Rift (5 page)

With a small thrill, Mitya realized he was seeing his first planetary creature, and it was Lithian, not Terran, with that Lithian trait of bioluminescence that he’d studied in zoology. And this alien being—old Lithian life—was watching him as though he were a creature in a zoo. Then the insect moved on, fading into the murk.

“Moping, are we?”

His uncle Stepan stood looking down at him. Judging from his heavily quilted jacket and pants, he’d been outside. His breather still clung to his face, outlining an oval from the bridge of his nose to just under his chin.

Mitya stumbled to his feet. “No, sir. Just looking.”

“How about helping me at the shuttle?”

Mitya was so surprised it took him a moment to respond. Meanwhile his uncle tossed him a breather.

“Better than moping. You’ll find that work can have its reward, boy.”

Mitya looked at the breather with some astonishment. “Outside?” His voice broke, as it always did at the worst moments.

“Nothing to it,” Stepan said. “Just breathe slowly a few times and don’t fight it.”

He was talking about the breather. Mitya followed his uncle in the direction of the air lock, his spirits lifting. The dry gel breather had already collapsed into
a tangle in his hand, but he shook it out and considered how to put it on.

Turning, Stepan considered his dilemma with amusement. “When in doubt, try the instructions.”

“Call for instructions,” Mitya said.

The mask responded: “Pull the throat tube forward from the back side and, pressing the liner over nose, mouth, and chin, swallow the tube.” Mitya had seen crew apply the masks. He quickly pulled the tube forward, pushing it onto his tongue, and attempted to swallow. He choked instead.

Stepan laughed. “Just relax.”

In another moment the gel had spread across his mouth and throat lining, setting up its chemical filters, ten microns thick.

His uncle tossed him a jacket and nodded at the small case on the floor by their feet. It wasn’t much for him to carry. Oran was just now plowing through the lock, toting an enormous coil of condensed resin piping. He smirked at Mitya but, glancing at Mitya’s officer-uncle, held his tongue.

The compartment wasn’t a true air lock. It was fitted with air pumps and vacuums to vent the worst of the dust and undesirable gases carried in by the crew, but it served more as a mudroom and perfunctory cleaning station.

Passing through the outer door, they stood for a moment enveloped in a fog which glowed dully in the midday sun. Visibility was zero to ten feet as the clouds drifted in greater and lesser galleons, trailing remnants of sulfur and gases too exotic to name by smell alone. Mitya’s eyes teared up, further blurring his vision. Stepan was gesturing him around the perimeter of the dome, and Mitya followed, the contents of the box clunking in his arms.

The deep mantle plume was nearby, he knew. Here on a jutting finger of high cliff, Captain Bonhert had ordered the dome constructed so as to be flanked on
two approaches by the 1,200-foot canyon wall and protected on the rest of the perimeter with a security wire and patrols. Within this safety zone were parked the two shuttles that had carried all their equipment and the forty-five survivors. Attacks from enclavers were always a possibility, but the real enemy was the orthong. Crew said it was an orthong attack that had destroyed Station, orthong who knew that their terraform project was almost ready to go and who would stop them at any cost. The threat of orthong attack had kept the crew on thirteen-hour shifts, around the clock, racing to complete their mission.

Mitya searched the terrain and its clumping mists for any sign of the pale orthong, camouflaged in their natural white hide. Now
there
was alien life Mitya would have liked to see. Twice alien—alien to humans and alien to Lithia. Where had the orthong come from, and what might
that
world be like? Mitya was hungry to know about these beings who, though his enemy, were the only other advanced beings humans had encountered—at least so far as Lithian colonists had ever heard. His uncle had no interest in the orthong except to kill one if he saw it, and the range gun on his webbed belt looked like it could do the job.

They approached the shuttle—a squat, blackened transport perched on landing struts. One side bore a mangled edge where the Station breakup had thrown something hard enough to dent its hull composites. Once in the equipment bay, Stepan explained that they were going to retrieve the main onboard quantum processors to check for damage. Mitya knew the drill: Check equipment, run diagnostics, and then a month later do it again. Station life was about maintenance, though Mitya always dreamed of doing real science instead. Once they got terraforming restarted, that would be his life’s work: chemistry, atmospherics …

“Open the carton, Mitya,” Stepan was saying, his voice husky through the breather. It made Mitya swallow
reflexively, thinking of the tube in his windpipe, even if he knew he wasn’t likely to feel its microscopic webbing.

Mitya pulled apart the carton flaps and dug inside among the assorted tools.

“Over here.” His uncle was kneeling beside the cockpit console housing the processors. “Take out the main bolts and loosen the frame.”

Mitya hurried to find the driver before Stepan changed his mind. Inserting the driver onto the bolt head and adjusting for size, Mitya handily slipped out the set of bolts.

Stepan pulled up the assembly, bracing it with a clamp, and began to slide out the main logic nets. Though hard-wrapped against quantum interference, the nets were still surprisingly light.

In truth it was easily done, and Stepan could have managed without him. Mitya waited to see what else was needed, but, after picking up the equipment and tools, they were done. Stepan led the way out of the shuttle, striding off in the wrong direction, away from the dome. Mitya hiked the tool carton up under his arm and followed, feeling his feet press into the spongy mass of the ground. The sensation of walking on a surface that
gave
with every step was an eerie reminder they were on the planet, a fact which otherwise could be doubted, given that they had yet to see the planetary sky or a vista of any sort. After a short walk they stood in front of a cordon that blocked their way.

“Out there,” Stepan said, gesturing.

Mitya peered into the haze.

“The valley’s out there, Mitya. The Rift Valley.”

The words thrilled him. A valley so huge it would take
days
to walk across it … and yet it was only a crease on the wider land of the vast continent.

“You remember your geology, boy? Two crustal plates have been moving apart here for thirty million
years. The valley must be a spectacular sight on a clear day. Or what passes for a clear day at the Rift.”

Mitya squinted, trying to see the other side, the matching cliffs of the western wall, twelve miles away. In his imagination, he could see the fathoms of air and the great well of the valley dropping away before them.

“The plume’s down there, somewhere,” Mitya said, stating the obvious.

As though he hadn’t heard, his uncle said in a softer voice: “Great-great-grandmother Malovich had a homestead in that valley. She grew sorghum and flax, raised ten children, and wrote a family history going back to first landfall. She cultivated orchids for fun. When the vents started smoking, she refused to leave. Said she was too old to start over. Family legend has it that when the fissures pumped out their river of stone, she sat down among her orchids and died along with them.”

“Did they ever … find her?”

“A hundred feet of lava, boy,” his uncle said, turning to him. “She’s under a hundred feet of rock. Her and her sorghum and the family albums.”

At the dark tone, Mitya stifled his response:
She must have loved it here
. He could imagine the valley full of grass and crops and a farmhouse with a fence around it, and for a moment he thought he knew why his great-great-grandmother sat down and refused to leave.

Stepan had turned back to face the Rift. “We’ll have a few surprises for this godforsaken valley,” he said. His grim face put an end to the conversation. As they walked back to the dome, Stepan added, “This is a hard time for you, Mitya. No youngster should lose both his parents at once.”

That caught Mitya off guard, and he felt the ache of the loss next to his ribs.

“I don’t know much about youngsters,” Stepan said.

Mitya figured it was Stepan’s way of saying he couldn’t take him on, couldn’t fill in the gap.

“That’s OK,” he said. He’d never figured Stepan owed him that, but he felt worse for knowing Stepan had considered and passed on it.

As they ducked into the air lock, three crew came in behind them, stamping their feet to dislodge dust and soil and setting the air cycle in motion.

One of the men turned and nodded at Stepan. It was Captain Bonhert. His sandy hair was just tinged with gray at his sideburns, and in the padded jacket his barrel chest and broad shoulders seemed massive. His eyes took in Mitya in an instant, and dismissed him as fast. “Best save the breathers for the adults, Stepan,” he muttered as he left the lock. “They’ll be needed for real work.”

Lieutenant Roarke, by Bonhert’s side, threw Mitya a disdainful smile.

Stung, Mitya watched as they disappeared into the dome.

Stepan’s hand was on his shoulder, guiding him through the door, watching Bonhert walk off. “Don’t worry about it, lad,” he said. “Sometimes he thinks we need telling when to blow our noses. He thinks a lot of himself, our Captain.”

Mitya disengaged his breather, handing it over and looking around the dome, which now seemed so much smaller than an hour ago, and more foreign.

3
 

1

Day four
. They were being watched, Reeve felt sure. Here in the folded gullies of the grasslands, an enemy could spy on them easily, lying in the grasses or crouching just over the next shallow rise. He and Marie were easy prey, with Marie still recovering from her head injury and Reeve gnawingly hungry. But if clavers were watching, why didn’t they strike? Or was it only paranoia brought on by the trek from the swamp and the everlasting pearly-blue sky that stared down at them?

Marie shifted in her sleep, tucked among her blankets. A late-afternoon nap would have been good for her, and kept her from pestering him about his plans, but instead she opened her eyes. Their usual bright blue seemed to take a deeper tincture from the sky.

“Are you leaving now?” she asked.

“I’ll be back in two or three hours.”

“A brace of quail over your shoulder?”

“A brace of what?”

“Quail. A kind of bird. Gone by now, I suppose.”

“Maybe I’ll bring back a few claver heads instead.” Reeve grinned at the look on her face.

“Don’t be a fool.”

“Why stop now?”

Marie smirked. “Stubborn, like your father.”

Reeve paused. “Am I like my father?”

“You have his olive skin, his black hair.” She shrugged. “And his stubbornness.” As he slapped the dust from his knees and shouldered his pack, she added: “Promise me you’ll just hunt animals.”