Wasteland of Flint

by Thomas Harlan

  The big view of Ephesus shimmered away and the v-pane displayed a high altitude shot of the planetary surface. Gretchen could recognize the edge of the northern permafrost, as well as the tapering wing of the Escarpment running down to smaller mountains and then—almost at the pole—to nothing but barren, rocky plains. "I don't see—"

  "Hsst!" Maggie cuffed Gretchen's head, catching one ear with the back of her paw.

  "Ow!"

  "Watch. Quietly. Learn." Maggie moved a control and the image narrowed, the point of view zooming down from orbit. Mountains, valleys, vast plains of glittering sand flashed past. Suddenly, Gretchen caught sight of a triangular shape flitting across a queer-looking stone plateau. The ground was chopped up into smaller triangles of shadow, making the speeding shuttle almost invisible.

  The shuttle was gone from the next picture—a half hour had elapsed—but the pattern of the ground had subtly changed. Gretchen stiffened in her chair. "What was that? What are those lines?"

  "Interesting, isn't it?" Maggie's tongue was showing. Gretchen frowned at her. "Look at this," the Hesht said, moving the control again.

  Another high-angle shot, but later in the planetary day. The image had been enhanced, but a long blackened gouge was clear, cutting across a rippling line of dunes to an abrupt end. Gretchen squinted as Magdalena zoomed again. The track ended in a welter of shining metal, a mostly recognizable wing canted at a queer angle, the twisted body of a shuttle scored with carbon and the signs of a fierce conflagration.

  "The Valkyrie didn't get home," Maggie said. "So our nosy crow has a bigger mess to clean up than he thinks."

  "Jesu ..." Gretchen zoomed again, though now the image was very grainy and large sections showed the gray rippling tone of comp interpolation. "They suck up too much dust?"

  "Looks like they got hit." Parker had come up on the other side of the captain's chair. He made a sign against ill luck, face screwed up in a grimace. 'That fire damage didn't happen on the crash, not in such a thin atmosphere. Something swatted them down. Maybe some kind of beam weapon."

  Maggie's ears twitched again. "I found the crash site last night, after everyone had gone to sleep. Old crow has been searching too. But he's not as good with the comp as this paaha, for all his shining-coat equipment. Now, you want to see what happened?"

  Parker and Gretchen gave the Hesht a disbelieving look. "How? Smalls's satellites only take pictures every half hour!"

  "True enough," Magdalena said, a deep purr beginning in the back of her throat. "But they don't take their pictures all at the same time, and near the poles the fields of view overlap." A claw tapped on the panel and the view of the planet returned, this time with white rectangular grids superimposed. Near the poles, the rectangles overlaid each other in a flurry of lines. "All this lets us see sideways into the area of the crash. So I cobbled together video from the adjacent satellites and from those further around the curve that had a horizontal vantage of the crash site. Which lets us see ..."

  The claw went tik-tik on the panel and a jerky, crude, massively interpolated vid unspooled on the display.

  The shuttle arrowed down out of the eastern sky, sweeping across the crisscrossed plateau. The flare of the twin engines was very clear in the vid. The Valkyrie began to bank, turning south and Gretchen felt her breath seize—the entire plateau seemed to ripple with motion, the crisscross lines shifting noticeably—and there was a sudden, shockingly bright flash. The entire plateau was blotted out by a burst of white light. When the light faded—after only a fraction of a second—the shuttle was wreathed in smoke. Flames jetted from a smashed engine in a bright, blossoming cloud. They wicked out only seconds later, but the shuttle was already spinning out of control.

  The vid skipped and they caught only a glimpse of the aircraft as it slammed into the desert floor and skidded wildly across the dunes, spewing debris, chunks of airframe, and engine parts. Then the vid ended, and the vast red disc of Ephesus replaced the grainy images.

  "You see?" Magdalena had her brush in her paw and was smoothing out the kinks and twists in her fur. "Sometimes the planet eats more than your boots."

  Parker shook his head, then flicked away his spent tabac and immediately lit another. Gretchen sat quietly for a moment, studying the images on the panel. She ran though the video again, her face composed and concentrated. After a moment, she said, "Did you extract more vid of this plateau with the lines?"

  "Ya-ha," Magdalena coughed. "The second v-feed in archive—yes, that's the one."

  Another series of images flowed past, these taken from weather satellite number eight at a slight angle from the west. Dawn spilled over the eastern horizon and the pattern of lines became apparent, elongated and stretched out, making a cross-hatching pattern. Day progressed and the lines shortened, shifted pattern, essentially vanishing at midday. Then, as the sun sank into the west, lengthened again—this time to the east—and went through a similar set of convolutions.

  Gretchen played the vid again, but this time she stopped the feed about an hour after the sun had risen, then zoomed and zoomed again. The comp interpolated busily, refining the image, and then a forest of tall pipelike structures were revealed covering the plateau.

  "Scale?" Parker was at her shoulder again, a coil of tabac smoke tangling in her hair and tickling her nose.

  "They're four to five meters tall," Gretchen said, brushing invisible smoky gnats away from her nose. "But look ... they bend as the sun passes. Not too much; the mineralized sheathing must be stiff to let them grow so high, but enough to follow the sun. Like flowers."

  "Pipeflowers." Parker grunted. "What made the flash? Did they?"

  Gretchen nodded, hand over her mouth. "Sinclair will have to look at this, but all of the microfauna he's found so far have used a kind of electron cascade as their... their blood, I guess. They store and release energy—the fuel that gives them life—by shedding electrons and storing potentials in segregated structures. And these ... stems ... must trap sunlight in some kind of photocell to sustain themselves."

  Parker scratched the side of his head. "They don't look dark, like a solar array."

  "No." Gretchen felt a vague thought rear its head. Something she'd almost grasped before, when she was in the medical bay, or when she was examining the book cylinder. "No, the sun gives life, but too much is deadly. Too much UV, right?" Her fingers drummed on the display. "So they build up a mineralized sheath—like the little creatures I found growing in the pulque can."

  Gretchen felt the puzzle shift in her mind, some pieces falling into place and revealing a new orientation and shape for other sets of data. She suddenly felt alive, as if her skin were humming and everything became perfectly clear.

  "The pulque can is the key," she said, looking up at Parker. "Because it's new and yet the organism had nearly filled the can. Sinclair thinks the whole ecosystem works very slowly, but he's wrong—the species he's examining are only replicating so slowly because they have so little energy to work with. The can was perfect for them—it's a substance they can digest—and it was in the shade of the trench. So they can grow and be protected from the sun." Gretchen nodded. "Because all of these organisms—all of this effusion of Ephesian life—are terribly sensitive to ultraviolet radiation. You saw what happened down in the examining room—everything just died. Or in the shuttle intake with your multispec lamp."

  "Okay," Parker said as he stubbed out his tabac. "Then how did all of this develop here? There's no ozone layer to speak of, no heavy atmosphere ... the surface is a kill zone for the chapultin. How would they ever get a chance?"

  Gretchen's expression changed and Parker thought she looked terribly sad.

  "Because there were so many of them to begin with," she said in a hollow voice. "Unnumbered billions, covering the world in a terrible killing mist. They must have blotted out the sun, turned the sky dark with their numbers. But of course, there was no one to see them, not by then."

  "Huh?" Parker's tabac hung on his lip, sending
up a slow, coiling trail of smoke.

  "They were the eaters," Gretchen said, grinding a palm heel against her eye. "The First Sun people came to this world and they scattered thousands of cylinders—just like those Russovsky found. The cylinders broke open and the chapultin poured out, relentless and unstoppable. And, in the end, when they were done, there was nothing but barren rock and stone and an empty world."

  Parker drew back, an expression half of amazement and half of disgust on his face.

  "Then the great machines descended from the sky and the whole mantle of the world was torn away and reshaped in a way which pleased the gods of the First Sun. Lennox thinks their project was interrupted, that they went away in haste and I think she's right. Because they left behind a ruin and some of their expendable tools were still alive. Some of the eaters lived, burrowing into the stone, hiding from the sun which turned the newly shattered surface into the harshest desert imaginable.

  "Smalls is puzzled by the levels of oxygen and nitrogen in the current atmosphere. They're much higher than they should be—like there's a chlorophyll reaction working somewhere—and there's really very little C02." A wan smile tried to intrude on Gretchen's face, but failed. "The descendants of the chapultin fill the sand, the rock, every niche—just as life always seems to do—and they gobble up any C02 they might find, releasing plain carbon and oxygen. And they fear the sun, so they've evolved in this swift million years, laying down waste products to protect their crystalline bodies, a shell to block the killing UV."

  Her hand opened, indicating the plateau of pipeflowers. "Some of them have evolved to get their energy from the sun, though even then in only a specialized way. They must... they must have thought the engine flare of the shuttle was a new sun—so bright, so close—but there was too much energy, too fast." Gretchen nodded to the pilot. "What's a beam weapon, but a directed stream of excited particles? That plateau is thirty miles wide, Parker, and there must be hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of pipeflowers. And every one of them probably suffered a catastrophic electron cascade all at once."

  "Ugly." Parker said after thinking about it for a moment. "Very ugly. Old crow better be careful flying around down there. Could get his tailfeathers singed."

  Gretchen smiled broadly at the thought of the Imperial judge plunging in a ball of fire to the desert floor. The mental image was clear and vivid and accompanied by a very satisfying crashing sound.

  "Hrrwht!" Magdalena shook her head, ears angled back. "A Midge won't attract them—it's quiet and unobtrusive—barely leaves a vapor trail. Russovsky was lucky—or figured it all out for herself. She was a careful hunter—well, before they ate her up, she was." The Hesht sighed.

  "Yes ..." Gretchen suddenly looked thoughtful. She was thinking of Hummingbird and his mysterious errand. "Parker, how much fuel does a Midge carry? How high can one fly?"

  "So," Anderssen announced in a very satisfied tone, "he's not coming back."

  Parker stared around in alarm, making a cutting motion at his throat. "Sister save us! Boss, don't talk like that! He's plugged into every surveillance camera on the ship."

  The pilot had been working up fuel loads and the speed and range of a Midge on the navigator's panel for an hour. None of his scenarios allowed an ultralight to rise to a sufficient altitude in the Ephesian atmosphere to let a shuttle on ballistic path to make a skyhook snatch.

  "Maggie?" Gretchen swiveled her head toward the black-furred alien.

  The Hesht shook her head, the overhead lights swirling across her work goggles, attention far away. "Crow and the Marines are loading supplies into the fresh Midge and doing a systems check. He's away from his surveillance equipment."

  "See?" Gretchen grinned at the pilot. Parker made a face.

  "Don't cost anything to be careful," he muttered. "Look—maybe he's expecting a pickup from the Cornuelle. A navy shuttle could pick him up anywhere. No law saying he has to be snatched out of the upper atmosphere on a skyhook."

  "I suppose." Anderssen's face fell and her grumpy mood returned. In her heart, she knew there was no reason at all for the Imperial nauallis to choose the same way down and back. "So you think he wants this crazy high-altitude insertion now because the Cornuelle isn't available?"

  "Sure." Parker settled back in the navigator's chair, his nervous tension draining away as Anderssen's voice became more reasonable. "Our shuttles aren't equipped with any kind of stealth tech, no antiradar alloys and composites ... just commercial birds. So if he wants a quiet delivery, then this ballistic skip is an entirely reasonable way to go. Coming back? The Cornuelle sends down some freaky, high-grade military shuttle to snatch him up all ghostlike."

  "Hmm. Only if the Cornuelle comes back soon enough. These suits and other equipment aren't going to last too long down there, not if he's wandering around in the mountains. He'll need to be extracted in no more than a week or two."

  "What do you mean?" Parker stubbed out his tabac. "People have been working down at base camp for months."

  "Yes, in pressurized buildings and using de-dusting equipment when they come in from the field." Gretchen waved her hand for emphasis. "Plus, the observatory site is in the middle of a bright, well-lit plain—almost flat, a desert even by Ephesian standards—so the population density of the microfauna is very low. I checked the airlocks and storm doors—they're eroding, not quickly, but you can see signs of wear. If the camp was someplace sheltered, in a canyon and in shade part of the day? There'd be nothing but a mineralized sheath left, or even an animate copy, like Russovsky."

  Parker's shoulder twitched in reaction. "That's a nice thought."

  "Ah-huh." Gretchen looked at Maggie questioningly. The Hesht was still staring into the distance. Still a little time, Anderssen thought. And what am I going to do? My prize is snatched away, the expedition cashiered short of any kind of deliverable—there won't be a single bonus now, not without something the Company can sell. The thought of not being able to afford a holiday ticket made her stomach turn over. Her thoughts shied away from the prospect of the expedition crew-being charged for the lost machinery, tools, equipment and data at the base camp. "Parker, can you tell where the Cornuelle has gone? When it might come back?"

  The pilot made a coughing sound—a conscious imitation of Magdalena's diesel generator laugh—and shook his head. "Sorry, boss. We lost the navy as soon as they went passive, shut down their hull lights and snuck off into the dark. Those light cruisers are built for snooping around, and the poor lot of matchsticks on this tub won't light them up even if we try."

  Parker sighed, tapping a fresh tabac from a dingy plastic box he carried in the front pocket of his work vest. "As to a return date? I don't know. One of Maggie's tapes has Isoroku saying karijozu on his last comm call as they were preparing to leave. 'Good luck hunting.' So I'd guess they're looking for the refinery ship." He squinted at one of the dead navigation panels, thinking. "A search of the asteroid belt could take weeks, even months."

  "I see." Gretchen's expression had grown still. She started to speak, but Magdalena suddenly twitched, making a sharp motion with one hand.

  "They've finished," the Hesht said, ears twitching. "Back to work."

  Grumbling, Parker hitched up his work belt and swung himself gracefully up and over the ring of command panels. "Mags, I think we need to jimmy up some kind of specialized clamp to back these dead connectors out...."

  Gretchen sat quietly, thinking, while the Hesht and the pilot worked in the tight space under the deck, cursing and sweating. After almost an hour, she leaned forward and keyed up the Midge fuel-loading model Parker had put together. Her eyes were oddly flat and expressionless as she tapped in a new scenario.

  A sleepbag muffled the sound of snoring, but Gretchen's work goggles were dialed up into light-amp mode and she pushed away from the door frame of Parker's cabin without a pause. She caught the far wall and bumped softly to a halt. With her free hand, she ran the sharp edge of her thumbnail down the sealer strip and a flap fell aw
ay, revealing the pilot's sleeping face.

  "Breakfast time," she whispered, pinching his earlobe. Parker's eyes flickered open and he blinked in the darkness. Straining against her own exhaustion, Gretchen laid a finger across his lips before he made too much noise. "Quietly, Parker-tzin, quietly. Get dressed and bring your tools."

  The pilot swallowed a curse, fumbled for his work shades, then hissed in disbelief at the hour. "Where—"

  "I'll show you," Gretchen said, closing her eyes for a moment. I am so tired.

  Parker eeled out of his bag with admirable skill, then started to gather up his work vest, toolbelt and clothing. The fingertips of Gretchen's left hand crept to the medband on her right wrist, and then a blessedly cool sensation began to prick up her arm. Ahhh ... nothing like a jolt of eightgoodhours.

  Fifteen minutes later, Parker had a very sour look on his face as they followed a guideline into the rear cargo deck of the number one shuttle. The docking bay was dark, lit only by the faint glow of lights around the airlock. Gretchen drew herself to a halt at the loading master's station, one foot hooked into a step-up to hold her steady. The hold was filled from side to side by the inelegant shape of a cargo pallet squatting atop the shuttle's deployment rack.

  "Stand clear," Gretchen said, keying the loading master's panel awake. Frowning, Parker stood aside, keeping feet, hands and head behind a wedge of crosshatched yellow lines on the deck. Anderssen ran her forefinger down a control ribbon, her thumb plastered against an override.

  A deep hum filled the air and Parker jerked back from the cargo rails. The enormous pallet slid forward smoothly, tiny winking lights marking the outline of the pod. As the pilot watched in growing alarm, the pallet rumbled past him, then out of the back of the shuttle.

  "Wha..." Parker turned to Gretchen, but she was watching the pod with a grim, fixed expression. "Please say Maggie has subverted the surveillance cam—"