Dusk (38 page)

—
Okay, Dada. But...

—
But?

—
I still don’t want you to go.

—
I know. Most of me doesn’t want to go either,
but part of me knows that I need to go, that somehow, what I do is
gonna be important. That’s why they asked me instead of someone
else.

—
I know you’re good at what you do, but why you?
Why not someone else’s dad?

—
Well, sometimes we have to do things that hurt
now, so that the pain for us or others can be fixed later. We have
to just take the pain we can, so we can stop the pain we might not
get up from. As much as I complain about how things go in the Uni,
if I didn’t go to help colonize a new world when they asked, I
would have to shut my mouth from then on out—and I’m not really
prepared to do that.

—
I guess I see your point, but I still don’t like
it.

—
Well, one day, you’ll have to make a decision
that hurts someone to help someone else, and you’ll understand that
like and dislike really don’t factor in.

—
Maybe. I just hope, when that day comes, you’re
around to help me through it.

—
Me too, Dari. Me too.

• • • • •

“You all know I wouldn’t bring you here if I didn’t
have to, but I have something I need to do for myself and for my
son; it might be dangerous, and I am going to need help.”

Tanner held his hand above his head. “I’m
in,” he said matter-of-factly.

“You don’t even know what it is.”

“Nor do I need to.” He let his hand return to
its original position on its lap.

Cyrus nodded and continued, “I need two more
of you to go along. Obviously, it will be best if Davidson and
Torvald stayed here to continue their research, but the nature of
the venture might require some of your skills and knowledge
Milliken.” Milliken gave a nod that communicated both approval and
acceptance.

“Which leaves Toutopolus, Jang, and Uzziah;
honestly, I would prefer Uzziah comes along...”

“Just in case the monkeys bust through the
vent,” Uzziah interjected with a sense of levity that seemed a
little forced and yet still sincere.

“I’d rather think of it as contingency, but
yes.”

There was a grumble among them, but when the
commotion settled, Uzziah, Milliken, and Tanner all nodded in quiet
approval.

“We will have to borrow a lev from the
Apostates, preferably one of the smaller, faster ones, and we need
to see if they have any geological surveying equipment.” Cyrus
seemed to look inside himself for a moment, as if he had something
to say but was searching for the appropriate words.

“So what is it that has gotten you off your
kilter?” Jang asked, standing to talk for no discernable reason,
“You didn’t seem this shaken inside that monkey shit prison.”

“It’s a little complicated,” Cyrus looked up,
his eyes quivering with emotion, but still wide with determination,
“I’ve just been charged to look for information in the dark side of
the planet. I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for, but it lies
somewhere within the Bereshit Scar. Paeryl’s men can’t go because
it is too far into the darkness.”

“So what did you see in that room that
brought all this about?” Uzziah asked, almost standing himself.

“Well, like I said, it’s complicated,” Cyrus
seemed contemplative for a moment, and then turned halfway back to
the iris, “As a matter-of-fact, it might be easier for me to just
show you.” He then turned completely and entered the code again.
The iris opened and Cyrus motioned to the scientists, beckoning for
them to enter the strange room behind him.

• • • • •

Uzziah set the grav-lev down at the edge of
the enormous depression in the surface of the planet. They had cut
the lights about three kilometers from the
two-hundred-kilometer-wide indentation, and then had set down
behind a protrusion alongside the rim. Milliken had procured a
surveying datadeck from one of Paeryl’s technology specialists. The
deck had been found in one of the levs they had ‘apportioned,’ what
they called their frequent thefts from the Ashan cities and
bases.

They had arrived at The Bereshit Scar, the
impact crater that had been created by the comet—fancifully coined
the Bereshit Egg by its discoverer—that had knocked Asha on its
side and had provided the planet with its ocean, setting up the
conditions that allowed life to exist on an otherwise barren
volcanic rock. Uzziah ran a ten-K scan of the area, found it clear
of any activity, and then proceeded with their descent into the
hole. The lev they had borrowed from Paeryl had also been used for
environmental surveys, and Milliken and Cyrus had selected it from
Paeryl’s garage as it provided both valuable sensors and a quicker
lev drive.

They turned on the lighting so Milliken could
observe the walls of the cavern as they descended. He would watch
the walls and then return to his holomonitor every few seconds to
check readings the craft’s sensors gathered as they slowly moved
down the rim. He murmured almost unintelligibly as he scampered
between the windshield and his monitor. “There is a large vein of
quartz. There was unmolested volcanic activity here. There’s shale.
There is some marbling near the bottom.” Then, after returning from
the window, something in the monitor screen hovering in front of
the control deck demanded a moment of pause, degenerating
Milliken’s murmuring into a considerably less scientific, “Wait a
second. What the hell...”

Cyrus and Tanner immediately moved to either
side of Milliken’s chair, which he now, in stark contrast to his
earlier scuttling, seemed fastened to. Uzziah instinctively stopped
their descent. He looked over the holoscanner and zoomed out the
image to check for any threat he might have overlooked.

“What?” Cyrus demanded. The magnitude and
scale of the crater was overwhelming, and it limited Cyrus’s
patience for Milliken’s silence.

“As far as I can tell, the vein in front of
us goes around the entire rim of the crater. And in two different
striations.”

“Okay, so assuming I wasn’t trained in
geological surveying, explain to me what just knocked you on your
cred stick.”

“Gold. Each vein is about 650 kilometers long
and about four hundred meters thick, and, according to these
readings, is full of gold deposits.”

“So what does that mean to us?” even as
Tanner asked it, Cyrus remembered the cables of the orbital station
when they first arrived.

“Okay, let me spell it all out for you. Gold
is a very dense metal found usually in flakes because it doesn’t
really react to anything easily. Because of this, if you compressed
all the pure gold ever mined on Earth—even including the last six
hundred years that we missed travelling here, it would all fit in a
room about the size of Paeryl’s garage.
This
vein alone
however, even if these readings are wrong by 30%, should contain
more pure gold than we could fit inside seven of those
garages—that’s a
lower
end estimate. And if that’s not
enough to get your core running, they’ve been mining this crater
constantly from the very beginning.”

“Oh,” was all Tanner could muster as Milliken
nodded to Uzziah and they continued down the side of the large
bowl.

Then, Uzziah killed the lights and stopped
the craft abruptly. “I got a blip,” he informed as he cycled
through the range increments of the hologram to reveal two crafts
that appeared to be about the size of the assault lev that had
pursued them through Eurydice. As Uzziah shifted the focus of the
hologram and zoomed in on the vehicle, they could all see that it
clearly was an assault lev, but something about it was very
strange. The guns on the top had evidently been removed, and the
turret there had been fitted with two large, unwieldy looking
tubes. The tubes had cables and piping that ran from them to the
sides of the turret. Uzziah engaged the lights and began moving
again. “Whatever reason they are here, that reason has not
presented itself for a while.” He tracked the hologram down the
side of the crater to the bottom of the assault lev, which not only
rested on the ground, but had been moored in by dust and dirt. He
then scrolled up on the hologram and focused on the tubes that had
replaced the cannon and autoguns.

“What were they thinking?” Uzziah allowed
escape under his breath.

“Are those what I think they are?” Milliken
asked, recognizing what he had only seen in a videogame.

“Extraplanetary lasers,” Uzziah’s
confirmation hung over everyone’s head like an edged pendulum.

“Were they mining the gold with it?” Cyrus
intoned as they moved closer to the tanks.

“Highly doubtful. Asteroids were mined with
ship-to-ship lasers before the Uni, but trying to mine gold with an
S-to-S laser would be like shaving your head with a lawn
razor.”

“So what were they using them for?” Tanner
asked, trying to take in as much as he could in the swath the
lights of the lev cut through the gelatin of moonless darkness
around them.

“Maybe this,” Uzziah added as the craft began
to swing to its left. For a moment they looked at the hologram,
expecting it to shrink and pan, but they quickly realized the
holographic imager, in this case, was not necessary.

As the lev rotated on its z-axis, the world
before them panned right in the ultra-white beams of light from the
lev. The lights revealed a tunnel opening, cut in a large, precise
square about eighteen meters wide in the face of a slab protruding
from near the base of the crater.

They looked at each other wordlessly as
Uzziah pantomimed a set of commands over his holomonitor. A diagram
and some figures that only he could see spread over the screen.
Before anyone could ask about the readings, the craft was already
moving forward. “Nothing jumpin’ inside and it’s plenty wide for a
good K,” he increased speed as the lev dipped forward slightly to
match the decline of the causeway.

They moved at a relatively high rate of speed
down the smooth-honed tunnel, but the kilometer seemed to take much
longer to traverse than it should have. “There’s an opening about
another two K down.” Uzziah was focused on his instruments and
piloting, and his delivery was matter-of-fact. They sped along for
another long minute, and then, Uzziah suddenly slowed the craft to
a crawl. “You getting readings for any kind of volcanic activity?”
Bewilderment was clear in his voice.

“No, shouldn’t be. Most of the rock around us
seems to have been formed by cooling magma, not actual volcanoes,
and as far as I can tell, that all stopped millions of years ago.
Why?” Milliken’s voice seemed to also be infected by Uzziah’s
bewilderment.

“Because according to my temperature
readings, it’s getting warmer—considerably warmer,” Uzziah
added.

“What do you mean warmer?” The bewilderment
spread to Cyrus.

“I mean, the surface is an insane forty
degrees below. Around us now is just around zero, and thermal scans
show it only gets warmer ahead.” Uzziah’s words came out in a scoff
but were still perplexed.

“I don’t see anything dangerous ahead,”
Milliken assured.

The craft began to move again, slower than
before, and after another grueling minute passed, Uzziah slowed
again. “There’s an opening up ahead. A few blips, but nothing is
moving.”

They passed into a large cubic chamber about
a hundred meters wide. There were various vehicles abandoned there,
some obviously designed for mining, others were cargo lorries or
earthmovers. As they passed through, Uzziah panned the lights
across the chamber. There were three laboratory levs lining each
wall. Evidently something had been studied here relatively
extensively, and yet the vehicles had all been abandoned. They
looked like they had not been operated or moved in years, but they
did not look as if they had sat motionless for centuries. There was
not much wind or sand to erode away their features, but the mixture
of humid salt-air would have taken its toll on the metals and
alloys that these vehicles were built from. They might not have
been used recently, but whatever they were used for was ongoing,
which was probably why they had been left here rather than moved to
a place where their presence would not arouse suspicion—even if
whoever left them here assumed no one would be crazy enough to
stumble upon them.

They passed through the chamber into another
perfectly square corridor, this one level. Then, as they passed
slowly into the tunnel, they all saw it—the pinpoint of light
hovering at the vanishing point of the artificially cut cavern.
Uzziah stopped the ship instantly, prepared to reverse, and he
double and triple checked his gram readings, zooming them out to
their fullest extent.

“What is it?” Impatience or anxiety or both
fueled Cyrus’s question as he leaned forward and squinted.

“According to these readings… it’s nothing at
all, but thermals say it gets warmer for the next two K. What do
you have Milliken?”

“Uhh,” Milliken was focused on something on
the holomonitor, gesturing over the flat image floating in front of
him. “Uhh,” he muttered again, settling on an image and moving
closer to it to get a better look. “According to this, there’s a
very large… uh nothing… in front of us.”

Everyone turned to Milliken except Uzziah,
who stayed focused on his own controls and readings. Milliken
expanded the floating monitor image and then waved his wrist so
that the image turned to face the others. On the flat image was a
three-dimensional rendering of the striations in the rock in front
of them, they could see the hollow of the tunnel they were
following leading to an enormous cavern, and inside the cavern,
just as Milliken said, the image displayed nothing.

“What now chief?” Uzziah asked, still focused
on his readings.