profiles had improved since Dorcas’s first detection, and now revealed what appeared to be a purposefully buried box, not so very different in size and proportions from the container Chama had uncovered on the Moon. A rectangular shaft must have been excavated, the box lowered into it lengthwise and the waste material dropped back over it, before being tamped down. With better equipment, they might even have been able to peer inside the box without bringing it to the surface. Not that it mattered: they’d have the thing in their hands before very long. Gribelin was digging a circular shaft slightly wider than the original bore, and he would stop short of the item itself, for fear of damaging it or triggering some destruct mechanism or booby trap. To be sure, they would send in the proxy Gribelin carried attached to the front of his vehicle.
‘When do we hit it?’ she asked.
Gribelin stared at the drill for a long while before answering. ‘Sixty, seventy minutes.’
‘When I asked you before, you said it wouldn’t take more than an hour.’
‘I said it wouldn’t take
‘Golem’s fifty kays out,’ Dorcas said levelly. ‘If the hammerheads are going to do anything, we’ll know about it soon enough. Maybe luck’s on your golem’s side.’
‘If we didn’t have to drill here, maybe we could drive out and meet the golem halfway,’ Jitendra said, stamping his feet nervously, as if the cold was starting to reach him through the insulation of his suit.
‘And then what?’ Dorcas asked. ‘Use reasoned persuasion?’
‘I was thinking more along the lines of a reasoned kick in the teeth.’
‘There’s no Mech to stop you, but you’d still be in a world of trouble once news got back to the Surveilled World. And we don’t know that the golem doesn’t have a human or warmblood guide with it.’ Dorcas nodded at the whirring drill. ‘We’ll see this through to the bitter end. It’s not as if it’s likely to be anything worth fighting over.’
‘You still don’t believe we’ll find anything,’ Sunday said.
‘If that box has been down there for a hundred years,’ Dorcas said, ‘then everything I know about the Evolvarium is wrong. And I’m afraid that’s just not the way my world works.’
‘Much as it pains me to agree with the good captain,’ Gribelin said, ‘she does have a point.’
There had been days that seemed to pass more rapidly than that hour. Watching the drill was like watching a kettle. Eventually Sunday gave up and walked away from the site, as far as she dared. Even when she was two hundred metres from the truck, she could still feel the vibrations from Gribelin’s equipment. Other than the rock plume, the sky was clear and cloudless, darkening almost to a subtle purple-black at the zenith. Pavonis Mons was a gentle bulge on the horizon – underwhelming, or would have been were she naive enough to have expected anything more spectacular. She was already on its footslopes. The mountains of Mars were simply too big to see in one go, unless one was in space.
Give her Kilimanjaro any day. At least that was a mountain you could point to.
The vibration stopped. She looked back just in time to see the plume attenuate, the last part of it bannering through the sky like a kite’s tail. She watched Gribelin push the drill back out of the way, nothing in his unhurried movements suggesting that there’d been a fault with the machinery.
She walked back to the drill site. By the time she got there, Jitendra and Dorcas were leaning at the edge of the fresh hole, hands on knees as they peered into its depths.
‘The good news,’ Dorcas said, ‘is that one of the hammerheads took the bait.’
‘And?’
‘It wasn’t a clean kill. The vehicle is still approaching, although not as quickly as before. But it’s damaged, and the other hammerhead may be taking an interest.’
‘Will there be repercussions?’
‘Reprisals? Probably not. Your golem resumed movement before sun-up, which is asking for trouble in anyone’s book.’
‘I hope no one else was hurt.’
‘Their fault if they were,’ Dorcas said.
Sunday took care as she neared the freshly dug hole. It was only about sixty centimetres across, but easily wide enough to become wedged in if she lost her footing.
‘About this much to go,’ Gribelin said, spreading his hands the width of a football. ‘We’ll back off and let the proxy dig out the rest.’
‘Sifters,’ Sibyl said, pointing to two pink plumes on the horizon, sailing slowly from left to right like the smoke from an Old-World ocean liner. ‘We’d best not hang around.’
The truck and the airship backed off a couple of hundred metres. Gribelin’s robot had detached itself from the prow of his vehicle and was now striding across the open terrain. Gribelin had gone into ching bind, otherwise immobile as he drove the proxy to the edge of the hole. It was the same kind of skeletal, minimalist unit that Sunday had chinged on the Moon, constructed from numerous tubes and pistons. It squeezed into the hole effortlessly, folding itself into a tight little knot like a dried-up spider, and vanished down the shaft. A few moments later, gobbets of rubble began to pop out of the opening.
But after a few minutes’ further excavation, the proxy had unearthed the box. Deeming it to be safe, at least for the moment, Sunday returned to the shaft and looked down. The proxy had extricated itself, allowing her a clear view of the object. About two-thirds of the upright container had been exposed, revealing it to be of dull, anonymous-looking construction. The size of a picnic hamper, the grey alloy casing was scratched and slightly dented. Sunday made out the seam of a lid, and what appeared to be a pair of simple catches in the long side.
She nodded at Gribelin. ‘Bring it all the way out.’
They retreated again and waited for the proxy to haul the box from the shaft and deposit it on the ground lengthwise, with the lid facing the sky. In all the red emptiness of Mars, it looked like something painted by Salvador
