“Them?” Bonnard dismissed the heavy-worlders with a fine scorn.
“They’re still thinking we’ve all been smashed flat in the dome!”
There was, the two leaders noted with wry approval, a decided smugness about Bonnard to which he was, in fact, entitled. He, alone, had managed to evade and discommode the heavy-worlders, despite their physical superiority.
“Let us devoutly hope that they continue in that delusion for a few more days,” said Kai. “Until Tor has a chance to arrive. Can you manage another trip today?” he asked, eyeing the pile of fresh greens and estimating the finished, synthesized result.
Triv’s answer was to turn back to the rope and begin the ascent, the others queuing to follow him.
“Morale’s very good,” Kai murmured to Varian.
“Now!” Varian’s single bitter word reminded Kai that morale was fickle.
To bolster his own spirits he sought Portegin, working in Trizein’s looted laboratory on a pile of matrix slabs and the damaged console panel which he had removed from the piloting compartment.
“I don’t know if I can fix the communit, even if I pirate every matrix circuit we’ve got and do field links,” the man said, running his fingers through his short hair. “They didn’t leave us so much as a sealing unit and these connections are too fine to be done by hand.”
“Could you rig a locator signal on the Thek?”, or even the ARCT-10’s frequencies?”
“Sure,” and Portegin brightened to be able to give a positive response.
“Do so, then, preferably one the heavy-worlders can’t tap.”
They’ve got to have power first, more power than they’ve got on their wrist units,” said Portegin, grinning with a touch of malice.
Kai moved on, checking futilely in the storage compartments in the hopes that something useful had been dropped by the heavy-worlders. He thanked providence for the ceramic hull of the shuttle which would not show up on the detectors the heavy-worlders possessed. The minor amounts of metal in the ship would easily be misread as ore in the cliffs. He tried again to remember if he and Varian had done much talking about the giffs in the hearing of any of the heavy-worlders. And remembered the tapes! Fighting the frantic pulse of fear, he also remembered the tangled, destroyed tape cannisters strewn about the compound and now buried beneath megatons of dead beasts. Supercilious of the light weights as the mutineers were, doubtless they had chucked tapes registered by either himself or Varian as being intrinsically useless. Kai forced himself to believe that possibility.
Everyone was busy at something, he noted. Triv and the youngsters were on the foraging party, Aulia was sweeping the main cabin with a broom made of short stiff grasses, Dimenon and Margit were hauling water up the cliff in an all too small improvised bucket.
“Try a piece,” said Varian, offering him a brownish slab.” It’s not bad,” she added as he broke off a corner and began to chew it.
“Dead grass?”
“Hmmm.”
“I’ve eaten worse. Very dry, isn’t it.”
“Dry grass, but it’s bearable. There’ll be plenty of this junk, so Lunzie is good enough to reassure us.” Then her expression altered to one of distaste. “Trouble is, it uses a lot of power, and water, which uses power, too, to be purified.”
Kai shrugged. Food they had to have, and water.
“We need at least a week for Tor to reply.”
Varian regarded him for a long moment. “Exactly what good will Tor’s appearance do us?”
“The heavy-worlders’ mutiny, or I should say their success, depends on our silence. That’s why they rigged our ‘deaths’ so carefully, in case we hadn’t been planted. Why they’d believe Gaber is beyond me, but …” Kai shrugged. Then he grinned. “Heavy-worlders are big, but no one is bigger than a Thek. And no one in the galaxy deliberately provokes Thek retaliation. Their concept of Discipline is a trifle … more permanent … than ours. Once we have Thek support, we can resume out interrupted work.”
Varian considered this reassurance and, for some reason that irked Kai, did not appear as consoled as she ought.
“Well, Lunzie estimates we’ve got four weeks of power at the current rate of use.”