Freedom's Landing (33 page)

“Call me Joe. Anything's better than Francis,” he said, giving Sarah a mock glare for her introduction. He spoke in a slightly nasal tenor voice which seemed to have a lilt of quiet laughter to it. He was tall and lean, with sun-creased eyes, an open face and smile, and dark hair growing gray at
the temples. One hand kept going to his head as if to adjust a missing hat. The gesture developed into a scratch of his skull. “Stockman—I know a bit about plants.” He had a sling tucked in his belt, a blanket pouch that bulged with pebbles. He sort of leaned against the three light lances he was armed with. They had, Kris noticed, metal tips. My, she thought,
the Arsenal is improving, too!

“Anyone know where we're bunked?” Kris asked.

“Zainal knows.”

“I lead, you follow,” Zainal said, pushing himself off the wall and moving off, past the hospital cave.

Kris wondered if he was annoyed that Mitford had given her the comunit. His expression did not give her any clues.

It was more a dugout than a cave, but it would shelter them from the evening shower and the colder winds that now blew during the night. There was just room enough for six bodies, but there were hooks for hanging and even a ledge.

“Rather snazzy,” Kris said. “Did Zainal tell you our mission?”

“More or less,” Joe said with a grin.

“You don't mind a Catteni patrol leader?”

Joe's eyebrows raised slightly and Sarah gave her a sharp look.

“Well, now…”

“Zainal here leads,” Kris said firmly. “I'm signals,” and she tapped the comunit.

“Gotcha!”

“I need a bath,” Kris added, carefully stowing the map case and the hand-held on the ledge. She turned to Astrid. “You coming?”

“Wash?”

“That's what we call it,” Kris said with a grin, easier now she'd made her point, and turned to Sarah.

“Had one. I'll get our grub. Smells good. C'mon, Joe, Oskar. Don't take too long,” Sarah said to the bathers.

“You better believe it,” Kris replied, and then, with Astrid on her heels, retraced her steps to the cook cavern and then down to the lake.

Astrid had no problem with cold-water bathing but then, if she was accustomed to saunas in Norway, she wouldn't be. But the temperature did not encourage one to dawdle and they were washed, dried, dressed, and on their way back to their quarters about the time their evening meal was ready.

“I do miss a beer,” Joe said plaintively, sopping up the last of the gravy from his bowl with his bread.

“I miss a cigarette,” Sarah said.

“I, too,” Astrid said with a smile, and translated to Oskar. He raised both hands skyward in longing. “You know plants?” Astrid asked Joe. “Find us one like tobacco.”

“Now there's a right good idea,” Joe replied. “Do my damnedest, I will.”

EACH MORNING KRIS CHECKED IN AND USUALLY
spoke to Mitford, giving him an all-clear. Each evening, around the fire, she got the others to help her add the terrain to the map they had covered that day. The fourth day they came upon another mechanical garage and spent the day dismantling it. Kris added that detail to the map with a certain amount of pleasure.

Joe Marley pushed back his nonexistent hat, scratched his scalp as he viewed his first mechanicals. Oskar, examining the first large harvester (Kris thought last out, last in) rattled off a long sentence to Astrid.

“He want to see it work,” she said, eyeing the large mechano dubiously.

“Maybe next year,” Kris said airily, “if we decide to put 'em all back in operation. If there're any with full parts by then.”

Zainal had already unfastened the solar panels on the top of the garage. Then he went after the flying-dart dispenser. Leon had asked particularly for them to collect any they found, for the anesthetic.

“Oskar asks how machine go with no wheels,” Astrid said, peering under the skirt of the biggest farm machine to check on that lack.

“On an air cushion,” and Kris mimicked the sound and the method.

Oskar nodded approvingly, still walking about the mechanical-beast. He also examined the flying device, carefully, since Kris warned him about the darts peeking out from the leading edge. Oskar seemed to approve most of the harvester design. Then made a roller-coaster motion with one hand and said something to Astrid.

“His farm is on hill. This thing,” and she kicked at its flange, “fall over,” and Astrid demonstrated something losing its balance and tumbling downhill.

Joe had moved to the storage areas, hunting for something.

“They left no tools behind them. These things self-repair?”

“We saw some working on others,” Zainal said and stepped up to the face of the harvester to start removing its solar panels.

“Oh, my word, this planet's odd,” Sarah said.

“You can say that several times,” Kris agreed. “They'll want panels and storage batteries back at the camp, or wherever. There's quite a herd of them here.” She peered into the shadows of the garage to the dimly seen forms parked there.

“Could we bed down here tonight?” Sarah asked with such a lack of expression that Kris almost grinned.

“I think so,” she said. “I wouldn't mind being out of that wind for a night, myself.”

“There're rocksquats back aways…” Sarah said, picking up her weapons.

“Kris, go with her,” Zainal said when the woman started off on her own.

“I can handle myself,” Sarah said indignantly.

“You go
with
,” Zainal said. “This planet has dangers. Kris knows dangers.”

“Yeah, but I don't hear as well as Coo,” Kris said, carefully setting down the comunit and the map case.

“Is he always like that?” Sarah asked Kris when they were out of earshot.

“Like what?”

“Don't bristle,” Sarah said with a grin. “He's not half-bad
for a Catteni. Not that I've met that many. But I heard…” and she let her tone rise up, a subtle prompting for Kris to expatiate.

“As Catteni go, he's pretty good,” Kris said noncommittally. “And he's saved a lot of folks.…”

“Oh, my word! You don't need to defend him to me. I came to on the outside of that bloody field and the guy next to me was being chewed up. I would have been next but for you stomping about like a brumby. Anyway, it's only good sense to go out
with
someone. Believe me, you do where I come from!”

They came back with rocksquats and some of the tender-fleshed little avians, brushwood, and a pile of droppings from the next field over. They had spotted only distant fliers but Kris pointed them out and told Sarah how to avoid becoming a meal.

“Are they after one now?” Sarah asked, squinting at the aerial menaces.

“Who knows?” Kris didn't particularly want to find out. “Now, if you were back on Earth, you'd probably jump into your four-by-four and go investigate.”

“Probably, but we're not on Earth now, are we?” and there was a world of regret in her tone.

“Sorry,” Kris said in a rueful voice. She hauled her gaze away from the distant avians and they walked on in silence for a while.

They reached high ground, where Sarah stopped and looked out over the vista of neatly squared, hedged fields and sighed. “Oh, my word! My da would go spare. And no one is in residence?”

“Haven't found any
one
yet. And that's why we're dismantling the garages, to sort of give notice.”

Sarah's eyes bulged. “You mean you
want
to find out who made those…machines?”

“Did anyone tell you about the ship that collected the harvest?” Kris grinned down at the slighter woman, the braces of rocksquats swinging from the stick she carried over her shoulder.

“I heard something—a ship as big as a city?”

“Small city,” Kris said with a laugh.

“You
want
to go on it?” Sarah's eyes went wide again but from respect.

“Not me, personally,” Kris replied, though if Zainal were involved in the adventure, she'd probably be right there with him. And he probably
would
be in the boarding party. “It'd be interesting to see what species set up this planet, made it self-sufficient, self-repairing, yielding so much
food…”

“Food?”
Sarah gulped and a brief panic almost made her drop her stick.

“That's what this planet does—makes food—and we don't know for whom. Or what. Except that they're probably omnivores like us.”

Sarah gulped again. “I hadn't thought about that aspect of it.”

“Well, it's easier to concentrate on making out day-by-day at the moment,” Kris agreed.

“Yeah, there's that all right,” she said as they came around the bend of the smooth-domed rock that housed this garage.

The others had dismantled what could be taken back to the camp for recycling. Oskar had shown himself particularly adept with the disassembly and the others had started to defer to him. As he worked, he asked for English words for various items and cheerfully muttered them under his breath, committing them to memory. Joe was almost his equal but then, he said, from the time he was old enough to lift a screwdriver, he'd been taught how to do repairs on his father's sheep station.

“You're looking at a heap of future hand-helds and other useful gadgets,” Joe said, gesturing to the neatly stacked things, including wires, connectors, linkages, and all kinds of curious gadgetry that had been inside the mechs. “A DIY's treasure trove.”

“Would you know how to make something out of this?” Kris asked.

“Depends,” Joe said cheerfully, “on what's needed.”

Zainal came up then, Kris' comunit in his hand. “You are asked to call home.”

“E.T.?” Kris asked with a grin but only Sarah and Joe caught the reference. She shrugged and tapped out 369 and a strange voice answered.

“Worry here.”

“Worry?”

“Ah, I'd be speaking to Kris?”

“You are, and you'd be Worrell.”

“Since I landed here, it's been worry, miss, so 'elp me. Report?”

She gave it to him and he expressed pleasure in the discovery of yet another garage and its reusables.

“Mitford's all right, isn't he?” she asked before she signed off.

“Never better,” Worry said and even over the line his voice sounded sardonic. “A truly amazing man.”

“No sign of any fly-bys?”

“You'd be recalled on the double if there were!”

“I can believe that!”

There was a laugh at the other end and then Worrell signed off with a reminder to register the approximate location of the new garage on the map. Zainal assisted her, as he was able to give her the relative distances from their previous camp and what he called a good guess as to the contours of the day's travel. Although Kris knew her legs could testify that they'd traveled far that day, her legs only knew they'd traveled, not how far uphill and down.

*   *   *

THE NEXT NOON THEY REACHED THE TOP OF A
high ridge and saw the unmistakable shine of sun glinting off a large body of water. Large enough so that a farther shore was not discernible even from their vantage point. Then, to their right on the shoreline, the obvious square outlines of an unnatural formation bulked large.

“A place for boats? They fish, too?” Astrid asked, shielding her eyes with one hand.

“Could be. They'd hardly let the wealth of a sea just sit there without harvesting it,” Kris said.

“Too right,” Sarah murmured, also peering ahead. “Would it be a salt sea?”

“We'll find out,” Joe said.

“Zainal?” Kris asked, since the Catteni had said nothing but was staring hard at the building.

“We go careful. Fishing year long.”

“True, but how could a machine fish? I mean, the sea doesn't follow any program, does it? Storms and stuff…unless they can control tides as well as the rain. Not that I wouldn't put it past them,” Kris said, mildly bitter.

“They do not control us,” Zainal surprised her by saying. “Tell the others.”

“About the flying darts and stuff?” She did and then turned back to Zainal. “However, if there are machines, surely they'd be specialized for use in the water. That building seems to be right on the edge. I don't think we have much to worry about them charging inland at us.”

“Famous last words?” Joe said, nudging her with an elbow and grinning.

“I hope not. One trip to an abattoir is quite enough.”

“Canning factory is what this'd be,” Joe said, still teasing.

“Hmmm.” Then Kris giggled. “Imagine him in a sardine can,” and she tilted her head irreverently at their patrol leader, still looking intently at the building.

“We go slow. We do not approach until second moon-rise.…”

“If you say so, boss,” Kris said flippantly.