“Perhaps they didn’t like the idea of leaving Teterev down here,” Lenka said.
“I bet they liked the idea of dying in orbit even less,” Rasht replied.
We continued our sweep of the wreck. We were less interested in Teterev’s whereabouts than what Teterev might have left us to plunder. But the two things were not unrelated. Any spacer, any Ultra, is bound to care a little about the fate of another. Ordinary human concern is only part of it. There may be lessons to be learned, and a lesson is only another sort of tradeable.
“I’ve found a journal,” I said.
I had found it on a shelf in the cockpit. It was a handwritten log, rather than a series of data entries.
The journal had heavy black covers, but the paper inside was very thin. I thumbed my way to the start. It looked like a woman’s handwriting to me. Russish was not my strongest tongue, but the script was clear enough.
“Teterev starts this after the crash,” I said, while the others gathered around. “Says that she expects the power to run out eventually, so there’s no point trying to record anything in the ship itself. But they have food and water and they can use the remaining power to stay warm.”
“Go on,” Rasht said, while the monkey studied its contaminated paw.
“I’m trying to get some sense of what happened. I think she came down here alone.” I skimmed forward through the entries, squinting with the concentration. “There’s no talk of being rescued, or even hoping of it. It’s as if she knew no one would be coming down.” I had to work hard not to rip the paper with my power-augmented fingers. It felt tissue-thin between my fingers, like a fly’s wings.
“A punishment, then,” Rasht said. “Marooned down here for a crime.”
“That’s an expensive way of marooning someone.” I read on. “No—it wasn’t punishment. Not according to this, anyway. An accident, something to do with one of the geysers—she says that she’s afraid that it will erupt again, as it did ‘on the day’. Anyway, Teterev knew she was stuck down here. And she knows she’s in trouble. Keeps talking about her ‘mistake’ in not waking the others. Says she wonders if there’s a way to signal the other ship, the orbiting lighthugger. Bring some or all of the crew out of reefersleep.” I paused, my finger hovering over a word. “Lev.”
“Lev?” Lenka repeated.
“She mentions Lev. Says Lev would help her, if she could get a message through. She’d have to accept her punishment, but at least get off Holda.”
“Maybe Teterev was never meant to be down here,” Lenka said. “Jump ahead, Nidra. Let’s find out what happened.”
I paged through dozens and dozens of entries. Some were dated and consecutive. Elsewhere I noticed blank pages and sometimes gaps of many days between the accounts. The entries became sparser, too. Teterev’s hand, barely clear to begin with, became progressively wilder and less legible. Her letters and words began to loop and scrawl across the page, like the traces of a seismograph registering the onset of some major dislocation.
“Stop,” Rasht said, as I turned over a page. “Go back. What was that figure?”
I turned back the sheets with a sort of dread. My eye had caught enough to know what to expect.
It was a drawing of the volcanic cone, exactly as it appeared from the position of the wreck.
Perhaps it was no more than an accident of Teterev’s hand, but the way she had put her marks down on the paper only seemed to add to the suggestion of brooding, patient malevolancy I had already detected in the feature. Teterev seemed to have made the cephalopod’s head more bulbous, more cerebral, the lava tubes more muscular and tentacle-like. Even the way she had stippled the tubes to suggest snow or ice could not help but suggest to my eye rows and rows of suckers.
Worse, she had drawn a gaping, beak-mouth between two of those tentacles.
There was a silence before Lenka said: “Turn to the end. We can read the other entries later.”
I flicked through the pages until the writing ran out. The last few entries were barely entries at all, just scratchy annotations, done in haste or distraction.
Phrases jumped out at us.
Can’t wake the others. Tried everything I can. My dear Lev, lost to me.
Such a good boy. A good son.
Doesn’t deserve me, the mistakes I’ve made.
Stuck down here. But won’t give in. Need materials, power. Something in that hill. Magnetic anomaly. Hill looks wrong. I think there might be something in it.
Amerikanos were here once, that’s the only answer. Came by their old, slow methods. Frozen cells and robot wombs. No records, but so what. Must have dug into that hill, buried something in it. Ship or an installation. See an entrance. Cave mouth. That’s where they went in.
I don’t want to go in. But I want what they left behind. It might save my life.
Might get me back to the ship.
Back to Lev.
“They were never here,” Rasht said. “Teterev would have known that. Their colonies never got this far out.”
“She was desperate enough to try anything,” Lenka said. “I feel sorry for her, stuck all alone here. I bet she knew it was a thousand to one chance.”
“Nonetheless,” I said, “there is something odd about that hill. Maybe it’s nothing to do with the Amerikanos, but if you’re out of options, you might as well see what’s inside.” I turned back to the drawing. The mouth, I now realised, was Teterev’s way of drawing the cave entrance.
But it still looked like the beak of an octopus.
“One thing’s for certain,” Lenka said. “If Teterev went into that hill, she didn’t come back.”
“I didn’t notice any footprints,” I said.
“They wouldn’t last, not with all the geothermal activity around here. The top of the ice must be melting and re-freezing all the time.”
“We should look into the cave, anyway,” Rasht said.
I shook my head, struck by an intense conviction that this was exactly the wrong thing to.
“It’s not our job to find Teterev’s corpse.”
“Someone should find it,” Lenka said sharply. “Give her some dignity in death. At least record what happened to her. She was one of us, Nidra—an Ultra. She deserves better than to be forgotten. Can I look at her journal?”
“Be my guest,” I said, passing it over to her.
“Nidra is right—her body isn’t our concern,” Rasht said, while Lenka paged through the sheets. “She took a risk, and it didn’t work out for her. But the Amerikanos are of interest to us.”
“Records say they weren’t here,” I said.
“And that’s what I’ve always believed. But records can be wrong. What if Teterev was right with her theory? Amerikano relics are worth quite a bit these days, especially on Yellowstone.”
“Then we return to orbit, send down a drone,” I said.
“We’re here already,” Rasht answered. “There are three of us—four if you include Kanto. Did you see how old Teterev’s helmet was? We have better equipment, and we’re not down to our last hope of survival. We can turn back whenever we like. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
It took something to make our ramshackle equipment look better than someone else’s, I thought to myself. Besides, we were inferring a great deal from just one helmet. Perhaps it had been an old keepsake, a memento of earlier spacefaring adventures.