Wasteland of flint

'The day after tomorrow,' Gretchen said, shaking her head at his optimism, 'one of the shuttles from the Palenque will make a skip-pass through the upper reaches of the planetary atmosphere. The approach will be entirely ballistic – no power, no radiation signature, no more evidence than a meteorite burning up in the mesosphere – and we will be waiting, both of us in a Midge, for a skyhook extraction.'

'Impossible! A Midge can't fly that high and we'd asphyxiate or freeze before reaching an altitude where a shuttle could pick us up on an approach like that.'

'If this were Anбhuac, you'd be right.' The comm console beeped pleasantly and Gretchen felt her stomach sink. There were no system messages waiting for her. No mysterious notes from Magdalena. No word the Palenque was actually coming to fetch them. 'But this is not Old Earth.'

Anderssen shuffled out, the pole scratching on the floor. 'Like Mars, this world's atmosphere is very thin. Maybe only half the depth of Anбhuac's ocean of air. Even the individual layers of the atmosphere are compressed or thinned. We only need to reach thirty k to escape. At such an altitude, in fact, we'll be worrying about broiling in solar radiation rather than freezing, but these Midge s are pretty well equipped to protect us from the heat.

'Air is a problem, but we can secure these suits for a super-low-pressure environment. We won't have to stay at height long – in fact, we won't be able to loiter for more than about thirty minutes – but the shuttle will be there when we are.'

Hummingbird was scowling, his face dark as a thunderhead above the Escarpment. 'A skyhook can only intercept one Midge at a time – if your Mister Parker can keep his hands steady enough to catch us. And how do you expect one of these dragonflies to reach that altitude?'

'I'm not trying to get us killed,' Gretchen said in a stiff voice. 'But it is dangerous.'

She ran her hand across the Gagarin's wing, taking a long look at the battered, scratched, wind-worn surface. The ultralight had traveled thousands of k across this world, with two pilots of varying abilities, making at least one complete circumnavigation. Mountains, plains, all the diverse wastelands…all without complaint. A sturdy, battle-hardened plane with a brave heart. Gretchen blinked, trying to restrain a wellspring of emotion.

'We,' she said, after clearing her throat, 'are going to strip everything unnecessary out of this one. The fuel tanks on yours detach, so we'll stuff them into the cargo compartment, doubling our range.' Gretchen tapped a pair of brackets on the underside of the airframe. 'Beneath my seat are two chemical rocket boosters, which fit here.'

She turned and gave the old man a weary smile. 'This world does not enjoy an evenly distributed gravitational field. There are huge disparities of mass inside the crust and core. Near the Escarpment there are eddies where g spikes three or four times surface normal. West of here, out in the Great Eastern Basin, there is an area of very low g. Our escape velocity will be drastically lowered once we enter the zone. We'll use the rockets when the air becomes too thin to impart any lift at all.'

Hummingbird blinked. 'And if no one is waiting in high orbit?'

'We fly back down.' Gretchen felt her stomach go cold. No sense in lying… 'I hope.'

'Hmm.' The nauallis clasped his hands and stared at the floor for a long time. When he looked up, a weight seemed to have lifted from him. 'Even so, flying such a distance will take time. So we had best get started.'

Gretchen nodded, then reached out her hand. The judge looked askance for a moment, then accepted her arm in rising. 'Let me get my gear – you need a special socket wrench to unbolt the fuel tanks.'

Three hours later, Hummingbird ducked through the door from the main building with the last of their baggage slung over his shoulder.

'I've good news,' he said, dumping the duffel bags on the floor of the hangar. Gretchen looked up from the cockpit of the Gagarin, her face streaked with grime, oil and tiny flakes of shredded plastic. The shockchair had been dismounted and moved aside, an effort which required cutting away the armrests to make room for the second chair from the other Midge. The compartment seemed very bare with the side panels torn out and everything stripped down to bare metal. Only the 3v of her kids and Russovsky's icon remained, tacked to the overhead. The power cell worked into the paper had finally failed, leaving only a static, fixed image. 'We needn't take more than one or two days' supply of food with us.'

The nauallis unsealed one of the bags and dumped out four or five packs of threesquares onto the floor. They made an audible clanking sound, stone striking stone. Gretchen tried to grin, but she was very tired again. Even the effort of dismounting everything which could be removed from the Midge had left her shaking.

'Infected?' Gretchen took the opportunity to sit down.

'Some surface dust must have gotten into the bag.' Hummingbird began separating the petrified bars from those still good. 'And our water is down to maybe three liters, plus whatever is in our suit reservoirs.'

'We can make more water,' Gretchen said, rubbing her eyes. 'The fuel cells generate waste H₂O as a byproduct. But they won't make food from nothing.'

The old Mйxica clicked his teeth. 'What progress?'

'Fuel tanks are moved and hooked up. I can't find any leaks, so I hope they're not there. If you help me lift in the second chair, I can bolt it in place. Then the rockets need to be mounted and control linkages tested.'

'And then?'

'Then we'll be done and I can lie down.' Her vision was getting hazy, but not from hallucinations. She started to slump over, then caught herself. 'What?'

'Go lie down now,' Hummingbird said. 'I can do the rest.'

'Okay.' Gretchen wiped her hands on her thighs, which made absolutely no difference to the grime on her gloves or legs. 'Think of anything else we can get rid of…I'm stumped. Weight is the enemy right now.'

Hummingbird watched her limp into the tunnel, a pensive expression on his seamed old face. Then he stood up and went to the second shockchair, which was sitting beside the cockpit door. He braced himself and started to lift, grunting in surprise at the weight.

On the open plains surrounding the base camp, sunset ushered in a long dusk. There were no towering mountains to the west to swallow the sun, plunging the land into shadow. Instead, the sun settled amiably toward a brassy gold horizon. Heavily laden, Gretchen limped down a sandy gully between the half-buried headquarters building and the lab. In the soft gilded light the empty doorways and barren eyesocket windows no longer seemed so disturbing. She wondered if Hummingbird's efforts to align the camp had driven away the shadows he claimed inhabited abandoned places.

Beyond the lab building she paused at the edge of the crude shuttle field. The most recent storm had destroyed both of the vehicle sheds. The eight-wheeled Armadillo carryalls had disappeared. Did we pack them up? Did Hummingbird do something with them?

'Enough procrastination,' Gretchen said to herself, sounding very much like her mother.

The Sif felt heavy in her hands. The gun carried a sense of solid menace, as though weapons obeyed some different order of density. Gretchen looked around, fretting at the thought of abandoning a perfectly good tool for almost no reason at all.

'But you're too heavy,' Anderssen said, speaking crossly at the shockgun. 'And useless.'

Letting go proved difficult, though, and she wandered back and forth at the edge of the camp for nearly an hour before stumbling across a narrow fissure in the earth. Something about the unexpected opening convinced her this was a safe place to discard the gun.

The Sif clanked and rattled down into the shadows. Gretchen tossed the ammunition canisters in one at a time as she walked the length of the fissure. The bandolier was easier – the cheap old leather was cracked and ugly – and she just tossed it into the crumpled ruins of an equipment shed.

In the gathering darkness – more than half of the sun was now hidden behind the western horizon – Gretchen could make out familiar pale gleaming lights in the wreckage. Politely, she pressed her fingertips to her forehead before limping back toward the headquarters building. She hoped the microfauna in the sand enjoyed the meal.

'Sister…I should get rid of all this stuff.' Gretchen fingered the tools on her belt and the work vest. There had to