Wasteland of Flint

by Thomas Harlan

  "Really?" Hummingbird turned away and began moving down the face of the dune with a sideways, half-walking, half-slipping motion. "Come. It will be dark soon."

  Both arms trembling with fatigue, Gretchen managed to get to her feet. She blinked, trying to clear away the sweat stinging her eyes. After a moment, she lifted the goggles a fraction to wipe the moisture away with the corner of her kaffiyeh. Even the brief instant of exposure stung her face with freezing cold and the terribly dry Ephesian atmosphere wicked the sweat away. Settling the goggles into their long accustomed grooves beside her nose and along the crest of her cheekbones, Gretchen set off after the nauallis. She felt entirely unsettled and the obvious—unexpected—distance between this unremarkable ridge of sand and the distant, glinting wreck made her feel a little queasy.

  "Wait for me," she growled into the comm. "There may be siftsand or hidden crevices!"

  Hummingbird did not reply, continuing to walk steadily west.

  Swallowing another curse, Anderssen stumbled to the bottom of the dune and then noticed—at last—the beginning of the crash skid in the swale between two lines of dunes. The little valley in front of her was scattered with a litter of hextiles and bits and pieces of decaying metal from the initial impact of the shuttle. "What the—How far did we run? Hummingbird!"

  There was no answer and the nauallis's shape disappeared over the next dune. Gretchen stumped after him, uneasily aware of her own exhaustion and the relentless advance of night.

  Thin night wind keened through the wreck, swirling among slender towers of calcite and quartz. Gretchen lay in the pressure tent, her head toward the entrance; her breathing mask, goggles and respirator blessedly laid aside. Her nose was covered with medical cream. The moment's exposure out at the end of the impact scar had given her a nasty burn. Part of the door was clear, allowing her to make out the dark shape of the wing surrounded by the blaze of stars. Ephesus had no moon and the constellations seemed terribly bright in such an ebon sky.

  She felt a little strange, lying in the darkness, listening to the tent's compressor hum to itself, the shoulder of her z-suit touching Hummingbird's. The tent had an insulated floor, the walls trapped three layers of atmosphere in an airtight sandwich, and a heating element glowed along the roof ridge yet she still felt cold. The only warm part of her entire body was the right shoulder, where she could feel Hummingbird's suit resting against hers.

  Is this how he feels all the time? A single warm point in a cold, friendless universe?

  Gretchen could feel her legs complaining, even through the haze of painkiller and muscle relaxant dispensed by the medband—all the gods bless that infuriating scrap of metal, which had decided to unlock itself an hour after she'd stumbled, nearly crawling, back into the camp—and trying to cramp up.

  "What happened this afternoon?" Anderssen grimaced, hearing her voice as a tight, tinny squeak. "I heard these sounds..,. I saw strange tracks in the sand.... What were you doing out there?"

  For a moment, Hummingbird did not respond, though she could feel him shift in his sleepbag. The ruined tent made a good cushion beneath them and Gretchen had managed to find the strength to lay out blocks of hextile as a floor to protect them from the hungry sand. There was a hiss, a clicking sound, then another hiss of air.

  "There was nothing to see." In the darkness, his voice sounded contemplative.

  Gretchen swallowed a very rude curse and then forced herself to breathe steadily until she thought she could speak without shouting. "I saw you walking very strangely. I heard a sound like someone singing over the comm link. I went out to see what you were doing and ... and I felt something strange in the air. The sun seemed . .. different. I started to feel odd, as if my body were very heavy. Then—suddenly—I'm three k away on top of a dune! How do you explain that?"

  There was another silence. Hummingbird turned towards Gretchen. She could see starlight glinting in his eyes. "You can't have heard anything," he said in a musing, suspicious voice. "I had my comm turned off."

  "What? That's impossible. I heard you chanting!"

  "You're very tired, Anderssen-tzin. You should probably sleep now."

  Hummingbird's fingers closed around Gretchen's wrist and her head rolled back. Though she tried to keep her eyes open, sleep rose up and swallowed her whole. Distantly, she heard a raspy voice singing:

  "Tla xi-huâl-huiân, in Temic-xōch . .. tla xihuâl..."

  Gretchen became aware of a faint clear light filling the tent and she opened her eyes, wondering if the nauallis had turned on a flashlight. Instead, she beheld the full vault of heaven, flush with glittering stars. They were tightly packed, a carpet of gleaming, colorful jewels, and their light fell upon her face with a cold, delicate touch. Wind ruffled her hair and for a moment—just a moment—Gretchen smelled realspruce and pine and the bitter, pungent tang of wood smoke.

  I'm home, she thought, then sat up, heart thudding with fear, the sleepbag clutched to her chest.

  The tent was gone. Hummingbird lay beside her, a dark indistinct shape wrapped in a dirty woolen blanket. She looked to her right and saw both Midges sitting on the sand, undisturbed, the smooth metallic shape of the shuttle rising behind them, metal skin intact, the windows glowing with the light of flight instruments.

  Impossible. Gretchen abruptly looked to her left. What was that? Something moved!

  A man, crouching on his hands and knees, was staring at her. He was blond, square-jawed, with short-cropped hair. Dark ink circled his biceps with interlocking genome trails. A shipsuit clung to taut muscle and a broad chest. A name tag gleamed on his shoulders and breast beside a star-shaped logo.

  You can't be here, she tried to say. Then she realized he was not wearing a helmet.

  Neither am I!

  She woke up in the tent, the air stifling and close, blood thundering in her ears. A dry, parched taste filled her mouth, as if she'd gone without water for days. In the darkness, Gretchen managed to find the tube of her water pouch by feel and slumped in relief to feel the brackish, metallic fluid sliding across her tongue.

  Beside her, Hummingbird was snoring softly, deeply asleep.

  THE ASTEROID BELT, EPHESUS SYSTEM

  A warning tone sounded through the bridge of the Cornuelle. "Proximity alert," the navigational system announced. "Object at two thousand meters and closing."

  Hadeishi sat quietly, watching Koshō leaning over the helmsman's shoulder. Despite missing a night's sleep, she did not seem at all fatigued. The chu-sa would have been envious, save he'd had to pull more than one all-nighter as an exec himself. The long cuffs of a Fleet uniform easily disguised the presence of a medband.

  "Drop thrust to one-tenth," Koshō said in a quiet, level voice. "Turn ship one-and-one-quarter to starboard. Hayes-tzin, lighten the sensitivity on those meteor sensors. We've nearly a k clearance between us and the nearest rock."

  Both the helmsman and the weapons officer responded immediately and Hadeishi watched the threat-well reorient as the Cornuelle nosed forward through the scattered debris at the edge of the asteroid belt. The main band of the planetesimals lay ahead and above of the cruiser's current vector—a dense cloud of massive fragments—but here in the dispersed fringe, they'd found it necessary to place the ship in harm's way.

  "Just a tap, now, just a tap," Koshō said, one eye on the navigation plot and one on a vector map on the helmsman's comp. "Five hundred meters forward .. . reverse at one eighth ... there you go. There you go."

  Hadeishi watched the meteor shield sensors waver—flashing amber and crimson—then steady to a sullen yellow as the cylindrical bulk of the light cruiser drifted to a stop beneath the enormous shape of a mountain-sized asteroid fragment. In comparison to some of the monsters deep in the belt, this one—identified only by a long spatial coordinate—was a tiny baby. Against the jagged, crumpled surface the Cornuelle was the tip of a toe, or a little finger. Mitsu glanced over at Hayes and saw the weapons officer was crouched over his panel, neck shining with sweat.<
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  Where an Imperial battlewagon or heavy carrier might mount the recently developed Kaskeala yaochimalli battle shield as a defense, the Cornuelle was blessed only with a porcupine-skin of point defense beam weapons and honeycombed ablative armor. Hadeishi had no illusions as to the fate of his ship if the cruiser collided with a multibillion-ton asteroid at any appreciable velocity.

  "Hayes-tzin, deploy Remote One." Koshō turned a cold stare upon the weapons officer, who swallowed, then stabbed a control on his panel. Hadeishi felt the thump of the pod ejecting from a forward missile tube through the decking under his feet. A v-pane unfolded on his main panel, showing an exterior camera tracking the flare of the pod's thrusters. The brilliant green diamond swept away into darkness, fading quickly to a shining mote.

  "Chu-sa," the exec said formally, turning to face Hadeishi, "Remote One is away. I expect we will have visual confirmation of the excavation area within twenty minutes."

  Hadeishi nodded in acknowledgement, leaning his chin against the back of his fist. "Deft maneuvering on the approach, Sho-sa. I hope your effort will not be wasted."

  Koshō stiffened, sensing a rebuke in the captain's quiet words. "Sir, we have invested a great deal of effort in mapping possible perturbations in the navigational maps of the belt. This planetesimal has markedly altered course, mass, and albedo between our two sets of data. I believe it has been mined by the suspected wildcatter."

  Raising an eyebrow, Hadeishi cut her off. "There are dozens of reasons this particular rock could have changed vector, Sho-sa. Mining is only one of them. But I agree we need direct confirmation of such activity ... and this is the only way to get such data."

  Slightly mollified, the exec nodded her head and returned to the helmsman's station. Hadeishi eyeballed the progress of the probe, which had come within a dozen meters of the asteroid surface and was beginning a winding circumnavigation of the enormous shape, scanning for fresh scarification, hot-spots or other signs of mining activity. Sighing, the captain turned back to reviewing the engineering department's weekly report on the state of the engines, fuel systems and the primary and secondary reactors.

  Movement on the bridge—no more than one of the sensor techs stiffening in his shockchair—drew Hadeishi's attention away from authorizing a request to draw higher-than-projected amounts of conduit sealant from stores. Koshō was already beside the helm panel, hands clasped at the small of her back as she scrutinized the data feed from the remote probe.

  "We have a positive," she announced after a moment. "Mirror this to main screen."

  A starfield image flickered onto the curving screen dominating the "forward" wall of the bridge. In truth, the command deck was situated at the heart of the crew spaces in the forward section of the Cornuelle's main body, hidden deep in the heart of the ship and surrounded by cargo holds and two belts of reinforced armor. If Hadeishi remembered the engineering schematics correctly, he was really facing a hold filled with crew rations and then the back end of the primary particle beam mount. However, as in the world of men, the illusion of a window served to distract the mind and direct thought into familiar, predictable paths.

  The v-feed from Remote One showed a deep shadow cleft in the flank of the asteroid. The nearer edge, now drifting into view in a cone of brilliant white from the pod's lights, was razor sharp. The pool of illumination spread over the abrupt juncture, then vanished into a enormous cavity. Hadeishi could see the wall of the pit was glassy and smooth.

  "Radiation readings are up, thermal signature is up. Exposed rock surfaces show the effects of extreme heat."

  The chu-sa nodded to his exec. "The cutting beam mounted by a Tyr. Can you drag a time frame out of this data?"

  "Processing now." Koshō's face had subtly changed and Hadeishi realized she was trying not to grin in triumph. "We'll know within ten minutes."

  "Good." Hadeishi tapped a glyph to dispatch his reports and leaned forward in his seat. "During this time, have Remote One do a complete circuit of the pit and log the data for later analysis. Copy one set to legal and time-stamp and lock the archive." He fingered his beard idly, frowning in distaste at the thought. "I doubt the Tyr will allow itself to be brought in as a prize, but legal action may result. So—take care to make an authoritative record."

  Koshō stared grimly at him for a long moment, puzzling Hadeishi. Then he remembered the events of the previous day and made an equivocal motion with one hand. Her expression did not change. "And plot us a course to the next 'disturbance'. Take us underway as soon as Remote One returns to the ship."

  The sho-sa nodded and returned to her business, but Hadeishi could tell she was still displeased with him. She is young, he reminded himself, setting his memories of the incident aside again. She remembers too many things.

  "Here is our present location," Koshō said, pointing out a blinking icon in the midst of the threat-well. A light green thread arced back from the winking mote to the orbit of the third planet. Hadeishi, Hayes and Smith stood around the railing. "The perturbation map we've built shows an irregular track through the main body of the belt in an anti-spinward direction."

  A second thread appeared—this one a virulent red—entering the belt far behind their present location and spiraling forward through the diffuse mass. The red overran the green and continued for a good hand-span in the holodisplay. Koshō frowned at the indicator signaling the end of the track.

  "We do not know how quickly the refinery ship is moving. In fact, as a Tyr can carry up to a dozen mining shuttles, this track may only be an aggregate path of the refinery and its satellite ships as they work through the field." Her hand brushed over the threat-well's control panel and the thread expanded into a heavy-bodied snake. "The possible locality of the refinery is somewhat larger."

  Hadeishi looked to Hayes questioningly. "Can we cover a volume this large with our passive sensor envelope?"

  The weapons officer shook his head dubiously. "Some of this volume will be scanned, but our usual range is degraded by all the debris. Hadeishi-san, we've picked up a lot of ambient radiation and particle decay in this area—definitely the exhaust of the big Royce-Energia XII sub-light engines mounted on a Tyr—so we can track them pretty closely if we follow right along their transit path, but—"

  "We don't want to come at them so obviously," Hadeishi finished the sentence. "I do not intend to court danger, much less have my ship take a particle beam shot at close range, to catch these ... these criminals. We will have to parallel their possible course from the edge of the volume, hoping to catch the refinery within our detection range." He paused, thinking.

  "When I was growing up," Hadeishi continued in a musing tone, "the prefecture police often used smart-nosed dogs to hunt down thieves. What is the operational range of our ECM drones if we deploy them as sensor relays?"

  Koshō and Hayes stared at him in surprise. "The outriders?"

  "Yes," Hadeishi nodded, tapping up profiles of the devices in question. "These units are ... yes, they are modular. We can program their sensor packs to search for this particle trail. Get with Isoroku and pull the chaff, jammer and spoofing racks from three of the drones and replace them with hydrogen cells to extend their time-on-station."

  The weapons officer looked a little sick, but Koshō shook her head minutely and he subsided before openly questioning Hadeishi's command. "Sir—"

  "I know." Hadeishi looked up from the panel. "We only have six drones and I'm asking you to cut the heart out of half our defensive network. However—with three drones reconfigured as sensor platforms we can rotate them on duty-station and extend our detection envelope across all, or nearly all, of your projected transit plot for the refinery. Our chances of being surprised by the Tyr will be greatly reduced." The captain tried a wintry smile, but neither the exec nor the weapons officer responded. "We have to be able to see them first or we've no chance of defeating this opponent."

  Koshō looked like she'd bitten into a rotten quince, but nodded sharply. "Hai, Chu-sa. I will
find engineer Yoyontzin and oversee the conversions myself."

  Yoyontzin? Ah, I'd forgotten—Isoroku is still aboard the Palenque. Hadeishi considered changing the plan. But Koshō has an excellent eye for modifying equipment and we've some time, picking our way through this maze, before we come into range of the enemy.

  "Very well, proceed. Keep me informed of your progress."

  Both officers bowed and Hadeishi turned back to the plot, considering the difficulties of finding and subduing one ship—particularly one so well suited for this crowded, dangerous environment—in such an enormous volume. I have become a policeman, he thought, a little angry. So low has my house fallen.. . . Then an amusing thought occurred. But this will be particularly bitter for our lady Koshō! A fine lot of keisatsu we are, chasing thieves in the night with our lanterns and rattan canes!

  THE SHUTTLE WRECK, NORTHERN HEMISPHERE, EPHESUS III

  Despite lingering pain in her shins, Gretchen was suited up before sunrise. The nauallis was still a snoring lump in the tent, which let her range unmolested around the camp while he was safely asleep. With the sky still dark and her goggles dialed into ultraviolet, Anderssen felt a little queasy to see shoals of softly-glowing lights crowding around the edges of the tent. Close examination showed the tent to be free of infection, though the groundpad made from Hummingbird's shelter was rapidly disintegrating. Other scattered pools of radiance marked places where one of them had dropped a wrapper from a threesquare or bits of metal from the shuttle were still being digested. Despite walking in a long, wide circle around the camp, she did not find any tracks.

  "Hmm," Gretchen muttered, pacing along the base of the nearest dune. She was surprised to see how quickly the wind wiped away the marks of human presence. Hummingbird's trail to the west had already been reduced to a shallow series of dimples, barely distinguishable from the ripples ascending the face of the ridge. "I must have been dreaming."