Wasteland of flint

into the number one isolation lab. A moment later, a woman entered the lab ring by the same tube. Her tied-back hair was long, orange-red and very curly. She was also dressed in field kit, with a pocket-covered vest, sunglasses perched on her forehead and linen pants tucked into her boots. 'And our mathematician in residence, Doctor McCue.'

Gretchen felt a pang, seeing such familiar-looking people. She'd never met either of them, though the faces matched the briefing materials provided by the Company. But they felt so much like her friends on Ugarit, or the other graduate students and professors at the university. And now they're gone, rendered down for Parker's nondairy creamer.

She ignored Clarkson in his lab, following McCue from camera to camera as the woman wound her way through the maze of cubicles and rooms. The mathematician was pushing a g-box in front of her, a dented steel case with a built-in anti-grav, controlled by a hand unit. On the far side of the lab ring from the main control station, she stopped in front of a heavy reinforced hatchway.

Gretchen sat up, puzzled. She'd walked through the whole ring…she hadn't noticed a security door. But McCue's image punched in a keycode and the heavy blast door swung up and away, revealing a specimen vault and a bit of a room filled with racks of bins and cargo crates stacked on the floor. Then the door closed, and she was left with a nice picture of the hatchway.

'Well. What does Doctor McCue have in her box, which was so valuable it went straight to the vault?'

She advanced the recording, flipping ahead ten minutes. No change. Then she blinked – a smoky haze swept down the corridor, flames leaping from empty air. The flooring blackened and warning lights began to flash. Lighting in the hallway flickered, then failed. Gretchen tasted bile, knowing what had to happen next.

The hatchway cycled up, and Doctor McCue stepped out, alarm clear in her round, freckled face. She started to call out, raising her left arm – the shining band of a comm winked in the remaining light. Gretchen bit her lip, teeth clenched tight. A cloud of gray coalesced out of the air and McCue staggered, throwing up her hand uselessly. Her clothing vanished in sudden flame, burning away with frightening speed, then her flesh sloughed away into nothing, and there was a flash of bone and red meat.

The gray-and-black cloud lingered for a moment, then dispersed in a drifting cloud of white dust and bits and pieces of metal scattered on the floor. The hatchway remained open for a moment, and Gretchen could see the edge of the g-box, then the door rumbled closed, cutting off the vault lights, plunging the hallway into darkness.

Video replay ended with a ping and a motion-ceasing glyph.

'That's a hard thing to watch,' rumbled a voice at Gretchen's shoulder. Sergeant Fitzsimmons was standing beside her, his black Marine z-suit blending into the dimness of the room. He had a bundle in his hands. 'Sorry to bother you, ma'am, but I thought you might need something for the cold.' He grinned. 'But that's a prettier hat than I had in my ruck. I like the…ah…reindeer?'

'Oh.' Gretchen touched the thick, felty plush of the cap on her head. 'My mum makes them for all the kids,' she said, tugging at the brightly-colored, shapeless mass. 'Thank you for the thought, Sergeant. But Ugarit had its own bad weather, and Mars was bitterly cold. I've plenty of warm things.'

Gretchen managed a smile, thinking of trudging across the brittle, rocky permafrost to the Polaris site, stiff in a triply-insulated z-suit and respirator. The Marine had a gray-green service wool cap and a pair of gloves, also a foul olive color, in his hands. Good enough for our slowly heating ship, she thought with a hidden frown, but not good enough to keep your hands and ears attached on Mars.

'Good,' he said, stuffing the cap and gloves into a cargo pouch on the front of his suit. 'Do you need help getting that vault door open?'

Gretchen started to shake her head – she had a video of McCue's keycode – but then realized refusing the offer might be rude. Might need a big, brawny Marine sometime. She stood up, snugging the sherpa cap under her ears. 'Thanks,' she said, 'I don't think there'll be any trouble, but you never know…'

The vault door proved to be hidden behind a standard wall panel. Gretchen supposed the panel had slid down automatically during the power failure. Fitzsimmons's combat bar made a suitable lever to pop the panel free from the floor, and then he rolled it up with one hand. The vault hatch was closed, and Gretchen stepped in – lips pursed in concern – to find the keypad in ruins. All of the pressure surfaces had eroded away, leaving only a contact panel and some pitlike holes where wires, perhaps, had once run.

'This is just fine!' Gretchen rapped the panel without result.

'Ma'am, let me try,' the Marine waited politely until Gretchen stepped away, then drew a v-pad from his belt, unfolded a set of waxy-looking stems from the back and – humming softly to himself – matched them up with the holes. After a moment the v-pad beeped and the schematic of a keypad appeared on its glassy face. 'Try this,' Fizsimmons said, suppressing a pleased grin.

Gretchen tapped in the code recorded by the surveillance cameras. The vault door made a chuff sound, then rolled silently away into the overhead. The vault room was entirely dark. 'Very handy,' she said, handing the device back to the sergeant.

'We try,' he said in a particularly dry tone, flicking a glowbean against the far wall. 'Sister bless, do they make such a mess all the time?'

Gretchen stepped into a crowded room, now lit by a pervasive blue glow. Doctor McCue's g-box was sitting on the deck amid a wild jumble of straw-shaped mineral core samples. She stepped carefully around the striated tubes – most had broken apart, leaving a wash of grit and sand on the floor – and picked up the controller for the g-box. It hummed to life, and the box lifted up and drifted to an empty section of deck.

'No,' Gretchen said absently, 'the core samples will have been in packing material and a cargo crate – they're just stiffened cellulose and a sealant – very tasty, I imagine.' She keyed the box to open, and the top latch released with a clank. Kneeling, she lifted the lid and shone her hand lamp inside.

'Oh, now…' She let out a long, low whistle of surprise. 'That is beautiful.'

Warily, Fitzsimmons leaned over. Inside the box was a chunk of stone – perhaps half a meter long and ten centimeters thick – a deep sandy red streaked with cream, glowing in the light of Anderssen's lamp. Gretchen brushed a fine layer of sandstone dust away, revealing a handsbreadth-wide whorl. A tapered tail of ribbed shell curled around the impression of stalklike legs.

'See, Sergeant? The fruit of some ancient Ephesian sea, preserved by chance in sandy mud, along with our… friend.'

Most of the fossil was buried in the stone, and lying alongside the ancient cephalopod was the unmistakable shape of a machined metal cylinder. Like the artifact in the isolation lab, the cylinder was crusted with limestone aggregate.

Gretchen bit her lip gently, tracing the outline of the device with a gloved finger. 'Russovsky's geological survey found wonders.'

Fitzsimmons stood up, his face pale. 'Ma'am – I know you won't like to hear this – but we should jettison this thing right away. What if it goes off like the other one?'

Gretchen looked up, face pinched with distaste. In that moment, she suddenly knew exactly how Clarkson had felt, clutching the prize close to his chest, rushing to make the first analysis. He would see what no one had seen in three million years – he alone would look upon mystery revealed and he alone would learn truth… But the open fear on the Marine's big, bluff face was too real to ignore. She looked back at the cylinder, at the marvelous piece of shale, at the delicate beauty of the shell and its ancient inhabitant, all trapped together by circumstance. The most beautiful, most striking, most wonderful thing I've ever seen. How did McCue keep from taking this to her laboratory, subjecting it to her experiments? Russovsky had the very luck to find this. If the cylinder is a First Sun device…my god.

'Ma'am?' Fitzsimmons touched her shoulder, gently, shaking her out of the reverie. His voice was soft and insistent. 'Doctor Anderssen, we have to isolate this weapon. Right now.'

'You're right,' Gretchen stood up, shaking her head. She felt a little shaky. 'Let's close up the g-box and put it in an airlock we're not using. That should hold the eaters if they escape, and we can vent the lock to space if necessary.'

'Doc, listen to me.' Fitz stood as well, towering over her. His dark brown eyes were filled with worry. 'There's no way to know if this cylinder holds the same kind of nanomechs as the other one – this one could be an explosive, a nuke, an antimatter bomb, anything. Poking something like this, even with a really, really tiny stick, is bad, bad business. Procedure says put the whole box on a carryall and have the