to get that permission.
He laughed, uneasily.
He still had all his teeth.
“Don’t you think he’ll give it to us?” I asked, innocently.
“Well, um . . . he’ll want to know who you are.” He glanced at Thayu.
