He felt another flare of resentment and gave her a dirty look, then decided that wasn’t fair. She was just trying to be nice-maybe nosy, too, but at least she wasn’t browbeating anybody the way Giancarlo and the others were. “Nah, my mom’s, uh, not available-but I think Dad would want Steve here.”
“Who’s that?”
“His assistant, and his partner,” Diego said, daring her to make something of it.
But she just nodded and said, “Okay, I’ll see if I can find out what’s being done officially, and if nothing is, we’ll try to do something unofficially. I just wanted you to know you’ve got friends here. Night.”
“Buenas noches,” he whispered back.
You did good, Bunka,” Clodagh said later, when Bunny had returned to Kilcoole. She had dropped Giancarlo off at the company station to await word from the head of the search party, and delivered the others back to SpaceBase before returning to the village. “The boy is alone. Do you think he saw anything, or was it just the father?”
“No,” Bunny said. “I think he did, too. I can’t say why-he’s denying he remembers a thing now, but they wouldn’t believe him if he told them the truth anyway. The father’s in the high-security ward at the infirmary. The flot around SpaceBase is that he’s crazy.”
“Poor boy,” Clodagh said, her eyes blinking rapidly through the steam from the teacup she held to her lips. “All alone. I can’t feel much for his father, but the lad is so young to be left to the company wolves, especially when he has passed through what he has. If only we could initiate him, it would be better. Has he no one?”
“Just this Steve,” Bunny said. “He is Dr. Steven L. Margolies, assigned to the same branch and regular duty station as Metaxos. I found that much out from Arnie’s soldier boyfriend at the communications shed. He put up the name Metaxos on the computer and it was there, under the info on Metaxos. I don’t know how we could find Steve though.”
Clodagh shook her head regretfully. “It’s not really our place to find him, but the boy will need help when he goes back out there-” Her head jerked up. “I wish Charlie was still here.”
“Maybe Yana can help,” Bunny suggested.
“Maybe,” Clodagh said slowly. “But be careful. Charlie was one of us. He would know, the way you do, what the boy is going through, as well as how the PTBs are. We don’t know Yana so good yet.”
“Sean likes her,” Bunny said.
“He does, does he? What did he say?” Clodagh smiled a very pretty smile that transformed her face, her eyes twinkling with gleefully prurient interest.
“Nothing, but I could tell,” Bunny said. “Don’t worry, you’ll be the first to know-well, maybe not the first …”
“Yana could be a good ally, but she’s real closed up. That’s better than being too friendly, I guess, but I’d feel better about her being here if we knew more about her.”
“Give her a break, Clodagh. It’s not her fault she was born at the wrong time and place for you to have delivered her the way you’ve done half of us. I’m going to go down there now and see if she has any ideas. Don’t worry. I won’t give anything away.”
Over the next ten days Yana gradually accustomed herself to the new environment. She slept a lot, in between the necessary chores of keeping warm and eating. She kept Clodagh’s medicine near her so that every time she felt the tickle that was the prelude to a cough, she could take a swig and forestall a spasm. Whatever was in the stuff was far more efficacious than what the medics had given her on Andromeda. She practiced taking deeper breaths of the marvelous fresh air of Petaybee, expanding her capacity, flushing out the last of the gas from the depths of the lobes. She would never be much use here on Petaybee if she couldn’t even breathe without coughing.
She had just finished making another futile trip to the virtually useless company store when she saw the snocles pulling into corps headquarters way up the street. Some game or the other was definitely afoot, but until the trouble came looking for her, she would conserve her strength. She needed all she could muster to withstand her own cooking, she thought, as she attempted to make a meal for herself and the cat. Other than the fish she had been given by Seamus and the one pan she had been given, she had found damned-all of any use through company channels in Kilcoole.