by KATHY OLTION
“Thank you, Doctor,” she said.
He couldn’t help admiring her as well, as she stepped past him. She looked radiant in the early morning light streaming in through the windows. Her light blonde hair glowed like a halo around her, and her smooth skin and slender face gave her a delicate, almost fragile appearance.
“How’s, uh, how’s Reynold this morning?”
“He seems fine. I made him go to school today, but I’m going to tell his teacher to keep an eye on him just in case.”
“That’s a good idea. We couldn’t find anything wrong yesterday, but something made him feel bad.”
“I just hope it’s not contagious. I don’t want everyone in the entire school coming down with the flu.”
“They won’t,” McCoy assured her. “But even if they did, I’m sure Dr. Neville could handle it.”
She nodded. “I’m sure he can, but I have to say I’m glad to have Starfleet’s best medical officer in town as well.”
“What?” McCoy said in mock surprise. “Is he here, too? This town’s got more doctors than a golf course on Wednesday. Good thing I’m headed into space again soon, or next thing you know there’ll be lawyers.”
His joke didn’t have quite the effect he’d hoped for. Lilian dropped her basket, scattering peppers all across the floor. “You’re leaving?” she asked.
There were maybe a dozen people seated at various tables, and two servers in white aprons behind the counter across the room. They all looked up at the noise, then looked away as McCoy set down his basket and began to gather up the peppers. “Not the whole ship,” he said. “Just me, and only for a few . . . well, I don’t know how long it’ll be, actually. Probably a few weeks.”
She bent down next to him. “A few weeks. Where are you going?” She didn’t sound all that relieved at the news.
“Just a little scouting mission,” he said airily. “The captain thinks it’s time we called on our neighbors and checked ’em out up close.”
“I see.” They stacked the peppers back in her basket, and he helped her to her feet again. She held onto his hand a moment longer than necessary. “Be careful.”
“Well, now,” he said, “I always am.”
“Good.” She turned toward the serving line, where she set the peppers on the counter. “I’m sorry,” she said to the servers, “but they’ll have to be washed again.”
“That’s all right, honey,” said the older of the two women. She narrowed her eyes and added, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I have,” she said, turning away.
McCoy set his basket on the counter beside hers and followed her to the door. “I’m sorry. I brought back bad memories.”
She shook her head. “It’s not your fault. You’d think after this much time I’d be able to get over it.”
They walked down the corridor to the front door, and he followed her outside. “You don’t just ‘get over’ the loss of a husband. It can take years to even accept it. You’re coping quite well under the circumstances.”
“Am I?” She stopped and looked up at the eastern hillsides, still in shadow this early in the morning. The sun shone directly into her face, but she didn’t even blink. “I sometimes still feel Tom’s arms around me at night. When I’m in a noisy room, I hear his voice among the others. When Reynold pops around a corner, I see Tom’s face first. Is that normal?”
“For you, it apparently is. Everybody handles grief differently.”
She turned her face toward him, and for a moment her pupils were tiny pinpricks before they opened up. “If this is ‘handling it,’ then I’d hate to watch somebody fall apart.”
Her words hung between them like thick fog in the morning air. McCoy cursed himself for a fool. He should have seen this coming, but he had been so impressed by her fortitude that he had completely missed the warning signs. She wasn’t working through her grief; she was overworking herself to the point of exhaustion so she could forget.
“You should take some time off,” he said. “Go visit one of the other settlements, or—”
“I don’t—”
“Or just stay at home and read if you’d rather. But you should set aside some time for yourself. You haven’t had a spare moment since you got here.”
“I don’t want a spare moment.”
“Tell me what you want, then.”
She started walking toward the school again.
“I’m serious,” he said, keeping pace with her. “You know better than anyone else what would do you the most good. Think about it. What do you want?”
She stopped so quickly he nearly ran into her. She took a deep breath, then said, “I want to go home. Coming here was a mistake, and staying here is an even bigger one. This place isn’t just dangerous; it’s deadly. It’s one big natural disaster after another, from the olivium in the moon to the weather. I’m tired of watching everyone I care about die one by one. I want to go home.”
“That . . . could be arranged,” he said slowly. “If that’s what you truly think best. It wouldn’t be a comfortable trip, but you could probably hitch a ride on an olivium freighter.”
“And be attacked by pirates the moment we crossed into unguarded space? No, thank you. I’ve had my fill of that.” She ran a hand through her hair and said, “I guess what I really want is to already be there. Or better yet, to have never come here in the first place—as long as I’m asking the impossible.”
“Going home isn’t impossible,” he said as they started walking again. “But you should think it over carefully before you make a decision one way or the other. Make sure it’s what you really want to do. Make sure you’re going toward something and not just running away.”
“Doctor, I’ve been going toward something all my life. I wanted to be there by now, but that something keeps changing, keeps moving out of my grasp. The irony is that I had what I wanted all along and didn’t realize it. Now part of what I had is permanently lost.” She crossed her arms and hugged herself in the chilly morning air. “I’m sorry to have unloaded on you like this, but you did ask.”
“Yes, I did,” McCoy admitted. “I won’t badger you about it, but I want you to think about this while I’m away. When I get back we can talk some more. In the meantime, why don’t you give yourself a break? Take a few days away from the school and find something that you like to do and haven’t done in a long time. Relax and enjoy yourself.”
She gave him a look that said, “Easy for you to say,” but before she could protest, he said, “Uh-uh. Those are doctor’s orders.”
“Yes, Doctor,” she said. Her face softened and she added, “I’ll look forward to your return. Maybe you can have dinner with us?”
“I’d be delighted.”
She turned away from him and walked toward the low, brick schoolhouse. Several children were playing tag on the hard-packed playground, their laughter and squeals piercing the morning air.
McCoy watched until she disappeared into the school. The gnawing in his gut was partially the effect of having one of those difficult discussions that doesn’t seem to have any good solution, and partially from anxiety over his upcoming mission with Scotty, but there was a third component he could not only identify but cure fairly easily: he was downright hungry. As he returned to the cafeteria, he wondered what his chances were of sweet-talking one of the cooks into making an omelette with some of those fresh tomatoes and peppers.
Chapter Seven
IT WAS AMAZING how quickly a mine could change the look of a place. Even more so when the whole place was a mine. Deloric sat by the tiny window of the shuttle and watched the devastated landscape of the comet slide by. They’d been slicing away at the seemingly endless carbon-dioxide ice for at least four days. Now, he could see that the constant work by hundreds of miners had carved away one whole face of the comet.
Halfway through, he thought. Four more days of cutting, and then what? He still had no clue what this was all about.
Terwolan sat behi
nd him, her booted foot pushing against the back of his seat in a constant rhythm. He found it both annoying and comforting. Annoying that he had to put up with that kind of distraction and comforting that someone he knew was close by. She had no more clue to what was going on than he did. Somehow that helped soothe his irritation. At least he wasn’t the only one in the dark here.
The shuttle landed with a thud as its gravity skids locked onto the ice. Deloric could see the workers from the previous shift gathering to board the shuttle once his shift cleared the airlock. There was something different about the way they stood, waiting to get on board, but he couldn’t put a finger on what it was.
With heavy sighs of resignation, the miners inside the shuttle rubbed their eyes and adjusted their ears one last time before latching down their suit helmets for the duration of the shift. Deloric found that while he didn’t like not being able to touch his head for hours at a stretch, the suit had benefits other than the obvious one of keeping him alive in the vacuum of space. For one thing, he only had to smell his own recycled air. For the duration of his shift, he was free of the stink that occurred when too many hardworking bodies lived for too long in too small a ship.
He switched on the suit’s power pack and tested the lamp and comm units. All working. He was ready to fling more ice into space.
But as he descended the shuttle’s ramp and headed toward the tool locker to get his energy pick, the project overseer stepped up to the group. “Never mind the picks and jets,” she said over the common frequency. “The last of the ice got sent off about midshift. Team leaders, go to channel two.”
Deloric reached over to the control pad on his left wrist and keyed his radio to the private channel. A dozen others did the same. Terwolan and Nialerad stood there beside him, waiting for him to relay their orders. He wondered what they thought he learned about the project during these beginning-of-shift briefings, and whether they would be amused or alarmed to learn that he was just as ignorant as they.
When the team leaders had switched over, the overseer said, “The rough work is done. We’re installing the disruptor now.” She gestured over her right shoulder toward the center of the comet’s flat face. Deloric could see a hole carved there, one big enough for ten or fifteen people to huddle in if they didn’t mind working close together. In the middle of the hole stood a turret gun from a Kauld battleship. What were they going to do with that, defend the universe’s biggest snow fort? From whom? Who would want it?
He itched to ask, but instead waited for more instructions.
The overseer said, “Teams one through thirty will make a topographic survey of the exposed face, finding the lowest spot in each sector. Teams thirty-one through fifty-five will sink pylons into the ice inside the central crater and fuse them in place while teams fifty-six through sixty attach the disruptor to those pylons, mounting it so that it can be raised and lowered as well as rotated all the way around. We’re going to slice a thin layer off the face at a level just below the lowest point. We want those pylons solid, and we want the disruptor absolutely stable when it makes the cut. We want the exposed face to be perfectly flat when you’re done.”
Deloric looked out at the ice. It extended for three or four rho, far enough for a person on the opposite edge to be a mere speck. The miners had followed survey lines as they removed the carbon dioxide blocks, but they had still left behind a rough surface crisscrossed with gouges and cuts. There were knee-deep valleys where overeager crews had dug deeper than their neighbors, and there were voids where pockets of methane ice had boiled off from the heat of the mining activity. He spoke up. “If we cut deep enough we can take care of the surface irregularities, but what about the voids? We’ve been hitting those all the way through. There are bound to be some at whatever level we make the cut.”
The overseer said, “Fill those in with waste material from the part we cut away, then make one final pass to polish it flat. We’re talking optically flat here. Deviation of half a wavelength of light or less.”
“Half a wavelength?” he said softly, awed at the idea of smoothing something this big that precisely. “What for?”
“You don’t need to know.” Her tone of voice made it clear he shouldn’t have even asked.
“Right. Sorry. We’ll make it flat.”
“Good.”
She reached out to her arm and clicked her radio control back over to the common channel. He did the same. “All right, people, get to work.”
Deloric’s team was number twenty-three. He switched his radio to the team’s private channel and said, “We’re surveyors today, marking low spots. Terwolan, you take the rod. Nialerad, you set points and record their elevation. I’ll run the level.”
“Oh, sure, you take the cushy job,” Terwolan said.
He knew she was just kidding, but he didn’t know how to answer her except with the truth. “I take the job with the most responsibility. That way if we mess up, they only shout at me. You want to swap places and get into the loop?”
She snorted. “Hah. They don’t pay me enough to be responsible.”
The three of them walked over to the tool locker, their footsteps slow and deliberate with only the gravity boots to hold them to the ice. They had taken their turn as surveyors before, so they already knew what to do without further instruction. Edging around a stack of paint drums that hadn’t been there yesterday—silver, Deloric noted—he picked out a level from the shelves of equipment, looking for one that had less dings and wear-and-tear than some of its neighbors. Nialerad and Terwolan didn’t seem to care as much about the condition of their tools. They just grabbed for stuff—a mallet, a bag of stakes, a datapad, and a graduated range pole. He was about to tell Terwolan to get a different rod since the one she snatched was bowed, but attitude or not, she was an observant worker. She sighted down its length before heading out, quickly saw the flaw, and replaced it.
Deloric conferred with the other team leaders, and they decided to divide the surface of the comet into thirty pie-shaped wedges, one for each crew. Everyone headed out to the middle to start, kicking off and drifting over the ice rather than trudging along its surface. They traveled in a close pack, always within reach of someone else in case someone drifted too far from the ice to reach it with a gravity boot.
As they approached the crater with the disruptor in it, Deloric realized just how big the gun was. The business end was as wide as his body, and the accumulator was easily three times his length. This was a heavy assault weapon, designed to overload an enemy starship’s shields and slice all the way through the hull beneath. Carbondioxide ice would be as thin as smoke as far as that gun was concerned. Even at low power, it would slice off the face of the comet without a whisper of resistance.
Was this the only tool they had for the job? That seemed unlikely. If they had access to this kind of weapon, they had access to tactical beams as well. And given the heavy losses that the fleet had taken in their battles with Federation, no commander would sacrifice even a single big gun without a very good reason.
They needed this one right where it was. That meant they expected to use it for more than just leveling the comet’s face. He looked upward, toward the star five light-days away. He wouldn’t be able to spot a hostile ship until it disengaged its dynadrive right over their heads, but he couldn’t help wondering if he should be expecting company.
Not on this shift, he decided, or the overseers would be working everyone harder.
He stretched out and touched his toe to the ice behind him, letting his boots’ angled gravity field provide enough drag to slow him to a stop just short of the crater. The others skidded to a stop around him, except for Nialerad, who misjudged and skidded out over the edge. Without a word, he whirled around and got his hands in front of him in time to bounce off the disruptor barrel, then pushed himself back beside his crew.
“Good reflexes,” Deloric told him, well aware that everyone else was laughing on their own private channels.
“Bo
ot caught a void,” Nialerad said.
“Ah.” Deloric led the way around to the point of the section they’d be surveying and set up his level while Terwolan and Nialerad trudged out a few hundred paces. He enjoyed surveying. It wasn’t rocket science, but it made more use of his brain than pick work. He sighted in on three of the reference beacons set around the perimeter of the comet’s face, establishing the same datum as everyone else, then focused on the graduated rod that Terwolan held in a shallow depression. “Seven point six two,” he said, reading the marks off the scale. Nialerad entered the elevation into his datapad, then marked it with a stake while Terwolan walked on toward the next low spot.
They quickly learned that Deloric could see the depressions much more easily from a distance than the other two could when they were right over them. He began directing them from spot to spot, zigzagging them back and forth in an ever-broadening pattern as their pie-wedge opened out before them.
The first dozen stakes went quickly, but they soon realized their part of the comet was riddled with small voids. The crew who’d mined here must have been cursing their bad luck while trying to get an acceptable piece of ice to ship off. Deloric’s crew quickly began to curse theirs too, because they repeatedly had to make judgment calls as to which ones could be filled and which ones should be undercut.
As the crews expanded outward and the team leaders reported back their lowest readings, the job became easier and easier. Since the whole purpose of what they were doing was to find the level at which the disruptor would make its slice, there was no point in marking anything that wasn’t lower than what someone had already found, so they quickly switched into a competitive rush to break the current record. It became a game, with people shouting their results over the common frequency and people betting on the final winner.
Over it all, the turret gun hunched menacingly at the center of all their antics, like a grim ruler overseeing his loyal but ignorant serfs as they toiled for his secret mission. Whatever that mission was, it continued to elude Deloric. He examined the mount, admiring the way the emitter could swing through a complete circle in every direction. It had been designed to go on the tip of a warship’s fin, where it would be able to defend the most area around the vessel. Here it would punch holes clear through what was left of the comet if it fired downward—a definite surprise for anyone on the other side!—but Deloric doubted if that was its purpose. They wouldn’t have needed to cut away so much ice just to do that.
