Dark Ararat

“Do you know who did it?” Matthew demanded.

“Not for certain.” It was another calculated provocation, although he didn’t go so far as to favor anyone with a meaningful look. Matthew began to feel just as uncomfortable as his two companions.

“Where?” Matthew asked, anxious to have done with the conversation.

“Outside. I’ll take you.”

Matthew knew that Solari had been at the crime scene for most of the morning. He couldn’t imagine that there would be any useful forensic evidence left after a week of imperfect weather, but Solari obviously thought that he had found something significant—something that he wanted to talk over with the only person on the Base who couldn’t possibly have committed the murder.

“Okay,” Matthew said, brusquely. “Give me twenty minutes. Are you eating?”

Solari shook his head. “I took a packed lunch with me,” he said. “Thought I might be gone all day—didn’t expect to find anything so soon.”

Matthew turned to the doctor and said: “How’s Marya

“Better,” Kriefma

“I met one of the monsters just now,” Matthew reported. “Just a little one. Lurking in the vegetation—odd, that, for a creature able to fix solar energy, with no apparent natural enemies in the vicinity.”

“Its instincts probably can’t figure out that it’s in a safe area,” Kriefma

“I’ve only seen pictures of the predators,” Matthew said. “Things like big rats with crocodile snouts and things like frilly lizards. Have you ever seen anything like that in the flesh?”

“Nothing particularly scary,” Kriefma

While Matthew collected his meal, Ly

While Matthew ate, Kriefma

Once they were outside the bubble Solari led the way downhill, in a direction almost exactly opposite to the one Matthew had taken on his earlier expedition. They made more rapid progress, though, partly because flamethrowers had been plied with such reckless abandon that the way was clearer and partly because Vince Solari’s mind was focused on more practical matters than Ly

Come nightfall, Matthew thought, Solari’s surface-suit and IT would be working overtime on the bruises generated by his purposeful hurrying.

“Have you reported your find to anyone else?” Matthew asked him, interested to know how fully Solari intended to cooperate with Konstantin Milyukov.

“I dare say they’ll know as soon as you do,” Solari told him, not bothering to specify who he meant by they. He was assuming, of course, that their surface-suits might have been bugged in some unobtrusive ma

From the top of the mound that he and Ly

The route Solari took involved little actual climbing, but the penalty they paid for that convenience was that it was by no means straight. At these close quarters it was easy to see that the wall-builders had made their own provision for laborers to pass from field to field, equipping their citadel-fields with gateways whose gates had long since decomposed, but they had not taken the trouble to make arterial roads that radiated from the city proper like the spokes of a wheel. Perhaps that was because they were anxious that such highways might be too convenient for traffic coming the other way, Matthew thought—or perhaps it was merely because the endeavor had spread out in an untidily improvised ma

Some of the fields had obviously had blockhouses in the corners, perhaps to provide temporary accommodation, or to house sentries, or to store tools, or for any combination of those reasons. Others had had stone shelves built into the angles where walls intersected, but any staircases that had led up to the tops of the walls must have been made of perishable materials; there was not the least trace of any such structure now.

The walk was a long one—more than twice as long as the one Matthew had taken with Ly