Wasteland of flint

Base Camp One

Another bone-deep cough wracked Gretchen's body, coupled with a shiver running from head to foot. Vapor leaking from her mask formed a rime of ice across her collarbone and goggles.

I'm going to freeze to death. The raw thought managed to force itself past crippling pain. Gretchen lifted her head, staring around in the darkness. Through the fog on her lenses, the queer lights had faded away and the nighted shape of Anderssen was gone. Heartened, she rolled up, feeling bone and muscle creak. Though her hands were tucked into her armpits, they had lost all feeling.

The single light on the upper floor of the main building shone clear and distinct, a welcome beacon in the darkness. Gretchen forced herself to her feet, the twinge of her brutalized soles barely noticeable against the hacking cough torturing her upper body. She swayed, dizzy and short of breath, but managed to stumble forward.

Putting one foot in front of the other was torturous work, but she kept her eyes on the light in the window and kept walking. The drifts of sand now seemed to be monstrous ridges.

Near the corner of the lab building, she stumbled and fell. Lying on the ground felt good – for a moment – but then the cold seeped into her suit again. Gretchen staggered up, then slid along the building wall, leaning into the concrete for support. At the corner, she took a careful look around – saw nothing – and then limped stiffly across the quad to the hangar door.

The pressure door was locked. Bumping the access plate with her hip evoked no reaction.

'Shit.' She lifted her wrists – eyes averted from the lacerated, discolored flesh – and clicked the comm band alive with her chin. 'Hummingbird? Hummingbird?'

Anderssen? His response was immediate and surprised. Where are you?

'Outside, outside the hangar pressure door. I can't get in.'

The side door has frozen up. Come around to the main airlock. It's clear now.

'Sure,' she grunted, slumping forward against the wall. A wave of dizziness threatened to pitch her over onto the ground again but the cold ceramic of the hangar door caught her. She decided to take just a moment to regain her strength. 'I'd love to. I'm hurt.'

Gretchen jerked awake, barely cognizant of someone helping her stumble through the pressure doors on the main airlock. A little old man in a z-suit was holding her up, his wiry shoulder under her arm. Then they were in the common room and the air – the air was warm enough to breathe without a mask – and there were lights and a heater humming on the floor.

Hummingbird sat her down and bundled blankets around her shoulders. A minute later he was tipping a cup of warm – not hot – syrupy liquid into her mouth. Alcohol and sugar and something mediciny flooded her throat and then a matching warmth spread through her chest.

'Show me your hands.' Hummingbird sounded concerned and his face tightened into a grim mask when he saw the blue-black sheen to her flesh and the ragged welts where the jeweled chains had bound her to the earth. His green eyes lifted to stare into hers. 'What happened?'

'She was here – outside – she caught me on my way back from getting rid of the Sif.'

'The Russovsky echo?'

'Yes,' Gretchen mumbled, the frail burst of adrenaline ebbing away. 'She looked…just like me.'

Completely drained, Anderssen curled up and fell sideways into the blankets. Hummingbird rummaged around and found another blanket for a pillow. He put the heaters on either side of her and started to warm more of the rum/cough syrup/energy concentrate mixture on the camp stove.

He made her drink more of the nasty fluid. 'The shape attacked you?'

'Ittried…' She frowned, trying to remember. Her head felt very strange inside, all jumbled and disordered. For some reason – and now she became cognizant of not knowing why – memories of her children and graduate school were very sharp and close at hand. Remembering what had happened earlier in the day was suddenly impossible. 'Something happened,' she said helplessly. 'I saw her, but she was me. There were shining lights in the sand. I can't remember everything…properly.'

'Were there two figures? Or just one, which changed?'

'One.' She mumbled, feeling her wounded fingers throb. 'I couldn't move – something had hold of me, of my hands…and you were there. There were – I had a vision! Yes, there were visions in my mind, someplace ancient, dead…under a foul yellow sky.'

The nauallis squinted at her curiously, then carefully examined her hands. Clicking his teeth together in thought, the old man sprayed them with something cold and prickling from his kit, then carefully cleaned the welts. The pain of his touch lanced through her, drawing a whining cry, robbing the last breath from her lungs. At some point, she passed out.

'I'm really doing very well,' Gretchen said, staring at her hands wrapped in more gauze and stinging from the dermaseal working away on the freeze damage. 'Between my feet and hands I look like a cirq clown.' She sighed, shaking her head, and gave Hummingbird an aggrieved look. 'Aren't you the lucky one? You crash and walk away, while I fly halfway round the world and am fine, then I'm here at base camp for two days and I look like a tree-rigger on leave.'

'You're lucky,' he said, giving her a severe look. 'Your medband was working the whole time and dispensed enough circulatory booster to keep you from losing any fingers or toes.'

'Great – I could have suffered heart failure instead.' Being flippant was making her tired, so she decided to stop.

'You're alive and will heal.' Hummingbird squatted at her side, peeling back an eyelid with his thumb. 'You might have more drug than blood in your system right now, but you don't seem to have become psychotic.'

'Yet.' Gretchen felt grainy and tired and wrung out. Again. 'Is the Gagarin ready to go?'

The old man nodded. In the morning light streaming through the round windows, he seemed rather drawn and gray. 'You'll want to check everything.'

'I slept a day?' He nodded. 'Then we need to get in the air. Where's my chrono?'

Hummingbird held up a mangled, pitted chunk of wire and metal. 'No chrono.'

'Fine. What time is it?'

'Six-thirty,' Hummingbird said after rather ostentatiously checking his own bare wrist.

'Time to mount up.' Gretchen lifted her gauze-muffled hands. 'Help, please?'

The hangar door groaned, both track engines long since consumed by the microflora, as they dragged on the chains. Reticulated metal clanked and rattled and the door inched up. Gretchen found she could lend a hand by clinging limply to the chain and letting gravity and weight do the work.

As the door rose in fits and starts, the morning sun blazed on their faces, shining hot through unusually clear, steady air. Gretchen peered suspiciously at the lab building. There were no mysterious figures silhouetted against the skyline on the dune ridges, nothing lurking in the shadows of the recessed doorways.

'What did I see?' She let the chain fall from her fingers, turning toward the Gagarin. The ultralight looked rather strange with the rockets strapped underneath and its wings folded up in parking mode. The other Midge was gone – stripped of parts and then broken down and scattered in the desert. Hummingbird had been busy while she slept, going here and there, scattering their belongings to the four directions.

Gretchen hoped, with a rather sick, dreadful yearning, there would be a shuttle waiting for them at height, ready to take them away into a universe of hot showers and sprung beds and differently flavored threesquare bars. I don't want to come back here. Not even if they offer me the dig director slot.

'As I said before,' the nauallis grumbled, 'you saw an echo. A copy engendered by your presence on this world.'

'With my memories – my speech patterns? What could make a copy like that?'

'Something,' Hummingbird said, opening the door on his side of the Gagarin. 'Descended from a race of machines designed to disassemble organic molecules into their component atomic parts. You saw the matrix of patterns in the cylinder.'

'Maps.' Gretchen opened her door and – wincing – slid into the seat. Hummingbird was not a large man, but the