Whistling and feeling better with every step—he still had a ways better to feel, he admitted—Daniel walked down the path to the beach. It was improved over the simple trackway they’d forced through the undergrowth the day before. The yacht hadn’t carried machetes or axes, but the ratings had improvised.
Adele sat at the edge of the beach, her back to a tree with knobby joints in its trunk. Her legs splayed out before her instead of being crossed. As he’d expected, the personal data unit was on her lap and the wands in her hands. She didn’t notice Daniel’s arrival till Barnes shouted a greeting from the Ahura’s upturned hull.
“I’m downloading everything I can find on Kostroman botany,” she said by way of greeting. Despite the brusque opening, she’d smiled to see him up and about. “The files are an awful tangle. Everything on this planet is an awful tangle.”
“That’s why they need experts from Cinnabar,” Daniel said cheerfully. “Let’s take a walk and see if we can’t do some untangling.”
Adele shut her computer down and transferred it to its sheath with a stringent caution that any spacer could recognize and approve. Only then did she rise, using Daniel’s offered arm as an anchor. It was like watching someone stand while wearing stilts. The two of them had stayed aboard the yacht until the instant it went over, so they’d had long dives into the water.
Daniel gestured to the left, past the salvage crew and along the lagoon side of the island. Fresh water was going to be a major concern when they left the atoll’s fruit behind in their jury-rigged vessel, and barrel trees couldn’t set their free-standing roots in ocean currents.
“A good thing we didn’t hit the land,” he said. He grinned. “Or the coral.”
“When I got up this morning, I didn’t think I could hurt any more than I did,” Adele said as she fell clumsily into step with him. “My knees were the size of melons. By now some of the swelling’s gone down and I’m almost glad that I wasn’t killed.”
Daniel blinked, then realized she was joking. He chuckled.
He supposed she was joking.
There was no path through the jungle anywhere on the island. Daniel would have been surprised to find it otherwise since large animals were unlikely to reach the atoll except if carried here by humans. It was fairly easy to move through the interior because the shaded undergrowth grew soft-stemmed and sickly, but to find the barrel trees they had to scout the margins.
He took the lead as they entered a thicket. The shrubs had thin, ropy stems with an explosion of green and yellow leaves at the peak fifteen feet in the air. Despite Daniel’s weight, the plants resisted him like a human mob.
“How is Hogg?” Adele asked quietly from behind him.
“Not great,” Daniel admitted, as he forced his way through to a less obstructive stretch of vegetation. He was sweating and breathing hard as he spread the last of the ropy shrubs for his companion.
“We can use these for fiber if we need to,” he said to Adele. “Though there was plenty of spare line aboard the Ahura. That’ll be simpler unless we can’t locate it now.”
Tiny insects shimmered about them, tickling as they drank human body oils and sometimes drowned in the droplets they craved. A wedge of lagoon entered the island here. Stalked eyes peered from the water, then vanished in bubbles and swirls of mud.
“They’ll do nicely to expand our diet,” Daniel said. “Crustaceans of some kind. There ought to be shellfish both here in the mud and on the ocean side.”
He met Adele’s eyes. “I’m worried about Hogg,” he said. “He’s got a concussion and there’s not a damned thing we can do here except supportive treatment.”
Adele gestured to her sheathed computer. “Any time you want . . .” she said.
Daniel shook his head. “No,” he said. “I have responsibility for the whole detachment. Things happen in wartime.”
Daniel took them inland to where they could step over the notch instead of trying to cross its original ten-foot width, even though that would have saved a hundred yards from their trek. He was sure that no major predator could have shared the lagoon with the giant sweep; but a day ago he’d have sworn that no sweep grew more than twenty feet in total length.