Rift (10 page)

Mitya had taken to sleeping under the galley food prep table. There was no privacy to be had except here in the compartment allotted for meal prep, where walls and a door were thought necessary to keep dust out of the dinner. The only other rooms besides the main dome were the Captain’s quarters, the toilets, and the clean room for the geo cannon. At night the crew inflated their mats every which way on the dome floor, with officers preferring the perimeter wall, leaving lesser individuals to congregate in the middle. This often left Mitya next to Oran, whose constant hazing inched ever closer to outright meanness.

This morning Mitya deflated his mat and crawled out from under his table just in time to meet Koichi as he ducked through the flap of the galley door. Koichi, a specialist second class in chemical systems, did double duty as galley chief.

“Looking for scraps?” Koichi said, one eyebrow raised.

“No sir,” Mitya said. He had learned that taking people’s gibes at face value saved him from complicated decisions like how to respond to sarcasm and insults.

Koichi began selecting his breakfast menu, a choice among wet and dry cereal and two kinds of re-meat. As Mitya laid out the bowls, he heard voices on the other side of the galley wall. An argument, from the sound of it.

“She doesn’t have the depth, damn it, you know that!”

Another responded: “I’ve said I need you on the technical end, Stepan. Leave the administration to Cody.”

“Administration? We’re a damn sight beyond administration! We’re stuck in the middle of nowhere and falling behind schedule. At this rate it’ll take months!”

“No, it
won’t
take months.” Now Mitya realized it was the Captain speaking.

“Damn it, Gabriel, we’ve still got calibration of the model and tests!”

“Stepan, Stepan. I understand that. But
someone
needs to coordinate the science team. We could do worse than Val Cody.”

“By rights, it’s my job—you know that. It’s a bitter thing to report to a woman fifteen years my junior!”

“Don’t think of it that way, Stepan, it’s—”

“Don’t tell me how to think!”

Koichi caught Mitya’s eye. “Go check the water gauges,” he muttered.

Mitya shuffled toward the door as the Captain responded, “It’s temporary, Stepan. When the time comes, I’ll be grateful you helped me out on this.”

As Mitya emerged into the central dome the two men noticed him and stopped their conversation. As soon as he was headed away, he heard their muffled voices, urgent and spiked with anger.

Over at the input valve for the water purification system, Mitya checked the readouts for contaminants, doing a quick scan for aluminum, methane, bicarbonate acid, iron chlorides, sulfuric acid, selenium, tellurium, and the rest of the caustic brew of the Rift area. All in normal ranges. The filters, awash in a solution of ruthenium disulfide and other purification catalysts, registered within tolerances. It was a make-work task that Mitya was sure they weren’t leaving to a thirteen-year-old.

He took the long way back to the galley, passing the clean room. This took up a quarter of the dome, a great wall of translucent resin from floor to ceiling, slightly concave under the sucking pressures of the air filtration fans inside, venting particulates out of the dome. As one of the crew ducked through the door flap, Mitya snatched a quick peek, and was rewarded
with a fleeting view of a draped assemblage the size of a shuttle passenger cabin.

“Curious about the cannon, Mitya?”

Mitya swirled to find Captain Bonhert looking down at him with a not-unfriendly look.

“Yes sir.”

“Quite a piece of machinery, eh?”

“Yes sir.” When the Captain lingered a moment, Mitya asked, “How are we going to get it down into the valley?”

“Good question, Mitya. How would you do it?”

“I’d build it to disassemble in sections, then take it down in the shuttles, piece by piece.”

The Captain’s broad face cracked sideways into a smile. “Well now, that’s exactly what we plan to do. Good thinking, Mitya. Could be you have some of your mother’s engineering in you. That so?”

“I hope so, sir.” He very much did hope so, for his mother had been a top engineering officer.

“I was thinking, Mitya, perhaps you could lend a hand with something.”

“Me, sir?” Voice cracking.

“Our situation is serious, Mitya. We may need to ask everyone to give a hundred and ten percent. Are you up to it?”

“Yes sir! I’m pretty good on computers; I even do a little quantum processing, sir, or anything in math or chemistry.”

Captain Bonhert smiled wider still. “Good, good. That’s just fine. But are you up for something that might be dangerous?”

“Dangerous? Oh yes, sir, I’m not afraid of danger.”

The Captain’s smile took on a tinge of irony, an expression Mitya had special antennae for. He realized he sounded like a child. “Whatever you need, Captain,” he added, figuring it for something Stepan might say.

“Good. We’ll be getting a field unit together this
morning to take readings at the vent. We need a strong back and a man who can follow orders. Can we count on you, Mitya?”

His mood soared. “Yes, sir!” At that moment he would have jumped into the Rift if Captain Bonhert had needed it of him.

“Report to Lieutenant Tsamchoe, then.”

As Bonhert turned away, Mitya blurted: “I never meant to horn in on the shuttle, Captain. It was an accident. I was just there and got pushed inside.” He’d waited six days to tell somebody that, but he was shocked he’d said it to the Captain himself.

Bonhert regarded Mitya kindly. “I’m glad you’re here, Mitya. We need some of your enthusiasm.”

That didn’t seem likely to Mitya, but he didn’t mind hearing it anyway.

“You’ll serve me well if you help keep crew spirits up and work hard.”

He paused and waited, so Mitya threw in a “Yes, sir.”

Bonhert continued: “Anyone with a bad attitude, I’d like to know about that person. You can report directly to me. No matter
who
it is, you talk directly to me. Agreed?”

“Yes, Captain.” As Bonhert walked away, Mitya drew a deep breath, filling his lungs with air for what seemed the first time in a week. Then he strode across the dome to the galley.

Koichi looked up at him, raising an eyebrow at his tardiness.

“I won’t be able to help you with breakfast today,” Mitya said.

“And just why would you think that?” Koichi was pouring boiling water into the cereal pot, and by the look in his eye he’d just as soon pour it on Mitya.

Mitya kept his voice studiously neutral. “Captain has me helping out with a field test in the Rift today.”

Koichi looked dead blank at him, maybe gauging whether Mitya would dare such a bald-faced lie.

“Be glad to help you tomorrow, if we’re back from the vent.” As Koichi stared, Mitya threw him a friendly smile, and ducked out to find Lieutenant Tsamchoe.

As it turned out, a strong back was all Mitya counted for, but he wasn’t complaining. Of the fourteen crew packed and ready to descend into the Rift Valley, only five of them carried gear, including him and Oran. The other nine were heavily armed, with both pistols and long, mean-looking automatics. Oran carried a pistol, he noticed. Though they didn’t trust Mitya with a gun, nothing could spoil the prospect of this adventure, not even the realization that they’d be lugging everything back out of the Rift today, back up the 1,200-foot escarpment to the dome, lest they leave anything behind for orthong sabotage.

Tenzin Tsamchoe had been into the Rift Valley already, to scout a course to the main volcanic vents, six miles into the valley. It had taken him two days to recover. Today the field expedition had reengineered breathers that made their throats feel like they were full of melted jelly, despite dissolving to microscopic thickness once implanted.

The morning grew brighter through a thin mist, but no warmer for all its brilliance. Heavy jackets and thermal caps promised to keep them warm enough, though Lieutenant Tsamchoe joked they’d walk themselves hot and then have to carry their jackets before long. As the crew set out single file, Mitya waited his turn to descend into the cut in the escarpment. As he watched, the mists thinned to gauze, revealing a wash of azure sky and then the deep valley itself. A stupefying vista lay before him, the red valley fading to purple and brown. There in the distance was a dark bank that Mitya figured must be the matching Rift Valley
wall. At this sudden shift in perspective, his stomach dropped down from its tentative perch in his body. The planet seemed to tilt out of alignment.

“By the Lord,” someone said. Even Oran was gaping at the view.

It was not possible for anything to be so big and yet contained in one vista. The mists were disappearing below them as though they were soap bubbles popping. Tatters of the valley floor swam into view, deep tubes of vertical space with the black and reds of the valley forming the bottom of the well. The sense of being up very high indeed, and having a long way to fall, was looping through Mitya’s mind.

Tsamchoe barked, “Anybody feel sick, look at your feet. Always a good idea to look where you’re walking anyway. Let’s go.”

Oran, just ahead, grinned back at Mitya, “You upchuck on my boots, you’ll lick them clean!” It was a disgusting thing to say, especially given the current state of Mitya’s stomach, but he said it friendly enough.

They left the plateau and began the descent, scrambling down a cut of black rock that mercifully enclosed them for a distance, screening the view and settling stomachs. Now and then through his breather Mitya detected faint threads of sulfur and chlorine, slightly unnerving and intriguing at the same time. No scrubbed and sanitized environment, this. The planet was a stew of alien smells and untidy geology. And there would be more strangeness: great hard-shelled insects, as big as your arm, Tsamchoe said, and birds in flocks. And crimson plants and maybe lava erupting if they were lucky. Or luckier yet, an orthong.

Mitya’s stomach churned as they emerged out of a narrow rock passage and beheld the colossal views of the Rift zone. He didn’t
think
it was fear, but rather hoped that the queasiness came from the sense of
wall-less distance, which, despite its beauty, did not sit well with his breakfast.

Forty-three miles away was the high fault that had once been close neighbor to the one they now descended. Twenty million years ago, a level plain had existed here. Directly below it lay the great juncture of one of Lithia’s crustal plates, and these two pieces were riding the mantle’s rocky currents away from each other at the speed of a growing fingernail. As the land stretched, the weak, extended crust allowed magma to rise, bulging slowly into a great hill. Finally the swelling dome split across the top. While the dome continued to rise, a miles-long slice of rock along the crack slipped downward, forming a notch. That was the beginning of the valley.

Over the millennia the valley floor stretched, widening that notch, the floor of which cracked, inviting fountains of magma from deep chambers in the mantle. One of them was the great plume, the one that reached up from the depths, and that the nanotech probes would follow, swimming against the stony current, to begin their dispersal of mantle heat, quieting the engine of the volcanoes, the source of all their troubles.

That plume was a convenient path to the heart of the world. Beginning at the outer boundary of the molten layer of Lithia’s core, its upward-creeping rock described a thirty-mile-wide conduit through the mantle until, about sixty miles from the surface, the pressure eased off enough to allow the plastic rock to liquefy, where it ballooned into magma chambers in the crust. This deep mantle plume was also the source of a deadly volatile—chlorine, a taste of the primordial mantle, with its rocky makeup laced with trapped gases. They knew enough to avoid any valley low points, where the chlorine would lie in heavy pools.

Mitya trudged across a tumbled mass of broken rock slumped at the bottom of the cliff. His balance
was not the best on an incline, especially carrying fifty pounds on his back; it seemed he was in a semi-controlled state of falling, with rocks shifting under his feet as he plunged downward.

When he reached the valley floor he was sweating and tired, but the team marched on, except for Lieutenant Tsamchoe, who was waiting for him.

“How are you doing, Mitya?”

“Fine, sir. I’m hot, though.” He unzipped his jacket, flooding his upper body with a cool influx of valley air.

Tsamchoe fell in step beside him. “You should keep the jacket on, though. I’m not sure what kind of weather we’ll have, but the rain around here will tend to be acid, and the sun isn’t much better, as pale as you are.”

“The rain is
acid
?”

Tsamchoe flashed a broad smile. “A
little
acid. Won’t kill you, but might sting. Sulfur trioxide reacts with any precip. The valley here is an extreme environment. Just a few little things to watch out for—nothing we can’t handle.”

“No sir,” Mitya said, adding acid rain to his list of wonders. They were walking through a flat terrain of trees and scrub grass that collected in bowls of soil etched into the rock. The trees looked wrong. From reddish, woody branches rose myriad bumps like marbles stuck to a tube. Not proper trees at all, without leaves, without green. Nothing like the Earth trees of the vids.

“As a last-minute addition to the expedition, you missed my natural history lecture yesterday, when I briefed the team,” Tsamchoe was saying. “So here’s the recycled version: Nobody drinks the water. When you smell it up close, you won’t want to, but no experimenting. Don’t touch anything. No collecting. Decontamination will be hard enough without people smuggling in bird feathers and the like.

“The insects are big. No one knows what the size
limit is; they’re like Terran crabs and crocodiles in that the older they are, the bigger they are. Don’t be thinking shuttle size, be thinking in the range of one meter and less and you’ll be about right. They run like hell on a gazillion legs, usually
away
from you, so don’t get trigger-happy.”