VEL — ARRIVAL
They smelled the camp before they saw it.
Wood smoke. Something cooking. The particular layered smell of a space that had been lived in continuously for long enough that it had stopped being a camp and started being a place — accumulated, settled, inhabited in the deep sense of the word.
The maintenance tent was not a tent anymore.
It had been a tent once — standard regional authority issue, grey-green canvas, collapsible frame, designed for three-week survey deployments. Now it was the nucleus of something considerably more permanent. Two additional structures had been built against it using formation stone and salvaged threading-survey timber. A water collection system ran from the roof to three large containers. There were instrument arrays — six of them, arranged in a precise semicircle facing the Vel formation's sealed markers — that Kai did not recognize and could not immediately classify.
