The Cold Between (34 page)

T
hey left
Lusitania
in orbit, sacrificing the extra radiation shielding to lighten their fuel burn, and Elena guided the civilian ship back through the atmosphere and over the lake of glass. The route over the city would have been just as fast; she might even have saved a minute or two. But she did not think she could bear to see it again, all of those beautiful, desolate buildings. So much created, so much accomplished, and for nothing. It was too close to her own life, to what she feared more than anything else. Whoever had lived here had died long ago, and all they had made was meaningless.

The meaning of her life, for the moment, was in finding Trey a way home.

She set them down by the power source, steadying the ship against the uneven terrain, and they stood in a circle to check the seals on each other's radiation suits. Trey, she observed, performed the ritual in the same sequence she and Greg did. She wondered if it was human nature, or if there was something in the construction of the things that led to the same process. She wondered how many rituals PSI had that she would find familiar.

Five minutes of unshielded radiation at these levels would be deadly; even with the suits, they would have to be back on board the ship in less than half an hour. Which meant that even with radiation suits, any survivors from the gray bird were likely beyond help at this point—although after seeing the cloak, she couldn't rule out the possibility that the other ship was equipped with more robust safety equipment than either
Sartre
or
Lusitania
. When she got home, she was going to have to comm some of her friends back at Central and find out exactly what kind of research was going on behind the scenes.

Greg jumped out of the ship first, taking a few unsteady steps. Gravity was slightly higher outside, and the glassy surface was far more uneven than it had appeared from the sky. She stepped out after him, Trey following.
Sartre
's door slid shut behind them, leaving them with absolute silence.

She used her comm to call up a crude display, and gestured forward. “The radiation spikes about two meters ahead,” she said. Her voice sounded loud and flat, and she wished she had not spoken.

Greg moved forward, his stride becoming more confident; and then he stopped abruptly, teetering as if he was going to fall. She rushed forward, instinctively reaching for his arm; he spread out his hands at her, gesturing for her to stop.

“I almost missed it,” he said, looking down.

There was an abrupt drop in the landscape, ten meters at least. The glassy, reflective surface of the lake had camouflaged the change in terrain so that it was nearly invisible. From the sky, she had not seen it at all.

They walked along the edge and found themselves moving down an incline, and then the land flattened and they were able to move underneath. Before them was the entrance to an enormous open hangar, built in a curve blending into the landscape. The glass before it was polished and even, providing a tarmac large enough for a small cargo runner or a two-person fighter. The arch itself had been manufactured out of large chunks of opaque glass, precision-cut and fitted together like jigsaw pieces. She was almost certain it was machined—there was a grace to the curve, an aesthetic pleasantness, like a wave rising out of the dead ground.

“Deliberate camouflage,” Greg said.

“Who would be looking?” Trey asked.

Elena felt grateful for her handgun.

The interior of the hangar echoed with a soft, mechanical hum. The floor, like the tarmac outside, was level, but instead of the glassy silver-gray it was dark and unpolished. From the feel of it under her feet, she thought it was a standard poured polymer, used for everything from home foundations to cargo ship hangars, but unadorned by the usual colorants. The space stretched at least a hundred meters straight back, angled downward into the ground; not large enough for a passenger ship, but enough of a taxiway to accommodate something with a fair amount of horsepower. The ceiling was illuminated all over, as if it was painted with light, and it took her a moment to realize why the material was glowing.

“How hot is it in here?” she asked.

“6.3,” Trey said. “And we are not at the radiation source yet.”

“What is that made of?” Greg asked, studying the ceiling.

“Cesium, I'd guess,” she replied. “Look closer—it's liquid.”

The silvery substance rippled here and there with the vibrations of the walls. “Cesium is not especially dangerous,” Trey remarked, “but neither does it last long before decaying.”

It seemed oddly wasteful, sealing such a liquid into the ceiling when it would need to be replaced. Except— “They are expecting to replace it with something else,” she realized. Whatever this place was, it was neither abandoned nor static. Suddenly the bright, rippling ceiling seemed oppressive. She moved farther inside.

A hallway opened to their left, and she peered into the darkness. She heard a hum, low and monotonous, echoing as if from a distance. All three of them switched on their suit lights, and the dark space lit up with a cool glow. Ten meters away from them stood a table on which sat three small cubes. As they watched, a robotic crane lifted one of the cubes and placed it on a belt behind the table, which swiftly carted it out of sight. Moments later another cube appeared on the belt, and the crane placed it in the vacant spot. Apart from the hum, everything appeared inert.

Elena circled to one side of the table, playing her light over it, a frown of concentration on her face. This was a test bed of some kind, but she couldn't imagine what the crane might be reading from the small, static objects. She leaned in closer to look at one of the cubes. It was gray and nondescript, its edges seamless. As she watched, the crane hovered over it for a moment, then lifted it and dropped it back on the belt to disappear. Rejected, for reasons she could not see.

“The radiation in here is unstable,” Trey told them. “It is spiking over seven, and it is irregular. We cannot stay here.”

Radiation.
“It's testing them for containment,” she guessed.

“They are not doing well,” Trey observed.

“Wait.” Greg was on the other side of the table, leaning over a cube waiting its turn, and he had grown completely still.

“Greg?”

“Come here,” Foster said, and his voice sounded like dust.

Elena rounded the table to stand behind him, and heard Trey move in behind her to look over her shoulder.

Etched in the side of the cube, almost invisible, dark gray on black, was a slowly spinning cube, shifting with the viewing angle. In the center was an ancient pictograph, a phonetic spelling of a family name in a character set no longer used. She would not have been able to read it had it not been familiar to anyone who paid any attention to the news.

“What is Ellis Systems doing here?” Greg asked.

That, she thought, was the wrong question. What they were doing seemed obvious. Ellis manufactured most of the high-yield terraformers in use these days, and they kept the details of their power sources very quiet. Elena had tried to dissect one once, curious about what was under its heavy shielding, and had found a heavily radioactive combination of strontium and iodine. With no confidence she could duplicate their containment, she had left off before she had completely dismantled it, and never opened one again.

Ellis was looking for a new power source. The question was why they were doing it here, and who else knew about it. “How are they getting results back?” she asked.

“There must be a way through,” Trey said. “At least for data.”

Greg had thought of the same problems she had. “But why here? Even if they can go back—it's got to be expensive, both in
energy and in wear-and-tear on this equipment. They could dig allanite on Shenzhu for less than it would cost them to maintain this place.”

Trey looked between the two of them. “Unlikely to be an ordinary lab, then,” he said.

Greg's expression grew more preoccupied, and she wondered what he was thinking. He met her eyes for an instant, then looked away. “Come on.”

They headed back up the hallway and into the hangar, following the radiation signal. There was another hallway at the rear of the structure, its shadowed entrance marked by a single row of floor-level lights, and Elena had a brief memory of the brick sidewalks in Novanadyr. They left their comm lights on, flooding the passage before them. Even so, the darkness swallowed everything just a few meters before them. Greg, a few steps ahead of her, pulled out his handgun, and instinctively Elena moved closer to Trey.

“Personally,” Elena whispered to him, “I'm missing that rolling pin.”

“We had best keep our ears open,” he agreed.

“If there's anyone here,” Greg said, “they already know we've arrived.”

She did not find that observation comforting.

Elena heard a low industrial hum coming from the space ahead of them, both louder and more complex than the hum of the test bed. They turned a corner, and the floor ended abruptly, the space opening downward into a vast cavern lit intermittently by operating machinery. A variety of drones hovered in the air, against the walls, on ledges built out of the sides. The bulk of the
space was a massive hole, the sides made up of streaks of blown glass blending into dirt striped with silver-gray mineral deposits. The stripes were luminescent, adding a faint blue shimmer to the lower part of the cavern. She could see the bottom, glowing solid far below, drones shadowing the surface.

“Ambient 6.5, spiking to 7,” Trey told them. “This is the source.
Sartre,
how long can we last in this?”

Fourteen minutes before symptomatic exposure,
the ship projected before his eyes.
Seventeen minutes before fatal exposure.

“How far away do we have to be at seventeen minutes?”

Ambient 6 or less.

He looked up at Elena and Greg. “We must be off the planet.”

Greg turned away. “Let's see if there's a way down.”

There was a steep ramp set against the wall, smooth and sturdy, but without a handrail. Greg went first, and she beamed her light at his feet. For wheels, she thought, looking at the ramp, not daring to glance at the drop. She lifted her left hand and let her fingers brush against the wall as she walked, giving herself the illusion of safety. She heard Trey's step close behind her.

“Elena,” he asked, “can you detect the age of any of this equipment?”

She had already tried. “I can't get a read on the material,” she told him. “Too much radiation. But based on the construction . . . some of it's new, newer than anything I've seen. But a lot of it—the drones in the air, for example—a lot of it is old. Decades.”

“Twenty-five years?” he asked.

“Plausibly, yes.”

“Older?”

She paused. “I cannot say,” she admitted at last. “I haven't seen anything obviously older.” She knew what he meant: none of this is coincidence. “You think this material is what Kelso discovered.”

In front of them, Greg stopped, and swore quietly. “It's dellinium.”

She stood still, and felt Trey's hand come to rest against her back. “How do you know?” he asked.

“The properties fit,” Greg said. He resumed walking, this time at a faster clip. “The glow, the interference.”

“It could be a dozen others,” Elena objected. “Promethium, cobalt, polonium—”

“You remember that question my pen pal asked me?” Greg interrupted. “The half-life of a nuclear starlight explosion?
Galileo
gave me a list of materials that would produce the kind of radiation they used to have out there. The first two on the list? Dellinium isotopes and Ellis terraformers. And you remember the rumors, after the explosion?”

She had been too young. Everything she had read was secondhand. “There were rumors of dellinium?”

“It was Volhynia that reported detecting dellinium,” Greg told her. “They were the closest recording station at the time. But less than twelve hours later, they retracted the information. Said it was distorted by the heavy radiation.”

There was no longer any question in her mind about who was behind all of this. Ellis could not have hidden evidence of dellinium on their own.

“How can Ellis have been using dellinium all this time?” she asked. “Someone would have known.”
Someone would have blown themselves up.

“They have not,” Trey said. “I would guess this is a refinery. Dellinium, properly refined and shielded, could power a terraformer for a hundred years.”

Elena thought about that. A hundred years. There were terraformers in the field that failed after five years, sooner if the climate they were fighting was severe enough. A dellinium-powered terraformer would hold off methane and sulfur, providing atmosphere and humidity for virtually any crop. It could make rain on a desert planet. It could turn dust into orchards within three months. People would not have to starve ever again. She would never again have to land on a planet where people had grown so used to death they did not even name their children anymore.

It sounded like a miracle. But that was not the most obvious use for dellinium.

“That city above us,” Elena said. “No wonder it was so vast. They would not have had to conserve anything.”

“I don't think they did,” Greg said. “I think they had everything they needed, and then someone got angry with someone else, and that was that.”

The ramp flattened out, and they came to a massive shelf dug into the earthen wall. They shone their lights along the floor and found stacks of boxes, each about a cubic meter, made of the same featureless plastic as the small cubes above. Trey stepped forward and scanned them. “These are not spiking as badly as the small ones,” he said after a moment, “but the yield is lower.”

A reasonable start, she thought; but if they could power no more than similar amounts of allanite, there was not much of a win. And with the risks of transporting something as inherently
unstable as dellinium—even a dilute isotope—they would need solid containment if they were going to put it to commercial use.