The Last Hour of Gann (11 page)

“Mr. Yao was just talking about that,” said
Nicci, sitting gingerly in the grass beside her. “And he says there’s plants, so we should expect there to be animals who eat them.”

Sensible. Although by that logic, if there were animals who ate plants here, there were probably animals who ate meat, too
. Forty-eight unarmed humans made an awful lot of meat.

“But no one’s seen any?” Amber pressed,
already thinking that even if there weren’t animals, that was a whole new kind of trouble, because those MREs wouldn’t last forever and she wasn’t exactly seeing fields of wild corn and apple trees out there in all that grassy nothing. “Not even bugs?”

“
Well, yeah, bugs. The ground kind. And Mr. Yao says there’s a lake on the other side of the ridge.”

“
So there might be fish?”

“
I guess, but Mr. Yao says if there are animals, we might see their footprints and stuff down by the water.”

“Oh. Yeah, right. Makes sense.” Amber knew nothing about animals except the little she’d seen on television and in most of those programs, they wore clothes and talked.
Times like this made a girl wish she’d paid attention in Biology to something besides Trevor Macavee in the second row.

Nicci
drew up her knees and hugged them, shivering a little. They watched people mill around in the camp, opening packs, eating ration bars, lighting fires. Nobody seemed to be talking much, but no one was crying and no one was wearing that empty survivor’s stare. The outlook was just as bleak as it had ever been, but at least they had something to do.

That made her think of Jonah and
so she turned listlessly that way, seeing nothing but the ship like a guttering torch in the growing dark. She wondered if he’d organized all the people Scott had only half-convinced into being his search and rescue team. She wondered if they’d found anyone alive to save. She wondered who he’d roll around with tonight to help him sleep.

She wondered if she was doing the right thing.

“Commander Scott wants to send you back,” said Nicci suddenly, softly.

Amber rolled her eyes, once more firmly in this moment, on this hill. “Crewman
Scott can kiss my pudgy white ass.”

“He says there’s no room for stubbornness out here. He says if someone can’t do something to help, they need to get out of the way.”

“I was miles behind everyone else most of this damn day. I couldn’t have been more out of his way.”

But it bothered her. Because he talked a great line
and people listened. And applauded.

“What does everyone else say?” she asked finally.

“Nothing much. Except Mr. Lassiter said that Mr. Lamarc told them to go with you, not him, and Ms. Alverez said she didn’t see him pulling people out of the ship when we were first waking up so he should just shut up, pretty much.”

“I didn’t pull anyone out of the ship
either,” said Amber, startled.

“Yeah, that one lady. From the room next door.”

“Oh. Yeah. Lawsuit-Lady.”

“That was Ms. Alverez.”

“Oh!” Amber looked at the camp again. “Which one is she?”

Nicci
stared at her.

“I don’t r
emember what she looked like.” Amber hesitated, then admitted, “I don’t think I looked, you know? I was kind of…out of it.”

Nicci
frowned, but pointed. Scott, not quite at the end of her arm, immediately noticed and looked their way. Nicci put her hands back around her knees.

Amber glanced at her and uttered a huffy, humorless laugh. “What, are you
afraid he’s going to write you up for creating dissension in the ranks?”

“He’s in charge.”

“No, he’s not.”

“He says he is. No one says he isn’t.”
Nicci chewed at her lower lip for a moment, then lowered her voice to say, urgently, “And he really doesn’t like you.”

“He can suck it up.
We’ve got real problems to worry about. I am not in the mood to compete in his personality contest.”

“Well, Sabrina says—”

“Who the hell is Sabrina now?”

Nicci looked surprised. She raised her hand to discreetly point, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Over
there, with Lani and Rachel, see?”

Amber looked, but saw only a loose knot of people—Manifestors, indiscriminate to her eyes—sitting on the concrete bags to keep off the wet ground. “Which one? The redhead?”

“No, the…” Nicci hunched and whispered, “The black lady,” before nervously looking to see if she’d been overheard.

“I think she knows she’s black by now, don’t you?” Amber asked, smiling.

Far from returning it, Nicci recoiled with a look of embarrassed horror. And what had she expected, really? Neither of them had much of a sense of humor, at least not around each other. They were sisters; they loved each other, and nothing made Amber feel better than to know she was taking care of her sister, just as nothing made her feel worse when she couldn’t. Amber had fed her little sister breakfasts and dinners, washed her clothes, walked her to school, but they didn’t talk very much and they didn’t joke around even when they did.

“Okay, so who else am I looking at?” Amber asked, pretending to care as she looked back at the other people where ‘Sa
brina’ sat with ‘Lani’ and ‘Rachel’. “Do you know them all?”

“I think so.” Nicci hesitated a few glances that way, her eyes darting from face to face. “There aren’t that many.”

“I guess not.” But there was no guessing about it. Forty-eight people was nothing. It was less people than had shared a classroom with her in school, less than half of the number that worked with her at the factory, less than a quarter of those who had lived at the apartment complex. There was nothing amazing in Nicci’s knowing everyone’s name; it was, come to think of it, a little disturbing that Amber didn’t.

The wind blew.
Nicci sat and rocked beside her, hugging herself and rubbing at her sleeves. The ship burned.

“Do you think they found anybody?”
Nicci asked. “You know…alive?”

“I don’t know.” Amber’s gaze drifted up to the men’s dorm mods, still burning high and hot. “I kind of hope not. We may not have a doctor or a medico or anyone like that, so if someone’s hurt…and they’d have to be hurt…what could anyone do about it?”

Nicci ducked her head and rubbed her arms some more. “What’s going to happen to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think they’ll find the beacons?”

Amber glanced at the burning ship and away again. The sky was now completely black, but the
Pioneer
gave them more than enough light to see each other by, even at this distance. If there were animals, either they’d stay well away or they’d probably go investigate there instead of here. She wondered if Jonah was prepared for that. She thought he probably was.

“Amber?”

“Nicci, you were sitting right there when Jonah and I talked about this. You know what I think.”

Nicci
’s arm bumped hers. She’d started crying again, quietly this time. Amber watched Scott move around the camp—inspecting his troops, improving morale, being a dick—amazed that her sister could still have any tears left after all the crying she’d already done. They said catastrophe stripped away the masks. A person could be almost anything with enough time to prepare for the part, but it took a disaster to show the world who you really were. Maybe even to find out for yourself. And she sure didn’t need the ship to crash to know Nicci was a crybaby.

‘And I’m a bitch,’ she thought disgustedly, and held out her arm in a silent invitation for
Nicci to come in under it. “We’re going to be okay,” she said as they huddled together in the grass. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’ll be fine. I’ll take care of you, you know that.”

“I don’t believe you!”
Nicci sobbed.

“Oh come on,” said Amber, smiling to hide how deeply those surely thoughtless words
had hit her. “When have I ever let you down?”

“When you brought me
here
!” Nicci shouted, turning heads all around the camp. “When you pushed me around and made me come here! I
hate
you sometimes, Amber! I hate you!”

And with that, she shoved herself back and out of Amber’s stunned embrace, stumbling back to the group. Amber tried to follow, but her legs collapsed under her, all the hurt in the world not enough to undo that hellacious uphill hike. She had to sit and watch as the people at the fire took
Nicci in, patting at her back and rubbing at her arms and closing in around her until she was lost to sight.

Scott
looked over at her across the tops of all their bent, consoling heads. She couldn’t tell if he was giving her a commander’s frown of censure or just an asshole-smirk.

She turned her back on him, on
Nicci, on all of them. She watched the ship burn.

* * *

Nicci came back, of course. And there had even been a mumble of apology and lots of hugging, but the hugging felt forced and when it came time to make their beds, they made them well apart, even though sharing heat would have made more sense. The tent Amber had half-killed herself lugging up here had been given to Mr. Yao, partly because Mr. Yao had carried the much-heavier packs of rations and had already agreed to do it again in the morning, and partly because Scott decided he had the authority to pass out tents and was being a dick about it.

If it had been anyone else…but it was Mr. Yao, who had apparently been told during the many hours it took Amber to catch up that it was his tent all along, and so even though taking it clearly made him uncomfortable and even though he offered to let the sisters share it with him,
Nicci and Amber slept outside in the grass under the thin silver sheets of the laughably inadequate emergency blankets. Amber kept waiting for it to rain, since that would have perfectly frosted the shit-cake and some part of her was still tensely waiting for the other boot to drop, but it never did. If anything, the storm eased up a little and the night would have been quiet, except for the constant rattle of the wind shaking the tents and all those emergency blankets. Between that noise, the burning ship (and the smell that came with it, that horrible sneaky smell that was like burnt hair and batteries but was probably charbroiled people), and the aching of her overused muscles, Amber didn’t think it was possible to sleep.

But she did.

And in the middle of that first night, when she had been so sure that nothing could get any worse, Amber woke up to the most godawful howling roar she had ever heard or could have imagined. She was on her feet in an instant, aching muscles or not, and so, it seemed, was everyone else. Half a dozen filmy silver sheets went flying as the people who had been wrapped in them scrambled free to stand, helpless, and listen.

It roared again, this time in quick, forceful bursts, as if
God Himself were bent close to the ground and shouting, “Ha ha ha!” at them in an especially vindictive fashion. Then, quiet. They all looked at each other, waiting for the noise to be repeated, but the minutes dragged on and nothing happened.

“What the fuck was that?” Crandall asked at last.

“Sounded like a moose,” said a woman. Amber couldn’t see which one, but it didn’t sound like Lawsuit—like Ms. Alverez.

“It sounded like a fucking dinosaur!” Crandall corrected with a shaky laugh. “Jesus, all night long, I been thinking, ‘What next?’
Now I’m gonna be eaten by a fucking dinosaur. Why the
hell
did I join the Fleet?”

“The wind could be carrying the sound, right?” someone said. “From miles away, maybe.”

“It didn’t come from upwind,” said Eric. “It came from downwind. I don’t think sound carries against the current.”

A flashlight came on and there was
Scott, standing at the lip of the ridge and shining it down at whatever was on the other side.

“Are you crazy?” Crandall hissed, jumping to snatch the flashlight away.

Scott simply pointed back at the
Pioneer
, which was no longer going like a Roman candle but still glowed out strong like the dying ember she supposed it was.

“They can see us,” said
Scott. “Furthermore, the wind is blowing right across us and down this hill, so they can smell us too. As long as they can already see us and smell us, I’d just as soon see what’s out there, especially if it’s thinking about coming up here.”

He put out his hand. After a second or two, Crandall gave him his flashlight.
Scott switched it on and aimed it back down the ridge.

Amber couldn’t help herself. She limped over and looked with him.

“Go sit down, Miss Bierce,” he told her, sweeping the light back and forth over the dark water that was down there—the lake Nicci had mentioned—either looking for whales or having trouble remembering where the shoreline was. Although honestly, one was as sensible as the other. There was no law saying alien whales couldn’t roar and she sure as hell didn’t know where the shoreline was.