Wasteland of Flint

by Thomas Harlan

  The peripheral vision of a Hesht happens to be particularly good, which let Magdalena keep an eye on both Parker—who had shrunk down behind his console with a waxy, distressed look on his face—and upon Fitzsimmons, who had anchored himself just inside the doorway, his back to the wall, fingertips on the grip of his sidearm.

  "Our ship-den is in your debt, Isoroku-san," Maggie said, struggling to rein in her temper. "Your efforts to repair the engines are greatly appreciated, but we will not abandon our pack-leader."

  The engineer looked to Fitzsimmons, who raised an eyebrow in response and shrugged. Isoroku's face screwed up in a bitter grimace. "What can you hope to do, if something happens to the judge and your 'pack-leader'?" Before she could reply, the engineer's nostrils flared minutely and he gave her a searching, sideways look. "How could you tell if they were in danger?"

  "In just over a seven-day," Magdalena said, changing the subject, "Anderssen and the eldest-and-wisest will have returned to the observatory base camp. They will need to be picked up by a shuttle, yet we must be quiet in retrieving them."

  She looked curiously at Parker. "How far away is the Cornuelle?"

  The pilot shrugged, spreading his hands. "No idea. They went 'dark' before reaching the asteroid field and we haven't seen a sign of them since. But if they are searching the belt, they must have moved further away from their point of arrival, which was two days at maximum acceleration from Three a week ago. I'd guess an intercept time of at least four days."

  Magdalena shook out her shoulders, watching the engineer closely. She was sure the human male could estimate distance and speed as quickly as the pilot. There was just no reasonable or inconspicuous way for the Cornuelle to make the retrieval pickup. After a long moment, Isoroku's bitter expression grew worse, as though his face had been pickled in yee juice.

  "Your 'pack-leader' has a plan?"

  Magdalena nodded, swallowing a grin. "She does. We will pick her up—very quietly, very softly—in eight days."

  "What if the Cornuelle—or one of her shuttles—arrives at the same time?"

  The Hesht spread her hands, claws politely retracted. "Then we let long-spear-pack lift the wet cubs from the river and later, when we are all denned on Ctesiphon and fat with meat, we raise cups in their honor. But if they do not come, then Palenque-pride will be waiting and will snatch the drowning from the current and slip away, padding feet soft in the grass."'

  Isoroku's grimace did not waver, but the bull-headed man looked sideways at Fitzsimmons again. The Marine pursed his lips, tucked a wad of gum into his cheek and said: "Looks bad on the record, Thai-i, if you lose a judge by accident. There're not so many of them, you know."

  The engineer's color deepened and he gave Parker and Magdalena a tight, angry stare. "I have no desire to see the tlamatinime or Anderssen-tzin die," he said, biting out each word with a click of his teeth. "Yet these orders were given for a reason. You are putting the lives of everyone on this ship at risk. You should consider what will happen if they die, if we die, or if something worse happens because of this course of action."

  Magdalena stared back at him, a dangerous glitter in her eyes. "I will not be foresworn in my duty to the pack-leader, carver-of-stone."

  Nodding sharply, Isoroku pushed away and sped off down the accessway. Fitzsimmons looked after him with a troubled expression, but then followed. He did not look back. Magdalena turned around in the circle of her nest once, then twice. Parker started to say something, but she hissed at him and he slunk off, avoiding her eyes.

  Males, she grumbled to herself, feeling sulky. Her claws shredded the blanket. Useless copper-stinking males. Bah!

  Later, when she had verified the locations of Isoroku, the Marines, Parker and Bandao on the surveillance cameras, Magdalena restored the v-panes showing the communications stream from Russovsky's Midge. Unfortunately, several of the peapod satellites had burned up in the atmosphere, reducing her "eye' to a bare three orbital cameras. With such a reduced capacity to track and interpret the transmissions from the aircraft, she'd downgraded the feed to burst traffic, sending only compressed voice logs from the aircraft comm. She fretted about losing the video, but there was nothing to be done.

  "In flight again," she muttered, watching a plot of the aircraft creeping across the vast curve of the planetary surface. A projected vector arced south-southwest. "Toward the observatory base. Hrrrr... three days at this rate, maybe four."

  Checking again to make sure she wouldn't be disturbed, Maggie began listening to the latest set of voice recordings. After an hour, she gave up, rubbing sore ears. Philosophy... kittens complaining about the food! They must be bored down there, just flying all night. The Hesht flipped quickly through some secondary data which had come up with the burst transmission, just making sure both aircraft were in good shape. As she did, a log section highlighted itself and chimed for attention. What's this? A leak?

  "Parker," Maggie growled into her throat mike, "I need you to look at something."

  "On my way," the pilot replied, sounding groggy and irritated. Maggie glanced over at the surveillance camera and her whiskers twitched to see the human male shuffling out of one of the cabins used by the scientists. His patterned shirt was on backwards. Turning her nose politely in the air, Maggie routed the log information to his navigation console and sat back, staring at the huge red disc of the planet filling the main v-pane.

  A moment later, her head tilted to one side in confusion. "Where did that come from? What an odd color. Ah ..." She opened another private channel to the crew's quarters. "Mister Smalls," she asked in a very polite voice. "Could you join us on the bridge?"

  IN THE WASTELAND

  A pair of glittering white contrails made two rule-straight lines against the velvety darkness of the Ephesian sky. Both Midges hummed along, wing surfaces finely tuned to squeeze as much lift as possible from the thin atmosphere, ice crystals spiraling out behind them. In the Gagarin, Gretchen was letting the comp fly, her attention turned to the geologist's travel logs. Their flight path had carried them out over a truly vast desolation, leaving the uplands of the Escarpment far behind.

  Gretchen looked over the maps one more time. Russovsky had marked them up with a variety of notes and scribbled amendments. Not all of them were in Náhuatl or even in Norman. Anderssen scowled, trying to make out a note marking as area they would fly over near dawn if they held their current course. What is this? Old Russian, maybe. She scratched her jaw thoughtfully, trying to remember how to read the blocky letters. Her grandmother had some books ... thoughts of childhood yielded nothing but a memory of pine-smoke, nutmeg and pumpkin. Checking her comp found at least a phonetic alphabet.

  "B-r-i-l-l-e-a-n-t," she spelled out, rather laboriously. Russovsky's handwriting was not the clearest in the world. 'Or... brilliant. Hmm." What does that mean? Well, something she saw from the air. Something very bright—perhaps even visible at night. "Hummingbird? Are you awake?"

  "Yes," came the answer—and the nauallis, for once, did not sound half-asleep.

  "I'm looking at Russovsky's maps," Gretchen said, taking a moment to eyeball the horizon and the ground below. Sand. A barren flat covered with faint linear shadows. Anderssen grimaced, looking ahead. The field of pipeflowers disappeared rather abruptly into darkness. "And we've two options to reach the base camp. We can keep on this heading and enter an area she has marked 'brilliant' or swing north to follow a section of uplift."

  "An odd thing to mark," Hummingbird replied. "Can I see the map?"

  "It's on your comp ... now," Gretchen said, tapping a glyph to send the file to his console.

  There was momentary silence and then she heard the nauallis make a curious hmm-hmm sound. "This is in old script—Kievian Rus, I believe—and among those savages, the word brilliant' refers to 'almaz' or what we would term 'diamond in the rough.'"

  'Diamond?" Gretchen shook her head. "So a geometric figure on the ground? That would explain why she could see it from the air."


  "Not the shape," Hummingbird said, sounding a little puzzled himself. "Almaz is a cheap, colorless gemstone. There are Mixtec mining colonies on Anáhuac which mine the mineral for industrial purposes. It makes a particularly fine abrasive for certain processes."

  "Hmm. If it's a mineral, perhaps Russovsky could see an open drift of the material as she flew overhead. Or... or her geodetic sensors revealed a vein of the stuff in the earth. She'd re sure to note something like that."

  "Indeed." Hummingbird sounded satisfied. "So, do we swing north or not?"

  "I think we should be careful," Gretchen said, checking her fuel gauges. "A day won't make an enormous difference one way or another and there's no sense risking—"

  Out of the corner of her eye, Anderssen caught sight of Hummingbird's Midge suddenly lurch in the air and lose a hundred meters of altitude. At the same moment, her comp squawked in alarm and she heard the nauallis shout in surprise.

  "I've lost an engine," he barked, the ultralight falling away toward the desert floor in an ungainly spiral. "Number one has shut down completely. I'm losing fuel on tanks four and five."

  "Set down," Gretchen snapped, the Gagarin banking sharply to the right as she reacted. "I'm right behind you. Shut all your fuel feeds and go to an unpowered glide."

  "Understood." Hummingbird's voice was calm and precise, though Anderssen immediately lost visual sight of the plunging aircraft. The contrail ended abruptly in a slowly falling cloud of ice. The Gagarin nosed over into a steep dive, wind shrieking under her wings, and Gretchen felt the pit of her stomach squeeze tight.

  Her radar showed Hummingbird's Midge lose nearly a thousand meters of altitude before staggering into a kind of glide. By that time, Gretchen was swooping down out of the night sky, the falling ultralight in sight again. The upper wing of a Midge made a good reflector and by starlight her goggles could pick him out. Below them both, however, the land was dark and featureless, though Gretchen doubted the ground was soft as a pillow. At least we're past the pipeflowers!

  "Switch your radar to ground-scan," she said tersely. "You'll need to find someplace flat—"

  "Too late," Hummingbird snapped and his breath was harsh on the comm. Gretchen cursed—the altimeter jumped and radar suddenly revealed a broad, deep canyon rushing past below her—and pulled up, turning wide around Hummingbird, whose aircraft was skidding across the crown of a mesalike hill rising above the canyon floor. The Gagarin made a swooping leisurely circle as the other ultralight bounced to a halt and Gretchen could make out rough, jagged cliffs on every side.

  "Turn all your lights on," she said, hoping Hummingbird hadn't been knocked unconscious by the violence of his landing. "And put out your anchors."

  Her breath puffing white in the chill air of the cockpit, Gretchen ignored everything but the radar image of the rock and stone and precipices below as she lined up to land. "Gently now," she whispered to the Gagarin as the ultralight drifted down out of the sky, airspeed dipping low, almost into a stall. "Easy ... easy ..."

  The front wheel touched down, sending a shock through the airframe, and then the Gagarin was rolling to a halt a dozen meters from Hummingbird.

  "The number four fuel pump is clogged up," Gretchen said, her voice muffled by the cowling around the engine. White fog billowed around her shoulders, oozing from the maintenance hatch in thin streamers. "Looks like a line cracked when you crashed and has been leaking hydrogen vapor into the casing. Everything's frozen solid." A little shaky from too much adrenaline and too little rest, she climbed down from the upper wing, holding tight to the wing struts to keep from slipping.

  "Can it be fixed?" Hummingbird was unloading gear from the cargo compartment. He made a vague gesture at the dark, still night hiding the rugged mesa and canyon beyond. "Here?"

  Gretchen gave him a sharpish look—completely lost on the man, given the lack of light—and ran her hands over the tools on her belt. "If we have a schematic of the engine and component details, I might be able to fabricate a new fuel line or fix the old one, but I don't know if the maintenance manuals are loaded into either comp." Gretchen tried to keep her voice light, but the prospect of doubling-up in one single remaining Midge made her feel sick. We need both aircraft for the pickup, she thought desperately. The skyhook won't work with just one.

  "If they're not, we're in serious trouble." Anderssen cracked frost from her gloves, keeping her eyes away from the old man. "The weight ratio in one of these aircraft is marginal with one person and supplies. Two can fit, but not with much food, water or equipment. We could probably make base camp, but I don't know how long we'd last then."

  "Don't worry." Hummingbird's tone was still perfectly even. "The Cornuelle will come looking for us soon and base camp is filled with Company supplies."

  "It was," Gretchen said, picking her way across splintery, loose shale. There was a bitter edge to her voice. "You're thinking everything is still in place because we left so quickly. Maybe it is, but I've never seen an abandoned camp last—and with the microbiota here—well, I think we'll find bunkers filled with calcite flowers and beautiful stone cobwebs."

  "Well..." The nauallis seemed to have lost track of what he was going to say. "What can I do to help, then?"

  Gretchen pulled open the door of the Gagarin and slid into her seat. The lumpy confines were starting to fit properly, but she didn't know if that was because the chair had changed or she had. Biting her lip nervously, Anderssen started to punch up a document search.

  "Anchor both aircraft," she said, fighting to keep a rising tide of despair from overwhelming her. "And ... and set up the tent. Find someplace out of the wind—we're all exposed up here." Her voice trailed off in surprise.

  Her search for "fuel line repair" had returned an immediate hit and the comp had helpfully opened a series of v-panes on the display, showing a complete schematic of the fuel pump, the circulatory system on Hummingbird's Midge, the specifics of the lines and tubes, and a checklist showing how to repair a broken one.

  "What the?" Gretchen was entirely nonplussed. "There is no way," she said to herself, tabbing through the array of documents, "Russovsky shoehorned an AI into this comp. This is impossible. Just..." She blinked, staring at the checklist. The last entry read: Buy your beautiful, smart pack-sister a drink, when we get back to the den. Paw Paw, Magdalena.

  "Maggie?" Gretchen stared around the deserted, windswept mesa top in amazement. Outside, vapor was still boiling out of the damaged Midge and she could make out the outline of Hummingbird as he stomped around, stitching the anchors into the rock. A creepy shiver ran up her back, making her switch her comm to a private channel. "Can you hear me?"

  There was no answer, just the usual warble of toneless static.

  "Ok... maybe dear Magdalena is psychic." Gretchen read the checklist again. Everything seemed straightforward enough, except one part about checking all of the fuel lines for microfine cracks. "How are we going to do that?"

  The Gagarin rocked gently as Hummingbird unspooled an anchor line. Gretchen started to sort through her tools, reading each section of the instructions as she worked.

  "All done." Hummingbird leaned against the Midge, one hand on the raised door. "I've put the tent in a crevice not too far away. Should be out of the wind." He stopped, watching her suspiciously. "What is it?"

  Gretchen was regarding him appraisingly. "So, Hummingbird-tzin, an unbroken fuel line has a certain... wholeness ... doesn't it? So someone with the sight should be able to see a crack or break or even a weakness—that would be a distortion of proper order, right?"

  "Yes." The visible parts of Hummingbird's face became rather sour-looking. "They would."

  "Good." Gretchen tapped the panel in front of her. "Here's a layout of the entire fuel system in your Midge. You need to check every centimeter for leaks or fissures. I'm going to fabricate a replacement for the broken line."

  "Very well." Hummingbird stared stoically at the complicated spiderweb filling the v-pane. "Are these data on my comp?
"

  Gretchen nodded. "Make sure you have the hydrogen tanks locked off—we can't afford to lose any more fuel."

  The old man nodded and turned away. Gretchen looked around the tiny cockpit and sighed. Too small for this job. She gathered up all her tools and plugged her hand comp into the main panel to make a copy of the instructions. "Maybe the tent is big enough."

  A pale wash of violet was just beginning to tint the rim of the world when Gretchen climbed back up onto the Midge and unscrewed the engine housing. Hummingbird, wrapped in his cloak and a blanket, was squatting beside the main body of the aircraft, rubbing his hands together. Out in the open like this, without even the marginal shelter of an overhang or a cave, the night was ferociously cold.

  "Pass me the other heater." Gretchen wedged the tube-shaped unit in above the pump and turned it on high-radiate. The unit was low on power, but she hoped there was just enough juice left to melt the ice and run the forced-air fan to disperse the resulting fog. While the heater hummed and glowed and blew blessedly hot air against her chest, Gretchen laid out her tools and parts on a technician's clingpad.

  "You were able to make a replacement?" Hummingbird moved up next to her, angling himself into the warm draft from the heater.

  "Yes," she said dryly, craning her head to peer inside the housing. "Modern science and technology triumph again. Did you check all the fuel lines?"

  The nauallis nodded, arms wrapped tight around his chest "Two show signs of damage. I marked them with colored tape. They've not cracked through."

  "Yet." Gretchen brushed melting frost out of the way and began unscrewing the two valves holding the broken section of line. "We'll wrap them in steel tape later." She stifled a yawn. "This afternoon we'll press on and see if we can reach the camp in one long flight."

  "Very well." Gretchen felt the old man shivering, even with his suit and the blankets and djellaba.