Wasteland of flint ittotss-1

by Thomas Harlan

  Beyond the outcropping, a deep crevice split in the face of the mesa. I should head back…she started to remind herself, but then…what's that? A light?

  Anderssen stopped and knelt down, peering over the edge into the darkness. There was a light. There were many lights, spreading in a delicate cobweb across the rock, making the ravine gleam and glitter like the stars above, a hidden galaxy of jeweled-colors and shining motes.

  Like moss, a firemoss, she thought, lips quirking in a smile. Life blooming from nothing. Even here, at the edge of annihilation. Gretchen concentrated on the nearest filaments and was rewarded by a vision of delicate tendrils radiating out from a cone-shaped core. The surface seemed to glisten, though she doubted there was any kind of moisture in this system. A superconducting energy trap, maybe? I wish Sinclair and Tukhachevsky were here… They would love this. Ha! They'll be jealous when I tell them about all the things I've seen. God, I even miss that tub vodka of theirs. A sound interrupted her delight. Gretchen looked up, surprised. A cloaked figure knelt a few meters away, silhouetted by a wash of stars, djellaba and kaffiyeh wrapped expertly around narrow shoulders. An instant of surprise was replaced by a certain sense of recognition.

  "What are you?" Gretchen stood up slowly, hoping to leave the firemoss undisturbed. Flakes of rock spilled away from her gloves, falling among the thready clusters. "You're not Russovsky, are you?"

  "I am," answered the dark outline. The voice was hoarse, rusty, as if long unused. The shape stood as well, wiry blond hair hanging loose around her shoulders. "What are you?"

  "A human being," Gretchen said, then stopped, horrified. Hummingbird wouldn't want her to give anything away. "A visitor."

  "Am I a human being?" Russovsky came close and Gretchen could see her pale, lean face glowing with an inner light. Stunned, Gretchen realized she was seeing the pattern of a vibrant crystalline lattice seeping through the woman's skin. "My memories are strange. I was flying, high above the world. I was walking under the sea, among the bones of the dead."

  "Yes, yes, you were. But you are not a human being now. You are an Ephesian, like the moss."

  Russovsky looked down at the colony, her bare, unprotected face perfectly still. "No. I am not. The hathol are an incurious people, content with their long slow lives. I am restless. I need something I do not have."

  "Everyone is restless," Gretchen laughed softly, breath puffing white around her breather mask. "Perhaps you are human."

  "Are you content?" Russovsky moved closer and the light within her skin grew brighter. Her eyes shone like stars themselves. "Show me!"

  Gretchen began to back away, feeling her way along the edge of the ravine. Something in the shape began to change and she felt the prickling of alarm. The voice continued to echo in her suit comm, but she realized there was no way Russovsky could make such a sound in the thin atmosphere, not without a comm link. She scrambled up and over the crest of the rocks. The figure stopped and was staring up at her. Without waiting for the shape to do something, Gretchen scrambled away as fast as she dared, heading for the tent and Hummingbird.

  The Cornuelle

  Mitsuharu was sitting cross-legged on the edge of his sleeping mat, a fall of snarled dark hair spread over his shoulders and chest when the comm lit up with an incoming message. An officious two-tone chime sounded, indicating a priority connection from the bridge.

  "Hadeishi here," he said, putting down an ivory-handled brush. Guiltily pleased by the interruption — he did not enjoy the tedium of brushing — the chu-sa began plaiting his traditionally long hair up in a thick braid. "On screen."

  Comm stabilized to reveal Sho-sa Kosho sitting on the bridge. To unfamiliar eyes the exec's stiff, controlled demeanor would have revealed very little beyond an impression of cool consideration. Mitsuharu saw a certain eager excitement in the tilt of the woman's eyes and the set of her mouth. There was also a brief, nearly undetectable, reaction of embarrassment to finding him almost naked, clad only in an undershirt, belt, trousers, boots, comm unit and medband.

  "The g-sensor array has yielded up a match for the refinery ship," Kosho reported in a more-than-usually terse voice. "Distance is forty thousand k, by my estimate. Bearing two-six-three, elevation plus thirty-two."

  "Right on top of us." Hadeishi allowed himself a quick, pleased smile. He botched the smaller over-and-under at the end of the plait and gave up, letting the shining dark hair, a little streaked with gray, lie loose against his back. "Deeper into the belt?"

  Kosho shook her head, looking sideways at a hidden display. "Near the outsystem fringe. The bulk of the local drift is between us, so I've not been able to get a secondary detect with passive sensors."

  "Clever." Hadeishi unfolded himself from the bed and found his uniform shirt. "Keeping close to the area they want to work, neh? And behind a shield of debris. What is their gravitational situation? Could they make gradient to hyperspace from their current location?"

  The exec shook her head, an eager gleam of flickering in her eyes. "The local field is not smooth enough," she said. "They will have to bolt from cover if they wish to transit."

  "A location fraught with compromise." Hadeishi sealed the shirt in a smooth motion with his thumb. "Their holds must be only half-full, but the takings are likely rich, enough to warrant the risk of remaining in-system. Have you laid in an intercept course?"

  "Hai, Chu-sa." Kosho stiffened fractionally. "Would you like to review the plot?"

  "Not now." Hadeishi's thoughts were already leaping ahead to the next task. In any case, he had full confidence in Kosho's ability to maneuver the ship through this debris field. "I want to be in Outrider camera range as quickly as possible — while remaining hidden!" His tone turned serious. "If they bolt, we will have to catch them and we cannot risk a weapons exchange in open space."

  Kosho frowned. Mitsu made a "go-ahead" motion with his hand.

  "Hadeishi-san," she said, rather tentatively, "why not just spook them into making gradient? Then they'll be gone and the debris field will probably mask their departure from any…one who might be 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.
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br />   "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 and plastic permeated the air. The atmosphere recyclers in Engineering had been operating over capacity since the Cornuelle had launched from the Teotihuacбn Fleet contract yards sixteen years ago. A packet of schematics were crammed under his left arm, while his right fumbled for a fresh tabac. Spying Master's Mate Helsdon and his crew swarming over a box-shaped structure in the middle of the bay, the engineer turned their way, scowling furiously.

  "Helsdon — come down here." Yoyontzin ignored the other machinists, most of whom were packing up their tool bags or doing fine finishing work on the sheets of hull fabric plated onto a big open framework of hexacarbon pipe. The Nбhuatl lit the tabac and puffed furiously, feeling his nerves settle slightly, while the master's mate pushed up his work goggles and shut off a sealing torch.

  "There's an addition to this platform," Yoyontzin said when Helsdon had climbed down, rubbing his face clean with a very dirty cloth. The engineer opened the packet on a nearby work table. Like every other square meter of the engineering ring, the metal surface was discolored, scored, chipped and pitted. It was also antiseptically clean. "Chu-sa Hadeishi just called down. He says to disable the broadband and laser comm on the platform. He wants a wire-spool instead."

  Helsdon knuckled his chin, looking over the schematics. "How far from the ship to the refinery? Ah — six k — that's a bit of wire. Do we have that much comm wire?"

  Yoyontzin nodded, his nervousness fading a little bit. "Of course — first thing he asked me. I've got a crew bringing it up from stores. So — you'll need to mount it underside, I think, keep the spool out of the way of the gas exhaust."

  "And a patch to local comm. Wait — how is the
assault team going to interface with a wire-based comm system?"

  Yoyontzin grunted, exasperation plain on his face. "One of the Marines," he said in a rather disparaging tone, "is going to run a second wire roll from the platform into the refinery. We have…" He dug a glossy sheet covered with cutaway views and a picture of a combat trooper standing in a field out of the bottom of the stack. "…a field relay unit, Marine code 'Snorkel', which runs off the wire and handles short-range, scrambled comm. Backpack-sized unit."

  "Sure." Helsdon shrugged. He didn't have the time or energy to worry about what the Marine assault squad was going to do once they were inside the refinery ship. His concern was refitting a maintenance platform to get them there and back again. "Do you have the unspool speed for the wire? Oh, good. Yeah, we can mount this — take a couple hours."

  "Get on it." Yoyontzin's brief moment of good humor faded, remembering the rest of his discussion with the chu-sa. "There are some other…things."

  Helsdon made a questioning motion with his hands. The engineer stubbed out his tabac on the edge of the table and then ground the rest out under his boot. The master's mate said nothing, but his mustache twitched in surprise.

  "The platform needs to be ready to go at a moment's notice. We have the refinery ship on visual now, so as soon as the Marines are ready and command has double-checked their scan data, we'll be standing by for the order from Hadeishi-tzin."

  "Right," nodded Helsdon, separating out the diagrams he would need for mounting the wire spool. "We're going to move the EVA platform up to boat bay two. The Marines usually assemble there and the lock doors are facing the right direction. What else?"

  "Double-check everything." Yoyontzin's fingers were trembling and the look on his face made Helsdon stare in mounting concern. He'd never seen the engineer second in such a nervous state. "I mean it. The chu-sa is going in with the Marines."