“The situation is sustainable for a short time,” said Surtr. “The distance between us is slowly impairing my function, but not to a noticeable degree at this stage.”
“If we do have to flee, what about Eb?”
“Eb is very clear that he cannot leave the Dragon; he is too fundamentally intertwined. He has instructed me to fire atmospheric nukes to destroy him rather than let himself be captured. I have loaded two onto the lander.”
“Shit,” said Selene.
“He has been in Concordance hands before, remember,” said Surtr. “That was when most of the damage was done to him. He refuses to allow that to happen again.”
“Let's hope it doesn't come to that,” said Ondo. “I will come with you to explore. I've waited and rested too long.”
Selene turned her attention to Ondo, who was innocently regarding the view. “I don't think that's wise. You should stay here.” He still got sharp headaches for no reason that they could work out, although they appeared to be declining in frequency.
He waved her objections away. “Where do you want to go, Surtr?”
The Aetheral considered the numbers on the cliff face, and it was hard not to read a frown on those unchanging features. “I would like to know more about this. And about what has taken place on this world.”
If they did encounter any dangers, it was possible she might be glad of having Surtr along. She relented. “I planned to scout around, look for anyone who might be a threat. I guess we can all go.”
“I would welcome that,” the Aetheral replied. “There is so much that I don't understand. But I will be rather obtrusive; the inhabitants of this world closely resemble you in body form and stature. I do not; I could not be mistaken for anyone from here.”
“We'll keep our distance. And in any case, there's hardly anyone left. Even if an individual sees you, who are they going to tell? Who's going to believe them? They might even think you're some manifestation of their faceless god and start worshipping you.”
“I would not welcome that.”
“That's good to know,” said Selene.
A wide road had been blasted into the side of the mountain, spiralling down gently, but someone had gone to a lot of trouble to block it. Barricades of rusting machinery were piled up at several points: presumably a desperate attempt by those in the spaceport to protect themselves from the unfolding chaos below. The steep flanks of the mountain were largely impassable, strewn with fields of sharp scree that threatened to sweep you away if you attempted to wade through them. In the end, with Selene's help, the Aetheral lifted the wrecked refuelling trucks and cranes blocking their way and threw them thundering and rattling down the slopes.
“Its physical strength is enormous,” said Ondo, speaking brain-to-brain. “It's more than a match even for you.”
“Yeah, maybe. I've got all the brains in the family, though.”
Eventually, the winding road opened out onto gentler slopes. The territory reminded her of the uplands of Maes Far, except that there was only grassland, with none of the purple and red and white meadowfire with its thick, springy foliage that she remembered.
A wide plain lay spread out in front of them, patches of green and yellow interspersed with the winding curves of rivers and straighter lines that had to be irrigation channels, or tracks, or MagLev routes. The sun shone directly into her eyes, making details difficult to pick out, glinting off the waterways. She could see round patches that were clearly settlements: a cluster of buildings here that might have been a farm, larger areas further afield that had to be villages and towns and cities.
It all appeared normal, a scene from a thousand different planets across the galaxy – except for two things: the lack of movement and the lack of noise. She would have expected to hear the growing roar of machinery, see people moving around, catch trains flashing along the MagLev tracks, hear shouts of welcome or laughter from nearby farms. There was nothing, utterly nothing. There were also, she noticed, no birds carving through the high skies, no insectoids droning through the air. She thought she understood then why it was they'd seen only grassland on the higher slopes, even though the records suggested there should be a rich flush of flowers: only wind-pollinated plants were surviving.
There was also the smell. Not the flush of greenery she would have expected, but the tang of decay, sharp on the breeze. A lot of animals, a lot of people had died on Fenwinter in the very recent past.
They came upon the first settlement, little more than a cluster of stone dwellings and high, arched barns set in the middle of sloping fields that were separated by carefully laid stone walls. It had to have been a thriving farmstead once, but now it was deserted, something metallic clanging again and again in the breeze off the mountains. A couple of low, rugged bovines grazed in one of the enclosures, but they were vastly outnumbered by the dead. The rotting carcasses of their sisters lay all around, ribcages gaping open like teeth.
“The pathogen did this,” said Surtr. “Animals were susceptible too.”
“It jumped species boundaries,” said Ondo. “The infection is almost always fatal and highly contagious. You should be glad that you are not susceptible.” They'd ensured that she and Ondo were protected before coming to the planet, thanks to Hessia's DNA-sequencing of the pathogen. There was no risk to any of them, but the virus was most definitely there, in the air, upon surfaces. And, according to Selene's self-monitoring systems, upon her skin, in her lungs. Once they were away from the planet, it would take a few days for all traces of it to be eliminated.
“We could have helped them if we'd known,” she said. “We could have released benign viral vectors
