Wasteland of flint

activity this afternoon had broken an almost imperceptible weight of boredom, though now – with nothing new to engage his attention – he felt the deadening effect of routine stealing up on him again. This pricked his mind to something like angry motion, and he'd spent the period between end of watch and dinner devising a series of sudden training alerts, each one timed to come at the most inappropriate or difficult time.

Standing on station like this – waiting, with nothing in the offing – was particularly trying. Hadeishi prided himself on being a calm man – particularly in the face of tumult or crisis – but amid this stultifying sameness he found himself reaching for something, anything, to enliven the day. Today, particularly after sensing Sho-sa Kosho's quiet pride in the crew's reaction time to the alert, he was tempted to press her until her imperturbable calm broke.

That is entirely unworthy, he reminded himself. Your boredom is not an excuse to torment a fellow officer. Still, the prospect intrigued – Hadeishi was beginning to wonder if the lieutenant had ever truly lost her temper.

The steward set down small pale green plates, each one containing a single orange wedge. Hadeishi speared his with a single hashi and popped the sweet fruit into his mouth. Around the low table, his officers did the same – each in their own way – and then the stewards finished clearing the last of the dishes. Mugs of tea appeared, each steaming, filling the air with the turned-earth aroma of a high-grade sencha.

'Very well, then,' he said, after a decent interval. 'What have you found?'

Kosho bowed politely. Like the others, she was officially off-duty, so she tied back the sleeves of her kimono with a deft motion and turned her head toward the captain with a very proper air. Beside her, Hayes moved aside, leaving a section of otherwise blank wall unobstructed.

'As Hummingbird-san reported, a Valkyrie-class mining shuttle was observed in the northern hemisphere of Ephesus Three. The aircraft was banking over an extensive lava field at north sixty, west ninety-eight degrees.' Kosho indicated the blank wall with a control stylus and a rectangular image appeared – an enhanced version of the shuttle in flight. 'Due to space limitations on the peapods, Smalls-tzin had set them to record one image every half hour at moderate visual density. As a result, this snapshot of the shuttle is only a very small section of a very large image area. We do not have enough data to extract a ship name or identification number from the visible surfaces of the shuttle.'

The lieutenant commander motioned with the wand again. 'We have scanned the snapshots for two-hour periods on either side of the sighting, and there is no evidence of the shuttle in flight. Given the altitude and location of the mining shuttle, we believe it was descending from orbit and then landed before the next set of pictures could be taken.'

'And was hidden,' Hadeishi commented. 'Within thirty minutes.'

'We believe so,' Kosho said, inclining her head. 'The Valkyrie-class is usually attached to a Tyr-class mobile refinery.' Another image appeared, this of a huge, ungainly and entirely ugly collection of massive spheres, exposed girders and bulbous fuel tanks all arranged around an extended hexagonal core. 'A Tyr can carry as many as fifteen shuttles, each with a nominal operating range of about eight hundred million k, with an operational duration of twenty days. They are designed for light exploration, survey and ore sample recovery.'

'I see. Any pirate or wildcatter would be entirely pleased to have one under his control. Was the shuttle's descent within line-of-sight of the Palenque?'

'No, Hadeishi-san. At the time of descent, the civilian ship was on the opposite side of the planet.'

'Then our friends knew of the expedition ship and its detection envelope.'

Kosho nodded, though the stylus raised to indicate a point. 'The miners may not have been aware of the weather satellites. Peapods are small and innocuous, with a relatively tiny aspect. If the refinery ship was somewhere else in the system – in the asteroid belt, for example – the shuttle might have made a scouting trip in, unaware of being observed.'

Hadeishi frowned. 'How did they hide the shuttle, then? Their first trip should have included a great deal of loitering in atmosphere, looking for someplace suitable to set down. They would have shown up on subsequent satellite images.'

'This is true, sir. But what if they already knew where to land?' Kosho's eyes narrowed the tiniest fraction. 'What if someone had already found a place for them to set down, had left a beacon, one leading them to something of interest?'

Hadeishi's boredom – ephemeral as it was – dropped away like silk crumpling to a courtesan's tatami. 'Doctor Russovsky.'

'She is the most likely candidate,' the lieutenant commander said, slowly. The Fleet had avoided a great deal of trouble by promulgating a policy assuming all citizens, regardless of national affiliation or descent, were innocent as lambs. Treachery and rebellion, of course, were instantly and brutally repressed. Making racial distinctions about reliability…Hadeishi was only too aware of his own failing in this regard. Even Anderssen's name set his teeth on edge. A Russian…who could really trust a Russian?

'On the other hand,' Kosho continued in a careful tone, 'the other scientists have also made expeditions into the hinterlands. Russovsky's use of an ultralight, however, has allowed her to range far and wide across the northern hemisphere.'

'Did the Valkyrie make this flight before or after Russovsky returned to base camp with the cylinders?'

'Before,' Kosho said, cueing up a timeline. 'But only by a few days.'

'So – she could have found the cylinders, informed her compatriots and then headed back to base with some samples, while leaving the rest for these 'miners' to secure.'

The lieutenant commander nodded, dark eyes glittering in the light of the overheads. 'Yes, Chu- sa, but the real question is: Did Russovsky realize what the cylinder would do, if it were disturbed?'

Hadeishi grunted and a sardonic smile creased his face. 'You mean, Sho-sa, did she murder the crew of the Palenque to ensure no one noticed a shuttle lifting off with a hold full of First Sun artifacts? That is an excellent question.'

The Western Badlands, Ephesus III

A burning spot appeared on the eastern horizon; Toniatuh lifting a gleaming limb over the rim of the world, his light gilding the crowns of a great army of stone pinnacles. Wind-carved tufa – fantastically sculpted into corkscrew towers, hollow mushroom-shaped domes, translucent veils and jagged peaks – began to glow yellow-orange as the dawn reached out. Beneath the shining towers, deep ravines and canyons filled with dust and sand twisted through the wilderness. Down below the gimlet eye of the sun, remaining night shone with a quiet, subtle glow. Myriad sparks and gleams hid among the sand, sheltering beneath meters of fine-grained dust.

The sun continued to rise, the pressure of his gaze sending gusts racing through the canyons and moaning between scalloped reeflike towers. With the keening hiss of slowly heating air came a second sound – something foreign to the sere landscape – a humming drone echoing back and forth between cliff and precipice and spire. Light glinted from metal and the broad-winged shape of an ultralight appeared in the eastern sky. A contrail of vapor twisted away behind shining metal and plastic, the Midge sweeping gracefully past three turretlike pinnacles. The drone of the engine reverberated in the canyons below, but the slow life hiding in the sand heard nothing.

Day continued to broaden, his shining white coat rising to cover the east, driving the last shadows of night deeper and deeper into the ravines and crevices. The ultralight drifted among the towers, trending north and west, wings dipping as the pilot searched for a landing place. The thinning air was robbing the aircraft of lift, making the engine work harder and harder.

The ultralight banked sharply, the engine's droning pitch sliding up in scale, and the Midge circled. One of the great mushroom-shaped domes had cracked and splintered in some lost age, leaving a great bowl ringed with ragged shell-like walls. Sand and splintered tufa made an irregular plain within. The approach was short, the space confined, but the Midge drifted in to within a meter of the ground, then nosed up – into a stall – and bounced to the ground. A curtain of dust rose, then