Sunlight awakened Daniel. It filtered through the shelter of leaves and saplings his ratings must have built around him while he was asleep.
“Why didn’t—” Daniel said as he sprang upright. Every muscle in his body, particularly the big ones in his thighs and shoulders, grabbed him simultaneously. It was like being attacked by a platoon of madmen with icepicks.
“Mary Mother of God!” Daniel cried tightly. His mouth would have been content to scream instead.
Overwhelming pain had made his eyes blink closed. Memory painted across the inside of his eyelids an image of himself forty feet in the air, wrapped around the shuddering gun mount.
Daniel Leary had done amazing things yesterday, he’d tell the world he had, but exertion like that came with a price tag. He was paying it now.
“We thought you could use your beauty sleep, sir,” said Woetjans, seated with her back to the shelter’s end post. She stood easily and offered Daniel her hand.
“I’m not proud,” he muttered. He took Woetjans’s callused grip as a brace to hold him as his legs levered him upright.
After the first instant, it wasn’t too bad. The first instant felt like the madmen had exchanged their icepicks for flensing knives.
He laughed at Woetjans’s concerned expression. “Remind me to get into shape before the next time I go out for trapeze,” he said. “I’ll be all right, I’m just stiff.”
Very carefully Daniel stretched, locking his fingers behind his neck and arching his spine backward. He’d moved the detachment into a natural clearing formed by a protrusion of the igneous rock around which the island had grown. The ground cover was low-growing and soft. The hard rock wouldn’t support larger vegetation, and the canopies of surrounding trees shaded but didn’t cover the sky.
“Ganser’s lot buggered off in the night,” Woetjans said. “I don’t guess that’s much loss. They took a case or two of rations, but we had all the guns under guard with us.”
“I wonder where they think they’re going to go?” Daniel said with a frown. He didn’t understand the situation, so it worried him. The Kostroman thugs had scarcely seemed the sort who’d be ashamed to take charity from a Cinnabar contingent which was obviously more competent at living rough.
“I told the crew to make sure they’re always two together, even if they’re just going around the next tree to take a leak,” Woetjans said. “If anybody runs into a problem with the wogs, then I guess we’ll finish things the way we could’ve done back on Kostroma.”
Lamsoe and Sun, the detachment’s armorer and armorer’s mate by necessity, were in the clearing working on the guns. Daniel had seen enough of the pair to respect their competence but, like Adele, he very much doubted that the weapons could be safely reconditioned under the present circumstances.
“Where’s Ms. Mundy?” he asked. He heard ratings calling from the forest, gathering food from the species he’d indicated before the sudden tropic nightfall of the previous day. They’d begun cutting wood besides. Rhythmic axe blows rang from deeper in the forest.
Hogg lay on a leaf mat, beneath a shelter like the one that had covered Daniel. At intervals Sun leaned over and mopped Hogg’s face and mouth with a damp rag. Hogg was breathing hoarsely and, for the first time in Daniel’s recollection, looked his age.
“She went back to the beach for a better line to the satellites she’s using,” Woetjans said, also a little grimmer for viewing Hogg. “There’s six ratings there on the salvage detail, so no wog’s going to catch her alone.”
The big bosun’s mate shook her head. “Mind, I’d bet her against the whole lot of them. She surprised the living shit outa me, she did.”
“Yeah,” said Daniel. “Me too.”
He shrugged, loosening his muscles a little more. “I’m going to take her on a tour of the neighborhood,” he said. “She can get me details on the wildlife through her computer.”
Daniel grinned and added, “And she can be my bodyguard, so don’t put on that sour expression, Woetjans. The rest of the detachment has its duties laid out, so I’m the party best spared for scouting.”