Attanasio, AA - Solis

"Mr. Charlie," Mei rasps, looking back at the twisted debris of the rover. She jogs to the wreck and finds the plasteel capsule nestled among tangles of shredded metal. Its surface is spalled and cloudy with scratches, but the case itself is whole. She picks it up and scrutinizes it, trying to see if the shock of the blast damaged the interior.

Buddy strides past, carrying Shau in his arms. The corpse's face is

powder-blue, the lips silvery white. "We'd better check Munk's rover carefully." Mei lifts her angry face to the pale rose sky and screams, "Raza!"

Nude sandstone walls and maroon monument rocks crown the cliff crest where the dune climber and the first desert rover have stopped. These are the ruins of

Sama Neve, a famous center of passage centuries ago, during the Exodus of Light, and Grielle believes Rey stopped to offer her this fabulous view. She speaks reverently, "'At last, I see the last.' That was first said here, Rey. Think on the freedom of-"

"Did you see that?" Rey asks, pointing down the long escarpment to the alkali basin where he spotted the sparkle of the exploding rover, "That flash?"

Grielle's dreamy gaze surveys the golden desert below and selects a glimmer from among the strewn boulders on the nearby slope. "Yes, what is it?"

Rey widens his eyes in mock surprise. "I think that was one of the rovers! It exploded!"

Grielle presses against the viewport, frowning to see what looks like a white blossom on the desert floor, it's a blast cloud of sand. "Those fools!"

"That damn jumper must have flooded the compression tanks," Rey says, doing

the same, reaching across the burned gash of the console and stroking the sensor pads that will flood the compression tanks. In the next few minutes the tanks will explode and Grielle will make her passage sooner than she expected. He's pleased with himself that he has at least arranged for her to do so in the presence of Sarna Neve. "I better take the dune climber down there and see if anyone can be saved. Stay here, and I'll call you if it's safe."

Grielle makes a feeble attempt to detain him, but he exits quickly and closes the wing-hatch after him. She is moved by his humane urgency and stands to watch him sprint up the salmon-colored rise of sandstone to the dune climber. He

bounds into the cab and starts rolling downslope, the big blue wheels scattering

gravel in fins behind him.

Less than halfway down the escarpment, the dune climber fishtails to an abrupt halt. The glimmer among the strewn boulders that Grielle had glimpsed earlier flickerflashes toward Rey. In the red dust kicked up by his hard stop, the disclike bodies, whirling fins, and raving mouth parts of the shreeks materialize.

The white tarpaulin, now peach-red with sand, pulls away under their biting frenzy, exposing the cumbrous crates in the carry bay. More rocks spit skyward as Rey swings the dune climber around and starts churning up the boulder-waned slope. The shreeks thrash among the crates with shuddering might and bang their

.pugnacious bodies against the spinning wheels. Splats of squashed shreek spin away in widening vectors, and Grielle, who is watching appalled, thinks Rey is going to elude them. She looks for the comlink to encourage him.

Then one of the shreeks slams into the cab of the dune climber, and the canopy roof wings into the air. Grielle's heart thumps, and she steadies herself with a bracing gust of degage. Only the olfact enables her to stand still and watch the dune climber weasel among the scarp boulders, scrambling back toward the ridge. She scans the burnt console before her, trying to recall how Rey drove this thing. She wants to go to him, to drive the shreeks off if she can. But the

array of sensor pads are just so many jeweled lights to her.

The dune climber disappears from Grielle's vantage. Four heartbeats later, her breath is snatched away when the climber shoots over the rim of the scarp and lofts into the air, wheels blurring. It smacks onto the road in front of the rover, toppling the crates from its carry bay under the shrill screams of its brakes.

Rey pulls himself from the cab, and Grielle opens the side hatch for him. Shreeks flap up from below, etched into the visible by veils of dust. And though they are thronging toward Rey, she stands in the doorway to help him, to sacrifice herself if necessary. Under the gaze of Sarna Neve and the hundreds of millions who passed here, she can do no less for so valiant a man.

But Rey barrels into her, frantically shoving against her, trying to reach the console and abort the flooding of the compression tanks. Grielle, however,

thinks he is eager to get her out of harm's way, for she can see the shreeks slashing closer. Their grinding jaws electrify hearing, sending hurting vibrations into the small bones of her head. She tries to help him by closing the wing-batch, but he hurls her aside the instant before she can reach the lever. In his obvious zeal to save her, he exposes his back. Grielle and he scream together as a flashing streak of fangs scythes through the hatchway and severs his ham tendons.

Grielle watches in rigid horror as Rey collapses across the console, blood smoking from his legs, the shreek gnashing loudly as its teeth crunch into bone. She can't breathe.

Wildly flailing at the console to stop the imminent explosion, Rey enters the stop sequence just as the shreek completes its bone-crushing clamp on his leg and hauls him howling from the rover. A magnetic wind of sheer terror whisks Grielle to the hatch lever, and she secures the rover.

Standing at the viewport in an aching twist of fright and shocked stupor, she observes firsthand the feeding habits of the shreek. They do not compete once the prey is seized. They float in a circle of quiet, shared ecstasy. Only the successful predator feeds. It hovers over the writhing body it has hobbled, swiftly scissors it into parts, and does not share a crumb of bone.

In an astonishingly brief time, it is done. Then, like a shift of wind, the whole shimmery school of them is gone, and no trace of Rey Raza remains but the smeared imprint of his last agony in the coppery sand.

Late in the day, with the bloated sun looking corrugated among the ruins of

Sarna Neve, Mei Nili and Buddy find Grielle Aspect sitting stupefied with

olfacts in her rover. While Buddy examines the battered dune climber, Mei shakes Grielle alert and finds out about Rey's heroic death. Grielle refuses to believe that Rey had anything to do with the destruction of the second rover, which killed Shau Bandar. "He sacrificed himself to save me," she whispers through her drugged torpor. "He could have fed me to them instead. I was ready to die. I

wanted it, but he shoved me back. He saved me."

The dune climber remains functional, and Mei programs the rover's computer to autopilot it along with the rover lugging Munk's body. Slowly, the caravan departs Sama Neve and trundles into the night. Ghostly vegetative blooms ripple on the sandstone ridges in a nocturnal wind-foxtail, bitter dock, cordgrass, and yarrow-the profuse flora of the spores carried across the shoreless dark from

the blue star that is Earth.

A few hours later, the water cycler in the pilot rover emits a raspy groan and cuts out. By dawn the blackglass viewdomes are foggy with exhaled moisture,

which Buddy and Mei carefully sop up with their scarves and squeeze into empty nutripouches. Mei retreats to the rover that is carrying Munk, but the water cycler there is dormant, its power cells drained by disuse because the rover has been emptied of air to carry Shau Bandar's frozen body. When Mei tries to hook the cycler to the engine's power drive, the circuits, already straining from the supermassive weight of the androne, shut down. For most of that day, Mei and Buddy struggle to revive the engine.