Wasteland of flint

from the aircraft comm. She fretted about losing the video, but there was nothing to be done.

'In flight again,' she muttered, watching a plot of the aircraft creeping across the vast curve of the planetary surface. A projected vector arced south-southwest. 'Toward the observatory base. Hrrrr… three days at this rate, maybe four.'

Checking again to make sure she wouldn't be disturbed, Maggie began listening to the latest set of voice recordings. After an hour, she gave up, rubbing sore ears. Philosophy…kittens complaining about the food! They must be bored down there, just flying all night.

The Hesht flipped quickly through some secondary data which had come up with the burst transmission, just making sure both aircraft were in good shape. As she did, a log section highlighted itself and chimed for attention. What's this? A leak?

'Parker,' Maggie growled into her throat mike, 'I need you to look at something.'

'On my way,' the pilot replied, sounding groggy and irritated. Maggie glanced over at the surveillance camera and her whiskers twitched to see the human male shuffling out of one of the cabins used by the scientists. His patterned shirt was on backwards. Turning her nose politely in the air, Maggie routed the log information to his navigation console and sat back, staring at the huge red disc of the planet filling the main v-pane.

A moment later, her head tilted to one side in confusion. 'Where did that come from? What an odd color. Ah…' She opened another private channel to the crew's quarters. 'Mister Smalls,' she asked in a very polite voice. 'Could you join us on the bridge?'

In the Wasteland

A pair of glittering white contrails made two rule-straight lines against the velvety darkness of the Ephesian sky. Both Midge s hummed along, wing surfaces finely tuned to squeeze as much lift as possible from the thin atmosphere, ice crystals spiraling out behind them. In the Gagarin, Gretchen was letting the comp fly, her attention turned to the geologist's travel logs. Their flight path had carried them out over a truly vast desolation, leaving the uplands of the Escarpment far behind.

Gretchen looked over the maps one more time. Russovsky had marked them up with a variety of notes and scribbled amendments. Not all of them were in Nбhuatl or even in Norman. Anderssen scowled, trying to make out a note marking an area they would fly over near dawn if they held their current course. What is this? Old Russian, maybe. She scratched her jaw thoughtfully, trying to remember how to read the blocky letters. Her grandmother had some books…thoughts of childhood yielded nothing but a memory of pine-smoke, nutmeg and pumpkin. Checking her comp found at least a phonetic alphabet.

'B-r-i-l-l-e-a-n-t,' she spelled out, rather laboriously. Russovsky's handwriting was not the clearest in the world. 'Or…brilliant. Hmm.' What does that mean? Well, something she saw from the air. Something very bright – perhaps even visible at night. 'Hummingbird? Are you awake?'

'Yes,' came the answer – and the nauallis, for once, did not sound half-asleep.

'I'm looking at Russovsky's maps,' Gretchen said, taking a moment to eyeball the horizon and the ground below. Sand. A barren flat covered with faint linear shadows. Anderssen grimaced, looking ahead. The field of pipeflowers disappeared rather abruptly into darkness. 'And we've two options to reach the base camp. We can keep on this heading and enter an area she has marked 'brilliant' or swing north to follow a section of uplift.'

'An odd thing to mark,' Hummingbird replied. 'Can I see the map?'

'It's on your comp…now,' Gretchen said, tapping a glyph to send the file to his console.

There was momentary silence and then she heard the nauallis make a curious hmm-hmm sound. 'This is in old script – Kievian Rus, I believe – and among those savages, the word 'brilliant' refers to 'almaz' or what we would term 'diamond in the rough.''

'Diamond?' Gretchen shook her head. 'So a geometric figure on the ground? That would explain why she could see it from the air.'

'Not the shape,' Hummingbird said, sounding a little puzzled himself. 'Almaz is a cheap, colorless gemstone. There are Mixtec mining colonies on Anбhuac which mine the mineral for industrial purposes. It makes a particularly fine abrasive for certain processes.'

'Hmm. If it's a mineral, perhaps Russovsky could see an open drift of the material as she flew overhead. Or…or her geodetic sensors revealed a vein of the stuff in the earth. She'd be sure to note something like that.'

'Indeed.' Hummingbird sounded satisfied. 'So, do we swing north or not?'

'I think we should be careful,' Gretchen said, checking her fuel gauges. 'A day won't make an enormous difference one way or another and there's no sense risking -'

Out of the corner of her eye, Anderssen caught sight of Hummingbird's Midge suddenly lurch in the air and lose a hundred meters of altitude. At the same moment, her comp squawked in alarm and she heard the nauallis shout in surprise.

'I've lost an engine,' he barked, the ultralight falling away toward the desert floor in an ungainly spiral. 'Number one has shut down completely. I'm losing fuel on tanks four and five.'

'Set down,' Gretchen snapped, the Gagarin banking sharply to the right as she reacted. 'I'm right behind you. Shut all your fuel feeds and go to an unpowered glide.'

'Understood.' Hummingbird's voice was calm and precise, though Anderssen immediately lost visual sight of the plunging aircraft. The contrail ended abruptly in a slowly falling cloud of ice. The Gagarin nosed over into a steep dive, wind shrieking under her wings, and Gretchen felt the pit of her stomach squeeze tight.

Her radar showed Hummingbird's Midge lose nearly a thousand meters of altitude before staggering into a kind of glide. By that time, Gretchen was swooping down out of the night sky, the falling ultralight in sight again. The upper wing of a Midge made a good reflector and by starlight her goggles could pick him out. Below them both, however, the land was dark and featureless, though Gretchen doubted the ground was soft as a pillow. At least we're past the pipeflowers!

'Switch your radar to ground-scan,' she said tersely. 'You'll need to find someplace flat -'

'Too late,' Hummingbird snapped and his breath was harsh on the comm. Gretchen cursed – the altimeter jumped and radar suddenly revealed a broad, deep canyon rushing past below her – and pulled up, turning wide around Hummingbird, whose aircraft was skidding across the crown of a mesalike hill rising above the canyon floor. The Gagarin made a swooping, leisurely circle as the other ultralight bounced to a halt and Gretchen could make out rough, jagged cliffs on every side.

'Turn all your lights on,' she said, hoping Hummingbird hadn't been knocked unconscious by the violence of his landing. 'And put out your anchors.'

Her breath puffing white in the chill air of the cockpit, Gretchen ignored everything but the radar image of the rock and stone and precipices below as she lined up to land. 'Gently now,' she whispered to the Gagarin as the ultralight drifted down out of the sky, airspeed dipping low, almost into a stall. 'Easy…easy…'

The front wheel touched down, sending a shock through the airframe, and then the Gagarin was rolling to a halt a dozen meters from Hummingbird.

'The number four fuel pump is clogged up,' Gretchen said, her voice muffled by the cowling around the engine. White fog billowed around her shoulders, oozing from the maintenance hatch in thin streamers. 'Looks like a line cracked when you crashed and has been leaking hydrogen vapor into the casing. Everything's frozen solid.' A little shaky from too much adrenaline and too little rest, she climbed down from the upper wing, holding tight to the wing struts to keep from slipping.

'Can it be fixed?' Hummingbird was unloading gear from the cargo compartment. He made a vague gesture at the dark, still night hiding the rugged mesa and canyon beyond. 'Here?'

Gretchen gave him a sharpish look – completely lost on the man, given the lack of light – and ran her hands over the tools on her belt. 'If we have a schematic of the engine and component details, I might be able to fabricate a new fuel line or fix the old one, but I don't know if the maintenance manuals are loaded into either comp.' Gretchen tried to keep her voice light, but the prospect of doubling-up in one single remaining Midge made her feel sick. We need both aircraft for the pickup, she thought desperately. The skyhook won't work with just one.

'If they're not, we're in serious trouble.' Anderssen cracked frost from her gloves, keeping her eyes away from the old man. 'The weight ratio in one of these aircraft is marginal with one person and supplies. Two