Wildcatter

Day 413

He had expected something like grassland—not a putting green, of course, but a tussocky meadow. He should have known better. What Cacafuego had laid out as a welcome mat was a boulder field, giant shingle on a chaotic scale, with everything from gravel up to rocks as big as bathtubs. For three meters out from the shuttle the rocks had been blackened by the landing jets, but beyond that the ground was hidden under a dense mat of ropy roots or vines, from which sprouted ferny green stuff about waist high.

Of the shuttle’s five legs, one was contracted as far as it would go, two were fully extended, and one of those did not even reach the ground. The result looked highly unstable. If the wind veered about thirty degrees to the east, Control would very likely slam the door shut and lift off. It lacked enough fuel to hunt for a better site nearby. His EVA suit was fireproof but it could not save him from being boiled alive. He didn’t mention all that to his plog. It could be dubbed in later, if there was a later.

He hoisted one of the packs and carried it out of range, then came back for the other. They were heavy but the footing was horrible, even when he could see where he was stepping. He tore off a couple of fronds, wound them into a wad, and rolled them in a sample wipe—which looked like an ordinary sheet of sandwich wrap, but at once sealed itself and evacuated the air. Loamy soil and scummy water were the two best sites to find potentially pharmaceutical materials, but neither was handy. He tried tearing up one of the creeper vines, but could not budge it.

Then his eye was caught by a tiny movement. He was being watched. In shape it was most like a terrestrial lizard, about as long as his hand. In color it was trying to match the half-blackened rock on which it sat, but not succeeding very well. Fire would be rare on this rain-sodden island. Seth slowly drew his stun gun, set it to low, and froze the little critter. He picked it up.

“Sorry, wee fellow. Hey, you’ve got six legs! Aren’t you lucky?”

And so was he. Plants were just sunlight-eaters, sugar-makers, and much less diverse than fauna. There could be no argument with a new animal species. Chemists would drool over this evidence. He wrapped it in a wipe and dropped it in his collecting pocket.

“Captain to Master. Your fifteen minute planned stay is almost up. Our view of your location is through a probe, not direct. We don’t see any major storms lurking, but don’t rely on that too much.”

Especially when the shuttle was balanced on a hair.

“Copied and out.” Seth trudged back to the open door and threw the two samples inside. “Control, close door.”

Then he had to retrace his steps to the packs and squat to take out the flag. His knees were weary already. The flagpole was telescopic, but where could he plant it? It would be very unimpressive peeking over the shrubbery. He tried a patch of finer gravel, but the shaft went in only a few centimeters, not enough. He jammed it between two of the burned boulders, then turned to face Niagara.

“Can you see me clearly?”

“You’re beautiful!” That was JC, excited. “Wave for all your teeny plog fans. Now get farther back and send Niagara home.”

Easier said than done. The vegetation completely hid the ground, and kept writhing in the wind. While the boulders underneath seemed fairly stable, being locked in place by the creeper, he had to feel for every foothold. If he tangled a foot and tripped, he would very likely twist or break something. After about ten meters he turned.

“Control, return to mother ship for refueling.”

—Crewmember still ashore. Confirm instructions.

Does it think he was not aware of that? “Departure confirmed.”

White flames and smoke burst out around the shuttle’s undercarriage. Niagara soared up on pillars of fire and turned to the east. No birds flew up in alarm. The sky was a clear blue, but uncluttered by circling vultures. Evolution did not favor wings on high-gee worlds.

A stray buffet of wind blew the flag over.

Seth Broderick had a planet all to himself. He was as alone as a guy ever could be. Frustratingly, all he could see of his world was groundcover and a charred area like the scar of a large campfire. Control had avoided ridges when choosing a stable landing ground, so he was standing in a very slight hollow. He plodded up the gentle slope, arms spread to keep his balance, placing every step with care. Top speed was half a klick an hour now. He chattered to his plog.

“If you’ve watched many plogs, then I’m sure you’ve heard other prospectors say this, but I really wonder what this world smells like. The filter on my suit cuts out all the odors and dust…” He paused to catch his breath. “Another strange thing here is the silence. This is a very silent place. No birds singing, no dogs or traffic… Just the wind swishing this groundcover.”

At the top of the slope he found the chaotic rocks and pebbles more exposed, as if this were a later dump from some great fleet of trucks. Here the vegetation had not been burned, but he found dead remains of the ropy vines under some of the boulders, and collected a few fragments.

Although he was still standing on a plain, he had gained a slightly wider view. The sun was low in the sky, roughly north-north-east, but it would not set at this latitude yet, so he need not worry about darkness. The Tsukuba River lay somewhere to the north, heading eastward to the sea. Southeastward stood an ominous wall of cloud, not the storm he had flown over, another just as menacing. The chimneys must lie in that direction. To the south he ought to be able to discern the coastal ranges, but all he was sure of were some clouds that might be the sort that hung around above mountains.

To the north he thought he could see a white triangular wing pointed skyward, the remains of the Galactic shuttle, perhaps half a kilometer away. He had planned on being set down much closer to it.

“Golden Hind, can you place me?”

Jordan: “Your landing site was about 1.2 kilometers west of the chimneys. The Galactic shuttle is 0.6 klicks northeast of you.”

Right on! “And the river?”

“The major channel is at least three klicks north of the shuttle, but remember there are many minor channels.”

“Then I shall investigate the shuttle first and after that proceed to the colony. I doubt if I’ll get any farther over this terrain. What is Maria making of it? I was expecting alluvium—mud, not boulders. Is this crap glacial?”

“Maybe originally glacial,” Maria said. “The nearest I’ve ever seen are debris flows that you get in major floods. But that’s in mountains; I’ve never heard of anything quite like it on a river plain. Some of the rocks look well-rounded and some are freshly broken. It’s very poorly sorted—big stuff jumbled in with much finer. I can’t be sure without a closer look, but I suspect you’re seeing the product of those storm surges Control predicted. The river probably floods, but I can’t believe any river could throw boulders of that size around on what is basically flat ground. Anything that can do so must be extremely violent.”

“I can’t wait to meet it. Thanks. Prospector out.”

He made his way back down to his packs and collected two spare water bottles. He could always locate the packs by their transponders, but he very much doubted that he would be coming back for them.

Wading over that rubble in that gravity felt much like climbing a mountain while carrying a horse. It took him well over an hour to reach the shuttle, a distance he could have run in two minutes on Earth. Several times he nearly fell. Level patches were bad enough; the gentlest slopes, up or down, were even harder, because terrestrial eyes and reflexes couldn’t judge what was needed.

Still the only sound was the rush of the wind in the shrubbery. Every ten or fifteen minutes he heard that sound rising and lay down until it stopped howling and the wind dropped to a strong breeze again. Twice he thought he was going to be lifted bodily, and certainly would have been had he not had the vegetation to hang on to. He understood now how Dylan Guinizelli had let a gust of wind break his arm.

He collected a thumb-sized, four-legged beetle, a few stray weeds unlike the ferns, some fibrous material that he guessed was decayed wood-like matter left there by the storm surges, three broken shells with traces of organic material clinging to them, some tiny animal bones, and a dozen fecal pellets. Those would probably excite Reese more than all the rest. A single gram of organic material would yield thousands of exotic chemicals, but he found it hard to believe his packet of grunge would ever make him rich, despite the legends of old Mathewson and his bucket of dirt. It was not an inspiring collection and he might have to return with his sample bag more empty than full—unless, of course, he found some of the Galactic samples he could purloin. There would be a certain justice in that.

He had used up at least a third of his planned stay. He was tired. He was thirsty, and had emptied his first water bottle. Why couldn’t the damned planet have given him a nice flat meadow to run around on, as he had expected? A delta plain made of boulders was an absurdity.

Long before he reached the Galactic shuttle, he saw that it was a KR745, which could carry a team of five and made Golden Hind’s Oryo 9 look like a child’s toy. It had probably cost twenty times as much. JC liked to badmouth the multinationals, but even he never accused them of skimping on equipment. Seth found where the KR745 had touched down, charring the vegetation. He found the scars where it had dragged and bounced as the wind took it away. And he came at last to the gully where it now rested.

The KR745 had the standard delta wings for supersonic flight, but it was a “layflat” as opposed to a “standup” like Niagara. It landed level, not vertical. That might have been its undoing, if the crew had not appreciated the wind danger soon enough. Control should have done so, but with the two prospectors gone exploring, the biologist left aboard must have overruled Control’s advice to take off. Now what had once been a beautiful thing was an ugly corpse, lying like a dead bird in a shallow, sandy channel, resting on its port side against the far bank, with one wing pointing at the sky and the other crumpled underneath the fuselage. Its back had been broken, leaving the nose almost separated from the rest.

The channel was sinuous, its bed sandy not rocky, the first fine-grained sediment Seth had seen. No water was flowing, but Maria had been right about open water near the wreck, a shiny pond, rippling in the wind. More pools marking the low points of the channel, even on the limited stretch he could see before it curved out of view. Would they be salt tidal pools, or seepages of fresh groundwater from the river? He had no intention of tasting them to find out, but he would certainly take samples.

He was babbling about this to his plog when Jordan’s voice interrupted.

“Prospector, the shuttle will dock in about ten minutes. We can begin refueling at once, but how does the weather look down there?”

Weather? Seth glanced eastward and then used some words that would certainly have to be edited out before his plog could ever be made public. The storm was halfway up the sky, white on the crest, but black as death underneath, lurid with lightning flashes.

“Not good,” he added for publication. “What’s the timing?”

“Not good either. We think that brute is going to hit you in about two hours, and Niagara can’t get to you before then.”

“Two hours should give me long enough to take a look at the chimneys. This wreck must have been lodged here for two or three weeks. I can shelter inside it until the wind drops.”

“Keep in touch, Seth.”

“Stick around, won’t you? Prospector out.”

The rocky bank sloped gently, but gentle in that gravity felt like steep elsewhere. He slid and staggered down it without falling. Then, at last free to step out normally, he headed along the hollow to the wreck. His objective was the gaping hole just forward of the wings, which looked like an easy access. He hadn’t gone far when he saw the footprints, and those changed everything.

There were many prints, most of them old and faint, flattened by wind and rain until they were mere dimples in the sand. He might not have noticed them had they not been grouped into two distinct trails and highlighted by a few more recent tracks. Both trails began at the break in the shuttle. The wind had not yet had time to blur the latest set, although they did not look very recent. They were human footprints and their maker had been barefoot—reasonable in this climate, dangerous in this environment. One set ran eastward to the pond and the other west to a place where someone had been digging in the sand. Even your average Ph.D. could work out that the pond was for either drinking water or washing, while the digging site was a makeshift latrine. Animals dug pits, but not with a shovel.

Seth babbled to his plog about Man Friday and Robinson Crusoe while the rest of his brain raged against the extent of Commodore Duddridge’s treachery. Some of his shuttle crew had survived until very recently. They might even be still alive. The commodore had not merely given up too easily, he had deliberately flown away and marooned people to die on a planet one step up from Hell. Then the bastard had tried to cover up his crime by posting a quarantine beacon in the hope that Mighty Mite’s expedition would not come looking at the evidence. There was a charge of willful murder in Comrade Duddridge’s future.

Seth’s second thought—followed instantly by a surge of shame that he would think of such a thing at a time like this, when he had just discovered a fellow human being callously left to die—was that his financial future was now secure. If he returned alive to the real world, his plog was going to be a bestseller. It had all the syrupy drama and pathos of afternoon space opera, the sort of dreck churned out by teams of worn-out hacks to enliven the existence of Earth’s hopeless millions. He would be famous.

Jordan’s voice: “Are those prints human, Seth?”

“Yes, sir. Wait a minute, though…”

Seth laboriously lowered himself to his knees, and then crouched to view the sand at a low angle. The oblique sunlight helped. “The topmost set, yes,” he said. “And some of the older ones. But there are other tracks mixed in, bigger feet. Can you see this one?” He traced it out for the camera’s benefit: four toes in front, probably two behind. Or the other way around, of course. Every toe ended in a wicked claw. “Whatever it is, I don’t think it eats grass.”

He struggled to his feet again. “Now to look inside.”

“Watch you don’t get shot at,” Jordan said.

Wise advice. Seth decided he was already close enough to open negotiations.

“Ship ahoy!” He shouted as loud as he could, knowing how his mask would muffle his voice. “Hello, Galactic! Anyone home? Anyone looking for a ride back to Earth?”

Nothing happened except that the sun went out. The storm had now spread from horizon to horizon, but the wind had dropped, for the first time since he arrived on Cacafuego. The ferns were barely moving. He walked closer to the shuttle.

There was a dead fish lying outside the opening.

This time his voice definitely quavered.

“Now that fish is odd. The position looks too deliberate to be just chance. There are no other dead fish anywhere, not that I can see. Is this one meant to be bait, placed there to lure some animal closer? Or has someone left an offering to the gods who live inside? Any new planet is interesting, but this one is starting to look bizarre.” Also scary, even for him.

He shouted again. Still no response.

“I’m going closer.”

The opening in the fuselage marked where the shuttle had almost broken in two, a great wound like the mouth of a cave. The entrance was low enough that he had to stoop to see in.

He clattered his stun gun against the side and turned on his helmet light to scan the shadowed interior. He was looking through the former underbelly into a shambles that had been the biosafety laboratory, now lying on its side. Much sand had washed in, largely burying the heaps of smashed equipment and furniture on what had been a wall and was now the floor. The sand had retained many footprints, some human, others… not. About human length, but broader and webbed. Giant penguins?

There were bones mixed in with the debris. Although they looked more like fish bones than human, they suggested that this might be something’s lair. What something other than humans used a spade—which he now saw standing upright in the sand just inside?

There was a table, too, that had either landed almost exactly right way up or been placed in that position later. A drawer from a desk or chest stood upright on the table, handle at the top. Drawers in spacecraft did not fall out by accident, no matter how rough the turbulence, and he knew of no way that this one could have ended in that position unless it had been placed there by a sentient being.

The only exit from the lab had been in the forward bulkhead, now turned sideways so that the door hung open. He shouted again, and this time he heard a faint noise, more a groan than a cry. And tapping!

“I’m coming in!” An obstacle course in 1.6 gees with an unknown carnivorous species at the end of it was every boy’s dream. Stun gun in hand, he ducked inside. A workbench against the former forward bulkhead was now turned sideways with its cupboard doors open. It made a practical ladder leading up to the door, but would it hold his now enormous weight?

“I’m coming!” he repeated.

More tapping, faster this time.

He clambered up to the door without trouble and scanned the next room with his lamp. Predictably it was the decontamination chamber required by all high-level biosafety labs, equipped with evacuation fans, showers, and UV sterilizers. He was still as dangerously far from the new floor on that side, but the shower doors were just below him, like a platform. He lowered himself warily. They groaned, but took his weight.

He walked across to the far door, which was hinged on what was now the upper edge. Normally Control would never allow both doors of a decontamination chamber to be open at the same time, but here Control was dead. With the hinges at the top, the flap hung ajar, prevented from closing by a strip of scrap lithium alloy bent over the jamb.

He gently pushed the door wider and peered through. The next room had been the biologists’ dorm, equipped with foldaway bunks and a few more conveniences. Linen, clothes, and mattresses had fallen in heaps against the starboard side, and on this clutter lay a dying woman. She was understandably naked in the heat, but had pulled a towel over herself in an attempt at modesty. One hand covered her eyes to shield them from his lamp, and the other held the bottle she had used for tapping. It was empty, of course. Her effort to speak made only a croaking sound.

He turned the lamp so it shone upward. “Hi.” Careful to prop the door behind him, he climbed down one of the foldaway bunks, which was still chained to the wall and served as a ladder.

“My name’s Seth Broderick. I’m from Mighty Mite’s Golden Hind, and we’re going to take you home.” He knelt, pulling his spare water bottle from his pouch. He needed that water himself. It would fit safely to his drinking tube, but once he broke the seal to let this woman drink from it he would not be able to use it without being exposed to biohazard. He broke the seal, lifted her with an arm under her shoulders, and put the tube to her mouth.

She was either the master or the astrobiologist. She had been marooned down here for more than two weeks and he was going to rescue her. Cacafuego’s perils now seemed less dangerous. According to Duddridge, she had been hallucinating and suffering from a high fever, but she did not look fevered now. The killer planet might still be a serpent with two heads, but it had a weak bite if this woman had survived so long in these conditions. She must be a very tough lady.

“That’s enough for now,” Seth said, removing the bottle and letting her lie down. “Have you been drinking the muck outside, or has the shuttle’s supply just run out?”

She mumbled, “Two days ago.”

“Are you Mariko or Meredith?”

“Meredith.”

That was often a herm name and she was large, with curves that suggested muscle more than fat, but Seth decided she was probably trad female. That instinct to cover her nudity was not herm, and she wore her hair longer than most herms did. He spread the towel better and grinned through his vizor at her. She smiled back. He opened the first aid packet on his suit, loaded the injector with a stim shot, and squirted it into her arm.

“We named the river after you. Galactic ran away, you know?”

“So… should you. Go! Virus…”

“No.” He did not believe in infective agents that could slip through modern biosafety barriers. No virus particle or bacterium would penetrate his suit.

“Prospector to Golden Hind. Can you read me?”

Silence. The metal skin of the shuttle was blocking the feeble signals from his helmet. He wanted to know how the storm was progressing. He needed the shuttle more urgently now.

“You haven’t starved, though,” he said. The galley would have held emergency rations, but could she have reached it? The corridor door, the original exit, was three meters overhead, and closed. She must have been confined to this room and the laboratory. The decon showers might have let her access the water store.

“The centaurs bring me food,” she whispered.

Pause for thought. Wildcatters were always inventing weird names for new things, but he could not help wondering if her hallucinations lingered on. After three weeks in this atmosphere she must have serious nitrogen narcosis, at least, even if she had recovered whatever virus or bacillus she had caught before. Anything she said might be delusion.

Six-toed footprints with talons?

“Centaurs?”

“Amphibious creatures. Like otters.”

“Sentient?”

She nodded.

Something had laid a dead fish at her doorstep. Damn! First contact and Mighty Mite would be ruined by it.

“Friendly?”

“They don’t like clothes.”

Seth decided to leave the sentience question until later. It raised far too many questions and no answers.

“Apart from thirst, how are you feeling?”

“Weak, hungry, and so glad to see a human face that I’m about to have hysterics.”

“I often have that effect on people.”

“It’s against my religion. I was so sure I was going to… I can feel that stim shot working.” She took the water bottle from him and drank.

With her solid build, blond hair, and fair skin, she was a Brunhilda, not a Venus. Women were rarely prospectors. The thought that he might have met a female Seth Broderick amused him. As far as he could recall the legends, neither Brunhilda nor her boyfriend had ended happily.

“There’s a storm brewing outside. Will we be safe from it in here?”

“Safe as anywhere.”

“We have only one shuttle and it can’t land until the weather improves. You will have to put up with my company for a few hours.”

She smiled for the first time. Under normal conditions, that smile would rank as thrilling. “You won’t get very far in that armor, Sir Knight.”

“No offense intended, but I wasn’t planning any heavy moves just yet. I’ll take a rain check. Will you be able to walk to the shuttle when it comes? I doubt I can carry you in this gravity.”

“You ought to rescue smaller maidens.”

“Or maidens in less distress. How long have you been here?”

“Nineteen-hour days or twenty-four hour? I have no idea.”

Why shut herself up in this dark oven? Perhaps because vermin would have trouble getting in. Or perhaps she had just crawled in here at the end to die. Only one hell of a strong-minded woman would still be anywhere close to her right mind after such an ordeal.

“Our ship’s calendar won’t be yours, of course, but we reckon it’s been eighteen days since Duddridge posted his beacon.”

“I’d been here five or six days by then,” she said.

That was longer than Duddridge had implied in his beacon message. The more lies Seth identified in that, the more he agreed with JC’s suspicions that Galactic must have found something worth a double or triple murder. If so, Meredith Tsukuba must know what that something was. This might be a very profitable rescue. Except for the sentience problem.

“And he just pissed off, abandoning you?”

“It was the right decision. I told him to. I confirmed what Mariko had told him; that the infectious agent had bypassed all our barriers and couldn’t be contained. We were contagious and too sick to help ourselves. An unmanned shuttle wouldn’t be able to rescue us from the wreck, and a manned mission would put other lives at risk. Even if he could get us back upside, we’d endanger the ship’s crew.”

“It was your idea that he abandon you?”

“Mine and Mariko’s. And you should get away from me, too.”

This was insane. “You really think that bug of yours can penetrate a K333 suit?”

“Yes. It got through all our defenses. Dylan caught it first. Granted, there’s a very slight chance his suit was compromised in the centaur attack. But it didn’t say so, and we’d kept him quarantined in the infirmary. Then Mariko came down with it. Then I did.”

Seth shifted to a more comfortable position and thought some more about sentient centaurs who left offerings of dead fish. Meredith might still be hallucinating; nothing she said could be trusted. “Whatever it was, you survived, so it isn’t fatal. Did it kill the others?”

“Something killed Dylan, but it could have been a combination of the infection and trauma from his fall. I was suffering from muscle spasms and blackouts, so Mariko had strapped me into a bunk. That saved me when the storm waves rolled us. I came to my senses eventually, hung on a wall in here, in the dark. I managed to free myself, but I couldn’t find a way to her, wherever she was when it hit.” She glanced up at the door that was now in the ceiling. “The outside port hatch won’t open and the starboard one is jammed or locked.”

“You mean their bodies must still be somewhere in the shuttle?”

She nodded. “I thought I heard knocking for a day or two, but it might have been the wind.”

JC would have said “flaming shit!” at that point. De Soto’s telemetry must have told Duddridge what had happened to the shuttle, but he hadn’t mentioned it in his beacon message.

Meredith had survived the rolling, Mariko Seidel might have. If De Soto had sent down another manned shuttle with tools, both women might have been rescued. Duddridge was going to be hung, drawn, and quartered in the public media when ISLA released his report. He couldn’t edit or suppress his ship’s records. Why had he thrown away his career like that? Just because a pair of terrified, delirious women claimed they had succumbed to a virus that could bypass modern biocontainment precautions?

Or was JC right when he said Duddridge had found something on the planet that justified so much treachery?

Seth heard a faint roll of thunder, much muffled by the shuttle walls.

Meredith heard it also. “How long until the storm hits, Prospector?”

“Seth. Seth Broderick. It must be due soon. Can you walk?”

She nodded. “I can crawl. Go and report to your friends.”

“What I ought to do is go and find my baggage. It has three more water bottles and we’re going to need them. But it will take me a couple of hours, there and back.”

“Don’t tell me you walked that far over the boulder flats?”

“We didn’t know it would be such hard going.”

“We did. We had close-ups from the drones. That’s why we landed beside this distributary channel. It makes for easy walking all the way to the flower pots.”

“Golden Hind doesn’t carry atmospheric drones,” Seth admitted. Drones or not, the fact that Duddridge had ordered the shuttle to set down a good kilometer from the chimneys showed that even Galactic had not been certain that those were natural and not artifacts.

“You mustn’t risk it again,” Meredith said firmly. “You’ll break a leg for sure, or get caught in the storm. And the water you collect won’t cover the sweat you’ll lose, there and back.”

The mere thought of water made Seth thirsty. “What choice do I have?”

“We can collect rainwater, but you’ll have to boil it with your blazer, and I honestly don’t believe that will sterilize it.”

He hadn’t brought a blazer.

“That’s a last resort. I can dehydrate a bit longer.” This shuttle would still contain everything they could possibly need, but they couldn’t get at it. Niagara would be hours away yet. He stood up, weary all over from the constant gravity overload. “I’ll go and report.”

“Shine your light around for me. There’s a bra about somewhere.”

He laughed. “Modesty at a time like this?”

“Necessity in gravity like this.”

He apologized and found the bra for her.

As soon as he clambered through into the laboratory he heard almost continuous thunder. Gusts of rain sweeping across the plain had cut visibility down to a hundred meters or so. His external thermometer told him that the temperature had dropped twenty degrees. He had estimated that he could stand three hours on the surface, but now that seemed hopelessly optimistic and he had a lot more of this ordeal to look forward to. Even after the storm passed, Golden Hind might have to wait an hour or two for its orbit to line up with Sombrero before it could launch Niagara.

“Prospector to Golden Hind. Do you read?”

“Yes!” JC bellowed. “What the flaming shit have you been doing for so long?”

“You know how time flies when you’re with a pretty girl.”

“They’re alive?”

“Meredith Tsukuba is. She’s suffering from dehydration, malnutrition, probably nitrogen narcosis. Perhaps emotional trauma, but she’s a very tough woman.”

“What about the comas and hallucinations?”

Seth hadn’t made up his mind yet. “Nothing obvious. She’ll need a long decompression after this and certainly quarantine.”

“Master, this is Jordan.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bad news. Prepare for a major storm surge. That hurricane will make landfall right at high tide.”

“No problem,” Seth said. “Let me restate that: I mean, no decision needed. We’re in the shuttle and that’s as safe a place as we’ll find. Our problem is going to be drinking water. We have none left. We’ll try collecting rain; the air is wet enough to swim in right now.” If he opened his vizor to take as much as one sip of rainwater, he would be exposed to biohazard and faced with a long quarantine.

He uploaded his plog, bringing Golden Hind up to date on his situation and what he had learned. He didn’t ask how long the storm would last because he didn’t want to hear the answer. The rest of the team came on to wish him luck, or prayer in one case.

The drawer he had noticed earlier was now explained. He dragged it behind him as he crawled out of the cave on hands and knees—the storm had barely started and already he did not dare try to stand up in it. He scooped a hollow in the sand to anchor the drawer; he packed sand in around it. The rain was almost horizontal, but enough was going in to fill it fairly soon.

A good prospector should never miss a chance to sample. Back in the shuttle, he wrapped up some fish bones, a couple of beetles, and some more fecal pellets, larger than those he had found earlier. Those took him past the total of twenty he had promised JC. Now he just had to deliver them.

He headed back to find Meredith. She had reached the decon room, crawling out on hands and knees. She was doing fine, but did not object when he steadied her as she climbed down into the former lab. In addition to the bra, she wore a bed sheet as a sort of sarong.

“I have always believed that women look sexiest in garments that promise to fall off at any moment.”

“Sexy? If you think I look sexy in my present condition, you really are deprived. Close your eyes.”

“Not likely!” He turned his back instead.

Meredith draped the sheet over him in case he cheated. She crawled outside for a brief needle shower. Once she was dressed again, still wet but not chilled in the muggy heat, they made themselves as comfortable as possible, sitting on the lab table that stood half buried in sand. As a bench it was awkwardly tilted and not high enough for Seth’s legs, but it beat standing.

Her hair was still a tangled disaster and her long ordeal certainly showed, but a few days’ decent diet, some grooming, and something daring to wear, and she would turn all the heads in the dance hall. Her face was broad, showing the bone, portraying strength, not grace. Her eyes were large and steady, very pale gray. She was an Amazon.

“A steak about this size,” she said. “Rare. Fried onions, fried yams, and a magnum of ice-cold champagne. To celebrate my rescue.”

“Is that the biggest steak available?” He realized he was ravenous.

“And decent rags. And a comb, fergawsake.”

“Indecent rags have their good side.” He was amazed by her courage. What she had been through would have reduced most people to gibbering idiots, and it wasn’t over yet. “There’s a dead fish outside.”

“They go stinky very fast in the heat.”

With a roar like the end of several worlds, the rain turned to hail. Stones the size of eyeballs thundered on the shuttle, many bouncing in through the gap. In that gravity they would have battered Seth to pulp if they had caught him out in the open, going to fetch the water from his packs. The cataclysm stopped after ten minutes or so, and he recovered the drawer, pulling it inside. Meredith was waiting with a cup.

“Votre champagne, madame. Steak to follow.” The hail should melt quickly in the tropical-type heat. Outside, rain and thunder continued. The shuttle trembled as ever-stronger gusts hit the remaining wing.

“I was warned that there’s a storm surge on the way,” he said.

Meredith pulled a face. “We may have to go back inside, then. I’ve seen water almost high enough to flood through into the decon room. If it gets past that, we could be in some trouble.”

He wondered if the whole shuttle could shift, maybe break apart; didn’t say so.

“And the centaurs will come visiting,” she said. “They may bring me fish, but if they see you in that suit, they’ll go for you. That’s what they did to Dylan.” She sipped rainwater.

At this point Reese would say that it wasn’t the centaurs that bothered him, it was the unicorns.

Seth said, “While we’re waiting, and if you’re up to it, I’d like to record your account of what happened from the time you landed on Cacafuego.”

“That’s what you call it? I like our name better. But I’ll try.”

“Prospector to Golden Hind. Can you hear us over the racket?”

Maria’s voice. “Barely, but Control can filter the background out later.”

“Ok. We’re twiddling thumbs here. It’s raining on our picnic. I have Prospector Meredith Tsukuba with me, and she’s going to tell us what went wrong for Galactic’s landing party.”

“If I tell you what went right,” Meredith said. “It will be quicker.”