Hogg was giving orders in a voice that remained clear despite obvious wear from the dust and dryness. They’d all been drinking their fill in expectation of replenishing their water supply, but the mucous membranes of noses and mouths still suffered in this damnable atmosphere.
“How far’d we get, sir?” Sun croaked. If the gunner had wanted information instead of a reason to speak to Daniel, he’d have read the figure off his helmet’s navigation display. He was working his arms alternately to loosen them after the pull of his packstraps, switching the powerful impeller from hand to hand so that he wasn’t flailing it around.
“Ten point three one miles, Sun,” Daniel said. “A pretty decent hike for spacers on the first day, I’d say. We’ll try to double that in the future.”
“Umm . . .” Sun said, rubbing his mouth with the back of his free hand. He was a wiry man of middle height, and one of the solidest of the Princess Cecile’s crew—under normal circumstances. “I wonder, sir? If this gully was going in more or less the right direction—”
He’d obviously already looked at his map overlay. It would have showed him that the dry river entered the Middle Sea within ten miles of the cape where the beacon was set.
“—and we followed it, we could stay out of the wind.”
“I wish we could do that, Sun,” Daniel said truthfully, “but the vegetation down here is too thick for us to use ravines for passage.”
He gestured, calling attention to the brush around them. Daniel could differentiate at least a dozen species, though they all had smooth trunks and small, oval leaves. Several varieties had foliage covered with fine spines, even though Sexburga had no large herbivores. Daniel had seen that sort of adaptation before in desert climates: the spines created a zone of still air so that constant wind didn’t dry the plant out faster than the roots could replenish its fluids.
The armed leaves would nonetheless lacerate anybody moving through them quickly. Besides, the trunks of neighboring bushes twisted around one another in a slow-motion attempt to wrestle more of their valuable riverbed real estate.
Sun looked at the vegetation and sighed. “Yeah, I should’ve known that,” he said. “I don’t . . . I’m not used to the wind, I guess. Sorry, sir.”
He turned and walked back to where his men had cleared a tent-sized area under Hogg’s direction. The detachment had only one powered cutting bar, though Hogg had sharpened the two shovels on a rock slab at the landing site. They’d come here to view what might be foundations carved into bare rock, not to hack through the continent’s rare stretches of vegetation.
Daniel didn’t let the concern he felt for Sun reach his face. The constant wind was unpleasant to anybody, but the gunner’s reaction was just short of phobia. It wasn’t the sort of problem that would arise aboard a starship.
And there wasn’t a thing to do about it now.
The fire’s dense yellow flames crackled, throwing heat even to where Daniel stood twenty feet away. This South Land brushwood burned with an oily intensity, but Dasi and Pring had been unable to light it until Hogg feathered one of the chopped stems with his knife before touching the lighter to it.
Hogg sauntered over, smiling with satisfaction at a job well done—and also, if Daniel knew his servant, at his superiority to a bunch of city folk. “Want to take a little walk with me, master?” Hogg asked. “There’s something you might want to look at.”
“Certainly, Hogg,” Daniel said, feeling a touch of excitement that took him back to his boyhood. That was the way Hogg always prefaced a chance to view a part of nature that almost no one ever saw. There’d been the day the crystal moths issued from every pore of a tree their grub forms had eaten hollow, mating in the sunlight they saw only once in thirty years; the cave under the sea cliff, always in the past empty, from which the scaly head of leviathan rose one evening to follow the line of Hogg’s low-skimming aircar; the roc lifting as the sun woke updrafts from the hinterlands of Bantry . . .