Wasteland of Flint

The Western Badlands, Ephesus III

A burning spot appeared on the eastern horizon; Toniatuh lifting a gleaming limb over the rim of the world, his light gilding the crowns of a great army of stone pinnacles. Wind-carved tufa — fantastically sculpted into corkscrew towers, hollow mushroom-shaped domes, translucent veils and jagged peaks — began to glow yellow-orange as the dawn reached out. Beneath the shining towers, deep ravines and canyons filled with dust and sand twisted through the wilderness. Down below the gimlet eye of the sun, remaining night shone with a quiet, subtle glow. Myriad sparks and gleams hid among the sand, sheltering beneath meters of fine-grained dust.

The sun continued to rise, the pressure of his gaze sending gusts racing through the canyons and moaning between scalloped reeflike towers. With the keening hiss of slowly heating air came a second sound — something foreign to the sere landscape — a humming drone echoing back and forth between cliff and precipice and spire. Light glinted from metal and the broad-winged shape of an ultralight appeared in the eastern sky. A contrail of vapor twisted away behind shining metal and plastic, the Midge sweeping gracefully past three turretlike pinnacles. The drone of the engine reverberated in the canyons below, but the slow life hiding in the sand heard nothing.

Day continued to broaden, his shining white coat rising to cover the east, driving the last shadows of night deeper and deeper into the ravines and crevices. The ultralight drifted among the towers, trending north and west, wings dipping as the pilot searched for a landing place. The thinning air was robbing the aircraft of lift, making the engine work harder and harder.

The ultralight banked sharply, the engine's droning pitch sliding up in scale, and the Midge circled. One of the great mushroom-shaped domes had cracked and splintered in some lost age, leaving a great bowl ringed with ragged shell-like walls. Sand and splintered tufa made an irregular plain within. The approach was short, the space confined, but the Midge drifted in to within a meter of the ground, then nosed up — into a stall — and bounced to the ground. A curtain of dust rose, then drifted away. The pitted, scored canopy opened and a weathered-looking woman rolled out to stand upright. She stretched, rolled her head from side to side, and set about securing the aircraft.

When the sand anchors were set, she climbed a slope of pebbly, red sand to a shallow overhang. A flat stone blackened by carbon scoring made a rest for her cooking kit and a smudged line around the edge of the opening guided her hand in tacking up a mirror-bright sunshade. Then she lay down and closed her eyes, head resting on a tattered woolen blanket.

Below her in the basin, the Gagarin chattered and chuckled to itself, then the mirrored surface of the upper wing flashed and onboard systems oriented themselves towards the sky, searching for an answering signal.

"We're not going to be able to set down," Fitzsimmons shouted, trying to make himself heard over the roar of four airbreathing turbines. He hung half out of the starboard side of the shuttle, one hand gripping a stanchion inside the cargo door. Wind howled around him, rushing up from the basin below, in a tornado of flying sand and dust. The Gunso's combat visor was down, protecting his face from the rain of sharp-edged rock. His free hand was on a descender, back heavy with gun-rig and equipment bags.

"There's no place else to land," Parker's voice chattered from his earbug. "Can you drop in?"

"Yes," Fitz leaned out, arm stiff. The ground below was obscured by the dust storm, but he'd jumped into worse. "Deckard — let's fly."

The shuttle adjusted, tilting, and Deckard crowded into the cargo door beside Fitz. Both men were kitted out in drop gear — full combat suits, a light loadout of weapons, ammunition and tools. Their descender lines spooled out and their combat visors painted the nearly-invisible wire a virulent green. Fitzsimmons waited for the shuttle's natural roll to top out, then stepped off, monofil zipping through the magnetic clamp-ons in his hand and attached to his belt.

He landed gently, jerking up a half-meter short of the ground and dropping catlike onto the sand. Fitz detached from the line and tucked his hand clamp away in one quick, automatic motion. Deckard was down a second later and both men broke away from the landing point at a run. Fitzsimmons led with his Iztanuma PRK80 riotgun — no sense in packing the combat rifle or even the lighter shipgun, not for a pickup — and sprinted up the slope toward the overhang they'd spotted from the air. Deckard swung to the right, laboring in heavier, softer sand, but he kept up.

Above them, the shuttle's exhaust vents shifted and the aircraft slid sideways, clearing the bowl. The whirlwind of sand gusted down, dropping veils of dust across broken stone.

A moment later, Fitzsimmons brushed aside the shimmering metallic drape covering the overhang entrance and found an older, sandy-haired woman staring up at him with a quizzical expression. "Doctor Russovsky?"

She blinked as if waking from a deep sleep. Fitzsimmons was struck by her lack of surprise or reaction to his appearance — he knew he must seem strange in a dust-streaked combat suit, pointing what was obviously a weapon at her. He glanced around the shallow cave. Her gear was neatly stacked against a sloping wall, the makings of dinner laid out on a stone.

"Ma'am, you'll have to come with me," he said, trying to keep adrenaline-fueled harshness from his voice. "We're going back to the ship, to the Palenque." Fitz released the riotgun, letting the automatic sling wind the weapon back against his shoulder. He reached down and took the woman's hand. She stood up, still looking at him with the same curious expression.

"I have to finish my survey flight," she said in a serious, untroubled voice. "I've another two, three thousand k to cover on this leg."

Fitz jerked his head and the corporal sidled into the overhang, the muzzle of his riotgun centered on the woman's abdomen. "I've got her, Deck. Pack up the gear. It'll all fit into the Midge. Ma'am — you're needed on the ship — so we're going to go right now. The shuttle will pick us up."

Russovsky frowned, lean face furrowing into deep wrinkles around her mouth and nose. "I really don't have time to attend some meeting, young man. I have real work to do."

"I don't like meetings either, ma'am." Fitz guided her down the slope, one hand under her arm — he was surprised at the heavy, solid feeling of her suit and the muscle underneath. For all her frail appearance, he realized she'd have to be pretty tough to fly the gossamer shape of the ultralight halfway across the face of an alien, unknown world. "Hold on to me."

Gathering her against his chest, her boots atop his, Fitz strapped them together with a beltline, then plucked his descender clamp free. The shuttle drifted overhead again, raising another whirling storm of dust and gravel, but the Marine's combat visor picked out the spiraling line of monofil as a writhing lime snake. He snatched the line with the clamp, then secured the end tab to his harness.

"Lift," he shouted into his throat mike, and high above, Bandao leaned out of the cargo door, guiding the winch with one hand. Fitz felt the wire draw tight, clasped the woman to his chest, and then they were soaring aloft with a smooth, effortless motion. Dust and wind roared around them, then Bandao caught Fitzsimmons's shoulder and swung them both into the cargo hold of the shuttle.

Russovsky staggered heavily as Fitz let go, releasing the strap, but Bandao was right there — all quiet efficiency — to take her in hand. The sergeant looked down, seeing Deckard piling gear into the cockpit of the Midge. "I'm going back down," he shouted, hoping Parker could hear him. "We'll winch up the Midge and stow her in the bay."

"Will it fit?" Parker's voice was faint — even with the earbug — over the roar of the engines. "Those wings are pretty big…and hurry, I'm really burning fuel too fast up here."

"The wings retract," Fitz said, stepping off again and hissing down the descender. The sand storm in the bowl was getting worse — an inch-long chunk of obsidian glanced from the armor on his leg, leaving a shining scratch on the ablative mesh. "It'll fit. If we don't blow away…"

"This is strange." Magdalena frowned, the tightly-napped fur over her nose wrinkling up. "Grr'chen, look at her flight path here…"

Anderssen leaned over, one white elbow on the edge of the display panel. Despite the luxury of sleeping in gravity down on the planet, she was glad to be back in the climate-controlled, amazingly clean bridge of the ship. A quick shower between arrival on shuttle two and hurrying onto the bridge to watch the pickup had washed away a layer of planetary dust. She supposed weeks would pass before the usual level of oil, grime and skin flakes built up in the human-occupied sections of the Palenque. "What is it?"

Maggie zoomed in on a map of the northern hemisphere, with icons showing the Observatory base camp and other pertinent features. "This is the course Russovsky took upon leaving camp during the trip where she found the cylinders." A fire-bright line appeared on the map, swinging north and west from the base in a long jagged arc. The path wandered over barren plains, tumbled mountain ranges and seas of sand. Eventually the indicator circumnavigated the globe, jogged through the Escarpment and returned to base.

"And here's the path of her latest flight." This time a blue line leapt from the Observatory, heading north and west.

"They look the same." Gretchen was nonplussed.

"No," Magdalena said, zooming in the display to show the two lines as a burning purple trail. "They are the same. She's been flying the same course, landing at the same sites…for the last twenty days." The Hesht smoothed her whiskers and cocked her head to one side, looking at Anderssen. "So what do you suppose that means?"

Sitting in his cabin, door secured, surrounded by a steadily growing maze of comp boxes, display panels and conduits, Green Hummingbird's suspicious expression formed an uncanny likeness to Gretchen's on the bridge. The tlamatinime stared at the map, chin pressed against his knuckles. After a moment's thought, a deeper frown settled into his lean visage and he tapped open a comm channel.

"Sergeant Fitzsimmons? This is Hummingbird."

"What did you say, sir?" Fitz turned away from the ultralight, bending his head against the gale of wind and sand. His earbug hissed and sputtered with interference from the blaze of engines howling above and he could barely make out the sharp, commanding voice. "Aye, sir, I'll look in the cave."

Fitz waved Deckard to continue prepping the ultralight for extraction. The Marines had flushed the gas reservoirs in the wings and retracted them. Without their extent, the Midge made a compact rectangular shape. The tail assembly had proven difficult to maneuver in the wind, but they'd managed to dismount the dual fishtail and clamp it to the top of the main body. The corporal chased down a monofil line and hooked the cable onto a winch-ring atop the Midge.

"Deck, I'll be right back." Fitzsimmons jogged back up the hill, glad to be out of the immediate blast of wind. His combat suit was impervious to the flying gravel and sand, but he was worried about Ephesian dust seeping into his tools, weapons and even the suit itself. Isoroku had warned him about the unexpectedly corrosive nature of the local microfauna and Fitz didn't want to wake up with his shipsuit disintegrating into sand.

He ducked under the overhang and knelt, letting his camera pan across the rock shelter.

"What now?" He asked in a normal tone of voice. "The cooking stone? Aye, aye."

Fitz knelt by the blackened rock, gloved fingers brushing over the evidence of a heating unit and a meal. Hummingbird's voice was an intermittent whisper. The Marine rubbed a forefinger across the black streaks and was surprised to see the glove come away almost clean.

"This is an old fire," Fitzsimmons commented. "Really old. But who was here before Russovsky landed last night?" He felt a queer chill tickle his spine and his right hand drifted to the butt of the automatic slung at his hip. "Is there someone else out here?"