Wasteland of flint

wrists.

'Wha -' Gretchen rallied, violently collecting her thoughts. 'You don't look like me.'

The stance was all wrong, weight evenly distributed, not leaning to one side, favoring the wounded foot; even the face seemed distorted – lopsided – one eye fractionally higher than the other.

Hummingbird will be able to tell. Gretchen found the thought a frail comfort. If he has time to see as she rushes out of the darkness or creeps up behind him.

The chains of jewels dragging at her arms pulsed with delicate, subtle color. Gretchen felt something change and shift in her mind. Half-familiar memories stirred, clamoring for her attention. They felt strange – not soft and faded, burnished by the passage of time – but cold and clear, freshly struck from the die.

A sullen yellow sky filled with hundreds of bright pinpricks loomed overhead, a harsh, claustrophobic vault crushing the breath from her lungs. In every direction endless ranks of vast obsidian towers soared in counterpoint to the sulfurous heavens. She turned, images blurring past – more towers, some shattered and cracked with age, some newly raised from the plain.

In the distance, heat haze shimmered in deserted avenues, yielding the sickly black image of a vast, implacable lake. Somewhere, beyond the horizon, down just such an avenue as this, ringed by the same colossal buildings, the lake was real; oily, infinitely deep, stretching from horizon to horizon, a choking black band wrapped around the wizened throat of an ancient, dying planet.

'No – I was never there!' Gretchen shouted aloud, filled with an all-encompassing fear for her own memories, her own thoughts. Voices roared in her ears, shouting and accusing her of monstrous deeds. 'I'm not one of the things in the library! I'm not one of them!'

A cloud of brilliant stars spanned the arc of a blue-green world. Great whorls of white cloud obscured most of the surface, but mottled green and brown continents peeked through. Seas and oceans blazed blue, shining in the light of a dim yellow sun.

Across the face of the void, stars rippled and twisted, distorted by something vast. Space boiled and tore, splitting aside. A shape forced its way through the burning gap, something nearly dwarfing the world shining below. Tatters of space and time flew past, the light of distant suns still reflected in long streamers of darkness. An ebon shape swept across the world, blotting out any view of the green hills or shining seas.

In the passing wake, the fabric of space reknit, stars falling back into their accustomed courses, the glare of the sun once more traveling as it had done for millennia. Yet the spilling, fluid darkness already englobed the world, a tightening black web, shutting out the sun, blocking the light of the stars.

'No…' Gretchen tried to concentrate, to hold back a titanic flood of images – not her thoughts, not things she had done – from overwhelming her mind. They crowded in, pushing aside memories of her friends at the university, time spent hiking in the tall pines behind the steading, the smell of coffee perking in her dorm room, the harsh taint of diesel in the fog as she hurried across the Quad to class. 'Give them back!'

But her memories were dying. Wiped away. Replaced by images of a horizon boiling with black ink, of shining silver sparks raining down out of the sky, splashing into the sea, tangling in saw-leafed palmettos. The single burning image of a four-fingered hand lifting a muddy cylinder from a stream.

'Not mine. Not mine. Not mine!' Gretchen wailed, clutching desperately at carefully hoarded memories of two little girls and one little boy. The sound of Isabelle crying, swaddled in fluffy blankets. Duncan's face screwed up in a pout, thin little arms crossed over his chest, one of his grandfather's flannel shirts rolled up sixty times to fit. Tristan declaring she would be planetary president right after third form. Everything they had ever done or said or shouted. Bare feet pattering down wooden stairs into the kitchen.

A sharp sense of disassociation overtook her, a threshold breached by urgent need.

The sense of brilliant clarity from her dreams was suddenly there, around her, a perfect, frozen world of absolutes. Black stains upon her memory shone very clear in this incandescent vision. Mine, she raged, driving back the distorting clouds. Where the shimmering visions had lain entwined with her own imperfection, she summoned up every detail from faint traces, from ghosts, from the neural residue left in the rubble of invasion. Mine!

For a moment, she hung in a balance, staring into endless corridors of memory, where every lost day, every forgotten word, every kiss was still alive, poised for her to plunge into them again. Youth. Tiny wrinkled pink babies drawing breath for their first wailing cry. Tiny hands clasped in hers. Frost on the porch in the morning. Melting snow plunging from the steep, slate roofs of the university halls as spring sunlight shone through the last clouds of winter.

Freezing cold engulfed her hands and Gretchen hissed in pain. Her eyes were still open, staring at sand spun with a web of jewels, but the vision was very distant from her thought. A jolt of physicality shook her body, tearing her mind away from the swarm of memories and plunging her once more into the cold, bruised, bleeding, frightened body crouched on a bare stone outcropping amid desolation. 'Ahhhh! Oh Sister…that hurts!'

Her work gloves and the z-suit covering her forearms had been eaten away, leaving nothing to protect her skin from the subzero Ephesian night. Her fingertips were turning black. Gretchen clutched both hands to her chest and cried out at a fresh burst of pain.

A rasping cough tore itself from her chest, then another. Tears froze at the corners of her eyes. Still afraid to move, she curled herself up on the bare stone, trying to protect her ruined hands with the bulk of her body. Cold closed in on her, heat seeping away through the damaged suit into the open sky.

In the darkness, Anderssen frowned, displeased. There are no answers here.

Aboard the Turan

Tonuac, shipgun at high port, scuttled up to a pressure door at the end of the corridor. A dozen yards back, Hadeishi tensed, waiting for Heicho Felix – who was covering the Marine on point with her Whipsaw – to wave him forward. Tonuac crouched, keeping his head below the level of a glassite panel set into the door, and listened intently. A moment later he made a hand sign. Felix did not turn, but her hand slashed at the floor of the corridor. Traffic ahead.

Hadeishi settled in to wait. Maratay was right behind him, making sure the hardwire for the comm relay spooled out properly while keeping an eye on the chu-sa, who as an officer – a Fleet officer at that – needed constant supervision. Clavigero was ten meters behind, at the last bulkhead frame, watching the backtrail for unwanted visitors.

Nearly two hours had passed since they'd broken in through the airlock. The Turan had proved vaster than Hadeishi had expected. The schematics did not do justice to the endlessly snaking passages, countless levels, ramps, elevators, and gangways they had traversed to reach this point. From his handheld, Mitsu knew the corridor ahead was a main artery in the primary hab core of the refinery. Here, at last, they were reaching territory where they might encounter the crew.

'There's a galley and common area listed on the spec,' he whispered to Felix. 'Through the hatch and to the right about twenty meters.'

'I know.' The heicho grinned mischievously over her shoulder. 'You know, in the sims, everything was very shipshape.'

Hadeishi swallowed a guffaw. Nothing they'd seen so far had been clean. A thin layer of oily, pastelike grime covered every visible surface. Some of the gangways they'd climbed had left black stains on his gloves and boots. The chu-sa had neglected to pack an analysis comp with a sampler, but he suspected all this finely coated debris was residue from the refinery operations. He could feel the ship vibrating through his boots and shoulder – somewhere downship enormous machines were grinding raw asteroid rock down to a molecular grit for ore separation. Some process of the sort was leaking this slippery, invasive grime. Civilians…is it like this on commercial, licensed miners, too?

Shaking his head slightly, he nodded to Felix. 'Is this a bad spot? In the sims, I mean.'

'No.' Felix adjusted her grip on the Whipsaw, dark brown eyes troubled. 'So we're going to go careful.'

Tonuac motioned, drawing her attention back to the door. The point-man keyed the pressure door open, revealing a brightly-lit corridor with rubberized carpet. Tonuac eased out, swinging his gun sharply from side to side, then signed all-clear. Felix was moving the instant Tonuac cleared the door, one hand guiding Hadeishi through the opening. Behind them, Maratay scuttled along, playing out hardwire from his spool. Clavigero sprinted up the