Lt. Leary, Commanding (32 page)

That was true beyond doubt. Maybe it was a whim of the weather rather than a variation in climate, but the air here was ten degrees cooler than it had been on Spires when they left this morning. This site was far from the coast, which probably made a difference also. And speaking of the site—

"Hogg, let's look at the ruins," Daniel said. There was high-definition imaging equipment in the kit Adele's servant, Tovera, had packed for the expedition, but for Daniel's initial survey his helmet's recording capacity would be sufficient. "Dorotige, come along with us. You've been here before, and none of our records mention the location at all."

"There's not a hell of a lot to see," Dorotige muttered as he slid across the seat. "God but it's cold!"

Patterns that Daniel had taken for mineral deposits on the rock were actually the stems of woody plants. They crawled across the surface because the wind would shear them if they rose any distance in the air. Their purplish leaves were as tiny as grains of rice.

"Some're up this way," Dorotige said, waving toward the hillside. "But they're all over the place, for what they're worth. It's just ditches in the rock."

He started up the slope. His foot slipped on bare stone; from then on he stepped on the flat mounds of grass that gave him some traction. He was wearing soft-soled sandals better suited for a drawing room than a wilderness.

Daniel thought about how long it must take plants to grow in this windswept aridity but didn't say anything to Dorotige. Besides, only the outer rim of the cushions was still alive; the centers were coarse gray stems.

"Here's one," said Dorotige, pointing to his feet. "Not much to come a thousand miles for, it seems to me."

"You got that right," Hogg said. He spat again, grimacing as the wind blew the gobbet back just short of his boot.

Daniel squatted beside the indentation in the rock, hoping to find some reason to disagree. He couldn't come up with one immediately.

So: there was a trough in the sandstone. It was straight, true enough, but it never got deeper than his index finger and its margins were rounded. Eight feet up it crossed another trough, shallower yet, at right angles. When Daniel held his head low to the ground he could make out a whole network of the markings, just as Dorotige had said.

"They could be footings for walls," Daniel offered. The patterns had been easier to see from the air, because the shadows thrown by the indentations were more obvious than the grooves themselves.

"
Or
they could be cracks that the wind routed out with sand," Hogg said. His education had been practical rather than scholarly, but there was very little new about the countryside an academic would be able to tell Hogg. "And anyhow, it didn't happen any time in the last couple thousand years."

His boot pointed to—but didn't touch—a shrub growing where troughs joined, its four stems writhing up the intersecting lines. "If this wasn't about as big back when they settled the planet, I'll never touch liquor again."

"I'm getting a jacket," Dorotige said. He stalked off, rubbing his hands together. Daniel ignored him, so Hogg merely shrugged.

Sun had the aircar emptied; Vesey was leading a section with buckets and shovels into the nearest ravine, searching for the water that was supposed to be there. They'd brought three days' supply in jerricans, but it'd be nice to have extra so they could wash.

Daniel stood, feeling momentarily dizzy. Squatting had cut off the circulation in his legs, robbing his brain of blood when he rose too quickly.

"This is fine-grained rock," he said. "I don't see any reason why it should crack at right angles the way it has. And granted that the sand has worn it—"

The aircar's drive fans whined, spinning up from idle; Dorotige hadn't shut the motors down when he landed. Daniel turned, frowning slightly. Sun and the other spacers were nearer to the vehicle, but they were upwind and probably didn't notice.

"Officer Sun?" Daniel said, the name cueing his direct channel to the warrant officer. "Did you order the local to move the—"

Dorotige slammed full power to his fans, sending the aircar downslope in a spray of grit. He kept it sliding only a handsbreadth above the ground so that surface effect supported the vehicle and as much power as possible went to accelerating its mass. The spacers shouted angrily, shielding their eyes as the car passed.

Hogg rolled his impeller's butt to his shoulder. His left hand gripped the fore-end while his arm stressed the sling to provide two more contact points locking the weapon on target.

"Don't shoot!" Daniel said. He knocked the impeller up with the edge of his hand.

The weapon's
whack!
punctured only the empty sky. The hairs on Daniel's arm stood out straight; the pellet's aluminum driving skirt, ionized by the flux through the barrel's coil windings, quivered like a blob of rainbow in front of the muzzle.

When Hogg's shot crashed out, Barnes and Keast opened up with their submachine guns. If they'd heard Daniel's shout (which wasn't certain against the wind), they ignored it in favor of the direct appeal of somebody else shooting.

Daniel saw two sparkles from the vehicle's quarter panel where ten-grain pellets disintegrated against the dense structural plastic. A swatch of hillside fifty meters from the car erupted in miniature dust devils. If the guard—no way to tell which one—had missed the same distance to the left instead of right, he'd have laced his burst into fellow spacers scrambling for their stacked weapons.

Hogg, his face as dark and stiff as an old boot, lowered the weapon across his chest in a carry position. He didn't look at Daniel.

"Cease fire!" Daniel bellowed on the unit push. He spread his feet and stood arms akimbo, hoping to dominate the situation by example since he was too far from the others to interfere the way he had with Hogg.

The aircar dipped behind a knoll too low to notice in the ordinary course of events. Daniel could still track the vehicle by the line of dust rising in a dull red haze.

"I could've taken the bastard's head off," Hogg said in a tight voice, still refusing to look at his master. "Easy as nailing a tree-hopper back in Bantry."

"I know you could have, Hogg," Daniel said quietly. "Let's go down to the others. They don't know what's happened and it probably worries them."

"
I
don't know what's happened," Hogg snarled. "And I don't know about worried, but this ain't exactly the place I'd figured to spend my declining years."

They started toward Sun and the others. Vesey and her team appeared at the lip of the ravine. The midshipman's pistol, the only weapon among the four of them, was in her hand.

A mile from the site he'd marooned the Cinnabar spacers, Dorotige lifted the aircar from the nap of the earth. It was a black dot against the pale sky. Hogg paused.

"Bastard's going straight away so I wouldn't need to lead him," he said. "I could still . . . ?"

"Yes," said Daniel. "And if you brought him down, how are we better off? I don't imagine he intended to kill us or he wouldn't have waited for us to unload all our equipment and provisions."

"
I'd
be better off knowing the bastard was dead," Hogg muttered, but he knew it wasn't an argument he'd win with his master. He didn't push beyond the bare comment.

Daniel could be as ruthless as was necessary to safeguard his mission and his crew. If he didn't care to kill for no better reason than anger, though . . . well, that was his business. There was nobody on South Land to overrule him.

Sun already had the satellite radio out when Daniel and Hogg reached the intended campsite. It was part of the gear the Captal had supplied with the aircar and driver. Adele could have adapted one of the corvette's own units, but it was simpler to borrow a radio keyed to the planetary frequencies.

"I swear I tested it before we packed it aboard, sir," Sun said miserably. "It's dead as Todd the Founder, now."

"I'm sure you did, Sun," Daniel said. "It was my mistake not to expect sabotage."

A wry smile lighted his face. "And of course, there was a satellite communicator as part of the aircar's commo suite if we needed a backup."

He glanced around the semicircle of his subordinates. They straightened and tried to look unconcerned as they met his eyes, all but Barnes. The big man had turned his back shamefacedly as he reloaded the submachine gun he'd emptied without—or against—orders.

"All right, spacers," Daniel said. He saw his subordinates through the mask of the terrain display projected onto the inner surface of his visor. "We've been left here without communication. I assume the intention is to keep us—"

To keep Daniel himself; though he couldn't imagine why. The rest of the party were top spacers, but the
Princess Cecile
could certainly operate without them.

"—out of the way for reasons that aren't clear at present. Our food is RCN issue, so we'll have no difficulty there for at least a week. The water we've brought should last as long if we're careful. According to the background Officer Mundy prepared for me, some of the vegetation here is edible."

Though Daniel for one would have to be damned hungry to get up an appetite for lichen soup.

"Vesey?" he said. "What's the situation for water locally?"

The midshipman looked down in horror at the pistol she still held. In squeaky embarrassment she said, "Sir! We found water a few inches below the pebble surface of the ravine's bottom and just started filling our containers with osmotic lifts. It, ah, tasted all right. Sir!"

"Very good, Vesey," Daniel said. He deliberately turned his head so that Vesey could holster her weapon out of his sight.

"Spacers," Daniel resumed, "we've been left some three hundred miles to the north of where Lieutenant Mon will expect us to be. That's my fault also. I think there's a fair likelihood that the people who marooned us here plan to pick us up again in the future."

Daniel felt a grin form at the corners of his mouth. That provided a good reason not to shoot down the Captal's aircar, though he knew his decision had nothing to do with reason.

"I don't know that's their plan," he continued, "and in any case, they aren't people we could trust."

He grinned more broadly. He didn't even know who they were with certainty.

"We could hike overland to where we were supposed to be," Daniel said, "but I believe there's a better option. A hundred and fifty miles to the north of us is a navigation beacon for orbiting starships. With a little luck, we can rig that to summon help from Spires."

"By
God
we can!" said Sun, looking cheerful for the first time since he'd found the radio was dead. His training to repair electromotive weapons as armorer gave him more hands-on skill with electronics than Daniel and Vesey had gotten at the Academy.

Daniel looked at the sky. The sun was midway to the western horizon. "Hogg," he said, "break up what we need for the march into loads we can carry. Food, water, tools. One tarp for shelter. We'll leave an arrow of rocks on the ground to indicate our direction of travel if anyone comes back for us."

"How about guns, sir?" Sun asked.

Daniel looked at Hogg and raised an eyebrow. Hogg rubbed his mouth with a knuckle, considering the spacers. "Two impellers," he said. "Sun, you carry one, I'll have the other. The officers . . . ?"

He looked at Daniel and raised an eyebrow in turn.

Daniel unsnapped his pistol, holster and all, and laid it on the rocks at his feet. "Quite right, Hogg," he said. "Our enemy now is weight, not anything we can shoot."

"For now it is," Hogg said in a musing, almost cheerful, tone. "But when we
have
got back, then I've got some ideas about the next thing we do."

From context, that had to be
"
camp,
"
not
"
can't.
" Adele adjusted the character recognition parameters on her personal data unit, then used it to rescan the document's obverse. The machine whirred softly as it worked.

Adele stretched, wondering how long she'd been here in the attic of the Civil Government Building. The museum and library in the basement would have been a disappointment if she'd had any real expectations. She'd gotten a feeling she couldn't have explained when the museum's volunteer director, a retired ship chandler, mentioned the dead storage for items that weren't worth displaying, however.

Felt the thrill of the chase, Adele supposed. She visualized Hogg beside her in the dimness, waiting in perfect silence for prey to step into his sight picture. The thought made her smile, but there was truth in it nonetheless: every line of work has its tricks, and the people who know their craft very well always have an instinct that goes beyond the available evidence.

The data unit's display suddenly changed from opalescence to projected text. Moments before, about twenty percent of the document had been garbage; now less than half of that amount remained as a blur beyond analysis and reconstruction.

THE DAY AFTER THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN TYRFING, I LEFT THE CAMP AND PROCEEDED NORTH AS BEST I COULD JUDGE BY THE SUN. ANY NAVIGATIONAL MATERIALS FOR THIS GODFORSAKEN PLACE HAD PERISHED WITH THE SHIP'S COMPUTER DURING THE CRASH. . . .

The attic was musty, which was actually a good thing from the standpoint of this document's survival. It was written on leather, and now that she'd read much of it Adele had begun to wonder about the source of that leather. The ink came from the berries of what the writer called the Finger Bush. Adele couldn't match the writer's cursory description . . . THE HEIGHT OF MY FOREARM, WITH BRANCHES LIKE FINGERS AND FRUITS OF A SULLEN YELLOW ON THE TIPS THEREOF . . . with any plant in her database, but she knew she wasn't competent to direct the search for botanical answers.

The attic had a line of resistance lights in the ceiling, but the only two still working were on the far side of the big room. That didn't matter enough for Adele to get the bulbs replaced since she had a handlight and the data unit's display was self-illuminating. It did mean that when someone's body filled the square opening of the trapdoor, the dimming light attracted her attention as the squeaking of the ladder moments before had not.