Timothy Zahn - Spinneret

"Very fair, Colonel," she said, both surprised and pleased. He was being reasonable about this, after all. "Thank you, sir."

His mouth quirked in a wry smile. "Just remember this warm glow when you're trying to function on four hours of sleep a night. Dismissed."

Not surprisingly, Dr. Hafner was waiting for her in the outer office. "Well?" he asked, getting to his feet.

"All set," she said. "He took the package pretty much as I'd presented it."

"Great." Hafner opened the door and they walked together into the hall. "So …

when do I get my flyer?"

"How are you on early mornings and long days?"

"Haven't had anything else in years."

"Okay. Have all your stuff out at Martello Base by oh-four-hundred tomorrow.

Can the two of us load it by ourselves?"

"We can if we've got access to a forklift." He gave her a quizzical look. "You're coming too?"

"I pretty well have to, since I'll be flying the thing."

Hafner stopped short. "You?"

"Sure. The Army gave a bunch of us a crash training course right after the Celeritas got shot at and they thought we might be heading into a war. I'm not very experienced, but I am qualified, and flyers are actually simpler to handle than normal aircraft. More automatic systems, for one thing."

"I've heard that." Hafner still looked unhappy. "Uh … look, I don't doubt that you're capable—"

"And if we don't do it this way, you'll just have to wait your normal turn," Carmen put in calmly, "because I can't shift around both a flyer and a regular pilot without flashing red lights all over my boss's board."

Hafner considered for a second, gave in with a wry smile. "Well, since you put it that way, I accept. See you at four."

The notice, stuck prominently to the Ceres bulletin board, was surprising in and of itself; but to Perez, its coauthorizing signature was even more unexpected. So Carmen Olivero had gone and gotten herself involved. He'd hoped his nudges would do some good, but he hadn't expected anything this fast. You see, Carmen?

he silently addressed her signature. Underneath all that cultural armor you're just like the rest of us. Hispanic blood does not thin with distance.

He read the notice again, more carefully this time. Meredith, at least, was sticking to expected form. The council was clearly being designed as a cardboard cutout, with a slightly louder voice but no more power than any ten citizens had right now. But that was all right … because eventually it would change.

Turning, Perez strolled toward the rec center, where other workers would be gathering after a long day in the fields. Ceres's fifteen hundred civilians would have two representatives on the new council … and one of those, Perez had decided, would be him.

Astra's sun was peeking over the eastern horizon as Carmen eased open the throttle to send the flyer drifting smoothly into the air. Hafner kept his eyes on the handful of displays and meters as she shifted from vertical to horizontal flight, but if the maneuver was in any way a tricky one, it wasn't apparent. On the contrary; the more he watched, the more it seemed that a bare handful of the dozens of controls were all she needed to guide the craft. He wondered what the others did, but their glowing labels were more confusing than informative. Eventually, he broke down and asked her.

"Most of those are used only when the flyer is in its spacecraft mode," Carmen told him, raising her voice over the low rumble of the repulsers.

"Ah." At least they wouldn't be needing that capability today, Hafner thought.

"Have you decided yet where you'll want me to land?" Carmen asked.

"If we have the time, perhaps we can circle the cone first. I need to find a good area to sample."

She nodded and for a few minutes neither of them spoke.

Looking out his window, Hafner let his eyes drift over the landscape. Just south of their path Unie was a collection of tannish blocks set on slightly darker tannish ground. Much farther to the south the white-edged peaks of the Kaf Mountain range provided only a slight contrast of coloration; and most of that, he knew, was due to shadows and other basically optical effects. No ferric red, no cupric green—the whole territory had all the washed-out blandness of a Hawaiian hotel beach. His eyes drifted ahead to Crosse … and narrowed a bit. "Carmen," he called, "can you slow down just this side of Crosse?"

She glanced curiously at him. "Sure. Anything wrong?"

"I think I can see the outline of a shallow circular depression between the river and the Unie-Crosse road. I want a better look at it."

"What is it, a dead volcano or something?" Carmen asked, shifting the flyer's course toward the area he'd indicated.

"More likely an old meteor crater," he said, peering down. "A little higher, please

… yes … yes, damn it. That's what it is, all right. Too circular to be anything else.

Thanks; we can go now."

The flyer tilted slightly to her side and he saw her take a quick look for herself before resuming their horizontal flight. "You sound annoyed," she ventured. "Are you worried about meteors hitting us?"

"Yes, but not the way you're thinking." He waved toward her window. "Teardrop Lake over by Ceres. If you look at it on satellite photos you can see that it's a circular depression that's been eroded by the rivers entering and leaving. The Dead Sea southeast of Olympus is the same thing plus what appear to be fault-line appendages. Even Splayfoot Bay shows a deep area in the center that's basically circular. This planet has been literally pelted with rocks over maybe the last half million years—not surprising when you consider how close we are to the asteroid belt here. So where's all the metal those meteorites brought down with them?"

Watching her, he noted with approval the furrowing of her forehead. At least she recognized the paradox there; some he'd talked to hadn't even made it that far.

"Well … could the Rooshrike survey data be wrong?"

"That's the most likely explanation," Hafner nodded. "The problem is that we've done our own spot checks since then. Our equipment doesn't have their halfkilometer range, but the chunk of rock that dug out Splayfoot Bay ought to have left some of itself scattered through the topsoil."

"Then maybe the asteroids that hit were just as metal-poor as Astra," she suggested. "If the whole system formed from the same cloud of dust … no.

Doesn't work, does it?"

"Not when we know the Rooshrike are mining metals on the first planet," Hafner agreed. "Besides which, some of the smaller asteroids were analyzed by the original survey team and turned out to have a reasonable metal content. No, whatever happened here happened only to Astra."

They rode in silence for the next few minutes. Ahead, the hazy cone of Mt.

Olympus gradually became sharper, the low angle of sunlight showing first the gross and finally the fine structure of its surface. Hafner watched with undivided interest, eyes probing for clues as to the type of lava that had formed it. The steepness of the cone suggested viscous lava flows, which on Earth would mean a predominance of andesitic rock. On the other hand, he could see little evidence of the surface characteristics that usually accompanied that type of lava. Still, if the volcano had been dormant for a long time, erosion would have altered many of the visual reference points. As with everything else in geology, there was ultimately no substitute for physically digging out the rocks and analyzing them.

"What about some weird process that breaks the metal down?" Carmen spoke up abruptly. "A nuclear fission sort of thing. Maybe it's some organism's way of producing energy."

"Chemical energy is a lot safer to work with," Hafner grunted. An interesting idea