Catching the girl’s anxious look, she said, “Don’t worry, Rourke, it’s not contagious. Took a little gas at Bremport Station was all.”
“From the sound of that cough, you must have had a nasty time of it,” the girl remarked, speeding up slightly again but proceeding more cautiously than before, as if afraid the jarring would set her passenger off again.
“You might say that,” Yana said, thinking of the others. The hell of it was, she had been through a lot worse in her younger days and had come through without a scratch. Bremport was supposed to have been a routine training mission-new recruits, a couple of them from Petaybee, she remembered. She remembered just about everything from that mission, over and over again.
Using the technique she had learned a long time before from one of her old sergeants, she switched her focus, letting her eyes rest on the panorama of blue and white nothingness, the featureless landscape soothing her, helping her blank her mind, the cold in the air matching the cold inside her.
Ground-hugging vegetation pierced lumps of snow with frozen spines. Then she noticed that the snocle track was on ground slightly lower than the rest of the terrain.
“You guys dig a new road here, huh?” she asked her driver.
Rourke snorted. “Not a bit of it. Do you think they’d be spendin’ money on improvements for the likes of us? This-is the river!”
“No kidding?” Yana looked out and down. Where the snow had blown away in one patch, she saw the translucence of powder blue ice. “Anybody ever fall through the ice?”
“Not lately. Even this late in the winter it’s still between minus seventy-five and minus thirty most of the time.”
“If everything is frozen, what do you do about drinking water?” Company leaders automatically considered such details.
“Oh, that. I’ll show you.” The girl grinned and continued on.
After a few moments the ground had more rise and fall to it. Beside it, stunted trees, rooted and branched in billows of snow, began appearing closer and closer together until they formed a sparse forest on either side of the snocle. The girl veered the machine over toward the trees, and around the next bend, Yana saw a little pavilion set up on the ice, smoke rising from a hole in the top. Rourke had been decreasing the speed of her snocle and now drifted to a gentle stop.
The tent shook slightly from within and what looked at first like a bear emerged.
“Slainte, Bunny!” the bear said with a wave, dispelling the illusion. The fur-clad man lumbered forward, lifting his great fur boots high above the snow. His face bristled with icicles from the ruff around his mouth and nose, which was only lightly frosted, to his beard, eyebrows, and mustache, which were thickly encrusted with ice.
“Slainte, Uncle Seamus!” The girl waved back and cut the motor. The man’s eyes flicked up through his personal icicles to glance at Yana, a searching look for all its brevity. “This is Major Maddock, Uncle. She’s going to be staying at Kilcoole.”
“Is she now?” He included Yana in his wave, and she nodded at him.
“Do you have some thermos or two for me to take to Auntie, since I’m passing her way?” Bunny asked.
“Now, that would be very good of you, Bunny. I’ve two now, and I’ll have more later when Charlie and the dogs come along. This dama doesn’t mind stopping on her way, does she?”
“Nah! She won’t mind. Will you, Major? You wanted to see how we got water. Come look in the shed.”
Moving a little more slowly than she would have liked, Yana climbed from the snocle. Out here, on the river, the cold immediately clenched its fist around her face and thighs, the only parts of her that weren’t encased in synfur. She hoisted the muffler around her nose, but the sweet smell of wood smoke still came through. She wondered if it would set her coughing again. But there was Bunny, encouragingly holding up the flap of the tent and pointing to the fire burning in a circle around the rim of a long black hole in the ice. An insulated container on a length of line stood beside the hole, along with two other containers, which Seamus now gave Bunny.