Wasteland of flint ittotss-1

by Thomas Harlan

  Gretchen tapped in the code recorded by the surveillance cameras. The vault door made a chuff sound, then rolled silently away into the overhead. The vault room was entirely dark. "Very handy," she said, handing the device back to the sergeant.

  "We try," he said in a particularly dry tone, flicking a glowbean against the far wall. "Sister bless, do they make such a mess all the time?"

  Gretchen stepped into a crowded room, now lit by a pervasive blue glow. Doctor McCue's g-box was sitting on the deck amid a wild jumble of straw-shaped mineral core samples. She stepped carefully around the striated tubes — most had broken apart, leaving a wash of grit and sand on the floor — and picked up the controller for the g-box. It hummed to life, and the box lifted up and drifted to an empty section of deck.

  "No," Gretchen said absently, "the core samples will have been in packing material and a cargo crate — they're just stiffened cellulose and a sealant — very tasty, I imagine." She keyed the box to open, and the top latch released with a clank. Kneeling, she lifted the lid and shone her hand lamp inside.

  "Oh, now…" She let out a long, low whistle of surprise. "That is beautiful."

  Warily, Fitzsimmons leaned over. Inside the box was a chunk of stone — perhaps half a meter long and ten centimeters thick — a deep sandy red streaked with cream, glowing in the light of Anderssen's lamp. Gretchen brushed a fine layer of sandstone dust away, revealing a handsbreadth-wide whorl. A tapered tail of ribbed shell curled around the impression of stalklike legs.

  "See, Sergeant? The fruit of some ancient Ephesian sea, preserved by chance in sandy mud, along with our…friend."

  Most of the fossil was buried in the stone, and lying alongside the ancient cephalopod was the unmistakable shape of a machined metal cylinder. Like the artifact in the isolation lab, the cylinder was crusted with limestone aggregate.

  Gretchen bit her lip gently, tracing the outline of the device with a gloved finger. "Russovsky's geological survey found wonders."

  Fitzsimmons stood up, his face pale. "Ma'am — I know you won't like to hear this — but we should jettison this thing right away. What if it goes off like the other one?"

  Gretchen looked up, face pinched with distaste. In that moment, she suddenly knew exactly how Clarkson had felt, clutching the prize close to his chest, rushing to make the first analysis. He would see what no one had seen in three million years — he alone would look upon mystery revealed and he alone would learn truth… But the open fear on the Marine's big, bluff face was too real to ignore. She looked back at the cylinder, at the marvelous piece of shale, at the delicate beauty of the shell and its ancient inhabitant, all trapped together by circumstance. The most beautiful, most striking, most wonderful thing I've ever seen. How did McCue keep from taking this to her laboratory, subjecting it to her experiments? Russovsky had the very luck to find this. If the cylinder is a First Sun device…my god.

  "Ma'am?" Fitzsimmons touched her shoulder, gently, shaking her out of the reverie. His voice was soft and insistent. "Doctor Anderssen, we have to isolate this weapon. Right now."

  "You're right," Gretchen stood up, shaking her head. She felt a little shaky. "Let's close up the g-box and put it in an airlock we're not using. That should hold the eaters if they escape, and we can vent the lock to space if necessary."

  "Doc, listen to me." Fitz stood as well, towering over her. His dark brown eyes were filled with worry. "There's no way to know if this cylinder holds the same kind of nanomechs as the other one — this one could be an explosive, a nuke, an antimatter bomb, anything. Poking something like this, even with a really, really tiny stick, is bad, bad business. Procedure says put the whole box on a carryall and have the Cornuelle boost it into the sun."

  "No, I don't think so!" Gretchen stepped between the Marine and the box. "This artifact is worth my entire career, Sergeant. Worse, it's worth an enormous amount of money for the Company and for the Company's primary contractor — which is the Imperial Navy." She stopped, searching his face. He looked back, so plainly worried for his own safety, for her life and the others on the ship, her anger drained away as quickly as it had flared.

  "I'm sorry, Sergeant, I've no business shouting at you." Gretchen put her hand on his arm. "Like you, I'm under pretty strict orders — and my first order is to make sure things like this are brought back intact and well documented. So even if we talk to Captain Hadeishi, the answer is going to be the same — the cylinder stays and comes back to Imperial space with us."

  Fitzsimmons's eyes narrowed, and one hand made an abortive movement to his comm pad, but then he nodded, taking a long look at the battered, rusted box on the floor. "Are you going to try and study it on the ship?"

  "I…" Gretchen paused. Why lie? He'll know, and you'll look like an idiot. "Yes, I have to try. But — I'm not going to try anything invasive, or high energy, and I'm going to run passive scans on this thing for a day or two first."

  Fitzsimmons gave her an arch look and she blushed. "Really, Sergeant. And we'll be sure to evac the airlock of any atmosphere. I'll be careful!"

  "Sure, ma'am," he said, picking up the g-box controls. "Why don't you call Parker — or Bandao if our coffee-drinking man is still horking up his lunch — and have them get the number three airlock ready, while I angle our little friend here out of this place?"

  "See? Safe and sound." Gretchen leaned against the wall of a cargo bay, watching the atmosphere gauge sink toward zero pressure. Fitz and Deckard were packing up a welding kit they'd found in one of the workshops. Inside the airlock, the chunk of shale and its ancient passengers were firmly secured in a hexacarbon cradle. The metal cage was oriented toward the outer lock door on a pair of rails. A scratch-built launching mechanism — half blasting putty and a comm-controlled detonator — rode underneath. A couple of metal-cased sensors Gretchen had scavenged from the lab ring were pinned up on the gleaming white walls of the airlock.

  "You seem a little more relaxed," Fitzsimmons said, in an offhand way, as he coiled up a length of comm cable. He was trying not to smirk. "Now your precious baby is on the other side of the lock."

  "Maybe," Gretchen said, nodding. "I — "

  Her comm warbled, and Magdalena's voice filled the air around them. "Hunt-sister, the main comm array is working, and there's someone who wants to speak with you."

  "Patch 'em through," Gretchen said, turning away from the two Marines. "Someone on the Cornuelle?"

  "No," the Hesht said in a sly voice, "I managed to whisker the camp planetside. Everyone seems to be alive — but they're pissed and hungry and want to know if the showers are working."

  Damn. Gretchen clicked her teeth, cursing herself for forgetting about the scientists stranded on the planet. "I'm a fine leader," she muttered. "We should have called them first thing. They must be half-mad with fear from being abandoned."

  "I wouldn't say half covers the strength of their feeling," Maggie commented. "You want to take this call from the bridge?"

  "Doctor Lennox, I'm sorry, but Doctor Clarkson," Gretchen repeated for the sixth time, "is dead. Everyone who was on the Palenque, save for crewman Fuentes and crewwoman Flores, is dead."

  In the v-pane beside the captain's chair — now covered with an Imperial Marine field blanket — a thin, distressed-looking woman stared back at Gretchen, her face framed by the hood of a z-suit which had seen better days. Two men crowded behind her in some kind of shelter — Gretchen could make out the roof supports characteristic of an extruded building — and both of them seemed to have grasped the facts of the matter, to judge from their stunned expressions.

  "I–I don't understand. He just went on the shuttle…" Lennox had faded blond hair and high cheekbones. Gretchen guessed she'd been very pretty when she was younger, but years spent in the glare of alien suns had not treated her kindly.

  "Margaret," Gretchen leaned forward, catching the woman's eye. "I know it seems very sudden, but you've been out of contact with the Palenque for weeks — surely you thought something had gon
e awry aboard?"

  "Yes…" Lennox swallowed and seemed to become aware of her surroundings again. "I just hoped…he was still alive."

  "I'm sorry, but there was an accident and the crew, Doctor Clarkson and Doctor McCue, were all killed. Now — is everyone at base camp all right? Do you need medical assistance?"

  "We're fine," rumbled one of the two men, a hulking, bearded face with a stout nose. "And very, very glad to hear from you, Doctor Anderssen. I am Vladimir Tukhachevsky — dobre den!"

  "Good day to you, Doctor." Gretchen bobbed her head in greeting. "I know you all want to get a real shower and eat a different brand of ration bar, but there's going to be a delay before we can bring you back up to the ship."

  "What do you mean? Is there still a problem?" The other man — a smaller, wirier fellow — pushed his face into the camera. "Don't you have a rescue ship?"

  "Mister Smalls," Gretchen smiled amiably in greeting. "The Imperial Navy has been good enough to bring us here to help you, but accommodations are lacking on the Cornuelle for guests. There is also a problem with the shuttle engines, which has to be resolved. When there is a place to put you on the Palenque, and we can retrieve you safely, we will do so immediately."

  What a fine manager I make, passed through the back of Gretchen's mind. Next I'll be expressing my profound sympathies at their recent layoff.

  Tukhachevsky frowned, heavy black eyebrows beetling in concern. "What kind of accident, Doctor Anderssen? Has the Palenque been damaged?"

  "She's…a little Spartan right now, Doctor." Gretchen — watching the faces of the three scientists on the planet — decided not to explain the events of the artifact and its activation. Not today, at any rate. "The accident that killed the crew also…destroyed most of the amenities onboard. Luckily, the Cornuelle has been able to supply us with new bedding, towels and food." If you call Marine ration bars and olive-colored threesquares food.

  "In any case, we should have a shuttle ready to go in a day, perhaps two, so call in your field crews and get everyone ready to ship up."

  Lennox nodded, turning away with a distant, frightened expression on her face. Smalls was already gone, leaving only the bearlike Tukhachevsky with a troubled look in his eyes.

  "Doctor? Is something wrong?"

  "Ah…" Vladimir twisted the ends of his mustache with a nervous motion. "Almost everyone is already in camp. Since the Palenque stopped responding to our hails, I fear morale has suffered. No one is even working in the excavation anymore. But one of us, I fear, is not here. She's gone, out wandering in the wasteland."

  "Who?" Gretchen felt irritated, but at the same time she knew who it must be, even before Tukhachevsky said her name aloud. Who else would I want to talk to? Who do we need to talk to?

  "Our own dear Russovsky," Vladimir said sadly, scratching a sore on the side of his nose. "She left in her Midge the same day Clarkson and McCue went up to the ship. We've heard nothing from her since, not so much as a word."

  Aboard the Cornuelle

  "Captain? The civilians have established contact with their ground team. Do you want the recording on your number two?" The midshipman looked up with a painfully earnest expression on his face, fingers poised over the main communications panel.

  Hadeishi shook his head. "No, thank you, Smith-tzin. Just give me a realtime on my display if anything interesting happens." He gave the young officer a stern look. "Has Sho-sa Kosho set you to updating our navigational charts?"

  "Hai, Captain!" Smith managed to come to attention in his shockchair, a talent Hadeishi remembered all too well himself. His first posting had been under a Mйxica captain with a very strict sense of propriety. "All spare passive sensor time is already tasked."

  "Good. Carry on." Updating local navigational charts was dull — most of the time — but frighteningly essential to safe navigation and the rapid response of the Fleet to any threat. Hadeishi tapped up the boy's report and found the usual litany of planets, planetesimals, asteroids and stray cometary bodies. Too early to find anything interesting. A pity.

  The bridge was quiet and busy, filled with the little sounds of men and women working at routine tasks made fresh by a new duty station for the ship and at least the prospect of danger. Hadeishi let the shockchair take more of his weight, eyes roving idly from station to station. The well of the threat board drew his attention at last, as it usually did, and he frowned. The red sphere of Ephesus swam in the center, slashed with the white of enormous storms, surrounded by a scattering of tiny lights — each one tagged with ship identification numbers, directions of movement, thrust and mass figures — and there was absolutely nothing going on.

  Even the tense atmosphere aboard the Palenque had abated — no new horrors had been discovered, the alien devices were secured — and everyone aboard was busy restoring ship's systems. Hadeishi considered remanding the gun control orders which kept two forward beam weapons targeted on the civilian ship. But he did not. Quarantine restrictions were strict and he had no desire to generate more paperwork for himself.

  The rest of the system was equally boring; even the Ephesian sun was quiet, without particular flare activity, or mottling or magnetic storms. Hadeishi swung his chair from side to side gently, eyeing a trail of motes drifting along in the upper atmosphere of the planet. He moved a control on his display and the far side of the planet rotated into view. Immediately he frowned, seeing the fuzzy mottled streaks characteristic of delayed or corrupt data.

  "Mister Hayes?" The weapons officer became entirely alert, his massive frame tensing like a hunting dog preparing to leap to the chase. Hadeishi did not smile. "I don't like the lack of surveillance coverage for the far side of the planet. Please secure communications control of the civilian peapod satellites — how are they configured?"

  "Meteorological and geophysics survey, Chu-sa."

  "Good, well leave them to their business, but establish a tap. I would also like two reconnaissance drones launched into polar orbits to give us a real-time eye on farside."

  "Hai!" The weapons officer settled into his seat, face lit with enthusiasm. Once Hayes was looking away, Hadeishi did smile, a little. He was flirting with boredom as well, which meant he should start working on the weekly reports for sector command. What a horror…

  Instead of setting himself to his dull profession duty, Hadeishi tapped up the surveillance and comm feeds from the civilian ship. № 3v feed so far from home, he thought, rather guiltily, but you can always see what the neighbors are doing.

  "This doesn't look very experimental to me." Gretchen had both hands tucked into her armpits — her z-suit was dumped in the cabin she'd appropriated — and her mother's sherpa cap tugged down almost to her neck. She kicked the corner of the tachyon relay very gently, though even such a small motion drew a deep growl and hiss from underneath. "Shouldn't they repaint the case, or something?"

  The relay occupied one corner of the forward cargo hold, sitting on a standard cargo palette bolted to the deck with standard retaining bolts. The device was shaped very much like a standard cargo container, save for military markings and the particular gold-gray-olive color scheme of Imperial Navy equipment. A rat's nest of cables ran out of the back of the relay and down through an open floor panel. A pair of bare, furry feet were visible under the edge of the container.

  Gretchen sat on the edge of the palette, humming softly to herself. Clanking, more muttering and then a chunk sounded from under the relay. Magdalena emerged, her fur awry, and sat down next to the archaeologist.

  "I think, hunt-sister," the Hesht said, slipping a stiff brush from one of the cargo bags tethered to the deck and beginning to settle her fur. "I think your human guardpack calls things 'experimental' when they want to sell them for more money than they're worth." Magdalena smiled, showing a large number of sharp white teeth. "But this thing works."

  "It's back on main power?" Gretchen pointed with her chin at the tangle of cables. "And reset? Ready for business?"

  The Hesht nodded,
slicking back the fur along her neck and shoulders. "Recycling the system and acquisition of the sector relay emitter at Ctesiphon will take a few minutes, but then she'll be ready to send and receive." Maggie paused, glowering at Gretchen with one half-lidded eye. "You have messages to send? Greetings to your cubs? Your mate lying at home in the den?"

  Gretchen nodded sheepishly. "And reports for Gossi and the Company."

  "Them!" Magdalena made a sharp coughing sound. "They eat bark."

  "I suppose." Gretchen couldn't hide a smile. "Listen, I need to ask you some questions about the main comm array — can you use it to pick up the transponder on a groundside vehicle?"

  Maggie blinked slowly, showing two clear lenses fluttering across her yellow eyes. "You want to search for the missing hunter from the sky? For Russovsky?"

  Gretchen nodded. "The scientists on the ground have no idea where Russovsky went on her survey. She left no flight plan. Lennox says…well, that's immaterial. Lennox doesn't like her. The others, though — particularly Tukhachevsky — are worried."

  Maggie scratched the underside of her jaw. "Do we have to find her right now? Why not wait until she returns from hunting — there's only one watering hole, one den — she has to come back sometime."

  Gretchen's expression turned dour. "I need to talk to her about the cylinders, and about McCue and Clarkson and what she did, and what they did, on the day of the accident."

  Magdalena grunted, leaning back against the relay. "Huh. Now the pride's golden pelt is heavy on the shoulders, ya-ha?"

  Gretchen made a face. A dull, queer churning started in her stomach at the thought. "My job, now. But really the Company doesn't care about all the poor people who died on this ship. They'll pay the wergeld to the families and a pension, if one is owed. But no more. What they want, and what I need to find, is the place Russovsky found those cylinders — and anything else that might be there."