“All right, spacers,” Daniel said. He saw his subordinates through the mask of the terrain display projected onto the inner surface of his visor. “We’ve been left here without communication. I assume the intention is to keep us—”
To keep Daniel himself; though he couldn’t imagine why. The rest of the party were top spacers, but the Princess Cecile could certainly operate without them.
“—out of the way for reasons that aren’t clear at present. Our food is RCN issue, so we’ll have no difficulty there for at least a week. The water we’ve brought should last as long if we’re careful. According to the background Officer Mundy prepared for me, some of the vegetation here is edible.”
Though Daniel for one would have to be damned hungry to get up an appetite for lichen soup.
“Vesey?” he said. “What’s the situation for water locally?”
The midshipman looked down in horror at the pistol she still held. In squeaky embarrassment she said, “Sir! We found water a few inches below the pebble surface of the ravine’s bottom and just started filling our containers with osmotic lifts. It, ah, tasted all right. Sir!”
“Very good, Vesey,” Daniel said. He deliberately turned his head so that Vesey could holster her weapon out of his sight.
“Spacers,” Daniel resumed, “we’ve been left some three hundred miles to the north of where Lieutenant Mon will expect us to be. That’s my fault also. I think there’s a fair likelihood that the people who marooned us here plan to pick us up again in the future.”
Daniel felt a grin form at the corners of his mouth. That provided a good reason not to shoot down the Captal’s aircar, though he knew his decision had nothing to do with reason.
“I don’t know that’s their plan,” he continued, “and in any case, they aren’t people we could trust.”
He grinned more broadly. He didn’t even know who they were with certainty.
“We could hike overland to where we were supposed to be,” Daniel said, “but I believe there’s a better option. A hundred and fifty miles to the north of us is a navigation beacon for orbiting starships. With a little luck, we can rig that to summon help from Spires.”
“By God we can!” said Sun, looking cheerful for the first time since he’d found the radio was dead. His training to repair electromotive weapons as armorer gave him more hands-on skill with electronics than Daniel and Vesey had gotten at the Academy.
Daniel looked at the sky. The sun was midway to the western horizon. “Hogg,” he said, “break up what we need for the march into loads we can carry. Food, water, tools. One tarp for shelter. We’ll leave an arrow of rocks on the ground to indicate our direction of travel if anyone comes back for us.”
“How about guns, sir?” Sun asked.
Daniel looked at Hogg and raised an eyebrow. Hogg rubbed his mouth with a knuckle, considering the spacers. “Two impellers,” he said. “Sun, you carry one, I’ll have the other. The officers . . . ?”
He looked at Daniel and raised an eyebrow in turn.
Daniel unsnapped his pistol, holster and all, and laid it on the rocks at his feet. “Quite right, Hogg,” he said. “Our enemy now is weight, not anything we can shoot.”
“For now it is,” Hogg said in a musing, almost cheerful, tone. “But when we have got back, then I’ve got some ideas about the next thing we do.”
* * *
From context, that had to be “camp,” not “can’t.” Adele adjusted the character recognition parameters on her personal data unit, then used it to rescan the document’s obverse. The machine whirred softly as it worked.
Adele stretched, wondering how long she’d been here in the attic of the Civil Government Building. The museum and library in the basement would have been a disappointment if she’d had any real expectations. She’d gotten a feeling she couldn’t have explained when the museum’s volunteer director, a retired ship chandler, mentioned the dead storage for items that weren’t worth displaying, however.
Felt the thrill of the chase, Adele supposed. She visualized Hogg beside her in the dimness, waiting in perfect silence for prey to step into his sight picture. The thought made her smile, but there was truth in it nonetheless: every line of work has its tricks, and the people who know their craft very well always have an instinct that goes beyond the available evidence.