It switchbacked up steep, wooded slopes. Trees grew on either side, stabbing up into the fog. Some were a little like conifers, or a child’s drawing of conifers: stiff radial branches strung with puffballs of fine needles that condensed water droplets from the fog. Others were hung with what looked like tattered sails, or bunches of ragged, velvety straps that sparkled with condensation in the truck’s headlights. Puffballs and straps and sails were tinted deep purple—Venusian plants used a pigment similar to rhodopsin to capture light for photosynthesis. Fat cushions of black moss saddled between the trees. Everything was dripping wet.
A shape loomed out of the fog: a yellow, articulated dump truck exactly like the one she was driving, tipped nose down in the deep ditch at the side of the road. She slowed as she went past, craning to look inside the truck’s cab, seeing that it was empty and feeling a measure of relief: feeling that she was on the right track.
The oppressive shroud of the fog began to lift and break up into streamers caught amongst branches and sails, and she drove on in pewter light, trees thinning to scattered clumps with rough scrub between. The road turned, and gave out abruptly, and a truck was slewed at its end.
The men had come here, all right. Trying to escape the monsters in their heads by driving out of the fog to the place they came to play and relax.
Katya drove past the truck, drove across a rough meadow, past a barbecue pit and picnic tables, jolting on up a steepening slope until even in its lowest gear the truck could climb no farther.
She switched off the motor and swung out of the cab, looked back at the way she had come. A pure white sea stretched toward the horizon, seamlessly melding with the ivory dome of the planet’s permanent cloud cover. The sun was a bright smear low in the east. In less than twenty days, it would set at this latitude, and the long night—117 days long—would begin. Forty kilometers above, a lightning storm flashed and flickered under the cloudroof: she heard the distant, dull percussion of thunder, saw thin, shadowy twists of falling rain that would evaporate before they hit the ground.
There was still no sign of pursuit, but she did not doubt that she was being followed and began to climb toward the top of the ridge. Steep, stony slopes sparsely stubbled with purple vegetation. Squat vases, skull-sized puffballs, clumps of stiff, thorny whips or tall plumes. The air was very still, weighted with sultry heat. Long shadows tangled everywhere.
She was sweating hard, out of breath, her pulse hammering in her ears, when at last she reached the top of the ridge and saw the crests of further ridges rising above the fog, parallel rakes stretching toward the distant prospect of a stark mountain range, the beginning of the desert interior. Ahead of her, the broad ridge ran out toward a high prow crowned with a copse of trees.
A horn blared far below. She felt a spike of alarm, saw a yellow dump truck draw up beside hers, saw three men spill from it.
As she jogged toward the copse of trees, a speck materialized in the distance, scooting above the shadow it cast on the restless sea of fog, cutting through wisps of drifting vapor, rising as it tracked toward her. It was one of the ekranoplan’s drones, a chunky quadrocopter like a garbage-can lid pierced by a cross, with a caged rotor at the end of each bar of the cross. Its cluster of cameras glinted as it buzzed past her and turned and came back, flying low and fast, a homicidal Frisbee aimed at her head.
She dropped flat, felt the backwash of the drone’s fans blow over her, pushed to her feet as the quadrocopter curved around and shot toward her again, and ran toward a clump of thorns at the edge of a steep drop. She broke off one of the dead canes in the core of the clump and swung it at the drone, and the machine veered sideways and made a wide turn and came back toward her, moving in cautious, erratic spurts, halting a few meters away.
There was a metallic clatter and a voice said, “Stay where you are, Doctor. Wait for my men.”
“Is that you, Captain? If you care to follow me, I’ll lead you to the missing miners.”
“You disobeyed a direct order, Doctor. But if you come back now, I’ll overlook your transgression.”
“They climbed up here, looking for a place where they’d be safe,” Katya said, and pointed toward the trees.
The quadrocopter drone tilted and shot forward, and she jumped over the edge and plowed down the steep slope in a cloud of dust and small stones, fetching up breathless and bleeding in a clump of stiff purple plumes. She had lost the thorn cane. The drone was falling toward her, and she snapped off a plume and thrust it like a spear into one of the machine’s fans.
There was a grinding noise and a stinging blizzard of shards and splinters sprayed around her and the drone spun past, canted at a steep angle. It tried to turn back toward Katya, and the mismatched thrust of its fans spun it in a death spiral and it struck a shelf of rock and clattered away down the slope, bouncing and shedding parts.
The three men climbing toward her paused as the wreckage of the drone spun past, then started to climb again.
It took all of Katya’s strength to scramble back up the slope. She paused at the top, her pulse drumming in her skull, and blotted sweat and blood from her eyes—flying splinters had badly cut her face. The men were much closer now. The chief petty officer shouted something to her, and she turned and limped along the crest of the ridge, hot pain knifing in one ankle. Hot air clamped around her like a fever sheet; the world contracted to the patch of stony dirt directly in front of her feet. She scrambled up a steep gully, mostly on all fours, only realized that she reached the top when the shadows of the trees fell across her.
They were rooted amongst black boulders, upright trunks soaring skyward, stiff horizontal branches clad in bunches of purple needles. A man lay on his back on a dry litter of fallen needles, eyes shrunken in their sockets, cracked lips flecked with froth. Katya thought he was dead, but then he turned his head toward her and started to tremble and whimper.
Both his legs were broken. She could see bone sticking out of the shin of his torn trousers. A rifle lay some way off. She supposed that he’d dropped it when he’d fallen.
She knelt beside him and took one of his hands and asked him where his friends were. His eyes rolled back. She thought he had fainted, then she understood, and looked up. And saw small shadows high up in the jutting branches, half-hidden by puffball clusters of needles. Atavistic apes clinging to the safety of their perches.
Katya held on to the man’s hand as the chief petty officer and two seamen stepped toward her.
“I don’t know why he didn’t have you killed,” her mother said.
“Chernov didn’t have a plan,” Katya said. “He had a fixation, a belief that everything that he saw was the result of some fiendish American plot. He was trying to stop me, yes, but he was also trying to rescue me from what he believed to be my own foolishness. When his men saw that I had found the miners, that was the end of it.”
“I suppose we should for once be grateful for the rigid code of honor men value so highly.”
“Arkadi called him a hero. And he acted like one.”
“And now you are the hero. My daughter, who saved the world from war.”
“From a stupid skirmish created by that rigid code of honor. And I was wrong about too many things to qualify as any kind of hero. I was wrong about what infected the miners, to begin with.”
They were talking over lunch. Katya and the crew of the ekranoplan had just been released from quarantine, and her mother had whisked her away from the scrum of reporters and onlookers and a crew from the state TV news to the calm of the luncheon room of the Engineers’ Union, with its views across the simmering basin of Kosmograd and the blue curve of Crater Bay.