I was hungry and did as she said. The sweetness of the mixture was fantastic. I felt like I hadn't eaten in forever and struggled to swallow. "Is it true? We've been gone for twenty years?"
Nick looked to Marny, breaking eye contact with me. I could always read him like a book. He didn't want to tell me something.
"Something like that," Marny said.
"For frak sake," I said, setting the bowl in my lap. "I'm not a child. Just give it to me."
Nick nodded gravely. "What if it’s been longer than twenty years? We’d never know."
"Things you consider when you’ve had a long time to think," Marny said. I stared at her trying to rectify the lithe, graying woman with my memories of the powerfully built, stalwart I'd grown so close to. She smiled gently back. "You should try to eat more, and I have some bonda milk in that cup next to you."
"Bonda?"
"It's a fruit that grows downslope," she said. "The skins of the berries are just as sweet, but if you eat too many you'll be sitting in the outhouse all day. For some reason the milk doesn't cause the same problem."
"Next thing you'll tell me is that you ride mastodons and chuck spears at angry tribesmen. This is pretty surreal, you know."
"No mastodons," Marny said. "They're mostly friendly when it comes to outsiders. They have territories and when we run into a new tribe, they'll run us off. They're not violent, though. Just enough to make their point."
"Mostly friendly?"
"We've never successfully made long-term contact. The tribe that claims this valley as their territory gives us a wide berth. Early on, they even gave us some food. It would just show up in our camp only when we were really struggling. I caught one of the adolescent Scatters once. It was horrible. I was just trying to talk to her, but she thrashed around so badly I was afraid she was going to hurt herself. I had to let her go."
"Humanoid?" I asked.
"Look like Tolkien's elves," Nick said. "Small, thin, faster than the wind. They even have pointy ears and fair skin.”
"You're messing with me," I said, tipping back the bonda milk. Like the gruel, it was sweet. I could feel energy surge within my body as sugar made it to my stomach.
"I swear," Nick said, holding up his hand.
"Peter's amazing," I said. "He's so big."
"Takes after Marny," Nick said unnecessarily.
"Brains of his dad," Marny added proudly.
"You look a lot different, Marny," I said.
"Hard to maintain the protein diet and exercise," she said. "Gray hair a bit of a shock for you?"
"Don’t take it the wrong way, but it all suits you," I said. "Maybe that's just being a mother."
"Thank you, Liam," she said. "This wasn't the life we expected, but we've carved out a home."
"What about Ada and Jonathan?" I asked.
"With your suit, we finally have a shot at finding them. You wouldn’t believe how lucky we got finding you," Nick said.
"How did you find me?"
"It was actually Peter. He's picked up a bit of the Scatter language and overheard someone talk about a glowing box on the mountain. We went to investigate and there you were."
Nick stood, walked over to some wooden shelves and pulled out a jumbled mass of wires.
"What is that?" I asked.
"I'm hoping it's an earwig," Nick said. "I found some pieces after we woke up. I think it'll give me access to your suit. You mind if I try?"
"Nick," Marny warned.
"No. It's okay," I said. "You can take my earwig if you want."
A prompt appeared on my HUD. It was Nick requesting access. I blinked acceptance.
"I'm in," Nick said, breathing a contented sigh of relief. "And there she is."
"She?" I asked.
"Ada," he answered. "Four hundred kilometers and two mountain ranges, but there she is. Well at least that's a transponder for a suspension tank."
"That's thirty days," Marny said. "Snow is almost on us."
"Snow is already on the other side of the Juba range. We'd hit it in a ten-day," Nick said. "And there's no way Liam's in any condition to travel that far."
I ran my finger down my chest, opening my grav-suit to reveal shriveled, pasty white skin. A smell hit my nose and I realized it was all me.
"Whoa, hold on a minute," Tabby's voice announced from the door. "I go to sleep for a minute and you're in the barn getting jiggy with Marny and Nick?"
Marny ignored Tabby's statement and walked over to where skins were draped over a rack. It required all of my strength to fully remove the vac-suit. It was painful to look down at my emaciated body and I felt no small amount of shame.
"We've located Ada," Nick said. "She's four-hundred kilometers east, northeast. I believe Liam is offering his grav-suit as a mechanism to help retrieve her."
"I'll go," Tabby said, suddenly serious.
"You're probably the best fit for the suit," Marny agreed, draping my shoulders with a soft animal skin. "First thing in the morning, you're getting a bath, Cap. I'll get Pete to bring some water up from the river and we can heat it."
"You sure we should wait on the bath?" I asked. "The smell alone might kill me in my sleep."
"Too dangerous to go at night, especially with the scent you're putting off," Marny said. "There are some very effective predators on the mountainside. They mostly leave us alone, but that's because we've thinned their numbers."
"I can get water. I'm not putting that suit on until it's clean," Tabby said, accepting the earwig from me.
Marny nodded, not saying what we all knew. Tabby was the apex predator on the mountain and she could go wherever she wanted. "I'll stoke the fire and get started on a pack for you. Liam, how's that bonda milk sitting?"
I picked up the cup and took a long drink, finishing it off. "Delicious. I'd take more if you had it."
"Let that sit for a bit longer," she said. "I just wanted to know if we should pack some for Ada."
A few minutes later, Tabby returned to the barn, slopping water from two buckets. I marveled at the craftsmanship that had been required to create wooden containers that didn’t leak. She set them next to the fire after filling a large iron pot hanging from a tripod.
"You're a blacksmith now?" I asked Nick.
"Our little universe is in the iron age," he said. "Barely. Deposits of ore are sparse, but the Scatters don't know how to work with it so it can be found."
Tabby turned to go back out.
"Where are you going?" I turned to scan Tabby’s face, afraid that seeing me in this condition was too much for her.
"Adolescent maracat down by the river. Going to bring him back before he’s dragged off," she said, slipping outside.
"Maracat?" I asked, looking over to Nick who was busy turning my suit inside out and scrubbing it.
"Think saber-toothed tiger with a bad attitude," he said. "We've been tracking this one for a while. Pretty sure he came over from Mount Green earlier this year. He must have made his move on Tabby. Bad choice."
"On Tabby? As in, it attacked her?"
"Yeah, local maracats know better," he said. "Man, you really worked up a smell. I'm peeling off pieces of your suit liner. It must have disintegrated."
"Where did your grav-suits go?" I asked.
"We assume they’re back in the ship. None of us had put on suits yet that night. If only we'd known what Anino was up to," he said. "Your grav-suit is going to save us, you know."
"How's that? Everyone we know is dead," I said, slumping against the table.
"Trust us, Cap, life can get a lot worse." Marny helped me to a cot next to the fire. Without my grav-suit I was shivering from the cold. "We've had twenty years to come to grips with losing everyone. But today you came back into our lives and now we have hope of finding Ada. I can't recall feeling so happy in such a long time. Don't get me wrong, we've carved out a life and we have each other, but I cried today for the first time since we awoke. It's just so damn nice to see you, Cap."
A wi
nd blew in behind Tabby as she kicked open the door. Draped over her shoulders was a vividly green-furred cat that weighed at least one hundred fifty kilos. "Something has the blood-deer worked up. I nearly got run over on the way back from the river."
"The wind has changed," Marny said. "Smells like snow."
Chapter 5
Basket Weaving
"Your skin is torn just above your waist where the suit was creased. There's suit-liner embedded," Marny said. "This is going to hurt."
"I'll gather some hogen root," Little Pete offered, rising from the crouched position he seemed to prefer.
After removing my grav-suit the night before, Tabby had wiped me down using a mixture of a sweet-smelling clay and fine particles of sand. We'd discovered several sensitive patches of skin and skipped over them with the expectation of looking at them in the morning with better light.
"Is it always this cold?" I asked, my breath steaming in front of my face.
Marny smiled and brushed my cheek with the back of her hand. "The suspension chamber you were in must have been critically low on nutrients. Your body consumed most of your muscle and you have no fat to burn. You simply don't have the capacity to generate your own heat. Once your wounds are clean, we'll get you nice and warm. Are you ready?"
"Bite on this," Nick said, offering a stick about the size of my thumb. "We don't have much in the way of pain relief around here – at least nothing that won't make you high as a kite."
I accepted the stick and as soon as I put it in my mouth, Marny pulled at my skin. Pain lit throughout my body as if she'd hit my skin with a fire brand. She sucked in a deep breath as a fresh wave of putrid air assaulted our noses. I bit down and tried unsuccessfully not to cry out. After what seemed like hours, but was no doubt only a few seconds, the last threads of the liner pulled free.
"There's necrotic skin around the wound," Marny said. "I'd kill for a med-patch. Nick, I'm going to need your knife and I need it as sharp as you can get it."
"Okay, but I'm getting him some spring weed," he said.
The barn door opened and Tabby entered, carrying a load of split firewood. For a moment, our eyes met. She quickly looked down and moved across the room to unburden herself.
Marny caught the interaction and gave me a wan smile. "Don't worry about her," she said. "We all thought you were dead. We even had a service for you down by the river. It took her a long time to recover from your loss."
"This is so messed up," I said. "We just got onto Hotspur."
"Put the bite stick back in," Marny said. "A smaller piece on the other side needs removing."
"I'm taking the maracat carcass out to clean," Tabby said to no one in particular. "We're going to need more furs if we're to make it through winter."
I avoided crying out as Marny tugged a smaller piece of debris from my side. She rolled me over and continued working on my beleaguered skin. Through the tears caused by excessive pain, I tracked Tabby as she stalked through the building. She really hadn't changed that much, though her hair had streaks of gray and her face had aged. Throughout the torturous operation, she dared a few glances back at me. I saw both guilt and fear in her eyes. I wanted to make everything all right, but knew I had to let her come to me on her own terms.
After neatly stacking the firewood, Tabby pulled the giant cat from where it had been hanging and carried it outside.
"I think we have a problem," Nick said, crouching beside the cot where I lay by the open fire. In one hand he held a small clay bowl that had a fluted straw built in to one end. A small puff of smoke escaped from the straw as he held it in front of my face.
"What's this?" I asked through gritted teeth, as Marny continued to work on me.
"Spring weed," he said. "It won't actually stop the pain, but you won't mind it so much. Just puff on it. Word of warning, though, you're going to cough, so take it slow."
"Is that the problem?" I asked. I couldn't help but notice a disapproving look from Marny.
"I wish," he said. "Your grav-suit needs repair. Nothing a replicator and a trip through a suit-cleaner wouldn’t fix, but we're a bit short on both."
"It was working okay for me," I said, puffing on the bowl. The moment the acrid smoke touched my lungs I coughed and gave Nick a scowl. Just why anyone would smoke this crap, I had no idea.
"Won't be for long," he said. "The power cells aren't holding a charge. Your flight from the mountain nearly drained the entire thing. You have maybe two hours left on it. We’d be better off saving the power for the AI function."
"We've been in worse situations?" I coughed and laughed at the same time as I took another drag on the smoke bowl. I felt calmer, but my head was still clear.
"As planets go, Fraxus is about as nice as you could imagine," Nick said. "The indigenous people aren't overly hostile and there's a wildly diverse biome. Yeah, we've been in worse. I'm just not sure we're getting out of this one."
"Knife?" Marny asked brusquely, holding her hand over my body and rolling me further onto my side.
Nick handed her a basket that contained more than a knife. "Where did you come up with thread?" I asked as my eyes caught a thin white curved object that had a pointy end and a length of thread attached.
"Bite on your stick, Cap," Marny said. "And that's cat-gut. You really don't want the full description."
I bit down and once again my side seemed to light on fire as Marny cut away dead flesh. The pain was so great that I wished for the bliss of passing out, but it never came. Fortunately, she worked fast and after a while my skin simply throbbed with the memory of fresh insult.
"I've made the hogen paste," Little Pete said, pushing his way back into the barn, leaving the door open behind him. A cold wind followed and I shivered uncontrollably as it blew across me.
"Door," Nick said, accepting a wooden bowl from him.
Even though the salve was ice cold, it almost immediately quenched the fires on my body where Marny had worked on me. "Oh man, that's nice," I said, sucking on the smoky bowl. The heady effects of the spring weed relaxed me even further, even though I continued to shiver.
"I think we're done with that," Marny said, plucking the ceramic smoke bowl from my hands. "We don't need any stoners here."
"Are you ready for breakfast?" Nick asked. "The AI recommends light meals several times a day until your digestive system is fully acclimated. We have a grain porridge like you had last night or I could do some roadie eggs. My cheese experiment didn't go all that well, but last night the AI suggested I hadn't processed the rennet correctly."
I smiled. It was typical Nick in a completely foreign situation. He had taken his inquisitive nature and keen intellect and applied it to long-term survival. "I don't suppose you have a meal bar?"
This earned me a surprised chortle from Marny who was wrapping a warm leather blanket around me. "No meal bars, Cap," Marny answered.
"You know," Nick said. "If I baked berries, bonda flesh and some of those nuts we have, it'd almost be a meal bar."
"The porridge was good," I said. My entire body hurt from the scrubbing, cutting and suturing. The initial relief from the hogen paste was wearing off and I found that I was exhausted.
Nick must have caught my droopy eyes. "You're going to be tired, Liam," he said. "You'll need quite a lot of rest over the next few days. Let's get some food in you and you can sleep. You need to use the facilities yet?"
I smiled. I'd learned the facilities were nothing more than a small shack ten meters out behind the barn. "Nah, I'm good."
I awoke to the sound of a heated argument outside the barn. I had no idea how long I'd been asleep, but my bladder suggested I'd been down for a while. With effort and several painful reminders from my new stiches, I gained my feet. My overly thin body was unrecognizable even to me as I struggled to cover myself with a fur blanket. I'd seen more than a few news vids that reported on starvation cases and I realized I was lucky to be alive.
Opening the barn door, I was almost blinded as the lig
ht in the sky assaulted me. I blinked rapidly as my eyes burned but adjusted nonetheless. I pulled the cool thin air into my lungs and noticed that whatever argument had been underway had stopped. Marny, Pete and Tabby stood several meters from the barn next to a rack where the unmistakable bright green skin of the maracat hung. The three looked at me like I'd grown a second head, so I gave an awkward smile and a small wave.
"Don't let me get in the way of a perfectly good argument," I said. "I just need to visit the privy."
The uneven ground felt odd under my feet. Having spent the majority of my life in space either vac-suited or on a station or ship, walking barefoot was unusual to say the least. Apparently, there's a skill and I certainly didn't have it. The first sharp rock I found and placed into the tender sole of my foot drove me to a knee, the pain almost too much to bear.
"Liam," Tabby exhaled sharply and rushed to my side, helping me to stand. "You shouldn't be up."
Her voice washed over me like the hogen root had my wounds. There was an emotional separation between us that was hard for me to understand. The uncertainty ate at me, occupying my idle thoughts.
"Gotta do this," I said, pulling the fur tight around my shoulders. "No way to heal without pushing through. Right?"
"You're not well, yet," she said. "It's okay to ask for help."
"I've got this." I pushed her arm away. "Are you doing okay?"
"Me?" she asked, surprised. "I'm fine. Why would you ask?"
"You're avoiding me, Tabbs," I said. "I know we're not in the same spot. It can't help that I look like a refugee, either, but I'm still me."
"Nick says the grav-suit won't work and Marny doesn't want Pete or me to go alone to find Ada," she said.
Classic Tabby. She was uncomfortable in the conversation, so she changed the subject. "Oh? What's her reasoning?"
"You're just going to agree with her," she said.
"Just a second." I pushed open the wooden door to the outhouse and entered. Closing the door behind me, I sat on a well-worn seat. "Agree with what? I don't even know the argument," I said through the door.
Privateers in Exile Page 5
