"There was nothing to see." In the darkness, his voice sounded contemplative.
Gretchen swallowed a very rude curse and then forced herself to breathe steadily until she thought she could speak without shouting. "I saw you walking very strangely. I heard a sound like someone singing over the comm link. I went out to see what you were doing and…and I felt something strange in the air. The sun seemed…different. I started to feel odd, as if my body were very heavy. Then – suddenly – I'm three k away on top of a dune! How do you explain that?"
There was another silence. Hummingbird turned towards Gretchen. She could see starlight glinting in his eyes. "You can't have heard anything," he said in a musing, suspicious voice. "I had my comm turned off."
"What? That's impossible. I heard you chanting!"
"You're very tired, Anderssen-tzin. You should probably sleep now."
Hummingbird's fingers closed around Gretchen's wrist and her head rolled back. Though she tried to keep her eyes open, sleep rose up and swallowed her whole. Distantly, she heard a raspy voice singing:
"Tla xi-huГўl-huiГўn, in Temic-xoch…tla xihuГўl…"
Gretchen became aware of a faint clear light filling the tent and she opened her eyes, wondering if the nauallis had turned on a flashlight. Instead, she beheld the full vault of heaven, flush with glittering stars. They were tightly packed, a carpet of gleaming, colorful jewels, and their light fell upon her face with a cold, delicate touch. Wind ruffled her hair and for a moment – just a moment – Gretchen smelled realspruce and pine and the bitter, pungent tang of wood smoke.
I'm home, she thought, then sat up, heart thudding with fear, the sleepbag clutched to her chest.
The tent was gone. Hummingbird lay beside her, a dark indistinct shape wrapped in a dirty woolen blanket. She looked to her right and saw both Midges sitting on the sand, undisturbed, the smooth metallic shape of the shuttle rising behind them, metal skin intact, the windows glowing with the light of flight instruments.
Impossible. Gretchen abruptly looked to her left. What was that? Something moved!
A man, crouching on his hands and knees, was staring at her. He was blond, square-jawed, with short-cropped hair. Dark ink circled his biceps with interlocking genome trails. A shipsuit clung to taut muscle and a broad chest. A name tag gleamed on his shoulders and breast beside a star-shaped logo.
You can't be here, she tried to say. Then she realized he was not wearing a helmet.
Neither am I!
She woke up in the tent, the air stifling and close, blood thundering in her ears. A dry, parched taste filled her mouth, as if she'd gone without water for days. In the darkness, Gretchen managed to find the tube of her water pouch by feel and slumped in relief to feel the brackish, metallic fluid sliding across her tongue.
Beside her, Hummingbird was snoring softly, deeply asleep.
The Asteroid Belt, Ephesus System
A warning tone sounded through the bridge of the Cornuelle. "Proximity alert," the navigational system announced. "Object at two thousand meters and closing."
Hadeishi sat quietly, watching Kosho leaning over the helmsman's shoulder. Despite missing a night's sleep, she did not seem at all fatigued. The chu-sa would have been envious, save he'd had to pull more than one all-nighter as an exec himself. The long cuffs of a Fleet uniform easily disguised the presence of a medband.
"Drop thrust to one-tenth," Kosho said in a quiet, level voice. "Turn ship one-and-one-quarter to starboard. Hayes-tzin, lighten the sensitivity on those meteor sensors. We've nearly a k clearance between us and the nearest rock."
Both the helmsman and the weapons officer responded immediately and Hadeishi watched the threat-well reorient as the Cornuelle nosed forward through the scattered debris at the edge of the asteroid belt. The main band of the planetesimals lay ahead and above of the cruiser's current vector – a dense cloud of massive fragments – but here in the dispersed fringe, they'd found it necessary to place the ship in harm's way.
"Just a tap, now, just a tap," Kosho said, one eye on the navigation plot and one on a vector map on the helmsman's comp. "Five hundred meters forward…reverse at one eighth…there you go. There you go."
Hadeishi watched the meteor shield sensors waver – flashing amber and crimson – then steady to a sullen yellow as the cylindrical bulk of the light cruiser drifted to a stop beneath the enormous shape of a mountain-sized asteroid fragment. In comparison to some of the monsters deep in the belt, this one – identified only by a long spatial coordinate – was a tiny baby. Against the jagged, crumpled surface the Cornuelle was the tip of a toe, or a little finger. Mitsu glanced over at Hayes and saw the weapons officer was crouched over his panel, neck shining with sweat.
Where an Imperial battlewagon or heavy carrier might mount the recently developed Kaskeala yaochimalli battle shield as a defense, the Cornuelle was blessed only with a porcupine-skin of point defense beam weapons and honeycombed ablative armor. Hadeishi had no illusions as to the fate of his ship if the cruiser collided with a multibillion-ton asteroid at any appreciable velocity.
"Hayes-tzin, deploy Remote One." Kosho turned a cold stare upon the weapons officer, who swallowed, then stabbed a control on his panel. Hadeishi felt the thump of the pod ejecting from a forward missile tube through the decking under his feet. A v-pane unfolded on his main panel, showing an exterior camera tracking the flare of the pod's thrusters. The brilliant green diamond swept away into darkness, fading quickly to a shining mote.
"Chu-sa," the exec said formally, turning to face Hadeishi, "Remote One is away. I expect we will have visual confirmation of the excavation area within twenty minutes."
Hadeishi nodded in acknowledgement, leaning his chin against the back of his fist. "Deft maneuvering on the approach, Sho-sa. I hope your effort will not be wasted."
Kosho stiffened, sensing a rebuke in the captain's quiet words. "Sir, we have invested a great deal of effort in mapping possible perturbations in the navigational maps of the belt. This planetesimal has markedly altered course, mass, and albedo between our two sets of data. I believe it has been mined by the suspected wildcatter."
Raising an eyebrow, Hadeishi cut her off. "There are dozens of reasons this particular rock could have changed vector, Sho-sa. Mining is only one of them. But I agree we need direct confirmation of such activity…and this is the only way to get such data."
Slightly mollified, the exec nodded her head and returned to the helmsman's station. Hadeishi eyeballed the progress of the probe, which had come within a dozen meters of the asteroid surface and was beginning a winding circumnavigation of the enormous shape, scanning for fresh scarification, hot-spots or other signs of mining activity. Sighing, the captain turned back to reviewing the engineering department's weekly report on the state of the engines, fuel systems and the primary and secondary reactors.
Movement on the bridge – no more than one of the sensor techs stiffening in his shockchair – drew Hadeishi's attention away from authorizing a request to draw higher-than-projected amounts of conduit sealant from stores. Kosho was already beside the helm panel, hands clasped at the small of her back as she scrutinized the data feed from the remote probe.
"We have a positive," she announced after a moment. "Mirror this to main screen."
A starfield image flickered onto the curving screen dominating the "forward" wall of the bridge. In truth, the command deck was situated at the heart of the crew spaces in the forward section of the Cornuelle's main body, hidden deep in the heart of the ship and surrounded by cargo holds and two belts of reinforced armor. If Hadeishi remembered the engineering schematics correctly, he was really facing a hold filled with crew rations and then the back end of the primary particle beam mount. However, as in the world of men, the illusion of a window served to distract the mind and direct thought into familiar, predictable paths.