Wasteland of Flint

The Shuttle Wreck, Northern Hemisphere, Ephesus III

Despite lingering pain in her shins, Gretchen was suited up before sunrise. The nauallis was still a snoring lump in the tent, which let her range unmolested around the camp while he was safely asleep. With the sky still dark and her goggles dialed into ultraviolet, Anderssen felt a little queasy to see shoals of softly-glowing lights crowding around the edges of the tent. Close examination showed the tent to be free of infection, though the groundpad made from Hummingbird's shelter was rapidly disintegrating. Other scattered pools of radiance marked places where one of them had dropped a wrapper from a threesquare or bits of metal from the shuttle were still being digested. Despite walking in a long, wide circle around the camp, she did not find any tracks.

"Hmm," Gretchen muttered, pacing along the base of the nearest dune. She was surprised to see how quickly the wind wiped away the marks of human presence. Hummingbird's trail to the west had already been reduced to a shallow series of dimples, barely distinguishable from the ripples ascending the face of the ridge. "I must have been dreaming."

Anderssen was loath to put her gloves into the sand where she'd buried the sheet of hextiles, but the goggles didn't show her the usual glimmer under the sand. Gritting her teeth, Gretchen dug in and found the edge of the hexsheet. A moment later, the pad was uncovered and — remarkably, she thought — it was intact. So…Paxaxl Corporation Ceramobond doesn't taste good. That is excellent news.

Dragging the sheet of hextile to the Gagarin and under the forward landing gear was hungry work, and Gretchen was perched up in the wreckage eating a three-square when Hummingbird finally emerged from the pressure tent. The sun was still behind the eastern mountains, but a hot pink line silhouetted the peaks. With such a thin atmosphere, there was little warning of sunrise. She toggled local comm awake.

"You want breakfast?" Gretchen made a great effort to be civil, though the sight of the Nбhuatl brought to mind all of the odd business of the previous day. "There's hot chocolate in the pot."

The nauallis looked directly up at her, which surprised Gretchen. I'm not exactly drawing attention to myself up here, she thought, no lights, sitting in shadow. He nodded gravely and climbed up, hands and feet finding plenty of purchase on the crumbling metal.

A bronze mealheater sat between Gretchen's boots, steam condensing to frost around the lid. Hummingbird opened the cover and pinched out a tube of chocolate and a threesquare from slots surrounding the heating element. He squatted nearby, back to a tortured chunk of drive coil, and ate quickly. Gretchen watched him warily, sipping from her entirely cold chocolate. In temperatures like these, heat bled out of everything almost as quickly as it was generated.

"Yesterday," she said after a moment, "you said you'd found tracks left by the survivors of this crash, leading off into the western hills. I note — merely out of curiosity — your tracks have already been obliterated by the wind. It seems odd you could find a trail left by someone six weeks ago."

The nauallis did not answer, taking his time to chew down the rest of the bar. The chocolate followed and he tucked the foil wrappers away in a pocket of his overcloak. Gretchen finished hers as well. When he said nothing, she pursed her lips and tried a different approach.

"Are we departing this morning, or do you have more to do here?"

Hummingbird's head turned toward her, the faint gleam of sunrise reflecting murkily from his goggles. "I will need another day. Will the aircraft be safe?"

"Likely," Gretchen said, trying to catch any hint of an expression on his muffled, masked face. "If no big storm comes up. I can make more pads out of the hextiles — they'll protect the wheels and the tent floor. Do you need my assistance?"

"No." The nauallis shook his head vehemently. "You…you should ignore me. Pay no attention to anything you might hear or see." He paused and Gretchen gained the undeniable feeling he was debating with himself. "If you can, try not to think of me at all, think of something inconsequential, random, useless. Don't watch me or concentrate on my actions."

"I see." Gretchen licked her lips. They were always dry in this bitterly cold air. "Like yesterday. I started to follow you and…got caught up in whatever you were doing."

Hummingbird stood up, saying nothing, and climbed down from the wreck. Gretchen glared at his back, but he did not turn or look back.

"Pigheaded Aztec!" She sat sullenly for awhile, watching him closely out of spite. The nauallis wandered around the camp aimlessly, then took off into the desert. Though Gretchen kept the comm channel open, she heard nothing more of the odd noise. Eventually, Hummingbird disappeared around the far side of the shuttle. She thought about pestering him on the comm, but the sun was rising and there were things to do. Gretchen climbed down and began gathering up hextiles scattered around the crash site.

After a half hour, the sun was full in the eastern sky, painting everything in bleached-out colors. Anderssen used the sunshade from Hummingbird's tent to make an awning. Being out of the direct glare cut at least thirty degrees off the heat load borne by her suit. She squatted and began piecing new tilepads together. This is boring, Gretchen thought after an hour had passed. She looked up and scanned the horizon. There was no sign of the nauallis. Where is he now? Probably getting into trouble.

Restraining her curiosity, Gretchen finished assembling the last of the pads and dragged them over to the Gagarin. Getting the rear wheels onto the tilepads was sweaty work and when she was done, Anderssen parked herself in the shade of the awning. Her suit water tasted more brackish than usual, so she broke out a fresh bottle and topped off the reservoir before drinking the rest straight.

Hummingbird had not returned. Gretchen's comp showed noon had come and gone.

A little concerned, Anderssen climbed up onto the wreck again and found a perch near the twisted spine of the craft. From this new elevation, she searched the valley, hoping to catch sight of a tan-and-black figure doing…whatever. As it happened, Hummingbird was only a few hundred meters away, off at an angle from the crash scar and the wreck. He was hunched over, walking slowly across the gravelly soil, peering at the ground.

As she watched, he bent down and picked up something bright — a bit of metal, she thought — and weighed it in his hand. Gretchen expected the nauallis to throw the fragment away, but he did not. Instead, he continued to wander aimlessly. A little later, he turned suddenly, curving back on his previous path, and dropped the metal on the ground. Without pausing, Hummingbird continued his lazy, winding circuit.

Shaking her head, Anderssen climbed down from the wreck and resumed piecing hextiles together. Boring work, but at least there was some sense and purpose to the activity.

Hummingbird returned after dark, suddenly appearing at the edge of a circle of light cast by a lantern hung on the nose of the Gagarin. Both aircraft and the tent were now up on hextile pads. Anderssen ignored Hummingbird as he unwrapped his kaffiyeh and cloak. Another pad of tiles held the mealheater and a water bottle. She was working with her big comp, collating the data collected during the day by sensors on the Midge and her suit. Despite the nauallis's admonition, nothing had prevented the cameras on the ultralight from recording his activities.

"Did you finish?" Gretchen did not look up. An interesting pattern had revealed itself from the camera data. Biting her lip in concentration, she sketched in a transform with the stylus. The comp obediently began to interp the data, building a three-dimensional model.

"Yes." Hummingbird squatted across from her, his back against the front wheel of his ultralight. "We can leave in the morning."

"Are we going far?" Intrigued by the display building on the comp, she turned the device sideways to get a different perspective. "Which direction?"

Hummingbird pointed southwest with his chin. "The comm records on the Palenque show Russovsky used a relay transmitter on one of the Escarpment peaks to communicate with the ship when she was on farside. The peak is called Mons Prion on her maps. That is our next destination."

Gretchen nodded and put down the comp. "And once we're there, you'll make the transmitter disappear without a trace."

The nauallis unwrapped a threesquare and began to chew methodically.

"There you go with the stone face again," she sighed. "Do you really think I'll just follow your orders blindly? That I'll ignore what you're doing, or pretend it hasn't happened?"

Hummingbird stopped eating and Gretchen thought he was actually paying attention. She tried not to swallow nervously and plunged ahead.

"You didn't want me to pay attention to you today, so I kept out of your way. But the cameras on the ultralights recorded everything you did on this side of the wreck. You didn't seem to care about that…they made me a map of where you went. Would you like to see it?"

Gretchen tipped up the comp, showing him a three-dimensional representation of his path. The trail looked like a snake with a broken back, but one which entirely surrounded the wreck in a long oval. Moreover, the path seemed to cover the sandy ground without doubling back upon itself. "This search pattern, master Hummingbird, is a thing of beauty. I am truly impressed."

There was a grunt on the open comm channel and the nauallis looked away. Gretchen tucked the comp back into its bag with a pleased expression on her face.

"At the university, on my first dig, the pit foreman tried to teach all of us — all the first-term students — how to look for things on the ground. He gave us thirty minutes on a newly mown soccer field to find all the things he'd hidden. Seemed very silly to us — the grass was cut short, the field was almost perfectly flat — where could you hide anything? I managed to find a copy of Schulman's Techniques of Radiocarbon Analysis by tripping over the damned thing."

Gretchen smiled wryly and shrugged her shoulders. "The flatness of the field was an illusion — it wasn't entirely flat, there were little dimples or furrows in the grass — and we felt very, very stupid when he took us around and picked up all the things he'd laid out for us to find. More books, pencils, a belt, a hammer, a walking stick. A whole set of white plastic rulers he'd laid along the goal box lines. It's funny to think, now, how blind we were to things right in front of us."

Anderssen stretched. Her back was tight and sore from assembling sheets of tile all day.

"Most people don't think looking at the ground and searching for things is a skill. But it is." She pointed out into the darkness. "Today, you covered the debris field thrown out by the crash centimeter by centimeter. I really doubt you missed a single bit of metal or ceramic or wire. Did you?"

Hummingbird lifted a hand and made a "turning-over" motion. "I don't think so."

"Two questions come to mind, master Hummingbird." Gretchen felt as if she were approaching a flighty horse or a sleeping, irritable dog. "I can't make you answer them, but it would be helpful if I knew how to help you do this…thing."

The weight of the Nбhuatl's gaze grew heavy and Anderssen started to sweat, feeling as if an exam had suddenly been placed in front of her.

"First, you didn't pick up every piece of debris out there — only some of them. How could you tell there were materials the microfauna couldn't digest? You weren't using a comp — in fact, do you even have a comp with you?"

Hummingbird grunted and there was a hiss as he bit idly at his breathing tube. "There is a comp in the Midge. A powerful one."

"But you didn't use a comp today." Gretchen didn't wait for an answer. "You put the bits and pieces of indigestible debris back down on the ground. Sometimes you just adjusted them a little where they lay." Her heart was beating faster now and a curl of sweat was trickling down the side of her neck. "If I…if I went out there tomorrow morning, with this map, would I be able to find those fragments? I wouldn't be able to, would I? They'd be…invisible. Indistinguishable from the rock and gravel and sand out there."

Another hiss, followed by an almost-sigh. "With your map, you might be able to find some of them. All of this must be done in haste, which always leads to mistakes."

Gretchen stared at the nauallis. He turned his attention to the threesquare wrapper and empty chocolate tube in his hands. Slowly, he folded them up into a tiny ball which he placed in a pocket of his djellaba. Finally, she shifted to keep her legs from going to sleep.

"Will you answer my questions?"

"There are more than two!" Hummingbird replied in a tart voice. "Will you be content to let me be? I agree — I do need your help to escape from this world. I am entirely human and do not wish to be marooned here or consumed by the little creatures in the sand. If you stay out of my way, all of this will go much faster."

"How could you tell which fragments needed to be hidden?" Gretchen leaned forward, her voice rising. "Can you see a difference? Do you have special lens setting on your goggles?"

"No." Hummingbird shook his head in amusement. "This is part of my training."

Gretchen grew still. "Can you teach me how to tell the difference?"

"I will not," the nauallis replied with a dismissive snort. "Though I'm sure you think your career would benefit from such knowledge."

Anderssen settled back on her haunches. "If I could do what you did today, we would have been finished sanitizing this site yesterday and already on our way to Mons Prion. Two can cover more ground than one." She cocked her head to one side, squinting at him. "What if you are hurt? Or injured in an accident? Who will finish the job then? I won't be able to. The evidence of man — of the Empire — will be left scattered all over this world. Ready to be found by whatever you fear will come hunting us."

"I cannot teach you what I know." Hummingbird's voice sounded irritated. "You are a woman and my skills are a man's knowledge. I do not know how to train you properly." He stood up. Gretchen rose as well, a slow steady anger curdling in her gut.

"That is a remarkably stupid thing to say. Why should my gender make a difference?"

"It does," Hummingbird said. "Men and women are…different. They see differently. There is…there is some danger if you interfere with my work. Danger which springs from you. I think, when we get to Prion, we should make camp a distance away, so I can dispose of the relay by myself."

Gretchen shook her head in amazement at his naivetГ©. This must be religious…some artifact of cult practice from centuries ago. It has to be. I'm stuck on this planet with a mentally disturbed Imperial agent. How delightful. "What about this shuttle? How are you going to make it disappear? The smaller pieces I can understand, but most of the hull isn't going to be eaten away. Can you hide the shuttle in plain sight?"

"No." Hummingbird looked up at the dark mass of the shuttle wing. "In truth, I don't want to entirely hide the wreck, just obscure its origin."

"How? By filing off all the serial numbers?" Gretchen asked incredulously.

Hummingbird laughed — a short, sharp bark — and adjusted his breathing mask. "No — that would be a tedious effort. The comp cores were destroyed in the crash and the spaceframe mangled. The rest is only metal and ceramic. By the time we leave this world, most of the wreck will be in even worse shape than it is now. If someone examines the remains, they will draw a different conclusion than you would expect." Gretchen could hear a grim smile in his voice. "They will find a different trail."

"Leading them where?" Anderssen tried not to sound suspicious, but failed.

"Far from Imperial space," Hummingbird said. "To a dead world with no relation to Anбhuac or humanity at all."

"What world?" Gretchen felt almost itchy with curiosity. "Why would a dead world send a shuttle here?"

"The homeworld of the Mokuil is dead now," the nauallis said quietly. "But once they were a powerful, star-faring race. Their ships visited many worlds, even some near this backwater. Here is the truth, Doctor Anderssen: We have little time here and we are in great danger. I am rushing to confuse those who will follow. I hope — and this may be a frail hope, yet it is all we have — they will find the clues I've left behind and they will be led away from human-controlled space. They will go coursing into the dead realm of the Mokuil and find…nothing."

Gretchen stood up, feeling a chill at the undiluted seriousness in the man's voice. "Did the Mokuil find a world like this one? A place where the First Sun people had trod?"

Hummingbird nodded. "We believe so." He raised a hand to forestall another question. "We do not know what they found. All we know is they were powerful and curious and then their civilization was destroyed, leaving only ash and ruin. The best we can do is hide quietly among their corpses, hoping to avoid notice."

He's completely insane, popped into Gretchen's mind. I have a crazy religious zealot for a tentmate. She snorted, suppressing a laugh. This is almost as bad as my third-year roommate at the university.

"Okay," she said aloud, suddenly losing her desire to badger him with more questions. "We'll be really careful, then."

Hummingbird did not respond, stowing his litter in the ultralight. Gretchen looked around the camp and made sure everything was tied down and put away. Putting her head in the cockpit of the Gagarin, she checked the latest feed from the weather satellites. Everything seemed clear for a few thousand k in every direction. The nauallis had crawled into the tent by the time she had turned off the lantern.

Anderssen stood for awhile in the darkness, looking at the sky. She wondered which tiny spark of light was Anбhuac and which — if any of them — was the Mokuil homeworld. Somehow, without pressing the nauallis or checking her comp, Gretchen was sure the vanished alien race was bipedal, running on long reptilian legs, with a heavy, three-toed foot.

Shaking her head, she turned off her comm and bent down to enter the short airlock tube into the tent. I am tired, Gretchen realized. But there's no rest for the wicked. Just more work.

Someone talking close by woke Anderssen from a sound sleep. She opened her eyes to find the tent dark and chill. The heating element on the roof spine was glowing faintly, but even with it working, the waste heat of their bodies and the heavy insulation could not keep the dreadful cold of the Ephesian night entirely at bay. Hummingbird was asleep beside her, his usual snore reduced to a gargling hum. Foggy with sleep, she peeled back the flap covering the transparent panel in the door. Nothing was moving outside. There was no wind rattling the tent or whining through the guylines holding down the ultralights. She frowned. I heard something. Someone was speaking to me.

Shaking her head, she pulled the edge of the sleepbag over her face and closed her eyes.

A hiss of static brought her entirely awake. Struggling out of the sack, Gretchen heard a voice — a human voice — trying to say something amid a wash and warble of heavy interference. Turning on her side, she groped for the comm on her z-suit and found the indicators glowing softly. A channel had come alive, the signal strength indicator fluctuating wildly. Lips tight, she twisted around to get the pickup bug in her right ear.

"Hatho…sshhhsshh…" The voice faded away, leaving only a buzzing hiss.

"Damn." Gretchen fiddled with the controls, but the voice did not return.

Hummingbird paused in the shadow of the Gagarin's wing, their tent repacked and slung over his shoulder. The sun was more than halfway above the eastern peaks. Gretchen was sitting in the cockpit, one booted foot lodged against the wing strut, head and torso under the control panel. Her comp was sitting on the seat, chirping to itself as it ran through a series of system tests.

"Is something broken?" The nauallis leaned in, brow furrowed.

"I don't know." Anderssen fiddled with a component module hidden under the bulk of the panel. "My comm has been picking up all kinds of strange interference. Started last night just after midnight. Sounded like someone was trying to raise us on the comm. But I can't find anything wrong."

"Ignore it," Hummingbird said in a flat voice. "The Palenque and Cornuelle are under strict transmission security. If something happens in orbit, we will not know." He paused, staring off into the distance. "There isn't anyone down here we want to talk to. Come, let's get airborne."

Gretchen lifted her head to stare at him. "Don't be so hasty, old crow. The atmosphere is already heating — if we want to make any altitude at the end of the day we want to time our arrival at the Escarpment for evening when the air starts to chill."

Hummingbird shook his head sharply. "There is no time to waste. We may not reach Mons Prion today in any case. And if we do not, then we must be there tomorrow."

"Fine." Gretchen shut down the diagnostic and began worming her way out from under the control panel. "I'll be ready to lift off in five."

The nauallis strode off without a word. Frowning and unsettled, Gretchen watched him open the cargo door beneath the Midge and begin stowing the camping gear. Her own compartment was filled with sheets of bonded hextile from the shuttle. Luckily, they were very light for their size. Getting the ultralights airborne in this thin air was going to be troublesome enough.

After stowing the last bits of gear, Gretchen strapped in and began a preflight check. Her panel showed green in all areas and the 3v of her kids was still tacked in place beside the airspeed dial. Russovsky had left her a whole set of little santos, which were plastered along the structural bar lining the bottom of the canopy window. She touched the icon of St. Paraskeva for luck, though the little picture had long ago lost power and did not flicker or move or give the blessing of the martyrs. While she was waiting for the wings to extend and stiffen, Gretchen glanced at the other Midge. Hummingbird was nowhere in sight. "Ah-huh. Hurry up and then wait," she said under her breath.

Peering around, she found no evidence of the nauallis and her hand drifted to the control pad for the comm. Feeling a little guilty, she tapped open a sub-audible channel to the Palenque. A moment later the buzz of shipboard comm locking onto her signal and negotiating security filled her ear. Then a sleepy-sounding Magdalena came on the channel.

Gretchen? Has something happened? We're not supposed to -

"I know," Anderssen said, lips almost closed, throat relaxed. "I'm on a sub-audible. Listen, can you do a remote diagnostic on my Midge? I'm getting funny sounds and voice traffic on my comm."

Sure. Magdalena said. Just wait one…I have to download a diag package.

The control panel flickered and a small new v-pane opened, showing a progress bar.

Gretchen continued with her preflight check, spinning up the engines and going through a pressure test on the wings. Despite all the time-in-flight the aircraft had endured, the pressure seals remained intact, without even appreciable leakage. "Now that," Gretchen said to her checklist with a grin, "is some fine Russo-Swedish engineering."

A beep announced the diagnostic download was complete.

Okay, Magdalena's thready voice echoed in her ear. I'm starting a local systems check. It'll take about thirty-five -

Gretchen jerked back in surprise as a gloved hand reached across her and slapped the system cutoff glyph on her comm panel. Hummingbird's muscular shoulder pressed her back into the seat and his eyes — barely centimeters from hers — were furious. The comm made a peculiar wailing sound as the system went into cold shutdown.

"Do you understand anything about being quiet?" The nauallis punched an override into the panel. Magdalena's voice vanished from Gretchen's earbug as the channel snapped off.

"What do you th — umph!" Anderssen tried to shove him away, but Hummingbird was much stronger than she was. His fingers tapped a series of commands, then he stepped back. Gretchen shivered, shaking off a clammy feeling. "I'm running a diagnostic." She said in a cold voice.

"I told you to ignore any strange sounds or readings." Hummingbird was furious. "There will be more auditory…phenomena. There maybe visual events as well. You will ignore them. We will observe complete radio silence unless I initiate conversation."

Gretchen stared at him woodenly, trying to decide if she should speak her mind or not. Before she could say anything, he strode back to his ultralight and climbed aboard.

"Fine," Anderssen muttered, beginning to regret her impulsive decision to follow the Imperial judge. The other Midge's engines coughed to life and the sand anchors released with a bang. Gretchen flipped a series of switches controlling her own startup. The wings stiffened and the microcontrol comps woke up, subtly altering control surfaces and airflow guides in preparation for flight.

Hummingbird's ultralight bounced across the sand, turning away from the wreck and into an intermittent, gusty wind. Gretchen followed, her hand light on the stick. "Stupid ass," she said under her breath. Then one eye squinted in concentration as she thought about what he'd said: "Hmm. So, what could be listening for us?"