Mercury (12 page)

“Look,” he said to Molina, pointing.

For a moment Molina felt confused. Mercury has no atmosphere, he knew. There can’t be a gradual dawn, like on Earth. Then he realized that what he was seeing was the Sun’s zodiacal light, the sunlight scattered off billions of dust motes that orbited the Sun’s equator, leftover bits of matter from the earliest times of the solar system’s birth that hovered close to the star like two long oblate arms, too faint to see except when the overwhelming glare of the Sun itself was hidden, as it was now.

Molina grunted, then said, “I’d better get into the rig.”

Inside his helmet, Alexios shook his head. You never were the poetic sort, Victor. Not a romantic neuron in your entire brain. But then a sardonic voice in his head reminded him, But he got Lara, didn’t he?

By the time he had helped Molina into the climbing harness, the rim of the Sun was peeping above the horizon, sending a wave of heat washing across the desolate landscape. Alexios heard his suit ping and groan as its cermet expanded in the sudden roasting warmth. The air fans whirred like angry insects. The visor of his helmet automatically darkened.

“Ready?” he asked Molina.

He heard the man gulp and cough. Then he replied, “Yes, I’m ready.

The gully was filling with light as the Sun climbed higher against the black sky. Alexios stood by the winch as it unreeled its cable and Molina slowly, carefully, picked his way down the steep slope of the crevasse.

It’s not all that deep, Alexios saw, peering down into the ravine. Ten meters, maybe twelve. Just deep enough. He watched as Molina reached the bottom and unhitched the cable from his climbing harness.

“Good hunting,” Alexios called to him.

“Right,” said Molina faintly. His voice was already breaking up slightly, relayed from the bottom of the crevasse to one of the commsats orbiting overhead and then to Alexios’s suit radio.

In pace requiescat,
Alexios added silently.

Once he’d removed the climbing cable from his suit, Molina took in a deep, steadying breath and looked up and down the gully. It was like a long, slightly irregular hallway without a roof. One steep wall was bathed in sunlight, the other in shadow. But enough light reflected off the bright side so that he could see the uneven floor and even the shadowed side fairly well.

This must be a fault line, he told himself. Maybe it cracked open when a meteor impacted. He attached his sampling scoop to the metal arm and extended it to its full length. Not much dust on the ground, he saw. The bottom here must be exposed ancient terrain. If I can get some ratio data from the radioactives I’ll be able to come up with a rough date for its age.

It was all but impossible to kneel in the heavy, cumbersome suit, but slowly Molina lowered himself to his knees. Inside the suit he could hear its servomotors whine in complaint. He chipped out a small chunk of rock, then fumbled through the sets of equipment lying on the ground until he found the radiation counter. No sense trying for argon ratios, he told himself. The heat’s baked all the volatiles out of these rocks eons ago.

The radiation signature of uranium was there, however. Weak, but clearly discernable in the handheld’s tiny readout screen. Then he tried the potassium signature. Stronger. Unmistakable. Molina weighed the sample, then did some rough calculating on the computer built into his suit’s wrist. This sample is at least two and half billion years old, he concluded. If I can dig deeper, I should find older layers of rock.

He looked down the length of the slightly uneven corridor of rock. The floor seemed to drop away farther down. Maybe I can get to older strata without digging, he thought. I don’t have a really powerful drill with me, anyway.

It took a mighty effort to get back on his feet again, even with the servomotors doing their best. Molina blinked sweat from his eyes and called up to Alexios:

“I’m going down the arroyo about a hundred meters or so.”

It took a moment for the radio signal to bounce off the nearest commsat.

“Which direction?” Alexios asked.

Molina pointed, then realized it was foolish. He tapped at his wrist keyboard, then peered at the positioning data that came up on its display.

“North,” he said into his helmet microphone. “To your left as you face the rim.”

A silence longer than the time for the signal to be relayed off the satellite. Then, “Very well. If you go any farther, let me know and I’ll bring the tractor and rig to your position.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Molina answered immediately.

Again a delay. Finally, “Very well. I’ll wait here.”

Molina started slogging along the rock-walled chasm. That voice, he said to himself. Why should it sound so familiar?

Alexios climbed back into the tractor’s bubble of a cab and sat awkwardly in the driver’s seat. The chair was bare metal, designed to accommodate the bulky suits that the tractor crew had to wear.

No sense standing in the open, Alexios thought. The glassteel doesn’t afford that much protection against radiation, but every little bit helps. He remembered an old adage he had heard from a mercenary soldier out in the Belt: “Never stand when you can sit. Never stay awake when you can sleep. And never pass a latrine without using it.”

No latrines out here, Alexios knew. Nor out in the Belt, either. You piss into the relief tube built into your suit and you crap when you can find a toilet inside a pressurized vessel.

The Sun was halfway above the horizon now, already frighteningly large and glaring.

Alexios smiled. In another fifteen minutes or so it will dip back down and plunge this whole region into darkness again. What’s Victor going to do when the light goes away and he’s stuck down in that crevasse?

Dante Alexios sat in the cab of the tractor and watched the Sun drop toward the horizon, a twisted smile on his slightly mismatched face. Although Molina hadn’t spoken to him since he announced he was heading farther up the gully, he could hear Victor’s breathing through the open microphone in the astrobiologist’s helmet.

Alexios turned off the suit-to-suit link and called in to the base on another frequency.

“Alexios to base control.”

The reply was almost immediate. “Control here.”

“Do you have our position?”

A slight delay. Alexios could picture the controller flicking his eyes to the geographic display.

“Yes, your beacon is coming through clearly.”

“Good. Anything happening that I should know about?”

A slight chuckle. “Not unless you have a prurient interest in what the safety director and her assistant are up to.”

Alexios laughed, too. “Not as long as they keep their recreations confined to the privacy of their quarters.”

“So far. But there’s a lot of heavy breathing going on at their workstations.”

“I’ll speak to her when I get back.”

“Her? What about him?”

“Her,” Alexios repeated. “The woman’s always in control in situations like this.”

“That’s news to me,” said the controller.

There was nothing else significant to report. One of the powersats was getting some experimental shielding; otherwise, the base was running in standby mode until the IAA gave them clearance to resume their work.

Alexios clicked off the link to the base and sat back as comfortably as he could manage inside the suit. How long will it take Yamagata to go bankrupt? he wondered. And when the Sunpower Foundation does go bust, will Yamagata simply siphon more money out of his corporation? Will his son allow that? A battle between father and son would be interesting.

The Sun was dipping lower. Turning, he could see bright stars spangling the blackness on the other side of the sky. Alone with the stars. And his thoughts.

Lara. She was Molina’s wife. Had been for just about ten years now. They have a child, a son. Victor, Jr. His son, out of her body.

The pain Alexios felt was real, physical. He realized his jaws had clamped so tightly that he could hear his teeth grinding against one another.

With a physical effort, he forced himself to relax and tapped the keypad to reopen the suit-to-suit link.

“—dark down here,” Molina was saying. “My helmet lamp isn’t all that much help.”

“The Sun’s going down for a while,” said Alexios.

“How long?”

Alexios had memorized the day’s solar schedule. “Fifty-eight minutes, twelve seconds.”

“A whole hour?” Molina’s voice whined like a disappointed child’s.

“Just about.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do down in this hole in the dark for an hour? You should have told me about this!”

“I thought you knew.”

“I can’t see fucking shit down here!”

“You have the helmet lamp.”

“Big help. It’s like trying to find your way across the Rocky Mountains with a flashlight.”

“Have you found anything?”

“No,” Molina snapped. “And I won’t, at this rate.”

You won’t at any rate, Alexios replied silently. Aloud, he asked, “Do you want to come back to the tractor?”

A long silence. Alexios could picture Molina angrily weighing the alternatives in his mind.

“No, dammit. I’ll wait here until the frigging Sun comes up again.”

“I’ll move the tractor down to your location.”

“Good. Do that.”

With no atmosphere to dilute their brightness, the stars provided adequate light for Alexios to reel up the winch’s cable, disassemble the rig and pack it all back onto the tractor’s rear deck. Then he drove carefully along the rim of the crevasse to the spot where Molina sat, waiting and fuming, for enough sunlight to resume his search. A waste of time, Alexios knew. Victor won’t find what he’s looking for.

By the time he had drilled the holes in the ground for the rig’s supporting frame and set the winch in place, the Sun was rising above the bare, too-near horizon once again. This time it would remain up for weeks.

Even through the heavy tinting of his visor Alexios had to squint at its powerful glare. The Sun was tremendous, huge, a mighty presence looming above him.

The hours dragged on. Alexios listened to Molina panting and grumbling as he searched for rocks that might harbor biomarkers.

“Christ, it’s hot,” the astrobiologist complained.

Alexios flicked a glance at the outside temperature readout on the tractor’s control panel. “It’s only three-eighty Celsius. A cool morning on Mercury.”

“I’m broiling inside this damned suit.”

“You’d broil a lot faster outside the suit,” Alexios bantered.

“There’s nothing here. I’m going farther up the gully.”

“Check your suit’s coolant systems. If the levels are down in the yellow region of the display, you should come back.”

“It’s still in the green.”

Alexios called up the suit monitoring program and saw that Molina’s coolant systems were on the edge of the yellow warning region. He’s got about an hour left before they’ll dip into the red, he estimated.

Nearly an hour later, Alexios called, “Time to come back, Dr. Molina.”

“Not yet. There’s a bunch of rocks up ahead. I want to take a look at them.”

“Safety regulations, sir,” Alexios said firmly. “Your life-support systems are going critical.”

“I can see the readouts as well as you can,” Molina replied testily. “I’ve got a good hour or more before they reach the red line, and even then there’s a considerable safety margin built in.”

“Dr. Molina, the safety regulations must be followed. They were formulated for your protection.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just let me take a look at—hey! Damn! Ow!”

“What happened?” Alexios snapped, genuinely alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m okay. I fell down, that’s all. Tripped over a crack in the ground.”

“Oh.”

Alexios heard grunting, then swearing, then quick, heavy breathing. The sound of panic.

“Christ, I can’t get up!”

“What?”

“I can’t lift myself up! I’m down on my left side and I can’t get enough leverage in this goddamned suit to push myself up onto my feet again.”

Alexios could picture his predicament. The suit’s servomotors were designed to assist the wearer’s normal arm and leg movements. Basically they were designed to allow a normal human being’s muscle power to move the suit’s heavy sleeves and leggings. Little more. Molina was down on the ground, trying to lift the combined weight of his body plus the suit back into a standing position. Even in Mercury’s light gravity, the servos were unequal to the task.

“Can you sit up?” he asked into his helmet mike.

A grunt, then an exasperated sigh. “No. This damned iron maiden you’ve got me in doesn’t bend much at the middle.”

Alexios thought swiftly. He can last about two more hours in the suit, maybe three. I can leave him there and let him broil in his own juices. He left me when I needed him; why should I save his life? It’s not my fault—he
wanted
to go down there. He insisted on it.

Base control wasn’t on the suit-to-suit frequency. The suit radios could be picked up by the commsats, of course, but you had to plug into the commsat frequency and Victor didn’t know that. He rushed out here without learning all the necessary procedures, Alexios thought. He depended on me to handle the details.

Just as I depended on him to help me when I needed it. And he walked away from me. He took Lara and left me to the wolves.

Inside his helmet, Alexios smiled grimly. He remembered Poe’s old story, “The Cask of Amontillado.” What were Fortunato’s last words? “
For the love of God, Montresor!”
And Montresor replied, as he put the last brick in place and sealed his former friend into a lingering death, “Yes, for the love of God!”

“Hey!” Molina called. “I really need some help here.”