She pointed her pen at a contour representation of an area in Raphta’s east-central region, reconstructed from orbital radar scans. “It’s looking like somewhere around here, three to three-fifty miles southeast, on the other side of the Spine. It’s amazing that they were able to make from there on foot. They had to cross a whole new uplift zone.”
“Do we have enough information to schedule a recce with probes?” Jorff asked.
“Well . . . this is about as good as it’s going to get.”
“Then package it up so I can get it off to Zeigler. He’s waiting to get started.”
Leisha pointed at the compad. “Working on that right now.”
Jorff moved closer, making a pretense of looking over her shoulder. “Talking about recce probes, there’s that one still out there somewhere that needs to be located for recovery,” he murmured, twining a finger in a curl of hair at the back of her neck.
“One still out where?” Leisha kept on working, but she didn’t pull away.
“The day that Scout first got here. I was part of the crew. There was an incident that involved a probe coming down low, and Enka put a stone-headed arrow up its intake in a freak shot.” Leisha snickered. Jorff went on, “It probably didn’t harm anything, but the thing was making unhealthy noises, so we put it down until it can be checked out. It’s still up there somewhere, over the ridge.”
“Oh. I see.” Leisha’s tone said that she saw several things.
Jorff toyed lightly with the curl of hair. “So . . . what say you and I take a walk up that way and see if we can find it? Nice and peaceful, away from all these people . . .”
“As I said, we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”
Behind them, Calina said something to Yobu from where she was sitting by the wall of the inner hut. He spoke, and Leisha turned her head. Jorff looked at her and raised his eyebrows.
“She asks why people from the sky who can do anything need our young men to fight for them,” Leisha said.
Jorff wasn’t going to get into any of that. He wasn’t sure he could have explained it if he’d wanted to. “We’ll make Rakki a great chief,” he replied, thinking that should suffice.
Leisha conveyed it back. “Rakki brought Jemmo to the caves and made him a great chief too,” was the gist of Calina’s answer.
“What does that mean?” Jorff asked Leisha.
“I’m not sure.”
“No great chief will ever stay second to another,” Yobu supplied. “Even the gods fight already in their city to the north. She wants to know, when their chief has made Rakki like themselves, how long will it be before they and he turn on each other? And when the power of the gods turns into anger, what will become of her people then?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“Fridays, when it was clam chowder,” Keene said to Charlie. “And a good seafood salad bar. I was never that much into lobster, though. Too much like groceries. You know—one bag of them always made three bags of trash. But maybe some scrod or flounder, or a nice piece of whitefish . . . What?—”
For a moment it was like the loss of steering when a car slides on ice. They were crossing above slopes of rock outcrops and mud slides overlooking tracts of reedy marshland, and trading visions of their best-remembered restaurants in Los Angeles and Boston, when Keene felt a lightness in touch on the wheel. And then the whole cab seemed to rise from the ground, and he was seized by a sudden vertigo, as if he had been transported back into space and become weightless. Charlie was clinging to the bar on the door pillar and flailing with his other hand to find purchase, but some relentless force seemed to be lifting him from the seat and sending him sideways against Keene. Keene became conscious of a juddering, roaring noise, seemingly all around, and an octave below it, a groaning from deep in the ground that he felt in his stomach more than heard. Then came the punctuation of a series of immense, violent shocks that stung in his ears like the reports of nearby artillery. The runabout seemed to bounce and leap upward again, the scene outside turning. He registered in a detached kind of way that the tilt of the piece of ground they were on was changing. The runabout was thrown up and bounced several times more, becoming part of a jumble of loose boulders all tumbling and bounding downward in a melee as if they had taken on life. The force reversed and carried Charlie away, pinning him against the far side of the cab, and Keene found himself in turn hugging the steering column and trying to brace with his leg to avoid being flung on top of him. And then the whole section of hillside beneath them detached and slid away, sweeping them down toward the fringe of the marshes. The windshield shattered into a shower of pieces, and Keene found himself first bracing across the gap to prevent himself from jackknifing out over his seat harness, then slammed back against the rear wall as the runabout rolled and turned over. His head struck something hard, and his vision kaleidoscoped; but he remained conscious of them thudding to a halt in an upended position, straps cutting into his body.