Rift Read Online Free PDF Page B

work: chemistry, atmospherics …
    “Open the carton, Mitya,” Stepan was saying, his voice husky through the breather. It made Mitya swallowreflexively, thinking of the tube in his windpipe, even if he knew he wasn’t likely to feel its microscopic webbing.
    Mitya pulled apart the carton flaps and dug inside among the assorted tools.
    “Over here.” His uncle was kneeling beside the cockpit console housing the processors. “Take out the main bolts and loosen the frame.”
    Mitya hurried to find the driver before Stepan changed his mind. Inserting the driver onto the bolt head and adjusting for size, Mitya handily slipped out the set of bolts.
    Stepan pulled up the assembly, bracing it with a clamp, and began to slide out the main logic nets. Though hard-wrapped against quantum interference, the nets were still surprisingly light.
    In truth it was easily done, and Stepan could have managed without him. Mitya waited to see what else was needed, but, after picking up the equipment and tools, they were done. Stepan led the way out of the shuttle, striding off in the wrong direction, away from the dome. Mitya hiked the tool carton up under his arm and followed, feeling his feet press into the spongy mass of the ground. The sensation of walking on a surface that
gave
with every step was an eerie reminder they were on the planet, a fact which otherwise could be doubted, given that they had yet to see the planetary sky or a vista of any sort. After a short walk they stood in front of a cordon that blocked their way.
    “Out there,” Stepan said, gesturing.
    Mitya peered into the haze.
    “The valley’s out there, Mitya. The Rift Valley.”
    The words thrilled him. A valley so huge it would take
days
to walk across it … and yet it was only a crease on the wider land of the vast continent.
    “You remember your geology, boy? Two crustal plates have been moving apart here for thirty millionyears. The valley must be a spectacular sight on a clear day. Or what passes for a clear day at the Rift.”
    Mitya squinted, trying to see the other side, the matching cliffs of the western wall, twelve miles away. In his imagination, he could see the fathoms of air and the great well of the valley dropping away before them.
    “The plume’s down there, somewhere,” Mitya said, stating the obvious.
    As though he hadn’t heard, his uncle said in a softer voice: “Great-great-grandmother Malovich had a homestead in that valley. She grew sorghum and flax, raised ten children, and wrote a family history going back to first landfall. She cultivated orchids for fun. When the vents started smoking, she refused to leave. Said she was too old to start over. Family legend has it that when the fissures pumped out their river of stone, she sat down among her orchids and died along with them.”
    “Did they ever … find her?”
    “A hundred feet of lava, boy,” his uncle said, turning to him. “She’s under a hundred feet of rock. Her and her sorghum and the family albums.”
    At the dark tone, Mitya stifled his response:
She must have loved it here
. He could imagine the valley full of grass and crops and a farmhouse with a fence around it, and for a moment he thought he knew why his great-great-grandmother sat down and refused to leave.
    Stepan had turned back to face the Rift. “We’ll have a few surprises for this godforsaken valley,” he said. His grim face put an end to the conversation. As they walked back to the dome, Stepan added, “This is a hard time for you, Mitya. No youngster should lose both his parents at once.”
    That caught Mitya off guard, and he felt the ache of the loss next to his ribs.
    “I don’t know much about youngsters,” Stepan said.
    Mitya figured it was Stepan’s way of saying he couldn’t take him on, couldn’t fill in the gap.
    “That’s OK,” he said. He’d never figured Stepan owed him that, but he felt worse for knowing Stepan had considered and passed on it.
    As they ducked into the air