Wasteland of Flint

by Thomas Harlan

  "Ma'am, you'll have to come with me," he said, trying to keep adrenaline-fueled harshness from his voice. "We're going back to the ship, to the Palenque." Fitz released the riotgun, letting the automatic sling wind the weapon back against his shoulder. He reached down and took the woman's hand. She stood up, still looking at him with the same curious expression.

  "I have to finish my survey flight," she said in a serious, untroubled voice. "I've another two, three thousand k to cover on this leg."

  Fitz jerked his head and the corporal sidled into the overhang, the muzzle of his riotgun centered on the woman's abdomen. "I've got her, Deck. Pack up the gear. It'll all fit into the Midge. Ma'am—you're needed on the ship—so we're going to go right now. The shuttle will pick us up."

  Russovsky frowned, lean face furrowing into deep wrinkles around her mouth and nose. "I really don't have time to attend some meeting, young man. I have real work to do."

  "I don't like meetings either, ma'am." Fitz guided her down the slope, one hand under her arm—he was surprised at the heavy, solid feeling of her suit and the muscle underneath. For all her frail appearance, he realized she'd have to be pretty tough to fly the gossamer shape of the ultralight halfway across the face of an alien, unknown world. "Hold on to me."

  Gathering her against his chest, her boots atop his, Fitz strapped them together with a beltline, then plucked his descender clamp free. The shuttle drifted overhead again, raising another whirling storm of dust and gravel, but the Marine's combat visor picked out the spiraling line of monofil as a writhing lime snake. He snatched the line with the clamp, then secured the end tab to his harness.

  "Lift," he shouted into his throat mike, and high above, Bandao leaned out of the cargo door, guiding the winch with one hand. Fitz felt the wire draw tight, clasped the woman to his chest, and then they were soaring aloft with a smooth, effortless motion. Dust and wind roared around them, then Bandao caught Fitzsimmons's shoulder and swung them both into the cargo hold of the shuttle.

  Russovsky staggered heavily as Fitz let go, releasing the strap, but Bandao was right there—all quiet efficiency—to take her in hand. The sergeant looked down, seeing Deckard piling gear into the cockpit of the Midge. "I'm going back down," he shouted, hoping Parker could hear him. "We'll winch up the Midge and stow her in the bay."

  "Will it fit?" Parker's voice was faint—even with the ear-bug—over the roar of the engines. "Those wings are pretty big ... and hurry, I'm really burning fuel too fast up here."

  "The wings retract," Fitz said, stepping off again and hissing down the descender. The sand storm in the bowl was getting worse—an inch-long chunk of obsidian glanced from the armor on his leg, leaving a shining scratch on the ablative mesh. "It'll fit. If we don't blow away …"

  "This is strange." Magdalena frowned, the tightly-napped fur over her nose wrinkling up. "Gretchen, look at her flight path here..."

  Anderssen leaned over, one white elbow on the edge of the display panel. Despite the luxury of sleeping in gravity down on the planet, she was glad to be back in the climate-controlled, amazingly clean bridge of the ship. A quick shower between arrival on shuttle two and hurrying onto the bridge to watch the pickup had washed away a layer of planetary dust. She supposed weeks would pass before the usual level of oil, grime and skin flakes built up in the human-occupied sections of the Palenque. "What is it?"

  Maggie zoomed in on a map of the northern hemisphere, with icons showing the Observatory base camp and other pertinent features. "This is the course Russovsky took upon leaving camp during the trip where she found the cylinders." A fire-bright line appeared on the map, swinging north and west from the base in a long jagged arc. The path wandered over barren plains, tumbled mountain ranges and seas of sand. Eventually the indicator circumnavigated the globe, jogged through the Escarpment and returned to base.

  "And here's the path of her latest flight." This time a blue line leapt from the Observatory, heading north and west.

  "They look the same." Gretchen was nonplussed.

  "No," Magdalena said, zooming in the display to show the two lines as a burning purple trail. "They are the same. She's been flying the same course, landing at the same sites ... for the last twenty days." The Hesht smoothed her whiskers and cocked her head to one side, looking at Anderssen. "So what do you suppose that means?"

  Sitting in his cabin, door secured, surrounded by a steadily growing maze of comp boxes, display panels and conduits, Green Hummingbird's suspicious expression formed an uncanny likeness to Gretchen's on the bridge. The tlamatinime stared at the map, chin pressed against his knuckles. After a moment's thought, a deeper frown settled into his lean visage and he tapped open a comm channel.

  "Sergeant Fitzsimmons? This is Hummingbird."

  "What did you say, sir?" Fitz turned away from the ultralight, bending his head against the gale of wind and sand. His earbug hissed and sputtered with interference from the blaze of engines howling above and he could barely make out the sharp, commanding voice. "Aye, sir, I'll look in the cave."

  Fitz waved Deckard to continue prepping the ultralight for extraction. The Marines had flushed the gas reservoirs in the wings and retracted them. Without their extent, the Midge made a compact rectangular shape. The tail assembly had proven difficult to maneuver in the wind, but they'd managed to dismount the dual fishtail and clamp it to the top of the main body. The corporal chased down a monofil line and hooked the cable onto a winch-ring atop the Midge.

  "Deck, I'll be right back." Fitzsimmons jogged back up the hill, glad to be out of the immediate blast of wind. His combat suit was impervious to the flying gravel and sand, but he was worried about Ephesian dust seeping into his tools, weapons and even the suit itself. Isoroku had warned him about the unexpectedly corrosive nature of the local microfauna and Fitz didn't, want to wake up with his shipsuit disintegrating into sand.

  He ducked under the overhang and knelt, letting his camera pan across the rock shelter.

  "What now?" He asked in a normal tone of voice. "The cooking stone? Aye, aye."

  Fitz knelt by the blackened rock, gloved fingers brushing over the evidence of a heating unit and a meal. Hummingbird's voice was an intermittent whisper. The Marine rubbed a forefinger across the black streaks and was surprised to see the glove come away almost clean.

  "This is an old fire," Fitzsimmons commented. "Really old. But who was here before Russovsky landed last night?" He felt a queer chill tickle his spine and his right hand drifted to the butt of the automatic slung at his hip. "Is there someone else out here?"

  THE PALENQUE

  A pressure gauge mounted into the green, then steadied as standard atmosphere was established—at last—in the shuttle bay. Gretchen waited impatiently, one boot tapping against the heavy door. She could see shuttle one resting in its cradle in the bay, windows shining with cabin lights, the forward lock cycling through its own regulatory process. Her door opened first and Gretchen kicked off into a sharp, distinct smell of heated metal, ionized gasses and ozone.

  Brushing a tangle of hair out of her eyes, Anderssen clung to the cargo netting around the landing bay while the shuttle lock opened, spitting red dust, to let Bandao help a tired, worn-looking woman in an old-style z-suit and tan-colored poncho across to the passenger airlock.

  "Doctor Russovsky?" She put out her hand in greeting. "I'm Gretchen Anderssen, University of New Aberdeen. Very pleased to meet you."

  The Russian gave her an odd, exasperated look, hands hanging at her sides. "I'm very busy," Russovsky said. "I have no time for your meetings and weekly updates. I'll turn in a proper report when I'm done with my survey."

  Gretchen withdrew her hand and gave Bandao a surprised look. The gunner shook his head slightly and subvocalized on his throat mike. She's been this way since we picked her up.

  Anderssen took a moment to look the geologist over. The older woman seemed physically fit. Her face was much as the Company holos had represented—weathered by too much sun and wind, marked
by the calloused grooves of goggles and respirator mask, her hair turned to heavy straw—and her suit, though battered and worn, was obviously in good repair. Gretchen was surprised at the state of the woman's boots and the sand-colored poncho—given the effects of the Ephesian dust, they were in excellent shape.

  Only her eyes belied a sturdy, no-nonsense appearance. Though as sharp and blue as the holos recorded, they stared coldly past Gretchen, past the wall of the ship, past everything in her immediate vicinity. Anderssen had a strange impression the woman was viciously angry, though nothing else in her demeanor or the line of her body suggested such a thing.

  "Take her up to Medical, Magdalena's waiting," Gretchen said to Bandao. The gunner nodded silently and took Russovsky by the arm. The woman allowed herself to be led away.

  "That was a stupid thing to do!"

  The sound of Parker's voice sharp with anger, real anger, swung Gretchen's head around, eyebrows raised in surprise. She hadn't known the pilot for very long, but he seemed eternally calm. To her further surprise, she found Parker and Fitzsimmons glaring at each other in the shuttle airlock.

  "... hang around for hours while you dink about recovering some salvage!"

  Fitzsimmons's face grew entirely still as Gretchen approached, the corner of one eye tightening. Parker wasn't bothering to restrain his temper, his voice ringing through the entire shuttle bay. Heicho Deckard was watching from the top of the stairs, his face split by a huge grin. Gretchen looked behind her and was relieved to see none of the scientists had wandered into the bay.

  "We don't leave equipment behind," Fitzsimmons replied in an entirely emotionless voice.

  "Well, that's great," Parker snapped, "but we don't have unlimited fuel, like the navy, or some armored shuttle that can eat stone and bounce right back up!"

  "What happened?" Gretchen settled on her stoic management-is-displeased face and shouldered in between the two men, looking up at Parker. To her disgust, she realized though the pilot was only a few inches taller, Fitzsimmons was head and shoulders above her. Despite her disadvantage, both men backed off a little—not so much as she'd have liked—but enough to put them at arm's reach.

  "Your Marine," Parker said in an acid voice, "decided we should recover the Doc's Midge from down a freakin' hole today. I spent far too long juggling our wingtips between cliffs. We barely got back to base and I was flying on fumes the whole way. I don't think that was a good idea!"

  "Her ultralight?" Gretchen turned and stared up at Fitzsimmons. "Why? Do we need it?"

  The sergeant gave her a look—a considering, not-quite-baleful, not-quite-outraged look. "Fleet does not leave working equipment behind, ma'am. We recovered Doctor Russovsky and her Midge without incident and in a timely fashion." His voice was very clipped and precise. "Ma'am."

  "We didn't need the u-light," Parker had calmed down a little, but Gretchen could feel his body trembling and she realized the pilot was coming down from a massive adrenaline shock. "All we needed was the doctor, whom we had extracted in two minutes, no muss, no fuss! Not thirty-five minutes wallowing around on top of razor-sharp stone with canyons on either side! Not thirty-five minutes with the air heating thinner and thinner every second!"

  "Mister Parker." Gretchen managed to chill her voice appreciably and caught the man's eyes with her own. A baleful stare usually reserved for naughty children worked equally well on the pilot, who abruptly closed his mouth. "The cameras and geological sensors on the u-light are Company property, as is the aircraft itself. It is incumbent upon us—as specifically stated in our contracts—to recover any misplaced, lost or stolen Company property with all due speed. Failure to do so will—in some cases—result in the cost of the equipment being deducted from employee salaries, as appropriate."

  She paused, watching an expression of disgust spread across Parker's face. How does that taste? She thought. Tastes bitter—realizing the Company cares more for the contents of a camera crystal or sensor pack than for a human life. Very bitter. "But I'm glad you came back alive, Mister Parker, with Doctor Russovsky and our Marines. And I'm glad you didn't have to walk home."

  Gretchen turned to the sergeant. "I'm glad no one was killed, Gunso Fitzsimmons, and I am glad you brought back Russovsky's Midge. Her cameras and sensors might explain a mystery that's cropped up this afternoon." She smiled a little, seeing a glint in the Marine's eye. "But please don't risk your life this way again—you see how much you've upset Mister Parker." Gretchen patted the pilot on the arm. "He cares, you know. He'd weep to see your broken body scattered across some lava flow or field of calcite ash."

  Deckard broke up—a big horse laugh—but neither Parker nor Fitzsimmons did more than stare at Gretchen in disgusted amazement. She didn't wait to see if they renewed their argument—she wanted to be in Medical. Russovsky, and the answer to so many questions, was waiting.

  In comparison to the acrid heated-metal and testosterone smell in the shuttle hangar, Medical was quiet, cool and a little dim. The soft overheads had lost their matching pastel wall coverings during the "accident" and the bare metal of the ship's skeleton drank up what little light fell from the panels. Russovsky was sitting on an examining table in the main surgical bay, her pale hair glowing in a shaft of heavy white light. Gretchen paused at the doorway of the nurses' station. The geologist seemed entirely and unnaturally still to her.

  "Doctor Russovsky? Victoria Elenova? Kak vui chu-vstvyete?" Gretchen tried another smile.

  This time Russovsky turned to look at her, brow crinkling, in puzzlement. For some reason, she seemed tired now, her formerly straight shoulders slumped, her skin a little ashen. The light in here? Or is she starting to relax after so many weeks alone? Gretchen knew how hard a homecoming could be.

  After her first tour on Mars, she'd taken a commercial liner home to New Aberdeen. After sixteen months Crawling around on the ice, the thought of her mother's farmstead—of seeing her children, the gray sky pregnant with rain—the thought of domesticity had been overwhelming. A hunger she couldn't quench until she was in her own bed upstairs, listening to real spruce limbs brush against the roof, all three of her children packed in around her like loaves in an oven, so many quilts on top of them all, she could barely breathe. Mars had been bitterly cold.

  For two days, she'd been entirely happy—able to smile again, able to feel safe again. Able to walk under an open sky without a respirator mask, without a z-suit chafing against her skin ... feeling little hands clutch tight in hers.

  On the third day, she'd come down sick. The rest of her vacation was spent shivering in bed, overcome with a succession of illnesses—flu, a cold, a sore throat, pneumonia and a racking cough. For three hundred and twenty days she'd lived and worked under terrible conditions at Polaris, never suffering any kind of sickness. Not so much as a sniffle. Then everything had caught up with her at once.

  "I need," the geologist said, staring fixedly at Gretchen, "to get back to work."

  "Of course," Anderssen said, nodding. "There are just a few things ... were there more of the cylinder-shaped objects where you found the piece of limestone you gave Doctor McCue? Or just the two?"

  "If," Russovsky said, in an inflectionless voice, "Clarkson wants me to do something useful, then he should let me do my work. I need to get back in the air."

  Gretchen forced herself to remain standing at the edge of the examining table. She looked over to the nurses' station and was greatly heartened to see Bandao and Magdalena watching her with uneasy expressions. "Maggie, can you fire up the diagnostics on this table? Thanks."

  "Gagarin could use more fuel," Russovsky said, as if to herself. "I'll top him up before I leave."

  Gretchen turned back to the geologist, watching her intently, as if the woman were a particularly fragile artifact dredged from the bottom of a deep trench. "Victoria? Do you know where you are?"

  Russovsky looked up sharply, her eyes glittering. The strange anger Gretchen had seen in her eyes down in the hangar returned, and now the lean ol
d face was tight with fury. "Here's your geld for the water, Master Clarkson, and I hope you've the talent to find a return on your investment!"

  The woman's arm blurred up as if tossing something away. Anderssen tried to jerk herself back, but a cupped hand mashed her head to one side. Gretchen flew into the bulkhead with a crash, and then fell heavily to the deck. Russovsky stood abruptly, her face in shadow as she stepped out of the light over the table. "I'll top up," she said in a conversational voice, turning toward the door. "And be on my way."

  "Stop!" Bandao was in the doorway, the flat metallic shape of his automatic gleaming in the dim light. "No farther."

  Russovsky stared at him, puzzled, hands hanging limply at her side again.

  Gretchen blinked, stunned, then tested her jaw. Not broken! "Maggie, what is it?"

  There was a long moan of a hrrrwwwt from the Hesht. Magdalena looked up from the display surface of the nurse's station, ears napped against her skull, the short hairs on her shoulders and back raised in a stiff triangular ruff. "Not human," she growled, shaking her head in confusion. "Something else ... like a... living crystal."

  Bandao took two steps back, his thumb flipping some kind of switch on the side of his gun. There was an answering beep! "The thing in the sand Sinclair was talking about?"

  "The microfauna?" Gretchen stood uneasily, swaying slightly. Her medband hissed cold at her wrist. The woman, or the thing which looked so much like a woman, did not react, remaining as still as a statue. "But why ... and how? Maggie, does she have bones, blood vessels, internal organs?"

  "Yess ..." Magdalena hissed, her claws skittering across the unfamiliar medical display. "The shapes of things are there—but body temperature is even throughout—there are no fluids—no movement. It's nothing more than a cold copy."

  Gretchen's lips parted, her entire attention focused on the marvelous creature poised on the far side of the table. "But she can walk, speak—she remembers bits and pieces of her life.... The duplication must be at almost a cellular level!"