The House of Styx by Derek Künsken

Author:Derek Künsken [Künsken, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781786183200
Google: 2kbiDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B088HGQQ2G
Publisher: Solaris
Published: 2020-08-19T23:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-FOUR

THE TABLE WAS quiet but for the moaning of the wind in the video, but Pascal felt electrified, buzzing. Marthe was giving him a cautioning look. She touched his arm.

“Why don’t you make some coffee, Pascal?” she said. “Let’s take a break to absorb things a bit?” she added to the others.

He stood. Marthe always knew what to do. She stood too. Gabriel-Antoine was still frowning at the hull section. Marie-Pier met Pascal’s eyes and he felt suddenly shy. She smiled.

“You went to the surface, Pascal?” she said, rising too.

He nodded and moved to the galley.

“Do you have anything more than video?” Gabriel-Antoine asked. He’d set down the hull piece and was replaying the video. “And the unedited video? This stars-under-the-surface is a hoax.”

“Never mind. I’ll make the coffee,” Marthe said. “Pascal, can you take Gabriel-Antoine to see the sample we retrieved?”

Pascal turned. Marthe took the press from him and smiled. Butterflies fluttered in his stomach, but Gabriel-Antoine was still frowning, his teasing manner gone.

“Outside?” he asked.

“He’s asking a fair question. Show him the proof.”

The young engineer was silent as they suited up and cycled into the slow, sweltering hundred-degree wind. The electric lights under the habitat shone on the gantry, making the clouds seem somber.

“Come on,” he said to Gabriel-Antoine, leading him around the ring of platforms and railings woven of tough carbon nanotubes. Pieces of equipment and piles of supplies were lashed down against the weather. Almost at the other side of the gantry from the airlock was a long triangle shape under an acid-proof carbon tarp. He undid the lashings and pulled the tarp away.

The probe lay on its dorsal side, exposing its underside. Pascal felt bad about the saw marks in the hull, but there had been no other way to really see inside. Broken manipulator arms, or just stubby remains, lay limp. Gabriel-Antoine ran his glove along the ventral side, hunching to look at the surface from an angle.

“This is a small sample intake hatch, and here’s the camera lens,” Pascal said, indicating both the open space near the attachment points for the manipulator arms, and the abraded glass lens on the front.

Gabriel-Antoine gratefully accepted an offered flashlight and peered into all the holes.

“I couldn’t find the camera’s guts,” Pascal continued, a little more comfortable inviting Gabriel-Antoine’s attention to the engineering puzzle, “although there’s a lot of space in there. For all we know, before it shut down in that cave, it might have ejected its memory and some of the more valuable equipment.”

“That doesn’t make sense if it’s Russian or American or Chinese,” Gabriel-Antoine said.

“I don’t think it is.”

Gabriel-Antoine straightened, his eyes narrowing. “Someone out there?” he mocked.

“Humans didn’t build this.”

“Did aliens help your bad video splicing?”

Pascal opened a drawer and took out a block of ceramic about two centimeters thick and ten centimeters on a side. It was inlaid on one surface with metal fibers, while the cut edges showed cross-sections of other metallic threads, edge-on.

“This is part of the ventral section of the hull,” Pascal said.

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