His grin flashed afresh. “Hey, I like your frankness. It’s a long story on both sides, I’ll bet. You’re with a scientific expedition, right?” She nodded. “Yeah, Dzesi and I guessed that, when we detected your ship and base as we approached. Whose are they?”
“You could have learned that when you arrived.” His gaze on her stayed shameless. “Our expedition originated on Asborg. Several Houses there sponsor what planetary exploration and research their means allow. This time it’s mine and one other. Jonna has been neglected since it was first found and skimpily surveyed.”
“Jonna? Your people’s name?”
A second sip glowed along her tongue. She relaxed somewhat and smiled. “Better than a catalogue number.”
“Seems like your party’s awfully small. To judge by the glimpse we had. No offense, but how much can you do, working out of one camp in—how long a stay?”
She sighed. “Two years. Asborgan, that is; twenty-one months Earth standard. The most the consortium can afford at this stage.” Too many worlds, she thought, too full of unknownness, and we sophonts too few. “But a beginning. There’s no such thing as useless information, insight, is there?” Enthusiasm surged. “Who knows? We could make a discovery important enough that major institutions on several planets will mount a real effort.” She curbed it. “You may have made one, Captain Hebo.”
“Torben, Lissa. Formality doesn’t belong hereabouts.”
The Rikhan surprised her by taking her side. “Tradition is not a shield to lower lightly.”
“Speak for your own folk, partner. Uh, not to get forward, Lissa, or m’lady Windholm if you’d rather. How did you find us?”
“A monitor satellite of ours captured a view.” Happenstance, [20] as enormous as the region was, but not too improbable, given the capabilities.
“I reckoned so. We’d figured it was lucky for us your base is on the next continent. Well, our luck didn’t hold out. Not that any harm’s necessarily been done. For sure, none was intended.”
“You didn’t respond to our calls,” she accused.
“Is that compulsory? They weren’t distress signals.”
Her amity dimmed. “You hoped we didn’t receive more than an inadequate image that could be misleading, and we’d be too busy to investigate just on the strength of it. Didn’t you?”
He laughed again. “That was sort of what we hoped. At least, we were buying a little time. But, say, if you wanted to check, why not send a flyer directly?”
“We are busy,” she admitted. “Undermanned, underequipped, under a deadline because of supplies—” She stiffened her backbone. “It chanced that Karl and I were in this vicinity. Base asked us to go have a look.”
He raised beaker and brows together. “On foot?”
“Our flyer is parked about fifty hours’ journey away by the most direct route,” Karl put in. “Our mission is to conduct a random-sampling investigation of nature in these parts, on the ground, for comparison with data from elsewhere. Brief, superficial, inadequate in itself, granted; but trained observers may conceivably come upon a clue that causes research to redirect itself. Since, in our ignorance, one direction was as good as another, we readily agreed to make for this point.”
Hebo kept his attention on the woman. “So you’re a xenobiologist, Lissa?”
“No, Captain Hebo,” she said. “I’m a—generalist. I’ve simply done a fair amount of wilderness exploration on more than one planet, and the forest here is not too unlike others for scouts afoot to cope with.” The joy of it! “Karl’s the scientist.”
“And the muscle, I see. Not that you don’t have mighty good-looking muscles yourself,” Hebo purred.
She felt herself flush, and snapped, “Very well, here we are. Now it’s the turn of you two to explain what you’re at.”
III
A shelter window let in the deceptively mellow sunlight. From where she sat, Lissa could see over the scarred ground to the edge of the canyon and, beyond, wanly sheening amidst the gleam of water, the thing.
“Fair enough,” Hebo was saying. “Yep, fair enough. We’re absolutely legitimate.”
She swung her gaze back to meet his. “Then why the stealth?”
Dzesi stirred. She touched her knife. “S-s-s,” she hissed. “That is not a pleasant word about this.”
Karl took a short step forward and loomed at her.