Wasteland of flint

pushed him, but the air was still and cold. Gretchen felt the heat of the pale white disk of the sun burning on her arms, even through the layers of insulation and her cloak. The air pressure in her suit seemed to rise, making it difficult to breath, though the gauges showed nothing abnormal.

Hummingbird grew smaller again, as if he had traveled a great distance over the desolate plain, but he still had not passed the nearest boulder. Gretchen felt her pace slow, following the line of his tracks in the disorderly sand. Now she felt a heaviness in her own limbs, as if the suit had grown thicker, more cumbersome.

Gasping, Gretchen forced her feet to move, to step forward. There was an instant of resistance and then she began to run. She became aware of a peculiar sensation – her legs had become long and heavy, tipped with something sharp, something which dragged in the sand. Her body moved strangely and she weaved, realizing a swing weight followed her motion, acting as a counterweight to her loping stride. Terror rushed up in her throat, green bile biting at her tongue. The sky had darkened to brass, the sun shrunken to a single point of steady white light. Under her feet, the footprints left by Hummingbird were obscured, blown away by the wind and only her heavy, three-toed tread replaced them.

'What was that?' Gretchen found herself standing beside Hummingbird on the crest of a low, scythe-shaped dune. The hills were a dim line along the horizon. Her entire body was aching, starved for breath and she crumpled with agonizing slowness to her knees. Sweat clouded the inside of her goggles and pooled in the hollows of her cheekbones. 'What happened?'

The masked face of the nauallis stared down at her. A steadily rising breeze tugged at the man's kaffiyeh and cloak. He did not seem winded by the run across the desert. 'You should not have followed me. Now you will have to walk back.'

Gretchen tried to rise, but found her attention entirely occupied with the effort of breathing. 'I saw…I thought I saw something. There were tracks in the sand… They weren't human footprints.'

'Really?' Hummingbird turned away and began moving down the face of the dune with a sideways, half-walking, half-slipping motion. 'Come. It will be dark soon.'

Both arms trembling with fatigue, Gretchen managed to get to her feet. She blinked, trying to clear away the sweat stinging her eyes. After a moment, she lifted the goggles a fraction to wipe the moisture away with the corner of her kaffiyeh. Even the brief instant of exposure stung her face with freezing cold and the terribly dry Ephesian atmosphere wicked the sweat away. Settling the goggles into their long accustomed grooves beside her nose and along the crest of her cheekbones, Gretchen set off after the nauallis. She felt entirely unsettled and the obvious – unexpected – distance between this unremarkable ridge of sand and the distant, glinting wreck made her feel a little queasy.

'Wait for me,' she growled into the comm. 'There may be siftsand or hidden crevices!'

Hummingbird did not reply, continuing to walk steadily west.

Swallowing another curse, Anderssen stumbled to the bottom of the dune and then noticed – at last – the beginning of the crash skid in the swale between two lines of dunes. The little valley in front of her was scattered with a litter of hextiles and bits and pieces of decaying metal from the initial impact of the shuttle. 'What the – How far did we run? Hummingbird!'

There was no answer and the nauallis's shape disappeared over the next dune. Gretchen stumped after him, uneasily aware of her own exhaustion and the relentless advance of night.

Thin night wind keened through the wreck, swirling among slender towers of calcite and quartz. Gretchen lay in the pressure tent, her head toward the entrance; her breathing mask, goggles and respirator blessedly laid aside. Her nose was covered with medical cream. The moment's exposure out at the end of the impact scar had given her a nasty burn. Part of the door was clear, allowing her to make out the dark shape of the wing surrounded by the blaze of stars. Ephesus had no moon and the constellations seemed terribly bright in such an ebon sky.

She felt a little strange, lying in the darkness, listening to the tent's compressor hum to itself, the shoulder of her z-suit touching Hummingbird's. The tent had an insulated floor, the walls trapped three layers of atmosphere in an airtight sandwich, and a heating element glowed along the roof ridge yet she still felt cold. The only warm part of her entire body was the right shoulder, where she could feel Hummingbird's suit resting against hers.

Is this how he feels all the time? A single warm point in a cold, friendless universe?

Gretchen could feel her legs complaining, even through the haze of painkiller and muscle relaxant dispensed by the medband – all the gods bless that infuriating scrap of metal, which had decided to unlock itself an hour after she'd stumbled, nearly crawling, back into the camp – and trying to cramp up.

'What happened this afternoon?' Anderssen grimaced, hearing her voice as a tight, tinny squeak. 'I heard these sounds… I saw strange tracks in the sand… What were you doing out there?'

For a moment, Hummingbird did not respond, though she could feel him shift in his sleepbag. The ruined tent made a good cushion beneath them and Gretchen had managed to find the strength to lay out blocks of hextile as a floor to protect them from the hungry sand. There was a hiss, a clicking sound, then another hiss of air.

'There was nothing to see.' In the darkness, his voice sounded contemplative.

Gretchen swallowed a very rude curse and then forced herself to breathe steadily until she thought she could speak without shouting. 'I saw you walking very strangely. I heard a sound like someone singing over the comm link. I went out to see what you were doing and…and I felt something strange in the air. The sun seemed…different. I started to feel odd, as if my body were very heavy. Then – suddenly – I'm three k away on top of a dune! How do you explain that?'

There was another silence. Hummingbird turned towards Gretchen. She could see starlight glinting in his eyes. 'You can't have heard anything,' he said in a musing, suspicious voice. 'I had my comm turned off.'

'What? That's impossible. I heard you chanting!'

'You're very tired, Anderssen-tzin. You should probably sleep now.'

Hummingbird's fingers closed around Gretchen's wrist and her head rolled back. Though she tried to keep her eyes open, sleep rose up and swallowed her whole. Distantly, she heard a raspy voice singing:

'Tla xi-huГўl-huiГўn, in Temic-xoch…tla xihuГўl…'

Gretchen became aware of a faint clear light filling the tent and she opened her eyes, wondering if the nauallis had turned on a flashlight. Instead, she beheld the full vault of heaven, flush with glittering stars. They were tightly packed, a carpet of gleaming, colorful jewels, and their light fell upon her face with a cold, delicate touch. Wind ruffled her hair and for a moment – just a moment – Gretchen smelled realspruce and pine and the bitter, pungent tang of wood smoke.

I'm home, she thought, then sat up, heart thudding with fear, the sleepbag clutched to her chest.

The tent was gone. Hummingbird lay beside her, a dark indistinct shape wrapped in a dirty woolen blanket. She looked to her right and saw both Midges sitting on the sand, undisturbed, the smooth metallic shape of the shuttle rising behind them, metal skin intact, the windows glowing with the light of flight instruments.

Impossible. Gretchen abruptly looked to her left. What was that? Something moved!

A man, crouching on his hands and knees, was staring at her. He was blond, square-jawed, with short-cropped hair. Dark ink circled his biceps with interlocking genome trails. A shipsuit clung to taut muscle and a broad chest. A name tag gleamed on his shoulders and breast beside a star-shaped logo.

You can't be here, she tried to say. Then she realized he was not wearing a helmet.

Neither am I!

She woke up in the tent, the air stifling and close, blood thundering in her ears. A dry, parched taste filled her mouth, as if she'd gone without water for days. In the darkness, Gretchen managed to find the tube of her water pouch by feel and slumped in relief to feel the brackish, metallic fluid sliding across her tongue.

Beside her, Hummingbird was snoring softly, deeply asleep.

The Asteroid Belt, Ephesus System

A warning tone sounded through the bridge of the Cornuelle. 'Proximity alert,' the navigational system announced. 'Object at two thousand meters and closing.'

Hadeishi sat quietly, watching Kosho leaning over the helmsman's shoulder. Despite missing a night's sleep,