Wasteland of Flint

Aboard the Cornuelle

"Captain? The civilians have established contact with their ground team. Do you want the recording on your number two?" The midshipman looked up with a painfully earnest expression on his face, fingers poised over the main communications panel.

Hadeishi shook his head. "No, thank you, Smith-tzin. Just give me a realtime on my display if anything interesting happens." He gave the young officer a stern look. "Has Sho-sa Kosho set you to updating our navigational charts?"

"Hai, Captain!" Smith managed to come to attention in his shockchair, a talent Hadeishi remembered all too well himself. His first posting had been under a Mйxica captain with a very strict sense of propriety. "All spare passive sensor time is already tasked."

"Good. Carry on." Updating local navigational charts was dull — most of the time — but frighteningly essential to safe navigation and the rapid response of the Fleet to any threat. Hadeishi tapped up the boy's report and found the usual litany of planets, planetesimals, asteroids and stray cometary bodies. Too early to find anything interesting. A pity.

The bridge was quiet and busy, filled with the little sounds of men and women working at routine tasks made fresh by a new duty station for the ship and at least the prospect of danger. Hadeishi let the shockchair take more of his weight, eyes roving idly from station to station. The well of the threat board drew his attention at last, as it usually did, and he frowned. The red sphere of Ephesus swam in the center, slashed with the white of enormous storms, surrounded by a scattering of tiny lights — each one tagged with ship identification numbers, directions of movement, thrust and mass figures — and there was absolutely nothing going on.

Even the tense atmosphere aboard the Palenque had abated — no new horrors had been discovered, the alien devices were secured — and everyone aboard was busy restoring ship's systems. Hadeishi considered remanding the gun control orders which kept two forward beam weapons targeted on the civilian ship. But he did not. Quarantine restrictions were strict and he had no desire to generate more paperwork for himself.

The rest of the system was equally boring; even the Ephesian sun was quiet, without particular flare activity, or mottling or magnetic storms. Hadeishi swung his chair from side to side gently, eyeing a trail of motes drifting along in the upper atmosphere of the planet. He moved a control on his display and the far side of the planet rotated into view. Immediately he frowned, seeing the fuzzy mottled streaks characteristic of delayed or corrupt data.

"Mister Hayes?" The weapons officer became entirely alert, his massive frame tensing like a hunting dog preparing to leap to the chase. Hadeishi did not smile. "I don't like the lack of surveillance coverage for the far side of the planet. Please secure communications control of the civilian peapod satellites — how are they configured?"

"Meteorological and geophysics survey, Chu-sa."

"Good, well leave them to their business, but establish a tap. I would also like two reconnaissance drones launched into polar orbits to give us a real-time eye on farside."

"Hai!" The weapons officer settled into his seat, face lit with enthusiasm. Once Hayes was looking away, Hadeishi did smile, a little. He was flirting with boredom as well, which meant he should start working on the weekly reports for sector command. What a horror…

Instead of setting himself to his dull profession duty, Hadeishi tapped up the surveillance and comm feeds from the civilian ship. № 3v feed so far from home, he thought, rather guiltily, but you can always see what the neighbors are doing.

"This doesn't look very experimental to me." Gretchen had both hands tucked into her armpits — her z-suit was dumped in the cabin she'd appropriated — and her mother's sherpa cap tugged down almost to her neck. She kicked the corner of the tachyon relay very gently, though even such a small motion drew a deep growl and hiss from underneath. "Shouldn't they repaint the case, or something?"

The relay occupied one corner of the forward cargo hold, sitting on a standard cargo palette bolted to the deck with standard retaining bolts. The device was shaped very much like a standard cargo container, save for military markings and the particular gold-gray-olive color scheme of Imperial Navy equipment. A rat's nest of cables ran out of the back of the relay and down through an open floor panel. A pair of bare, furry feet were visible under the edge of the container.

Gretchen sat on the edge of the palette, humming softly to herself. Clanking, more muttering and then a chunk sounded from under the relay. Magdalena emerged, her fur awry, and sat down next to the archaeologist.

"I think, hunt-sister," the Hesht said, slipping a stiff brush from one of the cargo bags tethered to the deck and beginning to settle her fur. "I think your human guardpack calls things 'experimental' when they want to sell them for more money than they're worth." Magdalena smiled, showing a large number of sharp white teeth. "But this thing works."

"It's back on main power?" Gretchen pointed with her chin at the tangle of cables. "And reset? Ready for business?"

The Hesht nodded, slicking back the fur along her neck and shoulders. "Recycling the system and acquisition of the sector relay emitter at Ctesiphon will take a few minutes, but then she'll be ready to send and receive." Maggie paused, glowering at Gretchen with one half-lidded eye. "You have messages to send? Greetings to your cubs? Your mate lying at home in the den?"

Gretchen nodded sheepishly. "And reports for Gossi and the Company."

"Them!" Magdalena made a sharp coughing sound. "They eat bark."

"I suppose." Gretchen couldn't hide a smile. "Listen, I need to ask you some questions about the main comm array — can you use it to pick up the transponder on a groundside vehicle?"

Maggie blinked slowly, showing two clear lenses fluttering across her yellow eyes. "You want to search for the missing hunter from the sky? For Russovsky?"

Gretchen nodded. "The scientists on the ground have no idea where Russovsky went on her survey. She left no flight plan. Lennox says…well, that's immaterial. Lennox doesn't like her. The others, though — particularly Tukhachevsky — are worried."

Maggie scratched the underside of her jaw. "Do we have to find her right now? Why not wait until she returns from hunting — there's only one watering hole, one den — she has to come back sometime."

Gretchen's expression turned dour. "I need to talk to her about the cylinders, and about McCue and Clarkson and what she did, and what they did, on the day of the accident."

Magdalena grunted, leaning back against the relay. "Huh. Now the pride's golden pelt is heavy on the shoulders, ya-ha?"

Gretchen made a face. A dull, queer churning started in her stomach at the thought. "My job, now. But really the Company doesn't care about all the poor people who died on this ship. They'll pay the wergeld to the families and a pension, if one is owed. But no more. What they want, and what I need to find, is the place Russovsky found those cylinders — and anything else that might be there."

Magdalena's ears flattened back, and her eyes narrowed to pale, golden slits. "Ya-ha, hunt-sister, they would indeed. Well, I know a little about the main array and a little about these dragonflies — the transponder has only a short range, but if we knew exactly where to look, we could open a direct comm channel to Russovsky's aircraft."

"If we knew where to look. Big planet down there." Gretchen felt disgruntled. "Can we search the surface visually? Slave some kind of camera to the comp and tell it to look for the outline of a Midge in flight?"

"Hrmph. Perhaps." Magdalena scrunched up her nose. "I'll see if we can do that."

"Good." Gretchen got up and pulled on a pair of mittens from her pocket. "How's Isoroku coming with the heaters?"

"Is it still cold?" Maggie's tongue poked out between her teeth, then coughed merrily at the human's disgusted expression. Her breath frosted in the air. "You should have a nice thick fur coat, like me."

"Fine," Gretchen grumbled. "I'll go play with my toys, then. You just find our missing scientist."

Hadeishi grinned, though he was entirely comfortable in his shipsuit, sitting on the climate-controlled bridge of a modern warship. Anderssen- tzin hasn't lost her sense of humor yet. Still… He remembered being constantly cold more than once himself. And wet. He tapped open a channel to his wayward engineer.

"Hai?" The old bull's voice was aggrieved and distant. Metallic clanking and spitting sounds nearly drowned out his voice. "Yes, Captain?"

"What's your environmental situation?" Hadeishi didn't bother to hide his amusement.

"Cold and dark," Isoroku grunted. "We have power, but most of the heaters and lights are still down because we have no power conduit in place."

"Do you need more help?"

There was a short silence. Then the engineer ventured to ask: "Is the quarantine lifted, Hadeishi-san?"

"No," Hadeishi replied, sighing in disgust. Regulations required another week of isolation for the Palenque, and then a week's medical review for any returning crew. Any engineer's mate he sent across to the civilian ship would be lost to him for two weeks, and he was already shorthanded with Isoroku gone. "No, it's not been lifted. How about supplies? Do we have conduit we can spare ourselves?"

"Yes." Now Isoroku's voice changed and became wary. "We're pulling spares out of cargo storage here — most of the expedition supplies still in storage survived the attack because they were sealed in cargo pods — there should be enough to serve."

Hadeishi understood the engineer's decision. No fleet officer is going to spend his hard-won supplies on a civilian ship. And I shouldn't ask myself.

"Carry on, then." Hadeishi tapped the channel closed. "Bah."

The number of reports in his message queue had not shrunk. Two more had popped in while he was malingering. "Enough, to work. Duty. Honor. Empire."

Somehow, when Gretchen reached the number three airlock, Gunso Fitzsimmons was there already, looking bulky in a military field jacket, gloves and a pathetic fur hat. She looked at the musty, moth-eaten chapeau on his head and refrained — by dint of biting her tongue — from making any comment. "Sergeant."

"Ma'am." Fitz nodded genially. "Come down to take a look at your prize?"

"Yes." She scowled at him, then squatted down in front of a portable display pane she had salvaged from the lab ring. Since most of the ship was still dead, she could steal cycles from main comp for her analysis. Ignoring the Marine, who had maneuvered around to watch her work, she plugged her handheld into the panel, then loaded the suite of xenoarch software she'd been using on Mars and Ugarit. The pad and the panel beeped in synchrony, then a set of v-panes expanded, showing her feeds from the sensors in the airlock and the security cameras.

"Careful," Fitzsimmons breathed, radiating nervousness like a dark cloud.

Gretchen glared at him out of the corner of her eye. He was clutching the fail-safe for the lock ejection mechanism in both hands. "You should be careful," she snapped. "Nothing's happened…and if the lock won't hold back whatever comes out, you're not going to have time to push the button. An atomic or antimatter weapon will just vaporize us where we stand."

The sergeant gave her an equally fierce look. "I don't like the prospect of being disintegrated, or dissolved, or anything which involves the end of my personal self-awareness. So I'll just keep hold of this, okay?"

"Whatever." Gretchen turned away to hide her hands — which were trembling ever so slightly — from the Marine. "Let's see what we can see."

Inside the airlock, the passive sensors had been recording for almost a day and her volume analysis software had built a fine-grained map of the outside of the cylinder, the slab of limestone and every nook and cranny of the pitted surface. From this, the soft had extracted a map of the inner structure of the stone fragment and the cylinder. In both cases, large sections of the display were blank or an all-too-familiar fuzzy gray. "Not enough data to see inside, not yet."

Gretchen opened a log and started talking into her throat mike. Her awareness of Fitzsimmons faded away, replaced by a smaller, more tightly defined universe of stone surfaces and densities. "Previous sample — as shown in Clarkson's logs — activated when exposed to high-density sub-x-ray scan. Previous sample did not activate when subjected to microwave analysis. I am starting, therefore, with low-power ultrasonic and will advance slowly to microwave."

She tapped a series of quick commands and held her breath. There was no explosion, no ominous hum, only a flickering on the sensor command relays and then a new v-pane appeared, showing an echo-scan image building. After a few moments, the first scan completed.

"The sandstone is unremarkable," Gretchen said, resuming her narrative. "Though the embedded shell is really quite beautiful. A number of smaller cephalopods and annelids are also recognizable in the matrix. The cylinder does not express the same characteristics as the previous sample. This low-power survey is unable to penetrate the metallic casing, but there are markings incised into the surface of the device. I am going to enter the airlock, move the sensors manually, and then run another set of low-power scans."

Fitzsimmons coughed in alarm, but Gretchen didn't even hear him.

"I hope to build a more complete image by interpolating the scan results and taking, oh, four complete sets from different vantage points in the airlock. Luckily, the heavy shielding of the lock itself is blocking out a great deal of outside interference. In fact…" She paused, thinking. "…as we are in orbit, a gravitometric analysis may reveal a great deal about the object."

Gretchen stopped, stood up, stretched and noticed the Marine watching her, arms crossed, with a distracted expression on his face. "Are you all right?"

"What? Yes ma'am, I'm fine. Need a hand moving the sensors?"

"Sure." Her lips pursed. "Should we suit up to work in the lock?"

"Yeah." Fitz nodded. "A pain, but better than finding yourself outside without a jacket."

An hour later, Gretchen was sitting again, cross-legged, watching a second set of images build on her display. Fitzsimmons had given in to complete boredom and was sleeping with his head on a wadded-up blanket behind her. A small heater had appeared from somewhere and was baking Gretchen's righthand side, though her left was still very cold.

She dragged a fingertip, rotating the interpolated image of the cylinder.

"A densely-packed inscription covers the surface of the object. Each character is very small and quite complex. My IdeoStat says the least complicated ideogram is formed by seven strokes, the most complicated by nineteen. There is a noticeable distribution, though the average tends toward the complex, rather than the simple." She rubbed her eyes, feeling a peculiar, too-familiar twitching prick behind her left eye. "Adamski would argue this indicates a glyph-based language, like old Nбhuatl or pre-Kanji Japanese — one without a phonetic alphabet. I can't make any kind of judgment yet, not without even the faintest idea of the creator race's vocal apparatus or lack thereof. I would say, however, the information density on the object surface is very high. There are thousands of distinct ideograms, thousands…"

In the display, the mapping software unwound the surface image of the cylinder into a long luminous strip covered with thousands of tiny characters. The dizzying arrangement of glyphs filled Gretchen with an odd disquiet. They seemed to dance and twist across the v-pane and she was uncomfortably aware of a sensation the characters were shifting places as she watched, rearranging themselves into an almost recognizable pattern. She blinked and rubbed her eyes.

"The density of the exterior…" she continued, looking away from the IdeoStat display. As a result, she did not see the system monitor showing the translator drawing a gradually increasing rate of comp cycles. "…is far exceeded by the possible content of the interior. Unlike Clarkson's sample, this one is entirely filled with a dense membrane structure. If my hypotheses about the first device are correct, then this one contains an enormous amount of information, coded on the fine surfaces of the membranes."

Thinking, she chewed slowly on her thumb. "I think this one is a book, or perhaps an entire library. Yet, as with most glyph-based languages, we may never decipher the contents, not without an intersecting language to point us toward a translation." She began to feel ill, as if the promise of the cylinder were burning a hole in her stomach. The tiny fragments left by the First Sun civilization inspired awe and lust in equal measure. A clear window into the distant past might be sitting only meters away.

"What a loss," she murmured. "I want to read this! Well, as long as it's not legal documents. Lort! It's probably property records, or warehouse inventories or recipes."

Green Hummingbird was in near darkness, lying on a narrow bed in his quarters. Pale green and blue lights played across his angular face. A swing-out display hung above him, showing feeds from the cameras on the Palenque and Cornuelle. Most of them were muted and dialed down to thumb-sized squares. One mirrored the contents of Anderssen's work panel. In the main v-pane, a cylinder engraved with thousands of tiny glyphs rotated slowly. Two more v-panes showed her working, blond hair slowly becoming a tangled mass, and the object itself, resting in a steel cradle in the airlock. The tlamatinime watched and listened, eyes unfocused, thoughts distant.

As the scan image of the writing on the cylinder unfolded in the feed, Hummingbird stirred to life, attention sharpening. One hand, gnarled and scarred, brushed across the display, keying a series of preset searches. The panel chirped pleasantly, then began processing. Immediately, the video feeds flickered to a stop and the entire device dimmed noticeably.

In the small, crowded office beside his private cabin, Hadeishi cursed as his display slowed to a crawl, then snapped back to its normal responsiveness. A stiff finger jabbed a comm channel open. "Sho-sa Kosho, are we under attack?"

"No, Captain," came a quiet, level reply. "By ship's clock Hummingbird-tzin was using twenty percent main comp capacity for six seconds."

Hadeishi suppressed a curse, then curiosity washed away his anger. "What is he doing with that level of capacity?"

"I do not know, Hadeishi-san, and would not venture to guess." Kosho's voice was very demure.

"Understood." Hadeishi cut the channel, forcing speculation from his mind. There were logistics and supply usage reports to review and sign. Twenty percent? Is he modeling planetary weather or something?

Hummingbird scowled, lean old face twisting into a tight mask. Bits and pieces of the glyphs incised into the cylinder were coming back a match with examples from his archive. He thought briefly of using the blue pyramid, but discarded the notion. I urge caution on others, he thought with a trace of humor, so should I practice it myself.

What did match was troubling. Some of the more complicated signs were very like a series of temple carvings observed by a deep-range probe in a dead system beyond New Malta. Others suggested the contents of tablets secured by a Mirror agent from the marketplaces of Ik-hu-huillane. Both sets of documents were restricted to the highest levels of the Mirror — Hummingbird did not even possess translations of them, only symbol-match heuristics — and a series of winking red-and-white banded glyphs appeared alongside the comparison results.

"You say they're dangerous," he muttered at the panel. "But how?"

He began to feel uneasy, watching the Anderssen woman work with her probes and sensors, slowly revealing more and more layers hidden inside the cylinder. The arrangements of the membranes inside the structure did seem to contain more data — a vast amount, far more than even the writing etched on the outer surface.

"Are they access instructions?" he wondered aloud, wishing the upper levels of the Mirror had seen fit to provide him with more information about dead Gulatith and whichever race had chipped the Ik-hu-huillane tablets from interstellar ice. "Could she decipher them, given time? Or is the device too old — broken by the wear of so many millennia… She has the inclination, I see." Hummingbird was glad Anderssen had such limited software.

On his v-pane, the woman was cursing at her slow panel and tapping commands at a furious rate. Hummingbird shook his head slowly — curiosity was a powerful drug — one whose effects he had felt himself and he wondered if the soldier was right. We could throw the cylinders into the sun. There they might be destroyed, or at least lost for another million years.

"But then," he said to the dark room, "we would not know, would we? And we are curious monkeys…even I am pricked by curiosity."

The densely packed strip of symbols taunted him from the display. He could sense — even through the filters running in his panel, even with well-ordered detachment — a tantalizing meaning in the angular, alien shapes. Hummingbird felt an urge to turn the power of his display — of the Cornuelle's main comp — to their decipherment. The pyramid might contain a linguistic key. My tools might —

"I think not," he said aloud, and tapped off the v-feed from the Palenque.

"Delores…take a look at this." Parker dialed up the magnification on his work lenses, head cocked as he stared down the throat of shuttle number two's air intake. The heavy machinery had been — at last — removed from shuttle number one's cargo hold, the mold cleaned away and the entire assembly mounted on a diagnostic rack in the Palenque's engineering ring. The morning had been spent laboriously attaching power feeds and exhaust vents so the engine could be tested. The exploration ship did not have a proper maintenance bay, causing Parker and Isoroku to waste a great deal of time trying to get reliable diagnostic relays established between the Sunda Aerospace Yards Komodo-class shuttle and the Novoya Rossiya–built mechanicals on the Palenque.

Eventually, the pilot had given up trying to make the Javan and Swedish equipment play nicely and had settled for a visual inspection. A multispectrum lamp was clipped to the lip of the intake.

"What?" Delores, surly again for some reason — though she'd greeted both Parker and Isoroku with a big smile this morning when she came swinging out of the accessway — climbed up on the rack and worked her head and shoulders inside.

"Switch to UV-band on your lenses," Parker said, gently placing his fingertip on a curving section of the intake wall. The highly polished ceramic alloy gleamed like a mirror, reflecting his face as an enormous, distorted monster. "And hi-mag, about six hundred."

"Now I can't see anything but the surface of the composite." Delores didn't bother to keep mounting irritation out of her voice.

"Follow my arm, then just ahead of my finger."

Delores grunted, making a face. "You need to take a bath sometime. Your nails…" Then she whistled softly in alarm. "By the Sister — what is that?"

"Something alive," Parker said, watching a faint discoloration shimmer like a rainbow in the hi-mag view of his work lenses. He could see regular, symmetric structures in the discoloration — not the stolid honeycomb of the ceramic, but something delicate and far, far more complicated. "Something eating the hi-temp ceramic lining and making more…more metallic lichen."

"Oh, Sister!" Delores scrambled backward out of the intake. "It's the eaters!"

"No," Parker said, watching the tiny gleaming lights with a bemused expression on his narrow face. "No, it's not them…we'd be dissolved or turned inside out. This is different — this must have come from the planet. Is there any life down there?"

"No," Delores called from across the engineering bay. "Just rocks, sand and barren mountains. Nothing green, no trees, no water. Nothing."

The pilot wanted to scratch his nose, but couldn't, not in the close confines of the intake. On a hunch, he breathed on the discoloration, trying to focus the flow of moist gas with his lips. In the restricted universe of hi-mag, he saw the delicate tendrils wave in the wind, and the textures and colors brightened. He blinked, then squinted in disbelief. "I think they got bigger," he called excitedly to Delores.

The crewwoman was still on the other side of the bay. She had found a welding torch and was hefting the slender wand like a bat. "Well, don't do that again, whatever it was! Come on, let's tell the engineer or Anderssen-tzin about this."

"Hmmm…ok." Parker backed out of the intake and swung the UV lamp to mark the discoloration. Even from the vast remove of a meter, he could no longer make out the lichen. Sitting on the steps of a work ladder, he tapped open a channel.

"Doctor Anderssen? Parker. Can you join me and Delores down in Engineering bay four? Bring your hi-mag lenses, if you've got 'em handy."

Squeezed into the intake, with Parker, Delores, Isoroku and the ever-present Fitzsimmons crowding around outside, Gretchen stared dully at the glassy, curving surface. Now she felt too hot — the heaters were working in Engineering for some reason — and there were too many people around. "All right Parker, what am I looking at?"

"Right where I've got the UV spot shining," the pilot said, trying to wedge in beside her. "You can't miss them, not in hi-mag."

"I don't see anything," Gretchen said after a moment, "except some discoloration, like some kind of acid spilled on the ceramic." She turned her head, then made a face. The inside of Parker's nose was not the place to be looking with work lenses dialed high. Flipping up the goggles, she looked at him inquiringly.

"What?" Parker swung down his own lenses and hunched over the section of metal. Almost immediately he started cursing. "This is…they're all gone! There's nothing but some kind of mottled smear left." He sat up, cracked his head against the roof of the intake, then wormed his way back out with a snarl. "I saw them," Parker declared, stripping off his lenses. "They were there, all glowy and fanlike and…they were alive! Delores saw them too!"

Gretchen looked at the crewwoman and she nodded her head in agreement. "He's not crazy. Well, ok, he saw what he said he saw."

"Fine." Gretchen looked at Isoroku. "Then what happened to them? Vanishing in thirty minutes is too great a rate of change for me. Did they cause the engines to overheat?"

"Maybe," Parker mumbled, scrunching up the side of his mouth. He took a tabac out of his pocket, shucked the wrapper and lit the stick on his belt. Gretchen stepped back, out of a rising gray whorl. In low-grav the tobacco smoke made corkscrew patterns in the air. "They grew — I saw them grow — with more moisture, more air, more oxygen. No, more carbon dioxide. Maybe they eat CO₂, like a plant at home?"

"Would that cause an overheat?" Gretchen spread her hands questioningly.

"No…" Parker squinted into the intake, then at the fleet engineer. "But if they got inside, into the rest of the engine, they would make turbulence — the airflow surfaces wouldn't be smooth anymore — and they do seem to be eating away at the composite."

"Even in a Javan machine," the engineer rumbled, his Norman tinged with a thick accent, "there are close tolerances. We will have to examine the entire engine for contamination."

"Do it." Gretchen started to turn away, but then a thought struck her. "Wait — find another patch, if there is one. Record the…um…the infestation or planting or whatever. Then shine Parker's lamp on it for a half hour."

"Good idea." Isoroku's eyes glinted. "The simplest explanation."

"I killed them with the multispec?" Parker seemed incredulous. "But if they came from the planet…the atmosphere's thin — everything's bathed in UV! Why should it kill them?"

"Try it anyway," Gretchen replied, swinging up onto the ladder leading into the main accessway. "And let me know what happens." She disappeared up the shaft, followed moments later by Fitzsimmons.

Parker shared a glance with Delores, who shrugged and looked at him expectantly, and the Nisei, who had no discernible expression at all. The pilot hunched his shoulders and shuffled back to the engine, glaring at the machinery. "And I thought you were pretty," he grumbled as he flipped down his work lenses. "Shows what I know."

Gretchen woke from a dream of endlessly mutating gray-green ideograms to an irritating beeping sound. Groaning — the sound was her comm paging — she unzipped her sleepbag and peered out into darkness. The lights in the crew quarters were on some day-night cycle which eluded her — they certainly didn't match the schedule on the Cornuelle — and her mouth tasted bad, her eyes were grainy and the persistent throb of a headache flared as consciousness returned.

"Oh Sister, mother of God, bearer of the Holy Savior…" Gretchen fumbled for her medband and pressed the cool metal against the side of her neck. A sensor flickered, there was a warning beep, and a cool, delicious sensation flooded into her bloodstream. With sanity restored, she picked up the comm and saw the pilot's face — even rougher-looking than she imagined her own appeared — staring back. "Good morning, Mister Parker."

"Its afternoon," he replied in a dead-sounding, slurred voice. "Planetside, anyway. I'm finished with your shuttle engine."

"Good," Gretchen said, clipping the comm to her duffle. She eeled out of the sleepbag and braced herself against the floor. A netted sack held her clothes, and she began dragging out an undershirt, pants, her skinsuit. "What did you find?"

"This engine is completely infested with these…these chapoltin…these locusts! Well, they're not insects, but plants, I guess. Ones that like to eat hexacarbon and ceramic composite and drink CO₂ and produce O₂ and C and some more O and lots of little crystalline frond-thingies." He rubbed his face, leaving a long smear of oil across his forehead. "We're sack-bound, but the number two shuttle engine is cleaned up, disinfected with your friendly multispec lamp set on hi-UV and then…" Parker groaned. "We resurfaced everything back to tolerance, or replaced the sections eaten clean through. So — maybe tomorrow — we can fly shuttle one back to groundside base and put this engine back in the grounded shuttle."

The pilot glared owlishly at Gretchen, who was worming herself into a skintight shipsuit. When she was done, he continued. "Before you ask: Yes, we checked the other engine. It was infested too, but not so badly. Anyway, Isoroku cleaned up number one. So both will fly, eventually."

"What happens when we go groundside?" Gretchen asked, straightening her hair and pulling the heavy blond mane back into a ponytail. "They'll get infected again, right?"

Parker nodded, listlessly pushing another tabac into the corner of his mouth. "Yeah, and we'll clean up again, I guess."

"Okay," Gretchen said, her attention already turning to the puzzle of the cylinder. "One trip, then, to repair the other shuttle and load everyone up. Then it's back upstairs for the entire team. If we need to make an excursion groundside, we'll use the shuttles in rotation and not leave them on the planet for more than a day."

"Sure." Parker took a long drag on his tabac, then tapped off.

Gretchen stared at the comm, then shook her head. Should I call Maggie about her status? No, later. I'll just take a look at the latest translation runs before breakfast.

Feeling much better, she banged the door open, then kicked off in a long arcing jump toward the main accessway. Behind her, a minute telltale flashed on her doorway, and not so far away, a chime went off in a cabin occupied by the two Marines.

A black sleepbag stirred in the dimly lit room, then an arm reached out from the cocoon and thumped the other sleeping soldier.

"Fitz, your girlfriend's up." Deckard closed his eyes and fell back to sleep.

Fitzsimmons crawled out of his own sleepbag, rubbed a chin covered with fine black stubble and started getting dressed. I hope she gets breakfast first, he thought forlornly, so I can at least get some coffee. Even the bad coffee on this barge — or the reprocessed, recycled "black crude" from the navy threesquares — was better than nothing. He hooked one foot in a hanging strap, then slung on his combat vest and gun-rig before picking up a jacket to hide the weapons. "Huh," he laughed softly. "I've been with the navy too long — like anyone aboard would worry if I was carrying."

His combat bar strapped to the side of one boot, a heavy utility knife to the other. The waist rig held eight flechette-wire clips, and a holster with the pistolstyled shipgun. The rest of the chest rig held various tools, lamps and spyeyes. His hand hovered over the squat, short-barreled shape of his heavy shipgun, then he plucked it away from the wall and slung the automatic rifle behind his back. Nervous fingers — this whole situation made him nervous — checked the loads in the pistol and the rifle. Both weapons were topped, lit green and ready to cook.

Pretty useless, he thought, mouth tasting oily, but what else do I have? Nothing to stop a nanomech cloud, or a pocket-sized shipkiller, or a virus or a biological. Not much at all but spit and my knife.

"Thank you, Sho-sa." Hummingbird tapped his comm closed and took a deep breath. Lieutenant Isoroku's respectfully polite call reported the Palenque main environmentals restored to operation, the last of the air filters cleaned out and power working on most decks. Almost time to go across and see these things for myself.

The tlamatinime turned to his surveillance display and panned through the feeds. After a moment, he switched back to the video from outside the number three airlock on the Palenque. The portable work panel Anderssen had been using for her translations and analysis sat idle, the area lights dimmed low.

"Not there?" Hummingbird made an amused clicking sound with his teeth. "But not sleeping, or eating." He flicked through the feeds from the Company ship and his brow furrowed. The archaeologist was nowhere to be seen. A stab of intense irritation twisted his lip, but then he calmed himself. Large sections of the Palenque were still without power, and many video feeds were dead or offline. She could be anywhere, doing anything, and be out of his sight. He glanced around the cabin, reminding himself of the many luxuries afforded by the navy ship.

"Everything works here," he said aloud, "on a well-maintained Imperial vessel. There? On a private ship which has only known the attentions of the pious and dutiful Isoroku for a few days? Scattered feathers, filth, fallen shells."

Hummingbird switched the view back to the number three airlock, where the cylinder still rested quietly in its steel cradle. He bent close, though a fingertip's motion on the panel would zoom the image to almost any level of detail he desired. Red sandstone and milky white streaks of sediment filled the view. "But how could she leave your mystery, even for a moment?"

Anderssen had been spending every waking moment with the artifact for the past two days. The still-idle exploration ship's main comp was almost entirely tasked to her translation jobs, much to the annoyance of everyone else working aboard. Hummingbird suddenly closed the feed, feeling his own curiosity stir.

"A cunning lure," he muttered, then turned away from the panel and knelt before a small shrine set into the wall of the cabin. Nothing so fancy as the main chapel down in the heart of the ship, but this was a space reserved for him and him alone. The Blessed Virgin stared down, jade eyes looking upon him with radiant compassion. Hummingbird made the sign of the cross, bowed to the Lady of Tepeyac, she surrounded by so many shining rays, she of the dark cloak strewn with stars, with a mantle of flowers and shining feathers, possessor of the beneficence of man. On a narrow ledge before the icon sat a cup filled with milky liquid and a scattering of dried, perfectly preserved rose petals.

Hummingbird began to sing, his hoarse voice rising in the cabin.

So it has been said by the Lord of the World,

So it has been said by the Queen of Heaven:

It is not true, it is not true

We come to this earth to live.

We come only to sleep, only to dream.

Our body is a flower.

As grass becomes green in the springtime,

So our hearts will open, and give forth buds,

And then they wither. So did our Lady of Flowers say.

The sound echoed and died, and he felt a great comfort from the long-familiar ritual. Hummingbird bowed again, before the image of the merciful one, then raised the cup of octli to his lips. The smell of bitter alcohol stung his nose and he took the sacred liquid into his mouth, let the fermented sap of the god's fruit wash over his tongue, then passed the fluid, again, into the cup.

"So does temptation wash over me, held at bay by your grace, Queen of Heaven, lady whose belt is a serpent, whose faith lifts the heavens and presses the earth." He made the sign of the cross once more, and pressed his forehead to the floor before the Sister. "So it is above, so it is below."

He stood, his heart easy once more, and passed his hand across the display set into the wall. The comm woke to life, and a blinking glyph — a youth bearing two rabbits by the ears — winked azure. Hummingbird grunted, feeling the moment of isolation and serenity pass.

"Yes, Sho-sa Kosho? Has something happened?" The tlamatinime did not feel entirely at ease with the dark-eyed lieutenant or her ever-pleasant expression. Hummingbird thought he'd reached an equitable relationship with the captain, but this woman…her eyes were filled with secrets. Is she also an agent of the Mirror? One set to watch me, as I watch the others? Or is her malice solely a matter of our races, our stations in life?

"Honorable one," the executive officer said, bowing her head slightly. "The Companymen have launched one of their shuttles — they are descending to the surface to repair the grounded shuttle at the observatory camp."

"Ah." Hummingbird was surprised. He had not expected the civilians to finish their repairs so quickly. "Are they going to retrieve the scientists on the ground as well?"

"I believe so," Kosho replied, a faint smile hiding behind her usual, stoic mask. "You left instructions to be informed. Shall I prepare a work carrel to take you and your luggage across?"

Hummingbird's face tightened — I should not have mentioned my intent to Hadeishi — and then he nodded in agreement. "Yes," he said, turning his most severe expression upon her. Kosho did not flinch, or look away, but maintained her pleasant, polite expression. "I will go across in twenty minutes."

The executive officer bowed again and tapped the channel closed. Hummingbird stared at the blank display for a moment, then his fingers stabbed at the panel, bringing up the surveillance view of the bridge. From this angle, he looked down upon Kosho's command station — an inset showed the ever-changing contents of her panel — and the soft lighting on the bridge gleamed in raven-dark hair. A long plait hung down her back, wound with copper, jade and pearl. The tlamatinime watched the woman intently, listening to the subdued chatter on the bridge, her conversation with a midshipman being dispatched to carry his bags, the orders to an engineering crew to bring a carrel around to the main airlock and prepare for a trip across the quarantine zone to the Palenque.

In all of this, she betrayed no knowledge of his observation, though Hummingbird could only assume she knew he was watching. After ten minutes he closed the feed — the lieutenant had studiously continued about her business — and began packing his bags. A suspicion was beginning to ferment in his agile old mind, though he did not believe any officer would be so reckless to endanger her career in this way.

She should be properly respectful, even a little afraid. Hummingbird wrenched his thoughts away from the Nisei woman and back to the delicate matter of packing the blue glass pyramid into a shockfoam carrying case. The object was very, very old. Even handling with thin gloves risked scarring or chipping the precious, eons-old surface.

Hummingbird breathed easier when the artifact was safely stowed.

The door chimed, and he turned to let the midshipman in.