"Only…one of you," she said, too tired to smile. "What…happened?"
His jaw clenched, then he visibly forced himself to relax. "The storm has mostly passed. I have tried to contact the Cornuelle, but there is no answer. Also, something has gotten into the hangar. Both aircraft have become one with the floor."
"Huh!" Laughing hurt, but the baffled look on the old man's face was priceless. Gretchen managed to worm one hand out of the blankets to take hold of the cup. The metal was only lukewarm, but the liquid inside burned her lips. She tasted more sugar than tea. "Told you so."
"Yes." Hummingbird tilted his head in acknowledgment. "You were right to be concerned. The rate of decay in the camp buildings is faster than I expected. But we should be able to clear out this set of rooms, get the generator started again and rig a positive-pressure environment. That will help."
Gretchen set the empty cup on her chest and stared at the ceiling again. "What day is it?"
"Plus fourteen from landing," the nauallis replied, taking the cup away to refill.
"Two days." Gretchen mumbled, feeling exhaustion overtake her. "The Palenque will be here. But we need both Midge s in working order."
"How…" Hummingbird saw she was asleep again, a soft snore escaping her lips. "Working order? I thought we were done here, but…" He got up and began gathering up what tools he could find. "Must be a sledgehammer or rock chisel somewhere in these buildings."
Still limping, using a survey marker pole as a cane, Gretchen stopped beside the Gagarin and peered suspiciously at the undercarriage. The floor was remarkably clean for a base-camp hangar, which proved Hummingbird had been very, very busy while she was sleeping. For her part, Anderssen felt remarkably refreshed for a woman with two bad feet, a medband whining about alkaloid toxins in her blood and no immediate prospects of rescue from an increasingly hostile world entirely unfit for man.
"Kind of banged up," she said, biting her lip at the dents and chipping visible on the landing gear assembly. Curious, Gretchen put her weight against the wing and the wheel clunked over. The heavy rubberlike material was badly pitted. She looked over at Hummingbird, who was squatting beneath his own ultralight. "Good work to get this place cleaned out."
"Does it matter?" The nauallis spread his hands, looking at her expectantly.
"It does." Gretchen opened Gagarin's cockpit door. "We need both ultralights to get off this rock. I was sure we were done for when your fuel pump froze up." She threw the comp restart switch and leaned back on the pole, watching the system spool up.
"We need only wait," Hummingbird said, eyes narrowing suspiciously. "The Cornuelle will return soon."
"The day after tomorrow," Gretchen said, shaking her head at his optimism, "one of the shuttles from the Palenque will make a skip-pass through the upper reaches of the planetary atmosphere. The approach will be entirely ballistic — no power, no radiation signature, no more evidence than a meteorite burning up in the mesosphere — and we will be waiting, both of us in a Midge, for a skyhook extraction."
"Impossible! A Midge can't fly that high and we'd asphyxiate or freeze before reaching an altitude where a shuttle could pick us up on an approach like that."
"If this were An,huac, you'd be right." The comm console beeped pleasantly and Gretchen felt her stomach sink. There were no system messages waiting for her. No mysterious notes from Magdalena. No word the Palenque was actually coming to fetch them. "But this is not Old Earth."
Anderssen shuffled out, the pole scratching on the floor. "Like Mars, this world's atmosphere is very thin. Maybe only half the depth of Anбhuac's ocean of air. Even the individual layers of the atmosphere are compressed or thinned. We only need to reach thirty k to escape. At such an altitude, in fact, we'll be worrying about broiling in solar radiation rather than freezing, but these Midge s are pretty well equipped to protect us from the heat.
"Air is a problem, but we can secure these suits for a super-low-pressure environment. We won't have to stay at height long — in fact, we won't be able to loiter for more than about thirty minutes — but the shuttle will be there when we are."
Hummingbird was scowling, his face dark as a thunderhead above the Escarpment. "A skyhook can only intercept one Midge at a time — if your Mister Parker can keep his hands steady enough to catch us. And how do you expect one of these dragonflies to reach that altitude?"
"I'm not trying to get us killed," Gretchen said in a stiff voice. "But it is dangerous."
She ran her hand across the Gagarin's wing, taking a long look at the battered, scratched, wind-worn surface. The ultralight had traveled thousands of k across this world, with two pilots of varying abilities, making at least one complete circumnavigation. Mountains, plains, all the diverse wastelands…all without complaint. A sturdy, battle-hardened plane with a brave heart. Gretchen blinked, trying to restrain a wellspring of emotion.
"We," she said, after clearing her throat, "are going to strip everything unnecessary out of this one. The fuel tanks on yours detach, so we'll stuff them into the cargo compartment, doubling our range." Gretchen tapped a pair of brackets on the underside of the airframe. "Beneath my seat are two chemical rocket boosters, which fit here."
She turned and gave the old man a weary smile. "This world does not enjoy an evenly distributed gravitational field. There are huge disparities of mass inside the crust and core. Near the Escarpment there are eddies where g spikes three or four times surface normal. West of here, out in the Great Eastern Basin, there is an area of very low g. Our escape velocity will be drastically lowered once we enter the zone. We'll use the rockets when the air becomes too thin to impart any lift at all."
Hummingbird blinked. "And if no one is waiting in high orbit?"
"We fly back down." Gretchen felt her stomach go cold. No sense in lying… "I hope."
"Hmm." The nauallis clasped his hands and stared at the floor for a long time. When he looked up, a weight seemed to have lifted from him. "Even so, flying such a distance will take time. So we had best get started."
Gretchen nodded, then reached out her hand. The judge looked askance for a moment, then accepted her arm in rising. "Let me get my gear — you need a special socket wrench to unbolt the fuel tanks."
Three hours later, Hummingbird ducked through the door from the main building with the last of their baggage slung over his shoulder.
"I've good news," he said, dumping the duffel bags on the floor of the hangar. Gretchen looked up from the cockpit of the Gagarin, her face streaked with grime, oil and tiny flakes of shredded plastic. The shockchair had been dismounted and moved aside, an effort which required cutting away the armrests to make room for the second chair from the other Midge. The compartment seemed very bare with the side panels torn out and everything stripped down to bare metal. Only the 3v of her kids and Russovsky's icon remained, tacked to the overhead. The power cell worked into the paper had finally failed, leaving only a static, fixed image. "We needn't take more than one or two days' supply of food with us."
The nauallis unsealed one of the bags and dumped out four or five packs of threesquares onto the floor. They made an audible clanking sound, stone striking stone. Gretchen tried to grin, but she was very tired again. Even the effort of dismounting everything which could be removed from the Midge had left her shaking.