Wasteland of flint

of my house…'

'I'm a pap-sucking kitten, am I?' Magdalena's claw adjusted a filter control minutely. A jittery, scrambled image of the Mйxica nauallis flickered, jumped, then cleared. The comm panel on the bridge of the Palenque was alive with v-panes, showing dozens of feeds from all over the ship, from Fitzsimmons and Deckard's z-suits, even from Isoroku's navy workrig. The Hesht bared all her teeth, then lashed her tail twice before settling down into the shockchair. 'A hunter sees, a kit hides. Now, what are you doing, little bird?'

As it happened, Hummingbird was still assembling his comps, though Magdalena found the specifics of his equipment very interesting. Still, he was likely to be busy for a few hours. The Hesht turned her attention to the two Marines. After watching them for a few moments, her attention wandered. Her own kind might have amused her for hours, but these slick, shiny pink things…her claw idled over a glyph, then tapped out a save-for-later. 'Males getting ready for the hunt. Hrrrr…boring. But hunt-sister might like to see. Hmm dee hmm.'

A task-glyph popped to the top of her work queue – one marked with Anderssen's rabbit-ear symbol. Magdalena sniffed disdainfully – More housekeeping, she thought, then tapped the message open with a shining white claw. A still of Gretchen's face appeared, nearly unrecognizable behind a broad hat, the respirator mask and work goggles. 'Maggie, I've remembered something – Russovsky didn't have a single letter in her t-relay queue when I printed out the mail last night – can you check to see if she ever got anything from home? Seems strange… Talk to you tomorrow.'

'No mail?' Magdalena shifted in her chair and tapped up the message logs from ship's comm. In her experience, humans loved to talk more than anything – one of them actually keeping quiet did seem very odd. Maybe she's sick or something… Let's see.

The t-relay had never gone down, though the massive power failure on the Palenque had knocked out the message queuing system interface with shipboard comm. Magdalena hadn't done more to restart the t-relay than restore normal power and re-init shipside systems. As a result, she hadn't needed to navigate the obtuse and entirely military interface for the relay logs before.

An hour passed in increasing, tail-chewing disgust before she managed to find the interface for viewing traffic statistics. Then she found an entire security module had been deactivated in the transfer to civilian control, which had disabled the usual logging features. Three hours later, the Hesht was carefully keeping her tail curled under the shockchair, and a section of light construction-grade metal paneling was floating in tiny pieces around her like a constellation of broken, blue-gray moons.

'There! Finally…' Magdalena scanned through the message queue storage facility. Her initial feeling of triumph faded quickly. The queue storage subsystem was encrypted and her commercial decrypt soft said the jumbled hash of characters and letters was a military code. Maggie reached out and dug her claws into the back of the command station behind her, tearing another section of paneling away. It felt good to feel something rend between her claws. 'So…so how are readable messages coming through at all?'

She broke into the current t-relay queue and glanced over two of the messages. They were as readable and plain as any human letter could be. Brow furrowed, the little claw on her smallest finger tapping against her left incisor, Maggie began tracing the interface between the public messaging system and the relay. After thirty minutes, she was curled up into a tight ball, only the horizontal yellow gleam of her eyes visible over her arm. A constant stream of what seemed to be garbage – code, machine dumps, encrypted text – drifted past on her panel. Her usage of main comp had crept up into the sixteen percent range, billions of cycles diverted to a multitiered array of searches, all trying to winkle out the encrypt key protecting the storage system.

A chime sounded, waking Magdalena from a dream filled with tiny green birds fluttering around her head, each one singing in an annoying voice, flitting only millimeters from her grasping claws. She uncoiled, staring at the panel. A queue flag had popped up, bearing the ideogram code encapsulating Russovsky's comm ID. Magdalena frowned, then her claws skittered across the panel, diverting the message into unencrypted storage and starting a system trace to find where it had come from.

'Addressed to Ctesiphon Station?' Maggie shook her head, blinking, and stared again at the message routing header. The sizeable message – several gigabytes in length – was slated to go outbound on the r-relay at a very low priority. The Hesht frowned, looking over the routing instructions, which were much longer than the usual Please send four quills for a new pelt brush. 'Dispatch only during dead-time? No…in sections, to a commbox on station, to be forwarded…'

Her tail started to lash again, very, very slowly. 'What a clever monkey. She's hacked the t-relay!'

Hummingbird's face lit with the soft glow of a display panel, weary old eyes glittering with the spark of glyphs flashing awake. Reassembling his surveillance systems had taken much longer than he expected – he'd considered calling Isoroku for help – but resisted the urge. There was really no reason to let the engineer see Mirror equipment in operation, not when the man was entirely competent and a boon to his ship. Dealing with an angry Chu-sa Hadeishi would only waste more time. So Hummingbird stretched in place, broke open a threesquare and swallowed the vile mixture. Four panels faced him – a control display between his knees – then three v-panes in a wing. To his left, an array of local camera feeds showed him the corridors and rooms of the ship, now suddenly crowded by the arrival of the scientists from the planet. To his right, a mirror of the planetary view maintained on the bridge shimmered in the display.

Despite his earlier decision to let Anderssen and her people find the missing scientist, a thought had occurred to Hummingbird while he was working. Setting up a search will only take a moment, he said, arguing with himself. Then they can make the pickup themselves.

In truth, the scientists were all taxing the water and power supply of the ship with a half-dozen simultaneous, extended showers. After that they'd want to stuff themselves with food – Hummingbird smiled, noting the shipboard mess was entirely barren, save for the same kind of threesquares the crew had been subjected to on the planet – and sleep. So I have a few moments to spare.

He tapped up a schematic of the coverage afforded by the meteorological satellites the expedition had deployed in a long string around the planetary equator. The weather surveillance system managed nearly pole to pole coverage. 'Good,' he said with a trace of smugness. 'Now show me what kind of video feed…'

More images flashed past on his displays. The peapods maintained an historical archive, which Hummingbird pillaged, looking for a highview shot of the base camp the day Russovsky delivered her deadly cylinder. A second later, the system chirped apologetically – the satellite array did not contain information older than a week. 'Odd…' Hummingbird tapped up specifics on the Texcoco ISA-built satellites. 'Ah, too much data to store locally.' He queried main comp to see if there was an off-array archive. Moments later, an answer came back: a partial archive was maintained in crystal storage at base camp, in the laboratory of Smalls, Victor A., doctoral candidate, Mars Academy of Sciences.

Hummingbird nodded, glad the young man had taken proper care to protect his work. Seconds later, the main comm array had thrown a whisker to the base-camp station, and Hummingbird's search was causing dozens of pale firefly lights to wink on in Smalls's crowded lab. An entire wall of c-storage rippled awake in response to the tlamatinime's request.

On the ship, Hummingbird sat back, eyes closed, breathing steady, waiting.

'Gretchen? Are you awake?' Magdalena bit nervously at a length of metallic support strut, leaving dimpled marks along the black metal. 'It's Magdalena, hunt-sister. Are you mating? Cleaning yourself? Answer, please!'

'I'm here,' came the muffled reply. The vid showed nothing, only darkness. Impatient, Maggie dialed up the light amp and image interpolate on the channel. This revealed the matte surface of a sleepbag, which then split open to reveal the mussed, tousled head of a very sleepy Anderssen. 'What happened?'

'I think…oh, a fine hunt! I think I've found ss'shuma Russovsky.' Magdalena grinned tightly, careful to keep her teeth covered, but the pink tip of her tongue poked gleefully between her lips. 'At least, I know where she was sixteen hours ago, when the sun came up.'

'Okay.' The image of Gretchen rubbed her eyes and a giant hand reached out to adjust the comm band so she could see Magdalena. 'Tell me.'

'I was trying to find Russovsky's mail – like you asked – and I couldn't. Very strange, but then a message processed through the Palenque main comm array – a message from Russovsky's Midge, from the groundside – and my watchers picked it up. Hunt-sister, the doctor didn't have any mail waiting for her because she's been picking it up all this time!'