Wasteland of Flint

by Thomas Harlan

  There was a pause in the flow of words from Tukhachevsky and Sinclair, and Gretchen realized they'd asked her something. She turned and raised a questioning eyebrow. "I'm sorry?"

  "Would you like to see the main excavation site before we leave?" Sinclair repeated, hair in his eyes, ragged fingernails twisting a fresh tabac from papers. "It'll take all day to load the shuttles, and we won't want to take off until dark."

  "I would," Gretchen said, standing up, coffee cup in hand. "About fifteen hundred? Good."

  As it happened, Parker had already snorked up the last of the coffee, but Gretchen felt alive enough to face the day. Standing in the door of the kitchen, she found the crew clearing out—Parker and Delores for the landing strip and the shuttles, Blake and the others to start packing and loading. Good, she thought, no one will really notice if I take a bit of a look around. All I need is a guide.

  "Mister Smalls?" The meteorologist looked up, startled, apparently unaware of her approach. "Do you have time to show me around the camp this morning? I'd appreciate it if you could."

  In the full glare of midday sun, the camp seemed even more desolate than by night. The horizon stretched away to a dim white line, unbroken by the sight of mountains or hills in any direction. Gretchen blessed the field goggles she'd packed and the battered straw hat that had survived from her very first dig a the ruins of the ancient II Dioptre observatory on Crete. Her suit was proof against heat and cold alike, but there was no sense in subjecting the temperature regulators to more stress than necessary. Smalls, for his part, had adopted a djellaba-like white cloak which covered him from head to toe, with wide-mouthed sleeves and a deep hood.

  Brittle sand crunched underfoot as they walked, a fine crust breaking away with each step. The ground sparkled and glittered, as if diamonds had been scattered among the gravel and stones. Tan and a cream-white color dominated, though as the eye reached to the horizon, the deep, deep blue-black of the sky made the distant plain seem yellow.

  "How's the weather?" she said at last. Smalls had said nothing after suiting up and leaving the main building. He seemed lost in thought. 'The prevailing wind is from the east?"

  There were no east-facing windows in the camp, and every building had a smooth, sloping berm of compressed earth and stone facing the rising sun. Even the sheds for the crawlers were reinforced, as if fortified against enemy bombardment, with deep airlocked doorways. More than one of the huts was half-buried by sand, with sloping ramps leading down to battered metal doors.

  Smalls said nothing, continuing to stump along. They approached the main lab—a long, low structure with tiny windows surrounded by reinforcing stone. Everyone seemed to sleep in the main building, on the second floor. Gretchen shaded her eyes, looking west. Sunlight flared on the raised tails of the two shuttles, and she could see dust rising from a trawler maneuvering around the back of one. She supposed they were preparing to remount the engine in number two.

  Still silent, Smalls keyed the airlock. There was a squeal of tracks clogged with grit, and Gretchen stepped inside, into blessed darkness. She watched the outer door grind closed, seeing the frame was almost entirely eaten away.

  'How bad are the storms?" She ventured again, hoping for some kind of response. Smalls pressed a softly glowing plate on the wall and the inner door cycled, dust swirling away at their feet. Beyond a line of glowlights shimmered awake, illuminating a dirty, narrow hallway. Despite the lock, the floor was covered with sand.

  "The storms?" Smalls seemed to wake at last, his eyes dark pits in the bad light. Something like a smile twitched on his lips. "They're beautiful. Gorgeous, really."

  Gretchen said nothing, only unclasping her mask and taking a moment to taste the building air. She could smell solvents, hot plastic, electrical components and the sharp smell of an overheated printer.

  "We'd been here a week," Smalls said, turning away and shuffling down the hallway. "And my satellites weren't all deployed yet, when the first big storm swept over us. Two of the sheds were torn to bits and scattered—Fuentes found one of the roofing panels a couple weeks later, sixty k from here. A crawler got knocked over and we nearly lost shuttle one."

  "Sounds bad..." Gretchen started to say, but then stopped. Smalls was still talking, apparently unaware of her comment

  "The planet got all smashed up, back at minus three million, and there aren't lots of mountain ranges to speak of, not big plate-driven ones like on Anáhuac or Hesperides. Heat builds up on these big open plains and you get enormous swings in air pressure as the sun moves. There's no humidity to speak of, not with such low temperatures. All the water is locked in the ice caps. No lakes, no oceans—nothing to moderate air temperature."

  Smalls unlocked a door, and Gretchen followed him into a room filled with v-pane monitors, computer equipment and racks and racks of data-lattice storage. A huge map of Ephesus glowed in a mosaic of nine displays, half the planet shining bright in the sunlight, and half plunged into complete darkness. The meteorologist waved a hand across the face of the world.

  "We have dust storms a thousand kilometers wide, with winds in excess of a hundred sixty k on a slow, quiet day. There are invisible tornadoes, which form and vanish in the upper air When they touch down, rocks, stones, boulders get lifted and flung for twenty to thirty k." His finger stabbed at the mosaic display, tracing a thin black line just emerging from the terminator.

  "And there's the escarpment. A wall across half the world, nearly from pole to pole. The planetary atmosphere's so tight on Ephesus there are peaks which brush the envelope." Smalls turned and looked at Gretchen for the first time. She was leaning against one of the tables, watching him quietly, arms crossed. "The sun is like a big broom, pushing a lot of air in front of the midday hot-spot. There's a fat gradient at dawn and when the wall of moving pressure hits the escarpment, well..." He shrugged, showing more than a little perverse pride.

  "You get vicious storms in the canyons," Gretchen supplied. "The briefing packet says they're in excess of four hundred fifty k at 'high tide.'"

  "They are." Smalls searched among papers and bits of equipment on one of the tables. After a moment, he handed Gretchen a heavy chunk of slate the size of her hand. "The wind rising from the sun compresses against the mountains and the only release is through narrow slot canyons. I have video—in places the walls are like glass, rubbed to near optical quality by sand and grit from a hundred k away. Look at the other side."

  Gretchen turned over the piece of slate. The reverse was glossy and black, like fine glass, with a dimple near the center. In the depression was a spherical metallic marble. She looked up in surprise. "What's this?"

  "Some bit of nickel-iron—native stuff, there are fields of it in some places, just sitting on the surface—rolling around for a few centuries, getting nice and round. Then a particularly bad storm picked it up and whipped it into a canyon. By the time the cyclone winds had slapped the marble downrange and it hit a certain section of cliff just right—the marble punched right into the slate and stuck. When Russovsky found that, the grit had worn away the splinter lines and cracks, but you can still see them with a ..." His voice trailed away.

  Gretchen put down the shale. She looked at Smalls, who was staring at his displays.

  "Do you want to tell me about Russovsky?" Gretchen swung toe foot up and sat on the table. "Did she find a lot of interesting things out there, in the wasteland?"

  "She did." Smalls scratched the side of his face. The respirator had worn a deep groove across his upper cheek. "I guess Tuk told you she hasn't come back."

  Gretchen nodded, politely looking away from the meteorologist at the view of the world.

  "Are we going to try and find her, bring her back with us?"

  "Of course," Gretchen said in a sharp tone. Smalls almost flinched, and she smiled in apology. "She's one of the crew, right? I won't leave anyone behind."

  "Okay." Smalls seemed to relax and sat down. "Did... did she bring something back, that day, the day we lost co
ntact with the ship?" He stopped, watching Gretchen's face. "There was a lot of shouting in McCue's lab—it's down the hall—that morning. Then, well, you know—my satellites route through the ship's main array for retransmit from farside, so I was the first to notice something had happened." Smalls shrugged. "The real-time map went out all of a sudden. At first I thought there was a malfunction in my equipment somewhere—the dust eats into things, you know, and they stop working. But everything seemed fine down here. I tried to raise Palenque control on the comm, but there was no answer. I guess—"

  "Everyone was dead by then," Gretchen said softly. "Russovsky found something in the desert and she brought it back to camp. Did you hear what they were saying, when they were shouting?"

  "Yeah, I guess." Smalls looked away. "Clarkson and McCue were always at odds over everything." He managed a bitter laugh. "You'd think they had been lovers or something, but they weren't, not those two." Smalls tapped the crown of his nose. "They just couldn't agree. Clarkson was very Company, very gung-ho, very—ah—results oriented. McCue just wanted to take her time, check things out, take—you know—a few more measurements, a few more readings."

  For the first time, Gretchen thought she saw something like fondness in the man's sallow, exhausted face.

  "She'd help with your data, you know? She'd take a look at it and do some raw analysis to see if you were getting instrument errors, or interference or something? And it would come back so clean ... everything would be just... solid. Reliable. That was McCue. She was reliable."

  Gretchen waited a moment. "Was Russovsky reliable? She and McCue were—"

  "They understood each other," Smalls said, nodding. "Russovsky is like one of the old-timers out of Olympus Station, or the outbackers—you ever been to Mars?"

  "Yes," Gretchen said, understanding. "I spent two years at the Polaris site."

  "Ah." Smalls tried to raise an eyebrow and look knowing, but mostly he looked foolish and Gretchen felt a sudden warmth for the man. Poor kid, she thought, thinking of Delores. He's just a squeeb. Probably never had a real girlfriend his whole life before he came here.

  "So Russovsky," Gretchen interrupted, "liked the emptiness. She liked to go out alone, in her ultralight, and just wander, looking for things. Just... seeing what there was to see."

  "Yeah!" Smalls scratched the back of his head ruefully. "She was kind of pissed when we first got there—I mean, she's the planetary geologist, right? But Ephesus was smashed like an egg back in First Sun times, the whole planetary mantle was broken into about a million pieces and then slammed back together again. There's no geology left! Just slowly settling rubble. Everything's a jumble—you can't even get a depth reading most places—and her instruments just kicked back garbage and plots looking like an Englishman puked six pints of bitters in the street."

  "I see." Gretchen frowned. "So why the flights?"

  "Well, that was another argument. See, Russovsky tried playing by the rules and duly reported all of this to Clarkson—and he said if she couldn't do her work, she could help someone else do something useful." Smalls grinned, and Gretchen realized with a start he was younger than she was. Much younger. How old is this kid? Twenty?

  "Now, that set McCue off like a rocket, but Russovsky kept her cool and said—and I quote—'I believe my data are in error, Doctor Clarkson. I will endeavor to rectify the situation.'—and then she just walked out of her office, loaded up the Gagarin and took off into the blue yonder."

  Gretchen answered his smile with one of her own. "Good for her. How many times did she go out?"

  Smalls pursed his lips, thinking. "About once a week, I guess. You can't carry too much on a Midge, but you can cover a lot of ground. So she must have been all over the place. She always tried to bring me or McCue something pretty—like that shale—or once she found these raw diamonds. She gave those to McCue, I think."

  "Did you see what she brought back the last time?"

  Smalls shook his head dolefully. "No. I was lying low! Clarkson was already in a mood about something, so when Russovsky came in and made a beeline for McCue's office with a big bundle in her arms, he was spoiling for a fight."

  Gretchen nodded. "Why don't you show me her office?"

  "Shuttle two to shuttle one, come in." Parker tapped his throat mike experimentally, watching the newly repaired shuttle's control panels light green section by section. Most of the cockpit was still dark, or winking amber. The long grounding had played havoc with the ship's systems. A cursory examination of the hull revealed deep pitting and large sections of discolored, infected metal. "Bandao, can you hear me? Delores, are you on this comm?"

  "I hear you," the gunner's voice answered on a crystal-clear channel. "How does it look?"

  "Good enough, maybe, sort of..." Parker wiggled one of the control panels and the black glassite suddenly flickered to life. "This boat's all eaten up by the damned spores."

  "Will she fly?" Delores's sharp voice came online. "Do you have an engine readout yet?"

  "I have diagnostics live from the engine," Parker replied dryly. The crewwoman was crouching in the aft engineering space, squeezed in beneath the housing, trying to match up relays and conduits in a maze of pipes and hoses. "And I think she'll fly—at least one-way—and everyone on board had better be suited up. Our little friends have been eating away for weeks."

  "Cargo in the damaged ship, then? Passengers in this one?"

  Parker nodded, attention distracted by another panel coming online. The wing and airfoil surfaces were showing only sixty to seventy percent response to a basic microcontrol flex tea "Yeah ... why don't you prep for takeoff. We can load cargo-with Delores, me and the security crew. Get all the civilians up to the Palenque and into their blessed showers."

  "Understood," Bandao replied. Parker squinted out the triangular window. Across the landing field, he could see the gunner rattling down the stairs from number one. "Delores—I still don't have any readout from the fuel gauges. They hooked up yet?"

  A grunting sound was her only response. Smiling to himself, the pilot began running through the basic systems checklist. After an hour, he looked up, lean face creased with puzzlement. A line of people was climbing the stairs into shuttle one. He tapped open his throat mike.

  "Chief? Anderssen? We're going to send shuttle one upstairs. Did you want to go?"

  There was no immediate response, so he checked his comm band to see if Anderssen was in range. Her proximity icon was glowing green, so Parker tried again. "Parker calling Anderssen—hello? Anyone home?"

  This time the channel chirped open, and the archaeologist's voice came back, a little thready. "Yes, Parker? What did you say?"

  The pilot repeated his question. As he did, Delores climbed down into the cockpit and slid into the copilot's seat. Her hair was streaked with oil, her face shining with sweat and her work gloves were dark with grime. She looked pissed, but Parker made a point of looking respectfully off into the distance, listening to Gretchen speaking on the comm.

  "Don't worry about me," Gretchen said, breath rasping as she scrambled up the side of an excavation trench. She squinted for a second while the work goggles adjusted to keep the flare of the late afternoon sun from spearing her eyes. "I'm out at the Observatory excavation site with Sinclair and Smalls. I believe they do want to go upstairs today, so tell Bandao to delay liftoff until they get back to camp." She waved to the xenobiologist, who was standing under a shining metallic sunshade a hundred meters away. "We've got two crawlers out here, so I'll take the other one back."

  She tramped across a work ladder laid down over the trench as a bridge and passed one of the obelisks forming the main part of the observatory. The stone spire cast a long finger of shadow across the rumpled ground—each obelisk was at least twenty meters high. Four rings of the stones circled the "nave," which nestled at the bottom of a kilometer-wide depression in the desert floor, about three k from the camp.

  A network of fresh trenches slashed across the ring arrangement. The e
xpedition had been digging exploratory excavations at ten-meter intervals, trying to find the foundations of the edifice. Gretchen could tell from the desultory sensor grid layout in the trenches they hadn't found what they were looking for. Sinclair had admitted, as they were bouncing up the dusty road from the camp, the "observatory" did not seem to be anything of the kind. The current thinking proposed some kind of naturally occurring phenomena. Just some rocks.

  Gretchen walked quickly down the path between two trenches to the long rectangular sunshade. Sinclair and Smalls were sitting at a camp table, their goggles glittering mirrors. Cargo crates made more tables and work areas under the strip of shadow.

  "They've called from camp," Gretchen said, doffing her hat under the awning. Her skin felt tight, already dehydrated by the parched air. "Shuttle one is ready to make a run back to the ship. You should go, I think, and I'll take the other crawler back."

  Both men shared a glance, then Sinclair tilted his head in a sort of temporizing way. "One of us should stay—it's bad policy to go about solo—even so close to the camp."

  "I understand," Gretchen said, taking no offense. "But I'll be staying overnight, which means one of you would have to give up a shower and the amenities of the Palenque for another night. Besides—Parker, Blake and Delores are staying ground-side with me, and I'll have the crawler."

  There was some more hemming and hawing, but Gretchen just waited for them to convince themselves, then waved as the Skoda Armadillo chuffed away down the road to the main camp. When they were mostly out of sight, she tapped her comm open.