Wasteland of flint

'I'm sorry.' Gretchen squeezed his shoulder. 'I'm sorry about what happened, and sorry it took so long to get here.'

'But you did come,' Tukhachevsky sighed, and shook himself. A weight seemed to lift from his broad old shoulders and he stood up straighter. 'Please, we can't stand here talking all night – come and meet everyone else and – please! – have a drink, on me.' His eyes twinkled. 'You will find men and women's interests are reduced to their base constituents when faced with a slow, lingering death abandoned on an alien world, far from home, without hope of survival.'

Gretchen made a show of sniffing the air. 'I can tell,' she said with a laugh. 'It smells like a distillery in here! What are you making?'

'Vodka, of course. You can make vodka out of anything.' Tukhachevsky pushed open the door to the common room and Gretchen stepped in. A dozen people rose to meet her, some young, some old, and a stained plastic cup was pressed into her hand, sloshing with jet fuel of some kind. The Rossiyan's meaty hand was on her shoulder, guiding her to a chair at the long table and Gretchen caught a swift montage of tired, haggard faces – men and women seamed by the elements, burned dark by the sun – and everyone was smiling, relief plain on their faces, babbling their names, questions, rude jokes.

'Hello,' she said, when things had quieted down a little and she'd taken a suitably long drink of the 'vodka' in the cup. 'I'm Gretchen Anderssen, and I thought you'd like to know the water cyclers on the ship are working just fine.'

Everyone smiled and the last of the heckling died down. Gretchen swung a heavy bag from her hip onto the tabletop. No one made any particular movement, but a sense of expectation pricked the air, like ozone spilling away from an oncoming thunderstorm.

'And our Magdalena has the t-relay working back to Imperial space, so there was some mail waiting for you.'

Hhhhuhhh… The simultaneous exhalation of a dozen breaths stirred the air. Gretchen didn't look up – it would be rude to grin at these men and women, who'd thought they were lost at the edge of known space, with no way home – and concentrated instead on dumping the bundles of printed messages onto the table. She'd sorted them on the flight down and tied up each set with string. Some events, she knew, were venerable enough to become rituals. This was one. Mail call, particularly when a new crewmember arrived on site.

'Blake.' She called out, holding up the first set of letters. A stocky man, his pockmarked face twisted halfway from a grim snarl to disbelieving joy, scraped back his chair and leaned over the table.

'Thanks,' he muttered, sitting down, almost-trembling fingers picking at the twine. 'Thanks.'

Gretchen nodded, then looked down. She'd already removed all the letters for the dead crewmen, for Clarkson and McCue. Strangely, there hadn't been any letters in the inbound queue for Russovsky, though her company file said she had an entire clutch of cousins and sisters at home on Anбhuac. Better have Maggie check on that, she thought while she held up the next bundle. 'Fuentes, Antonio?'

The sound of a power wrench whining against a reluctant bolt roused Gretchen the next morning. She blinked, seeing actual, real sunlight spilling down a dirty brown wall above her head, then poked her nose out from the sleepbag. A pungent smell of cooking oil, coffee, sweat and heated metal washed over her. 'Ah,' she grumbled, sitting up, 'home at last.'

Surprisingly – considering how late she'd remained awake, talking to Tukhachevsky and Sinclair and the others about the dig and the planet – she felt good. Actually rested. 'Gravity is a wonderful thing,' she said, baring her teeth for a little hand mirror she carried in her jacket. 'And whatever they put in the vodka here stains! Now I look like a real babushka.'

Taking a carefully hoarded bottle of water out of her bag, she washed her face and brushed her teeth. 'Two cups,' she muttered, measuring the fluid level in the translucent canteen by eye. 'I used to be able to take a whole bath in two cups.'

Water rationing had been very strict on Mars, even with thirty meters of permafrost under their feet. The Imperial Planetary Reclamation Board guarded the native ice jealously, and charged the dig crews for every liter they extracted. IPRB had a vision of a green Mars, and weren't going to let some profligate scientists spoil their grand dream. Ugarit, for all the stink and humidity and flies and constant, deafening noise, had plenty of water. Some of it was even potable by human standards, but Gretchen had fallen out of the habits she'd learned on Mars. New Aberdeen was a wet, green world – flush with stormy gray seas, heavy forests and chill, cleansing rain pouring from massive, white thunderheads. Home seems so distant…Then she put the thoughts away and concentrated on getting the right boot on the right foot.

As Fitzsimmons had promised, his repair still held. A Marine of a thousand uses, she thought amusedly, trying to dig her fingernail into the seam. She failed, finding the military-issue adhesive goo holding the uppers to the sole like bedrock. 'Time for breakfast, and I smell coffee!'

Downstairs, Gretchen found herself sitting at a table near the single window in the common room, a plate of eggs, toast and something which smelled – but did not taste at all – like bacon in front of her. The cook, a short, round Frenchman named De'vaques, poured her a big mug of coffee to which she added a liberal amount of sugar and creamer. By some unspoken conspiracy, she found herself accompanied for a lengthy breakfast by Tukhachevsky and the xenobiologist Sinclair. Both men were in a formidably happy mood, and Gretchen tuned them out almost as quickly as they started propounding at length on the peculiar nature of the Ephesian microfauna.

Hot food – and not a heated threesquare or mealbag – commanded her full attention until the plate was bare and the cup empty. She looked up, wondering if the kitchen was flush enough with supplies to allow her a second cup, and caught sight of the meteorologist Smalls's face from across the room. He was a thin, sallow-faced man in the sharp, bright glare of morning, with sunken eyes and lank black hair. Watching him, his body half-hidden behind Tukhachevsky's rotund bulk, Gretchen thought she'd never seen anyone so sad before.

A particularly sharp peal of laughter drew the man's eyes, his head moving with a sharp jerk. Gretchen looked over and realized the common room had already separated out, like some chemical precipitating out of solution, with the scientists – herself included – at one table, while the 'crew' sat at another. Delores, her oval face slightly flushed with amusement, was telling a particularly poor joke at the other table. Parker and Bandao were watching her with amusement, while the groundside security people – Blake and a comm tech named Steward – were groaning.

'…so she said she'd rather date a cattle guard than a cowboy, so we left her sitting by the fence until she had the sense to walk home herself!'

Only Smalls was sitting alone, at the end of a table near the kitchen door. Gretchen realized he was watching Delores, as covertly as he dared, and she remembered how he'd moved toward her on the landing field the night before. Poor kid, she thought, remembering a crush she'd suffered through on Mars. Being in the field for a long expedition – and one like this, on the edge of human-controlled space, might last for years without relief – was always tricky. Being married didn't make any difference, not if your spouse was sixty light-years away. Distance washes away all attachments, makes us forget the old world and see only the new.

There was a pause in the flow of words from Tukhachevsky and Sinclair, and Gretchen realized they'd asked her something. She turned and raised a questioning eyebrow. 'I'm sorry?'

'Would you like to see the main excavation site before we leave?' Sinclair repeated, hair in his eyes, ragged fingernails twisting a fresh tabac from papers. 'It'll take all day to load the shuttles, and we won't want to take off until dark.'

'I would,' Gretchen said, standing up, coffee cup in hand. 'About fifteen hundred? Good.'

As it happened, Parker had already snorked up the last of the coffee, but Gretchen felt alive enough to face the day. Standing in the door of the kitchen, she found the crew clearing out – Parker and Delores for the landing strip and the shuttles, Blake and the others to start packing and loading. Good, she thought, no one will really notice if I take a bit of a look around. All I need is a guide.

'Mister Smalls?' The meteorologist looked up, startled, apparently unaware of her approach. 'Do you have time to show me around the camp this morning? I'd appreciate it if you could.'

In the full glare of midday sun, the camp seemed even more desolate than by night. The horizon stretched