She went back to work, counting sunfish, measuring them, tracking the paths of individuals … Trying to squeeze as much data as possible from the truncated observations. At some point, she noticed that the deep drone of the turbofans had diminished to a gentle throbbing. The ekranoplan was afloat again, driven by its auxiliary engine as it nosed through dense billows of fog. Captain Chernov was outside, on the little railed observation deck behind the cockpit, with the chief petty officer. The two men wore pistols on their hips and were watching the long shadow of a shoreline resolve out of the fog: the shore of the mysterious equatorial continent.
Two billion years ago, the last great resurfacing era, vast quantities of molten rock from Venus’s mantle had risen to the surface through long, vertical cracks in the crust. Injections of lava and differential crystallization of minerals had formed an enormous geological basin with distinct layered strata, including reefs of titaniferous magnetite gabbro, and vast quantities of tin and iron. The basin had tilted and eroded and half drowned, leaving only one edge exposed, a long, narrow continent that wrapped around half of Venus’s equator. Most of its volcanic ranges and salt flats and deserts were scorching, waterless, and utterly uninhabitable, but a cold sea current rose at its southern coast, feeding banks of fog that grew during the long day and sustained an ecosystem found nowhere else on Venus. The People’s Republic had established several mining stations there to exploit deposits of titanium and tin ore, copper and silver, platinum and bismuth, and to lay claim to the deserts to the north.
This was the coast that the ekranoplan was approaching, drowned in fog and mystery.
An even, pearlescent light, streaming with particles and tiny transient rainbows in whichever direction Katya happened to look. The close, clammy heat of a Turkish bath wrapping around her like a wet towel. The puttering of the auxiliary motor and the slap of waves unnaturally loud in the muffled hush. And something echoing in the distance: faint, staccato, persistent.
“I see no monsters,” Captain Vladimir Chernov said, turning to Katya. “But I definitely hear something. Do you hear it, too, Doctor? Could you give your professional opinion?”
“It sounds like dogs,” Katya said. “Dogs, barking. Do they have dogs?”
“I don’t believe so. Pigs, yes. To eat their kitchen waste and supply them with fresh pork. They are Ukrainian, the miners here. And all Ukrainians love pork. But if the records are correct, there are no dogs.”
“Well, it sounds more like dogs than pigs. Someone smuggled in their pets, perhaps. Or watchdogs were assigned to this place, and the paperwork was lost or mislaid.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps it is monsters that kill and eat men, and bark like dogs,” Captain Chernov said. A fat pair of binoculars hung from his neck, a symbol of his status, perhaps: they were of no practical use in the fog.
“It would be something new to science,” Katya said, refusing to rise to his bait.
“Science does not yet know everything,” Captain Chernov said. “Isn’t that why you were studying the sunfish, Doctor? Not just to be friends with the Americans, but because you wished to learn something. We are at the edge of an unexplored continent. Perhaps you will learn something here.”
“Or perhaps they are really dogs. American running dogs,” the chief petty officer said.
He was a stocky, grizzled fellow with a scornful gaze who had even less time for Katya than Captain Chernov did. But at least they were direct about their dislike, unlike the chauvinist fossils at the Marine Biology Institute, and it had nothing to do with her being a woman—a woman who asserted her own opinions and refused to recognize her inferiority. No, they resented her presence because the IBY had many enemies in the government, and if its unstable mixture of science and peacenik appeasement blew up, the fallout would contaminate everyone associated with it. Which was why, of course, Katya had been assigned to the sunfish project by her bosses, and why she wanted to make a success of it.
“Dogs, pigs, monsters: we will find out. And we must do it soon,” Captain Chernov told Katya, for once addressing her directly. The ice age of his contempt had somewhat thawed. He was relaxed, almost cheerful. This was Navy work: he was no longer answerable to Katya and the IBY. “If the Americans are not already here, hiding from us or lying in wait, they will be here soon. They claim to have intercepted the distress call. They claim to want to help. There is no airstrip here. The terrain is rough. Too many steep hills and ridges. So everything comes in and goes out by sea. One of our frigates will be here in three days, but one of the American so-called research ships will be here tomorrow.”
Makarov Station, strung along the edge of a natural harbor sheltered by a sandbar, was entirely obscured by the fog: it wasn’t possible to survey it and the surrounding area with drones or lidar. Infrared imaging showed that the buildings, usually air-conditioned, were at ambient temperature. Apart from a man-sized trace perched on a dockside crane there was no sign of the twenty-six people who lived and worked there, or of the monsters that supposedly had attacked them.
The ekranoplan dropped anchor, sounded its siren, sent up a flare that burst in a dim red star high in the fog. There was no answer from the shore, no response on the radio, no reply when the chief petty officer called to the miners through a loudhailer, and no one was waiting at the edge of the long quayside as the landing party motored toward a floating stage in a big inflatable.
Captain Chernov sprang onto the stage and galloped up the steps, pistol drawn, followed by the chief petty officer, the drone pilot Arkadi Sarantsev, and seven seamen—most of the ekranoplan’s crew. Katya followed, her heart hammering in anticipation. When she reached the top of the stairs, sweating in the damp heat, the men had already spread out in a semicircle, menacing the fog with their pistols and carbines. The skeletal outline of a crane, heaps of dark ore, the outlines of a string of small, flat-roofed buildings and a tall radio mast faintly visible beyond. The persistent barking in the distance, tireless as a machine.
Captain Chernov paid no attention to it. He was standing with his hands on his hips, looking up at the crane’s scaffold stem. The jut of its long jib was veiled in misty streamers, but it was just possible to make out the shadow of a man at its end. He did not respond when Captain Chernov ordered him to come down and he did not respond when the chief petty officer put a bullet into the steel plating a meter behind his feet. The sound of the shot whanged off across the muffled, fog-bound quay.
Captain Chernov cupped his hands to his mouth. “Next one he puts in your damn leg!”
No response. They all stood looking up at the man. The monotonous barking had not let up, hack-hack-hacking away deep in the fog.
“Take another shot,” Captain Chernov told the chief petty officer.
“I’ll go up there,” Katya said.
“I distinctly remember telling you to keep out of the way,” Captain Chernov said mildly.
“I am medically qualified,” Katya said. It was technically true: she had been given basic first-aid training at Young Pioneer camp. “The poor fellow may be hurt or wounded. He may not be able to climb down without help.”
“He may be an American for all we know,” the chief petty officer said.
“You can bring him down?” Captain Chernov said.
“I can assess him, talk to him. Whether he comes down, that will be up to him,” Katya said, with that airy feeling just before a dive, before she toppled over backward into unknown water. As her mother so often observed, she had a knack of talking herself into trouble.