Her little troop was moving as carefully as she could have hoped, faces taut with fear, but coming on steadily. She looked outside. The cave opened onto a ledge, with a steep drop-off; she could not tell how far down without exposing herself to anyone on the opposite slope. That slope rose higher than the cave, taking up most of her field of view, great blocks of gray rock streaked with snow glittering in the sunlight. She could not see the sky, for the overhang of the cave entrance, but she could tell that their own slope was shadowed. She could hope that anyone watching from there would be blinded by the sun in their eyes, unable to see into the cave mouth. She could see no movement.
When the others came up behind her, tapping her shoulder to indicate they had all made it past the sleeping bear, she spoke softly. “I don’t see any movement, but we can’t be sure. I’m going out to look—”
Sergeant Chok held up one finger.
“Yes?”
“I’ve had both scout and mountain training. Let me.”
Ky nodded. “Fine. We need a hiding place—without a bear in it.”
He grinned at her, put his boots on, and eased past her, dropping to hands and knees. The rest leaned against the cave wall as close as they could get to the cave entrance. Time crawled past. Ky put her boots back on; the others did the same. The bear made no noise behind them. Finally Chok returned, upright this time, and signaled. Ky led the others out into sharp-smelling cold air. The ledge continued, slanting down and angling slightly to the right. The overhang disappeared; far above the sky showed clear blue with a few streaks of cloud. Beside them layers of rock plunged toward the ledge. Erosion had made these into steps of various heights, mostly inconvenient. All around was the musical tinkle of melting ice and water dripping and trickling away over rock.
They came to the hiding place Chok had found—a narrow cleft between rock layers, barely big enough for all of them. They edged into it one by one. It was cold, dark, dripping, and claustrophobic. Worst, from Ky’s point of view, was the lack of an alternate exit. And the obviousness. They were still too close to the exit, in the most obvious hiding place.
The forest below them gave better cover if they could get to it. Forest on their slope and the one across from them, with a snow-covered spoon-shaped space between. “We need to get down there,” Ky said. Heads nodded. Once more they came out into daylight and started downslope.
They had descended almost to the trees when they heard noise from behind and above: gunfire, a roar, screams. Everyone flattened against the wall. Ky could not see the cave entrance itself, but could see the wider ledge in front of it, then a small shape, flying through the air. One of the cubs, Ky realized, as it squealed frantically, pawing the air before it hit the ground and bounced, tumbled, and finally the squalling ceased. Then the bear—so huge, even at that distance, her growling roar echoing off the opposite slope, her forelegs sweeping one human form after another out into the air, the rag-doll corpses trailing blood, the weapons they’d held falling separately, still firing. The bear dragged herself forward as more gunfire ripped into her, as smoke and light and louder noise burst from the cave. Someone had fired a rocket grenade at her.
“They didn’t—” Cosper said. He covered his ears as did the others. A spray of blood, and the bear overbalanced, falling end-over-end. Rocks skittered down the slope. A stream of smoke wavered across the gap to the opposing slope and ended in an explosion that echoed back and forth. Ky looked back up at the cave. A group of humans—tiny and hard to see—rushed from the cave. Cosper said, “That was stupid—that rock could—” when a loud crack, like a close strike of lightning, silenced him.
Above the ledge, the overhanging slab leaned slowly away from the mountain. With ponderous grace it rotated until it came down on the ledge with a shock they could feel, breaking loose the front of the ledge. Overhang and ledge both tumbled down the slope, followed by an avalanche of smaller boulders.
“Move!” Ky said. “Now!”
They hurried as best they could, as the noise grew behind them: rocks falling, sliding. Were they far enough away? Ky risked another glance back and saw a growing scar above what had been the cave. Finally the noise lessened, but they kept on to the shelter of the first trees. A cloud of dust hung above the avalanche scar.
“That bear—she’d have killed us all,” Betange said in a hushed voice.
“She saved us all,” Ky said.
They had just made it into the first sparse line of trees when Ky heard the unmistakable whine of aircraft. She didn’t have to tell anyone to get down; they were all flattened into the snow before the craft came in sight. From their position, she could now see along the mountainside. A standard tensquad VTOL pod with Slotter Key AirDefense markings flew over their hiding spot, settling vertically into the clearing.
“Our ride home?” Gossin asked.
“Wait,” Ky said. The canopy popped on one side and three figures climbed out. She thumbed the viewer controls and zoomed in. They wore unfamiliar uniforms; the Black Torch logo showed clearly. They looked at the body they’d landed near, then up the slope at the scar and the cloud of dust still visible. Another rock broke loose, rattling down the slope. Ky couldn’t see, but could imagine, what they saw from their position. A dead bear, dead men, a rockfall. Would they fly away or investigate more? If they chose to investigate…
“It would be really handy to have that flier,” Ky said softly to Chok. “We have a good position.”
“Are they all out?”
“No, but I’m betting they will be.”
Sure enough, another clambered out, and then another, until ten of them stood in a pattern that minimized the view of someone from above, in the cave. Then they started up the narrow cleft, directly toward Ky and the others.
“If we’re really lucky, they won’t get a single shot off,” Kurin said.
“Wait.” They had numerical advantage, eighteen to ten, height advantage, and the mercs were acting as if they were out for a walk in the park. But they carried heavier weapons. Ky passed the word down her line. When the mercs reached the scraggly conifer she’d chosen, Ky’s group fired as one. Six of them dropped at once, clean kills; the others dove for the snow. Ky’s troop won the brief firefight.
“Let’s go get our ride out,” Ky said. Surely someone in her group could fly it.
They were almost to the flier when she heard another coming, fast and low. “Into the trees!” Without hesitation, her people scrambled into cover.
Two fliers, not just one, painted in bold splashes of dark green and white with a big gold logo and their name—MACKENSEE MILITARY ASSISTANCE CORPORATION—on the side. They hovered briefly, then landed. A team emerged from each, cautious. Ky recognized the lean, rangy form of Master Sergeant Pitt. She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. The entire group, after a cursory look around, stared up the slope at the fresh scar of the rockslide and the scatter of bodies.
Ky signaled her people to stay down and eased her own way toward Pitt, close enough to hear Pitt’s exasperated, “She has to be around here somewhere! That didn’t happen by itself.”
“Good afternoon, Master Sergeant,” Ky said. Pitt whipped around and Ky found herself staring into the muzzles of many weapons.
“Why didn’t you fly yourself out and save us the trouble?” Pitt asked, nodding at the first flier. She signaled to the others, and they relaxed.
“I don’t have a license for this craft,” Ky said. “Can you give us a lift?”
“Yes,” Pitt said, “at a price. I want to know how you got past that monster.” She pointed at the bear.
“Carefully,” Ky said.
“You’ll have to do better than that, Admiral Vatta,” Pitt said. “Call in your wolf pack and let’s get you back to your formidable great-aunt.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CORLEIGH
DAYS 246–251
Ky hadn’t wanted to come to Corleigh, but the Vatta tik plantation was one place the media could not easi
ly invade, and for the sake of a little privacy she had accepted Helen’s invitation to use the new vacation home on the other side of the cove from the house she had grown up in. It looked different, for which she was grateful: an airy beach house up on stilts with a wide veranda all the way around. She and Rafe dropped their small luggage in the largest of three bedrooms, changed, then walked down to the shore. It was the middle of winter here, but a winter milder than Miksland’s summer, and as the sun set and all the colors of a tropical evening shifted in water and sky, she tried to pretend everything was the same as before she left that first time.
“We’re on a tropical island at last,” Rafe said. “Two of your moons are up.”
She had not noticed, deep in her thoughts. She stared at the night sky and felt nothing thematically related to moonlight on a tropical beach. “It’s the tropical island where my parents and brothers died.” She turned, facing the paler blur that was his face. “How comfortable were you, back in the house where you had to kill that man?”
“Not,” he said. “Not at all. We sold it—or rather, I hear from Penny that she did, for a good amount, shortly after I left. It was…eerie, when I went back there. I didn’t fit at all.”
“And you had a house,” Ky said. “I have the bare place where it was and the memory of it.” The memory of her mother’s dead face in the ash-covered pool, so vivid in her father’s implant, had faded when those memories were removed from her implant. She knew she had seen it; she just couldn’t retrieve it now.
She couldn’t see Rafe’s face, but she heard the change in his voice, the deliberate calm. “So…we should go back to the beach house. At least that’s not in your memories.” She could almost hear the unspoken We could make our own.
Ky nodded; they returned to the house in silence, and during supper talked only of inconsequential things. That set the pattern for the next five days. Avoiding the past, not discussing the future, and in that empty present feeling out whether they still had a future together without talking about it. They walked the beach from one cove to the other, swam several times a day, ate meals from the well-stocked freezer without paying much attention to them. Hours on the wide veranda that encircled the house, conversations that died away in a few minutes, leaving Ky still uncertain. The nights…the nights were good, comfort and ease and a reminder how well she and Rafe suited each other. But she woke while he slept, her mind still replaying scenes from the crash, from the lifeboats, from Miksland. Why had she done this, and not that? What else could she have done that would have had a better outcome?
She and Rafe had both brought their comunits, and they had both locked down their skullphones. The local hub at the Vatta office nearby could transmit wirelessly to the house, but Ky didn’t pick up her comunit from the table where she’d dropped it until the fourth day. If Rafe used his, he didn’t tell her about it.
Nothing from Stella or Helen or Grace: they knew she and Rafe wanted to be left alone. A query from a journalist wanting an interview. And a longer communication, via Captain Pordre in Vanguard, from Dan Pettygrew back on Greentoo. She’d known something like this might be coming, but—
“How’s the admiral business coming?” Rafe had been stirring eggs for breakfast. His expression now was wary.
Ky let out a huff of air. “It’s not. Official notice—” She calculated the date from Cascadian to Slotter Key calendar. “Three or four days ago, Cascadian.”
Rafe looked stunned, then furious. “They canned you? They canned you? It’s your fleet; you created it; you saved them—everybody—”
Ky shook her head. “They had reasons. The other governments might have let me come back, but Moscoe Confederation blames me for Commander Bentik’s death. Her family’s prominent in Cascadian politics. Dan Pettygrew sent a long apologetic letter about it. He argued but says here it was hopeless. He thought I’d want him to stay in command, so he went along. He did insist on having my back pay and severance pay deposited to my account at Crown & Spears in Cascadia and suggests I transfer it immediately to Slotter Key. They might block transfer, he said.”
“That’s disgusting!” Rafe turned back to the cooktop. “Damn. These eggs are—”
“Fine,” Ky said. “Or trash—it doesn’t matter.”
“You should—”
“I shouldn’t, whatever you’re thinking. Serve those eggs or toss them out and I’ll do the next batch.” She stood up and stretched. “I was never a very good desk admiral, you know.”
“You were. You just don’t realize your own—”
“Talents. Yes, I do. Rafe, you know—I told you—I didn’t like that part of it. I was bored; I had even thought of resigning—”
“You didn’t tell me that!”
“No.” She nudged him away from the stove, where the pan of eggs looked like nothing she wanted to eat. She opened the recycler hatch with her foot and slid the mess out of the pan, cracked four more eggs and started again. “Get that funny-looking cheese out of the cooler.”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“I do. You’ll like the result. And some chives, and a slice of last night’s ham.”
Rafe leaned on the counter while Ky put together an omelet. “Our cooks would never let any of us do anything in the kitchen.”
“We had a cook sometimes, but my parents agreed that everyone should know how to cook.” Ky cut the omelet in the pan and slid half onto each plate. “The thing is, Rafe, after the first shock I feel free. I am not going to spend my life bitter about this. And I’m not broke—that much back pay and what Pettygrew told me was the severance, what was already in my account there—and what Stella owes me now that I’ve turned over my shares to her—it’s not pebbles. I can do anything I want, with time to think about what that is.”
Rafe had started on his portion of omelet; his eyebrows had gone up. “In light of that, then,” he said, “the Board at ISC prefers Penny to me, especially because of my attachment to you. They still have ridiculous notions about Vattas. So we’re both out of a job. Same as you, I turned over my inheritance and she’s paying fair for it and says she’ll keep me on the books with a regular remittance, as before. I was getting tired of that corner office anyway.” After a moment, he went on. “So what will it be?”
“What I’d really like—” Ky paused to eat. And think. What did she really want? Not a beach house on Corleigh. Not on a planet at all. Space, then, but in what sense? When had she felt most alive? “I want excitement,” she said. “Interesting things to do, puzzles to solve, new places. I don’t care about the rank and all the attention, and I don’t want to be stuck in an office day after day, signing papers, solving squabbles.”
“Puzzles? What kind of puzzles?”
“The one I found in Miksland. That whole base the bad guys were using, that we stayed in over the winter? Spaceforce didn’t build it. It was there already when the colonists arrived, with all kinds of tech that’s sort of human and sort of not. Labs full of what I think are templates for different kinds of animals and plants. Our history doesn’t go that far back. They came, they messed with the planet, moved things around, left and came back time and again to add to the life-forms, or maybe other things. And then left. They’d have had to start long before we think humans left Old Earth. Unless Old Earth was one of their other projects, not the original at all.”
“And you want to chase that down? You don’t want to figure out who was behind the trouble here? It’s your home world, and it affects your family.”
“No.” She could hear the tension in her voice. “I don’t want to stay here one day longer than I have to; I want to get off this planet and never come back. It’s their problem; let them deal with it.”
Rafe sighed. “Ky, I know you’ve had a shock—more than one—on this planet and about this planet, but this does not sound like you. You don’t run away from problems—”
“This is different—”
“Hear me out. It’s not like you. It may be you need more ti
me, or better therapy than a rakehell lover can give…have you ever checked into your implant to see if that medical team at Moray left you any guidance?”
“No.”
“Would you look at the indices and see if they did?”
“Why? I didn’t want to come in the first place, and I want to leave—” She heard the rising tone in her voice, and stopped there.
Rafe said nothing for a long moment. “Then—if that’s what you really want, I have a business proposition.”
“A business proposition.” She had her voice under control, but her neck hurt and she had to unclench her hands finger by finger.
“Yes. You have money in the bank. I have money in the bank—same as you. Let’s buy a ship and go.”
“Just like that?” She could not believe he’d given in so quickly; the argument she’d feared wasn’t going to happen. Self-doubt vanished; she felt light as a balloon.
“Yes. Well, after we’ve lolled on the tropical sands another week or so maybe.”
“Now,” Ky said. She pushed back her chair. “Can you think of a better time?”
“I could,” Rafe said, finishing his omelet. “But there’s always another day. Frankly I think starting tomorrow is better than starting at lunchtime. Or the day after?”
“Tomorrow,” Ky said. “I am capable of compromise.”
Rafe laughed. “Fine, then. You cooked; I’ll do the heavy labor of putting stuff in the cleaner.”
A last walk on the beach, a last swim. Clothes in the ’fresher, bags open—everything was ready to go before they slept. Ky woke early, padded out to the main room, and called over to the local office to be sure the plane was ready for them.
“It’s not here, Admiral,” a pleasant female voice said. “It was called back to Port Major overnight.” No strain in that voice; the reason had not been anything dire.
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