Gretchen had been annoyed when Hummingbird took the remains of Russovsky away into "Imperial Custody," though her reaction had been mild compared to Sinclair's. The xenobiologist had begged to examine the strange dust, but the Imperial judge had flatly refused. The rest of the scientists were confined to quarters, which greatly reduced the possible range of disputes. Gretchen had been a little smug – she could go where she wished – but all of her good humor had evaporated when she finally made her way down to airlock number three.
Which was empty. The steel cradle remained, but her good field comp, the jury-rigged sensor panel, the cylinder and its attendant limestone block were gone. For once, when she turned around snarling, Fitzsimmons was nowhere to be found. But Gretchen still knew who'd stolen her artifact.
"What does he think is down there?" Gretchen rattled her feet noisily – now in stiff-bottomed shipshoes – against the railing separating the captain's station from the rest of the crew positions. "Leave no trace of our visit? It's just not possible."
Magdalena peered over the top of the navigation panel. Her yellow eyes were bare slits. "What a whiny kitten you are," she declared with a sharp yrroowl in her voice. "Either ask him yourself or be a good packmate and help pull cable."
Gretchen ignored her to stare sullenly at the planet. Most of her hair was twisted into a thick corn-tassel plait. She started to bite at the braid, head cocked to one side. "He must believe something's down there, something that can see us…" She paused, thinking. "No – it can't see us now, but it might see us in the future? Something which will notice satellites, spacecraft…but why wouldn't his precious something find the observatory camp?"
Magdalena's tufted ears disappeared with a disapproving growl. Parker managed a subdued laugh, but his hands were filled with bundles of conduit. The power leads to the navigator's station were proving difficult to restore. The substandard cables had ended in metallic connectors, which were still embedded in the panel sockets. Sitting flush, without the usual cable run to grasp hold of, Parker was forced to remove them one at a time with a hand tool. He'd already wrecked one panel by shorting the connector with too much pressure.
"Maggie? How did Russovsky communicate with the Palenque when her ultralight was on farside?" Gretchen poked some of the buttons on the captain's panel and a variety of plotted routes, icons and little winking glyphs appeared across the live image of the planet. The routes of the geologist's flights vanished over the curve of the world, then looped back again. "Does she have some kind of a relay station?"
A low, ominous growl trailing away into a hissing snarl answered Gretchen's question. Magdalena crawled out of the utility space under the floor, her fur slick with sweat and snarled with bits of wire and the particular brand of sealant grease used by the Imperial Navy. The Hesht shot Anderssen a fierce, quelling look – an effort entirely lost on Gretchen, who was staring fixedly at the main v-pane.
"If I tell you, witless kit, will you be quiet?"
"Sure." Gretchen nodded, though even Magdalena could tell the human woman hadn't heard her. "Do you have a log of her transmissions? Could we find the relays that way? Does he have a copy? I mean – what if she dropped a three-square bar somewhere, would he have to clean that up?"
Magdalena swung herself over the comm station – her toolbags and tail drifting behind her – and dug a claw into the back of the captain's chair to anchor herself. Gretchen finally looked at her with something like full attention.
"I think the dust would take care of litter," Maggie said, voice rumbling deep in her throat. "The base at the observatory – that's a problem – or our mystery shuttle – there's another difficulty."
"Why?" Gretchen gave the Hesht a puzzled look, then she grinned. "Oh, do you think the miners will come back? That would spoil our crow's plan to leave no trace!"
Magdalena twitched her ears. "They don't have to come back. I've been running nonstop image searches on Smalls's weather archive." One long arm reached out and tapped a command on the panel. "The mining shuttle didn't leave like everyone expected."
The big view of Ephesus shimmered away and the v-pane displayed a high altitude shot of the planetary surface. Gretchen could recognize the edge of the northern permafrost, as well as the tapering wing of the Escarpment running down to smaller mountains and then – almost at the pole – to nothing but barren, rocky plains. "I don't see -"
"Hsst!" Maggie cuffed Gretchen's head, catching one ear with the back of her paw.
"Ow!"
"Watch. Quietly. Learn." Maggie moved a control and the image narrowed, the point of view zooming down from orbit. Mountains, valleys, vast plains of glittering sand flashed past. Suddenly, Gretchen caught sight of a triangular shape flitting across a queer-looking stone plateau. The ground was chopped up into smaller triangles of shadow, making the speeding shuttle almost invisible.
The shuttle was gone from the next picture – a half hour had elapsed – but the pattern of the ground had subtly changed. Gretchen stiffened in her chair. "What was that? What are those lines?"
"Interesting, isn't it?" Maggie's tongue was showing. Gretchen frowned at her. "Look at this," the Hesht said, moving the control again.
Another high-angle shot, but later in the planetary day. The image had been enhanced, but a long blackened gouge was clear, cutting across a rippling line of dunes to an abrupt end. Gretchen squinted as Magdalena zoomed again. The track ended in a welter of shining metal, a mostly recognizable wing canted at a queer angle, the twisted body of a shuttle scored with carbon and the signs of a fierce conflagration.
"The Valkyrie didn't get home," Maggie said. "So our nosy crow has a bigger mess to clean up than he thinks."
"Jesu…" Gretchen zoomed again, though now the image was very grainy and large sections showed the gray rippling tone of comp interpolation. "They suck up too much dust?"
"Looks like they got hit." Parker had come up on the other side of the captain's chair. He made a sign against ill luck, face screwed up in a grimace. "That fire damage didn't happen on the crash, not in such a thin atmosphere. Something swatted them down. Maybe some kind of beam weapon."
Maggie's ears twitched again. "I found the crash site last night, after everyone had gone to sleep. Old crow has been searching too. But he's not as good with the comp as this paaha, for all his shining-coat equipment. Now, you want to see what happened?"
Parker and Gretchen gave the Hesht a disbelieving look. "How? Smalls's satellites only take pictures every half hour!"
"True enough," Magdalena said, a deep purr beginning in the back of her throat. "But they don't take their pictures all at the same time, and near the poles the fields of view overlap." A claw tapped on the panel and the view of the planet returned, this time with white rectangular grids superimposed. Near the poles, the rectangles overlaid each other in a flurry of lines. "All this lets us see sideways into the area of the crash. So I cobbled together video from the adjacent satellites and from those further around the curve that had a horizontal vantage of the crash site. Which lets us see…"
The claw went tik-tik on the panel and a jerky, crude, massively interpolated vid unspooled on the display.
The shuttle arrowed down out of the eastern sky, sweeping across the crisscrossed plateau. The flare of the twin engines was very clear in the vid. The Valkyrie began to bank, turning south and Gretchen felt her breath seize – the entire plateau seemed to ripple with motion, the crisscross lines shifting noticeably – and there was a sudden, shockingly bright flash. The entire plateau was blotted out by a burst of white light. When the light faded – after only a fraction of a second – the shuttle was wreathed in smoke. Flames jetted from a smashed engine in a bright, blossoming cloud. They wicked out only seconds later, but the shuttle was already spinning out of control.