“The Airbus rover is parked at the vent. So that’s where they went.”
“What? I don’t follow.”
“Raoul and I called on Airbus yesterday, only they weren’t home. At least no one but Claudine. And she was real close-mouthed about where the other two were. Well, now we know.”
“What are they doing there? Can you see the crew?”
“Nope, just the rover, and a climbing rig. My guess is, they’re inside.”
She leaped to her feet. “That sonofabitch! I can’t believe it! Last I talked to Chen, it was going to be a joint descent.”
“How so?”
“I was going to go with them, or rather, him. I figured a two-biologist trip was optimum.”
“Boss know about this?”
“Not yet. He knows I talked biology with Chen, showed him my results. And that I refused to trade the samples for a ride home. I’m sorry now I told Chen anything. If I’d known what he was gonna do…”
“Well, he’d have found the vent with or without you.”
“I didn’t tell him where it was, or much about what the interior was like. I didn’t do a travelogue. We talked biology.”
“How’d he find it, then?”
“Probably followed our tracks backwards. He knew we were coming from there when they landed. We can always ask.”
“So he doesn’t know what to expect?”
“Not in any detail. I said it was slippery and dangerous, that Viktor’d been hurt there. I was still pissed off with the bastard, wanted to pick his brain on theory, not help him win the prize.”
“Well, we’re screwed now,” Marc said wanly. “There goes our last card.”
In her Sydney newspaper there was a lurid spread on the “Mars flu.”
“What?!” she cried. “Listen: ‘Julia Barth lies near death from an affliction caught from the Martian life she found—’ Where did they get this?”
Viktor said, “No leaks, Axelrod said.”
Raoul was doing his systems maintenance in the hab, so they had a meeting. “I told only my personal counselor,” he insisted.
“So means there is leak from counselor,” Viktor said.
“As we suspected before,” Marc said.
“Damn!” Julia fumed. “We can’t trust anybody now.”
“Maybe is best, keep us on guard.”
“It’ll be a media firestorm Earthside,” Marc said.
It was, and she soon sickened of reading even her “filtered” news summary. Axelrod came on soon, rueful at the leak. “A goddamned media tabloid paid Raoul’s counselor a million for the story,” he said angrily. “Said he didn’t want to stick around anyway, listening to Raoul die. The bastard!”
“I wonder if Axelrod didn’t know before?” Marc asked.
Viktor asked, “You mean, is Axelrod getting copies of all our counselor sessions?”
“Could be. Would explain some leaks,” Marc said.
“We cannot know if he is,” Raoul said. “We just don’t know what or who to trust anymore.”
Axelrod’s news did not make any difference to her. For each of them the whole nightmare of quarantine and panic suddenly became solidly real.
They were all having a rather glum midafternoon tea when the comm console lit up with a flashing red light. The unexpected chimes startled Julia from her seat.
Emergency message! But from who?
Claudine’s voice came across thin and tense in the sudden hush. “’Ello hab, are you there? Something’s wrong. Gerda and Chen are away from base in ze rover and zhey ’ave missed their second check-in. Can you do anything?”
Marc was closest to the console. “Where are they?” he asked blandly, knowing full well that the rover hadn’t moved from the vent.
“Zhey’re at a big fissure about twenty kilometers north of here. It’s the vent where Julia found the life-form. They went underground again this morning, and I ’aven’t ’eard anything since.”
“Again today? How long have they been out there?”
“Since yesterday. They did a short descent in ze afternoon, then prepared to go deeper today.”
“And check-in time was…?”
