Wasteland of flint

sleeping figure was a camp table holding a big service lantern. A gear bag and an insulated foodbox sat next to the table. Humingbird rose, blocking out the scene, and together they moved carefully back down the tunnel.

Outside, the eastern sky had darkened further. Winds were playing among the spires of Prion, flinging a constant rain of sand to rattle against the Midge s. Gretchen stopped just inside the mouth of the cave and dialed her comm to very short range. 'That wasn't the real Russovsky?'

Hummingbird shook his head. Gretchen could see the corners of his eyes were tight with tension. 'No,' he said after adjusting his own wrist-mounted comm. 'No respiration. No carbon dioxide residue in the air. It's some kind of copy – something like what you saw on the ship – but I don't think it moves or speaks.'

'But she was here,' Gretchen said, thinking of the whip antenna. 'She must have slept in the cave at least one night, perhaps two, while she was installing the relay.'

The nauallis nodded. 'You saw the dead moss on the floor? I think she cleared most of the local microfauna out of the cave to make a safe place to sleep.'

'Yes.' Gretchen adjusted her breather mask. At this height, you needed to keep a tight seal to reduce oxygen loss. 'Her lantern is a multispectrum one. If she left it tuned to UV all night, nothing would be able to get at her.'

Hummingbird grunted noncommittaly. 'But she didn't kill everything in the cave.'

'Maybe she knew what was dangerous and what wasn't. Not everything in this ecosystem will want to consume us and our equipment.' Gretchen smiled. 'Just enough of them to kill us if we're not careful. So – what is this afterimage made of? Dust, like the other one? Something else?'

The nauallis shrugged slightly. 'I'm not sure that is important, though an interesting question. She looks like the real thing. The table, the cloth – you can't tell a difference with the goggles dialed to hi-mag – but they aren't real.'

'How can you tell?' Gretchen bit down on a follow-up question, seeing Hummingbird stiffen. 'Ah, master crow, you don't have to keep secrets from me! We're all bundled up tight together, aren't we? Sharing the same piss-pot and cup.' With a mighty effort, Anderssen kept a sarcastic tone from her voice, though she dearly wanted to twit him again. 'Your secrets are safe with me. I swear I will never tell another soul – and if you doubt me, then when we're back on the ship, you can have me clapped in irons and sent off to the helium mines on Charon.'

With the mask and breather and hood, Gretchen couldn't tell if Hummingbird smiled or not, though she was fairly certain at least the tiniest ghost of amusement might have creased his weathered old face. There was a distinctive hiss-hiss on the comm channel.

'The shape on the floor,' he said at last, in a very careful tone. 'Does not feel out of place.'

'Oh.' Gretchen licked her lips. 'I see. But it should – if a human being were lying there, surrounded by human- made equipment – then you could tell there was a…dissonance…between the stone and dust and moss and Russovsky.' She paused, a glimmer of thought brightening into realization. 'This is one of your tlamatinime skills, isn't it? To tell when something fits properly or not? Like the debris from the shuttle – you moved those pieces of ceramic and hexsteel until they were properly aligned with the world around them – so they fit properly. And when they did – it's like they had been there forever – or at least, if they didn't fit right, you placed them on the ground as if a Mokuil had set them there.'

Hummingbird shrugged. 'Perhaps.'

'Oh, Lamb of God bless and protect us!' Gretchen felt her temper fray. The man was obviously on edge, worried, even a little frightened. But could he admit such a thing? No. 'Do you understand I don't care if you have some peculiar skill or hermetic training or secret universal decoder ring? I care about getting us both home, alive.'

The nauallis pushed away from the wall and peered out at the Midge s and the jagged peaks. The light in the sky was changing and there was an indefinable sense of gathering darkness.

'Well? Give over!' Gretchen didn't bother to disguise her irritation. 'Just shoot me with your little gun later, if I threaten the Empire with such precious knowledge as you might dispense!'

Hummingbird turned slightly, face in shadow, backlit by the brilliant sky. 'I would.'

'I don't think so,' Anderssen said in a tart voice, her nose wrinkling up. 'You'd bluster and be all mysterious and withholding and I'd break your bald head open with a wrench before you bothered to put a hole in me.'

'Hah!' Hummingbird laughed aloud, a breathy, thin sound. 'You would try, too.'

He shook his head, but the line of his shoulders had already relaxed. 'Though everything seems to be in order, I am uneasy. We need to destroy the antenna and this afterimage of Russovsky. The 'ghost' first, I think.'

'Do you know how?'

The nauallis shook his head. 'You've already touched upon the problem. This apparition isn't out of place – most ciuateteo are disturbances of the natural order and their nature is to disperse once matters are set in their proper balance – but this one is already at rest.'

'Hmm. I don't suppose we can leave it be? No? I thought not. Do you have any sense of what this ghost is made of? Is it dust, like the Russovsky on the ship?'

'No. The dead-seeming crystal fronds on the roof are a likely culprit, though.'

Gretchen wrinkled her nose again. 'So helpful. We need to experiment then.'

The nauallis replied with a skeptical grunt. 'With what?'

'With you, for a start.' Gretchen tilted her head toward the hidden chamber. 'You can tell the apparition is at rest and 'in order', right? Well, go see if you can divine anything more. I'm going to examine the radio antenna before the light fails completely.'

Without waiting for a response – and heartily glad to be out of the cave – Gretchen squeezed out the narrow entrance and set off for the relay. She heard a momentary hiss-hiss on the comm circuit and then nothing. Smiling slightly to herself and feeling entirely pleased to have bossed the nauallis around, Anderssen raised her head and began searching for the base of the antenna.

The bulk of the mountain had already cast the ledge into steadily-deepening shadow, so the onset of full dark caught Gretchen by surprise. The relay tower had been wedged into a flutelike wind-carved channel. Expansion bolts were driven into the rock on either side to pin the antenna in place. With some tricky climbing – more difficult for the heavy tools and gear slung on her harness – Gretchen had managed to get halfway up the relay. Now, with one boot braced against a lower bolt and a lightwand tight between her teeth, Gretchen was picking away at a thick cementlike layer coating the bottom half of the antenna.

'How did this get here?' Anderssen was puzzled by the encrustation covering the lower section of the relay. The material was suspiciously even in coverage and included both bolts and the pole. A hand tool splintered the surface, revealing shell-like layers. 'This looks like lime concrete slurry.'

Gretchen stopped and tucked the pick away. Wedging her shoulder into the space between the antenna and the rock, she wiggled a materials analysis pack out of her belt and – holding the cup in one hand – picked broken bits of cement from the antenna with the other. The stinging wind was beginning to die down but the relay was particularly exposed on the cliff, so Gretchen pressed herself into the rock and shivered while the cup woke up, detected a sample to compare against an internal database and went to work.

An hour later, Anderssen was sitting just inside the cave mouth, a comp on her knees and both feet centimeters from a circular heating element. The wind outside had died down to intermittent gusts, which rattled against a filament screen she'd tacked over the entrance. A second screen closed off the inner cave, leaving a five meter–long space where she'd stacked the camping gear. Among the things she'd dragged out of the Gagarin was a battered steel bucket filled with a cementlike crust. A brush was stuck in the long-solidified mire.

A noise drew her attention and Gretchen looked up in time to see the Nбhuatl unseal the edge of the inner screen. His cloak and legs were streaked with pale white dust.

'There's food -' she started to say.

'What are you doing?' Hummingbird came over to her, face tense beneath his breather. 'Put that away.'

Gretchen frowned at him, still holding the comp in her hand. It was difficult to use in the thin pressurized