The sky was lightening by the time Yarnolio’s transport neared the coordinates. He and Helder were in a considerably better mood now, having heard from Base Control that the aliens up near Blacksun appeared to be friendly. They still knew nothing about what had happened in their skies, but it did seem that the right ship had ended up in pieces, which gave his team a renewed interest in finding their chunk of it. After all, how often did one get the chance to examine alien technology?
“We’re at the edge of the grid,” Helder said. “Altering flight path to the search pattern.”
Yarnolio watched a grid superimpose itself on his flight map, waited until they had reached the corner of it, and banked the transport around to follow the first transverse line. “On pattern,” he said.
Helder tapped a control. “Activating thermal scanner. Although I can’t think it would still retain heat after this long.”
“That’s what your eyeballs are for.”
“Yes, thank you for your much-needed advice.” Helder punched the com button and called back to their crew. “Everyone look alert back there. We’re starting the search pattern over the general coordinates, but this thing could be anywhere on these slopes. The Astrophysics Lab got us this far; it’s up to us to finish the job. Eyes out the windows.”
She clicked off and stared forward, then turned to look out her side.
“If this is the biggest piece, and it fell from our upper atmosphere, wouldn’t it have made some sort of crater?” Yarnolio had been wondering about this for most of their flight. “Or at least flattened a bunch of trees?”
Helder shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it disintegrated after it dropped off the scanner screens. Or maybe it landed in the bottom of one of these side canyons.” She pointed toward a narrow slot canyon branching off the valley they were currently crossing. “It could make a crater in there, and we wouldn’t even see it unless we flew right down the slot.”
“Great,” he muttered. “You know that’s what happened. We’re going to fly this whole damned grid and find nothing, and then we’re going to have to start eliminating those slot canyons one by one.”
“More flying, less complaining,” she said.
Two hanticks of mind-numbing boredom later, Yarnolio thought he had good reason to complain. Hunting for alien technology surely ought to be more exciting than this. At the beginning of their mission he’d feared for the Lancer’s Guards approaching that giant crashed ship, but now he envied them. They were meeting aliens and making history. He, on the other hand, was flying a cargo crate on a boring search grid and finding nothing.
The sun was well up now, which was both good and bad news. It made the search easier wherever its light reached, but the shadows it created were so dark by comparison that Yarnolio and Helder could see very little in the deeper canyons.
“Hold on,” said Helder. “Broken trees, bearing fifteen.”
Yarnolio looked in the direction she’d indicated. Sure enough, there were several broken trees, their freshly torn trunks gleaming against the dark green of the forest. And they were right above the vertical drop of a slot canyon.
“We’ll have to thread that needle,” he said. As he lined up his approach, Helder called the news back to the crew.
Yarnolio entered the canyon carefully, using his thrusters to bring the transport to a hover just ahead of the broken trees.
“Thermal scanners show nothing,” Helder said. “I knew they’d be useless. You’re going to have to take us down.”
“Of course, because all I wanted to do today was drop this crate into a canyon barely any wider than we are.”
“You complain like an old man.” Helder was peering out the front, as if the mere power of her will could light the shadows beyond their searchlight. “You fly like one, too.”
“Shut up and keep looking.” He watched the canyon walls slide by as they dropped deeper and deeper in, then checked his altimeter. They were down to double digits. He wasn’t planning to reach the singles. The way this canyon was narrowing, if they went too deep, he might actually wedge them in.
“Stop!” Helder cried. “There!”
In the searchlight dead ahead was a clear landing mark. But it wasn’t a crater. The flattened grass and brush in the center meant something large and heavy had landed at a relatively low speed, which was only possible if it had been able to control its descent. And the way the grass was blown flat all the way to the canyon walls…that looked like landing thrusters to him.
But that wasn’t the strangest thing.
“Where the shek did it go?” he asked in bewilderment.
“No way did that piece of junk get up and walk off by itself.” Helder sounded angry. “Somebody got here before us. Did Baskensteen give our coordinates to another team by mistake?”
Yarnolio angled the searchlight. “Helder…”
“Oh, shek,” she whispered.
A trail of broken brush and churned soil led away from the landing site, deeper into the canyon.
“It did walk off by itself,” Yarnolio said, dread coiling in his belly.
Helder was already activating the com. “Transport WSC813 to Whitesun Base Control,” she said, her voice admirably calm despite the fear he could sense rising off her skin.
“Whitesun Base Control, go.”
A flash of white turned the shadows of the slot canyon into blinding daylight, and both of them threw their hands up in front of their eyes. Yarnolio felt the air grow warm around him as a strange crackling noise filled his ears.
May Fahla guide and protect us, he thought.
The canyon lit up a second time when the transport and its crew exploded into thousands of pieces, none larger than a handspan. They drifted to the canyon floor, some still burning, as the echoes of the explosion faded away.
A whirring, mechanical sound replaced the echoes, punctuated by solid, deep thumps as the machine emerged from the shadows. Nearly as large as the transport, it moved on four thick legs that crushed brush and small trees beneath them. It stomped through the debris field without pausing, flattening what few pieces of the transport remained, and made its way toward the canyon’s mouth.