Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  “University,” mused Hana, when Jenny didn’t reply right away, “Canfield. Human equation. On the Lamplighter team.”

  “Don’t mind her,” Nicole said while Hana was speaking, “she thrives on mysteries. A detective at heart.”

  “The answer’s obvious.”

  “Yes?” Nicole prompted.

  “Doctor, am I right?” Hana challenged. “Flight surgeon. Shrink in the bargain, I’ll bet.”

  “Aye. On all counts.”

  “To keep an eye on me?” Nicole asked.

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “Fucking Canfield.”

  “That’s uncalled for, Hana.”

  “That’s what you say. Does that make you Canfield’s pet spook, then?” she demanded of Jenny.

  The other woman bridled at the question and the way Hana put it to her.

  “Firstly, I’m nobody’s ‘pet’ anything. I’ve no notion why I’m here—in any context you mean—except perhaps for the fact that I’m bloody good at my job and the General thought I might be of some use. And possibly because I felt it would be an honor to work with the pair of you.”

  “I am not comfortable with being thought of in those kinds of terms,” Nicole muttered.

  “Get used to it, Ace,” grinned Hana. “The worst is probably yet to come. Speaking of which—are you seriously tempted by this cockamaime proposal?”

  “You prepared to dismiss it that easily?”

  “No problem—but then, I’m not at risk the way you are.”

  “Ramsey had a point.”

  “Nicole, forgive me, but this is no time to indulge your martyr complex. There are alternatives to the goals they describe; this one’s just top of today’s list. But I for one am not inclined to accept at face value something that puts you wholly at the mercy of a family of certifiable nutcases who bear you no love whatsoever.”

  “You think I am?”

  “I think you’re susceptible to certain kinds of enticements. I wouldn’t be surprised if Clan Cobri has a regularly updated copy of your psych file, along with every other scrap of data they can lay hands on about you, and that Amelia’s been told in copious detail precisely which buttons to push. I don’t like her, I don’t trust them, I am scared of this.“ She lightly rapped the tabletop with a knuckle, by a stack of data cartridges that had been left behind for them.

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Three, actually,” added Jenny, “for what it’s worth.”

  Nicole looked Hana full in the face.

  “I need your help,” she said simply.

  Hana responded with a shallow nod, followed by a slow smile, as though this was something she’d been waiting a long time to hear.

  “Well,” she said at last. “Canfield put the three of us together, let’s see what we can make of that.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  She doesn’t understand the power of the waves or the terrible force of the undertow that’s sweeping her steadily out to sea. She doesn’t know how to swim, but blind instinct prompts her to make the right moves. In smooth water, she might have a fair chance. But the tide is still in full flood, its current is too strong, the wave action—from a storm raging far out of sight beyond the horizon, whose fury never touched this coast at all—far too severe, quickly sapping both strength and will. Time and again, she sinks beneath the waves, until she fights her way back to the surface. It’s as though the water were a hunting pack—much like her own family—harrying and worrying at a healthy prey, wearing it down to the point where it simply hasn’t the strength to resist. She still refuses to admit it, but she’s face-to-face with her own mortality.

  She flew a dozen Swiftstar sorties in the ten days after they achieved orbit around Faraway, and looking back on it hadn’t felt more exhausted or more happy in her entire life. Colors and textures notwithstanding, sky was sky and ground was ground and she passed between them as though she’d been born to it.

  The Swift surpassed even her expectations, handling the heavy lifting tests—which climaxed with a full load of cargo and then passengers—as easily as the initial shakedown flights. It was a relief to put aside the cares and concerns of the last week and concentrate on the welcome, familiar stress of flying.

  She couldn’t sleep the first night she spent dirtside. It was like sitting on the Throne in SecCom, with the ship charging up about her to hurl itself headlong across the stars, only more so. She lay on her bed for what seemed like hours, almost giddy with the excitement of being here, her eyes wide, senses preternaturally alert as she just listened. She’d left the windows open; in the far distance, she could hear voices and remembered another night back on Earth when she discovered—much to her chagrin—precisely how far noise traveled on the high desert in the dark. The stillness was disconcerting; in space, there was always sound—beginning with something as basic, and essential, as the ventilation system. There, silence was a warning.

  That thought rolled her back to Lamplighter and she twisted on the bed and punched out the pillow.

  Still, sleep wouldn’t come, only now it was no longer from exhilaration. Which made her even more angry that this special moment had been ruined.

  She swung herself up and cast about in the darkness for shorts and sneaks, pulling on a polo and a sweatshirt as she stepped outside. Like the High Mojave around Edwards, this plateau was lousy at retaining the day’s warmth; the air had an edge to it that let her see her breath. She didn’t mind. It was a welcome relief from the canned, perfectly controlled climate aboard Constitution.

  There was no traffic this late, air or ground, not enough people on-planet, nor enough activity to justify round-the-clock operations over Faraway’s thirty-one-hour day. The landing field was mostly shadow, decorated by the boundary lamps that lined the roads and aprons, plus the day-bright floodlights to illuminate some of the parking revetments in the far distance. She could pick out the Swiftstar without any trouble, and the thought came unbidden that her plane made a temptingly perfect target. On a mostly empty planet, there wasn’t much need for security.

  A skeleton staff was on duty; everyone else—locals and visitors both—were enjoying the town’s hospitality. In many ways, Faraway was a resonant echo of life on the American frontier two centuries before, when long stretches of isolation were broken by the welcome arrival of a traveller from home. Starships were still the fastest and most efficient means of communication between systems, radio being limited by the speed of light. Messages sent wouldn’t be received for decades, much less their replies. Yet, along the same line, because starships themselves were still relatively few and far between—and the territory they covered expanding exponentially in literally every direction—those visits were also comparatively infrequent. Even scheduled flights couldn’t be guaranteed. A missed date could mean something ominous—as had happened twice since the colony’s founding, ships vanishing en route without a trace. Or merely that the vessel involved had been diverted to more pressing duties.

  Nicole thought while she stretched of all the elements of life she took for granted; even on the Moon, there was ready access to the latest releases in every aspect of the entertainment media: books, audio, video, computer. Not so on Faraway, or any of the other colonies. That was another reason for the starships’ importance. They weren’t required any longer for the necessities of life; Faraway was so well established it could survive on its own. They were like honeybees, enriching and revitalizing the plant with deposits of new and different pollen, broadening and deepening the cultural gene stock just as new immigrants did the biological.

  In some ways, these visits were a lot harder on the starships’ personnel. Only a comparative handful ever made it down to the surface, and that was generally restricted to the flight crews, plus various teams of mission specialists. There simply wasn’t sufficient equipment to accommodate everyone. Which in turn formed the primary rationale for the Swiftstar project, to find a more economical means of transit
from orbit to planet and back again. If the original Rockwell shuttle was envisioned as a space truck, Swiftstar was more along the lines of a bus—or better yet an off-road utility vehicle, as useful with passengers as cargo and intended to go pretty much anywhere.

  She felt as much as heard the rustling whip of wings slapping the air behind her and flinched as an owl swooped after something small and scampering too far in the distance for Nicole to see clearly. She heard a squeak that ended too suddenly, and watched the owl climb, silhouetted against the midnight starscape. Evidently, she wasn’t the only one thinking in terms of targets tonight.

  Both rodents and predators were imports. Nobody was quite sure how the one got here, or rather would admit to the responsibility. The birds came later, in an attempt to establish a biological balance before the place was overrun. According to the biologists, the birds were adapting quite nicely to their new environment, and expanding their hunting activities to include some of the native population as well. What would come of that, and of reports that the rodents were beginning to interbreed as well, no one was yet prepared to say. But quarantine protocols had been strengthened. Considerably.

  She set herself a gentle pace to start, following the road away from her bivouac and towards the flight line—no sense risking foolish injuries by striking out cross-country in the dark. The planet had three moons, but none could compare with Earth’s Luna; these were more of a piece, in size and orbit, with Mars’ satellites Diemos and Phobos. They didn’t have a significant effect on the planetary tides, and didn’t cast a whole lot of light. They didn’t have to, really; the stars did it for them.

  She’d never seen so many from within an atmosphere, and in truth had never breathed air so pure and clean. The most pristine spot on Earth still reflected the effects of two centuries of rampant industrial development, even if she couldn’t smell the pollution outright.

  She caught a glimpse of movement impossibly high overhead and thought at first it was the owl again or perhaps a hawk. Then she grinned, as the shape swiftly occluded one star after another in a straight line movement; it was only the Constitution, far enough out that it took the better part of a quarter hour for the great starship to pass from horizon to horizon. She stopped watching after only a couple of minutes; she was more interested in the background. The only moment she counted as more impressive was her first deep-space EVA, aboard Wanderer, when she stepped out into open space way beyond Mars and saw nothing in almost any direction around her save the Universe.

  She couldn’t help herself: she threw her arms wide and let out a howl of purest delight, same as she had the day she soloed. She spun herself around so violently she lost her balance and sat down hard on her tailbone. From there, she thought nothing of toppling full length on her back and staring wide-eyed at the celestial sights, grinning all the while like the classic village idiot.

  She loped along the main runway, a relaxed, steady gait that brought her from one end to the other in surprisingly short order and with no shortness of breath, despite the altitude, the plateau being almost a full klick above sea level. She turned to start back without a break—and at a faster speed—when she heard a sharp, high-pitched giggle from beyond one of the nearby dunes.

  Her first instinct was to mind her own business and keep going, but the woman’s voice was familiar, the male that answered—although the words were indistinguishable—very much so.

  She picked her way cautiously up the slope. The sand was hard-packed to the consistency of concrete—one of the main reasons for laying out the field here—but the occasional weather cracks, just wide and deep enough to catch an unwary ankle and wickedly difficult to see in the dark, made for dangerous footing. She had no illusions about surprising the couple; even though she was approaching from downwind, in that naturally still manner she’d somehow absorbed from the Hal she’d known, she assumed Raqella would hear her. Probably pick up her scent as well.

  Sure enough, the voices faded as she cleared the crest of the dune. Amy lay on her back, braced on both elbows, a miffed expression more than plain in the faint starlight. Raqella was facing the young woman, with his back deliberately to Nicole.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” was Nicole’s opening line, though she sighed inside at how lame and parental that sounded.

  Amy agreed with the thought.

  “To me,” she said, “it has a certain air of inevitability.” Her subtext was clear, get the hell out of our faces and leave us the hell alone. Nicole wasn’t about to. “Anything we can do for you, Major?” she asked, in open challenge.

  “It’s late,” Nicole said. “Raqella’s flying tomorrow.”

  “You’re up.”

  “Only for as long as it’ll take me to reach my room. And I won’t be in the air.”

  “Do you question my capabilities, Shea-Pilot?” Raqella demanded, features still in shadow as he trailed claw-tipped fingers along Amy’s arm, making her shiver in delight.

  “I require my personnel to be on a par with their equipment, if not better. If I have doubts about either, I’ll get a replacement.”

  Suddenly he rose, in the swift, disconcertingly fluid motion common to all the Hal Nicole had known—the least graceful among them making their most graceful human counterparts seem like lead-footed sluggards by comparison, a stark and absolute contrast that never failed to infuriate her. He faced her at his full height, his stance giving Nicole a flash of memory to their confrontation on the San Diego waterfront. Nicole’s body responded of its own accord, with minute adjustments of balance and bearing that cast a look of apprehension over Amy’s features, the beginnings of a realization—and a fear—that matters were on the verge of slipping out of hand.

  “You have no right to speak so to me, Waryk sk’nai!” Raqella spoke in Hal, using a term Nicole had never heard before. The tone was insulting, so she made sure to answer in English.

  “I’m a Squadron Commander aboard the Constitution,” she told him deliberately, “and Project Manager for the Swiftstar test series. You’re subordinate to me in both areas. That gives me the right. I think I know something of what you’re both feeling tonight—hell”—she tried a small smile in an attempt to ease the mood, though her eyes never left the young Hal’s—“it’s why I’m out here myself. That’s why I’m not making this an order, merely a suggestion. You show up in the morning ready to fly, all well and good.”

  She left the rest unsaid.

  She thought about what Raqella had called her all the way back. It was a burr under her skull that refused all her attempts at banishment as she slowed first to a walk and then a stroll, and tried to lose herself once more in the natural wonders that surrounded her. The sneer and the body language were clues, indicating a secret he was privy to that she wasn’t. But though she racked her memory, she couldn’t find a way to take her past the next step.

  It didn’t get any better in quarters, as she hunkered on her bed, a mug of steaming tea in hand and a plate of fresh-baked cookies close by, to stare at the screen of her PortaComp while it flash-scanned the Hal dictionary she’d built up over the past five years.

  “Sod,” she muttered at long last, when yet another marginal lead—and at that, the best she’d been able to manage—crashed and burned.

  Her head ached and her eyes felt like they were tucked snug into sandpaper-lined sockets. A good thing I’m not flying tomorrow, she told herself in disgust, or I’d be nailed by my own regs.

  She thought of pouring another mug, but couldn’t find the energy; instead, she gathered her comforter close about her and folded herself into the corner where bed met bureau, making a place for herself that was as much nest as cave.

  There was no sense of falling asleep.

  Her eyes popped wide, and closed just as quickly, as she tried to burrow her head beneath arm and covers in a desperate attempt to block out the sunlight streaming through her open curtains.

  She was sore all over, as though she’d aged a lifetime overnight, and not simpl
y from the miserable position she’d stuck herself into when she went to bed.

  “I’ll bet you have a story to tell,” announced Jenny with disgustingly good cheer on the flight line as Nicole hobbled gingerly out of the jeep.

  “And let me guess,” was Nicole’s reply, spaced between sips of tea, “you’re just the one to listen.”

  “Is that an invitation, then?”

  Nicole shrugged, narrowing her eyes behind the dark lenses of her RayBans as she took a preliminary look at the Swiftstar.

  “Didn’t see you at the party,” Jenny said.

  “Nope.”

  “Stayed to yourself, then?”

  “How was it?”

  Nicole started her walkaround inspection, Jenny obligingly following along behind. Nicole didn’t ask about Raqella; she was late, so she assumed he was already here and running through the on-board checklist.

  “The party? Not half bad, considering. Not in the class of a proper ceildh of course, but then what is?”

  Nicole allowed herself a smile of agreement. Her mug was empty, so Jenny—staying true to her public role as team dog’s-body—went to fetch a refill. She found Nicole on tiptoes atop the main undercarriage, glasses clenched between her teeth while she shined a flashlight into the recesses of the wheel well to examine the fittings.

  “Can you really tell what’s what by a gander at the outside?” Jenny asked.

  “Can you tell what’s what by tapping on my chest and feeling my wrists and ankles?”

  “You’d never believe how much.”

  “Same applies here. As without, generally, so within. Not a stone guarantee, of course, but a fair indication nonetheless.” She fiddled with a couple of fittings, satisfying herself they were snug and tight, and gave the tire an unconscious caress as she clambered down.