Except that she could not survive on a lake bed. She needed to breathe. There was no way to carry an air supply down with her.
She waded into the water until she was up to her knees. The water was pleasantly warm, and increased a little in temperature as she went deeper. Judging from the bottom slope, the middle of the pool would take her over her head. If she went in until the water came to her neck, the seals of her mask and air filter would be below the waterline and only her head would be above it. That would keep out the dust.
But how many hours could she stand like that? Not enough.
It was a solution that solved nothing.
She began to follow the flow-line of the chain of lakes, descending from one steplike level of rock to the next. The first cataract dropped two meters through a series of half a dozen small rapids, running over smooth lips of stone until they finally discharged into the largest of the lakes. If anything, the blowing dust was worse here at the lower level.
She walked on. This lake was roughly elliptical, at least three hundred meters across and maybe five hundred long. Its outfall was correspondingly larger, a substantial cataract that she could hear when she was still forty paces away from it.
When she came to the noisy waterfall she found a wall of water, three meters high, dropping almost vertically into the next lake of the chain. Spray from the foot of it blew up and fogged her mask, but at least it washed some of the dust from the air. If she could find nothing better, this might be a place to return to.
She was ready to head for the next pool when she saw that the waterfall actually flowed over an overhang in the ledge of rock. There was a space behind. If she could step through the fall without being carried away by the water torrent she would be in a shielded enclosure, protected from blowing dust by a rock wall on one side and running water on the other.
Darya moved to the side of the waterfall, pressed herself as close as she could to the rock face, and edged sideways into the rush of water. As soon as she was partway into the foaming white spray she knew she could get through it. The main force of the fall was missing her, arching out over her head in a torrent that sent only noise and blown droplets back to the hidden rock wall. And as she had thought, there was a space behind.
The trouble was, that ledge and shielded space were too small. She could not stand up without poking her head into the torrent. She could not lie down flat. The ledge was lumpy and uneven. And there was not one square inch of wall or floor undrenched by the continuous spray.
She began to feel dismay, then caught herself. What had she been expecting, an Alliance luxury apartment? This wasn’t a matter of comfort; it was one of survival.
With the quilt to protect her, she could curl up with her back to the rock. She could stack most of her food and drink outside, and whenever necessary she could leave her cave long enough to bring in more to eat, or to stretch her legs. She could wash out the mask and air filter when she was inside, to keep it free of dust. And she would be warm enough, even if she was never totally dry or rested. If she had to, she could survive here for many days.
She went back and made three trips to her cache of supplies. In the first two she carried everything except the beacon over to the waterfall, and spent a long time deciding which items should be inside with her, and which would be left just outside.
The third trip involved the most difficult decision.
She could carry the beacon signal generator over to a point of high ground near the lake. She could put it on a heap of stones, to maximize its range. She could make sure that it had adequate power. But would she do something else?
She thought about it, and knew she had no choice. If and when Atvar H’sial came back, Darya would still be at her mercy, to be used, rescued, or discarded, as the Cecropian chose. Two months ago Darya might have bowed to that as inevitable; now it was not acceptable.
She wrapped the generator in the quilt and carried it through into the waterfall cave. There she rearranged the waterproof sheet so that she and the beacon were shielded from blown water droplets. It was close to Mandel-noon, and enough light diffused in through the rush of water.
Slowly and carefully, she switched off the generator and partly disassembled it. It would be a mistake to rush, and time seemed to be the one thing she had in abundance. She knew the basic circuits she needed, but she had to improvise to achieve the impedance that would do the trick. She took the high-voltage alternating leads, and ran their output in parallel to the r/f stage, through the transformer, and on to the message box. Then it was a test of memory, and of long-ago courses in neural electronics. The convolver that she needed was little more than a nonlinear oscillator, and there were resistors and capacitors in the signal generator that could perform dual functions. She could not test the result, but the changes she had made were simple enough. It ought to work. The main danger was that it might be too powerful.
Mandel was setting before she was finished. The modified beacon went back outside, into the ruddy light of Amaranth and the driving dust storm, and onto its little cairn of stones. Darya activated it, and nodded in satisfaction as the function light blinked to indicate that the beacon was working again.
She inched her way back into the waterfall cave, swathed herself completely in the quilt, and curled up on the ledge of rock. Stony lumps stuck into her side. The splashing fall provided a continuous spray of droplets and the noise of rushing water. Underneath that was the uneasy movement of Quake itself, groaning as the planet was stretched harder on the rack of tidal forces.
No one could expect to be able to sleep in such conditions. Darya nibbled on dry biscuits, closed her eyes, and fixed her mind on one thought: she was fighting back. What she had done was little enough, but it was all that she could do.
And tomorrow, she would find some new idea to save herself.
With that thought in her head and uneaten biscuits still in her hands, she drifted off into the most restful sleep since she had left Sentinel Gate.
Hans Rebka had another reason for wishing to be alone. Just before they had left Opal, another encrypted message had arrived from Phemus Circle headquarters. There had been no time to examine it in the haste of their departure, but while the capsule was descending the Umbilical toward Quake he had taken a first look. He had been able to decipher just enough to make him uncomfortable by the time they landed. As the aircar took him north away from Opalside and toward the starside of Quake, the message was burning a hole in his jacket pocket. He put the plane on autopilot, ignored the brooding scene below him, and set out in earnest to work on the message.
Headquarters had switched from prime numbers and cyclic ideals as the basis for their codes, to an invariant-embedding method. The messages were supposedly almost uncrackable — and vastly more difficult to read, even when you knew the key. Rebka appropriated most of the car’s on-board computer power and began to grind out the message, symbol by symbol. It did not help at all that there were occasional data losses in transmission at the Bose Transitions, adding their own random garbling to the cipher.
The received signal contained three independent messages. The first, deciphered after three quarters of an hour of patient work, made him want to throw the whole facsimile record out of the car’s window.
…THE ALLIANCE COUNCIL MEMBER WHO IS HEADING FOR DOBELLE USES THE NAME JULIUS GRAVES, OR APPARENTLY SOMETIMES STEVEN GRAVES. HE IS AUGMENTED WITH AN INTERIOR MNEMONIC TWIN, DESIGNED AS AN EXTENDED SUPPLEMENTARY MEMORY, BUT THAT UNION IS NOT FOLLOWING NORMAL PATTERNS. OUR ANALYSTS SUGGEST A POSSIBILITY OF INCOMPLETE INTEGRATION. THIS MAY LEAD TO VOLATILE OR INCONSISTENT BEHAVIOR. SHOULD GRAVES ARRIVE ON DOBELLE, AND SHOULD HE EXHIBIT BEHAVIORAL IRREGULARITIES, YOU WILL COMPENSATE FOR THESE TENDENCIES AND NEUTRALIZE ANY ILLOGICAL DECISIONS THAT HE MAY SEEK TO MAKE. PLEASE NOTE THAT A MEMBER OF THE COUNCIL HAS PERSONAL DECISION POWERS THAT EXCEED THOSE OF ANY PLANETARY GOVERNMENT CONTROLS. YOU MUST WORK WITHIN THIS CONSTRAINT…