“You didn’t even try to find the others?” Giancarlo snorted contemptuously.
Lavelle had started yelling then, a rare event for the gentle and mild-mannered woman. “We didn’t even know where the heck we were, mister! If Odark hadn’t found us, I don’t know if we’d have any of us made it back alive. Siggy couldn’t even walk by then, and Brit and I would never have been able to dig the father out without the dogs helping us.”
All the while the conversation was going on the boy, Diego, stood out there in the cold listening to them natter on, his face closed except for the occasions when something said or done seemed to make him angry; then his dark eyes would glow like fresh-stoked embers in the snow-burned red rawness of his face.
Bunny didn’t know what to make of any of it, except that she was tired of acting just smart enough to drive her snocle, but dumb enough and friendly enough so that the big shots would keep talking in front of her, continuing their interrogation as she drove them to the ill-defined area where the party had been discovered. Terce was carrying on as if he had already become part of the inquisition, and the company men didn’t make a move without consulting him.
It took two days on the snocles, driving them out to where the hunting party had run across the survivors, and then, with the recent snowfall in these parts and the wind blowing drifts everywhere, they could only approximate the location. Bunny shivered. She was out of the wind here in the snocle, and the sky was clear, but outside the wind picked up veils of snow and flung them across the landscape. Behind her, the trail was already drifted over in places. The company men had sent Terce back to make camp at the halfway point with Odark and Brit. Lavelle and the boy had remained behind to “assist with inquiries,” and try to help them determine what had become of the other team members.
Bunny opened the door and climbed out of the snocle, trudging over to where the men stood arguing. Diego’s adrenaline seemed to have run out while the company men wrangled around him. He had been radiating tension and at times anger at the interrogation, but now he slumped against Lavelle, who put her arm around him. He looked exhausted. He really shouldn’t have been out here again so soon, but his father couldn’t be moved. Siggy definitely had to rest and look after his frostbite, or gangrene might get the rest of his foot. Clodagh had given him some stuff, but the company men had taken him back to SpaceBase and “accommodated” him in a separate room from the crazy man, Diego’s father, until he could be moved with the others to “another facility.” Bunny didn’t know what that meant, but she didn’t like the sound of it.
“Excuse me, folks,” she said to the party, “but we better make tracks while it’s daylight.”
“I say when we move,” Giancarlo told her. “You do realize, lady, that if I decide to, I can see to it that your license is revoked?”
“Oh, yes, sir. I know what an important man you are-how important all you people are. And that’s why I’m telling you. If we don’t get going now, I might lose my snocle instead of just my license, or another hunting party might have to find us. Our weather here, sir, as you may have noticed, is tricky. It has lots of-uh, different things-”
“Variables?” the captain suggested helpfully.
“Yeah. Those. Lots of variables. And right now a bad storm’s making. Also, sir, that lad looks to me as if he’s all done in.”
“She has a point, Colonel,” the captain said. “Maybe we should make for camp now that we’ve seen the approximate site and come back better equipped when the weather clears.”
The colonel glared but waved his mitten toward the snocle.
Diego Metaxos sat by himself in the corner of the shelter while the soldiers cross-questioned Lavelle. He wished they would let her alone. She had tried to help them-in fact, he thought, she had helped him a lot. And she could help him more, if only the interrogators would go away so he could talk to her.