Wasteland of flint

'We'll all be going back to the ship tomorrow,' she said into the comm as she stepped out into the blaze of sunlight. 'No, no, we don't have to pack the whole camp. People should just take their personal baggage. Well, bedding would be a good idea. Lennox and I need to decide if we're going to continue operations here or not. But that can wait a couple of days.'

Still listening to Parker and Delores bicker about the damage to shuttle two, she hiked back down into the bowl and began a long counterclockwise circuit around the excavation. People working tended to fall into patterns, and her moderately-experienced eye could see most of the dig crew here were right-handed. All of the paths tended to circle to the right, to pass around the righthand – or western – side of the obelisks. So, keeping a close eye on the ground, she moved left, peering into the trenches, inspecting the gridding, generally being as nosy as possible.

The sun drifted with her, and the shadows in the excavation slowly lengthened. By the time she'd reached the far side of the bowl, the trenches were almost completely in the shade. A ladder let her climb down into one of the larger cuts and Gretchen paused, seeing something odd lying in a cross-trench from the main. She stepped closer, head dropping into blessed shade.

A cylinder.

She stopped abruptly, her boots skidding in loose gravel. Her heart was pounding. 'Oh, Mother Mary! Wait a minute.'

Gretchen padded forward and knelt down. A pulque can was lying in the trench, abandoned and forgotten by someone. None of our crew would be so sloppy, she hoped. Must have been one of Blake's security people. She started to pick up the litter, then paused, taking a closer look. What is that?

Crouching down, head almost on the ground, she adjusted her lenses to higher mag and gave the can – a Mayauel from the faded rabbit on the label – a careful inspection from one end to the other. Something odd had happened to the can. The bottom, in particular, seemed to have fused with the ground, or more accurately, the ground had grown up around the underside of the can. Under hi-mag, she saw thin shoots of a stonelike substance working their way up the aluminum surface.

'Well now, this is interesting.' Gretchen took an optical probe from her vest and moved around to face the opening in the top of the can, now lying sideways. Gingerly, she adjusted the tiny wand and eased it up to the mouth hole. Closing one eye, she clicked the worklens control around to match the input from the wand. A moment later, a highly magnified, light-enhanced view of the can sprang into view on the inside of her right lens. Then, gently, she drifted the wand into the opening.

The inside of the can was almost entirely filled with a delicate web of stonelike filaments. In the faint, reflected sunlight she could see hundreds – or thousands – of tiny cilialike fronds and a denser, hexlike structure of mineralized accretions. After taking a good look, she sat up, working a kink out of her shoulder.

'Personal log on,' she said, cueing her throat mike. 'I've found a discarded pulque can in the observatory dig. Looks like it's been here a couple weeks. Close examination finds the Ephesian microbiota Sinclair and Tukhachevsky tried to explain to me this morning in evidence. Something very much like what Parker found in the shuttle engines is eating the can.' Gretchen stood up, stretching. She hadn't been grubbing in the dirt in months either. Her knees were already complaining. 'Pretty soon the whole can will be gone, and the result will look just like everything else here, a mineral layer like sand and rock over this…mineral life form.'

She stared up at the slender finger of the nearest obelisk. The pale cream texture made a sharp contrast against the blue-black sky. 'Lennox's team was disappointed,' she said, 'to find their 'observatory' made of nothing but rock and mineral deposits – not set down by the hand of the First Sun people. They've decided the whole structure is just a natural formation, a quirk of geology. I wonder… I need to talk to Sinclair about his microbiota. There's something…something here almost makes sense. Log off.'

Giving the Mayauel and its tiny colony a wide berth, Gretchen continued her circuit, eventually climbing out of the excavation as the sun was setting. Her suit recorded a brief moment of moderate temperature before shifting from cooling to heating. Night came swiftly out of the east, flooding across the desert plains. Without mountains or more than a high thin cloud to catch the last light of the sun, darkness was quickly upon her.

She switched on a lamp as she trudged up the slope to the crawler. In the starlight, everything seemed very quiet and still, frosted with silvery light. Her spot danced on the ground, a pale circle of yellow sliding over rocks, boulders, the tracks of the crawler. Gretchen paused, hands on the ladder leading up into the cabin. What was that?

The hum of the respirator masked most sounds and the wind had died with the passing of the sun. Gretchen turned off her lamp. Darkness folded around her again, then slowly lightened as her lenses adapted to the starlight. Everything seemed very still. She waited, listening.

Only the hum of the suit fans reached her ears. Annoyed, she shut down the respirator. There was a click and then nothing. Now she could hear her heart beating, a steady thump-thump-thump. Gretchen stepped away from the crawler, taking one step, two steps down toward the bowl. Her head cocked to one side, listening.

There was a sound. Something like the wind stirring sand and gravel, a faint tik-tik- tik. She slowly dropped into a squat on the trail, holding her breath. Now the sound was a little more distinct and she could hear – feel almost – a slow, pervasive susurration all around her. Gretchen breathed again, feeling faint. The respirator wasn't just for show, she reminded herself. Her thumb slid the control to ON, and the fans started up again, and her nose tube felt cold with the slow breeze of a suitable air mixture. Gretchen stood, the faint, delicate sound drowned out by the clamor of her breath and machines, but she was smiling.

Treading carefully on the fragile ground, she walked back to the crawler and climbed aboard.

Inside the cabin, her mask hooked to the vehicle's reserve air bottle, she sat for a long time, listening to the busy night and watching the stars slowly wheel overhead. Her comm was shut down, the crawler's engine cold. Gretchen thought, sitting there in the darkness, a rime of frost slowly congealing on her mask around the waste gas vent, she knew how Russovsky felt.

Am I an old-timer, then? The thought was very amusing. She was sure none of the outbackers on Mars would think so. She doubted if any of the dig scientists had stayed out past nightfall. I should go in. Parker's probably mustering a search party by now.

Sighing, she shook her arms, sending a cascade of CO₂ frost to the floor of the crawler, then switched on machine power and let the big tracked vehicle start its diagnostic. A heavy rumble trembled through the seat and soles of her boots. Her respirator whined on, and the suit began to percolate heat through her limbs. 'Damn!' Stabbing pains cramped her arms and legs. 'Too cold to sit here.'

Ten minutes later, she threw the Armadillo into gear and rumbled off down the road, the yellow headlights of the big tank dancing across the rutted track, a slow heavy cloud of dust rising behind. In the darkness, swathes of minute, glittering lights flared for a moment as the cloud of water vapor settled onto the desert floor, then faded as the windfall of energy from the sky was consumed.

Aboard the Palenque

Hummingbird swung onto the bridge of the Company spacecraft and paused, one hand on the railing leading up to the captain's command station. There was no threat-well, no gleaming banks of combat monitors, no subdued lighting or perfect climate control. Instead, bights of ratty wire and conduit hung from open panels in the overhead, there was an acrid, burnt smell in the air, and a racket of chattering comm feeds hissed from the communications station. Most of the control panels were dark and the deck had an uneven, mottled quality.

Lieutenant Isoroku started to say something, but the tlamatinime shook his head slightly.

'I've seen a damaged ship before, Sho-sa,' he said quietly. His interest fixed on a panoramic view of the planet below – a sharp dun-red crescent silhouetted against ebon night, with the peaks of the Escarpment beginning to glow in the morning sun. Somewhere down there, Russovsky found a book and a weapon – not so unalike. And where there is one, there will be others.…

Hummingbird pushed himself to the main comm panel, scarred fingers brushing over the controls. 'How awake is main comp -'

'Hsst! Who are you, stranger?' A sharp, inhuman voice cut across the tlamatinime's question. 'Stand away from my station!'