He tapped up a schematic of the coverage afforded by the meteorological satellites the expedition had deployed in a long string around the planetary equator. The weather surveillance system managed nearly pole to pole coverage. "Good," he said with a trace of smugness. "Now show me what kind of video feed…"

More images flashed past on his displays. The peapods maintained an historical archive, which Hummingbird pillaged, looking for a highview shot of the base camp the day Russovsky delivered her deadly cylinder. A second later, the system chirped apologetically – the satellite array did not contain information older than a week. "Odd…" Hummingbird tapped up specifics on the Texcoco ISA-built satellites. "Ah, too much data to store locally." He queried main comp to see if there was an off-array archive. Moments later, an answer came back: a partial archive was maintained in crystal storage at base camp, in the laboratory of Smalls, Victor A., doctoral candidate, Mars Academy of Sciences.

Hummingbird nodded, glad the young man had taken proper care to protect his work. Seconds later, the main comm array had thrown a whisker to the base-camp station, and Hummingbird's search was causing dozens of pale firefly lights to wink on in Smalls's crowded lab. An entire wall of c-storage rippled awake in response to the tlamatinime's request.

On the ship, Hummingbird sat back, eyes closed, breathing steady, waiting.

"Gretchen? Are you awake?" Magdalena bit nervously at a length of metallic support strut, leaving dimpled marks along the black metal. "It's Magdalena, hunt-sister. Are you mating? Cleaning yourself? Answer, please!"

"I'm here," came the muffled reply. The vid showed nothing, only darkness. Impatient, Maggie dialed up the light amp and image interpolate on the channel. This revealed the matte surface of a sleepbag, which then split open to reveal the mussed, tousled head of a very sleepy Anderssen. "What happened?"

"I think…oh, a fine hunt! I think I've found ss'shuma Russovsky." Magdalena grinned tightly, careful to keep her teeth covered, but the pink tip of her tongue poked gleefully between her lips. "At least, I know where she was sixteen hours ago, when the sun came up."

"Okay." The image of Gretchen rubbed her eyes and a giant hand reached out to adjust the comm band so she could see Magdalena. "Tell me."

"I was trying to find Russovsky's mail – like you asked – and I couldn't. Very strange, but then a message processed through the Palenque main comm array – a message from Russovsky's Midge, from the groundside – and my watchers picked it up. Hunt-sister, the doctor didn't have any mail waiting for her because she's been picking it up all this time!"

Gretchen, wondering why her mouth tasted so foul, managed a "Huh?"

Maggie looked off-screen for a moment, her ears pricked up. "The Midge houses a comm array in the upper wing, a big, broad surface. A great transmitter and receiver. So Russovsky changed her messaging configuration here on the ship – I found where she broke into the system and tweaked some access settings – so her Midge could connect to the Palenque on a maintenance channel and transmit her messages. The burst I intercepted was big – because it's filled with video from the cameras on the ultralight – and she uploads every morning."

Gretchen blinked. "Wait – so she's keeping a record of where she flew during the day?"

"Better," Maggie grinned, and this time she didn't bother to hide her fangs. "She's transmitting all of her data from the geosensors on the Midge; each day she flies, she's mapping the planetary surface, taking gravity measurements, even spectroscope of exposed rock formations…everything she can pick up."

"Ah." Gretchen felt her mind begin to work, sleep-rusty gears ticking over. "But her data doesn't go through a known channel – and nothing that Clarkson would notice. So everything's stored in Palenque main comp?"

The Hesht's ears flicked and a queer, pleased gleam spilled into her eyes. "Not at all. The Midge sends the data here with a tail-twister of a routing header – notes on where the message should go, who it's intended for – to sit on the t-relay until main comm traffic is low. Then Russovsky's message wakes up and sends itself to Ctesiphon Station. She lets it break up into sections if need be, so if there's a lot of traffic, her entire message won't get through for a couple hours. But once at the big emitter on Ctesiphon, it gets forwarded all the way to the University of Aberdeen, on Anбhuac!"

"She's sending the data to herself, at home, in her lab." Gretchen made a face. Her tongue tasted strange. I am never drinking Blake's "special" vodka again. Ever. No matter how much he begs. "That's very clever. She's not paying for the transmission time, is she?"

Maggie laughed out loud, a rumbling, crackling cough. "The accounting system here, and on Ctesiphon, always allows a certain amount of synchronization traffic between relays. Each station has to identify itself and make sure messages are passing properly between them. Russovsky's data goes over in the checksum of the synchro packets, or attached to other messages. If anyone pays, it's the Company."

"Fine. Fine." Gretchen didn't really care about the technical details. "The comm array has to get a fix on her transmitter then, right?"

The Hesht nodded. "I have a fix, to the centimeter, of where she set down at sunrise today. She's flying tonight, I suppose, but when she transmits in the morning…"

"Tell Fitzsimmons and Bandao to gear up," Gretchen said, lying back down, the sleepbag helpfully curling up around her shoulders. "They need to be ready to drop shuttle one as soon as you've got a fix and pick her up. Bring her back to the ship. Parker and I will come up in the other shuttle as soon as we can."

Maggie nodded, but Gretchen was asleep and snoring softly before the channel flickered closed.

Hummingbird's eyes opened and he looked expectantly at his display. A moment later there was a chiming sound and a v-pane unfolded with the results of his search. Smalls had been capturing an enormous amount of data – the entire planetary surface in visual, plus air temperature and density scans – for weeks and weeks. Scanning such a volume, looking for the silhouette of an ultralight flying a low altitude, proved far more time consuming than the tlamatinime expected. Now he unfolded himself from a waiting posture and tapped the first of the search results.

A highview shot of a Midge sitting on the landing field at base camp appeared.

"No…" Hummingbird flipped through the rest of the results. None of them were useful, though each picture was – with clouds, dust and other interference scrubbed away – a fine picture of a Midge-class ultralight seen from above. "Strange. Why only base camp? Oh, I see…"

Smiling at his own naivetГ©, Hummingbird expanded his search criteria to include an aircraft in flight, one where the silhouette changed as the ultralight banked or turned, or the recorded image was only partial due to heavy clouds or sandstorms. The search started again and he began reciting a long memory chant to pass the time.

"Even if a man were poor, lowly," he sang, "even if his mother and his father were the poorest of the poor, his lineage is not considered. Only the matter of his life matters, the purity of his heart, his good and humane heart, his stout -"

Another chime interrupted, which made Hummingbird frown suspiciously. "That's too quick!"

He tapped up the image, expecting to find a sand dune or rocky flat. Instead, the glittering shape of an aircraft wing catching the sun was frozen in the satellite picture. Hummingbird blinked in surprise, then zoomed the image. And again. At first the image was blurry, barely the shadow of an angular shape against a field of shattered black lava, then the display panel kicked in and the view sharpened. The tlamatinime pursed his lips. He'd found an aircraft – but not Russovsky's ultralight – or one of the Javan Yards shuttles from the Palenque. Something else, something without Company markings.