Wasteland of flint

Even in the jerky, disrupted image on the panel, Magdalena could tell there was a fierce wind lashing against the cliffs. Less than two kilometers away, a boiling cloud of yellow-red dust raged against the Escarpment. Sheets of sand roared across the valley floor and funneled down into a terrifying-looking standing cone at the mouth of the canyon.

Hummingbird turned and scuttled back beneath the overhang, the tail of his cloak snapping in the violent air.

'Looks rough,' Parker said, chewing on his fingernails. 'Those anchors had better hold…'

'He's checked them twice already since the sun rose.' Magdalena adjusted the camera view again, trying to get a low enough angle to look beneath the overhang. The image changed, but not enough. 'Ssssh! Curse warband leader Hadeishi for trying to crash our satellites!'

Parker tapped on one of the secondary panels and grimaced at the resulting screen. 'Almost no propellant left.'

'No.' Maggie let out a steam-kettle hiss of disgust. 'I managed to stop them from degrading too much, but all I can do now is reorient their point of view. Some of the others are already deep in the atmosphere – they'll burn up soon. We'll go blind, eyes gouged out one at a time.'

'Still no comm?' Parker started to chew on his other hand. Magdalena stared at him in disgust – his weak claws were already worn down to repulsive pink nubs.

'No – I was talking to Gretchen several days ago and we were cut off. I think the old crow is trying to impose comm silence… Will you stop doing that?'

'What?' The pilot stared at her in surprise. Maggie's paw blurred in the air and seized his hand, turning over the ruined fingernails. 'Oh…I just need a tabac, you know. Makes me nervous to…not have any.' He grimaced.

Magdalena let go of his hand, then wiped her paw on one of the blankets surrounding her. 'Bitter smoke means so much to you?'

'Yeah.' Parker looked a little queasy and rubbed his wrist. 'I'll stop.' He put both hands in the pockets of his jacket. 'So – hey – don't Midge-class ultralights act as a local comm relay? We could tap in and listen to what they're saying.'

'Yes,' Maggie growled, curling up in her nest again. 'Which is all shut down. I suppose they have suit-to-suit comm working, but I've tried opening a long-range link through the peapods and there's no response. Feather-brain has everything locked up tight.'

'What about accessing a backup system?' Parker looked painfully earnest. Both of his hands, flat-looking fingers and all, were out of the jacket pockets and being rubbed together as if he were cold. 'You used the standard long- range highband, right? Isn't there a secondary system on these aircraft?'

'Sometimes.' Maggie gave the pilot an inscrutable look. 'But the peapods do not mount microwave emitters. There's no way to punch an area transmission through the atmosphere.'

'Really?' Parker started to smirk. He pointed at the main display. 'How are you getting a transmission back from your satellites?'

Maggie showed him a full set of teeth, which did not properly impress the pilot. After a moment she relented, saying 'To reduce emissions I am using a point-to-point laser link.'

'You mean,' Parker said, grinning, 'to get around the main array lockout. And keep engineer stoneface from noticing your violation of the judge's orders.'

'Maybe.' Maggie stirred in her blankets and bone-white claws make a sharp, skittering tik-tik- tik on the panel as she queried the peapods. 'A highband query failed to draw a response from the Midge onboard comm. So if we try a laser we'll have to drop a whisker right on the comm port, which seems very unlikely if we're firing from orbit and trying to hit a port which is probably underneath the wing.'

'Not at all!' Parker seemed to have forgotten his tabac sticks and slid over the panel to stand beside Magdalena. 'Look, let's bring up the mechanical schematic from the repair bay – not the standard manual, mind – but PГўtecatl's record of modifications she'd made herself.'

The Hesht and the human both began looking through the dead engineer's records, searching for maintenance records concerning the expedition ultralights.

An hour later Magdalena coughed in delight and brought up a hand-annotated schematic on the command panel. Parker squinted at the diagram and smiled himself.

'That's it.' The pilot ran a thin, tabac-stained finger over a layout of the Midge tail assembly, squinting to read a block of annotated text. 'This is a military-surplus comm aperture bolted to the rear engine housing. Which is great.' He frowned. 'But why?'

'To communicate with the ship,' Magdalena said, eyes bare sodium-yellow slits. 'With the Palenque. Look at the other Midge.' A claw stabbed at the image on the main display. Both ultralights were leaning hard against the cables holding them to the sand. Hummingbird's aircraft, despite the patched wing, was obviously newer and lacked the worn, battered appearance of Russovsky's aircraft. Seen from above, there were other differences – the extra comm aperture, larger air intakes, reinforced tail pylons…

'PГўtecatl and Russovsky must have been busy.' Parker fumbled in his pocket, but found nothing, not even a gum wrapper. 'Crap. Stupid Marines… Okay, see if you can get a lock with a peapod laser! If you can, we'll be set.'

'Perhaps.' Magdalena began sending a new set of codes to the satellites. She hummed as she worked, a deep rumbling sound in her chest. Parker became nervous after listening for a bit and sidled off the bridge.

By the time he returned, looking even more morose than before, the Hesht was watching as a targeting overlay wandered jerkily across the video feed from the surface. Hummingbird was nowhere to be seen and the wind had died down to intermittent gusts. Parker stared at the screen, then turned to Maggie with a perplexed expression. 'What's going on?'

'Comp on a peapod is about as smart as a leaf-eater,' she said, flashing both incisors. 'It's having a hard time finding the comm aperture.'

'Guide it to lock-on yourself,' Parker said irritably. His right hand moved toward the control panel.

Magdalena raised a silver-frosted eyebrow at him. Long whiskers curving back around her face twitched in amusement. 'How far away are we from the planet?'

'Oh. Yeah.' Parker slumped against the console again. The Palenque was steadily accelerating away from the third planet. 'How much lag is there?'

'Three light-minutes,' she replied, turning her attention back to the screen. The targeting indicator was jumping from spot to spot, wildly painting the top of the Midge, the rocks, blowing sand, the left wheel as it groped to find the aperture receiver. 'We'll just have to wait. Shouldn't take long.'

Five minutes passed with Parker squirming like a kit who had to find some fresh dirt. Then the scatter-search pattern implemented by the peapod comp hopped into lock with the aperture. There was a cheerful chiming sound and a new v-pane opened on Maggie's panel as the peapod negotiated a channel with the Midge.

A sharp beep followed and Maggie frowned at the v-pane.

'I think we've got a lock,' she announced in a dissapointed tone, 'but the responder laser is not working properly.' The Hesht scrolled through a log, whiskers flat against her head. 'This model has a two-part system,' she explained after a moment, indicating a sub-schematic. 'The receptor itself can modulate a reflected signal along the path of the incoming beam, but only for basic comm etiquette. Real data return is handled by a second, separate laser. But we're not getting any response at all. I think this other laser is blocked out by Hummingbird's comm lockdown.'

'So,' Parker said, his brief excitement dampened. 'We can only talk one way? How do we get any data back?'

'I don't know.' Magdalena frowned at her displays. Luckily, Hummingbird had not emerged from the cave while the laser-whisker was gyrating across the landscape. The only motion visible below was the slow rocking of both ultralights in the wind. 'I could send sets of command codes blindly, but…' She hissed, picking at her left upper incisor with the tip of a claw. 'All we see are the ultralights and their immediate area. We need something to change visually in response to our signal. Ah!'

Her claw stabbed at the v-panel, running along the grainy, pixilated front edge of an ultralight wing. A curving