"Ow!"
"Watch. Quietly. Learn." Maggie moved a control and the image narrowed, the point of view zooming down from orbit. Mountains, valleys, vast plains of glittering sand flashed past. Suddenly, Gretchen caught sight of a triangular shape flitting across a queer-looking stone plateau. The ground was chopped up into smaller triangles of shadow, making the speeding shuttle almost invisible.
The shuttle was gone from the next picture — a half hour had elapsed — but the pattern of the ground had subtly changed. Gretchen stiffened in her chair. "What was that? What are those lines?"
"Interesting, isn't it?" Maggie's tongue was showing. Gretchen frowned at her. "Look at this," the Hesht said, moving the control again.
Another high-angle shot, but later in the planetary day. The image had been enhanced, but a long blackened gouge was clear, cutting across a rippling line of dunes to an abrupt end. Gretchen squinted as Magdalena zoomed again. The track ended in a welter of shining metal, a mostly recognizable wing canted at a queer angle, the twisted body of a shuttle scored with carbon and the signs of a fierce conflagration.
"The Valkyrie didn't get home," Maggie said. "So our nosy crow has a bigger mess to clean up than he thinks."
"Jesu…" Gretchen zoomed again, though now the image was very grainy and large sections showed the gray rippling tone of comp interpolation. "They suck up too much dust?"
"Looks like they got hit." Parker had come up on the other side of the captain's chair. He made a sign against ill luck, face screwed up in a grimace. "That fire damage didn't happen on the crash, not in such a thin atmosphere. Something swatted them down. Maybe some kind of beam weapon."
Maggie's ears twitched again. "I found the crash site last night, after everyone had gone to sleep. Old crow has been searching too. But he's not as good with the comp as this paaha, for all his shining-coat equipment. Now, you want to see what happened?"
Parker and Gretchen gave the Hesht a disbelieving look. "How? Smalls's satellites only take pictures every half hour!"
"True enough," Magdalena said, a deep purr beginning in the back of her throat. "But they don't take their pictures all at the same time, and near the poles the fields of view overlap." A claw tapped on the panel and the view of the planet returned, this time with white rectangular grids superimposed. Near the poles, the rectangles overlaid each other in a flurry of lines. "All this lets us see sideways into the area of the crash. So I cobbled together video from the adjacent satellites and from those further around the curve that had a horizontal vantage of the crash site. Which lets us see…"
The claw went tik-tik on the panel and a jerky, crude, massively interpolated vid unspooled on the display.
The shuttle arrowed down out of the eastern sky, sweeping across the crisscrossed plateau. The flare of the twin engines was very clear in the vid. The Valkyrie began to bank, turning south and Gretchen felt her breath seize — the entire plateau seemed to ripple with motion, the crisscross lines shifting noticeably — and there was a sudden, shockingly bright flash. The entire plateau was blotted out by a burst of white light. When the light faded — after only a fraction of a second — the shuttle was wreathed in smoke. Flames jetted from a smashed engine in a bright, blossoming cloud. They wicked out only seconds later, but the shuttle was already spinning out of control.
The vid skipped and they caught only a glimpse of the aircraft as it slammed into the desert floor and skidded wildly across the dunes, spewing debris, chunks of airframe, and engine parts. Then the vid ended, and the vast red disc of Ephesus replaced the grainy images.
"You see?" Magdalena had her brush in her paw and was smoothing out the kinks and twists in her fur. "Sometimes the planet eats more than your boots."
Parker shook his head, then flicked away his spent tabac and immediately lit another. Gretchen sat quietly for a moment, studying the images on the panel. She ran though the video again, her face composed and concentrated. After a moment, she said, "Did you extract more vid of this plateau with the lines?"
"Ya-ha," Magdalena coughed. "The second v-feed in archive — yes, that's the one."
Another series of images flowed past, these taken from weather satellite number eight at a slight angle from the west. Dawn spilled over the eastern horizon and the pattern of lines became apparent, elongated and stretched out, making a cross-hatching pattern. Day progressed and the lines shortened, shifted pattern, essentially vanishing at midday. Then, as the sun sank into the west, lengthened again — this time to the east — and went through a similar set of convolutions.
Gretchen played the vid again, but this time she stopped the feed about an hour after the sun had risen, then zoomed and zoomed again. The comp interpolated busily, refining the image, and then a forest of tall pipelike structures were revealed covering the plateau.
"Scale?" Parker was at her shoulder again, a coil of tabac smoke tangling in her hair and tickling her nose.
"They're four to five meters tall," Gretchen said, brushing invisible smoky gnats away from her nose. "But look…they bend as the sun passes. Not too much; the mineralized sheathing must be stiff to let them grow so high, but enough to follow the sun. Like flowers."
"Pipeflowers." Parker grunted. "What made the flash? Did they?"
Gretchen nodded, hand over her mouth. "Sinclair will have to look at this, but all of the microfauna he's found so far have used a kind of electron cascade as their…their blood, I guess. They store and release energy — the fuel that gives them life — by shedding electrons and storing potentials in segregated structures. And these…stems…must trap sunlight in some kind of photocell to sustain themselves."
Parker scratched the side of his head. "They don't look dark, like a solar array."
"No." Gretchen felt a vague thought rear its head. Something she'd almost grasped before, when she was in the medical bay, or when she was examining the book cylinder. "No, the sun gives life, but too much is deadly. Too much UV, right?" Her fingers drummed on the display. "So they build up a mineralized sheath — like the little creatures I found growing in the pulque can."
Gretchen felt the puzzle shift in her mind, some pieces falling into place and revealing a new orientation and shape for other sets of data. She suddenly felt alive, as if her skin were humming and everything became perfectly clear.
"The pulque can is the key," she said, looking up at Parker. "Because it's new and yet the organism had nearly filled the can. Sinclair thinks the whole ecosystem works very slowly, but he's wrong — the species he's examining are only replicating so slowly because they have so little energy to work with. The can was perfect for them — it's a substance they can digest — and it was in the shade of the trench. So they can grow and be protected from the sun." Gretchen nodded. "Because all of these organisms — all of this effusion of Ephesian life — are terribly sensitive to ultraviolet radiation. You saw what happened down in the examining room — everything just died. Or in the shuttle intake with your multispec lamp."
"Okay," Parker said as he stubbed out his tabac. "Then how did all of this develop here? There's no ozone layer to speak of, no heavy atmosphere…the surface is a kill zone for the chapultin. How would they ever get a chance?"
Gretchen's expression changed and Parker thought she looked terribly sad.
"Because there were so many of them to begin with," she said in a hollow voice. "Unnumbered billions, covering the world in a terrible killing mist. They must have blotted out the sun, turned the sky dark with their numbers. But of course, there was no one to see them, not by then."