Tom and his brothers had never had any real finds. A few scraps, chunks of twisted metal that truthfully could have been anything. The dealers in Zeefield never offered much. Scavengers said if any true find came along the dealers would bid against each other, bumping the price up. Tom hated the dealers, but the only way to get the true price on the scraps was to drive all the way back to Armstrong City where the navy starship visited every couple of months to see what’d been found. Traveling cost them weeks. They weren’t making enough to do that.
Every time they went out, Tom was convinced that this would be the trip that hit pay dirt. The starship was huge, mostly solid machinery according to the dealers and other scavengers. That meant there should be segments the size of houses buried under the new desert. How difficult could it be?
This had been another washout trip. They had sensors rigged to cables that stretched out for twenty-five meters on either side of their old Mazda jeep. The ends were fixed to small quad bikes that Hagan and Andy rode, keeping the cable taut. That way they could cover big stretches of the new desert driving along together. The guy they’d bought them off swore the system could find metal twenty meters down. The price he charged them for the rig, they should have been able to locate anything a kilometer away.
All they’d got was a battered old pump made of some lightweight metallic composite, which was probably going to fetch a couple of hundred Far Away dollars, and three curving jags of metal that looked suspiciously like wheel arches to Tom. But they had wires and some electronic modules fixed to them. So you never knew…It had taken the better part of five days to excavate them. The trouble with the new desert was that it wasn’t a real desert, especially not now, a year after the planet’s revenge. To start with it had been a naked expanse of sandy soil. But the rains washed over it, and seeds from the buried plants germinated and began to grow. It was a faint green color now, and the soil was claggy, making digging difficult, especially after the rain. Streams and rivers were reappearing along contours. There were some lowlands that were now just bogs, impossible to traverse. Every time they went out, they’d spend hours digging the Mazda out of unexpected patches of mud.
Tom found Highway One just after midday, and turned onto it, heading north. Farther south, where the road ran parallel to the Dessault Mountains, it had completely vanished beneath the soil of the new desert. Here, it extended out in the open, sometimes for kilometers before high dunes covered it again. They slowly diminished the farther north you went, until half a day past Mount StOmer they ended altogether. It was easy to follow the road, though. Every vehicle left tracks along the line of the concrete underneath the dunes. You could even find the road in the dark.
When he was on the crest of one dune, he saw a dark figure by the side of the tracks a few hundred meters ahead. “What the hell is that?”
“What’s what?” Hagen shouted.
“Will you turn your fucking music off,” Tom told him. That was another thing: Hagen played his jazzy rock all day long at full volume.
“It’s a girl,” Andy said. “Yahoooo.”
Tom peered forward. No way you could tell. “Come on, guys, it’s someone with a busted truck, is all.” Not that he could see one. Not anywhere. But how else would anybody get out here?
“I’m telling you, it’s a girl.”
“Hagen, turn you music off right now, or I’m gonna throw that array out of the jeep.”
“Screw you, asshole.”
But he did turn it down. Tom gunned the Mazda down the slope. Not that he believed Andy, but…
“How much do we charge for recovery and taxi service?” Andy said with a laugh.
“Hell, I know what I’m gonna charge her,” Hagen said, and cupped his crotch.
It made Tom realize what they must look like. Filthy overalls and T-shirts, all in raggedy old sunhats, ancient shades. Unshaved for the whole three weeks. And the state of the Mazda was pretty poor. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered as they approached the figure who still hadn’t moved. He slowed the jeep.
“Told you so,” Andy said.
Hagan started an excited heavy breathing laugh as if he were some kind of retard.
“Shut up, Hagen,” Tom shouted. It really was a girl. She had short dark hair under a white peaked cap, and wore a sleeveless orange T-shirt with tight dark pants cut off just above the knees. And she was sitting in a very weird position, with her legs crossed and feet bent back somehow. All he could think of was how supple she must be to do that. A smile was growing on his face. He halted the jeep beside her. “Good afternoon, there.”
“Howdy!” Andy shouted. “Me and my brothers, we’re heading into town.”
Tom jabbed his elbow into Andy’s ribs.
“Yes, ma’am.” Hagan laughed. “We’re gonna have us a party tonight. Do you wanna party?”
To Tom’s complete surprise she stood up and grinned at them.
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” said the Cat.
***
As always, lack of sleep made Ozzie testy. He unzipped his tent, flapped his arms against the chill of the early morning forest air, and wandered over to the fire they’d built last night. The Bose motile was standing beside it, feeding small chips of wood to the embers. Flames were starting to flicker again.
“Morning, Ozzie,” the Bose motile said. “I’ll have this going again in a minute. Do you want your hot chocolate?” It was speaking through a small bioneural array attached to the tip of a sensor stalk, a custom-built system that could easily be swapped for a standard Prime interface module.
“Coffee,” Ozzie grumbled. “It’ll help keep me awake.” He glowered at the tent on the other side of the small clearing that Orion and Mellanie shared.
“I’m lucky, this body doesn’t need sleep like humans. A good rest is all it takes to refresh me.”
Ozzie sat down on an ancient rotting tree trunk and started tying his boot laces up. The horses were snorting behind him, impatient for their feed. “Some humans don’t need any sleep, apparently. I mean, did you hear them last night? Man, they were at it for hours.”
“They are young.”
“Huh. They could at least be young and quiet.”
“Ozzie, you’re turning into quite a grump. Did you never have a honeymoon?”
“Yeah, yeah. Throw some eggs on the pan, will you, I’m going to see to the horses.” He busied himself with the nosebags.
Tochee was next up, unzipping the hemispherical tent that it had designed for itself. “Good morning, friend Ozzie.”
“Morning.” The array on his wrist translated his grunt into an ultraviolet pulse for Tochee. It looked like a bracelet with a black stone set in the top, the whole thing was bioneural and custom made. The experts in the CST electronics division had relished the challenge of coming up with bioluminescent ultraviolet emitters; it’d taken them the best part of six months, but the little unit functioned perfectly along the Silfen paths.
The first cup of coffee mellowed Ozzie’s temper slightly. Then the sound of human sex started to echo around the clearing, rising in pitch and intensity. The tent was shaking.
“Why do they both refer to your deity while mating?” Tochee inquired as it munched on some rehydrated cabbage. “Is it a request for a blessing?”
Ozzie shot the Bose motile a look, but of course it didn’t have body language he could read. “Uncontrollable reflex, man, look it up in your encyclopedia files.”
“Thank you, I will do so.”