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Nevertheless he was huffing and puffing by the time he reached the thing. Unfortunately if there was a person or persons inside it, they were not looking out the cabin windows, which were up at the top and front of the thing. There was nothing for Kiran to do except jog next to it and jump up onto its side where a ladder came almost to the ground. Climb the ladder, get on the roof of the thing, which was not only railed, but full of instrumentation to hold on to. Alas it was a bit of exposure to hang over the front and try to reach down to where the windows started, and there was nothing much to hold on to. Seemed as if the windows were in fact still out of reach, which was frustrating.

There was a hatch door, however, in the roof, and when he saw it he began to pound on it with his fists, then kick it with the heels of his boots. He was looking around to see if there was anything he could break off to hit the door with even harder when the behemoth shuddered to a halt, and soon after, he could hear voices below him, and the hatch door opened.

“Thanks!” he shouted. “I got lost out here!”

So two Venusians brought him inside, and he had a very difficult time making up a story for them that would explain his presence down there on the frozen ocean-it had to involve an admission of recreational drug use and even worse, geographical disorientation, so he squirmed his way through it, feeling lucky that embarrassment was the appropriate emotion for his cover story and its lame particulars. Happily the two minders listened to their translator saying it all in Chinese, and merely nodded as if they had often witnessed such foolishness before, and went back to their screen game. They were headed for a working camp under Ba’het Patera, they told him, and would be there in four hours. There was beer in the fridge if he was interested.

The working camp they came to was one of a whole series of them, Kiran saw on the map, running west along the northern shore of the new ocean and sheltering the people who were getting the last of the CO 2 sealed over. Kiran gave his original ID card to the people at the camp, but they only looked at it briefly and waved him over to the galley. He ate voraciously while he pored over the map on his tabletop screen. He had already seen that there were fast little snowmobiles out in the camp’s parking lot, and the map seemed to indicate that the camps dotting the shore were close enough together that a snowmobile could get from one to the next on one fuel load. Maybe that was even part of the plan.

Very nice. And as they kept regular hours despite the perpetual night, he merely waited until everyone had gone to bed, and then went out to one of the snowmobiles, checked that it was full of fuel, fired it up, and took off west.

These snowmobiles were neat little things, more like cars on skis than any of the monsters being used for the sequestration work. He had often enjoyed driving them in his first months on Venus, and now he sat back and gave the AI instructions and watched the eerie dim landscape slide by. The snow here had packed down to what they called firn, and his vehicle zipped right along. It would be an all-night drive, so to speak, but then he could come into the next camp when they were getting up. Maybe just drive into the parking lot and jump into another snowmobile and keep going, why not? No one cared about these vehicles on the ice; they were no one’s property. And there was nowhere to go in them.

Or so he told himself as he fell asleep, and when he woke up and had the AI slide them into the parking lot of the next camp, it worked just as he had hoped. Out of that one, into another, off again; no one the slightest bit concerned. “I love Venus,” he told the AI pilot. His old translation belt said it in Chinese, although probably the vehicle’s AI understood English too. The old belt was a sad step down from the spectacles, but in this situation it didn’t really matter.

Two more camps, two more snowmobiles, and he came to a camp he had spotted on the maps, one that had a train line spur that would take him up through the Ut Rupes and the Vesta Rupes and eventually to Colette. As he came into the camp he saw a train, at what passed here for a station, which was just a loading dock and a small building. As he slid up on the snowmobile he saw that they were loading some of the cars from a siding, under big lights. Being in the light of the lamps, they could see little outside that cone of illumination, so he crept up on them, staying in the dark, and in the moment when they were finishing their work he threw a rock at the building by the tracks, and when they went to investigate the bang, he hopped up into the car and ducked down behind the boxes inside. Not long after that he was closed into the car, and felt the train jerk forward with maglev smoothness and head up the long slope to Colette, far above him on the Lakshmi Planum, so ominously named.