Wasteland of flint

'Do you need more help?'

There was a short silence. Then the engineer ventured to ask: 'Is the quarantine lifted, Hadeishi- san?'

'No,' Hadeishi replied, sighing in disgust. Regulations required another week of isolation for the Palenque, and then a week's medical review for any returning crew. Any engineer's mate he sent across to the civilian ship would be lost to him for two weeks, and he was already shorthanded with Isoroku gone. 'No, it's not been lifted. How about supplies? Do we have conduit we can spare ourselves?'

'Yes.' Now Isoroku's voice changed and became wary. 'We're pulling spares out of cargo storage here – most of the expedition supplies still in storage survived the attack because they were sealed in cargo pods – there should be enough to serve.'

Hadeishi understood the engineer's decision. No fleet officer is going to spend his hard-won supplies on a civilian ship. And I shouldn't ask myself.

'Carry on, then.' Hadeishi tapped the channel closed. 'Bah.'

The number of reports in his message queue had not shrunk. Two more had popped in while he was malingering. 'Enough, to work. Duty. Honor. Empire.'

Somehow, when Gretchen reached the number three airlock, Gunso Fitzsimmons was there already, looking bulky in a military field jacket, gloves and a pathetic fur hat. She looked at the musty, moth- eaten chapeau on his head and refrained – by dint of biting her tongue – from making any comment. 'Sergeant.'

'Ma'am.' Fitz nodded genially. 'Come down to take a look at your prize?'

'Yes.' She scowled at him, then squatted down in front of a portable display pane she had salvaged from the lab ring. Since most of the ship was still dead, she could steal cycles from main comp for her analysis. Ignoring the Marine, who had maneuvered around to watch her work, she plugged her handheld into the panel, then loaded the suite of xenoarch software she'd been using on Mars and Ugarit. The pad and the panel beeped in synchrony, then a set of v-panes expanded, showing her feeds from the sensors in the airlock and the security cameras.

'Careful,' Fitzsimmons breathed, radiating nervousness like a dark cloud.

Gretchen glared at him out of the corner of her eye. He was clutching the fail-safe for the lock ejection mechanism in both hands. 'You should be careful,' she snapped. 'Nothing's happened…and if the lock won't hold back whatever comes out, you're not going to have time to push the button. An atomic or antimatter weapon will just vaporize us where we stand.'

The sergeant gave her an equally fierce look. 'I don't like the prospect of being disintegrated, or dissolved, or anything which involves the end of my personal self-awareness. So I'll just keep hold of this, okay?'

'Whatever.' Gretchen turned away to hide her hands – which were trembling ever so slightly – from the Marine. 'Let's see what we can see.'

Inside the airlock, the passive sensors had been recording for almost a day and her volume analysis software had built a fine-grained map of the outside of the cylinder, the slab of limestone and every nook and cranny of the pitted surface. From this, the soft had extracted a map of the inner structure of the stone fragment and the cylinder. In both cases, large sections of the display were blank or an all-too-familiar fuzzy gray. 'Not enough data to see inside, not yet.'

Gretchen opened a log and started talking into her throat mike. Her awareness of Fitzsimmons faded away, replaced by a smaller, more tightly defined universe of stone surfaces and densities. 'Previous sample – as shown in Clarkson's logs – activated when exposed to high-density sub-x-ray scan. Previous sample did not activate when subjected to microwave analysis. I am starting, therefore, with low-power ultrasonic and will advance slowly to microwave.'

She tapped a series of quick commands and held her breath. There was no explosion, no ominous hum, only a flickering on the sensor command relays and then a new v-pane appeared, showing an echo-scan image building. After a few moments, the first scan completed.

'The sandstone is unremarkable,' Gretchen said, resuming her narrative. 'Though the embedded shell is really quite beautiful. A number of smaller cephalopods and annelids are also recognizable in the matrix. The cylinder does not express the same characteristics as the previous sample. This low-power survey is unable to penetrate the metallic casing, but there are markings incised into the surface of the device. I am going to enter the airlock, move the sensors manually, and then run another set of low-power scans.'

Fitzsimmons coughed in alarm, but Gretchen didn't even hear him.

'I hope to build a more complete image by interpolating the scan results and taking, oh, four complete sets from different vantage points in the airlock. Luckily, the heavy shielding of the lock itself is blocking out a great deal of outside interference. In fact…' She paused, thinking. '…as we are in orbit, a gravitometric analysis may reveal a great deal about the object.'

Gretchen stopped, stood up, stretched and noticed the Marine watching her, arms crossed, with a distracted expression on his face. 'Are you all right?'

'What? Yes ma'am, I'm fine. Need a hand moving the sensors?'

'Sure.' Her lips pursed. 'Should we suit up to work in the lock?'

'Yeah.' Fitz nodded. 'A pain, but better than finding yourself outside without a jacket.'

An hour later, Gretchen was sitting again, cross-legged, watching a second set of images build on her display. Fitzsimmons had given in to complete boredom and was sleeping with his head on a wadded-up blanket behind her. A small heater had appeared from somewhere and was baking Gretchen's righthand side, though her left was still very cold.

She dragged a fingertip, rotating the interpolated image of the cylinder.

'A densely-packed inscription covers the surface of the object. Each character is very small and quite complex. My IdeoStat says the least complicated ideogram is formed by seven strokes, the most complicated by nineteen. There is a noticeable distribution, though the average tends toward the complex, rather than the simple.' She rubbed her eyes, feeling a peculiar, too-familiar twitching prick behind her left eye. 'Adamski would argue this indicates a glyph-based language, like old Nбhuatl or pre-Kanji Japanese – one without a phonetic alphabet. I can't make any kind of judgment yet, not without even the faintest idea of the creator race's vocal apparatus or lack thereof. I would say, however, the information density on the object surface is very high. There are thousands of distinct ideograms, thousands…'

In the display, the mapping software unwound the surface image of the cylinder into a long luminous strip covered with thousands of tiny characters. The dizzying arrangement of glyphs filled Gretchen with an odd disquiet. They seemed to dance and twist across the v-pane and she was uncomfortably aware of a sensation the characters were shifting places as she watched, rearranging themselves into an almost recognizable pattern. She blinked and rubbed her eyes.

'The density of the exterior…' she continued, looking away from the IdeoStat display. As a result, she did not see the system monitor showing the translator drawing a gradually increasing rate of comp cycles. '…is far exceeded by the possible content of the interior. Unlike Clarkson's sample, this one is entirely filled with a dense membrane structure. If my hypotheses about the first device are correct, then this one contains an enormous amount of information, coded on the fine surfaces of the membranes.'

Thinking, she chewed slowly on her thumb. 'I think this one is a book, or perhaps an entire library. Yet, as with most glyph-based languages, we may never decipher the contents, not without an intersecting language to point us toward a translation.' She began to feel ill, as if the promise of the cylinder were burning a hole in her stomach. The tiny fragments left by the First Sun civilization inspired awe and lust in equal measure. A clear window into the distant past might be sitting only meters away.

'What a loss,' she murmured. 'I want to read this! Well, as long as it's not legal documents. Lort! It's probably property records, or warehouse inventories or recipes.'

Green Hummingbird was in near darkness, lying on a narrow bed in his quarters. Pale green and blue lights played across his angular face. A swing-out display hung above him, showing feeds from the cameras on the Palenque and Cornuelle. Most of them were muted and dialed down to thumb-sized squares. One mirrored the contents of Anderssen's work panel. In the main v-pane, a cylinder engraved with thousands of tiny glyphs rotated slowly. Two more v-panes showed her working, blond hair slowly becoming a tangled mass, and the object itself, resting in a steel cradle in the airlock. The