“It killed them?”
“Hell, no.” The pilot leaned back and closed her eyes all the way. The car touched down, light as a feather. “A ’Fact won’t actually kill a team — they were designed not to. But it can give you a pretty bad time. This one roughed ’em up so bad, they decided they’d had it with being a Pursuit Team. They split up. I picked ’em up one by one, and they all went home. So there we were, one out of three.”
The pilot glanced out of the window and nodded approvingly. They had come to rest at the exact center of the landing circle. “Want to hear about Team Four?”
“Of course. Maybe I can learn by their experience.”
“They were the worst of all. They got themselves organized, searched for their ’Fact, found it, and were all ready to blow it to bits. Well, that’s when the Pipe-Rilla decided it couldn’t go through with it. Couldn’t stand the idea of killing something, even if it was only an Artefact.”
“So they had to quit?”
“Not quite. The human on the team — big fat blond feller, looked like he’d not harm a fly — got so mad with the Pipe-Rilla, wasting all his time, he was all set to blow her full of holes in place of the ’Fact. Might have done it, too, if the Tinker hadn’t swarmed him.
“I got ’em all out in one piece, but the whole thing convinced the other Stellar Groups — again! — that humans are crazy killers. And if you think that didn’t create an interstellar incident and make things worse here …”
She opened the door of the car. A wave of dry heat like dragon’s breath wafted into the cabin. “Phew! Welcome to sunny Barchan. This car’s all yours now, until you get your Fact. Good hunting.”
As she started onto the steps Chan leaned out after her. “You’ve seen them all. What do you think our chances are?”
The pilot paused with the door half-closed, and the car’s air conditioner went into overdrive. “Your chances? Well, if you believe it’s a random process, past history says you’re one in four. But I don’t believe it’s that random. Mind if I ask you a question?”
“I’ve been asking you plenty.”
“Well, I’ve looked you over pretty hard these past few days. You don’t fit this job, not at all. With your face and body, you’re an entertainment natural — public, or one-on-one. There’s fifty billion women would like a piece of you. So how come you’re on a Pursuit Team, out here at the ass-end of the universe?”
Chan hesitated. Had Leah talked about him, so the pilot was just prodding for more details? The waves of arid heat coming in through the open door produced floods of sweat on his face and neck that dried the moment they appeared, but the pilot seemed oblivious to outside conditions. She was waiting patiently, and her face gave him no clues. He decided that her question reflected no more than a genuine interest.
“I was born on Earth. I was a commoner, with a contract. This gave me a way out, and when it’s over I’ll be free to do as I like.”
It was close to the truth, and the pilot was nodding sympathetically. “Ah, I’ve heard about Earth. Everything’s relative. Maybe after that, Barchan don’t seem so much like the ass-end of the universe. I know that Leah Rainbow seemed pleased enough to be here. Did you get recruited the same way she did?”
“Pretty much. We were both recruited by Commander Mondrian.”
“Good enough. You’ve answered my questions, now I’ll answer yours. I’ll up your odds of success from one in four to fifty-fifty. Mondrian’s as hard as Tinker-shit and cold as Angel-heart, but he’s one sharp son of a bitch. And he don’t pick losers.” She swung the door closed and grinned at him through the window. “I mean, usually,” she shouted. “But there’s exceptions to everything. Fifty-fifty! Good luck!”
She gave him a wave and set off for the cluster of service buildings. Chan sat quietly in the car, inspecting the landscape around him. They were in Barchan’s low polar regions, where winter temperature would allow a human to survive without a suit except around noon. The vegetation, such as it was, was deep-rooted and covered in waxy blue-green foliage. At the pole itself it would grow in Barchan’s half-g surface gravity to fifty meters or more; here it sat low to the ground, tight-wrapped to conserve moisture. The soil beneath the plants was dry, dark,” and basaltic, rising in slow, brooding folds away from the landing area. Gusty surface winds lifted the top layer of soil up and about the parked aircar in twisting dust-devils of dark grey. Near the equator that sand layer was hundreds of feet deep. The constant winds blew it into the miles-long crescent-shaped barchan dunes that gave the planet its name.
Eta Cassiopeiae’s twin suns hung close to the horizon. They lit the scene with orange, dust-filtered light. This dour landscape, according to Chan’s briefings, was the most attractive part of the planet.
He wondered where the Artefact might be hiding. According to those same briefings, it would have no trouble living anywhere on Barchan — even in the scorching equatorial regions where only micro-organisms survived.
The three service buildings stood a kilometer away from the parked aircar. As Chan watched, a swirling veil of dark purple emerged from one of the buildings and blew like a rolling cloud of dust towards the car. When it was fifty yards away Chan opened the door. The individual components of the cloud could now be resolved. They were purple-black winged creatures, all identical and each about as big as his finger. They approached with a whirring of wings. In less than thirty seconds every one of them had entered the aircar door and settled all over the rear of the main cabin.
Chan closed the door and turned to watch. He had seen the next phase in briefing displays, but this was his first exposure to the real thing.
It began with one component — an apparently arbitrary one — hovering in mid air with its purple-and-black body vertical. A ring of pale green eyes on the head stared all around, as though assessing the situation, while the wings fluttered too fast to see. After a moment another component flew in to attach at the head end, and a third one settled into position beneath. Thin, whiplike antennae reached out and connected heads to tails. The triplet hovered, wines vibrating. A fourth and fifth element new over to join the nucleus of the group.
After that the aggregation grew too fast for Chan to watch individual connections. As new components were added the Composite extended outward and downwards, to make contact with and derive support from the cabin floor. Within a minute the main body was complete. To Chan’s surprise — something not pointed out in the briefings — most of the individual components still remained unattached. Of the total who had entered the cabin, maybe a fifth were now connected to form a compact mass; the remainder stood tail-first on the cabin floor or hung singly from the walls using the small claws on the front of their shiny leather-like wings.
The mass of the Tinker Composite began to form a funnel-like opening in its topmost extremity. From that aperture came an experimental hollow wheeze. “Ohhh-anhh-gggghh. Hharr-ehh-looo,” it said. Then, in an oddly accented variety of solar speech, “Har-e-loo. Hal-loo.”
Kubo Flammarion had warned that this was inevitable. “Imagine,” he said, “that somebody took you apart every night and put you back together every morning. Don’t you think it would take a little while to get your act together? So make allowances for the Tinkers.”
Chan couldn’t imagine it. But he suspected that the little captain, a long-time alcoholic and a recent Paradox addict, knew that morning-after where’s-the-rest-of-me feeling rather too well.
“Hello,” he said, in response to the Tinker’s greeting. “Hello.”
As he had been advised to do, he waited.