Spinneret

"Great. Well, if that's the worst goof the engineers made when they laid out this place, I guess we can live with it."

"At least we've got the fertilizer to spare." Brown was looking curious. "You expecting to find Captain Kidd's treasure or something hidden in the hinterlands?"

"What? Oh—the flyers? No, I just thought we should do some low-level surveys of the territory around the settlement."

Brown shrugged. "We've got cartography-quality photos for about a hundred kilometers around us. What more are we likely to need?"

There was a faint whistling noise, and Meredith looked out the window in time to see the two sleek flyers shoot by and head east toward the cone of Mt. Olympus in the distance. He'd fought the budgeteers tooth and claw to get a half dozen of the Ctencri-built craft assigned to Astra, and considered himself fortunate they'd only whittled the number down to three. Though primarily for blue-sky use—their plasma jets utilized atmospheric oxygen in burning the fuel to preplasma temperatures—the flyers were equipped with a self-contained oxygen supply that enabled them to reach low orbit, which meant they could serve as extra shuttles in an emergency. "Suppose," he said to Brown, "that there are colonies of spores or something out there, dormant now but ready to grow if and when the soil's metal content should jump—say, if one of those asteroids circling a million kilometers away comes down. Some of our fertilizer's bound to be blown off the fields, and if it starts something growing I want to have some 'before' pictures available."

Brown whistled under his breath. "I never thought about that," he admitted. "I guess that's why I'm in charge of runways and spaceports. Straightforward stuff."

"Actually, I can't take credit for the idea, either—it was the biology people who came up with it. When you think about it, the situation's analogous to desert ecology, except that here it's trace metals instead of water that's missing."

Meredith paused as the faint sound of a sonic boom wafted in through the window. "Sounds like that last shuttle's coming in."

Brown hauled himself to his feet. "Yeah. I'd better take a quick look at how the unloading's going and hurry all the hovercraft back to Martello. If your terminals are on-line by the time we've got the inventory list I'll send it through; otherwise, I'll bring you a hard copy later."

"Fine. Make damn sure we've got everything before you let the Aurora leave."

"Right." Brown saluted and was gone.

Picking up the top printout, Meredith turned to the last page and sca

President Allerton was a hundred percent solid behind the colony and always had been; but it was a handful of shortsighted congressmen who held Astra's umbilical. They obviously considered the whole thing a UN plot to drain the United States of manpower and resources and had adjusted the colony's budget accordingly.

Laying the printout aside, Meredith picked up the next one from the pile. The months of logic, persuasion, and arm-bending were behind him now, and there was nothing more to do but get Astra ru

And with that settled once again in his mind, he got to work.

It was just over an hour later when his phone buzzed with bad news. "Flyer Two has gone down, Colonel," a tense-sounding lieutenant reported. "Somewhere south-southwest of Mt. Olympus, we think."

Meredith felt a shiver go up his back. Near the volcano? He threw a quick look out the window as he headed across the room, but there was no sign of any smoke rising from the distant cone. "What happened?" he asked, throwing open the door and hand-signaling his aide to get the car.

"We're not sure, sir. We got just a fragment of something about the repulsers going crazy, and then they were cut off."

Damn unreliable alien technology. "Are any of the normal planes in service yet?"

"One of them is, sir."

"Put a medical team aboard and get it in the air. Have them pick me up east of Unie—they can land on the Unie-Crosse road. Where's Flyer One?"

"Heading toward Olympus, sir. It was over the Kaf Mountains south of here when Two went down."

"Cancel that. Have One return to base immediately."

"Yes, sir." The phone went dead for a few seconds: the lieutenant on another line.

"The Cessna's being wheeled out now, Colonel. They'll be leaving in five minutes or less."

Lieutenant Andrews already had the car ru

We'll be waiting a couple hundred meters outside town. Let me know immediately if Two makes any response."

The medical team, it turned out, was u

Meredith walked carefully over the crash site, his stomach sore with the ache of tight muscles. The flyer had gouged a furrow perhaps a hundred meters long, scattering pieces of itself along the entire length, before coming to rest as a mangled pile of metal and plastic. The crewmen, similarly mangled, were discovered still in their cockpit.

It was midaftemoon before the crash specialists finished their survey and returned to Martello Base. "Near as we can tell, Colonel, all the repulsers just seemed to quit at once," the captain in charge of the team told Meredith. "We'll know more when the electronics people finish with the stuff we brought back."

Meredith nodded, gazing past the man as the Cessna was wheeled back into the hangar. He'd come here with the medical men and bodies earlier in the day, knowing he would simply be in the way at the crash site and hoping he could get some work done while the experts sifted through the rubble. The tactic had been only half successful; his mind had understandably refused to concentrate on inventories. "Any ideas as to why the repulsers should do that?"

"None, sir. I'd go so far as to say it should be impossible. They run off of three completely independent systems."

"The radar showed they were going pretty slow when it happened. If just the underside repulsers went out, would they have had time to switch to forward motion?"

"They should have—they were high enough and that maneuver's programmed into the on-board. And if they had tried that and simply not made it up to speed in time, they would have hit a lot harder than they did." The captain shook his head.

"All right," Meredith said after a moment. "Get busy on that analysis; I'm grounding the other two flyers until you find out what went wrong."

"Yes, sir. I'm … sorry, Colonel." Saluting, the captain strode off toward the hangar.

I'm sorry, too, Meredith thought as he turned and trudged toward the docks. Their first full day on Astra, and already he'd lost two men. That's really showing the scoffers, Meredith. For an encore, maybe I could shoot myself in the foot.

Three of the five hovercraft were bobbing gently beside the dock; Meredith passed them up in favor of a small motorboat. Casting off, he headed at half throttle toward the narrow entrance to Splayfoot Bay. By now the death certificates would be waiting on his terminal at Unie, and his stomach tightened anew at the thought of filling them out. He'd never been able to stoically accept death in his commands, not even as a line officer in the Honduras conflict where he'd faced it every other day. His years of desk riding, he was now discovering, hadn't made him any better at seeing human beings as faceless numbers. Damn the Ctencri, anyway, he thought, twisting the tiller hard as he steered around a half-submerged rock. If it turns out to be a manufacturing fault, I'll twist their silly crests together.