Sakura appraises Ashley with a cool gaze for a split second, before shaking her hand and breaking into a smile.
"Pleased to meet you, Ms. Logan." She turns to Croft and ramps up the smile another notch, returning his, and puts her arm in his. "I'm sure we will," she says, turning towards the crawler.
"All aboard," says Sorensen.
*****
The journey to the surface is a tedious one. The crawler travels up one of the many tunnels that connect Lison City with the surface of Tribon, a gently sloping spiral cut 10 meters wide through the rock and reinforced with regularly spaced trapezoidal metal braces. For the most part, the tunnel is lit only by the running lights of the crawler, which moves at little more than a brisk walking pace. Every 20 minutes or so the crawler arrives into a harsh glare of light, the tunnel blocked by huge airlock doors and guarded by Consortium troops. Each time, Sorensen has to go through a series of security checks to pass through.
This takes about two hours in all, and in the quiet phases Sorensen outs the crawler in auto and shows you around. It is a bit like a shuttlecraft on wheels, quite small and cramped. There are environment suits for all plus the standard emergency gear. Two airlocks exit the vehicles (via short ladders since it has an almost 2m ground clearance), one to the rear, one on the right-hand side. Some fold-out bunk compartments, a small head (with cleaning wand instead of a shower), and the drive compartment. Very cosy for 8 people.
Sorensen examines the coordinates given by Quaisak, and pulls up a satellite image on a screen.
"Venmeron Lake," he says, pointing to a circular crater with an almost perfect blue-white circle at the bottom. "An old impact crater, filled with water ice and a good source of liquid gases. It'll take us about two days to get there." He pulls the image back to a larger scale, indicates the realtive positions of Lison and the crater. "If any of you are claustrophobic, now's the time to leave."
