Page 1 of River Dragon’s Song

CHAPTER ONE

The bolt moved when Frankie Valente tapped it with the handle of her rock hammer. She tapped it again, just to be sure, and felt the faint answering shiver travel through the anchor plate and into her glove. It wasn’t much. Most people wouldn’t have noticed it. But the bolt was holding up a length of safety line strung along the ceiling of a lava tube, forty meters beneath the newest housing block in Iron Ridge. And she had been hired to notice exactly this kind of problem.

“Ethan,” she said into her helmet mic. “I’ve got a loose anchor at marker twelve.”

There was a pause long enough for her to picture the team leader’s resigned expression. Then his voice crackled in her ear. “Define loose.”

“It moves.”

“Frankie, everything moves a little. It’s basalt.”

“The rock isn’t moving. The bolt is.” She shone her helmet lamp along the curve of the ceiling, following the pale orange line to the next anchor and the one after that. The light slid over rippled black stone that had been poured out of the planet as liquid fire, long before anyone had thought to give Mars a name. It looked solid. It usually was. “I want to check the rest of this section before anyone clips onto it.”

Behind her, Tanjiri Shah made a small, pained noise. Frankie didn’t have to turn around to know what her face looked like either. The geologist had brown skin and dark eyes and a perpetually impatient look—one that was frequently directed at Frankie and her more methodical approach. The other woman had been bouncing impatiently on her toes since they’d climbed down the access shaft that morning.

“We did check them,” Lucas Reed said, crouched next to one of the equipment cases. He was frowning at a diagnostic tablet, and he didn’t bother to look up. Lucas was tall and thin and intense, and if it wasn’t technical, he wasn’t interested. “Yesterday. You were there.”

“I checked marker twelve yesterday,” she agreed. “It didn’t move yesterday.”

Ethan Mercer came back along the tube towards them, his big frame blocking most of the light from the lamps strung further ahead. The field engineer was a good twenty years older than she was, with a kind weathered face and the tired eyes of a man who had spent more time in the Martian dust than out of it. He also had the weary sigh of a man who had been working with her for almost three weeks. He lifted a gloved hand and tugged the safety line. It held, of course.

“It’s fine,” he said.

“It’s fine right now.”

“It’s a lava tube, Frankie. It’s been standing for a few million years.”

“And it only has to fall down once.”

She said it lightly, but her jaw tightened beneath the edge of her breathing mask. God, she hated this part. She hated the way the air changed when she opened her mouth on a job site, the patient looks and the rolled eyes and the unspoken agreement that she was being difficult again. She had been hearing some version of it since her first year of training. Back then she had been the only woman in the structural program, and the only student who actually read every page of the load specifications. She’d learned to live with it. That didn’t mean she enjoyed it.

Ethan rubbed the back of his neck. “How long?”

“An hour. Maybe less.”

“We don’t have an hour. GenCon wants preliminary readings on the lower chamber by the end of shift, and the lower chamber is where Tanjiri’s anomaly is.”

“It’s not my anomaly,” Tanjiri protested. “It’s GenCon’s anomaly. I just want to be the first person to look at it.”

That was the reason any of them were down here, after all. Months ago, something deep beneath the equatorial belt had set off a cluster of GenCon’s seismic sensors, a series of odd, rhythmic pulses that nobody had been able to explain. Iron Ridge was growing so quickly that the construction crews had already been digging foundations for a new housing block.

When one of their drills broke through into the lava tube, GenCon had decided it was a conveniently placed spot to start looking. They had funded a small survey team, sent a very polite message about the importance of speed, and assigned Frankie to make sure nobody died while they hurried. She had worked for GenCon since she finished her training, and she had no illusions about them. They built half of what stood on Mars, and they cut every corner they thought nobody would check. Somebody had to check.

Frankie’s theory was that the pulses came from gas pockets shifting as the terraforming process warmed the planet. Ethan’s theory was the same, although he used a lot more words to say it. Tanjiri was hoping for something more interesting, and Lucas didn’t seem to care as long as his equipment kept working.

“Then go ahead,” Frankie said. “Leave me the spare lamp and a couple of anchors, and I’ll finish this section and catch up.”

“We’re not supposed to split up,” Lucas said unexpectedly, frowning at her.

“We’re fifty meters apart in a straight tube with comms. I think we’ll survive.”

Ethan studied her for another moment, and she braced herself for the argument. Instead he just sighed and nodded. “Fine. One hour. Check in every fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

He gave her a look that suggested he knew exactly how much respect was packed into that “sir,” but he turned away and waved the others forward. Tanjiri was already moving, her helmet lamp bobbing eagerly through the dark. Lucas packed up his tablet, shouldered one of the equipment cases, frowned again, and followed her. Ethan paused just long enough to set a spare lamp and a small bag of anchors on the floor of the tube.

“Frankie,” he said quietly. “You know you’re good at this, right?”