Wasteland of Flint

The "Observatory" Base Camp, the Edge of the Western Desert, Ephesus III

An orange spark swelled in the sky, the thin, attenuated roar of airbreathing engines piercing gathering twilight. The number one shuttle swept over the base camp, wings glowing with the heat of reentry. Dust swirled up from the landing strip — no more than a long rectangle of glowlights and flattened earth. Against the blue-black heavens, the long coiling contrail burned golden with the last light of day. The Ephesian atmosphere was thin, and even with the copper disk of the sun still hanging at the horizon, a wash of stars filled the east.

The shuttle set down, engines thrust-vectored to airbrake. More dust billowed up, burning red with jet exhaust, and the aircraft bounced and shivered down a thousand meters of flattened desert. The runway was a crude outline at best, scratched from the dry soil. At the far end, engines idling down to a rumbling shriek, the shuttle turned and began rolling back to the camp.

From a forward window, Gretchen peered out at a sprawling compound of brown huts and tall metal poles strung with swinging glowlights. Under fitful spots of illumination, she saw beaten paths winding between the buildings, a handful of figures shrouded in z-suits trudging toward the landing strip and the bulky shapes of crawlers parked under metal sheds. Everything was brown and tan or hidden in shadow.

Just another camp on another world, far from home. She felt a keen disappointment. There was nothing grand here, only the same prefab huts and camp buildings. Another brown, desolate world filled with dust and chokingly thin air. Even the diamond brilliance of the night sky was familiar — she was no astronomer to pick out differences in the constellations — this place seemed no different than Mars or Ugarit or Zhendai.

The shuttle rattled to a halt and pressure lights came on. Cabin lights flared awake and Parker called back from the cockpit in a cheerful voice. "Please have your customs and immigration forms ready. Welcome to Ephesus Three. Please enjoy your stay."

Gretchen gathered up a heavy courier-style bag and checked the seals on her suit. Fitzsimmons had stitched her boot back together with some kind of adhesive goo and fishing line. Which was very nice of him, she thought wryly. He'll be glad to have me out of his hair for a day. Her goggles slipped into their long-accustomed grooves beside her nose and around her ears. Sealing the breather mask and checking the tubes and respirator were second nature — quickly and efficiently done — then she turned and checked the seals on Bandao's suit as well.

The gunner waited patiently, calm brown eyes watching the figures crossing the field toward them through the window. When she was done, he returned the favor and signed she was tight. Gretchen smiled in thanks and wove her way forward past Delores to the main hatch.

"Mister Parker, cycle the lock please."

The pilot nodded over his shoulder, flipped a series of switches and the inner door recessed with a dull clang. Two minutes later, Gretchen was standing on the landing strip, feeling a chill, cutting wind tug at her legs. She'd left a little of her face mask open and the smell of the planet flooded her nostrils.

Ephesus at twilight was sharp and cold, tart dust and crushed rock, the methane-stink of a recycler in the camp, a faint aroma of something metallic tickling the back of Gretchen's throat. She was glad she'd put on field pants and a shirt and jacket over the z-suit. The thermal heaters in her leg pads were already starting to run and her fingers were cold even with two layers of gloves.

Bandao rattled down the landing stairs and took up a position to the left and behind, while Parker and Delores went around to the cargo doors to start unloading the repaired engine. The gunner had a hand on the butt of his rifle — a stocky, evil-looking thing with a shining dark finish and a stubby, rubberized scope — and his attention moved in careful, measured sweeps, watching the distant, flat horizon and the buildings.

"Mister Parker," Gretchen called, her voice buzzing on the comm, nearly drowned by the keening wind. "Don't forget to put those seals in our engine intakes."

"Crap!" Both the pilot and Fuentes turned around and jogged back to the shuttle. Isoroku had machined up a set of shockfoam plugs to close the air intakes and — hopefully — keep the Ephesian spores out of the engines. They were unwieldy, and Gretchen watched in amusement as Parker staggered down the stairs with a pair of multispec worklamps around his neck, arms filled with the fat round shape of an intake plug.

"Doctor Anderssen?" A bluff, accented voice called through the darkness and Gretchen turned. Three shrouded figures approached, bent into the wind. She walked forward, hand raised.

"Doctor Lennox." Gretchen clasped the thin woman's hand firmly and nodded. "Smalls-tzin. Doctor Tukhachevsky."

"Welcome to Ephesus," the Rossiyan answered, dark eyes sparkling over the green snout of his respirator. Neither Lennox nor Smalls said anything. "Come, let's get to the main hall and you can meet the rest of the crew."

Everyone began walking back toward camp, save for Smalls, who paused — indecisively, it seemed to Gretchen — and stared at Fuentes and Parker working on sealing the engine intakes. Then the meteorologist shook his head and hurried to catch up with the rest of the group. Gretchen watched him as they followed the path through the buildings — even in the poor light of the hanging lamps she could see he was a little pale. Hmm…can't be Parker, no one here knows him…must be Delores.

The main hall was a two-story building framed with hexacarbon beams, the walls and roof formed by extruded slabs of local gravel and sand run through a reprocessor. Gretchen passed into the airlock in the middle of the group — a line of dust-streaked backs, shining respirator tanks, the local equipment pitted and gray. She paused at the outer door, fingertips brushing across the metal frame of the door. The hexacarbon was scored and dark, riddled with tiny pits, as if acid had splashed on the exposed surfaces.

Inside, she pulled back the cap of her skinsuit and tugged the respirator mask aside. She was in the building atrium — a close, crowded room filled with work-suits, boots, stained jackets and dirt — with Bandao close at hand. Smalls was already gone, leaving a tired-looking Lennox and a beaming Tukhachevsky behind.

"How is everyone doing?" Gretchen slipped her nose tube free and tucked it into the collar of her suit. "I guess you'll be glad to get upstairs and hit the showers."

"Yes, our water supplies have always been minimal. There's no local source of water, though we'd hoped…" Lennox sounded even more exhausted than her haggard face suggested. "I'm sorry, Doctor Anderssen, I'm very tired. Do you know when we'll be able to return to the ship?"

Gretchen spared a quick glance for Tukhachevsky, who was watching Lennox with concern, and Bandao, who was waiting patiently at the inner door of the atrium. She could see the acid glare of overhead lights and the tinny sound of someone's music box playing year-old tunes. The smell was entirely familiar and for an instant — setting aside the pale, worn face of the woman in front of her — she could have been standing in Dome Six at Polaris again.

"I think," Gretchen said gently, "we'll send you up to the ship tomorrow. Do you have your things together?"

"Oh." Lennox seemed to come awake, blinking. "No — I've been busy. I suppose I should — "

"Mister Bandao? Would you help Doctor Lennox pack her things up, and take them to the shuttle? Tell Mister Parker we'll be wanting to ferry up most of the crew tomorrow morning — early, I suppose, before the air gets too thin to fly."

Bandao nodded and shifted his rifle behind him, out of the way and out of sight.

"Doctor? Bandao-tzin will help you get ready and carry your things." Gretchen took Lennox by the hand and turned her around.

Bandao nodded politely and introduced himself. While he did, Gretchen motioned to Tukhachevsky and they stood aside near the main lock.

"Is everyone still in camp?" She asked, quietly. The Rossiyan nodded, fingering his beard. The sore beside his nose was beginning to suppurate — Gretchen recognized the sign of an ill-fitting respirator mask — and he smelled of alcohol. "Have you heard anything from Russovsky?"

"Nyet," he said dolefully. "Not so much as a peep. I don't know — she seemed preoccupied when she was here last — maybe the desolation is telling on her. This is a bleak world."

"Did she talk to you, when she was here? Did she talk to anyone — say where she'd been, where she was going?"

Tukhachevsky shook his head again, beard wagging slowly in counterpoint. "No, Doctor Anderssen. She landed while we sat at breakfast and immediately went to see McCue in the main lab. Then Clarkson…" The Rossiyan paused, nose twitching, and Gretchen could see him weighing dirty laundry in his mind. After a moment, he shook his head slightly and continued. "Doctor Clarkson went out to the main lab as well. An hour later — I would guess — I was packing a crawler to go reset the sensors at the edge of the White Plain and I saw Russovsky's Midge taking off." He scratched his beard. "A little odd, that. By then it was full sun, but she took off anyway and headed north."

"When did the shuttle leave?"

"Later," Tukhachevsky said, a slow grin peeking out from his beard. "I heard Clarkson on the comm, shouting at Blake — he's the head of the security team — to get a shuttle ready. But number two was already sidelined on the field with some mechanical problem. So they had to wait for a shuttle to come down from the ship to pick him up."

"Him and the damaged engine, right?" Gretchen tucked a wayward tendril of hair behind her ear. "Carlos flew the shuttle down to pick them up?"

Tukhachevsky nodded. "Yes, Flores had been down for several days, working on the grounded shuttle. By the time the other shuttle arrived, Clarkson was about wetting his pants." The Rossiyan grinned again. "He was in a rare state — almost happy, if such a dour man could ever be happy — and he was even civil to Molly."

"You saw them while they were waiting for the shuttle? Were they waiting together?"

"No! They couldn't abide being in the same room." Tukhachevsky waved a hand dismissively. "I didn't see — I'd already taken the crawler out — but Frenchy told me Doctor McCue decided to go aboard at the last moment. Clarkson was already aboard, the engine already stowed. They had to delay departure a couple minutes for her." The physicist shrugged.

So, Gretchen thought to herself, Russovsky and McCue didn't show Clarkson the limestone fragment, only the free-standing cylinder. That was enough to get him off their backs…but why did McCue suddenly go aboard the shuttle? What made her hurry? Or was she just trying to keep Clarkson from seeing what she'd put in the cargo hold?

The Company dossier on McCue implied she was a careful, thorough woman. A mathematician from the Arkham Institute on Anбhuac, the dig coordinator and chief bottlewasher. Meticulous, detail-oriented…not the kind of person to rush a sample somewhere, even one so precious. Huh. But if things between her and Clarkson were as cold as everyone is hinting, maybe she wanted to make him look bad.

"What happened then?" Gretchen returned her attention to the Rossiyan, who was looking mournful, his memories of the past stirred up. "Did you hear anything more from the ship, from Clarkson or McCue?"

"No." Tukhachevsky laughed hollowly. "Blake received a call from Sho-sa Cardenas, saying the shuttle had docked on the Palenque, then nothing. For weeks and weeks, nothing. We made a telescope — we could see the ship — but…"

"I'm sorry." Gretchen squeezed his shoulder. "I'm sorry about what happened, and sorry it took so long to get here."

"But you did come," Tukhachevsky sighed, and shook himself. A weight seemed to lift from his broad old shoulders and he stood up straighter. "Please, we can't stand here talking all night — come and meet everyone else and — please! — have a drink, on me." His eyes twinkled. "You will find men and women's interests are reduced to their base constituents when faced with a slow, lingering death abandoned on an alien world, far from home, without hope of survival."

Gretchen made a show of sniffing the air. "I can tell," she said with a laugh. "It smells like a distillery in here! What are you making?"

"Vodka, of course. You can make vodka out of anything." Tukhachevsky pushed open the door to the common room and Gretchen stepped in. A dozen people rose to meet her, some young, some old, and a stained plastic cup was pressed into her hand, sloshing with jet fuel of some kind. The Rossiyan's meaty hand was on her shoulder, guiding her to a chair at the long table and Gretchen caught a swift montage of tired, haggard faces — men and women seamed by the elements, burned dark by the sun — and everyone was smiling, relief plain on their faces, babbling their names, questions, rude jokes.

"Hello," she said, when things had quieted down a little and she'd taken a suitably long drink of the "vodka" in the cup. "I'm Gretchen Anderssen, and I thought you'd like to know the water cyclers on the ship are working just fine."

Everyone smiled and the last of the heckling died down. Gretchen swung a heavy bag from her hip onto the tabletop. No one made any particular movement, but a sense of expectation pricked the air, like ozone spilling away from an oncoming thunderstorm.

"And our Magdalena has the t-relay working back to Imperial space, so there was some mail waiting for you."

Hhhhuhhh… The simultaneous exhalation of a dozen breaths stirred the air. Gretchen didn't look up — it would be rude to grin at these men and women, who'd thought they were lost at the edge of known space, with no way home — and concentrated instead on dumping the bundles of printed messages onto the table. She'd sorted them on the flight down and tied up each set with string. Some events, she knew, were venerable enough to become rituals. This was one. Mail call, particularly when a new crewmember arrived on site.

"Blake." She called out, holding up the first set of letters. A stocky man, his pockmarked face twisted halfway from a grim snarl to disbelieving joy, scraped back his chair and leaned over the table.

"Thanks," he muttered, sitting down, almost-trembling fingers picking at the twine. "Thanks."

Gretchen nodded, then looked down. She'd already removed all the letters for the dead crewmen, for Clarkson and McCue. Strangely, there hadn't been any letters in the inbound queue for Russovsky, though her company file said she had an entire clutch of cousins and sisters at home on Anбhuac. Better have Maggie check on that, she thought while she held up the next bundle. "Fuentes, Antonio?"

The sound of a power wrench whining against a reluctant bolt roused Gretchen the next morning. She blinked, seeing actual, real sunlight spilling down a dirty brown wall above her head, then poked her nose out from the sleepbag. A pungent smell of cooking oil, coffee, sweat and heated metal washed over her. "Ah," she grumbled, sitting up, "home at last."

Surprisingly — considering how late she'd remained awake, talking to Tukhachevsky and Sinclair and the others about the dig and the planet — she felt good. Actually rested. "Gravity is a wonderful thing," she said, baring her teeth for a little hand mirror she carried in her jacket. "And whatever they put in the vodka here stains! Now I look like a real babushka."

Taking a carefully hoarded bottle of water out of her bag, she washed her face and brushed her teeth. "Two cups," she muttered, measuring the fluid level in the translucent canteen by eye. "I used to be able to take a whole bath in two cups."

Water rationing had been very strict on Mars, even with thirty meters of permafrost under their feet. The Imperial Planetary Reclamation Board guarded the native ice jealously, and charged the dig crews for every liter they extracted. IPRB had a vision of a green Mars, and weren't going to let some profligate scientists spoil their grand dream. Ugarit, for all the stink and humidity and flies and constant, deafening noise, had plenty of water. Some of it was even potable by human standards, but Gretchen had fallen out of the habits she'd learned on Mars. New Aberdeen was a wet, green world — flush with stormy gray seas, heavy forests and chill, cleansing rain pouring from massive, white thunderheads. Home seems so distant…Then she put the thoughts away and concentrated on getting the right boot on the right foot.

As Fitzsimmons had promised, his repair still held. A Marine of a thousand uses, she thought amusedly, trying to dig her fingernail into the seam. She failed, finding the military-issue adhesive goo holding the uppers to the sole like bedrock. "Time for breakfast, and I smell coffee!"

Downstairs, Gretchen found herself sitting at a table near the single window in the common room, a plate of eggs, toast and something which smelled — but did not taste at all — like bacon in front of her. The cook, a short, round Frenchman named De'vaques, poured her a big mug of coffee to which she added a liberal amount of sugar and creamer. By some unspoken conspiracy, she found herself accompanied for a lengthy breakfast by Tukhachevsky and the xenobiologist Sinclair. Both men were in a formidably happy mood, and Gretchen tuned them out almost as quickly as they started propounding at length on the peculiar nature of the Ephesian microfauna.

Hot food — and not a heated threesquare or mealbag — commanded her full attention until the plate was bare and the cup empty. She looked up, wondering if the kitchen was flush enough with supplies to allow her a second cup, and caught sight of the meteorologist Smalls's face from across the room. He was a thin, sallow-faced man in the sharp, bright glare of morning, with sunken eyes and lank black hair. Watching him, his body half-hidden behind Tukhachevsky's rotund bulk, Gretchen thought she'd never seen anyone so sad before.

A particularly sharp peal of laughter drew the man's eyes, his head moving with a sharp jerk. Gretchen looked over and realized the common room had already separated out, like some chemical precipitating out of solution, with the scientists — herself included — at one table, while the "crew" sat at another. Delores, her oval face slightly flushed with amusement, was telling a particularly poor joke at the other table. Parker and Bandao were watching her with amusement, while the groundside security people — Blake and a comm tech named Steward — were groaning.

"…so she said she'd rather date a cattle guard than a cowboy, so we left her sitting by the fence until she had the sense to walk home herself!"

Only Smalls was sitting alone, at the end of a table near the kitchen door. Gretchen realized he was watching Delores, as covertly as he dared, and she remembered how he'd moved toward her on the landing field the night before. Poor kid, she thought, remembering a crush she'd suffered through on Mars. Being in the field for a long expedition — and one like this, on the edge of human-controlled space, might last for years without relief — was always tricky. Being married didn't make any difference, not if your spouse was sixty light-years away. Distance washes away all attachments, makes us forget the old world and see only the new.

There was a pause in the flow of words from Tukhachevsky and Sinclair, and Gretchen realized they'd asked her something. She turned and raised a questioning eyebrow. "I'm sorry?"

"Would you like to see the main excavation site before we leave?" Sinclair repeated, hair in his eyes, ragged fingernails twisting a fresh tabac from papers. "It'll take all day to load the shuttles, and we won't want to take off until dark."

"I would," Gretchen said, standing up, coffee cup in hand. "About fifteen hundred? Good."

As it happened, Parker had already snorked up the last of the coffee, but Gretchen felt alive enough to face the day. Standing in the door of the kitchen, she found the crew clearing out — Parker and Delores for the landing strip and the shuttles, Blake and the others to start packing and loading. Good, she thought, no one will really notice if I take a bit of a look around. All I need is a guide.

"Mister Smalls?" The meteorologist looked up, startled, apparently unaware of her approach. "Do you have time to show me around the camp this morning? I'd appreciate it if you could."

In the full glare of midday sun, the camp seemed even more desolate than by night. The horizon stretched away to a dim white line, unbroken by the sight of mountains or hills in any direction. Gretchen blessed the field goggles she'd packed and the battered straw hat that had survived from her very first dig in the ruins of the ancient Il Dioptre observatory on Crete. Her suit was proof against heat and cold alike, but there was no sense in subjecting the temperature regulators to more stress than necessary. Smalls, for his part, had adopted a djellaba-like white cloak which covered him from head to toe, with wide-mouthed sleeves and a deep hood.

Brittle sand crunched underfoot as they walked, a fine crust breaking away with each step. The ground sparkled and glittered, as if diamonds had been scattered among the gravel and stones. Tan and a cream-white color dominated, though as the eye reached to the horizon, the deep, deep blue-black of the sky made the distant plain seem yellow.

"How's the weather?" she said at last. Smalls had said nothing after suiting up and leaving the main building. He seemed lost in thought. "The prevailing wind is from the east?"

There were no east-facing windows in the camp, and every building had a smooth, sloping berm of compressed earth and stone facing the rising sun. Even the sheds for the crawlers were reinforced, as if fortified against enemy bombardment, with deep airlocked doorways. More than one of the huts was half-buried by sand, with sloping ramps leading down to battered metal doors.

Smalls said nothing, continuing to stump along. They approached the main lab — a long, low structure with tiny windows surrounded by reinforcing stone. Everyone seemed to sleep in the main building, on the second floor. Gretchen shaded her eyes, looking west. Sunlight flared on the raised tails of the two shuttles, and she could see dust rising from a crawler maneuvering around the back of one. She supposed they were preparing to remount the engine in number two.

Still silent, Smalls keyed the airlock. There was a squeal of tracks clogged with grit, and Gretchen stepped inside, into blessed darkness. She watched the outer door grind closed, seeing the frame was almost entirely eaten away.

"How bad are the storms?" She ventured again, hoping for some kind of response. Smalls pressed a softly glowing plate on the wall and the inner door cycled, dust swirling away at their feet. Beyond a line of glowlights shimmered awake, illuminating a dirty, narrow hallway. Despite the lock, the floor was covered with sand.

"The storms?" Smalls seemed to wake at last, his eyes dark pits in the bad light. Something like a smile twitched on his lips. "They're beautiful. Gorgeous, really."

Gretchen said nothing, only unclasping her mask and taking a moment to taste the building air. She could smell solvents, hot plastic, electrical components and the sharp smell of an overheated printer.

"We'd been here a week," Smalls said, turning away and shuffling down the hallway. "And my satellites weren't all deployed yet, when the first big storm swept over us. Two of the sheds were torn to bits and scattered — Fuentes found one of the roofing panels a couple weeks later, sixty k from here. A crawler got knocked over and we nearly lost shuttle one."

"Sounds bad…" Gretchen started to say, but then stopped. Smalls was still talking, apparently unaware of her comment.

"The planet got all smashed up, back at minus three million, and there aren't lots of mountain ranges to speak of, not big plate-driven ones like on Anбhuac or Hesperides. Heat builds up on these big open plains and you get enormous swings in air pressure as the sun moves. There's no humidity to speak of, not with such low temperatures. All the water is locked in the ice caps. No lakes, no oceans — nothing to moderate air temperature."

Smalls unlocked a door, and Gretchen followed him into a room filled with v-pane monitors, computer equipment and racks and racks of data-lattice storage. A huge map of Ephesus glowed in a mosaic of nine displays, half the planet shining bright in the sunlight, and half plunged into complete darkness. The meteorologist waved a hand across the face of the world.

"We have dust storms a thousand kilometers wide, with winds in excess of a hundred sixty k on a slow, quiet day. There are invisible tornadoes, which form and vanish in the upper air. When they touch down, rocks, stones, boulders get lifted and flung for twenty to thirty k." His finger stabbed at the mosaic display, tracing a thin black line just emerging from the terminator.

"And there's the escarpment. A wall across half the world, nearly from pole to pole. The planetary atmosphere's so tight on Ephesus there are peaks which brush the envelope." Smalls turned and looked at Gretchen for the first time. She was leaning against one of the tables, watching him quietly, arms crossed. "The sun is like a big broom, pushing a lot of air in front of the midday hot-spot. There's a fat gradient at dawn and when the wall of moving pressure hits the escarpment, well…" He shrugged, showing more than a little perverse pride.

"You get vicious storms in the canyons," Gretchen supplied. "The briefing packet says they're in excess of four hundred fifty k at 'high tide.'"

"They are." Smalls searched among papers and bits of equipment on one of the tables. After a moment, he handed Gretchen a heavy chunk of slate the size of her hand. "The wind rising from the sun compresses against the mountains and the only release is through narrow slot canyons. I have video — in places the walls are like glass, rubbed to near optical quality by sand and grit from a hundred k away. Look at the other side."

Gretchen turned over the piece of slate. The reverse was glossy and black, like fine glass, with a dimple near the center. In the depression was a spherical metallic marble. She looked up in surprise. "What's this?"

"Some bit of nickel-iron — native stuff, there are fields of it in some places, just sitting on the surface — rolling around for a few centuries, getting nice and round. Then a particularly bad storm picked it up and whipped it into a canyon. By the time the cyclone winds had slapped the marble downrange and it hit a certain section of cliff just right — the marble punched right into the slate and stuck. When Russovsky found that, the grit had worn away the splinter lines and cracks, but you can still see them with a…" His voice trailed away.

Gretchen put down the shale. She looked at Smalls, who was staring at his displays.

"Do you want to tell me about Russovsky?" Gretchen swung one foot up and sat on the table. "Did she find a lot of interesting things out there, in the wasteland?"

"She did." Smalls scratched the side of his face. The respirator had worn a deep groove across his upper cheek. "I guess Tuk told you she hasn't come back."

Gretchen nodded, politely looking away from the meteorologist at the view of the world.

"Are we going to try and find her, bring her back with us?"

"Of course," Gretchen said in a sharp tone. Smalls almost flinched, and she smiled in apology. "She's one of the crew, right? I won't leave anyone behind."

"Okay." Smalls seemed to relax and sat down. "Did…did she bring something back, that day, the day we lost contact with the ship?" He stopped, watching Gretchen's face. "There was a lot of shouting in McCue's lab — it's down the hall — that morning. Then, well, you know — my satellites route through the ship's main array for retransmit from farside, so I was the first to notice something had happened." Smalls shrugged. "The real-time map went out all of a sudden. At first I thought there was a malfunction in my equipment somewhere — the dust eats into things, you know, and they stop working. But everything seemed fine down here. I tried to raise Palenque control on the comm, but there was no answer. I guess — "

"Everyone was dead by then," Gretchen said softly. "Russovsky found something in the desert and she brought it back to camp. Did you hear what they were saying, when they were shouting?"

"Yeah, I guess." Smalls looked away. "Clarkson and McCue were always at odds over everything." He managed a bitter laugh. "You'd think they had been lovers or something, but they weren't, not those two." Smalls tapped the crown of his nose. "They just couldn't agree. Clarkson was very Company, very gung-ho, very — ah — results oriented. McCue just wanted to take her time, check things out, take — you know — a few more measurements, a few more readings."

For the first time, Gretchen thought she saw something like fondness in the man's sallow, exhausted face.

"She'd help with your data, you know? She'd take a look at it and do some raw analysis to see if you were getting instrument errors, or interference or something? And it would come back so clean…everything would be just…solid. Reliable. That was McCue. She was reliable."

Gretchen waited a moment. "Was Russovsky reliable? She and McCue were — "

"They understood each other," Smalls said, nodding. "Russovsky is like one of the old-timers out of Olympus Station, or the outbackers — you ever been to Mars?"

"Yes," Gretchen said, understanding. "I spent two years at the Polaris site."

"Ah." Smalls tried to raise an eyebrow and look knowing, but mostly he looked foolish and Gretchen felt a sudden warmth for the man. Poor kid, she thought, thinking of Delores. He's just a squeeb. Probably never had a real girlfriend his whole life before he came here.

"So Russovsky," Gretchen interrupted, "liked the emptiness. She liked to go out alone, in her ultralight, and just wander, looking for things. Just…seeing what there was to see."

"Yeah!" Smalls scratched the back of his head ruefully. "She was kind of pissed when we first got there — I mean, she's the planetary geologist, right? But Ephesus was smashed like an egg back in First Sun times, the whole planetary mantle was broken into about a million pieces and then slammed back together again. There's no geology left! Just slowly settling rubble. Everything's a jumble — you can't even get a depth reading most places — and her instruments just kicked back garbage and plots looking like an Englishman puked six pints of bitters in the street."

"I see." Gretchen frowned. "So why the flights?"

"Well, that was another argument. See, Russovsky tried playing by the rules and duly reported all of this to Clarkson — and he said if she couldn't do her work, she could help someone else do something useful." Smalls grinned, and Gretchen realized with a start he was younger than she was. Much younger. How old is this kid? Twenty?

"Now, that set McCue off like a rocket, but Russovsky kept her cool and said — and I quote — 'I believe my data are in error, Doctor Clarkson. I will endeavor to rectify the situation.' — and then she just walked out of her office, loaded up the Gagarin and took off into the blue yonder."

Gretchen answered his smile with one of her own. "Good for her. How many times did she go out?"

Smalls pursed his lips, thinking. "About once a week, I guess. You can't carry too much on a Midge, but you can cover a lot of ground. So she must have been all over the place. She always tried to bring me or McCue something pretty — like that shale — or once she found these raw diamonds. She gave those to McCue, I think."

"Did you see what she brought back the last time?"

Smalls shook his head dolefully. "No. I was lying low! Clarkson was already in a mood about something, so when Russovsky came in and made a beeline for McCue's office with a big bundle in her arms, he was spoiling for a fight."

Gretchen nodded. "Why don't you show me her office?"

"Shuttle two to shuttle one, come in." Parker tapped his throat mike experimentally, watching the newly repaired shuttle's control panels light green section by section. Most of the cockpit was still dark, or winking amber. The long grounding had played havoc with the ship's systems. A cursory examination of the hull revealed deep pitting and large sections of discolored, infected metal. "Bandao, can you hear me? Delores, are you on this comm?"

"I hear you," the gunner's voice answered on a crystal-clear channel. "How does it look?"

"Good enough, maybe, sort of…" Parker wiggled one of the control panels and the black glassite suddenly flickered to life. "This boat's all eaten up by the damned spores."

"Will she fly?" Delores's sharp voice came online. "Do you have an engine readout yet?"

"I have diagnostics live from the engine," Parker replied dryly. The crewwoman was crouching in the aft engineering space, squeezed in beneath the housing, trying to match up relays and conduits in a maze of pipes and hoses. "And I think she'll fly — at least one-way — and everyone on board had better be suited up. Our little friends have been eating away for weeks."

"Cargo in the damaged ship, then? Passengers in this one?"

Parker nodded, attention distracted by another panel coming online. The wing and airfoil surfaces were showing only sixty to seventy percent response to a basic microcontrol flex test. "Yeah…why don't you prep for takeoff. We can load cargo with Delores, me and the security crew. Get all the civilians up to the Palenque and into their blessed showers."

"Understood," Bandao replied. Parker squinted out the triangular window. Across the landing field, he could see the gunner rattling down the stairs from number one. "Delores — I still don't have any readout from the fuel gauges. They hooked up yet?"

A grunting sound was her only response. Smiling to himself, the pilot began running through the basic systems checklist. After an hour, he looked up, lean face creased with puzzlement. A line of people was climbing the stairs into shuttle one. He tapped open his throat mike.

"Chief? Anderssen? We're going to send shuttle one upstairs. Did you want to go?"

There was no immediate response, so he checked his comm band to see if Anderssen was in range. Her proximity icon was glowing green, so Parker tried again. "Parker calling Anderssen — hello? Anyone home?"

This time the channel chirped open, and the archaeologist's voice came back, a little thready. "Yes, Parker? What did you say?"

The pilot repeated his question. As he did, Delores climbed down into the cockpit and slid into the copilot's seat. Her hair was streaked with oil, her face shining with sweat and her work gloves were dark with grime. She looked pissed, but Parker made a point of looking respectfully off into the distance, listening to Gretchen speaking on the comm.

"Don't worry about me," Gretchen said, breath rasping as she scrambled up the side of an excavation trench. She squinted for a second while the work goggles adjusted to keep the flare of the late afternoon sun from spearing her eyes. "I'm out at the Observatory excavation site with Sinclair and Smalls. I believe they do want to go upstairs today, so tell Bandao to delay liftoff until they get back to camp." She waved to the xenobiologist, who was standing under a shining metallic sunshade a hundred meters away. "We've got two crawlers out here, so I'll take the other one back."

She tramped across a work ladder laid down over the trench as a bridge and passed one of the obelisks forming the main part of the observatory. The stone spire cast a long finger of shadow across the rumpled ground — each obelisk was at least twenty meters high. Four rings of the stones circled the "nave," which nestled at the bottom of a kilometer-wide depression in the desert floor, about three k from the camp.

A network of fresh trenches slashed across the ring arrangement. The expedition had been digging exploratory excavations at ten-meter intervals, trying to find the foundations of the edifice. Gretchen could tell from the desultory sensor grid layout in the trenches they hadn't found what they were looking for. Sinclair had admitted, as they were bouncing up the dusty road from the camp, the "observatory" did not seem to be anything of the kind. The current thinking proposed some kind of naturally occurring phenomena. Just some rocks.

Gretchen walked quickly down the path between two trenches to the long rectangular sunshade. Sinclair and Smalls were sitting at a camp table, their goggles glittering mirrors. Cargo crates made more tables and work areas under the strip of shadow.

"They've called from camp," Gretchen said, doffing her hat under the awning. Her skin felt tight, already dehydrated by the parched air. "Shuttle one is ready to make a run back to the ship. You should go, I think, and I'll take the other crawler back."

Both men shared a glance, then Sinclair tilted his head in a sort of temporizing way. "One of us should stay — it's bad policy to go about solo — even so close to the camp."

"I understand," Gretchen said, taking no offense. "But I'll be staying overnight, which means one of you would have to give up a shower and the amenities of the Palenque for another night. Besides — Parker, Blake and Delores are staying groundside with me, and I'll have the crawler."

There was some more hemming and hawing, but Gretchen just waited for them to convince themselves, then waved as the Skoda Armadillo chuffed away down the road to the main camp. When they were mostly out of sight, she tapped her comm open.

"Mister Parker? Yes, you've got two more passengers coming into camp for your milk run. I'd appreciate it if Bandao-tzin waited for them."

There were some disgruntled noises and Gretchen had to smile as she adjusted her hat. Despite the crestfallen attitude of the dig team, she wanted to go over their excavation herself. It had been a while since she'd had a chance to do her work, and she wasn't going to pass up the opportunity. A failed dig was almost more interesting than a successful one.

"We'll all be going back to the ship tomorrow," she said into the comm as she stepped out into the blaze of sunlight. "No, no, we don't have to pack the whole camp. People should just take their personal baggage. Well, bedding would be a good idea. Lennox and I need to decide if we're going to continue operations here or not. But that can wait a couple of days."

Still listening to Parker and Delores bicker about the damage to shuttle two, she hiked back down into the bowl and began a long counterclockwise circuit around the excavation. People working tended to fall into patterns, and her moderately-experienced eye could see most of the dig crew here were right-handed. All of the paths tended to circle to the right, to pass around the righthand — or western — side of the obelisks. So, keeping a close eye on the ground, she moved left, peering into the trenches, inspecting the gridding, generally being as nosy as possible.

The sun drifted with her, and the shadows in the excavation slowly lengthened. By the time she'd reached the far side of the bowl, the trenches were almost completely in the shade. A ladder let her climb down into one of the larger cuts and Gretchen paused, seeing something odd lying in a cross-trench from the main. She stepped closer, head dropping into blessed shade.

A cylinder.

She stopped abruptly, her boots skidding in loose gravel. Her heart was pounding. "Oh, Mother Mary! Wait a minute."

Gretchen padded forward and knelt down. A pulque can was lying in the trench, abandoned and forgotten by someone. None of our crew would be so sloppy, she hoped. Must have been one of Blake's security people. She started to pick up the litter, then paused, taking a closer look. What is that?

Crouching down, head almost on the ground, she adjusted her lenses to higher mag and gave the can — a Mayauel from the faded rabbit on the label — a careful inspection from one end to the other. Something odd had happened to the can. The bottom, in particular, seemed to have fused with the ground, or more accurately, the ground had grown up around the underside of the can. Under hi-mag, she saw thin shoots of a stonelike substance working their way up the aluminum surface.

"Well now, this is interesting." Gretchen took an optical probe from her vest and moved around to face the opening in the top of the can, now lying sideways. Gingerly, she adjusted the tiny wand and eased it up to the mouth hole. Closing one eye, she clicked the worklens control around to match the input from the wand. A moment later, a highly magnified, light-enhanced view of the can sprang into view on the inside of her right lens. Then, gently, she drifted the wand into the opening.

The inside of the can was almost entirely filled with a delicate web of stonelike filaments. In the faint, reflected sunlight she could see hundreds — or thousands — of tiny cilialike fronds and a denser, hexlike structure of mineralized accretions. After taking a good look, she sat up, working a kink out of her shoulder.

"Personal log on," she said, cueing her throat mike. "I've found a discarded pulque can in the observatory dig. Looks like it's been here a couple weeks. Close examination finds the Ephesian microbiota Sinclair and Tukhachevsky tried to explain to me this morning in evidence. Something very much like what Parker found in the shuttle engines is eating the can." Gretchen stood up, stretching. She hadn't been grubbing in the dirt in months either. Her knees were already complaining. "Pretty soon the whole can will be gone, and the result will look just like everything else here, a mineral layer like sand and rock over this…mineral life form."

She stared up at the slender finger of the nearest obelisk. The pale cream texture made a sharp contrast against the blue-black sky. "Lennox's team was disappointed," she said, "to find their 'observatory' made of nothing but rock and mineral deposits — not set down by the hand of the First Sun people. They've decided the whole structure is just a natural formation, a quirk of geology. I wonder… I need to talk to Sinclair about his microbiota. There's something…something here almost makes sense. Log off."

Giving the Mayauel and its tiny colony a wide berth, Gretchen continued her circuit, eventually climbing out of the excavation as the sun was setting. Her suit recorded a brief moment of moderate temperature before shifting from cooling to heating. Night came swiftly out of the east, flooding across the desert plains. Without mountains or more than a high thin cloud to catch the last light of the sun, darkness was quickly upon her.

She switched on a lamp as she trudged up the slope to the crawler. In the starlight, everything seemed very quiet and still, frosted with silvery light. Her spot danced on the ground, a pale circle of yellow sliding over rocks, boulders, the tracks of the crawler. Gretchen paused, hands on the ladder leading up into the cabin. What was that?

The hum of the respirator masked most sounds and the wind had died with the passing of the sun. Gretchen turned off her lamp. Darkness folded around her again, then slowly lightened as her lenses adapted to the starlight. Everything seemed very still. She waited, listening.

Only the hum of the suit fans reached her ears. Annoyed, she shut down the respirator. There was a click and then nothing. Now she could hear her heart beating, a steady thump-thump-thump. Gretchen stepped away from the crawler, taking one step, two steps down toward the bowl. Her head cocked to one side, listening.

There was a sound. Something like the wind stirring sand and gravel, a faint tik-tik-tik. She slowly dropped into a squat on the trail, holding her breath. Now the sound was a little more distinct and she could hear — feel almost — a slow, pervasive susurration all around her. Gretchen breathed again, feeling faint. The respirator wasn't just for show, she reminded herself. Her thumb slid the control to ON, and the fans started up again, and her nose tube felt cold with the slow breeze of a suitable air mixture. Gretchen stood, the faint, delicate sound drowned out by the clamor of her breath and machines, but she was smiling.

Treading carefully on the fragile ground, she walked back to the crawler and climbed aboard.

Inside the cabin, her mask hooked to the vehicle's reserve air bottle, she sat for a long time, listening to the busy night and watching the stars slowly wheel overhead. Her comm was shut down, the crawler's engine cold. Gretchen thought, sitting there in the darkness, a rime of frost slowly congealing on her mask around the waste gas vent, she knew how Russovsky felt.

Am I an old-timer, then? The thought was very amusing. She was sure none of the outbackers on Mars would think so. She doubted if any of the dig scientists had stayed out past nightfall. I should go in. Parker's probably mustering a search party by now.

Sighing, she shook her arms, sending a cascade of CO₂ frost to the floor of the crawler, then switched on machine power and let the big tracked vehicle start its diagnostic. A heavy rumble trembled through the seat and soles of her boots. Her respirator whined on, and the suit began to percolate heat through her limbs. "Damn!" Stabbing pains cramped her arms and legs. "Too cold to sit here."

Ten minutes later, she threw the Armadillo into gear and rumbled off down the road, the yellow headlights of the big tank dancing across the rutted track, a slow heavy cloud of dust rising behind. In the darkness, swathes of minute, glittering lights flared for a moment as the cloud of water vapor settled onto the desert floor, then faded as the windfall of energy from the sky was consumed.