Hutch looked at Nightingale, hesitated, told herself what the hell, and repeated the ceremony.
Kellie, amused, shook her head. "Love fest," she said. "Who'd've thought?"
Kellie and Hutch followed the shoreline for a time, angled away from it when Marcel told them to, and struck off again to the southwest. The land was heavily forested, marked with ravines and ridges, with rocky bluffs and narrow waterways, and with occasional mountains.
A herd of gray creatures with faces like camels and long floppy ears rumbled past in great ground-eating leaps and disappeared behind a line of hills.
Marcel sent them around a mountain and across a trail. Animal or something else? Of course, in a world in which flying creatures attacked in synchronized squadrons and hunting cats walked erect, the line between sentience and pure animal behavior had grown a bit murky.
They kept moving.
At about noon, in the middle of a forest, they came upon a balustrade. Above it, Hutch saw a coved dome. Two domes. Twins.
"By God," said Kellie. "Look at that thing."
The domes were connected by a cornice.
"It's a temple." Hutch stopped in her tracks and stared.
It had six columns. They were fluted and supported a triangular pediment, on which a frieze had been carved. The frieze depicted two crickets, one seated in a shell of some sort, the other standing. The one in the shell was handing something, a cylinder, to the other.
No. On closer inspection Hutch saw it was a scroll.
"Lovely," said Kellie.
Hutch was glad for the excuse to stop moving for a minute. "It's baroque," she said. "Very close to eighteenth-century Parisian. Who would have thought…"
She could see an entrance hidden among the columns, and marble steps leading up to it. Kellie started toward them.
"No time," said Hutch.
"There's more over here."
A cylindrical structure was set at right angles to the temple. Pedestals projected every few meters, and a sculpted frieze circled as much of the building as she could see. It had a polyhedral roof supported by braces, and was adorned by roll molding and a small dome. The figures in the frieze seemed to show crickets in various poses, talking, reading, picking fruit from trees, playing with their young. Some were on their knees before a sun symbol.
There might have been an entire city hidden within the trees. She caught the outlines of majestic buildings, resplendent with arches and rounded windows and parabolic roofs. With galleries and buttresses and spires. And overgrown courts and abandoned fountains.
It was not a city that had ever known artificial lighting or, probably, a printing press. But it was lovely beyond any comparable complex Hutch had seen before. The detritus of centuries had blown across it, burying it, encasing it within a tangle of branches and bushes and leaves. But it nevertheless made her blood run to stand before the silent structures.
It might have been that the unearthly beauty of the place was enhanced by the encroaching forest, or by the sense of timelessness, or by its diminutive scale.
They stood entranced, relaying the visuals to Wendy. This time only silence came back. No one was asking them to take a moment to explore.
They spent less than two minutes at the site. Then they hurried on. A rainstorm washed over them. Black clouds rolled in, and lightning bolts rippled down the sky.
They lost contact with Marcel for almost two hours. The rain continued steadily, then changed to sleet. Tremors periodically shook the ground, severely enough to throw both women off their feet.
"Lovely day for a stroll," Kellie commented.
A line of trees appeared ahead. They plunged in. Something in the shrubbery went into a series of frenzied clicks. Hutch, in no mood for problems, and not wanting to give anything a clear shot at them at short range, cleared out the section with her laser. There were screeches, crashing around, animals charging off into the bush. They never got a good look at anything.
Marcel came back. "Bad weather?"
"Electrical storms."
"We see them. But you're doing fine. You should be there by early evening."
"I hope so."
"Hutch, I have another message for you from the Academy."
"What's it say?"
He hesitated. "It says they want you to take all precautions to avoid any further loss of life."
"Good. Tell them I'd never have thought of it myself."
"Hutch."
"Tell them whatever you like. I don't really care, Marcel."
The sun broke through. The sky cleared, and they hurried on. Something they couldn't quite make out tracked them for a while from the tops of a series of ridges. It ambled in the manner of an ape, but it apparently thought better of attempting an attack and eventually dropped out of sight.
"Scares me a little," said Kellie.
"Why's that?"
"At home, a cougar or a tiger or a gator, if it was hungry, would go for you. Most of these critters keep their distance."
"You're suggesting…"
"They're bright enough to know we're more dangerous than we look."
By late afternoon, when the light began to change, they were out in open country again. "Almost there," Marcel said. "Five klicks."
The ground was uneven and covered with thick grass. Hutch was spent. Kellie, with her longer legs, was managing a bit better. But she, too, looked weary.
Periodically they talked to Mac and Nightingale. They were, they said, enjoying the view. There'd been a high tide at about midday, and the water had come well up the cliff face. But they believed they had a substantial safety margin. MacAllister commented that he was more comfortable than he'd been since leaving the Star and didn't know whether he'd ever get up on his feet again.
The sky turned purple and threatening.
"Three klicks."
It was impossible to miss the worry in Marcel's voice.
"If you can move a little quicker, it would be a good idea."
The splotch of light that represented the sun sank toward a line of hills. Rain began to fall.
The lander, cold and silent, stood on the banks of a river so narrow it scarcely deserved the name. It was, in fact, an idyllic scene: a line of trees, a few rocks, the river, and the dying light. The trees marked the edge of the forest into which Tess's crew had disappeared on that long-ago morning.
It seemed almost to be waiting for them. Hutch was pleased to see the old logo, the scroll within the orbiting star still defiantly crisp on the hatch. The lander was green and white, the colors all the Academy's vehicles had worn in the early days. And the legend academy of science and technology shone proudly on its hull.
They jogged across the remaining ground, not all-out because they couldn't see the holes and furrows. But Hutch remembered the voracious redbirds and glanced uneasily at the woods. "We've got Tess," she told Marcel.
Marcel acknowledged, and she heard applause in the background.
Fortunately the hatch was closed. The ladder was still in place. Hutch climbed it, opened the manual control panel beside the airlock, pulled out the handle, and twisted it. The hatch clicked, and she pulled it open.
So far, so good.
They wasted no time getting through the inner door into the cabin. A layer of film and dirt covered the ports and windscreen, darkening the interior. Hutch sat down in the pilot's seat and scanned the console. Everything appeared to have been properly shut down.
In back, Kellie opened the engine panel in the deck and exposed the reactor. "Do we know what we're doing?" she asked.
"Find the boron. I'll be right there."
"Where are you going?"
She held up the collapsible container she'd taken from the Star lander. "Down to the river to get some water. You look for the boron."