“It’s clean. But there was a lot of dust, back where we came in— stuff that must have come down through the skylight from the winter dust storm. Why wouldn’t there be some in here? There should have been some air movement down here. Enough to blow at least some dust in over the years—”
S’reee stopped her glide forward. Nita and Carmela looked at her.
“What?” Nita whispered.
When S’reee answered, she didn’t do it vocally. Did you hear that?
Hear what? Nita said, as silently.
Something moved—
Something about S’reee’s tone of thought left Nita more nervous than before. She held still, listening.
Carmela quietly reached into her jumpsuit pocket and came out with what could have been mistaken, by the uninitiated, for a curling iron. She glanced over at Nita.
Nita swallowed and held up the rowan wand, looking toward S’reee. The whale’s attention was on something that moved and gleamed in the shadows of the doorway into the next chamber. As Nita followed S’reee’s glance, the thing she was watching moved into the light.
The wand’s silver fire gleamed and slid down skin like green metal as the creature moved forward. It looked very like a scorpion: but it was almost the size of a Shetland pony. It had entirely too many legs and claws, and blank, cold polished-jade eyes.
The scorpion moved slowly out of the darkness toward the three of them, the front two pairs of its claws lifted. Pouring along behind it out of the shadows came about fifty more like it, all their front claws scissoring together softly, making a grating, echoing whisper in the room of stone.
“We are on errantry,” Nita said, trying to keep any tremor out of her voice, “and we greet you!”
The scorpions did not pause, did not slow: they came on, cold-eyed, claws working.
Nita lifted the wand…
7: Stokes
Kit, Ronan, and Darryl came out of transit to find themselves standing at the dark far edge of a distant blue dawn. In a gauzy wrapping of atmosphere just above the edge of the world, a blue-white Sun hung still and small under a dome of pale blue haze, not yet too bright to be dangerous to look at. All around, under a sky only a few shades of violet from black, lay the flat, dark rock-scattered surface of the little crater called Stokes. Away to the east, the shadow of the crater’s rim lay in a sharp black crescent between the three of them and the morning; and from every least rock and pebble, a pointed finger of cold, dark shadow lay long against the ground.
First Darryl, then Ronan, stepped to the edge of the force-field bubble that surrounded them and gazed out, not speaking. Kit knew why. Full day on Mars can seem matter-of-fact once you get used to it; just another panorama full of beige-brown sand and rubble, just another dusty amber sky, sunlight seeming as dimmed by the blowing dust as by a Sun that’s fifty million miles farther away and twenty percent dimmer than it ought to be. But there was no making the same mistake at dawn or sunset, when because of the dust and lack of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere the light went blue instead of red. Then the surroundings became both bleak and beautiful in a way that was possible only here. That faint, thin hiss of wind, hardly to be heard; that sense of absolute, pristine barrenness, empty, but not in any of the usual ways— it all got under your skin, made you hold still and listen for some hint of the secret that was hiding from you, the real reason why this landscape seemed so studiedly unconcerned about your presence. It seemed to be saying, “This isn’t your place: you have no business here. Do whatever you like. It doesn’t matter.” But it does. It does. All we have to do now is find out why…
Ronan turned away from the sunrise and looked toward the northwestern horizon, where the crater wall was closer and the cracks and ravines running down it glowed a dull dusty cyan in the blue fire of dawn. He glanced back at Kit, the sunglasses gleaming indigo. “Like it’s whispering to itself about us,” Ronan said. “Not so easy to hear when there are a lot of other people around—”
“Yeah,” Kit said.
Ronan looked over at Darryl, who was still gazing at the brightening dawn. “As for you, don’t know how you’re doing that.”
Darryl looked at him. “What?”
“Being completely normal,” Ronan said. Kit had to agree. Darryl might as well have still been standing in Kit’s backyard for all the exertion the transit seemed to have cost him. “Every wizardry’s supposed to have a price. And here you just hauled yourself and two other people fifty million miles without breaking a sweat! Seems like cheating.”
“I am not cheating!” Darryl said, looking injured. “It’s not a transport: it’s a bilocation. Why should I pay some big price for going fifty million miles from Earth when I’m still there?” He brushed dun-colored dust off him. “You’re just jealous because you can’t pull the same stunt. Waste of time, if you ask me, because I may not be able to do this forever! So right now I plan to enjoy it. And so should you, because you’re riding free.”
“Okay, fine, I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful.”
“Well, you do. But I forgive you, ’cause I’m nice that way.” Darryl grinned, turned to Kit. “Where’s the spot the first signal went to?”
“Over there.” Kit pointed to the northeast. “A few hundred yards.”
The three of them headed for the spot using the half-bounce, half-walk that worked best in this gravity. Ronan was humming under his breath as he bounced along, and after a few bounces, he started to fill in the lyrics. “Oh, the chances of anything coming from Mars… are a million to one, he said…”
“So how come you got up so late this morning?” Kit said.
Ronan threw him a sideways look. “Because I was out late last night, nosy boy.” And he snickered. “While you’re at it, you might look into trying some kind of social life for size! I had a date to go clubbing with my mates. Why would I dump them just because something admittedly exciting happened up here? You start acting that way all the time, pretty soon no one invites you out anymore.” And Ronan turned his attention back to the landscape. “Oh, the chances of anything coming from Mars… are a million to one… but still they come …!”
“Okay, message received,” Kit muttered after Ronan, “but you didn’t have to jump down my throat about it.”
“Yes, he did. Dirty job, but somebody has to do it,” Darryl said, bouncing briefly higher to get a better view of where they were headed. “Everybody heard Miss Neets’s reaction to how you just dumped her yesterday. When she’s pissed off, her voice kind of carries—”
Kit flushed red. “I thought we said we were going to leave her out of this.”
“Heh,” Darryl said. He bounced high again. “How far now?”
Kit checked his manual. “A hundred yards—”
Darryl came down. “No outcroppings here. If there’s another egg, it’ll be underground.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. The crater wall was two miles away. The rest of the impact area was the usual rubble-strewn Martian landscape— sandy ground littered with rocks of all sizes, shattered by the summertime contrast between bitter cold and surprising warmth, and wind-worn afterward. Kit kept an eye on his manual, where the spot was highlighted on the map now showing their approach vector. Finally their path and the target’s location converged. “Right here,” Kit said, and stopped.
Darryl and Ronan stopped, too, staring at the ground under Kit’s feet—just sand, a scatter of pebbles, a few fist-size rocks. “Okay,” Darryl said, “dig we must. But not just on a hunch. We need ground radar.”
“Now, it’s funny you should mention that,” Ronan said, and held his hands out in front of him, starting to speak softly in the Speech.
“Ooh, magic gestures,” Darryl said, nudging Kit. “This should be cool.”
Ronan threw Darryl a withering look. “It’s to help me target, you plank,” he said. “Now shut your tiny gob and watch an expert at work.”