As Fitzsimmons had promised, his repair still held. A Marine of a thousand uses, she thought amusedly, trying to dig her fingernail into the seam. She failed, finding the military-issue adhesive goo holding the uppers to the sole like bedrock. "Time for breakfast, and I smell coffee!"
Downstairs, Gretchen found herself sitting at a table near the single window in the common room, a plate of eggs, toast and something which smelled — but did not taste at all — like bacon in front of her. The cook, a short, round Frenchman named De'vaques, poured her a big mug of coffee to which she added a liberal amount of sugar and creamer. By some unspoken conspiracy, she found herself accompanied for a lengthy breakfast by Tukhachevsky and the xenobiologist Sinclair. Both men were in a formidably happy mood, and Gretchen tuned them out almost as quickly as they started propounding at length on the peculiar nature of the Ephesian microfauna.
Hot food — and not a heated threesquare or mealbag — commanded her full attention until the plate was bare and the cup empty. She looked up, wondering if the kitchen was flush enough with supplies to allow her a second cup, and caught sight of the meteorologist Smalls's face from across the room. He was a thin, sallow-faced man in the sharp, bright glare of morning, with sunken eyes and lank black hair. Watching him, his body half-hidden behind Tukhachevsky's rotund bulk, Gretchen thought she'd never seen anyone so sad before.
A particularly sharp peal of laughter drew the man's eyes, his head moving with a sharp jerk. Gretchen looked over and realized the common room had already separated out, like some chemical precipitating out of solution, with the scientists — herself included — at one table, while the "crew" sat at another. Delores, her oval face slightly flushed with amusement, was telling a particularly poor joke at the other table. Parker and Bandao were watching her with amusement, while the groundside security people — Blake and a comm tech named Steward — were groaning.
"…so she said she'd rather date a cattle guard than a cowboy, so we left her sitting by the fence until she had the sense to walk home herself!"
Only Smalls was sitting alone, at the end of a table near the kitchen door. Gretchen realized he was watching Delores, as covertly as he dared, and she remembered how he'd moved toward her on the landing field the night before. Poor kid, she thought, remembering a crush she'd suffered through on Mars. Being in the field for a long expedition — and one like this, on the edge of human-controlled space, might last for years without relief — was always tricky. Being married didn't make any difference, not if your spouse was sixty light-years away. Distance washes away all attachments, makes us forget the old world and see only the new.
There was a pause in the flow of words from Tukhachevsky and Sinclair, and Gretchen realized they'd asked her something. She turned and raised a questioning eyebrow. "I'm sorry?"
"Would you like to see the main excavation site before we leave?" Sinclair repeated, hair in his eyes, ragged fingernails twisting a fresh tabac from papers. "It'll take all day to load the shuttles, and we won't want to take off until dark."
"I would," Gretchen said, standing up, coffee cup in hand. "About fifteen hundred? Good."
As it happened, Parker had already snorked up the last of the coffee, but Gretchen felt alive enough to face the day. Standing in the door of the kitchen, she found the crew clearing out — Parker and Delores for the landing strip and the shuttles, Blake and the others to start packing and loading. Good, she thought, no one will really notice if I take a bit of a look around. All I need is a guide.
"Mister Smalls?" The meteorologist looked up, startled, apparently unaware of her approach. "Do you have time to show me around the camp this morning? I'd appreciate it if you could."
In the full glare of midday sun, the camp seemed even more desolate than by night. The horizon stretched away to a dim white line, unbroken by the sight of mountains or hills in any direction. Gretchen blessed the field goggles she'd packed and the battered straw hat that had survived from her very first dig in the ruins of the ancient Il Dioptre observatory on Crete. Her suit was proof against heat and cold alike, but there was no sense in subjecting the temperature regulators to more stress than necessary. Smalls, for his part, had adopted a djellaba-like white cloak which covered him from head to toe, with wide-mouthed sleeves and a deep hood.
Brittle sand crunched underfoot as they walked, a fine crust breaking away with each step. The ground sparkled and glittered, as if diamonds had been scattered among the gravel and stones. Tan and a cream-white color dominated, though as the eye reached to the horizon, the deep, deep blue-black of the sky made the distant plain seem yellow.
"How's the weather?" she said at last. Smalls had said nothing after suiting up and leaving the main building. He seemed lost in thought. "The prevailing wind is from the east?"
There were no east-facing windows in the camp, and every building had a smooth, sloping berm of compressed earth and stone facing the rising sun. Even the sheds for the crawlers were reinforced, as if fortified against enemy bombardment, with deep airlocked doorways. More than one of the huts was half-buried by sand, with sloping ramps leading down to battered metal doors.
Smalls said nothing, continuing to stump along. They approached the main lab — a long, low structure with tiny windows surrounded by reinforcing stone. Everyone seemed to sleep in the main building, on the second floor. Gretchen shaded her eyes, looking west. Sunlight flared on the raised tails of the two shuttles, and she could see dust rising from a crawler maneuvering around the back of one. She supposed they were preparing to remount the engine in number two.
Still silent, Smalls keyed the airlock. There was a squeal of tracks clogged with grit, and Gretchen stepped inside, into blessed darkness. She watched the outer door grind closed, seeing the frame was almost entirely eaten away.
"How bad are the storms?" She ventured again, hoping for some kind of response. Smalls pressed a softly glowing plate on the wall and the inner door cycled, dust swirling away at their feet. Beyond a line of glowlights shimmered awake, illuminating a dirty, narrow hallway. Despite the lock, the floor was covered with sand.
"The storms?" Smalls seemed to wake at last, his eyes dark pits in the bad light. Something like a smile twitched on his lips. "They're beautiful. Gorgeous, really."
Gretchen said nothing, only unclasping her mask and taking a moment to taste the building air. She could smell solvents, hot plastic, electrical components and the sharp smell of an overheated printer.
"We'd been here a week," Smalls said, turning away and shuffling down the hallway. "And my satellites weren't all deployed yet, when the first big storm swept over us. Two of the sheds were torn to bits and scattered — Fuentes found one of the roofing panels a couple weeks later, sixty k from here. A crawler got knocked over and we nearly lost shuttle one."
"Sounds bad…" Gretchen started to say, but then stopped. Smalls was still talking, apparently unaware of her comment.