Wasteland of Flint

by Thomas Harlan

  Rrrrrr... they could be in trouble dirtside. Another pack might have them cornered. Her leg could be broken, she could be caught in the open, exposed!"

  Parker sighed and crawled backward out of the overhead. His forearms were crisscrossed with scars and dried blood. Working in such an old ship was wearing on mind and body alike. He swung for a moment, feeling the gentle tug of the ship's acceleration, then dropped to the deck. Palenque was underway, engines barely lit, in a long corkscrew orbit out from the planet. In another five days, the pilot figured, she would be far enough away to switch to full power. Then—if Isoroku and his Marine helpers were really working down in Engineering, not drinking themselves insensible—the ship might be able to achieve gradient and enter hyperspace.

  "Maggie ..." Parker stumbled into the navigator's chair and wedged one thin shoulder into a space between two of the supports. The shockchair's heavy, plush seatback had been eaten, leaving nothing but a cage of metal strips. He reached for the pack of tabac in his shirt pocket and found only empty waxed paper., Crap. No smoke. "I know Gretchen's your packleader now and all—I know that's important to you—but she's gone off on her own ... thing."

  The Hesht did not look at him, once more encased in a suspicious number of blankets. Parker blinked, then stared at a blue sleepbag tucked in behind her. "Is that my sleepbag? It is. You stole my sleepbag! Give over!"

  "Rrr I'm cold, monkey! You're not. You're working. When you go to your den to sleep, I'll let you have it back."

  "So—is all your fur for show or something?" Parker crushed waxed paper in his fist. "You're ... plushy. But you're cold all the time. I don't understand."

  "Heshukan," Magdalena said, baring the tips of her incisors, "was a warm, dry world."

  "Oh." Parker started to hunt through his pockets for something else to smoke.

  "You're out of bitter, smelly leaves," Magdalena said, staring moodily at the v-pane. Still nothing but static and garbage. She turned off the feed and began flipping through the various comm systems available to her. Most were dead and dark. "Maybe the hunters have some."

  "Ask the Marines?" Parker rubbed his face wearily. "They were cadging from me yesterday. Stupid—why give them away? Have I lost my mind? I should have sold them, or kept them for myself!" The pilot pushed himself out the chair and gestured at Magdalena. "I'm crashing. Give me my bag."

  Brow and nose wrinkled up in a grimace, the Hesht scooted to one side and let Parker recover his sleepbag.

  "Agh. It smells like piss!" The pilot held his bag at arm's length, mouth pursed.

  "You don't want it?" One of Magdalena's paws licked out and snagged the bottom of the bag with a curving white claw. "I made it smell proper, like a den-blanket should."

  "I do want it!" Parker snatched the bag back. He shook his head, then made his way carefully off the bridge, bag trailing behind him like a fat blue tail.

  Magdalena hissed at his retreating back and then rummaged around, adjusting her blankets. When she was done, the Hesht resumed paging through the comm channels. Her mood was even fouler than before.

  Bandao arrived an hour later, two bulky packages under one arm, and found the bridge dark and cold, save for Magdalena in her nest, with four v-panes casting a chill gray light on her face. Maggie ignored him. She was busy keying commands into the system in one pane while the others were filled with closely spaced documentation or remote console feeds. Her moodiness had departed, replaced by a near-maniacal concentration on the work before her. Bandao took no notice of the slight and began hunting around under the command deck.

  After a few moments, he found what he was looking for and plugged a field heater into a power socket under the navigator's station. Five seconds later, the olive-colored unit woke up and began to radiate a warm, dry heat into the area around the captain's chair.

  "Two and four are stabilized," Magdalena muttered under her breath. Her claws made a constant, rattling click-click-click on the control panel. If she were a human, she would be sweating. If she were Parker, there would be a cloud of smoke like a forest fire around her.

  Studiously ignoring the Hesht, Bandao paced around to the opposite side of her chair, installed a second unit and then disappeared back into the dark passageway leading into the main hab ring. Magdalena showed no sign of noticing his brief visit.

  "Ah," she said in relief, rolling her shoulders. "That's better. Seven will do." Magdalena's nose twitched—there was a sort of hot metallic smell in the air—but the images on the panel drew her attention before she noticed the two heaters.

  On her main v-pane, a video feed had appeared. The image was broken into seven sections arranged in an exploded hexagon, each showing a different view of the planet now receding behind the Palenque. The tip of her pink tongue showing, Magdalena watched the feeds very carefully. Seven matching remote console windows were live on another section of her panel,

  "Synch one to seven," she muttered, tapping a series of glyphs with the little claw on her right paw. The upper left video shivered, then adjusted, conforming to the image mirrored in the center of the hexagon. "Good... synch two to seven."

  Three-quarters of a million kilometers away, one of the peapod satellites still in orbit over the third planet made an adjustment, slewing to cover an equatorial region. The peapod's orbit had been degrading rapidly, but it was still in operation. The machine was aware—but uncaring—of a slight increase in the rate of collision with atmospheric particles. Almost imperceptibly, the satellite began to slow, dragged by an invisible fringe of the ocean of air surrounding the planet. Responding to the commands arriving over the telemetry link, the peapod made a series of minute adjustments to its orientation.

  "Synch six to seven ..." Maggie began to grin, foreteeth and sidemolars showing in a fierce display. "... and stabilize image." She tapped another patiently waiting glyph. The video displays from all seven peapods collapsed into one single image. Palenque-side comp picked up the dataflows and began to fuse them into one high-resolution feed. Magdalena waited anxiously, a fully extended striking claw clicking against the front of her cutting teeth.

  The comp interped and interped again, trying to adjust for differences in the rate of flow caused by the angular distance between the ship and the peapods scattered around Ephesus. Hating the concession, Maggie stepped down the level of resulting detail an order of magnitude. Palenque comp chirped happily in response.

  "Now," Magdalena growled happily, "let's look in on the crash site."

  The multilensed eye in the sky shifted, concentrating on a barren valley near the northern ice cap. Magdalena was grudgingly satisfied with the resolution coming back out of the cribbed-together system, but the satellites were responding far too slowly to satisfy her impatient nature.

  "Stupid tree-climbing machines..." When all seven peapods had focused on the crash area, Magdalena realized both Gretchen and the old crow had left the area. "Now where did they go?" She cleared the peapod documentation out of the secondary panes and brought up Russovsky's transmission logs and a plot of her flight path. "Hmm..."

  The heaters continued to glow, surrounding the Hesht in a warm cocoon. Her face shimmered in the constantly changing light from the panels as she worked, long into shipsnight. By shipsdawn, the tired Hesht was staring at a grainy picture of a mountainside. The upper wings of two ultralights gleamed in late-afternoon sunlight and Maggie could make out the blurry shapes of Gretchen and the Méxica talking as they loaded gear into their Midges.

  MONS PRION, NORTHERN HEMISPHERE, EPHESUS III

  Hummingbird fiddled with his breather and goggles, trying to get them to lie comfortably over his nose and ears. Gretchen, passing by with the last of her personal gear, threw the comp and sensor pad into the front seat of the Gagarin.

  "Hold still," she said over the comm, her own face mostly masked by the tail of her kaffiyeh. "There's a trick to it... there. How is that? Better?"

  The nauallis nodded, finding the new arrangement suitable. For a moment, Gretchen
thought he might actually thank her, but he did not. She was not surprised.

  "So—you feel comfortable leaving this place now?"

  "Yes." Hummingbird had spent the day sitting cross-legged in the cave, watching the passage down into the cavern. "We will follow the course of Russovsky's last flight."

  "Sure." Gretchen peered at the nauallis curiously. "You haven't seen anything? Felt anything?"

  Hummingbird shook his head. "We have a long way to go, Anderssen. We shouldn't waste any more time here."

  "Really." Gretchen felt a cold, sharp anger boiling up in her stomach. With an almost physical effort, she forced her voice to remain level. "Aren't you going to ask me how I could find Russovsky's stone—when you couldn't? Or do you know already?" Her eyes narrowed. "You do know. You even know why these things are happening!"

  Hummingbird laughed in relief, an abrupt, unexpected sound. "Know? I know many things, Anderssen, but I've not the slightest idea why the cave made a copy of Russovsky or kept repeating itself!"

  Oddly, as the nauallis was speaking, Gretchen became aware of a queer flutter in his voice, as if two voices were speaking at once—different voices—and they were contradicting each other.

  "You're lying." Hummingbird became very still. Gretchen looked around, entirely startled by her own statement and then she advanced on him. "You are lying and I... I can tell."

  "Could you?" Hummingbird stirred, regarding her with a fierce, sudden intensity. "Very well—how did you find the stone in the dust?"

  Faced with the question she'd wanted to hear all day, Gretchen felt entirely deflated. She was sure the nauallis already had some esoteric answer for her, and she realized she didn't care. "Never mind. Our real problem is what happened in the cave. There is no reason for an organism in this environment to waste energy making copies of things. At least—no reason I can think of." She drew back her hood, so the Náhuatl could see the fierce expression on her face. "Why don't you fill me in? Before we stumble into the next situation, and one of us is hurt, or killed, by my ignorance."

  Hummingbird's lips had compressed to a tight line and his eyes grew dark and guarded. "There are secrets which cannot be revealed ..."

  Gretchen's face contorted into a snarl. A hand groped at her belt for a wrench, a hammer, a gun ...

  "... so I will not tell you everything I know." Hummingbird said firmly. "But I will tell you enough. But first, think about what you did in the cavern. You've had a certain kind of training—from school, from university, from your parents, from the work of your hands—and you're skilled in a way of seeing." He paused, regarding her. "Did those skills show you the stone in the dust?"

  Gretchen became aware her mouth was very dry. She licked her lips and took a drink from the recycler tube in her mask. Hummingbird's gaze did not waver or look away. Gretchen started to become nervous. "I... no, no I don't think they did. I didn't see the stone, not with my eyes. There was only an itch. Just... something was out of place."

  The nauallis nodded minutely. He seemed to gather himself, jaw tightening, brow creasing. For a very long time, Hummingbird said nothing, staring at her with an unwavering expression. Just as Anderssen—tired of standing on a windy ledge while the day inexorably passed—was about to speak, he blinked and said:

  "Think of a river, broad and running swift. The bottom is smooth sand, the banks thick with algae. There is nothing to disturb the current, the surface is placid. If you hover above the clear water, you can see into the depths, pick out details of patterns in the sand. Perhaps there is seagrass waving in the current. Put your hand in the water and you are surprised by the strength of the water—but now the surface is distorted, confused. A wake trails behind your hand and suddenly the water is no longer clear. Such an effect is obvious, even to the unwary.

  "Consider a boulder, submerged and invisible to a man standing on the bank. The river may seem placid, but the current is distorted. A boat on the river may strike the rock before anyone notices anything amiss. The current may twist across the stone, eddying, rushing faster or slower. Now, in the constrained universe beneath the glassy surface, there may be places where the seagrass cannot hold, or places where an eddy falls, leaving a thick stand of growth."

  Hummingbird made a motion with his hand, indicating the landscape around them.

  "What you see here—the ruined surface, tortured mountains, desolate plains—is not the whole of this world. There are submerged currents. There is something here, something hidden. There is an influence, like my hidden boulder, which directs, confines, shapes all that happens on this poor, broken orb. We felt an echo in the cave—"

  Gretchen felt her pulse trip a little faster. She blurted, "The First Sun people! Something interrupted their labors! They fled, didn't they? What... what did they leave behind?"

  "Do not presume they fled," Hummingbird replied, raising his eyes to the sky. His goggles polarized into a shining mirror, reducing the sun to two blazing points. "Have you thought about the power of the First Sun people? They bestrode the stars as gods—we have seen the scraps and ruins they leave behind—and we are ants creeping across the floor of a deserted house. Our ships have visited six hundred worlds, only the tiniest fraction of the suns we can see with the unaided eye. Yet there are wonders which beggar our knowledge and skill even in such a tiny space. Have you thought what might lie beyond the rim of our domain?"

  "Hasn't everyone? Every undergraduate class debates this in first-term xenoarcheology!" Gretchen began to feel the excitement of curiosity stir and tried to keep her voice level. "Where did they come from, the giants of the First Sun? Where did they go? Why aren't they here now?"

  "They were destroyed." Hummingbird's statement was flat and cold. "There were—there are—powers which exceeded them in all ways. In age, though the First Sun races are impossibly ancient by our measure, in strength, though the least of the First Sun valkar could smash Earth to a cinder."

  He tilted his head toward the vast sweep of mountains and canyons and plains. "One of the valkar was here, remaking this world into something pleasing—if such a term can be used. Then it fled to safety." Hummingbird fixed Gretchen with a piercing stare. "What made it run? What drove it away, what frightened a power capable of shattering an entire planet?"

  "I..." Gretchen couldn't think of anything to say.

  "Not man." The nauallis shook his head, laughing bitterly. "Not man! Not our tiny little empire! We are very small. Insignificant. But think about what happened in the cave—Russovsky left something behind, something equally small. What did you find?"

  "A pebble." Gretchen squinted, trying to make out the man's expression. "Just a water stone, like the old-timers use on Mars. She'll have taken it out of her mouth at night and put it aside. Then she forgot in the morning and left. There are plenty of other smooth stones here."

  "You saw what happened. The things which live in the cave reacted—their current was disturbed—I venture they were trying to eject the stone, like shrapnel from a wound. You saw what kind of distortion such a small, tiny object created."

  Gretchen nodded. "But how—"

  Hummingbird raised a hand, cutting her off. "This world is filled with echoes, Anderssen-tzin. Echoes of destruction and fear. Echoes of the dead. There are shades all around us, even now. You cannot see them—they are faint even to me—but enormous forces have been at play. The tread of the gods, if you wish to think of the First Sun people as deities. Your precious cylinder was in a fragment of stone—even I recognize the fossils in the ancient layers of sediment. The valkar consumed a living world and was then defeated in turn by something even more monstrous."

  Pursing his lips, the nauallis stared off into the emptiness. "But I do not think it fled."

  "What do you mean?" Gretchen moved into Hummingbird's line of sight.

  "It is still here, somewhere. In hiding."

  "Oh." Gretchen shook her head, trying not to laugh. His statement seemed preposterous. She wasn't quite sure if she was afraid or e
xasperated with the old Méxica. "It's ... hiding here? In a cave or something?"

  "I don't know." Hummingbird looked entirely grim. "We see only echoes of its effects—ripples from a stone thrown a million years in the past. These crystalline entities, whatever consumed Russovsky and then vomited her up again, the corrosive dust, the fields of pipeflowers—they are reflections of a hidden power."

  "Have you been taking some kind of psychotropic while I wasn't looking?" Gretchen failed to hide her complete disbelief. "How can you reach such a conclusion after only being planetside for, what—three days? You don't have any data!" She stopped, mouth open. A nagging thought had blossomed into certainty, watching his inscrutable old face.

  "You knew what was here before you came." Gretchen felt a little sick. Russovsky. The crew on the ship. Doctor McCue... everyone who'd already died... "Did the Company know?"

  "No. No one knew." Hummingbird adjusted the hood of his kaffiyeh to shade his goggles. "I have data—but not from this world. From another ruined planet. If the proper authorities had known what was here, no civilian ship would have been allowed in the system."

  "Which authorities," Gretchen replied testily, "are the proper authorities for dealing with gods?"

  "I am," Hummingbird said quietly. "This is my responsibility."

  "You? Just you by your lonesome or the whole of the tlamatinime?"

  Hummingbird almost smiled. "Not all of the judges are privy to everything, but as a whole we are entrusted—by both Emperors, by the Fleet—with keeping a guard upon humanity."

  "Do we need to be guarded?" Gretchen felt cold, even in the direct unfiltered blaze of the Ephesian sun. "Are we sheep, who need a watchdog prowling? What would you do if one of these ... these valkar attacked a colony world or even Anáhuac itself?"

  "The world would die," Hummingbird said tonelessly. "But the valkar—the gods of the First Sun—are scattered or dead." He paused. "Or sometimes they lie hidden, trapped in a kind of sleep. This one must be dreaming, waiting for the stars to change in their courses so it may wake again,"