The sound of Hogg’s knife reopening punctuated the driver’s bluster. He choked the next word off in his throat.
Daniel grimaced. He could see a pattern of lines in the stone, but until he dialed up the magnification on his visor they looked like mere weathering. That still might be what they were, but at 40x magnification and with the helmet’s optical stabilizer engaged, Daniel could tell they were straight or at least seemed straight.
“There’s two sites!” Dorotige said, now in a tone of injured innocence that Daniel had to admit his right to. “This is where the Captal told me bring you. The water you can get at the place down south has a lot of sulfur in it.”
“All right,” Daniel said. “Set us down, please.”
He glanced into the passenger compartment. The helmet communicator was still engaged so the crewmen had heard everything that was going on. Dasi had his impeller pointed at the back of the driver’s head. The heavy slug would punch through the clear plastic without difficulty, true enough, but it’d also send fragments of the panel across the compartment like a grenade blast.
Daniel frowned and waved the weapon away. He said, “All personnel prepare for landing. We’ve reached our destination.”
He felt uncomfortable, but that might be simply because he seemed to have made a fool of himself. Still, the Captal should have mentioned that he’d directed them to a site that wasn’t . . .
Ah. The Captal might not even know what the RCN Sailing Directions said about South Land. Anyway, there was no way of telling what the Captal had said to Gerson or Gerson to Commodore Pettin during their interview.
“I’m very sorry, Dorotige,” Daniel said, sitting formally upright. “I jumped to conclusions. It won’t happen again.”
“And if you watch your tongue when you’re talking to the master,” Hogg said, “I won’t have to prick you to better manners again neither.”
Dorotige brought the aircar to a hover, raising a huge doughnut of red dust from the spiky vegetation. The cloud was inevitable, but he let the vehicle slip backward and landed expertly out of the worst of it.
Daniel opened his door; he’d studied the odd pull-lift motion of the latch before they left Spires. He’d learned as a child stuck in a narrowing cave that he didn’t want to get into anything where he didn’t know the way out.
Hogg stepped onto the deck on his side and surveyed the landscape: dark red rock with horizontal striations where the wind had dug deeper between layers; a sky so pale it was almost white; and cushions of reddish grass an inch or two high and about a foot in diameter. The vegetation vanished into the general rocky undersurface from any distance in the air, except in the ravines where greater moisture and protection from the wind let it grow higher.
Hogg spat. “Yessir,” he said. “This is just where I was hoping to spend the next three days.”
He turned to glare at Daniel over the cabin of the car. “And don’t tell me I didn’t have to come, young master,” he added, “because you know damned good and well that I wasn’t going to leave your ass swinging out here with nobody to look after you!”
“Yes, I did know that, Hogg,” Daniel said, stepping to the ground. The contact jolted him all the way from his heel right up the spinal column. For some reason sandstone felt harder than other kinds of rock, even granite and basalt.
“Barnes and Keast, you’re on guard till we know what we’re dealing with,” Sun ordered, lifting the gate of the cargo compartment. “The rest of you, stack arms and let’s get the tarp up for shelter so we don’t have to screw with it after the sunset. This wind’s cold as ice up the ass already!”
That was true beyond doubt. Maybe it was a whim of the weather rather than a variation in climate, but the air here was ten degrees cooler than it had been on Spires when they left this morning. This site was far from the coast, which probably made a difference also. And speaking of the site—