Felcia headed back for the town, Fayez for his own hut. As far as she could tell, Fayez was one of maybe two or three other people on the science team who was still sleeping alone. Sudyam and Tolerson were the latest pairing. Laberge and Maravalis had just broken off the relationship they’d started on the journey out, and each of them was already involved with someone else.
Sex wasn’t a strange thing among the scientific teams. That it was unprofessional behavior was set in balance against the fact that—especially on a years-long field expedition like this—the pool of potential mates was both very restricted and generally fairly high-value. People were people. If she felt any jealousy at all, it wasn’t for any of the particular relationships, but for intimacy itself. It would be nice to have someone to walk with in the darkness after the storm. Someone to wake up with in the morning. She wondered what the sexual politics were among the families of First Landing. If RCE had thought to send a social science team, it might have made a good paper.
Ahead of her and to the right, the alien ruins stood against the horizon, hardly more than a deeper darkness. Only a light was moving in them. It was small and faint. Less than a star, and only visible at all because it was moving. Someone was in the ruins again. Contaminating the site. She knew intellectually that she was letting herself be angry about it because it was better than feeling lonesome or guilty, but that didn’t keep the rage from feeling real. She turned back to her hut, her lips pressed together. She scooped up a flashlight, checked the battery charge, and stalked out toward the ruins, the thin blue circle of light bobbing ahead of her and illuminating her way. The fine dust shifted under her feet like snow, and her thighs ached from the speed of her hike.
As she neared the ruins, she thought she saw a dim light heading the other way. Back toward the town. But when she called after it, no one answered. She stood in the darkness for almost a minute feeling first unsure of herself, then embarrassed, then angry at feeling embarrassed.
A path led into the ruins that even the recent dustfall couldn’t conceal. Tracks as wide as a wagon where wheels had gone over the land often enough to leave ruts. Elvi shook her head and followed the path up, twisting around a high shoulder of land and into the huge alien structures.
Inside, the beam of her flashlight caught the walls and surfaces, sending off glittering reflections that seemed to shift whether she did or not. Where there was shelter from the wind, there were footprints. Lots of them. It wasn’t just someone from town exploring on their own. They were treating the ruins like some sort of clubhouse. Any samples the science team took from the soil here would already be compromised. The microorganisms, a mixture of known and unknown and whatever emerged when the two encountered each other in a totally uncontrolled environment. That the same was true of the whole township seemed insignificant. These were alien structures. They’d been built by a vast, vanished civilization about which humanity still knew almost nothing. It wasn’t some kind of treehouse.
“Hello?” she shouted. “Is anyone in here?”
Nothing answered her. Not even the wind. Shaking her head, she stalked deeper into the shadows. If anyone was here, she’d give them the talk she’d meant to give before. She would make them understand the issues, even if it took hectoring them all night.
The walls around her rose at strange and unsettling angles from the ground, organic and also not, like a machine that was built to pass for the product of nature. Arches rose, looking out over the bare, dark land. The deeper Elvi went, the more there seemed to be, until she had the illusion that the ruins were larger inside than out.
She was about to give up and turn back home when she saw something square. Simply being rectilinear made it stand out. The boxes were plastic and ceramic, functional gray where they weren’t the bright red and yellow of warning labels. DANGER HIGH EXPLOSIVE. DO NOT STORE NEAR HEAT OR CLASS THREE RADIATION SOURCES.
“Oh no,” Elvi said to herself. “Oh hell no.”
“Doctor Okoye,” Reeve said. “I’m hearing you tell me that you found explosives hidden outside of the town.”
“Yes,” Elvi said. “Of course that’s what you’re hearing me say.”
“And that there is evidence of several people having been to this clandestine site.”
They were sitting in Reeve’s office now. The light from his lamp shone warm and soft, and his rough pants and untucked shirt suggested she’d rousted him out of bed. It felt like the middle of the night, though the extended rotational period meant the darkness would be stretching on for almost another ten hours.
“Yes,” she said.
“All right,” Reeve said. “It’s all right. This is a good thing. I need you to tell me how to find this place.”
“Yes. Of course. I’ll take you.”
“No, I need you to stay right here. Not back to your hut. Not out to the ruins. I need you right here where it’s safe. You understand?”
“There was someone out there. I saw the light, and that’s why I went. What if they’d still been there?”
“We don’t have to worry about that, because it didn’t happen,” Reeve said in a carefully reassuring tone of voice that meant You’d be dead. Elvi dropped her head into her hands. “Can you give me directions?”
She did her best, her voice trembling. Reeve constructed a map on his hand terminal, and she was fairly sure it was accurate. Her mind seemed to be shifting on her a little, though.
“All right,” Reeve said. “I’m going to have you stay here for a little while.”
“But my work is all back at the hut.”
The security man put a reassuring hand on her shoulder, but his gaze was already focused inward, planning some next step that didn’t include her.
“We’re going to see you’re safe first,” he said. “Everything else will come after that.”
For the next hour, she sat in the little room or paced. The voices of Reeve and his security team filtered in through the wall, the tones serious and businesslike. And then there were fewer of them.
A young woman came to get her. Elvi had seen her before, but didn’t know her name. It seemed wrong that they could have spent almost two years traveling out here together, and Elvi still didn’t know her. It should mean something about populations and how they mixed. And how they didn’t.
“Do you need anything, Doctor Okoye?”
“I don’t know where to sleep,” Elvi said, and her words seemed thin. Fragile.
“I’ve got a bunk ready,” the girl said. “Please come with me.”
The rooms were empty. The others gone out into the alien darkness to face a terribly human threat. The girl leading her to the bunk had a sidearm strapped to her belt. Elvi glanced out the front window as they passed. The street was the same one she’d walked down the day before, and it was also wholly changed. A sense of threat hung over everything like the promise of a storm coming. Like the haze on the horizon. She saw Felcia’s brother walking down the street, not looking at her or anything else. Her fear was cold and deep.
Chapter Nine: Basia
Basia had volunteered for the night shift at the mine. Fewer people to hide from. Less open sky to make him jittery. The work, as backbreaking as it was, was a relief. The fabricator they’d brought down from the Barbapiccola was building tracks and carts as fast as they could load raw material into it. His team was trying to keep up with its output by assembling the rail system that would move ore from the pit to the sifters to the silos. There, it would wait for the Barbapiccola’s shuttle to take it up into orbit. Everything they’d mined so far had been moved with wheelbarrows by hand. A motorized cart system would increase production by an order of magnitude.