Wasteland of Flint

by Thomas Harlan

  A comm pane flickered and shifted as a hand in a work glove adjusted a camera lens. The blunt, broad, plant-eating face of Engineer First Isoroku glared out at her. "There has been no change since your last request for status. Maneuver drive three still offline."

  Magdalena showed her incisors in response, though she knew the challenge was lost on these humans. "Where is Parker-tzin?"

  The engineer shifted and pointed with a tilted head. The pilot's work boots were partially visible, wedged inside some kind maintenance accessway. A sort of muffled song was barely audible, leaking out from the opening. Maggie's ears twitched—Parker's idea of a pleasing tune did not coincide with hers. Where are the yowls and shrieks? "He, too, is still busy."

  She could tell—feel, really, from the tense tilt of his head and the flare of his nostrils—that the engineer was getting rightfully upset by her constant badgering. Despite their standing difference of opinion over remaining in the system, the Fleet officer had set himself to work in an admirable way. Even a Hesht of her particular temper could see he was making an honest effort. Though every instinct screamed to rush ahead, to boost output on the remaining two maneuver drives—and emit a radiation signature visible throughout half the system—she forced her mouth closed, politely hiding her teeth.

  "Isoroku-tzin," she said, forcing the words out in a strangled-sounding voice. "My apologies for interrupting your activities. Please carry on. When drive three is online, I would appreciate ... yrrrr... being informed."

  The engineer did not respond immediately. In fact, he squinted rather suspiciously at her. At length, lips pursed, he said, "Apology accepted," and signed off the channel, still frowning.

  Magdalena ran half-extended claws through her fur, wondering what passed for thought in the heads of these tree-dwelling fruit-eaters. "Rrrr... what is going on down there?"

  The storm-covered surface of the third planet mocked her, the single staring red eye of a monstrous serpent. Still on edge, she began experimenting with the different kinds of sensors mounted on the peapod. None of them proved immediately helpful.

  "I think," a gruff human voice said from the entryway. "you've confused Isoroku-tzin."

  Maggie turned and gave Gunso Fitzsimmons a level stare. In the daily routine of the ship, the Marines stayed off the bridge—Parker claimed they didn't like the smell, though of course he did—and contented themselves with gambling with the scientists, lending the engineer a hand and obsessively checking their equipment.

  "I was rude," she said bluntly. "They are working hard and I am impatient."

  Fitzsimmons nodded, drifting over to catch the railing circling the command station. "What does our interception widow look like?"

  "It shrinks." A claw tapped up a plot echoed from the navigational display. "This Shhrast-damned storm is making a mess of plotting pack-leader's pickup. Parker had hoped to make one pass around the planet...." The v-pane showed the path of the Palenque shearing close to the Ephesian atmospheric envelope, then hooking away in a sharp return path for the outer system. "... and picking up speed like a slingstone out again. But now ..." she sighed, ears limp with despair, "now we will have to decelerate into a parking orbit, losing precious velocity."

  "Are you sure?" Fitzsimmons frowned, leaning over the console. He smelled strangely familiar—bitter, pungent, smoke and old wood—and Magdalena raised her head, plush nose sniffing the air. Then she grinned properly, ears canted forward. "You've been avoiding Parker-tzin, haven't you?" The Marine looked at her quizzically for a moment, then smiled in a very impolite way, showing stumpy yellowed teeth. "Use of tabac," he said in a conspiratorial way, "dulls the human sense of smell."

  Magdalena shuddered, her fur twitching from head to tail. "A wretched weed," she hissed. "And this is enjoyed by your entire stunted, corrupt race?"

  "Parker is a very religious man," the gunso said in a roundabout way. "But Thai-i Isoroku requested our assistance in keeping his engines—well, the Company's engines—free of tabac ash and other contaminants that might otherwise foul power junctions, mar the efficiency of computational cores and soil the sacred decks of the engineering compartments."

  Magdalena hissed in delight. "You ate of his kill, pleading an empty belly," she said in mock horror, "while hiding your own in the river-pool! I saw you smoking his disgusting little sticks when we first came aboard."

  "Sure." Fitzsimmons shrugged. The whole situation was water off his furless back. "Share and share alike, right? Though Marines are never caught short of supplies." He held up four pink wormlike fingers. "Air, ammo, booze and tabac. Don't need much else."

  "He was generous," she started to say, but had to admit—as she had admitted Isoroku's efforts on their behalf—she did not rmiss the foul smell clinging to her fur and making her sneeze. "But I see the efficiency of the pack-ship is improved by this ... deception."

  "The Engineer First," Fitzsimmons said, scratching a jaw black with stubble, "is my superior officer. In the absence of other command authority, his operational requirements are my holy writ. But while it's fun to pick on Parker, we need to talk about getting Gretchen and the judge back."

  "Yess ..." Magdalena stared at the plot again. "If we still had the satellites we could see pack-leader and eldest-and-wisest take off from the ground, allowing us to adjust course properly. But with only one eye left—and that one losing more altitude each day—we are close to being blind."

  "Well," Fitzsimmons said slowly, eyeing the display. "In drop school one of my instructors was always saying 'It's all about angular momentum,' which sort of applies here. There's a Marine assault-ship technique which could solve your problem, something Fleet pilots call the 'Pataya knot'. Parker's not the greatest shuttle pilot in the world, but he might be able to handle it."

  Magdalena growled, giving him a suspicious look. She wasn't sure this hunter-from-another-den could be trusted. But she reminded herself, he was sniffing after the pack-leader, so he might soon be in her den as well. "Show me this knot."

  Unaccountably, Fitzsimmons turned a sort of russet color.

  THE 'OBSERVATORY' BASE CAMP

  These blankets are real, Gretchen thought, awareness returning from unnaturally vivid dreams. Real scratchy.

  For a moment she remained still, eyes closed, listening. the wind outside had died down to an intermittent moan. The camp stove was a soft hiss of burning gas. Hummingbird's spoon made a metallic sound stirring sugar into his cup. He was breathing as she was, momentarily free of the mechanical counter-rasp of the rebreather mask. Everything seemed very normal, even the sensations of chill air against her face and constant throbbing pain in her mutilated feet.

  The darkness of her closed eyes was vastly comforting. There were no phantoms, no visions of impossible vistas, no cloudy indistinct body rippling with clouds of buzzing lights. She felt solid—terribly tired and wrung out like a dead towel—but having substance. Okay, here we go.

  Gretchen opened her eyes, focused on a perfectly normal-looking roof formed of honeycombed prestressed concrete, crisscrossed by metallic tracks holding cheap lights, and was vastly relieved.

  "There is tea," Hummingbird said. She turned her head. The effort of putting aside the heavy blankets could wait. The nauallis was watching her from the other side of the little stove, his face filled with open worry. Reaching over, he put a cup of steaming tea beside her. From close range, pitted and scratched metal revealed the foggy, indistinct image of a pale-faced woman with sweat-streaked hair. "How do you feel?"

  Gretchen nodded, but was exhausted even by moving her head. After gathering her strength, she managed to say, "Tired."

  Hummingbird nodded, the deep grooves and wrinkles in his face deeper and more distinct than she remembered. The faint reddish glow from the heaters lent him a sepulchral aspect. "How is your vision?"

  "Only ... one of you," she said, too tired to smile. "What... happened?"

  His jaw clenched, then he visibly forced himself to relax. "The storm has mostly passed. I
have tried to contact the Cornuelle, but there is no answer. Also, something has gotten into the hangar. Both aircraft have become one with the floor."

  "Huh!" Laughing hurt, but the baffled look on the old man's face was priceless. Gretchen managed to worm one hand out of the blankets to take hold of the cup. The metal was only lukewarm, but the liquid inside burned her lips. She tasted more sugar than tea. "Told you so."

  "Yes." Hummingbird tilted his head in acknowledgment. " You were right to be concerned. The rate of decay in the camp buildings is faster than I expected. But we should be able to clear out this set of rooms, get the generator started again and rig a positive-pressure environment. That will help."

  Gretchen set the empty cup on her chest and stared at the ceiling again. "What day is it?"

  "Plus fourteen from landing," the nauallis replied, taking the cup away to refill.

  "Two days." Gretchen mumbled, feeling exhaustion overtake her. "The Palenque will be here. But we need both Midges in working order."

  "How ..." Hummingbird saw she was asleep again, a soft snore escaping her lips. "Working order? I thought we were done here, but..." He got up and began gathering up what tools he could find. "Must be a sledgehammer or rock chisel somewhere in these buildings."

  Still limping, using a survey marker pole as a cane, Gretchen stopped beside the Gagarin and peered suspiciously at the undercarriage. The floor was remarkably clean for a base-camp hangar, which proved Hummingbird had been very, very busy while she was sleeping. For her part, Anderssen felt remarkably refreshed for a woman with two bad feet, a medband whining about alkaloid toxins in her blood and no immediate prospects of rescue from an increasingly hostile world entirely unfit for man.

  "Kind of banged up," she said, biting her lip at the dents and chipping visible on the landing gear assembly. Curious Gretchen put her weight against the wing and the wheel clunked over. The heavy rubberlike material was badly pitted She looked over at Hummingbird, who was squatting beneath his own ultralight. "Good work to get this place cleaned out"

  "Does it matter?" The nauallis spread his hands, looking at her expectantly.

  "It does." Gretchen opened Gagarin's cockpit door. "We need both ultralights to get off this rock. I was sure we were done for when your fuel pump froze up." She threw the comp restart switch and leaned back on the pole, watching the system spool up.

  "We need only wait," Hummingbird said, eyes narrowing suspiciously. "The Cornuelle will return soon."

  "The day after tomorrow," Gretchen said, shaking her head a his optimism, "one of the shuttles from the Palenque will make a skip-pass through the upper reaches of the planetary atmosphere. The approach will be entirely ballistic—no power, no radiation signature, no more evidence than a meteorite burning up in the mesosphere—and we will be waiting, both of us in a Midge, for a skyhook extraction."

  "Impossible! A Midge can't fly that high and we'd asphyxiate or freeze before reaching an altitude where a shuttle could pick us up on an approach like that."

  "If this were Anáhuac, you'd be right." The comm console beeped pleasantly and Gretchen felt her stomach sink. There were no system messages waiting for her. No mysterious notes from Magdalena. No word the Palenque was actually coming to fetch them. "But this is not Old Earth."

  Anderssen shuffled out, the pole scratching on the floor. "Like Mars, this world's atmosphere is very thin. Maybe only half the depth of Anáhuac's ocean of air. Even the individual layers of the atmosphere are compressed or thinned. We only need to reach thirty k to escape. At such an altitude, in fact, we'll be worrying about broiling in solar radiation rather than freezing, but these Midges are pretty well equipped to protect us from the heat.

  "Air is a problem, but we can secure these suits for a super-low-pressure environment. We won't have to stay at height long—in fact, we won't be able to loiter for more than about thirty minutes—but the shuttle will be there when we are."

  Hummingbird was scowling, his face dark as a thunderhead above the Escarpment. "A skyhook can only intercept one Midge at a time—if your Mister Parker can keep his hands steady enough to catch us. And how do you expect one of these dragonflies to reach that altitude?"

  "I'm not trying to get us killed," Gretchen said in a stiff voice. "But it is dangerous."

  She ran her hand across the Gagarin's wing, taking a long look at the battered, scratched, wind-worn surface. The ultralight had traveled thousands of k across this world, with two pilots of varying abilities, making at least one complete circumnavigation. Mountains, plains, all the diverse wastelands ... all without complaint. A sturdy, battle-hardened plane with a brave heart. Gretchen blinked, trying to restrain a well-spring of emotion.

  "We," she said, after clearing her throat, "are going to strip everything unnecessary out of this one. The fuel tanks on yours detach, so we'll stuff them into the cargo compartment, doubling our range." Gretchen tapped a pair of brackets on the underside of the airframe. "Beneath my seat are two chemical rocket boosters, which fit here."

  She turned and gave the old man a weary smile. "This world does not enjoy an evenly distributed gravitational field. There are huge disparities of mass inside the crust and core. Near the Escarpment there are eddies where g spikes three or four times surface normal. West of here, out in the Great Eastern Basin, there is an area of very low g. Our escape velocity will be drastically lowered once we enter the zone. We'll use the rockets when the air becomes too thin to impart any lift at all."

  Hummingbird blinked. "And if no one is waiting in high orbit?"

  "We fly back down." Gretchen felt her stomach go cold. No sense in lying.... "I hope."

  "Hmm." The nauallis clasped his hands and stared at the floor for a long time. When he looked up, a weight seemed to have lifted from him. "Even so, flying such a distance will take time. So we had best get started."

  Gretchen nodded, then reached out her hand. The judge looked askance for a moment, then accepted her arm in rising. "Let me get my gear—you need a special socket wrench to unbolt the fuel tanks."

  Three hours later, Hummingbird ducked through the door from the main building with the last of their baggage slung over his shoulder.

  "I've good news," he said, dumping the duffel bags on the floor of the hangar. Gretchen looked up from the cockpit of the Gagarin, her face streaked with grime, oil and tiny flakes of shredded plastic. The shockchair had been dismounted and moved aside, an effort which required cutting away the armrests to make room for the second chair from the other Midge. The compartment seemed very bare with the side panels torn out and everything stripped down to bare metal. Only the 3v of her kids and Russovsky's icon remained, tacked to the overhead. The power cell worked into the paper had finally failed, leaving only a static, fixed image. "We needn't take more than one or two days' supply of food with us."

  The nauallis unsealed one of the bags and dumped out four or five packs of threesquares onto the floor. They made an audible clanking sound, stone striking stone. Gretchen tried to grin, but she was very tired again. Even the effort of dismounting everything which could be removed from the Midge had left her shaking.

  "Infected?" Gretchen took the opportunity to sit down.

  "Some surface dust must have gotten into the bag." Hummingbird began separating the petrified bars from those still good. "And our water is down to maybe three liters, plus whatever is in our suit reservoirs."

  "We can make more water," Gretchen said, rubbing her eyes. "The fuel cells generate waste H20 as a byproduct. But they won't make food from nothing."

  The old Méxica clicked his teeth. "What progress?"

  "Fuel tanks are moved and hooked up. I can't find any leaks, so I hope they're not there. If you help me lift in the second chair, I can bolt it in place. Then the rockets need to be mounted and control linkages tested."

  "And then?"

  "Then we'll be done and I can lie down." Her vision was getting hazy, but not from hallucinations. She started to slump over, then caught herself. "What
?"

  "Go lie down now," Hummingbird said. "I can do the rest."

  "Okay." Gretchen wiped her hands on her thighs, which made absolutely no difference to the grime on her gloves or legs. "Think of anything else we can get rid of... I'm stumped. Weight is the enemy right now."

  Hummingbird watched her limp into the tunnel, a pensive expression on his seamed old face. Then he stood up and went to the second shockchair, which was sitting beside the cockpit door. He braced himself and started to lift, grunting in surprise at the weight.

  In the open plains surrounding the base camp, sunset ushered in a long dusk. There were no towering mountains to the west to swallow the sun, plunging the land into shadow. Instead, the sun settled amiably toward a brassy gold horizon. Heavily laden, Gretchen limped down a sandy gully between the half-buried headquarters building and the lab. In the soft gilded, light the empty doorways and barren eyesocket windows no longer seemed so disturbing. She wondered if Hummingbird's efforts to align the camp had driven away the shadows he claimed inhabited abandoned places.

  Beyond the lab building she paused at the edge of the crude shuttle field. The most recent storm had destroyed both of the vehicle sheds. The eight-wheeled Armadillo carryalls had disappeared. Did we pack them up? Did Hummingbird do something with them?

  "Enough procrastination," Gretchen said to herself, sounding very much like her mother.

  The Sif felt heavy in her hands. The gun carried a sense of solid menace, as though weapons obeyed some different order of density. Gretchen looked around, fretting at the thought of abandoning a perfectly good tool for almost no reason at all.

  "But you're too heavy," Anderssen said, speaking crossly at the shockgun. "And useless."