Wasteland of flint

up most of the power conduit runs. Some survived, so we have lights in the main core and some sections, but everything replaced three maintenance cycles ago is gone.'

Gretchen wrinkled her nose. 'Bad parts?'

Maggie nodded. 'The repair logs show they swapped out most of the original conduit for new two years ago, as part of a systems upgrade. The new conduit was supposed to have a higher load tolerance, so they replaced all of the high-draw lines with this yherech-kwlll – pardon – inferior product. So the lights are on, some comp panels are up, but most of the hatches don't work, and the drives are offline, along with sensors, weapons, and the boat bay doors.'

'Okay.' Gretchen stared at the hatch into the clean room. 'What about this one?'

Maggie shrugged. 'The lights are on, try it.'

Gretchen took a breath, nodded abruptly and stepped to the door. Then she stopped, unwilling to touch the controls. She felt Bandao and Maggie staring at her and became aware of the man's shipgun, raised and pointing past her at the door. A smile twitched her lips. Instinct! Danger in the high grass! As if his gun will stop this thing, if it's still in there. Her forefinger stabbed the button and the hatch trembled. A motor whirred – the sound audible even through her suit insulation – and the heavy steel recessed, then drew up into an overhead panel.

There were bits and pieces of metal and ceramic scattered on the deck. Gretchen recognized the metal inserts from the soles of a pair of dig boots much like her own. The deck surface was a dark, irregular metal, and she realized the usual nonskid coating had been destroyed. She padded across the deck, giving a wide berth to the tumbled parts of a belt, a pen, a scratched and dented v-pad. Her eye shied away from two irregular shining white pebbles. Someone's teeth. I didn't need to see that, she thought fiercely.

The comp panel running the isolation chamber had power, but had gone through an abrupt shutdown. Gretchen studied the glyphs for a moment, then tapped in RESTART and RESUME. Magdalena leaned in at her side, staring into the chamber.

'These are the seal status indicators?' The Hesht ran a metal-sheathed claw across a line of winking red glyphs. Gretchen nodded, watching the system start up. The panel seemed sluggish, and one pane displayed a constant list of init errors. Magdalena hissed. 'Sloppy work. The entire seal is gone. Why don't they make them of solid metal or ceramic?'

Gretchen shrugged, concentrating on getting the panel operative again. 'Company probably bought from the low bidder. Here we go…'

A v-feed opened on the panel, showing the interior of the isolation chamber and the rocky, corroded-looking cylinder. Gretchen slid a control down, and the image rewound with a flash, ending with a similar image, though now the cylinder was intact and the lighting slightly different.

'Replay,' Gretchen muttered, finding the glyph for movement-returning-to-the-source and tapping the stylized warrior in a loincloth holding two reeds crowned with white fluff. '…with audio overlay.' Another tap, and a timer began to run in one corner of the image.

For a moment there was no sound and Gretchen frowned. Magdalena laughed softly and her claw-tip danced across a series of controls. An excited male voice suddenly filled Gretchen's helmet comm.

'…on day six-flint-knife, in the month of Offering Flowers, an artifact described by image log seven-seven-two was recovered from the surface of Ephesus Three with some assistance from Miss Russovsky, a post-doc performing a routine geophysical survey of the planet. This is the first artifact we have found which is of an obvious and patently manufactured origin.' There was a throaty, satisfied laugh, and Gretchen's nostrils flared. She decided she did not like the speaker, whoever he was. Assistance? You mean this Russovsky found the damned thing and brought it to you like a good little student – or did you take it from her?

'Initial analysis shows a metallic cylinder surrounded by a matrix of sedimentary rock. The encrusting mixture is of interest, indicating the cylinder lay in mud or clay. Preliminary isotopic decay readings suggest an age for the matrix of nearly three million years.' The laugh came again, and this time there was a sense of relief in the voice. 'This places the artifact well within the timeframe of known First Sun activities.'

Gretchen felt the cold chill flood back into her stomach. What a fool!

'Doctor McCue has suggested that we isolate the artifact and send it back to the Company labs for more extensive examination, but I believe it is safer and more prudent for us to make an initial survey here, aboard the ship.' The voice settled, becoming pedantic and measured.

'She suggests the object may be dangerous, but if so, would it not be wiser to examine the artifact here – far from inhabited space? Any violent event would then affect only this one ship, and of course, myself. A loss, to be sure, but far better than losing Mars or Novoya Rossiya!'

Gretchen shook her head in amazement at the man's ego. She could feel him thinking, even through the distance of the recording, and he was so, so eager to see what was inside the cylinder. Any real thought of caution or wariness was entirely disregarded.

'Luckily,' the voice continued, 'the limestone matrix does not interfere with most of our sensors here in the lab. I am going to try a low-power microwave scan first, just to see what the exterior really looks like…'

A succession of images unfolded – the cylinder's crusted surface was mapped, showing each ridge and bump and crevice in the stone – then the cylinder itself, a smooth metal tube, closed seamlessly at each end. There were no markings or signs on the outside of the metal, or at least none shown by the initial scans.

'I am initiating a low power intrusive scan, to see if the surface is permeable to x-ray.'

Gretchen forced herself not to flinch as an emitter ring descended and began a pass along the length of the cylinder. At her side, she felt Maggie stiffen, and Bandao mutter: 'Idiot – what if it's a booby trap, or a bomb?'

The image of the cylinder on the v-pane did not react, and a second image replaced the first. A murky picture showing the outlines of the limestone matrix, a metallic shell – very thin – and then a cavity within.

'Odd,' echoed the voice from the past. 'Half of the tube is solid, half empty. Wait – perhaps the solid half is only very dense…'

The image zoomed, focusing in, and zoomed again, revealing a dense, interlocking system of membranes and fluted, intertwined protrusions.

'Looks like a lung,' Bandao said, staring sideways at the display.

'Some kind of structure,' the voice continued, 'very, very dense. The separations between the alveoli-like structures are barely measurable. Yet they exist. Hmmm…an information storage structure? Could this be a book?'

Gretchen had to suppress a start; the hard, dry voice of Green Hummingbird was whispering in her memory. A book? Or some other storage media? The man's voice started to trend upward, filling with a rush of excitement.

'It must be a book,' greed dripped into his voice. 'Or a visual storage mechanism. Ah, what a prize that would be! But how is it accessed?' The image shifted to focus on the empty half of the cylinder. 'And what is this space for? Why use only half of the container? Hmmm…perhaps the empty half is not exactly empty?'

A glyph appeared in one corner of the recording, showing the visual feed was switching to a different sensor. Gretchen squinted at the icon, but didn't recognize the symbol. 'What's that?' she asked.

'Super-shortwave sensor,' Bandao answered with a slight hesitation, face tense. 'It interpolates to sub-x-ray definition for medical use – but he's a fool to use a high power probe on this thing.'

'…beginning scan,' the recording announced. The image tightened, flashed blank, then focused again. The 'empty' half of the tube was momentarily revealed as a murky soup of tiny spinning particles, then the image jerked, the tube split in half and there was a warning whoop of sound from the recording. Then everything went black and the panel beeped quietly, indicating the end of the image file.

'Well,' Gretchen said after a moment. 'I guess you should have been here, Mister Bandao.'

The gunner shook his head, his face a tight mask. 'I'm not disappointed to come late. If I had been here before, I would have put the bastard down.'

With that, Bandao left, swinging angrily out of the lab and bounding off up the ring toward the main accessway. Gretchen watched him go, but said nothing, and did not call him back. Instead, she turned to Maggie and said: 'Can you make this panel play back the last part frame by frame?'

The Hesht coughed in amusement, her claws dancing across the display controls.

Sighing with relief, Gretchen thumbed the release mechanisms for her helmet and heard a sharp click as they retracted. Fresh, chill air bathed her face. The ship would be cold for hours