My hands shook weakly as I assembled the auger. The tool chest had hit my palm when it hit the slope and skidded into me, but there was no point cataloguing that. I drove the bit down into the cracked ground and began to turn.
One foot.
The hardpan resisted like pottery. It was what I expected: surface sediment compressed by decades of thermal cycling, no moisture infiltration. My arms were already failing. We had been on reduced water for two days. I was somewhere near the bottom of the useful range. I kept turning.
Two feet down.
Same composition. I kept my eyes on the entry point and not on the men above me on the rim. I did not want their doubt to infect me. I had so little confidence left. If I didn't find something, I would give the men the orders to return and head out into the desert by myself. Not back to Heliqar. If we returned empty-handed, the Council would sign with Carth under worse terms than we had started out. That was what fear did. And Carth's contracts were a slow noose: first the tariffs, then the debt, then the plantations. The city that had taken in every exile and wanderer and given them a trade, the city my parents had built, would end with the citizens working Carthian fields. The men above me on the rim would return to a Heliqar that was already dead. I would not return at all. I withdrew the auger and cleared the dirt from the work area. Dry grey dust. No variation from the surface sample. I drove it back in.
Three.
Dry dust spiraled up. I was lightheaded enough that I caught myself leaning into the handle instead of turning it. "The handle," I whispered to myself. "Focus on the handle."
Four.
Less resistance. I withdrew and examined what had come up. Finer particulate. Looser grain structure. That was a layer transition, not random variation. Fine particles settle out of slow-moving water. They don't compact the same way as surface hardpan. That meant something had moved through here. The only question was when.
Five.
Every turn was easier than the last. The layer transition was real and continuing. I withdrew, cleared, confirmed the grain structure was still changing. I drove it back in.
My legs had begun to shake. I had not noticed when it started. I was kneeling, so it didn't matter, but I noticed. The body maintains its priorities and the legs are not high on the list when the arms are working. I kept turning.
Six feet.
I withdrew for the clearing cycle and the hole gave me nothing. Dry again. The finer particulate was gone. I stared at the grey dust on the auger tip and felt the thought form that I had been holding back for two days: I had been wrong. The layer transition had been random variation after all. There was no water here. Heliqar was already lost.
The time had arrived. I decided to get up and give the orders. But when I tried to stand, my legs didn't respond. They were numb, cold, distant, and bloodless from kneeling too long while the rest of my circulation was committed to my arms. Severe dehydration makes the body triage without asking permission, and anything not already working gets deprioritized. My legs weren't gone, but they were unreachable, like tools left out of arm's reach. I wasn't going to walk into the desert alone. I wasn't going to walk anywhere. Not with the men watching. Not like this.
I put the auger back in and turned it because there was nothing else to do.
A smell came up with the soil. Cool. Mineral. The specific combination of gypsum and wet clay. I had encountered it twice before, once in the Ardenne survey, once in the lower caves beneath Heliqar. There it had been colder, harder, iron-edged from the basalt. I had not smelled anything except dust and Tuspak for three weeks. My hands tightened on the handle of their own accord. I cleared the debris and drove it back in.
Seven.
The auger punched through something. The resistance vanished so suddenly that I nearly fell forward. A compressed sediment cap! It was storm deposition, exactly as I had theorized, sealed over the water table until the pressure differential equalized. A long gentle hiss came up from the hole.
Then a thin jet of muddy water hit my forearm.
I held still and watched.
The jet slowed to a trickle and then steadied. Low pressure. Consistent with a water table at moderate elevation, not an artesian system under significant pressure. The water was dark with suspended sediment: calcium carbonate, iron oxide, the signature chemistry of basalt-filtered groundwater. It ran along the existing fissures in the hardpan and began to fill them. The depression was broad and shallow. The water was finding the low points methodically, the way water always does.
The argument had been sound.
I sat back on my heels and tried to take stock of my own condition. My hands were shaking. I identified that as the delayed response of a body that had been running on threat chemistry for the last forty-eight hours and was now receiving the signal that the threat had resolved.
For a moment nobody moved. Then Olen's voice came from the rim. "Buckets! Get the buckets!"
The men came down the slope quickly, not carefully. I watched them. Some went straight to the water and knelt. One man pressed both hands flat into the spreading pool, palms down, and held them there. I understood the desire. He was confirming the reality of the situation with a different touch, not just his eyes.
Another man filled his cupped hands and stared at the water running between his fingers before he drank it. The men who had been loudest about turning back were now entirely silent. Fear and relief occupy the same people in sequence and the interval between them can be very short.
From the rim came the low groan of the Tuspaks. They had smelled it. Their handlers scrambled to get the lead lines sorted before the animals decided the question for themselves. The beasts were better dehydration instruments than anything I carried. They had been signaling their distress for days and now they were signaling the opposite.
Bastien came down last. He moved carefully, the way a large man moves when he is not confident of his legs. He stopped at the water's edge and stood looking at the spreading pool for a long time without speaking. Then he sat down in the mud beside me.
"I didn't see it," he said. "The stone... it knew I was wrong even when I thought I was right."
"It was capped," I said. "Storm sediment over the water table. Could have been deposited any time in the last couple thousand years. You were looking for moisture on the surface and there wasn't any to find."
He was quiet. He watched the men working the bucket lines. "I told you there was nothing here," he said finally.
"You reported what your survey found. The survey had a gap. That's different from being wrong."
"The stone said I was negligent."
"The stone said your search was incomplete. That's a description of the method, not the man." I thought about how to say the next part accurately. "The stone confirmed the water existed by measuring the gap in your search. It used your honesty as an instrument. That only works because you are honest. A man who had simply lied about checking would have shown red, and I would have learned nothing."
He chewed that over. I watched him look for holes in my logic that he could use to condemn himself. He didn't find any. "Your parents are going to hear about this," he said.
"Yes."
"Your father is going to be furious."
"Certainly."
He laughed. He put his hands on his knees and stood up and offered me his arm. I took it. My legs had less in them than I had thought. I'd been too optimistic about my own condition.
Olen looked at me as we came up from the water's edge. I could not read his expression. It was in the neighborhood of the look men give you when an outcome they had predicted as unlikely has come out the other way. It had appeared on my own face more times than I cared to remember.
I wiped the mud from my face and looked at the black Justice Stone lying in the sand where I'd dropped it.
Its facets were dark again.