“How far back was it terraformed?” Rafe asked. “Is this atlas accurate?”
“I don’t know that, either. Our real history goes back only five hundred forty-three years; that’s when the first colony ship arrived. We Vattas came later. I guess it looked pretty much then as it does now, except for what we’ve built on it.”
“It’s odd we have no clue who did it, even though these files claim someone understands what was done,” Rafe said. “Nexus has more history than Slotter Key—our schoolbooks say it’s been settled well over a thousand standards. Bigger population, too. Four continents all bigger than what you’ve got.” He looked again. “This Miksland’s likely to be cold even in summer, isn’t it? And what season is it now?”
“Spring where Vatta headquarters is, Port Major. In Miksland it’s winter already and going to get worse. That’s why no one thinks Ky could still be alive. Part of that ocean freezes in winter; a survival raft won’t stand that.”
Rafe repressed a shiver. Here in FTL space, he could not pick up any ansible signal. All he could do was hope that Ky was still alive. He had given up on that hope before, and she had lived. He would hope.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
MIKSLAND
DAYS 33–39
When the second party arrived four days later, Ky had opened the second hut, and Betange had located another two caches of nonperishable food. Each hut had a storage closet holding sealed bundles of bedding, toilet supplies, and cleaning supplies. No one had yet found any controls for the water supply. Ky had designated a site well away from the buildings for a latrine, though the frozen ground meant it had to be built up with stones and snow. Buckets served for indoor use, as they had in the rafts. They still had to gather clean snow and ice for water, melting it on the kitchen stoves.
The arriving party had stuffed contrived packs out of the storage pockets from one of the rafts, so they had ration packs and water sacks; they’d even dragged one life raft partway and then weighted it down with rocks to be fetched later. “I thought you’d want the materials and supplies,” Marek said. “Even though we couldn’t manage to bring it all.”
“Yes, indeed,” Ky said.
“And I took down the canopies on the other raft and weighted it down, too, so if we have the time and energy, we can retrieve them. We’re not going to use them come summer, are we?”
“No,” Ky said. “We can’t steer them and none of us have enough knowledge of the currents and weather patterns to be sure of hitting inhabited land. If there was a forest up here, we could build something with a bit of keel and a rudder, but there’s nothing big enough.”
“I didn’t know it had any vegetation. And animals—we saw these four-legged things, bigger than cows—”
“So did we. If we can figure out a way to kill them—”
He gave her an odd look. “You have a firearm, don’t you?” When she didn’t answer at once—how had he known that when others didn’t?—he went on. “I mean—I assumed an officer of your rank—and you wouldn’t have left it on the shuttle.”
“Yes,” Ky said. “I have a pistol, but the ammunition I have is safe for shipboard and station use, not ideal for hunting an animal that size.”
“I could try; I’m a pretty good shot—”
“Master Sergeant, with the sabotage, we have to consider that I may need a firearm for something other than those animals. We may have unfriendly visitors, not rescuers.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Right. So high on my list—though behind shelter, food, water, and clothes—is defense. We haven’t explored everything here yet. This is clearly a military installation shut up for the season—or longer. The doors opened to Spaceforce ID cards and a code number from the Rector of Defense’s office.”
“What? Cosper didn’t tell us that.”
“I’m telling you and my aide. Not everyone. We still may have a traitor among us. The others think I just guessed or had another source, perhaps from the Academy. If a high government code opens these locks, then Spaceforce is involved in all this—the shuttle, the life raft supplies, and this place. We don’t know why, we don’t know who, but we’re going to find out.”
He nodded. “How much food do we have? Enough for the winter?”
“No. That’s why we need to hunt. I’m hoping we find something smaller and easier to catch than those whatever-they-are, because I suspect as soon as we kill one of them, the others will vanish and not be seen again.”
“Fuel?”
“Another problem. We’ve been running the generator nonstop to get both huts above freezing and melt snow for water, but it’ll run through the fuel we found—the barrels in the generator hut—in another ten days. I’m hoping there’s more underground, or another generator down there—something. If we cut the generator time, it’ll give us more days, but I doubt it’ll be enough. Melting the snow and ice is our only water source right now.”
“But you still think we have a chance?”
“More than a chance,” Ky said. “It’s like I said that first day. If we keep focusing on now—what we need, what we can use—we will survive the winter and we will make it back.”
“You’re that sure.”
“I’m sure I’m not giving up,” Ky said.
He grinned. “You got us this far, Admiral. I believe you.”
“I’ve considered moving all the bunks into one hut—that gives us easy room for eight, everyone sleeping in a bunk rotating in three shifts. Then we’d need heat in the other one only for melting snow and ice, and cooking.”
“Good idea,” Marek said. “Might also consider stacking snow up around the lower walls for insulation.”
“Snow?”
“Blocks of it—there’s a lot of airspace in snow. Used to make snow forts when I was a kid—our place was up on Foster Mountain. We had snow every winter. I was twelve when we moved to the city. What about that mine shaft? You think there’s more good stuff down there?”
“I don’t know yet, but I definitely want to find out. Anything—food, a way to get water without melting snow, more fuel for the generator, or anything we can burn for heat.”
“It’s funny,” Marek said, looking around. “This isn’t anything like a full-scale military camp. More like you’d think a small scientific station—meteorology, maybe—only eight bunks total. They must fly in, in the warm season. But are there aircraft that could carry eight passengers and luggage—surely they bring in their clothes, more food, fresh stuff maybe—and fly back somewhere without refueling? And without guidance on the airstrip? We all heard what you did: terraforming failure, uninhabited, barren, nothing of interest.”
Ky nodded. “And I keep thinking there has to be more to it. Someone’s known about the place; the locks responded to current codes, but the buildings aren’t new—twenty standards, or fifty—and if that’s an airstrip, which it probably is, it’s got stuff growing on it. How fast can stuff grow in this climate, anyway? And why didn’t it ever show up on the weathersat data?”
“And why, since it responds to Spaceforce codes, haven’t they sent someone down here to see if we’ve found it?” He shook his head. “Next things next. I’ll get those bunks moved; you want power off over there?” He jerked his head toward the second hut.
“Not yet; we’re going to need more water tonight.”
Within an hour, four double bunks lined two of the walls of the main room of the first hut; the table and one desk now made a longer table, enough for eight at a time to sit to a meal. Everyone had had a mug of thin cracker-soup, good and hot, with Marek and Jen reminding them to go slow, and nobody had puked yet. Ky counted that a win. It would take days to bring them up to full rations—if they could find more food.
The first eight climbed into the bunks; lights went off in the main room. Already the room was warmer, with all of them in it, warm and stuffy. Smelly, even. Well, they’d had no chance to bathe and nothing clean to change into since they’d dressed to board the shuttle. Of course
they stank. She stank.
She went to the kitchen and took one of the empty pots, as Betange was washing dishes. “I’ll get more snow,” she said. She slipped through the door and closed it; they had found the latch that left it unlocked for normal use, and she checked it as always to be sure it was in the open position.
The cold bit into her instantly. Overhead, green fire with streaks of pink danced in the sky; the snow seemed to ripple in response. She walked carefully across to the drift against the wall of the generator shack and filled the pot with snow, packed it down as hard as she could, filled and packed again, then carried it back.
Now the inside felt almost hot, but the blower wasn’t on. She carried the pot into the kitchen and set it on the stove to melt.
“This is much better,” Betange said. “Thank you, for insisting we come up here. I didn’t believe we’d find anything but bare rock. How did you know—?”
“I didn’t,” Ky said. “But I knew we had to move. If we had to pile rocks with our bare hands up here to make a shelter, we had to move—there was no more food—”
“I know. I know, but—you must be a very lucky person.”
“Possibly,” Ky said. She hadn’t thought of it that way, arguing the first group into following her up here, when they were weak from hunger and ready to give up. It had been a blind leap, spending energy without knowing if it was useless. Finding that road surface, though—from there on she had been sure something lay on top of the cliffs.
When the others had finished with the dishes and put them away, Ky said, “You can sleep in here for a while, if you want. Leave the light on, though. I’m going over to check on the water at the other hut.”
“Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Next shift,” Ky said. She turned the stove down, then went out again and across to the other hut. Jen was there in the kitchen, a blanket around her shoulders, half asleep in a chair.
“Sorry, Admiral,” she said. “I thought someone should make sure snow didn’t boil away.” Jen hadn’t volunteered for chores before. “And it’s…more private here. Couldn’t we have this hut?”
“You need rest,” Ky said, ignoring that question for the moment. “And I need you rested. Get another couple of blankets and lie down—I’ll wake you when it’s time. I may go out and gather more snow when this is melted.”
Jen seemed asleep in moments. Ky turned the stove low, then went into the main room, barely warmer than outdoors. With a cautious look out the door, she went to one of the desks and felt along its side for a power cable, then followed it down to the outlet on the floor. She unfastened the top of her protective suit, then her uniform jacket, then her shirt, and ran her fingers into the neck of her personal armor. There it was, the power cable for her cranial ansible. And, in the inside pocket of her jacket, the adapter Rafe had given her.
She checked on Jen again. Still asleep. She plugged the cable into the desk’s outlet; the tiny green light came on. The other end of the cable went into the jack for her implant. And the internal switch…there.
Scent flooded her olfactory neurons, and a rush of excitement caught her breath. It worked, and maybe it could bypass whatever was blocking other signals. But the scent did not change, and her attempt to send the connecting code to Rafe brought no response. Was it blocked? Or could he be—not out of range, for they had tested it at astronomical lengths—but perhaps in FTL flight? Perhaps coming to Slotter Key? How long would that take?
She would try again every night, she told herself, and went to sleep. But for the next several days, she found others awake and using the other hut every time she went in, apparently determined to make use of the second hut. Marek even suggested it should be the official watch station, so the first hut could be used for sleeping, as they’d divided the use of the rafts on the beach. It was clear he assumed they would stay in the huts all winter; he argued against trying to get through the door set into the hill.
“It doesn’t respond to the same code; it could be very dangerous to force it. Set to explode or something.”
“We have to do something,” Ky said. “We still don’t have enough food.”
“We should hunt. We should at least try.” He paused, then went on. “Someone may have more experience hunting with firearms than you, Admiral. I used to—”
“Not now,” Ky said firmly. “We’ll take a look at the other surface buildings—those hangarlike things. They might be storage. Some barrels of fuel for the generator, other supplies. But if nothing shows up, we’ll have to risk trying that door.”
He shook his head but did not argue further.
When she finally managed to evade the others—having chivvied them out of the second hut so she could inspect it, then turn off the power, to save fuel, it was the thirty-ninth day, by her count, since the shuttle crash. Six since they had made it to this shelter, days filled with one nagging problem after another. She thumbed the door latch so no one could come in, checked that the stove was off, turned off the lights, and then connected the cable. Her implant overrode the ansible signal momentarily with a BATTERY LOW warning, then BATTERY CHARGING, and finally the familiar smell made her wrinkle her nose. Would he be in range?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SLOTTER KEY, PORT MAJOR
DAY 36
Vatta Transport’s courier Morningstar appeared on scan, one of a list of arriving spacecraft. Grace noted its arrival on the morning report, remembering Stella’s encrypted message and MacRobert’s broad hint. “Someone you should check out,” she’d said. “Claims to be one of Osman’s, but I doubt it.” Morningstar had priority routing—all Vatta ships did—and in much shorter time than any other could have done it, it was docking at Vatta’s own section of the main station. A Vatta shuttle brought it down safely; Grace watched the landing with grim satisfaction. Vatta shuttles did not fail.
By 1130, the car had arrived. From the surveillance images, neither passenger looked anything like Rafe Dunbarger. A tall skinny fellow, whose skin was an unusual shade for Slotter Key—yellow-brown, with brown freckles—and a plump florid man who minced along as if his feet hurt. She called MacRobert from his own office; he arrived before they did.
She had of course seen media images of Rafe Dunbarger—and for that matter, images of his father and the entire Board of Directors of ISC, plus a few others of their senior managers. It had been her task, when she was head of Vatta’s corporate security staff, to know a lot about any other corporation Vatta had dealings with, competitive or otherwise.
She looked now at the plump, prissy man mincing along the hall. He looked nothing like those images, except the dark eyes with their hard focus. A good disguise, for those who knew him only from images, but she wondered if he thought he could fool her. If he did, he had a surprise coming.
Once inside her office, however, he gave her a very different grin as he pulled a standard security cylinder from his pocket and set it on her desk. “I’m sure you know I’m really Rafe Dunbarger,” he said. “And with your permission I’ll take these uncomfortable appliances out of my face.”
“Don’t you think you should leave my office the way you came in?” Grace asked.
“Probably,” Rafe said. “But in that case perhaps we could talk elsewhere? Your gravity is heavy for me, and the rest of this weighs more here than it does at home. My feet really do hurt and my face is this red because I’m sweating.”
“Stella said you were absolutely convinced Ky is alive,” Grace said. “She’s also told me you two love each other, so why is this not hormonal wishful thinking?”
“Because it’s not my hormones but technology,” Rafe said. “It’s also technology that was—is—both very secret and very dangerous. Development was stopped, but as I had been the test subject—for a certain consideration—I was left with the prototype. It would have been fatal to me to remove it.”
“And it lets you know if your girlfriends are still alive?”
Rafe looked at her. Grace had heard about his star
es, and stared back. She had her own weaponized gaze.
“She’s alive,” he said without looking away. “I am sure of that. I do not know how much longer.”
“Can you tell anything about her condition, her whereabouts, anything—”
“No. Not without getting closer and plugging the device in.”
“And you think our ansible needs tuning—how are you going to work there and here both?”
“I may be able to do some work on the ansible remotely,” Rafe said. “You don’t have good scan on that continent she was near when the shuttle went down.”
“Miksland,” Grace said. “We know something—” She looked at Mac, then at Rafe’s very silent—too silent—companion. “But before I tell you that—what about Teague?”
“Technical help,” Rafe said. “Electronics, on the one hand. Cold-weather specialist, on the other. He was involved in the rescue of my family.”
“Are you a killer? Is he?”
“Like Ky,” Rafe said. “Yes to both.”
Grace felt a glow she recognized as total satisfaction. She had been right all along when she’d told Ky’s mother that the girl wasn’t just a softhearted busybody—that underneath she was more like Grace than any of the others. Ky’s mother had recoiled in horror, insisting that her daughter was “normal.” And clearly Rafe—harmless as he looked in that fat suit—was of the same sort. Maybe, just maybe, Ky would have a partner suited to her needs while still young enough to enjoy it. She hadn’t been that lucky, for a long time. She glanced at Mac, who had met Rafe on Cascadia. He’d been right, too.
“How long can you stay?” she asked Rafe.
“Until we find her, and until we find out who did this,” he said. “Teague’s contract with me is for a year, but he might be willing to extend it.”
“Gary might not,” Teague said. His voice had an odd quality to it, reminiscent of a much younger man whose boy-voice was in transition to an adult timbre. She looked more closely at him. What was he?
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