"Are not valid aboard this ship," Magdalena hissed, body stiffening. "This is a civilian ship, not Fleet. Our salvage papers have been properly filed. You are our guests."
The peripheral vision of a Hesht happens to be particularly good, which let Magdalena keep an eye on both Parker – who had shrunk down behind his console with a waxy, distressed look on his face – and upon Fitzsimmons, who had anchored himself just inside the doorway, his back to the wall, fingertips on the grip of his sidearm.
"Our ship-den is in your debt, Isoroku-san," Maggie said, struggling to rein in her temper. "Your efforts to repair the engines are greatly appreciated, but we will not abandon our pack-leader."
The engineer looked to Fitzsimmons, who raised an eyebrow in response and shrugged. Isoroku's face screwed up in a bitter grimace. "What can you hope to do, if something happens to the judge and your 'pack-leader'?" Before she could reply, the engineer's nostrils flared minutely and he gave her a searching, sideways look. "How could you tell if they were in danger?"
"In just over a seven-day," Magdalena said, changing the subject, "Anderssen and the eldest-and-wisest will have returned to the observatory base camp. They will need to be picked up by a shuttle, yet we must be quiet in retrieving them." She looked curiously at Parker. "How far away is the Cornuelle?"
The pilot shrugged, spreading his hands. "No idea. They went 'dark' before reaching the asteroid field and we haven't seen a sign of them since. But if they are searching the belt, they must have moved further away from their point of arrival, which was two days at maximum acceleration from Three a week ago. I'd guess an intercept time of at least four days."
Magdalena shook out her shoulders, watching the engineer closely. She was sure the human male could estimate distance and speed as quickly as the pilot. There was just no reasonable or inconspicuous way for the Cornuelle to make the retrieval pickup. After a long moment, Isoroku's bitter expression grew worse, as though his face had been pickled in yee juice.
"Your 'pack-leader' has a plan?"
Magdalena nodded, swallowing a grin. "She does. We will pick her up – very quietly, very softly – in eight days."
"What if the Cornuelle – or one of her shuttles – arrives at the same time?"
The Hesht spread her hands, claws politely retracted. "Then we let long-spear-pack lift the wet cubs from the river and later, when we are all denned on Ctesiphon and fat with meat, we raise cups in their honor. But if they do not come, then Palenque-pride will be waiting and will snatch the drowning from the current and slip away, padding feet soft in the grass."
Isoroku's grimace did not waver, but the bull-headed man looked sideways at Fitzsimmons again. The Marine pursed his lips, tucked a wad of gum into his cheek and said: "Looks bad on the record, Thai-i, if you lose a judge by accident. There're not so many of them, you know."
The engineer's color deepened and he gave Parker and Magdalena a tight, angry stare. "I have no desire to see the tlamatinime or Anderssen-tzin die," he said, biting out each word with a click of his teeth. "Yet these orders were given for a reason. You are putting the lives of everyone on this ship at risk. You should consider what will happen if they die, if we die, or if something worse happens because of this course of action."
Magdalena stared back at him, a dangerous glitter in her eyes. "I will not be foresworn in my duty to the pack-leader, carver-of-stone."
Nodding sharply, Isoroku pushed away and sped off down the accessway. Fitzsimmons looked after him with a troubled expression, but then followed. He did not look back. Magdalena turned around in the circle of her nest once, then twice. Parker started to say something, but she hissed at him and he slunk off, avoiding her eyes.
Males, she grumbled to herself, feeling sulky. Her claws shredded the blanket. Useless copper-stinking males. Bah!
Later, when she had verified the locations of Isoroku, the Marines, Parker and Bandao on the surveillance cameras, Magdalena restored the v-panes showing the communications stream from Russovsky's Midge. Unfortunately, several of the peapod satellites had burned up in the atmosphere, reducing her 'eye' to a bare three orbital cameras. With such a reduced capacity to track and interpret the transmissions from the aircraft, she'd downgraded the feed to burst traffic, sending only compressed voice logs from the aircraft comm. She fretted about losing the video, but there was nothing to be done.
"In flight again," she muttered, watching a plot of the aircraft creeping across the vast curve of the planetary surface. A projected vector arced south-southwest. "Toward the observatory base. Hrrrr… three days at this rate, maybe four."
Checking again to make sure she wouldn't be disturbed, Maggie began listening to the latest set of voice recordings. After an hour, she gave up, rubbing sore ears. Philosophy…kittens complaining about the food! They must be bored down there, just flying all night.
The Hesht flipped quickly through some secondary data which had come up with the burst transmission, just making sure both aircraft were in good shape. As she did, a log section highlighted itself and chimed for attention. What's this? A leak?
"Parker," Maggie growled into her throat mike, "I need you to look at something."
"On my way," the pilot replied, sounding groggy and irritated. Maggie glanced over at the surveillance camera and her whiskers twitched to see the human male shuffling out of one of the cabins used by the scientists. His patterned shirt was on backwards. Turning her nose politely in the air, Maggie routed the log information to his navigation console and sat back, staring at the huge red disc of the planet filling the main v-pane.
A moment later, her head tilted to one side in confusion. "Where did that come from? What an odd color. Ah…" She opened another private channel to the crew's quarters. "Mister Smalls," she asked in a very polite voice. "Could you join us on the bridge?"
In the Wasteland
A pair of glittering white contrails made two rule-straight lines against the velvety darkness of the Ephesian sky. Both Midge s hummed along, wing surfaces finely tuned to squeeze as much lift as possible from the thin atmosphere, ice crystals spiraling out behind them. In the Gagarin, Gretchen was letting the comp fly, her attention turned to the geologist's travel logs. Their flight path had carried them out over a truly vast desolation, leaving the uplands of the Escarpment far behind.
Gretchen looked over the maps one more time. Russovsky had marked them up with a variety of notes and scribbled amendments. Not all of them were in Nбhuatl or even in Norman. Anderssen scowled, trying to make out a note marking an area they would fly over near dawn if they held their current course. What is this? Old Russian, maybe. She scratched her jaw thoughtfully, trying to remember how to read the blocky letters. Her grandmother had some books…thoughts of childhood yielded nothing but a memory of pine-smoke, nutmeg and pumpkin. Checking her comp found at least a phonetic alphabet.
"B-r-i-l-l-e-a-n-t," she spelled out, rather laboriously. Russovsky's handwriting was not the clearest in the world. "Or…brilliant. Hmm." What does that mean? Well, something she saw from the air. Something very bright – perhaps even visible at night. "Hummingbird? Are you awake?"
"Yes," came the answer – and the nauallis, for once, did not sound half-asleep.
"I'm looking at Russovsky's maps," Gretchen said, taking a moment to eyeball the horizon and the ground below. Sand. A barren flat covered with faint linear shadows. Anderssen grimaced, looking ahead. The field of pipeflowers disappeared rather abruptly into darkness. "And we've two options to reach the base camp. We can keep on this heading and enter an area she has marked 'brilliant' or swing north to follow a section of uplift."