Somewhat to Helen’s surprise, Grace just nodded and stepped aside for Ben as he hurried out the door. Helen did not, however, miss the purely triumphant smile that spread across her face.
Can’t blame her, I suppose. “If that’s what it looks like,” she repeated out loud.
“If that’s what it looks like, all our old problems are over with, and we’ll have a set of brand-new ones,” said Michael. “But ohmygod…”
Helen touched his arm. “I quite agree. Go grab your gear, Michael, and tell Jolynn and the boys you won’t be home for supper.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He snapped a mock salute and hurried out the door.
Grace and Helen faced each other for a long moment. “Well,” said Grace brightly, “I think I’ll go reorganize my files. I think there’s going to be some new work coming in.” She left, and the door slid shut behind her.
Finally alone, Helen reached up and untied her scarf. Her long white hair fell down around her shoulders. She combed her fingers through it, feeling how each strand separated and fell, brushing her cheeks and shoulders. It felt coarser than she remembered it feeling when she was a young woman. Coarser and yet more fragile, like its owner.
Let this work out, she prayed silently. I don’t care if I have to spend the next fifty years apologizing to Grace Meyer. This could save us all. Please, let it work out right.
Less than five hours later, Helen, too on edge to remember she ought to be tired and hungry, unstrapped herself from a second crash-couch. This one was in the little dormitory aboard Scarab Fourteen. The scarab itself crawled across the Venusian surface, following the signal output of Derek Cusmanos’s two drones.
Because it was Kevin Cusmanos’s policy to always have two of Venera’s twenty scarabs ready to go in case of emergency, heading to the surface had been a matter of grabbing overnight bags and calling on Adrian Makepeace, the duty pilot for the afternoon shift. Kevin said he’d take the board down himself, but he wanted Adrian’s experience in the copilot’s seat.
Scarab Fourteen was a clone of all the other scarabs owned and operated by Venera Base—a wedge-shaped, mobile laboratory that could both fly and roll. They were designed to take a team of up to seven researchers plus two crew members to almost any spot on the Venusian surface that wasn’t covered in lava. Built wide and low to the ground, they were practical but not comfortable. Adrian, Helen noticed, seemed to be developing a permanent stoop and a tendency to walk sideways from all the time he spent in them.
Designing for the heat and pressure of the Venusian surface had proved incredibly difficult. That was one of the reasons Venera floated through the clouds. The surface was an oven. Up in the clouds, the temperature was close to the freezing point of water. Down here, they had to carry layers of insulation and heavy-duty coolant tanks that had to be recharged and refrozen after each trip.
Helen picked her way between the crash-couches, rocking slightly with the motion of the treads until she emerged into the main corridor. Ben and Michael had gone ahead of her and already crowded behind Kevin’s and Adrian’s chairs in the command area. They all stared through the main window that wrapped around the scarab’s nose.
The scarab ground its careful way across the nightside of Venus. Outside, the cracked surface of Ruskalia Planitia glowed with the heat it radiated, creating a quilt of deep reds, bright oranges, and clear, clean yellow. Overhead, the light reflected off the clouds, lending them the color and texture of molten gold being stirred by some invisible hand.
Kevin, a cautious, quiet man, who was almost twice as broad in the shoulders as his younger brother, kept his gaze flickering between the map displays and the window which showed them Beta Regio, a ragged wall of living fire wavering in the distance.
Coming down several kilometers from the whatever-it-was had seemed prudent. They did not want to land accidentally on something important.
As Beta Regio grew larger, the plain under the scarab’s treads became rougher. Small, knife-backed ridges, blood red with escaping heat and blurred by the thick atmosphere, rose out of the plain. The closer they came to Beta Regio, the higher the ridges rose, until they became ragged walls. At last, Scarab Fourteen drove down a glowing corridor, following the path carved by a river of ancient lava.
A million similar paths spread out around the various Venusian highlands. Kevin drove the scarab gently over the rocks and swells, guided by the global positioning readout and the signals from his brother’s drones.
The lava trail dead-ended at a sharp, smooth cliff that shone a livid orange. Some coal-bright sand rolled lazily along the brilliant ground, brushing against the hatchway set into the living rock.