"The planet got all smashed up, back at minus three million, and there aren't lots of mountain ranges to speak of, not big plate-driven ones like on Anбhuac or Hesperides. Heat builds up on these big open plains and you get enormous swings in air pressure as the sun moves. There's no humidity to speak of, not with such low temperatures. All the water is locked in the ice caps. No lakes, no oceans — nothing to moderate air temperature."
Smalls unlocked a door, and Gretchen followed him into a room filled with v-pane monitors, computer equipment and racks and racks of data-lattice storage. A huge map of Ephesus glowed in a mosaic of nine displays, half the planet shining bright in the sunlight, and half plunged into complete darkness. The meteorologist waved a hand across the face of the world.
"We have dust storms a thousand kilometers wide, with winds in excess of a hundred sixty k on a slow, quiet day. There are invisible tornadoes, which form and vanish in the upper air. When they touch down, rocks, stones, boulders get lifted and flung for twenty to thirty k." His finger stabbed at the mosaic display, tracing a thin black line just emerging from the terminator.
"And there's the escarpment. A wall across half the world, nearly from pole to pole. The planetary atmosphere's so tight on Ephesus there are peaks which brush the envelope." Smalls turned and looked at Gretchen for the first time. She was leaning against one of the tables, watching him quietly, arms crossed. "The sun is like a big broom, pushing a lot of air in front of the midday hot-spot. There's a fat gradient at dawn and when the wall of moving pressure hits the escarpment, well…" He shrugged, showing more than a little perverse pride.
"You get vicious storms in the canyons," Gretchen supplied. "The briefing packet says they're in excess of four hundred fifty k at 'high tide.'"
"They are." Smalls searched among papers and bits of equipment on one of the tables. After a moment, he handed Gretchen a heavy chunk of slate the size of her hand. "The wind rising from the sun compresses against the mountains and the only release is through narrow slot canyons. I have video — in places the walls are like glass, rubbed to near optical quality by sand and grit from a hundred k away. Look at the other side."
Gretchen turned over the piece of slate. The reverse was glossy and black, like fine glass, with a dimple near the center. In the depression was a spherical metallic marble. She looked up in surprise. "What's this?"
"Some bit of nickel-iron — native stuff, there are fields of it in some places, just sitting on the surface — rolling around for a few centuries, getting nice and round. Then a particularly bad storm picked it up and whipped it into a canyon. By the time the cyclone winds had slapped the marble downrange and it hit a certain section of cliff just right — the marble punched right into the slate and stuck. When Russovsky found that, the grit had worn away the splinter lines and cracks, but you can still see them with a…" His voice trailed away.
Gretchen put down the shale. She looked at Smalls, who was staring at his displays.
"Do you want to tell me about Russovsky?" Gretchen swung one foot up and sat on the table. "Did she find a lot of interesting things out there, in the wasteland?"
"She did." Smalls scratched the side of his face. The respirator had worn a deep groove across his upper cheek. "I guess Tuk told you she hasn't come back."
Gretchen nodded, politely looking away from the meteorologist at the view of the world.
"Are we going to try and find her, bring her back with us?"
"Of course," Gretchen said in a sharp tone. Smalls almost flinched, and she smiled in apology. "She's one of the crew, right? I won't leave anyone behind."
"Okay." Smalls seemed to relax and sat down. "Did…did she bring something back, that day, the day we lost contact with the ship?" He stopped, watching Gretchen's face. "There was a lot of shouting in McCue's lab — it's down the hall — that morning. Then, well, you know — my satellites route through the ship's main array for retransmit from farside, so I was the first to notice something had happened." Smalls shrugged. "The real-time map went out all of a sudden. At first I thought there was a malfunction in my equipment somewhere — the dust eats into things, you know, and they stop working. But everything seemed fine down here. I tried to raise Palenque control on the comm, but there was no answer. I guess — "
"Everyone was dead by then," Gretchen said softly. "Russovsky found something in the desert and she brought it back to camp. Did you hear what they were saying, when they were shouting?"
"Yeah, I guess." Smalls looked away. "Clarkson and McCue were always at odds over everything." He managed a bitter laugh. "You'd think they had been lovers or something, but they weren't, not those two." Smalls tapped the crown of his nose. "They just couldn't agree. Clarkson was very Company, very gung-ho, very — ah — results oriented. McCue just wanted to take her time, check things out, take — you know — a few more measurements, a few more readings."
For the first time, Gretchen thought she saw something like fondness in the man's sallow, exhausted face.
"She'd help with your data, you know? She'd take a look at it and do some raw analysis to see if you were getting instrument errors, or interference or something? And it would come back so clean…everything would be just…solid. Reliable. That was McCue. She was reliable."
Gretchen waited a moment. "Was Russovsky reliable? She and McCue were — "
"They understood each other," Smalls said, nodding. "Russovsky is like one of the old-timers out of Olympus Station, or the outbackers — you ever been to Mars?"
"Yes," Gretchen said, understanding. "I spent two years at the Polaris site."
"Ah." Smalls tried to raise an eyebrow and look knowing, but mostly he looked foolish and Gretchen felt a sudden warmth for the man. Poor kid, she thought, thinking of Delores. He's just a squeeb. Probably never had a real girlfriend his whole life before he came here.
"So Russovsky," Gretchen interrupted, "liked the emptiness. She liked to go out alone, in her ultralight, and just wander, looking for things. Just…seeing what there was to see."
"Yeah!" Smalls scratched the back of his head ruefully. "She was kind of pissed when we first got there — I mean, she's the planetary geologist, right? But Ephesus was smashed like an egg back in First Sun times, the whole planetary mantle was broken into about a million pieces and then slammed back together again. There's no geology left! Just slowly settling rubble. Everything's a jumble — you can't even get a depth reading most places — and her instruments just kicked back garbage and plots looking like an Englishman puked six pints of bitters in the street."
"I see." Gretchen frowned. "So why the flights?"
"Well, that was another argument. See, Russovsky tried playing by the rules and duly reported all of this to Clarkson — and he said if she couldn't do her work, she could help someone else do something useful." Smalls grinned, and Gretchen realized with a start he was younger than she was. Much younger. How old is this kid? Twenty?
"Now, that set McCue off like a rocket, but Russovsky kept her cool and said — and I quote — 'I believe my data are in error, Doctor Clarkson. I will endeavor to rectify the situation.' — and then she just walked out of her office, loaded up the Gagarin and took off into the blue yonder."
Gretchen answered his smile with one of her own. "Good for her. How many times did she go out?"
Smalls pursed his lips, thinking. "About once a week, I guess. You can't carry too much on a Midge, but you can cover a lot of ground. So she must have been all over the place. She always tried to bring me or McCue something pretty — like that shale — or once she found these raw diamonds. She gave those to McCue, I think."