“I want no repeat of this omission in the future,” he said. “Meanwhile, I’ll look into the problem of your special equipment. Good evening, Major.”
She coughed and managed to blurt out “Colonel” only when he was well down the street. She covered her mouth and nose, reached around the corner of the door for the hook containing her parka, and grabbed Clodagh’s cough syrup and her muffler. Downing a swallow of the syrup, she rubbed the muffler in the snow and, holding it across her mouth and nose, dashed back into the cabin. She forked the burned fish from the pan and flicked it onto the snow for the cat to salvage later. Then, with the door still open, she put on her parka and sat outside, waiting for the smoke to clear.
Fraggin’ bureaucrat! He was one lousy grade above her and thought he was some kind of fraggin’ deity. Idiots like him had assigned Bry that mission that had gotten him killed. Idiots like him had cut costs by shortchanging the colony on Bremer until the colonists had grown tired of watching each other and their children die of curable diseases and starvation, and had rebelled. What was that saying about “penny wise and pound foolish”? Damn!
“Are you okay, dama?” her across-the-road neighbor, whom she hadn’t yet met, hollered out his door.
“Fine!” she called back.
“I saw smoke,” the man ventured, diplomatically not referring to the rest of the row.
“Burned my dinner,” she said.
“Want to come over while your house clears?”
“No, thanks,” she called, trying not to sound as belligerent as she felt. “I’m out here for my health.”
When she had literally and figuratively cooled off enough, she went back into the house. The odor of burnt fish was still very strong, but enough smoke had cleared so it didn’t bring on another coughing fit. She kept swigging on Clodagh’s bottle every so often to fend off hunger pains while she scoured the pan with her knife and fought off the cat, who kept climbing her leg, mewing piteously. It naturally wanted no more to do with the burnt fish than she did.
Bunny knocked on the door and let herself in before Yana could answer.
“Come in, sit down. No, better yet, I’ll be glad to feed you fish if you cook the dinner,” Yana told her.
Bunny shook her head and took the pan away from her, filling it with snow to melt on the stove and plopping the fish in-all of them. Yana had forgotten to take the rest of the string back outside, and they had all thawed.
“How did they expect you to live down here when they didn’t teach you how to survive?” she asked.
“That’s what I was just asking my good buddy, Colonel Asshole Giancarlo, when he came to give me his hail-and-farewell address.”
“I heard,” Bunny said.
“You did?”
“Yeah, all up and down the street. People thought you might be burning him at the stake or something until your neighbors saw him leave. They said you sure looked mad, dragging him inside. Then the smoke started billowing out of your house. You threw him out the door with burning fish and sat out in the cold.”
“How could you know?” Yana asked, mortified at the picture she probably had presented. Some clandestine operative she was. Giancarlo would probably send some mercenary hit man after her after this incident, but it was worth it. Asshole. “It just happened.”
Bunny shrugged. “It’s a small town, Yana. By the way, your face is black all down the middle from your eyes to your chin.”
“Shit.” Yana pulled out the tail of her uniform blouse, dipped it in the fish water, and scrubbed. “Did I get it?”
“Not all. Your nose is still dirty.”
That struck Yana as funny, and she began laughing so hard she started coughing again, realizing as she fell into hiccoughs that she was also slightly drunk from Clodagh’s cough syrup. She collapsed on the bed.
“Oh, shit, Bunny, what a week,” she said, her laughs subsiding into a flurry of silly intermittent giggles.
That started Bunny laughing, too. She put a plate on top of the pan for a lid and sat down at the table, laughing louder than Yana until her laughter started Yana off again.