The Secret of Life by Paul McAuley

Author:Paul McAuley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2011-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

They are awakened early in the morning by the insistent bleep of the radio. It is Penn Brown. “Something’s happened at the Chinese camp,” he says. “We have to move on at once.”

Anchee swings around in her hammock and plants her feet on the ribbed rubber floor. She says to the air, “We have to move? What’s happened?”

“There’s a message in your e-mail box. Take a look while you’re getting ready. I want to leave in fifteen minutes.”

The e-mail is a brief video clip from Howard Smalls. Although he is wearing a suit and tie, Smalls looks as rumpled as Mariella feels. He recorded the clip thirty minutes ago, in the early hours of the morning in Washington.

“We have pictures that show the Chinese moving out of their camp,” he says. “They put something down their last borehole yesterday, and now they’re driving straight out of Chasma Boreale toward their lander. They have left a lot of equipment behind—I understand that NASA technicians are trying to enhance the pictures so they can make an inventory. NASA has picked up some radio traffic from the Chinese, too, although it’s deeply encrypted and we don’t have a handle on it yet. I want you to move in and find out what’s going on. More to follow when we know more, and meanwhile, good luck.”

There are only three pictures, snatched by one of the polar satellites. Mariella tries to make sense of them as Anchee fires up the rover’s motors and begins to follow Penn Brown at speed over the flat icescape. The pictures have not been processed or enhanced by any image-correction program, and the contrast between the bright western edge of the chasma and the dark shadows of the floor is so high that most detail is lost, but someone in the flight control center has circled the small dot that is the Chinese rover, and successive shots clearly show that it is moving away from the site of the camp. From the interval between the time-stamped photographs and a rough estimate of scale, Mariella figures that it is moving at about sixty kph. Recklessly fast. As if fleeing.

She gets on the radio and asks Penn Brown, “What did they drop down the borehole?”

Penn Brown says, “Some kind of cylinder, perhaps a meter high, fifty or sixty centimeters across. Most likely a bomb. They want to destroy the evidence, just as I predicted. I bet they emplaced bombs at the other sites, too.”

“It could be a probe,” Mariella says, and pulls out her slate and puts on her goggles and gloves and begins to type.

Anchee says, “It has to be nuclear. My God.”

“We don’t know that it’s nuclear,” Mariella says. “We don’t even know that it’s a bomb.”

“We don’t know that it isn’t,” Anchee Ye says, “and we’re headed straight for it.”

She has slowed down, and Penn Brown’s rover has begun to pull ahead.

Penn Brown says, “You’re drifting back. Not chicken, I hope.”

Anchee Ye switches off the radio and says to Mariella, “What do you think?”

“He’s going anyway.

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