“‘Scuse me,” he called over his shoulder and was out the door before he heard a response.
He caught a good glimpse of the battered rear end, of the craft and its trajectory. Frag it! The loon was landing just outside Shannonmouth. As he plowed a direct course across the mud road, ignoring the boardwalks, he also caught just a flick or two of orange tails. Turning to look back over his shoulder, he saw that there wasn’t a single cat on any of the roofs. The next thing he knew, he had tripped over a rock in the mud and measured his length in the thick gooey mud.
This did nothing to improve his humor. He got to his feet, scraping off as much as he could with his bare hands, then with a branch he savagely broke from a shrub, and finally with handfuls of moss from the trunks of trees. In a way, he realized, the accident had just helped him frame what he would say to the misbegotten ass hole fly boy who had illegal possession of an illegal-size vehicle andHe stopped dead at the clearing where the craft had landed, and at the man sauntering across the bracken toward him, unshaven, despite the clean guard uniform he wore and the badge that identified him as SpaceBase personnel.
“Captain Torkel Fiske?” the man asked, and the voice somehow set off a memory in Torkel’s mind: the voice, the stance, the swaggering insolence of a man in a common soldier’s uniform.
“What in hell do you think you’re doing, soldier? In an illegal vehicle, and here at a village site against the strictest orders …”
Take it easy, Captain, I’ve got something on board this shuttle that you’ve been after for a long time.”
“I doubt it.” Torkel said. Then, before he could continue to outline the penalties and fines the man had already accrued against specific regulations, he saw a slatternly female figure appearing to lean casually against the frame.
“What the frag!”
“Oh, I don’t mean her,” the man said, dismissing, the woman with a wave of his hand, “but I’ve heard you can’t find ore on this planet, not no way and no how.”
Torkel had started moving toward the man and the shuttle again for the purpose of ending this farce when the man’s taunting offer made him falter a stride or two. If he’d found ore on this bleeding planet …
“You have?” Torkel moved forward again, aware that his unkempt state was being observed by the man, who was now grinning. “Don’tmentionit,” Torkel warned, with a pause between each word.
“Why should I care if you tripped and fell in the mud?” the man said, shrugging his shoulders and lifting his hands high, but he had the wisdom to remove the smile as Torkel approached him.
“You are …” Fiske paused for the man to identify himself.
“Satok … shanachie of McGee’s Pass.” The man narrowed his eyes at Torkel, immediately resuming his cocky manner. Then be pulled out a fold of the clean uniform he was wearing by way of explanation for his present garb. “Needed to find out where you were. You’re a hard man to contact.”
“The ore, man …”
“Trouble’s been, you Intergal guys been going about your searching all wrong, and looking in the wrong places.”
“Oh, have we?”
Satok gestured for the girl to back out of the way to let Torkel enter.
The shuttle was in no better condition inside, but the moment Torkel saw the crates of varied shapes and colors netted safely away from the piloting area, he ignored everything else. He had studied just enough geology to be able to recognize the variety of ores known to be available on Petaybee, even if none had actually been found here. He touched greeny copper-bearing rock, grayish tin, copper-red-orange germanium; he saw the gold vein through rock, and even emeralds embedded in clay.
“I can’t deny you’ve found a variety of very interesting items, Satok,” he said with a nonchalance that was far from the exultant surge that he was experiencing at the sight of what they had spent years trying to locate on this ice ball.