"Is everyone still in camp?" She asked, quietly. The Rossiyan nodded, fingering his beard. The sore beside his nose was beginning to suppurate — Gretchen recognized the sign of an ill-fitting respirator mask — and he smelled of alcohol. "Have you heard anything from Russovsky?"
"Nyet," he said dolefully. "Not so much as a peep. I don't know — she seemed preoccupied when she was here last — maybe the desolation is telling on her. This is a bleak world."
"Did she talk to you, when she was here? Did she talk to anyone — say where she'd been, where she was going?"
Tukhachevsky shook his head again, beard wagging slowly in counterpoint. "No, Doctor Anderssen. She landed while we sat at breakfast and immediately went to see McCue in the main lab. Then Clarkson…" The Rossiyan paused, nose twitching, and Gretchen could see him weighing dirty laundry in his mind. After a moment, he shook his head slightly and continued. "Doctor Clarkson went out to the main lab as well. An hour later — I would guess — I was packing a crawler to go reset the sensors at the edge of the White Plain and I saw Russovsky's Midge taking off." He scratched his beard. "A little odd, that. By then it was full sun, but she took off anyway and headed north."
"When did the shuttle leave?"
"Later," Tukhachevsky said, a slow grin peeking out from his beard. "I heard Clarkson on the comm, shouting at Blake — he's the head of the security team — to get a shuttle ready. But number two was already sidelined on the field with some mechanical problem. So they had to wait for a shuttle to come down from the ship to pick him up."
"Him and the damaged engine, right?" Gretchen tucked a wayward tendril of hair behind her ear. "Carlos flew the shuttle down to pick them up?"
Tukhachevsky nodded. "Yes, Flores had been down for several days, working on the grounded shuttle. By the time the other shuttle arrived, Clarkson was about wetting his pants." The Rossiyan grinned again. "He was in a rare state — almost happy, if such a dour man could ever be happy — and he was even civil to Molly."
"You saw them while they were waiting for the shuttle? Were they waiting together?"
"No! They couldn't abide being in the same room." Tukhachevsky waved a hand dismissively. "I didn't see — I'd already taken the crawler out — but Frenchy told me Doctor McCue decided to go aboard at the last moment. Clarkson was already aboard, the engine already stowed. They had to delay departure a couple minutes for her." The physicist shrugged.
So, Gretchen thought to herself, Russovsky and McCue didn't show Clarkson the limestone fragment, only the free-standing cylinder. That was enough to get him off their backs…but why did McCue suddenly go aboard the shuttle? What made her hurry? Or was she just trying to keep Clarkson from seeing what she'd put in the cargo hold?
The Company dossier on McCue implied she was a careful, thorough woman. A mathematician from the Arkham Institute on Anбhuac, the dig coordinator and chief bottlewasher. Meticulous, detail-oriented…not the kind of person to rush a sample somewhere, even one so precious. Huh. But if things between her and Clarkson were as cold as everyone is hinting, maybe she wanted to make him look bad.
"What happened then?" Gretchen returned her attention to the Rossiyan, who was looking mournful, his memories of the past stirred up. "Did you hear anything more from the ship, from Clarkson or McCue?"
"No." Tukhachevsky laughed hollowly. "Blake received a call from Sho-sa Cardenas, saying the shuttle had docked on the Palenque, then nothing. For weeks and weeks, nothing. We made a telescope — we could see the ship — but…"
"I'm sorry." Gretchen squeezed his shoulder. "I'm sorry about what happened, and sorry it took so long to get here."
"But you did come," Tukhachevsky sighed, and shook himself. A weight seemed to lift from his broad old shoulders and he stood up straighter. "Please, we can't stand here talking all night — come and meet everyone else and — please! — have a drink, on me." His eyes twinkled. "You will find men and women's interests are reduced to their base constituents when faced with a slow, lingering death abandoned on an alien world, far from home, without hope of survival."
Gretchen made a show of sniffing the air. "I can tell," she said with a laugh. "It smells like a distillery in here! What are you making?"
"Vodka, of course. You can make vodka out of anything." Tukhachevsky pushed open the door to the common room and Gretchen stepped in. A dozen people rose to meet her, some young, some old, and a stained plastic cup was pressed into her hand, sloshing with jet fuel of some kind. The Rossiyan's meaty hand was on her shoulder, guiding her to a chair at the long table and Gretchen caught a swift montage of tired, haggard faces — men and women seamed by the elements, burned dark by the sun — and everyone was smiling, relief plain on their faces, babbling their names, questions, rude jokes.
"Hello," she said, when things had quieted down a little and she'd taken a suitably long drink of the "vodka" in the cup. "I'm Gretchen Anderssen, and I thought you'd like to know the water cyclers on the ship are working just fine."
Everyone smiled and the last of the heckling died down. Gretchen swung a heavy bag from her hip onto the tabletop. No one made any particular movement, but a sense of expectation pricked the air, like ozone spilling away from an oncoming thunderstorm.
"And our Magdalena has the t-relay working back to Imperial space, so there was some mail waiting for you."
Hhhhuhhh… The simultaneous exhalation of a dozen breaths stirred the air. Gretchen didn't look up — it would be rude to grin at these men and women, who'd thought they were lost at the edge of known space, with no way home — and concentrated instead on dumping the bundles of printed messages onto the table. She'd sorted them on the flight down and tied up each set with string. Some events, she knew, were venerable enough to become rituals. This was one. Mail call, particularly when a new crewmember arrived on site.
"Blake." She called out, holding up the first set of letters. A stocky man, his pockmarked face twisted halfway from a grim snarl to disbelieving joy, scraped back his chair and leaned over the table.
"Thanks," he muttered, sitting down, almost-trembling fingers picking at the twine. "Thanks."
Gretchen nodded, then looked down. She'd already removed all the letters for the dead crewmen, for Clarkson and McCue. Strangely, there hadn't been any letters in the inbound queue for Russovsky, though her company file said she had an entire clutch of cousins and sisters at home on Anбhuac. Better have Maggie check on that, she thought while she held up the next bundle. "Fuentes, Antonio?"
The sound of a power wrench whining against a reluctant bolt roused Gretchen the next morning. She blinked, seeing actual, real sunlight spilling down a dirty brown wall above her head, then poked her nose out from the sleepbag. A pungent smell of cooking oil, coffee, sweat and heated metal washed over her. "Ah," she grumbled, sitting up, "home at last."
Surprisingly — considering how late she'd remained awake, talking to Tukhachevsky and Sinclair and the others about the dig and the planet — she felt good. Actually rested. "Gravity is a wonderful thing," she said, baring her teeth for a little hand mirror she carried in her jacket. "And whatever they put in the vodka here stains! Now I look like a real babushka."
Taking a carefully hoarded bottle of water out of her bag, she washed her face and brushed her teeth. "Two cups," she muttered, measuring the fluid level in the translucent canteen by eye. "I used to be able to take a whole bath in two cups."
Water rationing had been very strict on Mars, even with thirty meters of permafrost under their feet. The Imperial Planetary Reclamation Board guarded the native ice jealously, and charged the dig crews for every liter they extracted. IPRB had a vision of a green Mars, and weren't going to let some profligate scientists spoil their grand dream. Ugarit, for all the stink and humidity and flies and constant, deafening noise, had plenty of water. Some of it was even potable by human standards, but Gretchen had fallen out of the habits she'd learned on Mars. New Aberdeen was a wet, green world — flush with stormy gray seas, heavy forests and chill, cleansing rain pouring from massive, white thunderheads. Home seems so distant…Then she put the thoughts away and concentrated on getting the right boot on the right foot.