Wasteland of Flint

Geosync Orbit Over Ephesus III

"We have orbital match in…three…two…one…Orbit match locked."

Sho-sa Kosho's cool voice echoed in Gretchen's earbug. She and Magdalena were crowded into the secondary weapons station on the command deck of the Cornuelle, sharing a combat chair. The flat black display in front of them was configured into three v-panes, one showing an orbital plot of the planet with the Palenque and the Cornuelle in their velocity dance, another the view from the warship's forward cameras and in the third a colorful, annotated image culled from the sensors on Parker's suit as he stood in an airlock.

"Main engines at zero thrust. Steering at zero thrust."

Around them, the officers of the Cornuelle began to go through a checklist in soft voices. Gretchen bit her lip, watching the image of the Palenque. The ship seemed intact, without visible hull damage or scoring. It was an ungainly monster in comparison to the rakish profile of the Cornuelle. The Temple-class were workhorse ships, with a big rotating habitat and lab ring sitting forward, squeezed around a command and sensor array platform. Behind the habitat ring was an enclosed shuttle dock assembly, surrounded by mushroom-shaped cargo modules, then a flare shield and the bulk of the engines. The Company logo, white on maroon, stood twenty meters high on the thruster fairings.

"Maggie, do you have anything on ship-to-ship comm?"

Maggie shook her head, long ears angled back. "Quiet as high grass, sister." Her claws made a tic-tic-tic sound as they worked the console. The view of the Palenque tightened, zooming in on an airlock beneath the command deck. The hatch was hexagon-shaped, with a clear window. Gretchen could see something through the opening.

"What's this?"

Maggie worked the panel and the image cropped, then zoomed again. There was a brief ripple across the v-screen as the console kicked in to interpolate the image. Gretchen leaned in a little, squinting through her com-glasses. There was an amber light shining above a control panel on the inner door of the lock. She tapped her finger on the v-screen. "Do we have a pattern match for this?"

"Yes," rumbled Magdalena in her I'm-working-on-it-already voice. A v-pane unfolded on the console display. It contained a schematic of the airlock control panel, with highlights indicating the meaning and use of each control, light and display. "There is interior pressure, but the airlock is in manual mode — no power for the automatic mechanism."

Gretchen nodded, pressing a fingertip against her cheekbone. "Parker, did you hear that?"

"You bet, boss." The pilot's v-feed shifted as he looked around the Cornuelle's lock. There were two Marines with him and Bandao. Both civilians were wearing dark gray z-suits, with bright Company logos on their chests, white-lettered nametags on each shoulder and over the heart. Both Marines were nearly invisible in matte-black suits far slimmer than the Company rigs. Both had nametags, but they could not be read in the ambient light. Gretchen frowned, but Maggie was already working. Text materialized on the v-feed, showing FITZSIMMONS and deckard above the two Marines. "We'll have to crank the lock ourselves."

"One kilometer," Kosho announced. The Cornuelle was approaching on the last dying bit of her insertion velocity, coasting in not only to match orbital paths with the Palenque, but to come within eyeball distance of the abandoned ship. "Three minutes."

"Maggie, are there any other lights? Radio emissions? Any EM at all?" Gretchen leaned back in the chair. The shock-cushion adjusted, cradling her back. The Hesht tapped up an ambient light gradient over a ship schematic on her main control window. The derelict showed heat and light loss at the personnel airlocks and around the big shuttle bay doors.

"She's cold. Just waste heat from standby systems," Magdalena said, "but there seems to be atmosphere inside from end to end. The hull shielding is blocking everything else, but when Parker gets the telemetry relay in place, we'll know more. Still no response from the comm system or the tachyon relay." Her shoulders shrugged in a rolling ripple of muscle. "Station-keeping is still on line; she's not spinning or losing altitude."

"Two minutes," Kosho announced. "Correcting roll with braking thrust."

Gretchen felt a very faint shudder through the decking under her feet. The feed from Parker's suit suddenly showed the planet rolling past in the window of the airlock, huge and ruddy tan. Then the Palenque slid into view. Gretchen touched her cheek again.

"Parker, we're almost ready. Start your checklist."

"Copy that," the pilot replied and the feed-image bent toward Bandao. Each man would double-check his z-suit, his equipment, the telemetry relay, their weapons before the lock opened. The Marines were already checking each other's suits. All four men were wearing propulsion packs. Gretchen's request for a wire-tether fired from the Cornuelle to the derelict had been refused. Hadeishi had no intention of establishing a physical connection between his ship and the Palenque.

Gretchen turned, looking up across the control station behind her. Hadeishi was ensconced in a command chair, half enveloped in shock-foam and control consoles. Faint lights from his panel displays mottled his face and combat suit. Kosho sat slightly below him, on his left, and Hayes down and to the right. She and the Hesht were at a station in the third ring of the bridge, matching the position of the ensign, Smith, on the opposite side of the U-shaped deck. The Imperial commander raised his head slightly and smiled, meeting her eyes.

Hadeishi toggled on his voice channel. "Near space scan, Smith-tzin?"

"Clear, Chu-sa. Two trailing asteroids, six low-orbit Company peapod satellites, no other ships, shuttles or unidentified objects. No radio or t-wave transmissions except the telemetry from the satellites. Everything's quiet."

"Engines, Isoroku-tzin?"

"Hot, kyo, idling at zero thrust. Power plant is at twenty percent. Spin time to hyper is six zero minutes. Repeat, six zero minutes." The engineer's voice echoed in Gretchen's earbug, coming from the downship channel.

"Weapons, Mister Hayes?"

"Weapons are hot, Captain. One flash bird rigged and solution locked. Point defense system is online and tracking."

"One minute," Kosho said softly.

Hadeishi nodded to her. "Full stop."

Kosho ran her finger down a control bar on her console. There was another slight shudder. In Gretchen's displays, a counter indicating meters-to-target slowed and then stopped. "Six hundred meters," announced the pilot. "We have velocity match."

"Are you ready?" Hadeishi's voice was soft in Gretchen's ear and she started. A blinking glyph in the bottom right corner of her glasses indicated they were on a private channel.

"Ready," she said, swallowing. This was it. She changed back to the open channel. "Mister Parker, have you completed your checklist?"

"Copy that, boss. We are ready to take a walk."

Gretchen looked sideways at Magdalena. "Cameras ready? Suit telemetry online?"

The Hesht grinned, showing double rows of white teeth like tiny knives. "Cameras live. Recorders are rolling. Suit telemetry is clean. All bio readings are in the green." The cat flicked a claw at a newer, smaller window on the console. Gretchen saw it showed a string of beadlike lights circling the planet. The peapod survey satellites Hayes had picked up. Excellent.

"Mister Parker, you are free to take a walk."

Unconsciously, she bit her lip, eyes fixed on the v-feed of the Cornuelle's airlock. One of the Marines, Fitzsimmons, punched a code into the airlock control panel. The hatch opened swiftly and raw sunlight flooded into the chamber, picking out every detail with brilliant clarity.

Deckard stepped out into the void. He was briefly silhouetted against the monstrous glowing disk of the planet. Bandao followed, white jets of vapor trailing behind him. Parker followed and Gretchen felt a moment of vertigo as he stepped out over an infinite distance. Then the suit cam focused on the distant, surprisingly tiny image of the Palenque.

"Five minute count to contact." Parker's voice was calm, even cheerful.

There was a faint clank as Parker's boots touched down on the metal skin of the exploration ship. Bandao landed a moment later, flanking the airlock, while the two Marines held back. From the viewpoint of the cameras on the two Company suits, Gretchen couldn't see either Marine, but she guessed they were covering the opening, weapons armed and ready.

"Checking lock diagnostics," Parker said, his voice still light and cheerful. The camera view stabilized on the entry pad. All of the keys were dark. The pilot's fingers tapped on them experimentally. There was no reaction.

"Some emergency power is offline," Magdalena commented, tail twitching. Parker echoed her a moment later. Bandao's camera shifted and a plate sealed with four spring bolts came into view.

"Stand by," the gunner said. "We'll try a manual entry."

Despite surface pitting and a faint layer of ice on the shadowed entry plate, Bandao's quick fingers released all four bolts, then set the magnetized cover aside to adhere to the skin of the Palenque, and swung the unlock bar over in a smooth motion.

Gretchen heard a slight hiss from Parker as the airlock recessed. Puffs of vapor squeezed out of the opening door as Bandao cranked the locking bar around and the hatch swung inward, revealing a dark cavity only barely illuminated by a single amber light.

"I am entering the ship," Parker said, only the faintest tremor in his voice. Gretchen blinked as the pilot's suit lamps swung to reveal the gleaming white and gray interior of the lock.

"No debris, no organic contaminates, no high-order radioactives," Magdalena said softly into a voice log, yellow eyes glued to the environmental sensors relaying from the z-suits of the men in the lock. The brass-colored snout of Bandao's shipgun appeared at the edge of Parker's video feed, swung back and forth, quartering the compartment, then withdrew. "Parker is inside the lock."

Gretchen looked back at Hadeishi, still sitting in the command chair, watching quietly, his face illuminated by lights from his combat displays. He raised an eyebrow at Gretchen's formal expression. "Chu-sa Hadeishi, Mister Parker has boarded and taken possession of the exploration ship Palenque, Company registry…" She read off the official registration and identification of the Temple-class starship. "I would like to request the assistance of the Imperial Navy in recovery operations at this time." She bowed politely and the captain returned the motion.

"Lieutenant Kosho," Mitsuharu turned his head slightly. The executive officer was waiting with a politely interested expression. "Please render all aid and assistance to the Company representatives in securing their ship and restoring power and environmental controls."

"Hai, Captain." Kosho touched her cheekbone, and began speaking to the two Marines floating outside the airlock.

"You may proceed with your recovery operation, Doctor Anderssen." Hadeishi nodded politely to Gretchen. In the cameras, the two Marines entered the airlock as Parker and Bandao moved aside to let them handle the ship-side hatch. A second plate was removed, and the inner airlock opened slowly as Deckard operated the manual release bar.

Gretchen bent over the panel, watching a hallway slowly emerge into the light. Everything was very dark. She looked sideways at Magdalena. "Atmosphere?"

"Clear," the Hesht replied, though she was frowning.

"What is it?" Gretchen tapped open the ship frequency. "Parker, hold up."

The video feeds stilled, and Gretchen caught sight of two stubby black Marine shipgun barrels swinging up, pointing down the newly revealed passageway. Parker's camera shifted as he swung to cover the now-closed exterior hatch.

"There's…" Magdalena twitched her nose, claws tapping softly on the display. "Mister Parker," she growled, "is your suit envirosensor working properly? Does it show green?"

"Yes," Parker said a moment later. "Everyone's does."

Gretchen started to turn toward Lieutenant Kosho, but the little Nisei woman's fingers were dancing on her own panel, and Magdalena's array of v-panes and gauges suddenly doubled in number, showing the telemetry feed from all four z-suits. The Hesht frowned again, black lips curling back from white incisors.

"Ship air is very, very clean," she said a moment later in a slightly disbelieving voice. "I show barely any contaminants, no waste products, only a slightly oxygen-rich standard oxy-nitrogen atmosphere. Scattered traces of free carbon and hydrogen."

"Dioxide levels?" Gretchen leaned over, searching out the air mixture readout for herself.

Magdalena waved a paw in dismissal, making the rows of bracelets on her wrists tinkle. "Negligible. Couldn't grow a fern if you wanted to. It's like no one is aboard, and never has been."

"All right. Parker, you're free to advance. Head for the bridge with all due precaution."

"Ok…" The pilot edged out into the hallway, his helmet light swinging across mottled gray bulkheads and an irregular-looking floor. "This is funny…"

While the observers on the bridge of the Cornuelle held their breaths, Parker moved to the base of the closest wall and knelt down. His hand — a little bulky in the z-suit — brushed along the baseboard. Bare metal under his fingertips gleamed and shimmered in clear white light.

"Discolored," Bandao commented, "like it's been flash-heated."

"Yeah…" Parker's camera shifted again, and fine gray ash puffed up from the deck at his touch. "Boss, could there have been a fire?"

"Huh." Gretchen slumped back in her shockchair, biting her lower lip. "Then where's the carbon scoring, the fire-suppression foam residue?"

Neither Bandao nor Parker had an answer. After a moment's pause, they pressed on.

Gretchen watched in silence, her frown steadily lengthening, as the four men moved forward along the main access passageway. Hatches revealing half-seen rooms drifted by. Everywhere, power was out, the ship dark and silent. When they entered what the ship schematic described as a crew common area just forward of the main lab ring, she opened the suit channel again.

"Parker, turn slowly. I want to see the whole room."

The camera view panned, and Gretchen doubled the size of the v-pane and dialed up feed magnification. Parker's camera slid across tables, chairs, counter-tops, drink dispensers, refrigerator and synthesizer doors. "Stop. Stop right there. Parker, do you see the door of the refrigerator?"

"Sure… What about it?" Parker's pistol could be seen on the bottom left of the screen, steady on the suspicious door. "Looks like a refrigerator door. Must be the snacks locker."

"Have you ever seen a ship fridge door that wasn't covered with stickers, leaflets, announcements, photos from home?"

Parker didn't answer for a moment, and his camera flicked back across the rest of the common area. "There's nothing here," he said, surprised. "It's like they cleaned up the place and left or…o rthere was a fire and it burned up everything."

"Made a very clean job of it then," Gretchen said in a dry voice.

"More than that, look at this," Bandao said, and his camera view drifted over to a food prep counter set into one bulkhead. Gretchen turned her attention to his display. There was a rack of chef's knives pinned to the surface on a heavy magnetic strip. She hissed in alarm.

The muzzle of Bandao's rifle touched the hilt of one of the knives. Where a heavy rubber or wooden grip should have enclosed the steel tang, there was nothing, only bare gleaming metal. "This was a set of Hotchkiss cooking knives from New France, on Anбhuac. These models have walnut handles and surgical-quality blades. Very expensive."

"Check the rest of the room," Gretchen said, feeling suddenly cold. "Check for anything organic, anything at all."

"Nothing here either," Parker said in a dead voice. He was standing on the bridge of the Palenque, one hand pushing the commander's chair back and forth. There was only a bare metal frame, lacking any plastic, leather or fiberfill. "Everything's just…gone. This is creepy."

Bandao's camera shifted, looking across the display panels of the command station. Like everything else, they were dark and mottled by heat. The gunner rapped the knuckles of his z-suit on the glassy plate. "Aren't these touch-panels plastic? What about the corridor walls, the doors — aren't they plastic of some kind? Why were they just melted a little, and not destroyed completely?"

Gretchen and Magdalena looked up. They had been poring over the shipyard diagrams and materials lists used in the construction documents on file for the Palenque. Gretchen rubbed her face. The maze of ship documents was giving her a headache. "I — "

"Command panels are made with an electrically active composite, which is not a long chain polymer, Mister Bandao." Lieutenant Kosho's cool, correct voice intruded on the circuit. "The range of materials removed from the ship is rather distinct."

Gretchen's glasses flickered and Hadeishi's private channel glyph was winking again.

"Yes?" she said, turning away from Magdalena. She was starting to feel sick.

"We think the ship was attacked by a 'cleaner' agent of some kind." Mitsuharu's voice was very calm and steadying. "Only certain molecules and sets of longer-chain compounds were affected. Particularly, those which form organic life. Paper, glue, bedsheets…all those things were swept up in the general criteria."

"A weapon." Gretchen felt a band of tension release from her chest. Vague fears crystallized and she felt relieved. See, she thought, the universe is filled with reason. "Something from the planet?"

"Perhaps." Hadeishi sounded thoughtful. "There have been reports of illegal activity in this region, but no human miners would have access to this kind of a nanoweapon. You should continue searching the ship. Perhaps something survived in one of the lab habitats."

"Of course," Gretchen turned back to Magdalena. The Hesht was talking Bandao and Parker through the removal of an access panel under the command display. "Maggie?"

"Just a moment. Yes, Mister Parker, use some muscle. You won't break anything. There! Now look inside."

Parker hesitated, heart rate spiking on the monitor, and his pistol and a detached lamp went first. In the dark cavity, ranks of crystalline system modules sat quietly, without showing any sign of activity.

"Still no power," Maggie grumbled to herself. "Yausheer Bandao, please take out a v-pad, if you have one. I will send a detailed ship schematic to you. I want you to go down to engineering and start checking the power-runs out from the batteries and fusion plant."

Parker muttered something obscene and crawled out of the access panel. Bandao said nothing. Both men kicked down the long central access passageway, gliding expertly from stanchion to stanchion, their suit lamps flaring on the white panels and dark openings onto surrounding decks.

"Kosho-san?" Gretchen looked across the dim, softly glowing command deck of the Cornuelle. "Could your Marines search the rest of the ship?"

"Hai," the exec answered. "I will send another pair across to secure the bridge while Deckard and Fitzsimmons search deck by deck."

Parker grunted, putting his shoulder into a length of hexsteel pipe. The pipe extended the manual locking release on a massive pressure hatch marked with radiation warning symbols. Bandao had his helmet pressed against the metal surface, listening. The pipe squealed, the sound tinny and faint after echoing through the pilot's gloves and suit.

"Nothing," Bandao said over the open channel. "The bolts aren't backing out."

"Is there another way in?" Parker spoke to the air.

On the Cornuelle, Gretchen shook her head. Magdalena's entire control panel was covered with schematics showing the engineering space, the reactor cores and every crawl space, access tunnel and passage in the aft half of the Palenque. The Hesht's ears were twitching in frustration.

"No, Mister Parker," Gretchen said wearily, only half-listening to the men on the ship. "Lieutenant Isoroku says the reactor has gone through an emergency shutdown procedure. That hatch is the only access, and the manual lock mechanism should work."

"Sorry chief, there's no joy here." Parker worked the pipe free from the locking bar, and then slammed the length of metal into the hatch in frustration. There was another tinny echo. The pilot swore again, and this time he did not bother to keep his voice down. "We'll have to burn through this door to get to the other side. How thick is the damned thing?"

Gretchen listened to the other channel for a moment, chewing on her lip. "Too thick, Mister Parker. It's supposed to restrain the core in case of a failure."

"What do we do, then?" Bandao stood up, the pilot's lamp throwing a huge shadow behind him. "Run the ship from the batteries? We can't get at them either. Everything's through this door."

Gretchen sat up straight in her chair, a vague thought trying to worm free of her tired brain. "Maggie, show me the electrical connections for the hatch mechanism."

The Hesht nodded sharply and a tap-tap of her foreclaw zoomed a section of the schematic into full view. Gretchen hunched over the panel, fingertips brushing over the band at her wrist. A tickling feeling of clarity welled up, banishing her fatigue. She punched the schematic onto the v-channel shared by the team on the Palenque and the watchers on the Cornuelle. "Isoroku-san, do you see the display on your three?"

A muttered acknowledgement echoed over the Cornuelle-side channel from Engineering. The thai-i was down in his engine room, watching a duplicate of the video feeds in front of Gretchen. "I do. Yes, I believe such an approach would succeed. Sho-sa Kosho?"

"I agree," the exec said. She had her own echo of the schematics. Kosho turned to look inquiringly at the captain. Mitsuharu frowned.

"Hayes-tzin, threat status?" The commander was very slowly stroking his beard.

"No change, Hadeishi-san." The armaments officer made a sketchy bow from his position on the bridge.

"Two ratings and a work carrel," Hadeishi said, nodding to his exec. "They'll need the cargo space for the power cell."

Gretchen turned back to her panel and toggled to Parker and Bandao's channel. "Parker, an engineering crew from the Cornuelle will be joining you shortly with a portable fuel-cell unit." She glanced down at the diagrams. Maggie's long, claw-tipped finger slid under her arm, indicating a section of corridor. "You can speed things up, I think, if you move — ah, about five meters back down the corridor — there will be an access plate — ah, from your current vantage, overhead — marked with an engineering glyph. Remove the plate and you'll find a pair of power-runs which lead to the hatch motor — "

"Understood," Parker cut in, already moving with his length of pipe. He kicked away from the blast door and tumbled gently to fetch up near the panel. "I see it — "

Beep beep beep!

"All units, hold position!" A raspy voice barked across the shipside channel, overriding Parker's comment. Gretchen flinched back from the panel as a series of warning glyphs flashed on her display. An audible tone silenced the quiet chatter on the bridge of the Cornuelle. "We've found someone."

"Who is this?" Gretchen hissed at Magdalena, waving her hand at the display board. The Hesht bared her teeth in response, almost spitting, but white claws flashed and the video feeds of all the men aboard the Palenque leapt into view on the panel.

"This is Sergeant Fitzsimmons, Anderssen-tzin." The Marine's Skawts accent was very dry and controlled. On the medical feed, his heartbeat had ticked up a little, but his respiration was holding steady. "V-channel six."

"I have it," Gretchen snapped, then she froze, grasping the image being projected from the Marine's suit camera. In comparison to the quality of the video thrown by the Company suits, Fitzsimmon's transmission was as sharp as a 3v broadcast at home. "What — "

"Three bodies, ma'am," the Marine said, gliding forward, his boots making a shhhhh-thup sound on the deck as he moved. The muzzle of his shipgun was not pointed at the sprawled gray-and-tan shapes on the open decking in front of him, but on the dark recesses of some enormous open space. At the very edge of his camera's field of view, Gretchen caught sight of the second Marine also making a slow advance, gun at the ready. "They're wearing Company tags."

"Where are they?" Gretchen muted her throat mike, whispering to Magdalena.

"The main shuttle bay, sister." Maggie zoomed both Marine camera feeds and jacked up the ambient light amplification.

A huge space sprang into view, curving walls looming overhead and the heavy, blunt-nosed shape of a shuttle filling the darkness to the right, a pale light gleaming in the cockpit windows. Directly ahead of the two Marines, three crumpled shapes in z-suits were sprawled on the decking only a meter or two from some kind of an access hatch. Gretchen felt a creeping chill at the loose, floppy limbs of the suited bodies.

"Maggie, what is behind that hatch?" Gretchen was whispering again.

"The starboard power, data and environmental venting lines." The Hesht was distracted, staring at her displays. "Wait one, wait one…"

Gretchen ignored her, watching in sick fascination as Fitzsimmons advanced on the bodies, the glare of his suit light throwing them in sharp relief against the corrugated decking. The Marine paused, gun high, and gave the side of one of the helmets a soft kick with his boot. There was no sound, but the glassine helmet rolled over, revealing emptiness. The suit tag read PГ‚TECATL.

"The chief engineer," Magdalena said after a moment. "PГўtecatl, Susan Alexandra. Company employee, six years. Master's chief certification and engineer aboard the Palenque for three years."

"Sergeant, check all the suit seals." Hadeishi's voice was very calm and even over the channel. "Sho-sa Kosho, please halt the movement of the engineering team toward the Palenque."

Fitzsimmons's gloved fingertips slid back the metal plate covering the environmental controls on the empty z-suit. A row of faint green lights appeared. "Suit integrity intact, sir."

Gretchen sat back in her seat, a tiny bead of blood oozing from her lip. Damn.

"Check the other two," Hadeishi said in a conversational tone. "Deckard, advance to the power panel door and open the accessway. Isoroku-san, please observe heicho Deckard's suit camera."

A distant Hai! echoed in the silence on the bridge.

Fitzsimmons stood up, his camera view swinging to check the rest of the boat bay. Though his shipgun was still at high port, Gretchen thought the man had ceased to worry about something leaping out of the darkness at him.

"Captain Hadeishi…" She started to say, but the commander met her eye and shook his head slightly.

"The Palenque is now under level-two quarantine, Anderssen-tzin." He said quietly. "Something consumed the men inside those z-suits after they had a sealed environment. We must presume everyone aboard is in the same danger — indeed, they may already be exposed — and we cannot risk the Cornuelle as well."

"How long — " Gretchen was almost immediately interrupted by Magdalena sinking a claw into her shoulder, and Isoroku's voice grumbling over the engineering channel.

"Hadeishi-san, look at the feed from Deckard's suit." The engineer's voice sounded both depressed and filled with righteous anger. "Sloppy civilian contractors…" He muttered.

Deckard's v-feed showed the inside of the utility run, a circular space filled with the heavy blue shapes of air and water returns, the darker reddish channels of data feeds and the charred black traces of power conduit.

"What happened to this stuff?" Deckard snorted, poking at the ruin inside the utility tunnel with the tip of his rifle. "It's all burned up!"

"Stay alert, Heicho." Fitzsimmons's voice was very sharp on the comm, and the sergeant was almost immediately in the accessway, shining his lamp up and down the shaft. "Back up and cover the boat bay. Thai-i Isoroku, are you getting a good feed from my camera?"

The sergeant panned his lamps slowly over the tangled mess, letting the engineer get a good look.

On the bridge of the Cornuelle, the captain leaned on the arm of his chair, watching Isoroku's face twist in thought on the v-feed from engineering. "Well?"

The engineer scowled into the pickup. His bald head was shining with a faint, fine sheen of sweat. "Poor materials, Captain." A thick finger stabbed at a screen out of the field of view. "We'll need a sample, but I'll say now the material used to insulate and EM-screen the power conduits was substandard — using some kind of organic in the composite. Something the weapon attacked and stripped away." Isoroku shrugged his heavy shoulders. "The conduit temperature spiked from all the waste heat, and then the superconductors failed and power went out."

"Did conduit failure shut down the fusion plant?" Hadeishi was smoothing his beard again.

"Unlikely, kyo." The engineer looked off-screen. "All three of those suits have engineering cert badges on them. Perhaps the attack started on the starboard side, power started to fail unexpectedly and they started a reactor shutdown, then moved to see what was happening."

Hadeishi nodded to himself, sighing. "And fell dead on the way, consumed."

"Captain?" Gretchen had risen up in her seat, tucking one leg under. "We've found something interesting."

"Yes?"

"There are higher levels of waste products in the hangar bay," Magdalena said, her throaty voice rolling and rumbling. "Complex carbon chains, waste gases, long chain organics. The sensors on the Marines' suits are starting to pick them up. And…"

Hadeishi raised one eyebrow and leaned forward. "And what?"

Gretchen tapped a control on the display panel and a section of video doubled, then trebled in size. A window, glowing with light, and a shadow against a bulkhead were plain to see. "There's someone alive inside the shuttle."

"Clip on." Gunso Fitzsimmons tossed Deckard a monofil line tab. The corporal caught the metal hook deftly and snugged the line to his belt with the ease of long practice. Both Marines had dialed down the audio on their comm sets, so the argument on the bridge of the Cornuelle was reduced to a dull thunder in the background.

"Clipped," Deckard replied after testing the line. He slung the angular black shape of his shipgun over one shoulder, and adjusted his gloves, bringing magnetic surfaces around to the palms. Fitzsimmons removed the little winch from his belt and adhered the metal box to the doorframe of the power conduit accessway. "Anchored."

"Anchors away, then." Deckard grinned, white teeth visible through the faceplate of his suit. He kicked off from the wall and sailed across the boat bay. As he approached the nose of the shuttle, the Marine tucked in his feet and rolled. Now feet first, he slipped past the window and reached out with both hands. The gloves slipped along the pitted, rusted surface of the shuttle, then slid to a halt.

"Quietly now," Fitzsimmons breathed over the combat channel. "Show me what's inside." Deckard spidered up to the forward window of the shuttle and paused just out of sight of anyone inside. Tugging one of his shoulder cameras free, the marine eased the filament up to the edge of the window. The sergeant, watching the spyeye view on a tiny, postage-stamp sized popup inside his helmet, made a scooting motion with his hand. "Just a hair more…"

Then he could see inside the cluttered, dirty cockpit of the shuttle, and — through the pressure door into the main cabin — two people sitting on facing piles of bedding. As he watched, the man tossed a playing card onto a pile between himself and the woman. Moisture was dripping from the walls of the shuttle, and the sergeant made a face. Mold? They're certainly alive. Not disintegrated at all…

Taking a breath, Fitzsimmons dialed up the volume on his comm.

"…the ship is entirely safe," Gretchen said, again, her voice rising slightly. "We've had men aboard for two hours and no one has been affected, there are waste gases loose in the boat bay, and they have not been destroyed — "

Hadeishi, his patience fraying — though only the sergeant or one of the crew would have been able to tell — interrupted. "Doctor Anderssen, I will not put my men, or my ship, at risk. Until we know exactly what happened and why, I will not put another man or woman aboard the Palenque."

"Ah, sir? Hadeishi-san?" Fitzsimmons made a face in the privacy of his suit. Luckily, the cameras only pointed forward, not at his grinning mug. "Chu-sa?"

"Hai, Gunso?"

"There are at least two people alive inside the shuttle, sir. They've been there quite awhile. Shall I go aboard and see what they know?"

"No," Hadeishi said, a slight edge in his voice. "If the contaminant is still loose on the Palenque, you'll only place them in danger. Hook up your exterior comm to the shuttle's data port and talk to them that way."

One of the other channels carried a muffled voice, and Fitzsimmons realized Anderssen-tzin's voice channel had been muted from the command deck.

"Aye, aye, sir." Fitzsimmons signaled to Deckard, then took two long, bounding steps to reach the shuttle's airlock. The corporal walked sideways down the hull to meet him, spooling up the monofil as he went. "Time for first contact, Corporal. Undog the comm port cover, would you?"

"We don't really know what happened. They just fell over, you know, and we couldn't raise anyone on the ship-to-ship comm channel."

Gretchen suppressed a sigh, staring at two grimy faces framed by the shuttle's v-cam. On her left, security team crewman Carlos Fuentes' bearded visage stared out at her with sick desperation. Beside him, nose screwed up in a grimace, her entire body turned away from Fuentes, crewwoman Delores Flores seemed equally despondent.

"Tell me what you saw," Gretchen said, again. "From the beginning."

"Well, ah…" Carlos groped for the proper words.

"Shut up, idiot," Delores said, pushing him out of the field of view. "I'll tell you, ma'am. We've been having problems with the shuttle engines since we arrived," the crewwoman began. "After five or six trips down to the base camp, they started showing warning lights in the afterburner and air intake ducts. Finally, shuttle two refused to power up groundside — claimed the engine would overheat. So we took number one down to base camp and pulled the entire engine assembly out of number two." She jerked her thumb over one shoulder. Something large and bulky, wrapped with shockfoam and cables, filled most of the cargo space on the shuttle.

"We brought up Doc Clarkson at the same time — he was in a big hurry! And Doctor McCue — she wasn't in such a hurry. They went upstairs, but we were working down here to prep this bastard to unload."

"Did anyone else ride up with you? Did you close the airlock after Clarkson and McCue left the shuttle?" Gretchen was chewing on the stub end of a pointing stylus.

"Always!" Delores nodded sharply, waving her hand off to one side. "Standard procedure. The bay doors are airtight, but the boat bay is considered an unsecured environment. You lock in and out of the bay, or the shuttles when they're aboard. And it was just those two. No one else wanted to ride up with them, not when they were in such a mood!"

"When did you notice something was wrong on the ship?"

"An alarm went off shipside," Delores said. "We heard the horn go off and I ran into the cockpit. Carlos — " The crewwoman's lip twisted slightly "- called the bridge. We heard some noise, some shouting for maybe thirty seconds, and then nothing." She pointed off toward the front of the shuttle. "Then the lock cycled and engineer PГўtecatl and two others ran into the bay. I called on the comm, and she said something was attacking the ship. Then she made sort of a choking noise, we saw a hot glow inside their helmets — and all three of them fell over."

"And then?" Gretchen frowned at the ragged plastic end of her stylus.

"They didn't move. We couldn't get anyone on the ship-to-ship channel." Delores shrugged. "The bay doors were closed, and we couldn't get them open by remote. We didn't dare go outside, not with three people dead in suits right in front of our eyes. With the shuttle parked inside the bay, we couldn't even raise groundside on the comm. So we've been waiting for weeks, hoping something would happen. Something good, I mean." She ventured a smile. "Can we get out of this tin can now and get a shower?"

"You can have a bath when we get you out," Gretchen promised with a smile. "But right now we have to figure out how to get you out of there safely. I'll call you back in a moment."

She shut down the channel, then turned to face Hadeishi. The captain and Lieutenant Kosho were talking, heads close together, at the exec's display board. "Captain Hadeishi?"

"Yes, Anderssen-tzin?" He seemed tense, and she knew he was bracing for another argument about the quarantine.

"I would like to transfer my crew and supplies — and the loan of a fuel cell, if you will — to the Palenque."

For a moment, Hadeishi said nothing, staring at her with narrowed eyes. At his side, the lieutenant allowed herself the ghost of a smile. Then the captain visibly shook himself and nodded.

"You're sure of your analysis? Sure enough to risk yourself and your team?"

"Yes," Gretchen said in a firm voice. Oh lord, I hope so! But we can't just sit here for weeks. Every day burns away at our nonexistent budget and our tiny little bonuses.

"Very well." Hadeishi glanced at his exec, who had stepped down to her own board, attention already focused on her lading schedules, thin rose-colored lips moving silently. "Kosho-sana, we will leave Sergeant Fitzsimmons and Corporal Deckard aboard as a, ah, loan to Anderssen-tzin and her group. For the moment. After the quarantine period has passed, we will want them back." The captain raised an eyebrow at Gretchen, who smiled in relief.

"Thank you," she said, making a heartfelt bow.

"Please don't damage my crewmen," Hadeishi responded on his private channel. "Good luck."

"There is one more thing…" Gretchen felt her stomach clench, knowing she was probably overstepping the bounds of hospitality. "If you could loan us an engineer's mate, I think we could get the power plant on the Palenque working again."

Hadeishi frowned. Gretchen kept her face impassive. The captain looked sideways, listening. He frowned again and said something into his throat mike. While Anderssen watched, the captain argued momentarily with someone, then gave up.

"Sho-sa Isoroku will be joining you on the Palenque," Hadeishi said in a tight voice.

Gretchen must have shown some of her astonishment openly. "I see."

"He," Hadeishi continued in a colorless tone, "wishes to see the damage caused by this weapon for himself. I believe he desires to submit a technical paper to the Fleet Engineering College on Mars. You should get ready to move your equipment."

Gretchen nodded again, in thanks, then began gathering up the v-pads, writing styluses and other bric-a-brac which had accumulated around the secondary weapons station. Magdalena was still hunched over her board, watching the feeds from the various suit cameras.

"I'll see you downstairs," Gretchen said, thumping the Hesht on one furry shoulder.

"Ya-ha," Maggie answered absently. "Be there in a bit."

The main lock of the Palenque cycled and Gretchen stepped through into a dark, echoing passage. A string of fading glowbeans cast the main access corridor in twilight, each shining dot throwing a circle of solemn blue-green light. She looked down at the enviro readouts on her arm — everything shone a friendly green — and she stepped aside to let Lieutenant Isoroku drag the battery pack into the ship. Magdalena followed, swimming through the opening with a flotilla of duffels, gearboxes and tools floating around her.

"You going to the command deck?" Gretchen lifted her chin in question. The Hesht shook her head.

"No, down to Engineering first. If we can get the hatch to the control compartment open we'll restart the ship's main comp before we try to bring up the reactor core. What about you?"

"I'm going to wander around," Gretchen said, looking at the readouts on her arm again. "The lab ring, I think. Keep channel four open." She looked over to Isoroku. "Lieutenant, could you use someone familiar with the ship systems?"

"Hai…" he answered dubiously.

Gretchen clicked her teeth, changing comm channel. "Sergeant Fitzsimmons, could you tell Miss Flores to suit up and go to Engineering? Lieutenant Isoroku will be waiting for her." She paused, listening. "I don't believe the ship is infected anymore, Sergeant. You and Corporal Deckard are proof of that, at least in my eyes. We would all be dead by now if the weapon remained active on-board."

There was an affirmative grunt on the channel and Gretchen smiled at the lieutenant.

"Crewwoman Flores will be along presently. Good luck — I'd love to see some light and heat in here."

Gretchen followed the battery pack — guided by Isoroku with a clever little hand-held gas-jet unit — down two main decks, then swung out of the access shaft to let her boots adhere to the doorframe of a large, doublewide portal labeled XA LAB ONE. The pressure hatch was closed, and she swore silently to herself. Of course it's closed. Everything is.

Feeling foolish, she found the manual locking bar and — straining to keep her feet wedged against the bulkhead for leverage — managed to crank the hatch open enough to get her suit through. On the other side, she paused, staring at the opening. Her arms were sore, but part of her brain was making a frightened sound. I might have to flee back this way…

"No," she said aloud, though her throat mike was muted. "No I won't."

Dialing her suit lamps to a more diffuse illumination, Gretchen pushed off gently and made her way forward through the ring. After a few minutes, she pulled herself up short, staring through a thick oval window into the next lab. The hatch was closed tight, the chamber dark, but the fragmentary light of her suit lamps picked out the shape of a clean-box with something bulky inside. Some kind of debris was scattered on the deck, and there was a subtle sense of disorder among the white and steel surfaces.

Someone working on something when the disaster overcame them?

"Damn." The hatch was sealed, the pressure seals closed. The chamber had no manual lock — indeed, a heat-distorted label declared the space beyond a "secured environment." Gretchen clicked her mike on. "Maggie? How long until we have power?"

There was no answer. Gretchen froze, listening to the warble of static and an intermittent, distant pinging sound. Suppressing a cold shiver of fear, she changed channel again. "Anderssen to the Cornuelle, come in please."

There was still no answer, but — obscurely — Gretchen was a little relieved. Something's blocking my suit comm, she thought. Of course.

Only slightly less apprehensive, she made her way back to the access shaft, pushing away from the handholds set into the ceiling and floor. Squeezing through the hatchway, she breathed a sigh of relief to hear channel four wake to life with Maggie and Delores chatting amiably while they worked.

"Magdalena? How long until we have power?"

The Hesht made a coughing sound — laughter — then said: "We haven't opened the door to Engineering yet, but we're close. One of the hatch motors burned out and Isoroku is replacing the mechanism. So I'd say another hour, at least."

"Thank you." Gretchen muted the channel, staring around at the cold darkness filling the ship. The main accessway seemed bottomless, even with a receding line of glowbeans shining in the dimness. Somehow the faint little pools of light only made the gloom seem more encompassing and complete. Disheartened, she sat down, swinging her boots over the shaft. "I guess I'll just wait, then."

After an endless minute, she pulled a v-pad from the cargo pocket of her suit and thumbed it awake. Might as well get some work done, she thought glumly. So something got loose in the ship, something which must have propagated through the air, a gas or vapor — how else could it move so fast and be unseen? Air is easy to penetrate, permeates most everything. An aerosol of some kind…She called up the ship schematics Magdalena had been using to follow the power and utility conduits. Her pad still held the modeling and time-regression software she'd used on Ugarit, which could understand the volume of the ship, the rooms and chambers, even the lack of organic artifacts.

Just like a site abandoned so long all the organics have decayed away, she thought after thirty minutes. Hmm…that's a good lab exercise for first-years.

Steadily brightening light broke her concentration, and she looked up to see the pilot scooting up the shaft toward her. A little embarrassed, she tucked the v-pad away. "How goes, Mister Parker?"

"Good," he answered, cheerful humor returned. "Engineering is open, and Isoroku's got his battery hooked up. Looks like the ship's fuel cells still have some juice, though Environmental was still working for awhile after the accident. Magdalena's starting up the comp from local power. I'm heading for the bridge to check the relays and get the main comm array running."

Gretchen smiled. "Good. What about main power?"

Parker waggled his hand ambivalently, inducing a slow spin. "No promises there. Isoroku wants to check every centimeter of the reactor to make sure nothing got eaten away by our little friend. Can't say I blame him."

"No, I suppose not." Gretchen rose, one hand clinging to a railing surrounding the hatchway. "If power comes back up, I'll want you to unlock the hatches in the lab habitat for me. Don't open them, though. I'll take care of that."

Parker nodded, then kicked off, flying up into the darkness, his helmet haloed by the flare of his lamps. Gretchen watched him go, feeling the darkness close around her again. Her suit was starting to smell, even with only a couple hours inside. Just like on Ugarit. Maybe the showers will work, she thought hopefully. Then she realized all the towels on board would have been disintegrated and she was depressed again.

The wall against Gretchen's back trembled and her eyes flew open. For a moment, she was disoriented — she'd fallen asleep listening to the hum of the fans in her suit — and saw only darkness sprinkled with faint lights above her. I'm outside?

Then she looked down the main shaft and saw a ring of lights flare on — a section of overheads a hundred feet away, near the ring hub into Engineering — then another and another. Gretchen stood up, grabbing hold of the nearest handhold, and the wave of lights washed over her. The deck continued to tremble, echoing the sound of a distant power plant turning over.

"Backup power is up in Engineering," Magdalena growled in her ear. "Some of the emergency lights are on. I'm starting the heat exchangers and air circulation."

Gretchen swung into the lab ring and crabbed down to the first tier of labs. Puzzled, she stared around — the lights were still out — then they flickered on, one by one, casting a steady daylight radiance. She blinked and her helmet polarized slightly. In the clear light, the stark emptiness of the work cubicles and rooms was even more striking.

All gone, everyone's work destroyed, she thought sadly, shuffling up the curve of the lab ring. Anything they didn't note down on comp — lost forever. She reached the sealed doorway to the clean room and looked inside. Here, most of the lights were still off, but two spots shone inside the containment chamber. A rust-red and ochre cylinder stood in a stainless steel cradle, anachronous and startling with irregular chips and flakes of stone amid the clean, smooth lines of the laboratory. Gretchen swallowed. The artifact — what else could it be? — was sectioned, cut clean in half as by a surgical beam. A metal-clad emitter ring hung poised above the cylinder, distended from an equipment pod. She guessed the cut was very narrow, perhaps only a millimeter across.

She started to sweat again, and the fans spun up in the suit, trying to keep her temperature constant. Reflexively, she looked down, checking the pressure seal on the door. With power returned, the panel showed three green lights and one red. She blinked.

The door seal failed. Oh god. Gretchen stepped back, and then stopped, gritting her teeth. Too late now, too late weeks ago. Whatever was inside escaped, ate through the containment pod, through the door seals, right out into the ship. She unclenched her hands and stared at the door. Adrenaline hissed in her blood, making her arms tremble.

After a long moment, she clicked her mike open. "Magdalena, are you busy right now?"

A growl answered, and a string of curses. Gretchen smiled, though the motion felt strange. "Yes, sister, I can wait. I'm in lab ring one. Take your time."

Gretchen sucked the last of a threesquare from her food tube and stood up as Magdalena and Bandao drifted down into the lab ring. The Hesht was still surrounded by a cloud of tools and cargo bags, but the gunner seemed to have accumulated some of the bulkier items.

"What's our status?" Gretchen asked, catching Maggie's paw and drawing her to a stop on the deck. Magdalena yawned in response, showing an ebon mouth filled with white teeth. Her fur was rumpled and one ear lay flat back against her head while the other was canted forward.

"All we have is sssrst-ta — tail feathers," the Hesht snarled. "Fuel cell power is up, main comp is up, the main reactor is still down, and we're lacking power in most of the ship." A gloved paw flexed and Gretchen noticed the Hesht's z-suit was fitted with a flexible metal mesh to accommodate extended claws. The fine mail glistened like fish scales. "Isoroku-san thinks this tangle-tailed weapon chewed up most of the power conduit runs. Some survived, so we have lights in the main core and some sections, but everything replaced three maintenance cycles ago is gone."

Gretchen wrinkled her nose. "Bad parts?"

Maggie nodded. "The repair logs show they swapped out most of the original conduit for new two years ago, as part of a systems upgrade. The new conduit was supposed to have a higher load tolerance, so they replaced all of the high-draw lines with this yherech-kwlll — pardon — inferior product. So the lights are on, some comp panels are up, but most of the hatches don't work, and the drives are offline, along with sensors, weapons, and the boat bay doors."

"Okay." Gretchen stared at the hatch into the clean room. "What about this one?"

Maggie shrugged. "The lights are on, try it."

Gretchen took a breath, nodded abruptly and stepped to the door. Then she stopped, unwilling to touch the controls. She felt Bandao and Maggie staring at her and became aware of the man's shipgun, raised and pointing past her at the door. A smile twitched her lips. Instinct! Danger in the high grass! As if his gun will stop this thing, if it's still in there. Her forefinger stabbed the button and the hatch trembled. A motor whirred — the sound audible even through her suit insulation — and the heavy steel recessed, then drew up into an overhead panel.

There were bits and pieces of metal and ceramic scattered on the deck. Gretchen recognized the metal inserts from the soles of a pair of dig boots much like her own. The deck surface was a dark, irregular metal, and she realized the usual nonskid coating had been destroyed. She padded across the deck, giving a wide berth to the tumbled parts of a belt, a pen, a scratched and dented v-pad. Her eye shied away from two irregular shining white pebbles. Someone's teeth. I didn't need to see that, she thought fiercely.

The comp panel running the isolation chamber had power, but had gone through an abrupt shutdown. Gretchen studied the glyphs for a moment, then tapped in RESTART and RESUME. Magdalena leaned in at her side, staring into the chamber.

"These are the seal status indicators?" The Hesht ran a metal-sheathed claw across a line of winking red glyphs. Gretchen nodded, watching the system start up. The panel seemed sluggish, and one pane displayed a constant list of init errors. Magdalena hissed. "Sloppy work. The entire seal is gone. Why don't they make them of solid metal or ceramic?"

Gretchen shrugged, concentrating on getting the panel operative again. "Company probably bought from the low bidder. Here we go…"

A v-feed opened on the panel, showing the interior of the isolation chamber and the rocky, corroded-looking cylinder. Gretchen slid a control down, and the image rewound with a flash, ending with a similar image, though now the cylinder was intact and the lighting slightly different.

"Replay," Gretchen muttered, finding the glyph for movement-returning-to-the-source and tapping the stylized warrior in a loincloth holding two reeds crowned with white fluff. "…with audio overlay." Another tap, and a timer began to run in one corner of the image.

For a moment there was no sound and Gretchen frowned. Magdalena laughed softly and her claw-tip danced across a series of controls. An excited male voice suddenly filled Gretchen's helmet comm.

"…on day six-flint-knife, in the month of Offering Flowers, an artifact described by image log seven-seven-two was recovered from the surface of Ephesus Three with some assistance from Miss Russovsky, a post-doc performing a routine geophysical survey of the planet. This is the first artifact we have found which is of an obvious and patently manufactured origin." There was a throaty, satisfied laugh, and Gretchen's nostrils flared. She decided she did not like the speaker, whoever he was. Assistance? You mean this Russovsky found the damned thing and brought it to you like a good little student — or did you take it from her?

"Initial analysis shows a metallic cylinder surrounded by a matrix of sedimentary rock. The encrusting mixture is of interest, indicating the cylinder lay in mud or clay. Preliminary isotopic decay readings suggest an age for the matrix of nearly three million years." The laugh came again, and this time there was a sense of relief in the voice. "This places the artifact well within the timeframe of known First Sun activities."

Gretchen felt the cold chill flood back into her stomach. What a fool!

"Doctor McCue has suggested that we isolate the artifact and send it back to the Company labs for more extensive examination, but I believe it is safer and more prudent for us to make an initial survey here, aboard the ship." The voice settled, becoming pedantic and measured.

"She suggests the object may be dangerous, but if so, would it not be wiser to examine the artifact here — far from inhabited space? Any violent event would then affect only this one ship, and of course, myself. A loss, to be sure, but far better than losing Mars or Novoya Rossiya!"

Gretchen shook her head in amazement at the man's ego. She could feel him thinking, even through the distance of the recording, and he was so, so eager to see what was inside the cylinder. Any real thought of caution or wariness was entirely disregarded.

"Luckily," the voice continued, "the limestone matrix does not interfere with most of our sensors here in the lab. I am going to try a low-power microwave scan first, just to see what the exterior really looks like…"

A succession of images unfolded — the cylinder's crusted surface was mapped, showing each ridge and bump and crevice in the stone — then the cylinder itself, a smooth metal tube, closed seamlessly at each end. There were no markings or signs on the outside of the metal, or at least none shown by the initial scans.

"I am initiating a low power intrusive scan, to see if the surface is permeable to x-ray."

Gretchen forced herself not to flinch as an emitter ring descended and began a pass along the length of the cylinder. At her side, she felt Maggie stiffen, and Bandao mutter: "Idiot — what if it's a booby trap, or a bomb?"

The image of the cylinder on the v-pane did not react, and a second image replaced the first. A murky picture showing the outlines of the limestone matrix, a metallic shell — very thin — and then a cavity within.

"Odd," echoed the voice from the past. "Half of the tube is solid, half empty. Wait — perhaps the solid half is only very dense…"

The image zoomed, focusing in, and zoomed again, revealing a dense, interlocking system of membranes and fluted, intertwined protrusions.

"Looks like a lung," Bandao said, staring sideways at the display.

"Some kind of structure," the voice continued, "very, very dense. The separations between the alveoli-like structures are barely measurable. Yet they exist. Hmmm…an information storage structure? Could this be a book?"

Gretchen had to suppress a start; the hard, dry voice of Green Hummingbird was whispering in her memory. A book? Or some other storage media? The man's voice started to trend upward, filling with a rush of excitement.

"It must be a book," greed dripped into his voice. "Or a visual storage mechanism. Ah, what a prize that would be! But how is it accessed?" The image shifted to focus on the empty half of the cylinder. "And what is this space for? Why use only half of the container? Hmmm…perhaps the empty half is not exactly empty?"

A glyph appeared in one corner of the recording, showing the visual feed was switching to a different sensor. Gretchen squinted at the icon, but didn't recognize the symbol. "What's that?" she asked.

"Super-shortwave sensor," Bandao answered with a slight hesitation, face tense. "It interpolates to sub-x-ray definition for medical use — but he's a fool to use a high power probe on this thing."

"…beginning scan," the recording announced. The image tightened, flashed blank, then focused again. The "empty" half of the tube was momentarily revealed as a murky soup of tiny spinning particles, then the image jerked, the tube split in half and there was a warning whoop of sound from the recording. Then everything went black and the panel beeped quietly, indicating the end of the image file.

"Well," Gretchen said after a moment. "I guess you should have been here, Mister Bandao."

The gunner shook his head, his face a tight mask. "I'm not disappointed to come late. If I had been here before, I would have put the bastard down."

With that, Bandao left, swinging angrily out of the lab and bounding off up the ring toward the main accessway. Gretchen watched him go, but said nothing, and did not call him back. Instead, she turned to Maggie and said: "Can you make this panel play back the last part frame by frame?"

The Hesht coughed in amusement, her claws dancing across the display controls.

Sighing with relief, Gretchen thumbed the release mechanisms for her helmet and heard a sharp click as they retracted. Fresh, chill air bathed her face. The ship would be cold for hours yet, until hot air streaming from the heaters permeated all compartments. Then it would be too hot until the environmentals adjusted themselves. She sat down — in something like real gravity — and tugged the helmet free from the z-suit. Parker, sitting across the table in the crew common area, slid a cup of fresh, hot coffee to her.

"There's some creamer, but no milk," he said.

"Thank you. Black is fine." The cup was very warm in her hands. Three sugar packets from a pocket of her z-suit disappeared into the oily black liquid. She took a long swallow, feeling warmth flood her chest. "Better," she said after finishing the cup. "Better. Are the Lieutenant and Flores still down in Engineering?"

Magdalena nodded, her attention focused on sucking pale red fluid and chunks of raw meat from a mealbag.

Gretchen studiously kept her eyes away from the Hesht dinner. "Mister Parker, do we have flight control and comm up?"

"Sort of," the pilot said, putting down his cup. "Attitude controls are mostly working, though there are still miles of conduit to replace for the main engines. Luckily, the fine control jets use compressed air and need only on/off signals to operate. They work fine — since they're mechanical. Navigation is up, and we have lost some planetary altitude, so when we do have engines live again I need to make an adjustment burn to put us back in the proper orbital. We have spin in this hab ring, but not the others. Main comp is up, so you have shipboard comm and info retrieval — if you can find a working display."

He turned toward Magdalena, who was squeezing the mealbag in one paw, making thick goo ooze into her open mouth. Parker jerked back toward Gretchen. "Ah…we've found the experimental transmitter, which is on its own fuel cell system, but I haven't messed with it. The cat can do that later, I guess. The main comm array is down until we rebuild power, but we're close enough to the Cornuelle that our suit radios still work."

"Unless you're in the labs," Gretchen commented, "which are shielded."

"What did you find down there?" Parker stole a glance at Bandao, who was sitting with his own cup in his hands, content to say nothing. The two Marines were equally quiet and unobtrusive, sitting back from the edge of the table. Out of his combat suit, Fitzsimmons was of medium height, very fit, with broad shoulders and curly blue-black hair. Deckard was thinner, with a lanky build and a ruddy complexion. Carlos, still looking miserable, sat beside Parker, slowly chewing on his thumb. "Did you find the…weapon?"

"Yes." Gretchen drained her cup and set it down on the spotlessly clean tabletop. "One of the scientists working on the planet — a geologist named Russovsky — found some stone cylinders in one of the canyons on the big mountain range. She brought an artifact back to base camp and showed her find to Doctor McCue, the dig supervisor. I think — not from anything said in record, but hearing between the lines — the lead archaeologist, a man named Clarkson, then took the cylinder from McCue and returned to the ship."

Gretchen looked down at the table, finding a ring of coffee-colored condensation where her warm cup had stood on the cold metal. She squeaked her finger through the liquid, drawing a line down the middle of the circle.

"Clarkson tried to see what was inside the cylinder with a high-powered sensor. Half of the tube seemed to be empty — but it wasn't, not really. Half seemed to be filled with a tightly packed membrane, like the filaments lining a human lung. The lab's isotope decay analysis estimates the cylinder is almost three million years old." A sharp, short laugh escaped her. "Clarkson was pretty sure the device wasn't working anymore, or if it was, it was a kind of book or information storage device, like a 3v pack. Well, he was right, in a way."

Her finger slashed across the circle of moisture.

"His probe injected enough energy into the empty chamber to make a sort of gas of very, very small particles expand violently. A thin wall between the two chambers broke down and the gas flooded into the membranes within a fraction of a second. They mixed, violently, and the cylinder broke open."

"A binary round," grunted Fitzsimmons, his brown eyes gleaming in the darkness. "But not the usual sort of explosion, I suppose."

"No." Gretchen shook her head ruefully. "The gaslike particles, I think, were some kind of tiny nanomachines. They dissolved the membranes — destroyed them — but at the same time they learned a pattern from the arrangement of the filaments. In less than a second, they were trained and they acquired enough raw material to duplicate themselves. Pressure expanded…"

Three fingers stabbed into the circle and swirled the last fragments of moisture out into an unsightly blotch on the tabletop.

"The weapon was released from its container and into the atmosphere." Gretchen sighed. "Clarkson had failed to evacuate the examination chamber, which ordinarily would not have been a problem, but in this case the waste gases in the unit atmosphere were fuel for more nanomachines. I'm pretty sure the machines ignore plain atomic components — O and N and so on — but they chew up CO₂ for lunch, and any kind of long-chain molecule in their attack pattern for dinner. Pressure built in the chamber, and the eaters reached the pressure seals.

"If the Company had not purchased second rate containment pods," Gretchen continued, "the eaters would have been contained. Their programming did not happen to include the stainless steel forming most of the pod walls. Unfortunately, a flexible sealant forming the join between the instrument package and the main unit was composed of long-chain polymers which were on the 'menu.'

"They escaped into the power and data conduit above the containment unit. The sheathing of the power cables gave them more food, allowing them to reproduce at an exceptionally rapid rate. I would guess, from the cut-off time of the recording unit, that they dropped power in the lab ring within sixty seconds of escape, and had penetrated into the starboard side of the ship within two minutes. Less than ten meters away is the starboard power coupling beside the boat bay. As the wave front propagated, power collapsed, and the engineering team — who had no idea, I imagine, that Doctor Clarkson was even aboard — started an emergency shutdown of the grid.

"Within five minutes, everyone on the starboard side of the ship was dead. The engineers, who had suited up on the run, will have run right through the weapon cloud without even noticing anything. Then, by the time they reached the boat bay, the eaters would have reproduced inside their suits…and you saw the result."

"Wait a moment." Fitzsimmons leaned forward, his tanned forehead creased in thought. "What happened to the eaters after they filled the ship?"

"They ate themselves." Gretchen looked around for something to clean up the puddle, then grimaced. No rags. There are no rags. "The last of their programming broke them apart when there was nothing left to consume. All they left was a cloud of component elements."

"And what happened to that?" Fitzsimmons looked mildly disgusted.

Gretchen nodded toward the rear of the ship. "Most of it will have been circulated into the air purification system, which continued to run on backup power while it detected impurities in the air supply. But when the cloud was processed, there was nothing but pure air left, and the system shut down automatically. The rest will have collected here and there, as grainy white dust — "

Parker suddenly snorted, coughing and spraying coffee across the conference table. He made a horrible face as he turned to Gretchen. "You mean this isn't nondairy creamer?"

Her ears covered with a thick cap of New Aberdeen cashmere, z-suit helmet parked on the display panel, Gretchen leaned back in a chair reduced to metal strips in the lab ring control cube. Curving hallways lined with hatches stretched up to her left and right. Light from the lab holding the broken cylinder spilled out into the hall. It was still very cold — the heaters in the lab spaces had failed to turn on with the rest — and Gretchen's breath puffed white as she hummed to herself.

On the display — only half of which was working — v-panes were running, speeding through the day of the accident. A crewman wandered through one feed, eating pine nuts from a bag, then out of one frame and into another. Mostly she watched empty rooms and quiet machinery idling in standby. All of the scientists were down on the planet, working at the main camp. Gretchen sighed, bored, and speeded up the replay.

Almost immediately, blurred figures appeared and she dialed back ten minutes. "Finally!"

A tall, lean man with a neat beard and field jacket swung down from the hab access tube, landing heavily in the partial gravity. His hair was silvered, with a few streaks of black remaining, and he was wearing a heavy pair of sunglasses. A battered, grimy fieldpack, bulging with a heavy weight burdened narrow shoulders.

"Doctor Clarkson — coming home with his prize," Gretchen murmured, keenly interested, watching the man hurry into the number one isolation lab. A moment later, a woman entered the lab ring by the same tube. Her tied-back hair was long, orange-red and very curly. She was also dressed in field kit, with a pocket-covered vest, sunglasses perched on her forehead and linen pants tucked into her boots. "And our mathematician in residence, Doctor McCue."

Gretchen felt a pang, seeing such familiar-looking people. She'd never met either of them, though the faces matched the briefing materials provided by the Company. But they felt so much like her friends on Ugarit, or the other graduate students and professors at the university. And now they're gone, rendered down for Parker's nondairy creamer.

She ignored Clarkson in his lab, following McCue from camera to camera as the woman wound her way through the maze of cubicles and rooms. The mathematician was pushing a g-box in front of her, a dented steel case with a built-in anti-grav, controlled by a hand unit. On the far side of the lab ring from the main control station, she stopped in front of a heavy reinforced hatchway.

Gretchen sat up, puzzled. She'd walked through the whole ring…she hadn't noticed a security door. But McCue's image punched in a keycode and the heavy blast door swung up and away, revealing a specimen vault and a bit of a room filled with racks of bins and cargo crates stacked on the floor. Then the door closed, and she was left with a nice picture of the hatchway.

"Well. What does Doctor McCue have in her box, which was so valuable it went straight to the vault?"

She advanced the recording, flipping ahead ten minutes. No change. Then she blinked — a smoky haze swept down the corridor, flames leaping from empty air. The flooring blackened and warning lights began to flash. Lighting in the hallway flickered, then failed. Gretchen tasted bile, knowing what had to happen next.

The hatchway cycled up, and Doctor McCue stepped out, alarm clear in her round, freckled face. She started to call out, raising her left arm — the shining band of a comm winked in the remaining light. Gretchen bit her lip, teeth clenched tight. A cloud of gray coalesced out of the air and McCue staggered, throwing up her hand uselessly. Her clothing vanished in sudden flame, burning away with frightening speed, then her flesh sloughed away into nothing, and there was a flash of bone and red meat.

The gray-and-black cloud lingered for a moment, then dispersed in a drifting cloud of white dust and bits and pieces of metal scattered on the floor. The hatchway remained open for a moment, and Gretchen could see the edge of the g-box, then the door rumbled closed, cutting off the vault lights, plunging the hallway into darkness.

Video replay ended with a ping and a motion-ceasing glyph.

"That's a hard thing to watch," rumbled a voice at Gretchen's shoulder. Sergeant Fitzsimmons was standing beside her, his black Marine z-suit blending into the dimness of the room. He had a bundle in his hands. "Sorry to bother you, ma'am, but I thought you might need something for the cold." He grinned. "But that's a prettier hat than I had in my ruck. I like the…ah…reindeer?"

"Oh." Gretchen touched the thick, felty plush of the cap on her head. "My mum makes them for all the kids," she said, tugging at the brightly-colored, shapeless mass. "Thank you for the thought, Sergeant. But Ugarit had its own bad weather, and Mars was bitterly cold. I've plenty of warm things."

Gretchen managed a smile, thinking of trudging across the brittle, rocky permafrost to the Polaris site, stiff in a triply-insulated z-suit and respirator. The Marine had a gray-green service wool cap and a pair of gloves, also a foul olive color, in his hands. Good enough for our slowly heating ship, she thought with a hidden frown, but not good enough to keep your hands and ears attached on Mars.

"Good," he said, stuffing the cap and gloves into a cargo pouch on the front of his suit. "Do you need help getting that vault door open?"

Gretchen started to shake her head — she had a video of McCue's keycode — but then realized refusing the offer might be rude. Might need a big, brawny Marine sometime. She stood up, snugging the sherpa cap under her ears. "Thanks," she said, "I don't think there'll be any trouble, but you never know…"

The vault door proved to be hidden behind a standard wall panel. Gretchen supposed the panel had slid down automatically during the power failure. Fitzsimmons's combat bar made a suitable lever to pop the panel free from the floor, and then he rolled it up with one hand. The vault hatch was closed, and Gretchen stepped in — lips pursed in concern — to find the keypad in ruins. All of the pressure surfaces had eroded away, leaving only a contact panel and some pitlike holes where wires, perhaps, had once run.

"This is just fine!" Gretchen rapped the panel without result.

"Ma'am, let me try," the Marine waited politely until Gretchen stepped away, then drew a v-pad from his belt, unfolded a set of waxy-looking stems from the back and — humming softly to himself — matched them up with the holes. After a moment the v-pad beeped and the schematic of a keypad appeared on its glassy face. "Try this," Fizsimmons said, suppressing a pleased grin.

Gretchen tapped in the code recorded by the surveillance cameras. The vault door made a chuff sound, then rolled silently away into the overhead. The vault room was entirely dark. "Very handy," she said, handing the device back to the sergeant.

"We try," he said in a particularly dry tone, flicking a glowbean against the far wall. "Sister bless, do they make such a mess all the time?"

Gretchen stepped into a crowded room, now lit by a pervasive blue glow. Doctor McCue's g-box was sitting on the deck amid a wild jumble of straw-shaped mineral core samples. She stepped carefully around the striated tubes — most had broken apart, leaving a wash of grit and sand on the floor — and picked up the controller for the g-box. It hummed to life, and the box lifted up and drifted to an empty section of deck.

"No," Gretchen said absently, "the core samples will have been in packing material and a cargo crate — they're just stiffened cellulose and a sealant — very tasty, I imagine." She keyed the box to open, and the top latch released with a clank. Kneeling, she lifted the lid and shone her hand lamp inside.

"Oh, now…" She let out a long, low whistle of surprise. "That is beautiful."

Warily, Fitzsimmons leaned over. Inside the box was a chunk of stone — perhaps half a meter long and ten centimeters thick — a deep sandy red streaked with cream, glowing in the light of Anderssen's lamp. Gretchen brushed a fine layer of sandstone dust away, revealing a handsbreadth-wide whorl. A tapered tail of ribbed shell curled around the impression of stalklike legs.

"See, Sergeant? The fruit of some ancient Ephesian sea, preserved by chance in sandy mud, along with our…friend."

Most of the fossil was buried in the stone, and lying alongside the ancient cephalopod was the unmistakable shape of a machined metal cylinder. Like the artifact in the isolation lab, the cylinder was crusted with limestone aggregate.

Gretchen bit her lip gently, tracing the outline of the device with a gloved finger. "Russovsky's geological survey found wonders."

Fitzsimmons stood up, his face pale. "Ma'am — I know you won't like to hear this — but we should jettison this thing right away. What if it goes off like the other one?"

Gretchen looked up, face pinched with distaste. In that moment, she suddenly knew exactly how Clarkson had felt, clutching the prize close to his chest, rushing to make the first analysis. He would see what no one had seen in three million years — he alone would look upon mystery revealed and he alone would learn truth… But the open fear on the Marine's big, bluff face was too real to ignore. She looked back at the cylinder, at the marvelous piece of shale, at the delicate beauty of the shell and its ancient inhabitant, all trapped together by circumstance. The most beautiful, most striking, most wonderful thing I've ever seen. How did McCue keep from taking this to her laboratory, subjecting it to her experiments? Russovsky had the very luck to find this. If the cylinder is a First Sun device…my god.

"Ma'am?" Fitzsimmons touched her shoulder, gently, shaking her out of the reverie. His voice was soft and insistent. "Doctor Anderssen, we have to isolate this weapon. Right now."

"You're right," Gretchen stood up, shaking her head. She felt a little shaky. "Let's close up the g-box and put it in an airlock we're not using. That should hold the eaters if they escape, and we can vent the lock to space if necessary."

"Doc, listen to me." Fitz stood as well, towering over her. His dark brown eyes were filled with worry. "There's no way to know if this cylinder holds the same kind of nanomechs as the other one — this one could be an explosive, a nuke, an antimatter bomb, anything. Poking something like this, even with a really, really tiny stick, is bad, bad business. Procedure says put the whole box on a carryall and have the Cornuelle boost it into the sun."

"No, I don't think so!" Gretchen stepped between the Marine and the box. "This artifact is worth my entire career, Sergeant. Worse, it's worth an enormous amount of money for the Company and for the Company's primary contractor — which is the Imperial Navy." She stopped, searching his face. He looked back, so plainly worried for his own safety, for her life and the others on the ship, her anger drained away as quickly as it had flared.

"I'm sorry, Sergeant, I've no business shouting at you." Gretchen put her hand on his arm. "Like you, I'm under pretty strict orders — and my first order is to make sure things like this are brought back intact and well documented. So even if we talk to Captain Hadeishi, the answer is going to be the same — the cylinder stays and comes back to Imperial space with us."

Fitzsimmons's eyes narrowed, and one hand made an abortive movement to his comm pad, but then he nodded, taking a long look at the battered, rusted box on the floor. "Are you going to try and study it on the ship?"

"I…" Gretchen paused. Why lie? He'll know, and you'll look like an idiot. "Yes, I have to try. But — I'm not going to try anything invasive, or high energy, and I'm going to run passive scans on this thing for a day or two first."

Fitzsimmons gave her an arch look and she blushed. "Really, Sergeant. And we'll be sure to evac the airlock of any atmosphere. I'll be careful!"

"Sure, ma'am," he said, picking up the g-box controls. "Why don't you call Parker — or Bandao if our coffee-drinking man is still horking up his lunch — and have them get the number three airlock ready, while I angle our little friend here out of this place?"

"See? Safe and sound." Gretchen leaned against the wall of a cargo bay, watching the atmosphere gauge sink toward zero pressure. Fitz and Deckard were packing up a welding kit they'd found in one of the workshops. Inside the airlock, the chunk of shale and its ancient passengers were firmly secured in a hexacarbon cradle. The metal cage was oriented toward the outer lock door on a pair of rails. A scratch-built launching mechanism — half blasting putty and a comm-controlled detonator — rode underneath. A couple of metal-cased sensors Gretchen had scavenged from the lab ring were pinned up on the gleaming white walls of the airlock.

"You seem a little more relaxed," Fitzsimmons said, in an offhand way, as he coiled up a length of comm cable. He was trying not to smirk. "Now your precious baby is on the other side of the lock."

"Maybe," Gretchen said, nodding. "I — "

Her comm warbled, and Magdalena's voice filled the air around them. "Hunt-sister, the main comm array is working, and there's someone who wants to speak with you."

"Patch 'em through," Gretchen said, turning away from the two Marines. "Someone on the Cornuelle?"

"No," the Hesht said in a sly voice, "I managed to whisker the camp planetside. Everyone seems to be alive — but they're pissed and hungry and want to know if the showers are working."

Damn. Gretchen clicked her teeth, cursing herself for forgetting about the scientists stranded on the planet. "I'm a fine leader," she muttered. "We should have called them first thing. They must be half-mad with fear from being abandoned."

"I wouldn't say half covers the strength of their feeling," Maggie commented. "You want to take this call from the bridge?"

"Doctor Lennox, I'm sorry, but Doctor Clarkson," Gretchen repeated for the sixth time, "is dead. Everyone who was on the Palenque, save for crewman Fuentes and crewwoman Flores, is dead."

In the v-pane beside the captain's chair — now covered with an Imperial Marine field blanket — a thin, distressed-looking woman stared back at Gretchen, her face framed by the hood of a z-suit which had seen better days. Two men crowded behind her in some kind of shelter — Gretchen could make out the roof supports characteristic of an extruded building — and both of them seemed to have grasped the facts of the matter, to judge from their stunned expressions.

"I–I don't understand. He just went on the shuttle…" Lennox had faded blond hair and high cheekbones. Gretchen guessed she'd been very pretty when she was younger, but years spent in the glare of alien suns had not treated her kindly.

"Margaret," Gretchen leaned forward, catching the woman's eye. "I know it seems very sudden, but you've been out of contact with the Palenque for weeks — surely you thought something had gone awry aboard?"

"Yes…" Lennox swallowed and seemed to become aware of her surroundings again. "I just hoped…he was still alive."

"I'm sorry, but there was an accident and the crew, Doctor Clarkson and Doctor McCue, were all killed. Now — is everyone at base camp all right? Do you need medical assistance?"

"We're fine," rumbled one of the two men, a hulking, bearded face with a stout nose. "And very, very glad to hear from you, Doctor Anderssen. I am Vladimir Tukhachevsky — dobre den!"

"Good day to you, Doctor." Gretchen bobbed her head in greeting. "I know you all want to get a real shower and eat a different brand of ration bar, but there's going to be a delay before we can bring you back up to the ship."

"What do you mean? Is there still a problem?" The other man — a smaller, wirier fellow — pushed his face into the camera. "Don't you have a rescue ship?"

"Mister Smalls," Gretchen smiled amiably in greeting. "The Imperial Navy has been good enough to bring us here to help you, but accommodations are lacking on the Cornuelle for guests. There is also a problem with the shuttle engines, which has to be resolved. When there is a place to put you on the Palenque, and we can retrieve you safely, we will do so immediately."

What a fine manager I make, passed through the back of Gretchen's mind. Next I'll be expressing my profound sympathies at their recent layoff.

Tukhachevsky frowned, heavy black eyebrows beetling in concern. "What kind of accident, Doctor Anderssen? Has the Palenque been damaged?"

"She's…a little Spartan right now, Doctor." Gretchen — watching the faces of the three scientists on the planet — decided not to explain the events of the artifact and its activation. Not today, at any rate. "The accident that killed the crew also…destroyed most of the amenities onboard. Luckily, the Cornuelle has been able to supply us with new bedding, towels and food." If you call Marine ration bars and olive-colored threesquares food.

"In any case, we should have a shuttle ready to go in a day, perhaps two, so call in your field crews and get everyone ready to ship up."

Lennox nodded, turning away with a distant, frightened expression on her face. Smalls was already gone, leaving only the bearlike Tukhachevsky with a troubled look in his eyes.

"Doctor? Is something wrong?"

"Ah…" Vladimir twisted the ends of his mustache with a nervous motion. "Almost everyone is already in camp. Since the Palenque stopped responding to our hails, I fear morale has suffered. No one is even working in the excavation anymore. But one of us, I fear, is not here. She's gone, out wandering in the wasteland."

"Who?" Gretchen felt irritated, but at the same time she knew who it must be, even before Tukhachevsky said her name aloud. Who else would I want to talk to? Who do we need to talk to?

"Our own dear Russovsky," Vladimir said sadly, scratching a sore on the side of his nose. "She left in her Midge the same day Clarkson and McCue went up to the ship. We've heard nothing from her since, not so much as a word."