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“How many days has he been gone?” she asked.
The chieftain counted on his fingers. “Five,” he answered. “And he is not alone. A boy, Hans Gunnarsson, is with him, and your own tribesman, the one that lives with the salmon people.”
Startled, Nikko turned to her husband. As a woman, she should let him do most of the talking in such matters, or risk their reputations among these people.
“Ted went with him?” Matthew asked.
“That’s what One-Eye Björnsson said. And Sten Van-naren saw them camped with Nils on the Danube.” Then Ulf told about the fight there, with Olof Three-Fingers and his kinsmen. “It seems that Nils plans to ride east somewhere,” the chief finished, “though where . . .” He shrugged.
“We need to find Sten,” Matthew said. “There may be more he can tell us.”
“He didn’t come home with us,” Ulf told him. “He’s never been one to spend time in his home village; that’s how he got his name. He planned to rest a few days with the people of the Ice Bear, and heal his wounds. They might be there yet, though I doubt it. Then he and Leif Trollsverd would go awandering, exploring.”
“Thank you,” Matthew answered. “We’ll leave right away. Perhaps we’ll catch them there.”
They took off at once, Matthew at the controls, and as they lifted, Nikko tried to raise Baver on the radio. She got nothing. It took only minutes to reach Isbjørnaby. There they were told that the two warriors had left early that morning, not saying where they were going. Next they flew to Laxaby, the principal village of the Salmon Clan, in case Baver had returned there. He hadn’t. The Salmon chief invited them to supper with his family, where they ate roast beef, and a pungent stew made with wild millet, wild peas, unidentified roots or tubers, and potent wild onions. Afterward, breath reeking, they got back in the Alpha and took off in the dusk. Instead of flying directly back to Varjby, they rode a gravitic vector straight upward to 280 kilometers, from
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where they could see the sunlit crescent of Europe to the west. To the east, across the Black Sea, lay 9,000 nightbound kilometers of the Eurasian continent, stretching to the Pacific.
“I’m surprised that Ted hasn’t radioed us,” Nikko said.
“There were times he couldn’t have reached us,” Matthew answered.
“But a lot more that he could have. Anytime the last couple of days. Do you think his radio could be malfunctioning?”
“Unlikely. It should last a decade or longer. The power tap too. Unless he’s damaged it somehow.”
Nikko examined the situation. “It’s very unlike him to even have left.”
Matt nodded. Ted Baver had been a surprise to them, a disappointment. Back on New Home, there’d been considerable competition to be part of the expedition to Earth. Baver had applied, passed the exams with high grades, impressed the interviewers, and been accepted. He’d opted for a post as junior ethnologist, studied hard, and come to Earth with them* as a second stringer. For the first weeks, given their involuntary involvement in the Orc War and its demands on the pinnaces, he’d had
*Their ancestors had migrated from Earth more than seven terran centuries earlier. When the colony was less than a decade old, ships stopped arriving, suddenly and inexplicably. The colonists had no jump ship of their own, and there were none at all on the landing grid when the possibility gradually dawned that they might have been abandoned.
They didn’t know about the burning plague which reduced the population of Earth to about 10-4 of its pre-plague level. Fortunately it had never reached their world. They’d only known that ships had stopped coming.
They had little attention to give the mystery. The New Home colony was the first sent out from Earth after development of the Patel jump drive, but at the time of New Home’s isolation, it was little more than the agrarian base for a planned, self-sufficient human world of the future. It took all the colonists’ hard work and resourcefulness to establish a viable economy that included a significant, if shrunken, technological base.