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“I thought you said you’d done this before.”

Gemma stopped in the middle of banging the rust off one of the eight servo stations that needed replacing. “We didn’t have to do it in suits down in the Sunbottle. Not to mention the rust.” With a final bang she got the access panel on the side of the servo open and started rummaging around inside. “How did it even get out here, anyway? Didn’t think there was enough oxygen or moisture in the air outside the dome.”

“I dunno. Maybe it worked its way around from the inside. Maybe there’s a similar reaction with the atmosphere out here.” Pak handed her a cable tester when she waved for it. “Maybe we just got bad parts when these were installed.”

“That’s comforting.” She fiddled for a moment then yanked a set of cables out. “No good.”

“Will replacing those add any time to fixing the hatch?”

Another set of cables came out of the hatch with similar abruptness. “I want to say not much but I’ve never had to rerun a set of these in vacuum rated gloves. It could just be a few minutes per servo, it could turn into as much as half an hour.”

“How long did this take down below?”

Gemma glanced at him over top of the hatch. “Twenty minutes with an experienced crawl team, thirty if I was on it. We’re getting two crawl teams plus the watchers you pulled, so we only need to do two servos per team. But the real problem is how deep we need to go.”

The lip of the hatch was about four inches above the red Martian dirt underfoot. Pak gave it another once over, he’d been certain there weren’t any servos down there but he hadn’t looked closely before. He’d been under the impression they wouldn’t do much on the bottom of the frame.

“Deep into the wiring,” Gemma said with a giggle. “Not underground. Corrosion tends to spread once it gets onto something. We may need to rip out part of the wiring in the dome walls or even find a junction box and rerun an entire line in order to get power moving to these things again.”

“Great.” Pak scooped up the hammer she’d been working with a moment ago. “Well, let me know if you need a hand with anything.”

“Where are you going?”

“To get the next servo case open.” He started towards the other side of the hundred and twenty foot hatch. “The sooner we can get all these tests done and start the replacements the happier I’ll be.”

---

 

“…And this is the Sunbottle.”

“Impressive.” It really was. Harriet hadn’t expected to feel outdone by the Malacandrans at any point during her visit but the reactor’s main floor atrium was enough to take the breath away after a few days on the bleak surface of the Red Planet. “Was it built like this or did you remodel it?”

Nobari shrugged. “It’s not really clear what is original and what was added by the Founders but the early records suggest at least part of this was added after Bottletown was established. Most of our existing facilities started off as remains for Borealis and were expanded to accommodate more people as the population grew.”

“Why not just expand out into the old colony?” Aubrey asked. “We have a lot of old, unused buildings on Earth but we were never shy about reappropriating them if we had a need. It’s just most of the time we didn’t.”

“Most of the old places are – were – unsafe. And there’s the question of whether we can feed everyone if we expand.” Nobari made a noncommittal noise. “Or that’s what I would have told you two weeks ago. There’s a lot about the Founders that only the Eldest and his or her successor know. Normally I’d be in the process of passing most of that on to Elder Rectenwald now that I’m Eldest but, to be honest, I’m not sure how much of it is going to be relevant in the future.”

“So you think you stayed out of the rest of the colony because only these buildings were masked by the reactor?” Harriet understood that was what the Naval engineers thought.

“That’s a possibility, although I don’t have the first clue how to tell if it’s true.” Nobari led them across the atrium to a door at one end of the oval and let them in. They arrived in a bare office with a single bookshelf at one end. “Most of our knowledge of the Founders’ era tells us about how things work but not why they work that way. In the Founders’ time people were not sent into Silence as young as now and there were fewer people overall, so they had more time to delve into the whys of the hows. Now most of what they learned just sits here and gathers dust.”

“What do you think the whys are, Eldest?” Harriet asked.

That drew the first genuine smile he’d shown that day. “Me? I’m an odd person to ask, don’t you think?”

Harriet fumbled for a moment, a bit taken aback. “Well, you’re the Eldest, aren’t you?”

“That doesn’t mean as much as you might think,” he answered, laughing. “I’ve known most of the Eldest’s secrets for about twenty days and I’ll leave the position in about the same period of time, Oyarsa willing. That’s about average for an Eldest’s tenure. There’s really not a whole lot of weight to the position, or at least there wasn’t until we had you folks to deal with.”

“But you are the one dealing with us,” Harriet pointed out.  “That makes it your decision and makes your thoughts kind of important, no?”

Nobari rocked uncomfortably from one foot to the other and back again. “Perhaps.”

Long honed instincts told Harriet she wasn’t going to get any more pushing harder. Better to let the interview’s subject take some time to sort their thoughts out. “I know this is a strange time for you,” she said. “We’ll let you–“

“Eldest!” A harried looking young man burst into the room, panting.

Nobari pivoted instantly from uncomfortable contemplative to decisive actor, pivoting to look back to at the door in the same moment. “What’s wrong, Ramone?”

“The wing fields are fluctuating towards the edges of the orange zone in shorter and shorter intervals!” He paused and gasped in another breath. “We could be looking at a complete field collapse!”

Momentary confusion crossed Nobari’s face, then he nodded. “This is because of the conduit problem Elder Alyssa was working on?”

“Yes, Eldest!”

Nobari started for the door with purposeful strides. “Show me.”

---

 

The crates took up a full quarter of the spacelock and the last batches of parts were still trickling in from fabber labs across the ship but, based on her expression, Alyssa was already overwhelmed by what she was seeing. Craig suppressed a smile and asked, “Is anything not up to your standards?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Pretty much the opposite, in fact.” She was looking over the injector assembly in her hands with a critical eye. She indicated a small patch near the primary coupling. “I’m not even sure what some of these parts do. I presume this is the secondary regulator, because that’s where it is on the parts we use, but this is far too small to be an exact replica of them.”

“It’s not,” Deveneaux confirmed. “It’s  a modern regulator with a quarter the size and twice the redundancy as what you have now. We’re not replacing your primary regulators right now so they aren’t going to take all the burden off the injection system but they will remove some of the strain. You can keep running your reactor under its current settings for another couple of centuries before the problems start again. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Alyssa put the injector back into its spot in the crate and closed the lid. “I don’t understand why you would consider sharing technology like this immoral. You could do so much good with it.”

“It’s not the technology itself that’s the problem,” Craig said. “Human beings are influence by their environment, up to and including the technology and culture around them. We think introducing technology and culture to those who aren’t prepared to deal with it is a harmful influence to the people in question. It distorts their culture and prevents them from developing into who they would be otherwise.”

“What if who they would be otherwise is less human than the people they will become if you help them?”

“That’s hardly a new line of thought, ma’am. But it’s also a very dangerous one. Many evil things in the past were done in the name of helping other people.” Craig shrugged. “Ultimately we decided that intervention beyond certain boundaries was something we couldn’t be trusted with. Humanity is not a thing we let ourselves define.”

“If you won’t define it, why have the word?” She locked the crate closed with a little more force than necessary. “We never wanted to become a colony locked in a dome, hiding from our homeworld, ignorant of how half our technology works. It was a terrible thing, made worse because we remember just enough to know that, in many ways, we are so much less than what we should be. Even then, we may never conform to what you think humanity should be, either. But it would be nice to at least know enough to judge whether you’re lying to me about the evils of the past. We could find our own ways to avoid them, then.”

A smile tugged at the corners of Craig’s mouth. He knew when he’d lost a point. “I think we can do that, at least. Is everything to your liking?”

She glanced down at her inventory list. “I think I’ve seen everything. And yes, it all looks more than functional in our reactor.”

“Excellent, then I’ll–” A low whistle in his ear informed him of an incoming communication. “Excuse me for a moment.”

He moved a couple of paces away and flicked a finger so his AI would tell him who was calling. A bland voice told him, “Harriet Thacker.”

Craig frowned. She was supposed to be on the surface, doing journalist things. He accepted the call. “Miss Thacker?”

“Captain.” She sounded a little frantic. “You need to get Mrs. Pracht and Commander Deveneaux on a line down here ASAP. Something’s gone haywire in the Sunbottle.”

“Understood. Standby.” He cut the line and looked across the spacelock. “Chief Merryweather! Start loading it up! Alyssa, Commander, we need to make a quick visit to the comms lab…”