“If Commodore Pettin—” Adele said. If she’d been able to continue, she would—she might—have blurted the name of Mistress Sand.
“Mundy,” Lt. Mon said, his face suddenly stark. “You have your orders. I’ll thank you to leave my duties to me!”
It was odd to find out how much she had absorbed by being in the RCN. Adele actually saluted before she turned to choose the three spacers who’d accompany her, Tovera, and the prisoners to South Land.
* * *
Daniel checked the sun and determined that it was five minutes short of local noon. His helmet would have given him the time correct to milliseconds, but for this purpose he preferred to use his eyes as he would have done in the forests of Bantry. He wouldn’t always be wearing a helmet.
“Forgot by the planet that bore us . . .” sang the detachment behind him, Sun the loudest of all. He seemed to be all right—”seemed” being the operative word. The gunner’s mate had done everything with enthusiasm since the spacers returned to the surface with full water cans and fruit from the cavern stuffed into the pockets of their utilities. He was an active man who deserved his rating, but his present demeanor smacked of a boy whistling in the dark.
“Betrayed by the ones we hold dear . . .”
That was perfectly all right with Daniel. All that mattered was that Sun had found a way to overcome his funk.
Vesey came up on Daniel’s left side, opposite Hogg. They weren’t trying to keep a formal order of march, though everyone knew to stay within a few paces of the next spacer ahead.
Daniel smiled at the midshipman and said, “I figured we’d take a break in a few minutes, Vesey. How does the unit appear to be holding up to you?”
“The good, they have all gone before us . . .”
“Quite well, sir,” Vesey said. She meant her tone to be professional, but her dry throat tripped her into a squeak in the middle of the short phrase. “The fresh rations have made a great improvement, and finding an assured source of water also.”
“I’d say half of ’em are high as kites!” Hogg commented, casting his eye back on the spacers. “Something more than juice in that stuff, I’d say, but it don’t work on everybody.”
“And only the dull ones are here!”
Hogg spat. “I wish t’hell it worked on me,” he added.
“Sir, I wanted to ask about the fruit . . .” Vesey said. “And the caves and everything. The animals. Where do they come from?”
Daniel kept his expression blank as he considered both the question and what was behind the question. The Princess Cecile was too small to rate a chaplain, so the crew’s religious health was part of the captain’s duties. That was pretty clearly the hat Vesey wanted him to wear now.
“There are cases of parallel evolution,” Daniel said carefully. “On single planets and between species from planets a thousand light-years apart where there isn’t the least genetic similarity. But I don’t think that could be involved here.”
There was a ravine close by to the left. Daniel had intended to declare a break and lead the expedition into it—and he would, but first he needed to deal with the midshipman’s question in the privacy that the march provided.
“They’re really human, aren’t they?” Vesey said uncomfortably. “They’re what colonists from the first settlement turned into, here on South Land.”
“We have samples from the carnivore,” Daniel said. Hair, skin, and a scrap of bone blown from the back of the creature’s skull. The last contained marrow. “When we get back we’ll be able to test them. Even the Princess Cecile’s medical computer should be able to make a genetic comparison. With human DNA.”
The bushes growing to the lip of the nearby ravine made a brilliant contrast to everything around it. Though the small leaves were the dull red usual on Sexburga, they merely speckled the yellow and white striped bark of the trunks and branches. Daniel didn’t recall anything so colorful from the natural-history database. The species might be new to science. Human science.