Wasteland of flint

yet, until hot air streaming from the heaters permeated all compartments. Then it would be too hot until the environmentals adjusted themselves. She sat down – in something like real gravity – and tugged the helmet free from the z-suit. Parker, sitting across the table in the crew common area, slid a cup of fresh, hot coffee to her.

'There's some creamer, but no milk,' he said.

'Thank you. Black is fine.' The cup was very warm in her hands. Three sugar packets from a pocket of her z-suit disappeared into the oily black liquid. She took a long swallow, feeling warmth flood her chest. 'Better,' she said after finishing the cup. 'Better. Are the Lieutenant and Flores still down in Engineering?'

Magdalena nodded, her attention focused on sucking pale red fluid and chunks of raw meat from a mealbag.

Gretchen studiously kept her eyes away from the Hesht dinner. 'Mister Parker, do we have flight control and comm up?'

'Sort of,' the pilot said, putting down his cup. 'Attitude controls are mostly working, though there are still miles of conduit to replace for the main engines. Luckily, the fine control jets use compressed air and need only on/off signals to operate. They work fine – since they're mechanical. Navigation is up, and we have lost some planetary altitude, so when we do have engines live again I need to make an adjustment burn to put us back in the proper orbital. We have spin in this hab ring, but not the others. Main comp is up, so you have shipboard comm and info retrieval – if you can find a working display.'

He turned toward Magdalena, who was squeezing the mealbag in one paw, making thick goo ooze into her open mouth. Parker jerked back toward Gretchen. 'Ah…we've found the experimental transmitter, which is on its own fuel cell system, but I haven't messed with it. The cat can do that later, I guess. The main comm array is down until we rebuild power, but we're close enough to the Cornuelle that our suit radios still work.'

'Unless you're in the labs,' Gretchen commented, 'which are shielded.'

'What did you find down there?' Parker stole a glance at Bandao, who was sitting with his own cup in his hands, content to say nothing. The two Marines were equally quiet and unobtrusive, sitting back from the edge of the table. Out of his combat suit, Fitzsimmons was of medium height, very fit, with broad shoulders and curly blue-black hair. Deckard was thinner, with a lanky build and a ruddy complexion. Carlos, still looking miserable, sat beside Parker, slowly chewing on his thumb. 'Did you find the…weapon?'

'Yes.' Gretchen drained her cup and set it down on the spotlessly clean tabletop. 'One of the scientists working on the planet – a geologist named Russovsky – found some stone cylinders in one of the canyons on the big mountain range. She brought an artifact back to base camp and showed her find to Doctor McCue, the dig supervisor. I think – not from anything said in record, but hearing between the lines – the lead archaeologist, a man named Clarkson, then took the cylinder from McCue and returned to the ship.'

Gretchen looked down at the table, finding a ring of coffee-colored condensation where her warm cup had stood on the cold metal. She squeaked her finger through the liquid, drawing a line down the middle of the circle.

'Clarkson tried to see what was inside the cylinder with a high-powered sensor. Half of the tube seemed to be empty – but it wasn't, not really. Half seemed to be filled with a tightly packed membrane, like the filaments lining a human lung. The lab's isotope decay analysis estimates the cylinder is almost three million years old.' A sharp, short laugh escaped her. 'Clarkson was pretty sure the device wasn't working anymore, or if it was, it was a kind of book or information storage device, like a 3v pack. Well, he was right, in a way.'

Her finger slashed across the circle of moisture.

'His probe injected enough energy into the empty chamber to make a sort of gas of very, very small particles expand violently. A thin wall between the two chambers broke down and the gas flooded into the membranes within a fraction of a second. They mixed, violently, and the cylinder broke open.'

'A binary round,' grunted Fitzsimmons, his brown eyes gleaming in the darkness. 'But not the usual sort of explosion, I suppose.'

'No.' Gretchen shook her head ruefully. 'The gaslike particles, I think, were some kind of tiny nanomachines. They dissolved the membranes – destroyed them – but at the same time they learned a pattern from the arrangement of the filaments. In less than a second, they were trained and they acquired enough raw material to duplicate themselves. Pressure expanded…'

Three fingers stabbed into the circle and swirled the last fragments of moisture out into an unsightly blotch on the tabletop.

'The weapon was released from its container and into the atmosphere.' Gretchen sighed. 'Clarkson had failed to evacuate the examination chamber, which ordinarily would not have been a problem, but in this case the waste gases in the unit atmosphere were fuel for more nanomachines. I'm pretty sure the machines ignore plain atomic components – O and N and so on – but they chew up CO₂ for lunch, and any kind of long-chain molecule in their attack pattern for dinner. Pressure built in the chamber, and the eaters reached the pressure seals.

'If the Company had not purchased second rate containment pods,' Gretchen continued, 'the eaters would have been contained. Their programming did not happen to include the stainless steel forming most of the pod walls. Unfortunately, a flexible sealant forming the join between the instrument package and the main unit was composed of long-chain polymers which were on the 'menu.'

'They escaped into the power and data conduit above the containment unit. The sheathing of the power cables gave them more food, allowing them to reproduce at an exceptionally rapid rate. I would guess, from the cut-off time of the recording unit, that they dropped power in the lab ring within sixty seconds of escape, and had penetrated into the starboard side of the ship within two minutes. Less than ten meters away is the starboard power coupling beside the boat bay. As the wave front propagated, power collapsed, and the engineering team – who had no idea, I imagine, that Doctor Clarkson was even aboard – started an emergency shutdown of the grid.

'Within five minutes, everyone on the starboard side of the ship was dead. The engineers, who had suited up on the run, will have run right through the weapon cloud without even noticing anything. Then, by the time they reached the boat bay, the eaters would have reproduced inside their suits…and you saw the result.'

'Wait a moment.' Fitzsimmons leaned forward, his tanned forehead creased in thought. 'What happened to the eaters after they filled the ship?'

'They ate themselves.' Gretchen looked around for something to clean up the puddle, then grimaced. No rags. There are no rags. 'The last of their programming broke them apart when there was nothing left to consume. All they left was a cloud of component elements.'

'And what happened to that?' Fitzsimmons looked mildly disgusted.

Gretchen nodded toward the rear of the ship. 'Most of it will have been circulated into the air purification system, which continued to run on backup power while it detected impurities in the air supply. But when the cloud was processed, there was nothing but pure air left, and the system shut down automatically. The rest will have collected here and there, as grainy white dust -'

Parker suddenly snorted, coughing and spraying coffee across the conference table. He made a horrible face as he turned to Gretchen. 'You mean this isn't nondairy creamer?'

Her ears covered with a thick cap of New Aberdeen cashmere, z-suit helmet parked on the display panel, Gretchen leaned back in a chair reduced to metal strips in the lab ring control cube. Curving hallways lined with hatches stretched up to her left and right. Light from the lab holding the broken cylinder spilled out into the hall. It was still very cold – the heaters in the lab spaces had failed to turn on with the rest – and Gretchen's breath puffed white as she hummed to herself.

On the display – only half of which was working – v-panes were running, speeding through the day of the accident. A crewman wandered through one feed, eating pine nuts from a bag, then out of one frame and into another. Mostly she watched empty rooms and quiet machinery idling in standby. All of the scientists were down on the planet, working at the main camp. Gretchen sighed, bored, and speeded up the replay.

Almost immediately, blurred figures appeared and she dialed back ten minutes. 'Finally!'

A tall, lean man with a neat beard and field jacket swung down from the hab access tube, landing heavily in the partial gravity. His hair was silvered, with a few streaks of black remaining, and he was wearing a heavy pair of sunglasses. A battered, grimy fieldpack, bulging with a heavy weight burdened narrow shoulders.

'Doctor Clarkson – coming home with his prize,' Gretchen murmured, keenly interested, watching the man hurry