Wasteland of flint

cabin of the ultralight was now very, very crowded. With the doors closed they were cheek by jowl. Anderssen reached across him and keyed up the preflight check. The sound of the fuel cells waking up and the engines turning over had never been so welcome. 'Diagrams of what to destroy…the eater had to be able to differentiate between targets.'

'Not an impossible step from such a mechanism to one which could recognize and replicate an equivalent molecular system.' Hummingbird tried to strap himself in but found the spacing between the seats very tight. Gretchen rolled her hip to the side, jamming her face against the window so he could lock in. 'At least in broad strokes. The thing on the ship could not sustain itself, not out of the magnetic field of the planet.'

Thinking about what he'd said, Gretchen reached across and tested his restraints. 'Solid. Okay, engines are up, fuel pressure is constant…controls are responding.'

The Gagarin shivered as the wheel brakes released. Gretchen goosed the engines slightly and the aircraft clattered out onto the sandy ground. One eye watching the fuel line readings, she turned the ultralight and they bounced and rattled across uneven ground toward the landing strip. After clearing the buildings, the Gagarin shivered, struck crosswise by a heavy gust.

'But…' Anderssen turned the aircraft nose to the wind and felt the wings flex slightly, even retracted. She flipped a series of switches on the overhead panel. Both wings began to extend, micromotors whining with effort. 'You're thinking creatures that can live down here can't survive beyond the influence of the, ah, the thing hiding in the world. They need its presence to live?'

Hummingbird nodded, trying to keep calm as the ultralight shimmied and swayed from side to side. The extending wings weren't providing any lift, not yet, but their cross section was providing the gusty, prying wind with plenty of surface area to press against. The Gagarin began to bounce backward across the field, raising clouds of fine, sticky dust with each hop.

'Even a nanomachine,' he said, gritting his teeth and clinging to the support bar as they slammed up and down, 'must be powered by some means. The safest way is a broadcast system, so they may be denied sustenance if they run wild. Hazarding a guess, I would say the sleeping valkar is leaking power on some wavelength the descendants of the planet-killers can absorb, can use. While they are within the beneficent aura of the entity, they can live, work, replicate themselves.'

The aircraft jounced sideways, throwing Hummingbird against the door.

'Making a copy of something like a human must use a lot of power.' A clanking sound signaled the wings reaching full extension. The sharp hops transformed into long, slow arcs. Gretchen settled her hands – still wrapped in bandages and feeling enormous – on the control stick and sideboard panel. 'Hold on. Here we go.'

Both engines flared to life as she ran up the power. The ultralight settled out of a bounce and Gretchen pushed to maximum thrust. The Gagarin began to move forward, wheels whirring across the gravel and sand. With the wings at full extension, the aircraft generated a tremendous amount of lift and they were airborne within seconds. The camp buildings rushed past under their wheels and Gretchen swung the ultralight around in a long, broad turn. They continued to climb.

The plains sprawled below them. The camp became a collection of match-boxes. Off to the east, the standing stones of the observatory and the jagged lines of the excavation trenches stood out against a dun-colored background.

'Comm check.' Gretchen clicked her throat mike live. 'Clear?'

'Loud and clear,' Hummingbird answered. The roar of wind and the hiss of the engines filled the tiny, cramped cockpit. 'It may be…' He paused and Gretchen wondered if he was at a loss for words. 'Perhaps the Ephesian life- form you saw – whatever had taken Russovsky's shape, and yours – learns in this way, by consuming another entity, by taking its memories and thoughts, even its physicality into itself.' The nauallis's voice was almost tentative.

'Well,' Gretchen said, filled with joy just to be airborne again, the nose of her ultralight pointed at the black vault of heaven. The Gagarin climbed steadily toward the southwest. Slowly, the dark sky swelled to fill the forward windows. The planet dropped behind, then bent away, the horizons receding into a white arc. 'Then it tried to consume my memories. I can't remember much of what happened, but I know it was painful and unpleasant.'

Hummingbird said nothing. Gretchen glanced aside at him and her eyebrows narrowed in concern. He looked ghastly. 'What?'

'If that is true…' He turned to look at her. 'How did it learn to make your shape? '

Gretchen blinked, then took a long swallow of water from her recycler tube. 'Well,' she said after thinking for a moment, 'we'll know pretty soon if I'm a copy.'

Ahead, the solid black bar of the sky was beginning to sparkle with the gleam of faint, diffuse stars. The hiss of the engines grew more strident as the air thinned.

Wind stirred in the empty hangar, scattering dust and hathol spores across the clean, smooth concrete. A rule-straight shadow delimited sun from shade, slowly edging toward the door frame as the sun moved in the sky. In the shadows, blowing sand and grit accumulated in a corner, gathered itself and began to exert an electrostatic field. More sand skittered across the floor. A nubbin of gravel compressed. The day continued to lengthen.

When the killing sun had passed zenith and the hangar was entirely in shadow, the collecting sand stirred, rose, sprouted long thin crystalline tubules. They knotted into the outline of two legs, a torso, a chest, arms, finally a head. The wind circled in the hangar, bringing a heavy cloud of dust and small stones.

Russovsky compressed out of the air, grit and debris rushing together with a sharp hiss. The shape's eyes opened and shook a dusty head. The husks and shells of the dead hathol and firten puffed away from a gleaming black skinsuit. Russovsky wiped her cheek, hand coming away covered with a glittering gray stain. She looked around the empty shell of a building.

Gone. He is gone. Russovsky considered her memories, finding them filled with moments of parting. In some of the vignettes there were tears, impassioned words, something she remembered as ‹loss| sorrowlonging›. She did not think these last two humans had lingered, delaying their departure, hoping to squeeze a few more seconds from the grasp of implacable time. They had moved with admirable efficiency. They had taken her Gagarin away.

Now there was something disorderly in her cold, perfect thoughts. The aircraft, the battered old Midge, held meaning – something tantalizing at the edge of comprehension. She wished the ultralight would return. Russovsky raised her hands, feeling the echo, the vibration of its presence. The machine had stood here, just so, wheels pressing against the concrete. Minute indentations had been left in the aggregate. Tiny flakes of rubberlike material from the wheels lay on the floor. Even the air itself, troubled by the wind as it was, had not yet forgotten the shapes of the wings, the body, the landing gear.

A shadow remained, still visible to her eyes in the chaos boiling behind the individual molecules of gas in the air. An absence where the Gagarin should stand. Something in her revolted at the void, pressed her to summon forth creation from nothingness, to fill an emptiness in the hangar which echoed dissonantly with her colorless memories.

Russovsky spread her hands and wind howled in the chamber. A dark yellow cloud roared in from outside, borne around her by billowing, violent zephyrs. Sand and gravel and dust flooded in, caught up in a standing tornado roaring and shrieking in the cavity. The roof groaned and shook, panels cracking away. All three walls shivered and the concrete floor splintered and cracked and crushed into more dust and grit.

The shape closed her hands. There was a thrumming whoomp and the air congealed.

When Russovsky dropped her hands, the Gagarin stood before her, wings retracted, metal struts gleaming with a newly manufactured shine. Even the wheels were glossy black. The shape paced around to the side and opened the pilot's door.

These memories, these motions seemed proper – they seemed right – and Russovsky wondered when a flush of pleasure would fill her heart, rising in her breast like the dawn wind. She settled into the seat. The display before her was cold and dark. Slender fingers flipped a series of switches on the ceiling panel. The right hand flexed the stick, checking the resistance and response of the control surfaces. She rolled her shoulders back and forth,