Wasteland of flint

away to a dim white line, unbroken by the sight of mountains or hills in any direction. Gretchen blessed the field goggles she'd packed and the battered straw hat that had survived from her very first dig in the ruins of the ancient Il Dioptre observatory on Crete. Her suit was proof against heat and cold alike, but there was no sense in subjecting the temperature regulators to more stress than necessary. Smalls, for his part, had adopted a djellaba-like white cloak which covered him from head to toe, with wide-mouthed sleeves and a deep hood.

Brittle sand crunched underfoot as they walked, a fine crust breaking away with each step. The ground sparkled and glittered, as if diamonds had been scattered among the gravel and stones. Tan and a cream-white color dominated, though as the eye reached to the horizon, the deep, deep blue-black of the sky made the distant plain seem yellow.

'How's the weather?' she said at last. Smalls had said nothing after suiting up and leaving the main building. He seemed lost in thought. 'The prevailing wind is from the east?'

There were no east-facing windows in the camp, and every building had a smooth, sloping berm of compressed earth and stone facing the rising sun. Even the sheds for the crawlers were reinforced, as if fortified against enemy bombardment, with deep airlocked doorways. More than one of the huts was half-buried by sand, with sloping ramps leading down to battered metal doors.

Smalls said nothing, continuing to stump along. They approached the main lab – a long, low structure with tiny windows surrounded by reinforcing stone. Everyone seemed to sleep in the main building, on the second floor. Gretchen shaded her eyes, looking west. Sunlight flared on the raised tails of the two shuttles, and she could see dust rising from a crawler maneuvering around the back of one. She supposed they were preparing to remount the engine in number two.

Still silent, Smalls keyed the airlock. There was a squeal of tracks clogged with grit, and Gretchen stepped inside, into blessed darkness. She watched the outer door grind closed, seeing the frame was almost entirely eaten away.

'How bad are the storms?' She ventured again, hoping for some kind of response. Smalls pressed a softly glowing plate on the wall and the inner door cycled, dust swirling away at their feet. Beyond a line of glowlights shimmered awake, illuminating a dirty, narrow hallway. Despite the lock, the floor was covered with sand.

'The storms?' Smalls seemed to wake at last, his eyes dark pits in the bad light. Something like a smile twitched on his lips. 'They're beautiful. Gorgeous, really.'

Gretchen said nothing, only unclasping her mask and taking a moment to taste the building air. She could smell solvents, hot plastic, electrical components and the sharp smell of an overheated printer.

'We'd been here a week,' Smalls said, turning away and shuffling down the hallway. 'And my satellites weren't all deployed yet, when the first big storm swept over us. Two of the sheds were torn to bits and scattered – Fuentes found one of the roofing panels a couple weeks later, sixty k from here. A crawler got knocked over and we nearly lost shuttle one.'

'Sounds bad…' Gretchen started to say, but then stopped. Smalls was still talking, apparently unaware of her comment.

'The planet got all smashed up, back at minus three million, and there aren't lots of mountain ranges to speak of, not big plate-driven ones like on Anбhuac or Hesperides. Heat builds up on these big open plains and you get enormous swings in air pressure as the sun moves. There's no humidity to speak of, not with such low temperatures. All the water is locked in the ice caps. No lakes, no oceans – nothing to moderate air temperature.'

Smalls unlocked a door, and Gretchen followed him into a room filled with v-pane monitors, computer equipment and racks and racks of data-lattice storage. A huge map of Ephesus glowed in a mosaic of nine displays, half the planet shining bright in the sunlight, and half plunged into complete darkness. The meteorologist waved a hand across the face of the world.

'We have dust storms a thousand kilometers wide, with winds in excess of a hundred sixty k on a slow, quiet day. There are invisible tornadoes, which form and vanish in the upper air. When they touch down, rocks, stones, boulders get lifted and flung for twenty to thirty k.' His finger stabbed at the mosaic display, tracing a thin black line just emerging from the terminator.

'And there's the escarpment. A wall across half the world, nearly from pole to pole. The planetary atmosphere's so tight on Ephesus there are peaks which brush the envelope.' Smalls turned and looked at Gretchen for the first time. She was leaning against one of the tables, watching him quietly, arms crossed. 'The sun is like a big broom, pushing a lot of air in front of the midday hot-spot. There's a fat gradient at dawn and when the wall of moving pressure hits the escarpment, well…' He shrugged, showing more than a little perverse pride.

'You get vicious storms in the canyons,' Gretchen supplied. 'The briefing packet says they're in excess of four hundred fifty k at 'high tide.''

'They are.' Smalls searched among papers and bits of equipment on one of the tables. After a moment, he handed Gretchen a heavy chunk of slate the size of her hand. 'The wind rising from the sun compresses against the mountains and the only release is through narrow slot canyons. I have video – in places the walls are like glass, rubbed to near optical quality by sand and grit from a hundred k away. Look at the other side.'

Gretchen turned over the piece of slate. The reverse was glossy and black, like fine glass, with a dimple near the center. In the depression was a spherical metallic marble. She looked up in surprise. 'What's this?'

'Some bit of nickel-iron – native stuff, there are fields of it in some places, just sitting on the surface – rolling around for a few centuries, getting nice and round. Then a particularly bad storm picked it up and whipped it into a canyon. By the time the cyclone winds had slapped the marble downrange and it hit a certain section of cliff just right – the marble punched right into the slate and stuck. When Russovsky found that, the grit had worn away the splinter lines and cracks, but you can still see them with a…' His voice trailed away.

Gretchen put down the shale. She looked at Smalls, who was staring at his displays.

'Do you want to tell me about Russovsky?' Gretchen swung one foot up and sat on the table. 'Did she find a lot of interesting things out there, in the wasteland?'

'She did.' Smalls scratched the side of his face. The respirator had worn a deep groove across his upper cheek. 'I guess Tuk told you she hasn't come back.'

Gretchen nodded, politely looking away from the meteorologist at the view of the world.

'Are we going to try and find her, bring her back with us?'

'Of course,' Gretchen said in a sharp tone. Smalls almost flinched, and she smiled in apology. 'She's one of the crew, right? I won't leave anyone behind.'

'Okay.' Smalls seemed to relax and sat down. 'Did…did she bring something back, that day, the day we lost contact with the ship?' He stopped, watching Gretchen's face. 'There was a lot of shouting in McCue's lab – it's down the hall – that morning. Then, well, you know – my satellites route through the ship's main array for retransmit from farside, so I was the first to notice something had happened.' Smalls shrugged. 'The real-time map went out all of a sudden. At first I thought there was a malfunction in my equipment somewhere – the dust eats into things, you know, and they stop working. But everything seemed fine down here. I tried to raise Palenque control on the comm, but there was no answer. I guess -'

'Everyone was dead by then,' Gretchen said softly. 'Russovsky found something in the desert and she brought it back to camp. Did you hear what they were saying, when they were shouting?'

'Yeah, I guess.' Smalls looked away. 'Clarkson and McCue were always at odds over everything.' He managed a bitter laugh. 'You'd think they had been lovers or something, but they weren't, not those two.' Smalls tapped the crown of his nose. 'They just couldn't agree. Clarkson was very Company, very gung-ho, very – ah – results oriented. McCue just wanted to take her time, check things out, take – you know – a few more measurements, a few more readings.'

For the first time, Gretchen thought she saw something like fondness in the man's sallow, exhausted face.

'She'd help with your data, you know? She'd take a look at it and do some raw analysis to see if you were getting instrument errors, or interference or something? And it would come back so clean…everything would be just…solid. Reliable. That was McCue. She was reliable.'

Gretchen waited a moment. 'Was Russovsky reliable? She and McCue were -'

'They understood each other,' Smalls said, nodding. 'Russovsky is like one of the old-timers out of Olympus Station, or the outbackers – you ever been to Mars?'

'Yes,' Gretchen said, understanding. 'I spent two years at the Polaris site.'