SIX

 

 

EVEN WHEN PASCAL began rewinding the cable, he couldn’t get a signal back from the camera. He worried he’d lost both the camera and the spare wheel in the terrible wind, that maybe he hadn’t tied the cable properly. No one could work very precisely through manipulator arms. But when, through the probe’s main camera, the spare wheel and camera appeared from the gullet of the cave, relief soaked into him.

Pascal untied the wheel with the manipulator arms and repacked everything into the tool panel. The wind hadn’t let up. It had, in fact, strengthened to eleven kilometers per hour around the shelter of their boulder. They had to get the probe out of there. The winds forty-five kilometers higher would carry the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs inexorably west, and soon they would be out of recovery distance.

Pascal launched the probe into the air, riding on a hard burst of propellers. In ninety-three atmospheres of pressure, every churn of the props lifted the probe, but the view on their screen lurched wildly as the wind sucked it towards the cave. The rock-face approached fast; when only a meter separated it from dashing into stone, the probe’s buoyancy and lift finally got it above the current. It swayed drunkenly above Diana Chasma and then ascended more certainly.

An hour later, George-Étienne went outside to tie it to the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. Then they turned the habitat propellers on a course to catch up with their flock, floating fourteen hours downwind of them.

George-Étienne came back in from stowing the probe, holding the spare wheel. Pascal took it with a small sense of awe. He was holding something that had traveled beneath the surface of Venus. Although it had been scratched and dented, the wind had scoured its black carbon down to the metal beneath and polished it mirror-bright. Experimentally, he held the tread face of the wheel in front of himself. In its curved surface, his face stretched, distorting so much that, for once, he could stand to see his own reflection. His inflated green eyes stared back. His distended nose overwhelmed his face. His long brown hair framed his face from a great distance.

Pascal detached the beaten camera. Remarkably, for all the blows it had taken, the diamond lens had survived. He downloaded the images.

“They’re clear,” his father said in wonder.

They were, as much as they could be. The still images taken every ten seconds, where not ruined by poor light or quick movement, weren’t bad. None of the snowy static they’d been seeing in the live feed showed in the pictures.

“I wonder if the transmitter burnt out,” Pascal said.

He began a diagnostic of the transmitter while they looked at the pictures. They had good ones of the clean walls, sometimes blurred at the edges. They had three worth keeping of the first eddy and the silt build-up. These photos would be worth a lot to geologists. What might they ask for in trade?

Then they came to two pictures at the end, in the last eddy. The graininess in them was entirely due to the fading light from the failing battery. Not static like they’d seen in their feed. The black and white pictures showed a flat triangular shape buried under silt, about four meters long. At its apex something shiny and smooth and not at all basaltic reflected the light.

“What is it?” George-Étienne asked.

Pascal couldn’t even guess. He knew of no geological process that would create a perfect isosceles triangle. It wasn’t made of the same materials as the rock. It had to be artificial.

“Do you think the Russians or Chinese or Americans sent down some secret probes?” Pascal hazarded.

“You mean maybe we aren’t the first to find this cave?”

Pascal shrugged. He couldn’t think of anything else. Maybe one of the big powers had sent something down to look at the geology of Venus up close.

“None of them have done anything on Venus for over a hundred years,” Pascal said. The exploration of Venus by bigger nations had never amounted to much more than seeing Venus as a dead end on the road to colonizing the solar system. No one had contested the claim to the clouds of Venus by a new sovereign Québec sixty years ago. Why would they?

“But what if one of the Banks sent down an automated probe,” Pascal said, “looking for whatever Banks look for—minerals, or rare metals, something that would make their investment worth it? The triangular shape looks a little like a wing. What if they didn’t know the wind was there? While their automated probe was gliding, maybe it got caught in the wind and sucked into the cave?”

George-Étienne brushed at his beard.

“Maybe,” he said. “The bloodsuckers in the Bank stick their noses into la colonie’s business, looking to take over. Never seemed to me to be worth their while; we’re too poor for them to make any real money off us. Maybe they knew something was down here.”

“That still doesn’t explain where the wind is coming from,” Pascal said, “or where it’s going.”

“Whatever that probe is,” George-Étienne said, staring at the frozen image, “it’ll be good salvage. Three meters long minimum. In metals alone, it’ll be more than we harvest.”

“How are we going to get it out?” Pascal asked. “Against the wind?”

“It got in there somehow,” his father said. “We’ll make a salvage plan and we’ll get it out.”

George-Étienne wandered away cheerfully to resume chores that hadn’t been done for a day, especially now that Pascal couldn’t put on his suit for a few days. Pascal turned his attention back to the pictures. He flipped through them more slowly, examining each one minutely.

All the static came from the bad transmitter. They’d need a new transmitter for the next try, or he’d need to disassemble and rebuild this one. At least he could do that while his legs were healing. He ran a diagnostic program on the transmitter to see what parts he’d need.

But the diagnostic failed. Nothing was wrong with the transmitter. It passed all the tests and should have transmitted all the way back to the probe, even through the cave. He wasn’t an expert on supercritical carbon dioxide, but he didn’t think Venus’s atmosphere could have interfered with radio waves.

He dug deeper into the camera’s simple operating system. In the admin levels, he found the logs for the last ten minutes of operation, a kind of transmitter black box for diagnostics if the device stopped working. It wasn’t coded for easy user interface, but he made his way through the code and memory buffers and found a lot more radio signal than there should have been.

A very defined radio wave curve showed, increasing in strength as the camera descended into the cave. Even with only ten minutes of sample, it was unmistakable. What would produce radio waves under the surface of Venus? He didn’t think it was the triangular probe, if it really was a probe. It had been the same temperature as the rest of its environment, which meant its circuitry was probably inactive.

The radio signals repeated with the regularity of some kind of machinery. But what machinery would have survived in the crushing pressure and melting depths of Venus? And why? The basaltic rock had nothing of value. Except the wind?

He ran all his calculations again, then called Pa.