Wasteland of flint

his head against the roof of the intake, then wormed his way back out with a snarl. 'I saw them,' Parker declared, stripping off his lenses. 'They were there, all glowy and fanlike and…they were alive! Delores saw them too!'

Gretchen looked at the crewwoman and she nodded her head in agreement. 'He's not crazy. Well, ok, he saw what he said he saw.'

'Fine.' Gretchen looked at Isoroku. 'Then what happened to them? Vanishing in thirty minutes is too great a rate of change for me. Did they cause the engines to overheat?'

'Maybe,' Parker mumbled, scrunching up the side of his mouth. He took a tabac out of his pocket, shucked the wrapper and lit the stick on his belt. Gretchen stepped back, out of a rising gray whorl. In low-grav the tobacco smoke made corkscrew patterns in the air. 'They grew – I saw them grow – with more moisture, more air, more oxygen. No, more carbon dioxide. Maybe they eat CO₂, like a plant at home?'

'Would that cause an overheat?' Gretchen spread her hands questioningly.

'No…' Parker squinted into the intake, then at the fleet engineer. 'But if they got inside, into the rest of the engine, they would make turbulence – the airflow surfaces wouldn't be smooth anymore – and they do seem to be eating away at the composite.'

'Even in a Javan machine,' the engineer rumbled, his Norman tinged with a thick accent, 'there are close tolerances. We will have to examine the entire engine for contamination.'

'Do it.' Gretchen started to turn away, but then a thought struck her. 'Wait – find another patch, if there is one. Record the…um…the infestation or planting or whatever. Then shine Parker's lamp on it for a half hour.'

'Good idea.' Isoroku's eyes glinted. 'The simplest explanation.'

'I killed them with the multispec?' Parker seemed incredulous. 'But if they came from the planet…the atmosphere's thin – everything's bathed in UV! Why should it kill them?'

'Try it anyway,' Gretchen replied, swinging up onto the ladder leading into the main accessway. 'And let me know what happens.' She disappeared up the shaft, followed moments later by Fitzsimmons.

Parker shared a glance with Delores, who shrugged and looked at him expectantly, and the Nisei, who had no discernible expression at all. The pilot hunched his shoulders and shuffled back to the engine, glaring at the machinery. 'And I thought you were pretty,' he grumbled as he flipped down his work lenses. 'Shows what I know.'

Gretchen woke from a dream of endlessly mutating gray-green ideograms to an irritating beeping sound. Groaning – the sound was her comm paging – she unzipped her sleepbag and peered out into darkness. The lights in the crew quarters were on some day-night cycle which eluded her – they certainly didn't match the schedule on the Cornuelle – and her mouth tasted bad, her eyes were grainy and the persistent throb of a headache flared as consciousness returned.

'Oh Sister, mother of God, bearer of the Holy Savior…' Gretchen fumbled for her medband and pressed the cool metal against the side of her neck. A sensor flickered, there was a warning beep, and a cool, delicious sensation flooded into her bloodstream. With sanity restored, she picked up the comm and saw the pilot's face – even rougher-looking than she imagined her own appeared – staring back. 'Good morning, Mister Parker.'

'Its afternoon,' he replied in a dead-sounding, slurred voice. 'Planetside, anyway. I'm finished with your shuttle engine.'

'Good,' Gretchen said, clipping the comm to her duffle. She eeled out of the sleepbag and braced herself against the floor. A netted sack held her clothes, and she began dragging out an undershirt, pants, her skinsuit. 'What did you find?'

'This engine is completely infested with these…these chapoltin…these locusts! Well, they're not insects, but plants, I guess. Ones that like to eat hexacarbon and ceramic composite and drink CO₂ and produce O₂ and C and some more O and lots of little crystalline frond- thingies.' He rubbed his face, leaving a long smear of oil across his forehead. 'We're sack-bound, but the number two shuttle engine is cleaned up, disinfected with your friendly multispec lamp set on hi-UV and then…' Parker groaned. 'We resurfaced everything back to tolerance, or replaced the sections eaten clean through. So – maybe tomorrow – we can fly shuttle one back to groundside base and put this engine back in the grounded shuttle.'

The pilot glared owlishly at Gretchen, who was worming herself into a skintight shipsuit. When she was done, he continued. 'Before you ask: Yes, we checked the other engine. It was infested too, but not so badly. Anyway, Isoroku cleaned up number one. So both will fly, eventually.'

'What happens when we go groundside?' Gretchen asked, straightening her hair and pulling the heavy blond mane back into a ponytail. 'They'll get infected again, right?'

Parker nodded, listlessly pushing another tabac into the corner of his mouth. 'Yeah, and we'll clean up again, I guess.'

'Okay,' Gretchen said, her attention already turning to the puzzle of the cylinder. 'One trip, then, to repair the other shuttle and load everyone up. Then it's back upstairs for the entire team. If we need to make an excursion groundside, we'll use the shuttles in rotation and not leave them on the planet for more than a day.'

'Sure.' Parker took a long drag on his tabac, then tapped off.

Gretchen stared at the comm, then shook her head. Should I call Maggie about her status? No, later. I'll just take a look at the latest translation runs before breakfast.

Feeling much better, she banged the door open, then kicked off in a long arcing jump toward the main accessway. Behind her, a minute telltale flashed on her doorway, and not so far away, a chime went off in a cabin occupied by the two Marines.

A black sleepbag stirred in the dimly lit room, then an arm reached out from the cocoon and thumped the other sleeping soldier.

'Fitz, your girlfriend's up.' Deckard closed his eyes and fell back to sleep.

Fitzsimmons crawled out of his own sleepbag, rubbed a chin covered with fine black stubble and started getting dressed. I hope she gets breakfast first, he thought forlornly, so I can at least get some coffee. Even the bad coffee on this barge – or the reprocessed, recycled 'black crude' from the navy threesquares – was better than nothing. He hooked one foot in a hanging strap, then slung on his combat vest and gun-rig before picking up a jacket to hide the weapons. 'Huh,' he laughed softly. 'I've been with the navy too long – like anyone aboard would worry if I was carrying.'

His combat bar strapped to the side of one boot, a heavy utility knife to the other. The waist rig held eight flechette-wire clips, and a holster with the pistolstyled shipgun. The rest of the chest rig held various tools, lamps and spyeyes. His hand hovered over the squat, short-barreled shape of his heavy shipgun, then he plucked it away from the wall and slung the automatic rifle behind his back. Nervous fingers – this whole situation made him nervous – checked the loads in the pistol and the rifle. Both weapons were topped, lit green and ready to cook.

Pretty useless, he thought, mouth tasting oily, but what else do I have? Nothing to stop a nanomech cloud, or a pocket-sized shipkiller, or a virus or a biological. Not much at all but spit and my knife.

'Thank you, Sho-sa.' Hummingbird tapped his comm closed and took a deep breath. Lieutenant Isoroku's respectfully polite call reported the Palenque main environmentals restored to operation, the last of the air filters cleaned out and power working on most decks. Almost time to go across and see these things for myself.

The tlamatinime turned to his surveillance display and panned through the feeds. After a moment, he switched back to the video from outside the number three airlock on the Palenque. The portable work panel Anderssen had been using for her translations and analysis sat idle, the area lights dimmed low.

'Not there?' Hummingbird made an amused clicking sound with his teeth. 'But not sleeping, or eating.' He flicked through the feeds from the Company ship and his brow furrowed. The archaeologist was nowhere to be seen. A stab of intense irritation twisted his lip, but then he calmed himself. Large sections of the Palenque were still without power, and many video feeds were dead or offline. She could be anywhere, doing anything, and be out of his sight. He glanced around the cabin, reminding himself of the many luxuries afforded by the navy ship.

'Everything works here,' he said aloud, 'on a well-maintained Imperial vessel. There? On a private ship which has only known the attentions of the pious and dutiful Isoroku for a few days? Scattered feathers, filth, fallen