Wasteland of flint

watching from Three.'

'True.' Hadeishi scratched at his beard in irritation. 'I have considered this. Unfortunately, we know at least one shuttle from this refinery ship was operating in the atmosphere of Three – and what if they picked up someone or something? Though our tlamatinime is not currently aboard, I know he would be…ah… apoplectic if we allowed a gang of landless miners to make off with a First Sun artifact. Even a small one.'

'I see.' Kosho nodded. 'I will arrange to approach under cover and in full stealth.'

'Good.' Mitsu cleared the comm channel and punched up Thai-i HuГ©mac's quarters on the barracks deck. There was a brief delay and the v-pane cleared, revealing the bronzed face of the Marine commander.

'Hai, Chu-sa?' Half of the Zapotec's face was glistening with shaving gel.

'We have found our quarry,' Hadeishi said, shrugging into his uniform jacket. 'Are Heicho Felix and her squad ready to go?'

HuГ©mac tensed, lips compressing into a tight line to admit anything less than perfect readiness to his commander. 'Almost. They need some more time in the simulators – if we have time to spare, kyo.'

Hadeishi nodded to himself and checked the navigational plot Kosho had seconded to his comp display. 'Two, perhaps three ship-days, Thai-i. And then we will need to move quickly.' He looked back to the Marine. 'Is there a problem with the personnel assigned? Should Heicho Felix be replaced as team leader?'

HuГ©mac shook his head slowly, though Mitsu thought he could see a tinge of concern behind the impassive, southern-highlands face. A near-open struggle flickered behind the flint-dark eyes. 'No. Felix and her men have done very well. It's just…'

'What is it?' Hadeishi kept his voice conversational and polite. For the Marine to say anything less than 'Can do, kyo. Done, kyo.' indicated a serious problem. Not for the first time, Hadeishi wished his subordinates would not drink quite so deeply of Fleet tradition and doctrine.

'The simulations, kyo.' HuГ©mac actually glanced over his shoulder, though there was no one in his tiny cabin, before meeting Hadeishi's quizzical look. 'They're monstrous – vicious – almost unbeatable. The assault team's been vaporized, holed, shot, incinerated, decompressed, blasted, and cut to bits every day. It's hard on the men to keep their heads up when they lose so often.'

'And Felix?' Hadeishi cocked his head a little to the side. 'How is she holding up?'

'She's still game,' HuГ©mac allowed, his expression brightening. 'She gets knocked down, she gets back up… but she must be near worn out, too. The sho-sa has just been after her with a flint club, kyo. Relentless.'

'I understand.' In fact, Mitsu felt genuinely touched by Susan's efforts on his behalf. 'Tell Felix to stand her men down for a day – all members of the assault team on shipside leave, no duties – and get some sleep. Tomorrow have them run through a full prep equipment check. They'll be on round-the-clock call starting in two days, so make sure they remember to eat. If anyone has trouble sleeping, override their medbands.'

'Hai!' HuГ©mac signed off, vastly relieved by the commander's temperate reaction. Hadeishi made a desultory effort at combing his beard and washing his face, but his thoughts were far away. His attendant fussed around, straightening up the cabin and brushing lint from his jacket. Mitsu let the old man go about his business, thinking of the future.

Now, I'll be the one having trouble sleeping, he thought as a tubecar whisked him toward the bridge. And Susan will be nagging me. The prospect of facing the massive cutting beam on a Tyr-class in a shooting fight did not calm his stomach. There would be little room to maneuver among the asteroids, which took away the Cornuelle's advantages of speed and agility.

As the car slowed, Hadeishi felt an air of melancholy dropping away like leaves from the great oak in his father's courtyard, replaced by a surety of purpose he hadn't even realized was missing.

The Cornuelle held station in the radar shadow of a mountain-sized chunk of nickel- iron, skin mesh at full absorption, engines cold, every ship's system dialed down to minimal levels. On the bridge, where even normal lighting seemed unaccountably dimmed by standing to battle stations, Hadeishi leaned back into the embrace of his shockchair, entirely calm, and watched a v-feed from Outrider One.

Hayes was driving the drone from his Weapons station, broad shoulders hunched over the controls. Both Kosho and Smith were hanging on every flicker of data from their passive sensors and the point-defense network. On the v-pane, Hadeishi saw acres of jagged rock slide past as the Outrider inched its way around the nearer asteroid. The drone had been stripped down – more work for the engineers, he thought in amusement – to little more than a brace of cameras and a compressed air jet for maneuvering. Yoyontzin had claimed the modified skin-mesh on the Outrider would let it avoid detection on radar if the miniature ship did not betray itself with an exhaust signature.

So a machinist's crew – Hadeishi presumed that meant Master's Mate Helsdon and his wrench monkeys, who seemed to get all the tricky jobs – had dismounted the reactor core and plasma thrust drive and jimmied in a hand-built propulsion unit straight out of the 'Firetower' era of space exploration on Anбhuac.

'Saw this on a 3v about the race to the moon,' Helsdon confided to Smith, while Hadeishi happened to be in hearing. 'Simple. Reliable. Not too fast – which is good. Don't want a missilelike velocity signature to pop up on someone's passive scan.'

The Outrider crossed a range of spikelike peaks and emerged from shadow. The cameras adjusted to the faint sunlight, though Hayes did not make any course corrections. He was flying almost blind, letting the stream of telemetry returning from the drone via a laser-whisker guide him along a plot derived from the g-array scan data. Somewhere ahead, still out of sight, the refinery was lurking, hidden between the screening mass of two mammoth asteroids.

'Three minutes,' Kosho announced, eyeing her navigation display. 'You should have visual by now.'

Hadeishi steepled his fingers and continued to watch quietly. Young Smith-tzin was sweating hard, eyes flickering back and forth between the confusing array of scan data. A problem with the software running the 'consolidated' display had left him to reconcile the regular passive scan and the g-array by hand. The wildcatters did not seem to have deployed their own sentry drones, but…

The camera view changed again. The Outrider had passed into the shadow of the two asteroids. Now – dead ahead – there was a half-familiar outline floating in the ebon void. Points of light gleamed against a greater darkness, and they were not stars.

'Contact,' Hayes announced in a whisper. 'Stabilizing platform.'

The Outrider slowed to a halt, hanging in the abyss, both cameras cycling through a variety of wave- and focal lengths. Shipside comp gobbled up the data and began building an enhanced image on the main display. Hadeishi sat up in his chair.

The keglike shapes of ore carrels became visible, the lights now revealed as EVA lamps strung along supports surrounding the massive containers. A cluster of circular exhausts came into view, the flaring nacelles blackened by plasma flux. A scale indicator appeared beside the screen. One of the Cornuelle's shuttles would fit into the maw of a single thruster. The cruiser itself would fill only three of the dozens of ore carrels now visible.

'Drone hold position,' Hadeishi said quietly, his eyes traveling along the bulky, mammoth lines of the refinery. Mazes of pipe filled the spaces between the ore containers. The actual ship itself was entirely hidden, save for the massive engines protruding from the globular mass. 'Shift the Outrider so the asteroid backdrops the drone. We need a full scan workup of the refinery before we move to phase two. No sense risking a star or planet silhouette by accident.'

He tapped a builder's schematic on a secondary v-pane. 'Update the plans we have. I want to know about anything out of the ordinary, no matter how small. And see if you can get a registry number from a side-stencil or something.'

Hayes and Kosho nodded before turning back to their panels. Mitsuharu opened a downship channel. 'Engineering? This is Hadeishi. I would like hourly updates on refitting progress.'

Engineer Second Yoyontzin hurried into the service bay at clockwise two on the engine ring. The high-vaulted space was crowded with machinery, men and the hiss of welding torches. A sharp, metallic tang of heated metal