"Shuttle two to shuttle one, come in." Parker tapped his throat mike experimentally, watching the newly repaired shuttle's control panels light green section by section. Most of the cockpit was still dark, or winking amber. The long grounding had played havoc with the ship's systems. A cursory examination of the hull revealed deep pitting and large sections of discolored, infected metal. "Bandao, can you hear me? Delores, are you on this comm?"
"I hear you," the gunner's voice answered on a crystal-clear channel. "How does it look?"
"Good enough, maybe, sort of…" Parker wiggled one of the control panels and the black glassite suddenly flickered to life. "This boat's all eaten up by the damned spores."
"Will she fly?" Delores's sharp voice came online. "Do you have an engine readout yet?"
"I have diagnostics live from the engine," Parker replied dryly. The crewwoman was crouching in the aft engineering space, squeezed in beneath the housing, trying to match up relays and conduits in a maze of pipes and hoses. "And I think she'll fly – at least one-way – and everyone on board had better be suited up. Our little friends have been eating away for weeks."
"Cargo in the damaged ship, then? Passengers in this one?"
Parker nodded, attention distracted by another panel coming online. The wing and airfoil surfaces were showing only sixty to seventy percent response to a basic microcontrol flex test. "Yeah…why don't you prep for takeoff. We can load cargo with Delores, me and the security crew. Get all the civilians up to the Palenque and into their blessed showers."
"Understood," Bandao replied. Parker squinted out the triangular window. Across the landing field, he could see the gunner rattling down the stairs from number one. "Delores – I still don't have any readout from the fuel gauges. They hooked up yet?"
A grunting sound was her only response. Smiling to himself, the pilot began running through the basic systems checklist. After an hour, he looked up, lean face creased with puzzlement. A line of people was climbing the stairs into shuttle one. He tapped open his throat mike.
"Chief? Anderssen? We're going to send shuttle one upstairs. Did you want to go?"
There was no immediate response, so he checked his comm band to see if Anderssen was in range. Her proximity icon was glowing green, so Parker tried again. "Parker calling Anderssen – hello? Anyone home?"
This time the channel chirped open, and the archaeologist's voice came back, a little thready. "Yes, Parker? What did you say?"
The pilot repeated his question. As he did, Delores climbed down into the cockpit and slid into the copilot's seat. Her hair was streaked with oil, her face shining with sweat and her work gloves were dark with grime. She looked pissed, but Parker made a point of looking respectfully off into the distance, listening to Gretchen speaking on the comm.
"Don't worry about me," Gretchen said, breath rasping as she scrambled up the side of an excavation trench. She squinted for a second while the work goggles adjusted to keep the flare of the late afternoon sun from spearing her eyes. "I'm out at the Observatory excavation site with Sinclair and Smalls. I believe they do want to go upstairs today, so tell Bandao to delay liftoff until they get back to camp." She waved to the xenobiologist, who was standing under a shining metallic sunshade a hundred meters away. "We've got two crawlers out here, so I'll take the other one back."
She tramped across a work ladder laid down over the trench as a bridge and passed one of the obelisks forming the main part of the observatory. The stone spire cast a long finger of shadow across the rumpled ground – each obelisk was at least twenty meters high. Four rings of the stones circled the "nave," which nestled at the bottom of a kilometer-wide depression in the desert floor, about three k from the camp.
A network of fresh trenches slashed across the ring arrangement. The expedition had been digging exploratory excavations at ten-meter intervals, trying to find the foundations of the edifice. Gretchen could tell from the desultory sensor grid layout in the trenches they hadn't found what they were looking for. Sinclair had admitted, as they were bouncing up the dusty road from the camp, the "observatory" did not seem to be anything of the kind. The current thinking proposed some kind of naturally occurring phenomena. Just some rocks.
Gretchen walked quickly down the path between two trenches to the long rectangular sunshade. Sinclair and Smalls were sitting at a camp table, their goggles glittering mirrors. Cargo crates made more tables and work areas under the strip of shadow.
"They've called from camp," Gretchen said, doffing her hat under the awning. Her skin felt tight, already dehydrated by the parched air. "Shuttle one is ready to make a run back to the ship. You should go, I think, and I'll take the other crawler back."
Both men shared a glance, then Sinclair tilted his head in a sort of temporizing way. "One of us should stay – it's bad policy to go about solo – even so close to the camp."
"I understand," Gretchen said, taking no offense. "But I'll be staying overnight, which means one of you would have to give up a shower and the amenities of the Palenque for another night. Besides – Parker, Blake and Delores are staying groundside with me, and I'll have the crawler."
There was some more hemming and hawing, but Gretchen just waited for them to convince themselves, then waved as the Skoda Armadillo chuffed away down the road to the main camp. When they were mostly out of sight, she tapped her comm open.
"Mister Parker? Yes, you've got two more passengers coming into camp for your milk run. I'd appreciate it if Bandao-tzin waited for them."
There were some disgruntled noises and Gretchen had to smile as she adjusted her hat. Despite the crestfallen attitude of the dig team, she wanted to go over their excavation herself. It had been a while since she'd had a chance to do her work, and she wasn't going to pass up the opportunity. A failed dig was almost more interesting than a successful one.
"We'll all be going back to the ship tomorrow," she said into the comm as she stepped out into the blaze of sunlight. "No, no, we don't have to pack the whole camp. People should just take their personal baggage. Well, bedding would be a good idea. Lennox and I need to decide if we're going to continue operations here or not. But that can wait a couple of days."
Still listening to Parker and Delores bicker about the damage to shuttle two, she hiked back down into the bowl and began a long counterclockwise circuit around the excavation. People working tended to fall into patterns, and her moderately-experienced eye could see most of the dig crew here were right-handed. All of the paths tended to circle to the right, to pass around the righthand – or western – side of the obelisks. So, keeping a close eye on the ground, she moved left, peering into the trenches, inspecting the gridding, generally being as nosy as possible.
The sun drifted with her, and the shadows in the excavation slowly lengthened. By the time she'd reached the far side of the bowl, the trenches were almost completely in the shade. A ladder let her climb down into one of the larger cuts and Gretchen paused, seeing something odd lying in a cross-trench from the main. She stepped closer, head dropping into blessed shade.
A cylinder.
She stopped abruptly, her boots skidding in loose gravel. Her heart was pounding. "Oh, Mother Mary! Wait a minute."
Gretchen padded forward and knelt down. A pulque can was lying in the trench, abandoned and forgotten by someone. None of our crew would be so sloppy, she hoped. Must have been one of Blake's security people. She started to pick up the litter, then paused, taking a closer look. What is that?
Crouching down, head almost on the ground, she adjusted her lenses to higher mag and gave the can – a Mayauel from the faded rabbit on the label – a careful inspection from one end to the other. Something odd had happened to the can. The bottom, in particular, seemed to have fused with the ground, or more accurately, the ground had grown up around the underside of the can. Under hi-mag, she saw thin shoots of a stonelike substance working their way up the aluminum surface.