by neetha Napew
Powers That Be
Chapter 1
Striding in the crowded processing center of Petaybee’s spaceport, Yanaba Maddock eyed the side door as a drowner would eye a drifting spar. Unobtrusively making her way to it, she hoped it wasn’t locked. It was, but the lock was not proof against the skills she had acquired in her years as a company soldier, investigator, explorer, training officer, and, most recently, long-term resident of a medical facility. Automatically checking to see if her activity was being noticed, Yana slid the door open just wide enough to accommodate her thin body. She paused to pull on her gloves: she had been warned in the briefing-and she always took briefings seriously-of the danger of bare skin sticking to frozen surfaces.
For a moment she leaned back against the slide panel, to secure it in case she had been observed. Then the cold air hit her. She knew from previous cold-weather training not to inhale the freezing blast that whipped around the corner of the building and slammed into her face.
“The temp-er-actch-chur of Planet, Terraformation B, commonly called Petaybee, at certain locations during certain points in lime during the winter can range as low as minus two hundred degrees fare-in-height,” the computer aboard the shuttle from ship to port had cautioned. “That’s cold, troops. Do not touch metal objects with your unprotected epy-dur-mus. Do not run, or the air will freeze into small icicles in your lungs and lacerate them. Wear or carry your winter gear with you at all times. Do not count on a nice warm vehicle for warmth. For one thing, there is a shortage of nice warm vehicles on Petaybee, because machinery that doesn’t freeze and crack in the extreme cold is expensive. For another thing, even the expensive equipment breaks down, and you may find yourself stranded. The tem-per-atch-chur at Kilcoole Space Base today is minus fifty degrees fare-in-height. Some of the locals have been known to regard this as relatively tropical by comparison with what they consider real winter. Bear in mind that summer to these same individuals consists of two months of fairly constant daylight as warm as fifty-five to sixty degrees above zero, still twelve to seventeen degrees colder than regulation shipboard settings of seventy-two degrees. So button up your outer gear, ‘cause the wind blows free, and take good care of yourselves, remembering at all times that your ass belongs to the company. That is all.”
Yana had smiled to hear the computer briefing given in the gruff voice and speech patterns of a senior NCO, but she was no more inclined to ignore the warning than she would have been had it been issued by a flesh-and-blood top sergeant. Minus two hundred, huh? Good thing she’d gotten here during a “heat wave.” Icicles lacerating her already trashed lungs would do nothing for her convalescence.
Fumbling with outerwear that had been broiling her in the facility, she pulled her scarf across her mouth, flipped the hood to her head, pulled it down over her forehead, which was fast becoming wooden with cold, and tucked the scarf securely up to her eyes before she tied the hood under her chin.
Cold though the air was, and despite a taint of overheated oil and space fuel from the snow-rimmed plascrete landing pad, the freshness of it-warmed by her breath as she inhaled through the muffling fabric-was clean! One of the small joys of her life were those first moments of breathing fresh, unadulterated, unrecycled air. the real stuff.
She inhaled through her mask, tentatively at first, because her lungs were still not working as well as they should-one of the reasons she was the perfect candidate for Petaybee in the eyes of her employers. Gradually she began to take deeper breaths; she wanted to flush the dead air of a spaceship out of her poor abused lungs. They would have even more of a chance to heal here in Petaybee’s unpolluted atmosphere than in the rarefied aisles of that medical complex back on Andromeda Station.
She took in one deep breath too many and started to cough, gasp, and choke until her eyes teared with the spasms. Panting with short chest inhalations, she managed to get control again. The tears froze on her cheeks and she brushed them away. Grimly she thought that you could have too much of a good thing-even air. And she had better get back inside: for all she was wearing garb appropriate to the new climate, she could feel her fingers and toes numbing. She spared one look at the horizon; the great bowl of a blue sky without so much as a defense shield over the spaceport, and the ice-covered land and wondered if she really had made the right decision.
Slipping back inside, she pushed the hood off, pulled down the scarf, and scanned her nearest neighbors. Only one of them seemed to notice that she had left and come back. He blinked and frowned before turning his attention to the screen at the far end of the long hall where the names of those to be processed were blinking. Y. MADDOCK was one of them.
She moved forward, squeezing past people until she came to the more eager layers of folk, packed tightly as they waited for release.
“Maddock, Y,” she said to the official, offering her plastics.
“ID,” he said without looking up from his terminal.
She extended her left wrist, and with rough fingers, he turned it so he could see it, bending her hand painfully.
“You’re cold!” He looked up now, seeing her as a person, not a number.
She shrugged. “Leaning against that door.”
“Humpf. Didn’t you attend the briefing?” He frowned. “Don’t touch metal ...”
“Even inside?” she asked with the innocent inquiring look she had used to flummox brighter men than this one.
He frowned, and then the terminal required his attention, her plastic having jumped out of the processing slot. It skidded halfway across the worktop before he caught it. Yana kept her face straight: he looked the sort not likely to appreciate chasing anything, much less plastic.
A slip of film extruded from the slot by her hand.
“That has your work number, which you will memorize, work assignment, living quarters, ration status, travel and clothing allowance, and the name of your official guide as well as his office hours. Your travel pack has already been delivered to your quarters.” Then he paused and startled her by smiling. “You can take one of the waiting vehicles outside the terminal. Major Maddock. Welcome to Petaybee.”
Amazed by both the courtesy and the unexpected smile, Yana thanked him and moved smartly out of the way to make room for the next person in line.
A translucent roof shield protected the area outside the passenger terminal. It was filled with the sounds of confusion and impatience as the processed arrivees, most of them lugging their precious 23.5 kilo personal-allowance sacks, searched for each other or for transportation.
“Yellow slip, huh?” someone said in her ear, pulling her hand down to peer at it.
The someone was a young girl, so bundled in furs that only her face was visible, and that slightly obscured by long wisps of fur and, possibly, her own hair. She appeared to be in her early to mid-teens; her keen gray eyes were alive with intelligence and interest
“I’m cleared for yellow, too,” the girl added, and her mittened hand shoved a plastic square under Yana’s eyes. The woman grabbed her hand for a longer look at the official-looking plastic. The girl didn’t resist, though her eyes widened slightly at the strength of Yana’s grasp.
The plastic-covered printed documentation that licensed Buneka Rourke to convey passengers in an authorized snocle within the environs of the port but no farther. There was a large A in the right-hand corner and a renewal date sometime later on in Petaybee’s year.
“How much?”
Buneka Rourke blinked and then grinned companionably. ‘From here to your place, it’s on the PTBs.”
“The PTBs?” Yana wasn’t sure she had heard correctly.
Buneka’s grin broadened, and her eyes twinkled with mischief. “Sure, PTB-the powers that be. Petaybee,” she adde
d. “You didn’t know that’s where this planet got its name?”
“The briefing said it was Planet, Terraformation B,” Yana said.
The girl waved her mitten dismissively. “They would manage to make it sound dull. But it’s really named after them-the Powers That Be that move us from A to B or Z or wherever they gotta plug holes or clean up disasters or fight wars. C’mon. Let me get you out of this mess and give you a proper welcome to Petaybee.” The girl tugged at Yana’s sleeve, pointing to a battered-looking but clean orange/yellow snocle with fluorescent numerals, MTS-80-84, that matched those Yana had seen on the plastic ID. But as Yana stepped off the curb, a big figure intervened.
“Yellow ticket? I take yellow tickets.” The man glared menacingly at the girl. “You doan wanna ride with this flitter-face. She turn you over into snow drift. No one find you. Yellow ticket deserves big, warm snocle.” He gestured toward a large, sleek affair.
“I’ve already-“ she began.
“Terce, she’s legally mine.”
“You ain’t cleared for yellows,” the man said, hunching belligerently over the girl. He was a tall enough man, but the furs made him even more bulky.
“Am, too.” She waved her ID at him; snarling, he batted at her hand, dismissing her qualification. “I got a passenger all legal, Terce,” she went on. “You weren’t even here.”
Yana deftly inserted herself between them and made eye contact with the intruder. “I’ve already accepted Rourke’s assistance, but I thank you for your willingness to transport me.”
“I gotta, dama . . .”
At first Yana thought he was swearing at her and then realized that he was bowing with great subservience. There was an edge of anxiety in his voice and manner.
“You’re safer with me,” the girl said, glaring such a challenge first at Yana and then at Terce that Yana sensed that more was at stake than just a fare.
“Look, girl, another yellow ticket.” Terce gestured toward a man whose yellow ticket was plainly visible in his hand, “you take ‘im.” Then he took a firm hold on Yana’s upper arm and began to swing her toward his vehicle.
Deftly, almost automatically, Yana disengaged her arm and then strode across to the battered little MTS-registered snocle.
“Dama, dama,” Terce cried, real concern in his voice.
Yana ignored him, lengthening her stride when she heard the triumphant exclamation from Buneka, followed by the sound of boots slithering across the snow mush behind her. Yana hit the door release on the passenger’s side, then paused a moment to catch her breath before she slung her sacks onto the rear storage shelf. Still chuckling over her success, the girl slid into the driver’s scat.
“You’d better button up. This thing takes longer to warm up than Terce’s fancy sleigh.”
“And I’m safer with you?” Yana asked at her driest, as she rearranged her hood and scarf and belted into the seat before slipping her hands back into the fur mittens.
The girl’s eyes crinkled. “Well, Terce is known to do ‘errands’ for folk. My hunch is he was there on purpose to collect you. If you’d wanted to go with him, you could have, of course, but you didn’t. So you didn’t know he was there to meet you. So ... you’re safer with me-especially the way he was acting. He’s not very bright.” Her remark was couched in a kindly tone but held a hint of caution nonetheless. She glanced over at Yana, her eyes bright, alert.
Well, Yana mused. An hour on the planet and intrigue starts already. Never a dull moment, no matter what the spaceflot about Petaybee was. PTB! Powers that be. She chuckled at the thought but let that also be an answer for her driver.
The chuckle turned into one of her coughing fits, and between spasms she fumbled in her sack for her bottle of syrup. She was suddenly weak with the effort it took to draw enough breath between explosions that threatened to blow her ribs apart. The fur mittens made her hands clumsy, and she almost dropped the bottle before she could peel a mitten from her shaking hand and get the plastic cap off. As soon as the syrup began to coat her pharynx, the spasm eased. She cradled the bottle in her hands, against her chest. The preparation had a lot of alcohol in it, but she still wouldn’t risk it freezing.
The girl slowed the vehicle and looked back at her with wide eyes. Poor kid looked as if she were wishing that she had let Terce take her fare.
“Are you-all right, Major?”
Yana gulped another swallow of the syrup, this time feeling the warmth spreading into the poisoned cavities of her damaged lungs. Every time she coughed, ;-he images flashed through her brain of the graphic films the doctors had shown her when they had explained why she was no longer fit for active duty. As if the fact that she couldn’t laugh or hoist a duffel bag without a paroxysm of coughing wasn’t evidence enough of her disability. Still, she was alive, which was more than the others were. She recapped the bottle, tucked it into her parka pocket, and pulled the mitten back over her hand. It was already going numb with cold. She noted with satisfaction, however, that there was no blood on either mitten.
Catching the girl’s anxious look, she said, “Don’t worry, Rourke, it’s not contagious. Took a little gas at Bremport Station was all.”
“From the sound of that cough, you must have had a nasty time of it,” the girl remarked, speeding up slightly again but proceeding more cautiously than before, as if afraid the jarring would set her passenger off again.
“You might say that,” Yana said, thinking of the others. The hell of it was, she had been through a lot worse in her younger days and had come through without a scratch. Bremport was supposed to have been a routine training mission-new recruits, a couple of them from Petaybee, she remembered. She remembered just about everything from that mission, over and over again.
Using the technique she had learned a long time before from one of her old sergeants, she switched her focus, letting her eyes rest on the panorama of blue and white nothingness, the featureless landscape soothing her, helping her blank her mind, the cold in the air matching the cold inside her.
Ground-hugging vegetation pierced lumps of snow with frozen spines. Then she noticed that the snocle track was on ground slightly lower than the rest of the terrain.
“You guys dig a new road here, huh?” she asked her driver.
Rourke snorted. “Not a bit of it. Do you think they’d be spendin’ money on improvements for the likes of us? This-is the river!”
“No kidding?” Yana looked out and down. Where the snow had blown away in one patch, she saw the translucence of powder blue ice. “Anybody ever fall through the ice?”
“Not lately. Even this late in the winter it’s still between minus seventy-five and minus thirty most of the time.”
“If everything is frozen, what do you do about drinking water?” Company leaders automatically considered such details.
“Oh, that. I’ll show you.” The girl grinned and continued on.
After a few moments the ground had more rise and fall to it. Beside it, stunted trees, rooted and branched in billows of snow, began appearing closer and closer together until they formed a sparse forest on either side of the snocle. The girl veered the machine over toward the trees, and around the next bend, Yana saw a little pavilion set up on the ice, smoke rising from a hole in the top. Rourke had been decreasing the speed of her snocle and now drifted to a gentle stop.
The tent shook slightly from within and what looked at first like a bear emerged.
“Slainte, Bunny!” the bear said with a wave, dispelling the illusion. The fur-clad man lumbered forward, lifting his great fur boots high above the snow. His face bristled with icicles from the ruff around his mouth and nose, which was only lightly frosted, to his beard, eyebrows, and mustache, which were thickly encrusted with ice.
“Slainte, Uncle Seamus!” The girl waved back and cut the motor. The man’s eyes flicked up through his personal icicles to glance at Yana, a searching look for all its brevity. “This is Major Maddock, Uncle. She’s going to be staying at Kilcoole.”<
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“Is she now?” He included Yana in his wave, and she nodded at him.
“Do you have some thermos or two for me to take to Auntie, since I’m passing her way?” Bunny asked.
“Now, that would be very good of you, Bunny. I’ve two now, and I’ll have more later when Charlie and the dogs come along. This dama doesn’t mind stopping on her way, does she?”
“Nah! She won’t mind. Will you, Major? You wanted to see how we got water. Come look in the shed.”
Moving a little more slowly than she would have liked, Yana climbed from the snocle. Out here, on the river, the cold immediately clenched its fist around her face and thighs, the only parts of her that weren’t encased in synfur. She hoisted the muffler around her nose, but the sweet smell of wood smoke still came through. She wondered if it would set her coughing again. But there was Bunny, encouragingly holding up the flap of the tent and pointing to the fire burning in a circle around the rim of a long black hole in the ice. An insulated container on a length of line stood beside the hole, along with two other containers, which Seamus now gave Bunny.
Yana took a couple of steps toward the tent before the smoke from the fires wafted toward her. She felt her throat seizing up and stepped back, silently cursing her weakness. How the frag was she going to survive on a cold planet if she couldn’t breathe in the presence of fire?
Bunny, her shoulders bowed as she hauled one of the thermoses with both hands so that the container bumped against her shins, nodded to Yana to return to the snocle. Yana was relieved not to put her lungs through any further ordeal. She turned with more enthusiasm than was prudent and her feet promptly slid on the ice underlying the thin covering of drifted snow. She placed her feet more cautiously then, and managed to make it back to the snocle without falling.
Seamus set the other water thermos in beside her and ran a mitten across his face, an accustomed gesture that dislodged some of his facial icicles. “Welcome to Petaybee, such as it is, Major. You need something, you just ask Bunny here.”
