Geological Research

 Scorpius 13, m0039, continued

Reckoning that time is still of the essence in all this, the team make their excuses and leave Mr Chen's house as soon as they have eaten. Florence takes control of the rover, and drives them - quickly and efficiently - to the site of the incident. Specifically, they first visit the Poles' camp site, which proves to have been ignored by the automated rescue mission to the actual landslip. They take a proper forensic approach, with Vajra first sending in an aerobot swarm, leaving the ground and all material objects untouched. Vajra shares the data feed with Aunty, who has the skill sets to process some of it usefully, and it is she who identifies and catalogues the various footprints and exploratory cybershell track-prints in the surrounding dust.

Applying criminological software to the task, Aunty's first conclusion is that this doesn't look like a crime scene; there are certainly no signs of violence. Vajra, however, notes that there is no sign of any kind of comms base station, as a two-person expedition in the Martian wilderness might be expected to use. Professor Zajdel's cybershell may have had good comms capability on board, but this does seem like a curious oversight.

So the team next move in carefully, sweeping the camp with EM scanners. They pick up no signals, and a quick look at the equipment lying around finds little with much in the way of sentience or memory. Looking round, they find other, perhaps more significant, lacks; there's not much in the way of food, and those party members with training in survival skills see other bits and pieces of equipment missing that they'd assume should be present. There's also at least one set of tracks, heading north, which might be compatible with a human leaving and not having returned.

This causes them to examine the Web access logs for the two Poles more closely, and Vajra notes that Zajdel seemingly dropped out of communication entirely about ten minutes before Lipinski. The team begins trying to construct hypotheses to fit all this data. They're now suspecting some kind of criminal action on Lipinski's part - but if that's correct, whatever he did, he didn't engage in much intelligent planning. Of course, a lot of crime is opportunistic or generally unintelligent...

Anyway, the team promised to find a landing site for Maria Vega. Jianwei calls her, but she says that doesn't plan to come out to the site that night. Florence, the trained pilot, looks around for sites, but doesn't find very much at this point.

So now, the team looks at the automated systems working on the landslip site. These turn out to consist of a cluster of small "swarmdozers" (with non-sapient control systems with a certain amount of communal intelligence) under the authority of a low-sapient program in a static unit. These haven't found much that the LAI judged it necessary to report as yet, but the team run analyses on the samples which the burrowing swarmdozers have accumulated, and turn up a few volatiles and metallic micro-fragments to suggest an area to search for Professor Zajdel's cybershell. The LAI acquiesces to their suggestion, and Vajra sends in a small "surveillance worm" and works with the rescue systems. This leaves the two organics free to go and take a look higher up the landslide site. They don't pick up much in the way  of geological evidence there, though, or find any tracks. Vajra, meanwhile, has some problems, mainly with the tunnel behind his worm collapsing (the LAI had problems plotting a safe mining scheme), but does find some metallic fragments. Forensic assessment suggests that these come from the missing cybershell - although only from the outer casing.

Vajra doesn't have to sleep, but the other two do, so they head back to Mr Chen's house, leaving Vajra and the other AIs working. Chen has retired to bed by the time they arrive, but two people are still up and showing an interest in what they might have to report; Maria Vega, who Jianwei realises is maybe carefully judging what she says and how she says it, and the servant named Hua, who they have down as Mr Chen's secretary (in the most traditional sense) or personal assistant, who is coolly bland. The four individuals share green tea and engage in subtly guarded conversation, before the Europeans retire to bed. On an instinctive judgement, Jianwei tells Aunty to research possible links between Ms. Vega and Lipinski while he sleeps. Meanwhile, the team have also asked Quentin, back at the embassy, to acquire some thermal imaging data for a wide area around this location from satellite sources; they suspect that it might locate Lipinski.

 Scorpius 14, m0039

Vajra and the LAI rescue system work through the night, but there's one small accident in that time - Vajra's surveillance worm gets trampled by a swarmdozer, disabling it. Still, by the time the sun rises, the swarmdozers have recovered enough fragments of manufactured material for Vajra to conclude that some hardware, including computer systems, was crushed by the landslide, and everything about the finds is compatible with it having been Zajdel's cybershell.

Meanwhile, Jianwei and Florence awake to news from Quentin; the IR imagery has indeed picked up a trace of what looks like a one-person camp, at a distance that might well rate as a couple of day's walk north of the landslide site. Quentin also has messages from some of Professor Zajdel's friends in the academic community, who have been applying their skills to the puzzle of their colleague's misfortune; they've been analysing available imagery, including the reports that Vajra and the other AIs have recently filed from the site, and combining it with the seismic traces from the time, and their conclusion is that the landslide looks to have been triggered by some kind of abrupt and not very natural-looking shock or impact.

Aunty, on the other hand, has little to report; if there are any signs of Lipinski and Vega having any kind of association, she hasn't been able to locate them on the Web. However, when Jianwei takes a few minutes to casually review the raw data which Aunty has acquired, he notes that Vega is a very mobile sort of operative; it looks as though working for the Martian Commonwealth not only keeps her busy, but almost permanently on the move, in person. Then, in a moment of inspiration, Jianwei looks again at some wilderness travel plan filings from about a year ago - and realise that she was most likely in the region west of Olympus Mons at exactly the time when Dr Tiberius Vartex had his nigh-fatal hopper crash. That could just be coincidence, of course.

Jianwei begins the process of filing confirmation that Professor Zajdel's processor has been destroyed, which will allow the insurance company to begin the process of releasing her latest backup to run and covering the cost of a replacement cybershell - although they'll probably cautiously wait a little longer to complete the process. He also decides to tell Vega some but not all of what they know, including Vajra's discovery of the cybershell remains, to provide her with some of the visual imagery that they acquired the previous day (but not much from the camp site), and to make another effort to find a landing site for her hopper. She flies over to the site quite promptly, and when she arrives, Vajra notices a spike in local network traffic; her snakebot is hitting the rescue-system LAI with lots of queries for accessible data.

The European team meet up and head back to the camp site, but only take a quick look there. Then they slip behind a ridge, hoping to avoid Vega's attention as they head north in pursuit of (they assume) Lipinski. Jianwei and Florence both have tactical training, which pays off here in helping them to be subtle about this. They do make a call to Mr Chen, though, to thank him for his hospitality and to bid him farewell.

They find the site which they picked up on the satellite IR images, but it's now been abandoned, so they continue to track their quarry northwards. It's slow going, though; they spend a lot of their time out of the rover, walking ahead of it while scanning the Martian dust from as close as possible. This carries them through the late morning and afternoon, and they find that they are now moving into an area of rising hills. Florence's driving skills enable them to keep the rover with them for quite a while - albeit sometimes with only three of its six wheels on the ground at a time - but eventually, they enter a seriously rocky region, and have to leave the vehicle behind.

As they climb, they receive a call from Hua, who wants to ask them to place the data which they've accumulated under a diplomatic seal - not making it a secret, but certifying it and protecting it against tampering, the better for use in, say, future court cases. Hua now seems increasingly cagey; Jianwei doesn't perceive him as a servant any more. When Jianwei suggests that he make the same request of Ms Vega, he demurs; "your employers' neutrality is much respected", he adds, slightly gnomically.

Then, as the party ascends a slope, Jianwei spots a figure, waiting and lurking behind a stack of rocks further up. Those rocks begin to slide, tumbling down the slope towards the group - and at that same moment, their AI aides report that a large volume of data is arriving in their in-boxes. It appears to be a great deal of accounts data relating to Mr Chen's past business career...