Dark Secret (2016)

by Edward M. Lerner

  DARK SECRET

  Edward M. Lerner

  COPYRIGHT

  Dark Secret Copyright © 2012 by Edward M. Lerner.. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

  Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Science Fiction Classics, Phoenix Rider, The Stellar Guild Series, Manor Thrift and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor, LLC, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

  This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

  DARK

  (Landing Day)

  1

  The wind howled.

  Blake Westford crouched to the lee of the shuttle, struggling to maintain his grip on the not-yet-inflated shelter. Plastic sheeting billowed in the squall off the inland sea, and one by one the stones with which he had weighted the shelter’s corners rolled or bounced away. Every gust threatened to tear the flapping fabric from his hands. If it blew away, they would be sleeping in the cockpit.

  “Almost there,” Rikki Westford shouted, her breather mask and the shriek of the wind muffling her words. The gale had stirred her long ponytail into one massive snarl. Two steel pegs had bent rather than penetrate the rock-hard ground. She was tying a guy rope to her third peg—and cursed as the wind once more whipped the rope from her hands. Finally, she got the line knotted. “That’s one.”

  He grunted acknowledgment, saving his breath. Grit pelted him and skittered across the barren ground. Standing here, playing windbreak, had exhausted him, not that he had kept much wind off Rikki. His whole body ached. And flight-suit electrical heater be damned, he felt cold.

  They had cut things close, landing late in the day when the temperature dropped and the winds tended to pick up. Not that anyone had any business yet speaking of tendencies here….

  “Got another tied,” his wife shouted.

  The sun was half-vanished beneath the sea by the time they finished anchoring the shelter. The compressor kicked on with a welcome roar.

  Although the inflated structure jiggled in the wind like a bowl of Jell-O, by nightfall they, their hiking gear, and supplies for three days were settled inside. A portable heater had warmed the enclosed space almost to coziness. Their exertions done, they were able to shed their breather masks and eat a simple dinner.

  He sidled across the shelter floor to put an arm around Rikki. Her face was drawn, her hair still a tangled mess. “A good day’s work,” he said.

  She snuggled closer. “A long day’s work,” she answered.

  He was tired, too. Exhausted, in fact. But they had not been alone together since…it seemed forever. Not since Mars.

  Perhaps she had the same thought. With her free hand, she flicked off the shelter’s glow strip. Starlight and moonlight streamed through the clear fabric of the shelter—

  And the moment passed.

  The sort-of crescent overhead rivaled the Moon, but there could be no confusing the two satellites. This body was lumpy, potato-shaped, and not massive enough to have collapsed into a sphere. Only its close orbit made it seem large. A second body, looking almost as big, hung beside the first. A brilliant dot, brighter than Venus, was this world’s third, outermost moon. Nothing—not the constellations, or the spill of the Milky Way, or the splotches of dark nebulae—was familiar.

  Remembered skies served as standards of reference, if nothing else.

  Rikki was trembling. He said, “We don’t know that everyone is gone.”

  “Don’t we?” she whispered. “Why else are we here?”

  To which there was no answer. And so, beneath an alien sky, as the wind screeched and moaned, they huddled together in shared melancholy.

  *

  A dusting of snow had fallen while they slept, but the morning sun quickly burned it off. The wind had faded. After a quick breakfast they began prepping for their hike.

  “Oh-two,” Rikki read off her checklist. She looked better for having slept.

  “Two full tanks each,” he said, peering into the open knapsacks. One should be more than ample.

  “Masks.”

  “Ditto,” he said.

  The shelter would be here waiting for them when they came back down the hill that afternoon; everything else they would carry. Water bottles, ration packets, radio headsets, smart specs, batteries, first-aid kits, cleats and collapsible hiking poles, rope, flashlights and flares, hats and gloves, emergency thermal blankets, hammers and pitons, folding shovels, cameras, sample bottles…the list seemed endless. Rikki caught him shifting a part of her gear to his knapsack and took everything back. “I carry my own weight,” she snapped.

  Only, unlike Blake, she was Martian born and bred. Merely standing here, she carried four times her accustomed weight. And he could do nothing about that. He tipped his head back to kiss her. “Sorry,” he said.

  Knapsacks on their backs, in sturdy boots, flight-suit thermostats at the ready, headsets on, breather masks dangling by elastic straps on their chests, they exited the shelter. The breeze off the water smelled vaguely of mold, citrus, and salt. It wasn’t offensive, just strange.

  Apart from scattered dirty snowdrifts, the landscape was all sepias and charcoal grays. The sky had a somber green tinge, except near the horizon where a haze of dust contributed hints of pink. The sun glowered a sullen orange-red, and the barren landscape drank up that feeble excuse for illumination. There was a reason they called this world Dark.

  Blake wondered if they could learn to call it home.

  Tidal pools dotted the beach. Except for things like algae mats, spongy bits, and fronds like kelp, the pools appeared lifeless. He saw nothing more animal-like than the spongy bits. They collected samples, from pools and the slow, rolling combers alike. Even if the local biota weren’t edible (and why would they be?), maybe synth vats could do something with them.

  “Comm check?” Rikki asked.

  “Sure.” He tapped his headset. “Comm check, Endeavour. We’re ready to head out.”

  “Endeavour,” a gravelly voice answered. The mother ship hung nearby in orbit and Blake hardly noticed the delay. “You’re…up early.”

  According to shipboard time, perhaps. Here the sun had already climbed above the ridge he and Rikki would be climbing. Though basic astronomy said this was local spring, snowpack sparkled along the crest.

  “Lots to do,” Rikki said. “How are you today, Antonio?”

  “Fine.”

  “How’s our day going to be?” Blake asked.

  “Cold.”

  That much Blake already knew. “Can you give me something more to go on?”

  “When I…can…you’ll be the first…to know.” (Antonio’s speech was like that, all unnatural pauses, rhythms, and emphases—unless he got lost in his thoughts. When that happened, all anyone got from him was monosyllables.) “I don’t…understand…the weather here…yet.”

  For matters unrelated to astrophysics, that was a speech. Unless you happened upon one of Antonio’s hot buttons….

  Back when they still knew where they were, Rikki had inadvertently set their shipmate talking about food. A monologue on cooking or favorite breakfasts, Blake could have handled. Maybe, even, a monologue on pancake preferences. But fifteen minutes on the virtues of differe
nt blueberry types in pancakes? That was a bit much, because they had no blueberries.

  But except for Antonio, they would all be dead.

  “Okay,” Blake said. “If you spot anything, let us know.”

  “All right.”

  “Who else is awake?” Rikki asked hopefully.

  “No…one.”

  “We should get going,” Blake said. “We’ll call in when we reach the cave.”

  “Fine,” Antonio said.

  “Shall we?” Blake asked Rikki. He tapped off his headset.

  She shrugged to reposition her knapsack. “Sure.”

  Long shadows spilled across the desolate terrain. Along the rock-strewn shore, wavy bands of jade-green sludge marked recent storm and tidal surges. Last night’s gale had torn fissures in the algae mats, or whatever the drifting sludge was, that half-covered the inland sea. Their shuttle, looking tiny, perched five meters beyond the highest of the high-water marks.

  The topo map on his specs showed a blinking dot scarcely two klicks away. An easy enough hike—if their way wasn’t all uphill. If the oxygen even here, near sea level, wasn’t already marginal and the carbon-dioxide concentration almost toxic. If gravity wasn’t forty percent beyond standard, and the temperature just above freezing, and the rocky incline everywhere slick with melting hoarfrost.

  If the fate of—everything—did not burden every decision they made, every step they took.

  “If it had been safe to land closer,” Rikki said, “I know you would have.” She patted his arm before slipping on her breather mask. Leaning forward, she started up the hill.

  Two klicks, Blake kept telling himself as he followed, ready to catch her if she fell. Nothing to it.

  A thirty-degree average upslope was quite doable—on Mars. Here they were panting after fifty meters. Angling back and forth, improvising switchbacks, he guessed their two kilometers would end up closer to…six. They detoured around boulders and mounds of dust-speckled snow. Twice he feigned interest in stony outcroppings, giving Rikki a rest while he chipped away with his rock hammer. As the day warmed, they stepped across more and more trickles of snowmelt, the water-slicked rock shimmering like fresh tar. They seldom spoke, saving their energy for the climb.

  He wasn’t a hiker or a climber, but none of them was. No one on Endeavour was a spelunker, either. Or a geologist, or a meteorologist, or a….

  Quit whining, he told himself. Keep walking.

  “How about we break for lunch?” Rikki wheezed.

  They had at least an hour until local noon. She must be beat. Still, they were almost to the cave entrance. They had done a good morning’s work.

  “Sounds good,” he told her.

  His mask dangling about his neck, Blake chugged most of a bottle of water. When he forgot to breathe deeply, even just sitting, he felt lightheaded. By virtue of their climb, the already low atmospheric pressure would have dropped by about a tenth.

  No longer fixated on where next to set down his boots, the terrain seemed bleaker than ever. The shuttle looked puny, and the shelter beside it very inviting. There was nothing like a tree or a shrub to be seen, not as much as a scraggly weed. Life on Dark had yet to make the great leap to dry land.

  “Are you cold?” he asked.

  “Freezing, at the moment,” Rikki said. “I’m okay when we’re moving.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  He had his back to the wind, but his bare face already tingled from the cold. The higher altitude alone could explain the temperature drop, or the weather might be changing on them.

  He tapped his headset. “Endeavour, I see a line of clouds bearing down on us from the west. A weather front?”

  “Yes,” Antonio said, the connection crackling with static.

  Almost certainly the hiss was in the low-power link between Blake’s headset and the shuttle, not the shuttle’s radio link to orbit. They were at the limits of the headsets’ range; Blake had expected to set down much nearer to the caves.

  “Rain?” Rikki wondered.

  “I don’t know,” Antonio said.

  Where Blake had grown up, a sky like this was ominous. On Dark, a green sky might be the norm. “Can you make a guess?”

  Antonio finally answered, “Snow flurries, based on Earth and…Mars weather models.”

  “What good are those here?” Blake asked. Rikki gave him a dirty look.

  Antonio took no offense. “Those models are…all we have. In time…we’ll adapt them.”

  Shading his eyes with a hand, Blake looked uphill. He and Rikki were not far below the shadowed cave entrance. “Keep an eye on things. Let us know if conditions get worse.”

  “Will do.”

  Rikki was already stowing the remains and wrappings of their lunches. “Best not dawdle.”

  “Right,” he told her. “I don’t like that sky, so only a quick look around today. If the caves show promise, we’ll come back up.”

  He pretended not to notice her wince.

  An uninterrupted thirty-minute climb delivered them, both panting, to the cave mouth. A warm, steady draft poured from the opening. He heard water trickling.

  The orbital radar survey had revealed a system of caves beneath this ridge. Even a short distance underground, the temperature would be moderate. They would be safe inside from the elements, no matter the weather. They would have room to deploy Endeavour’s irreplaceable biological cargo. The nearby sea would supply their fusion reactors with deuterium. Used up close, the ship’s anti-space-junk laser could carve out a landing zone near the cave mouth, perhaps even etch a road between the caves and the shore.

  He would have liked a forest they could harvest for lumber, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not for a long time. Never, unless they managed to start a forest from seeds, for which, first, they needed to turn rock into soil, for which first—

  Big picture here, he lectured himself. This cave system could be the first step toward a viable colony.

  “We’ve reached the cave mouth and are about to go inside,” Blake radioed. “Keep watching the weather for us.”

  “Copy…that,” he made out over the hiss.

  “Let’s see what we have,” Rikki said.

  Flashlight in hand, barely having to duck, she strode into the cave. Without ducking, Blake followed.

  The beam of her flashlight, sweeping deep into the cave, paused on a rock formation. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “Rock icicles?”

  Mars had been geologically dead for so long. Did that world even have caves? “Those are called stalactites. They form from”—he needed a moment to retrieve an old memory—“calcium carbonate dissolved in dripping water.”

  “They’re beautiful,” she said.

  He tried to send images to Endeavour, but his connection to the shuttle kept dropping. His voice link was unintelligible static.

  The radar survey from orbit had suggested the entrance opened into a large space, and the echoes of their footsteps agreed. By flashlight beams alone, he couldn’t prove it. He reached into a pocket of his flight suit.

  “Flare,” he warned Rikki. With a yank on the cord, the flare ignited.

  That quickly, his hopes died.

  Rubble piles littered the chamber floor. Looking up, he saw where part of the roof had collapsed. Handing Rikki the flare, he focused his flashlight on the stump of a massive stalactite. Though wet with dripping water, the fracture surface looked flat. The break could not have happened very long ago. Certainly not geological time ago.

  An inky something meandered along the cave floor. Stepping close, he saw the zigzag was a rift, not a shadow. When he removed a glove, the rim felt knife-edged and new.

  “There’s been a…seismic event.” That he hadn’t called it an earthquake had nothing to do with precision. In subjective time, at least, the loss was too fresh. “Not long ago, either. We can’t live in these caves.”

  She sighed. “It would have been nice.”

  “Yeah. Well, there are oth
er cave systems.” Ignoring sore muscles, certain that Rikki ached more, he said, “We’d best start back down.”

  Lips pressed thin, she nodded.

  Maybe it was just the contrast with the warm air underground, but Blake shivered as they returned to the surface. He retrieved hat and gloves from his knapsack, then radioed, “This cave is a nonstarter. We’re on our way back to base camp.”

  “Walk fast,” Antonio said. “The temperature is…dropping over…that inland sea. It could…snow…more than flurries.”

  “We weren’t out of touch that long,” Blake protested.

  “Never…the less.”

  Blake could picture the shrug.

  Dark was…Dark. No world like it had ever been imagined, much less modeled. And if, by fluke, an existing weather model somehow applied? Model predictions were no better than the information that fed them. They had no sensors on the ground, and scant hours of observational data from their few weather microsats. Sudden storms might be normal here. Or not.

  “How bad?” Rikki asked. She had put on hat and gloves, too.

  “I can’t…tell.”

  “Let’s get moving,” Blake said. With luck they could break camp, pack everything onto the shuttle, and move on to the next landing zone before the cold front ran them over.

  Halfway down the hill an icy blast struck, and Blake knew they weren’t going to have that sort of luck.

  The temperature plummeted. Wind howled. The snowfall, when it hit, changed in minutes from flurries to a blizzard, like the worst nor’easter he had ever seen. Beneath the snow, where the ground temperature remained above freezing, snowmelt made every footfall treacherous.

  With rope and clips from his knapsack he linked Rikki and himself together. They got out their collapsible poles and cleats.

  What they needed, and didn’t have, was snowshoes.

  First he caught a boot tip on something hidden by snow, falling to his hands and knees, almost pulling down Rikki. He got back to his feet, and three steps later her feet flew out from under her. She went splat, flat on her back, but the snow and the knapsack cushioned the blow and she got up unharmed. Every few paces one of them went down. But for wrist loops, the hiking poles would have been long gone.