It was incredibly draining. Physically, it was clear that neither of us was in shape for this kind of activity, and by the time the first fluffy clouds began to form about noon my eyes, head, and legs all ached with fatigue. Calandra, with the normal woman's higher stamina in such things, fared a shade better, but not enough to really matter. By midafternoon she was stumbling as much as I was, and leaning on me for balance as much as I leaned on her.
But as bad as it was physically, it was even worse emotionally.
I'm not sure really what I was expecting when we started out that morning. That God had guided me in a lucky guess, I suppose, and that within a couple of hours we would spot the telltale signs of fusion-drive damage and could scamper back to Shekinah and call Commodore Freitag down on them. But it wasn't happening. To gaze at an unfamiliar landscape and try to pick something "abnormal" from it took incredible amounts of both painstaking attention and equally painstaking imagination. The existence of the thunderheads helped, but not as much as we'd hoped it would. The dirty-white plants grew in small clumps, never with more than three or four together, and never in the kind of widespread daisy field that would eliminate large sections of territory from our consideration.
And as the work continued—as the hours dragged by without even a hint of what we thought we were looking for—the optimism slowly faded... to be replaced by depression and finally despair.
We both felt it—both tried to hide it from the other for pride's sake, if for no other reason. But as the sun dipped toward the horizon, and Calandra started us toward yet another distant hill, she finally gave up the pretense.
"It's not working, Gilead," she sighed, abruptly letting her foot off the accelerator. The loud background swishing of the plants against the car faded to a half-imagined ringing in my ears as we rolled to a stop. "We're not going to find anything this way, and we both know it. Let's give it up and go back."
I ground my knuckles into my eyes, trying to rub the soreness out of them. Watching the landscape from a bouncing car, we'd discovered, was even harder on the eyes than repeatedly sweeping the horizon from the tops of hills. "We can't do that, Calandra," I told her, hearing her same tiredness in my own voice. "Besides, we've just barely reached our main target section. All this up to now has been practice; tomorrow is what really counts."
She turned to face me. "Do you really believe we're going to find anything?" she asked bluntly.
"There's always hope—"
"That's not what I asked."
I clenched my teeth. "You've given up on faith completely, haven't you?"
"What I believe or don't believe isn't the issue," she said stiffly. "And if it comes to that, don't forget that you've left the Watchers, too."
My stomach tightened. "It's not the same."
"Oh? Tell me how—and don't forget to include how much Carillon's paying to rent your soul."
I took a deep breath, trying to will my anger and depression away, and broke my eyes away from her glare. A short ways ahead, a little off to our right, was a rocky pair of close-set bluffs rising out of the vegetation surrounding them. "I don't think either of us is in the mood for a rational discussion at the moment," I said. "Tell you what; let's drive over to those bluffs over there and make camp for the night."
She hesitated a long minute, then shrugged. "I suppose we might as well," she agreed with a tired sigh. "It's probably too late to get back to Myrrh before dark, anyway."
We headed out... and as we approached the bluffs I discovered that my original guess had been wrong. There were, in fact, four bluffs in the group, not two, sitting closely together in a rough square. Probably with a fair amount of reasonably sheltered space in the middle of the formation, judging from what little of their shapes I could see. It would indeed be a good place to spend the night.
Perhaps an equally good place for a smuggler to spend the night. Possibly even a good place in which to hide a small shuttle...
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stiffen. If there were smugglers in there, watching our approach...
Beside me, Calandra stirred. "There's a thunderhead on the top of the bluff," she said.
I felt heat rise to my face as I squinted against the bright sky behind the bluff. She was right, as usual; in fact, I could see one of the large plants on each of the two bluffs whose tops were visible from here. "Oh, well," I said. "It was just a thought."
"Yeah. How close do you want me to get?"
"Might as go all the way in, if you can," I told her, pointing to the nearest of the gaps. "If last night was any indication, it's likely to get pretty chilly tonight, and those bluffs may at least break the wind for us."
"Or funnel it right down our throats," she muttered.
"So we'll find someplace out of the line of fire," I growled. "Let's just go, okay?"
She flashed me a glare and drove on in silence.
The place was clearly not being used by smugglers... but the closer we got, the more I realized it could easily have been. All four of the bluffs were tall and—from this side, at least—unusually straight-walled, which meant the gaps between them remained narrow all the way up. A cozy hideaway, indeed, with virtually no visibility except from directly overhead. The ground leading to our target gap began a gradual rise about a hundred meters out from the bluffs, and from glimpses I caught through the opening I got the impression that the ground fell away again toward the center of the enclosed area.
"What do you think?" Calandra called over the swishing of plants around and beneath us.
I studied the gap and the terrain in front of it. "Looks like we can get in all right," I told her. "Let's try it. We can always stop if we hit a patch of sharp rocks or something."
She nodded. We passed the outer edges of the bluffs, the sunlight from behind us cutting off abruptly as we passed into shadow. The walls of the bluffs curved toward us, and I could see now that the narrowest part of the opening would indeed be large enough to admit us. Calandra saw that, too, and kept going. A couple more meters of slope up; and then we were through the gap, angling down now toward the slightly depressed center—
And Calandra slammed on the brakes. "God in heaven," she breathed, almost mechanically.
Directly ahead, filling the enclosed area from the base of one bluff to the next, was a literal sea of thunderheads. The plants which always before we'd found in the centers of lush vegetation... and never in groups larger than four.
I took a deep breath. "Offhand," I heard myself say, "I'd guess we've found a very healthy place to camp."
The words seemed to break the spell. "Right," Calandra said dryly. "At least if you're a thunderhead." She stared at them for another minute before shaking her head. "Well, come on, then," she growled, getting stiffly out of the car. "Let's get those shelters put together before the sun goes down."
Chapter 18
Calandra had been correct about the gaps tunneling the wind. They did, and with a vengeance, converting the gentle breeze outside into a steady whistle that here in the shadow of the bluffs was already beginning to be chilly. Fortunately, I'd also been correct in the assumption that we'd be able to find someplace sufficiently sheltered from the blast. The northernmost bluff had two gentle ridges extending from its top all the way down into the mass of thunderheads, and between those ridges was a hollow with plenty of room for both of the shelters Shepherd Zagorin had lent us. The shelters themselves proved to be both simple and idiot-proof, and in perhaps twenty minutes we had a fairly cozy camp put together.