Powers That Be

by Anne McCaffrey

  He felt another flare of resentment and gave her a dirty look, then decided that wasn’t fair. She was just trying to be nice—maybe nosy, too, but at least she wasn’t browbeating anybody the way Giancarlo and the others were. “Nah, my mom’s, uh, not available—but I think Dad would want Steve here.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “His assistant, and his partner,” Diego said, daring her to make something of it.

  But she just nodded and said, “Okay, I’ll see if I can find out what’s being done officially, and if nothing is, we’ll try to do something unofficially. I just wanted you to know you’ve got friends here. Night.”

  “Buenas noches,” he whispered back.

  “You did good, Bunka,” Clodagh said later, when Bunny had returned to Kilcoole. She had dropped Giancarlo off at the company station to await word from the head of the search party, and delivered the others back to SpaceBase before returning to the village. “The boy is alone. Do you think he saw anything, or was it just the father?”

  “No,” Bunny said. “I think he did, too. I can’t say why—he’s denying he remembers a thing now, but they wouldn’t believe him if he told them the truth anyway. The father’s in the high-security ward at the infirmary. The flot around SpaceBase is that he’s crazy.”

  “Poor boy,” Clodagh said, her eyes blinking rapidly through the steam from the teacup she held to her lips. “All alone. I can’t feel much for his father, but the lad is so young to be left to the company wolves, especially when he has passed through what he has. If only we could initiate him, it would be better. Has he no one?”

  “Just this Steve,” Bunny said. “He is Dr. Steven L. Margolies, assigned to the same branch and regular duty station as Metaxos. I found that much out from Arnie’s soldier boyfriend at the communications shed. He put up the name Metaxos on the computer and it was there, under the info on Metaxos. I don’t know how we could find Steve though.”

  Clodagh shook her head regretfully. “It’s not really our place to find him, but the boy will need help when he goes back out there—” Her head jerked up. “I wish Charlie was still here.”

  “Maybe Yana can help,” Bunny suggested.

  “Maybe,” Clodagh said slowly. “But be careful. Charlie was one of us. He would know, the way you do, what the boy is going through, as well as how the PTBs are. We don’t know Yana so good yet.”

  “Sean likes her,” Bunny said.

  “He does, does he? What did he say?” Clodagh smiled a very pretty smile that transformed her face, her eyes twinkling with gleefully prurient interest.

  “Nothing, but I could tell,” Bunny said. “Don’t worry, you’ll be the first to know—well, maybe not the first . . .”

  “Yana could be a good ally, but she’s real closed up. That’s better than being too friendly, I guess, but I’d feel better about her being here if we knew more about her.”

  “Give her a break, Clodagh. It’s not her fault she was born at the wrong time and place for you to have delivered her the way you’ve done half of us. I’m going to go down there now and see if she has any ideas. Don’t worry. I won’t give anything away.”

  Over the next ten days Yana gradually accustomed herself to the new environment. She slept a lot, in between the necessary chores of keeping warm and eating. She kept Clodagh’s medicine near her so that every time she felt the tickle that was the prelude to a cough, she could take a swig and forestall a spasm. Whatever was in the stuff was far more efficacious than what the medics had given her on Andromeda. She practiced taking deeper breaths of the marvelous fresh air of Petaybee, expanding her capacity, flushing out the last of the gas from the depths of the lobes. She would never be much use here on Petaybee if she couldn’t even breathe without coughing.

  She had just finished making another futile trip to the virtually useless company store when she saw the snocles pulling into corps headquarters way up the street. Some game or the other was definitely afoot, but until the trouble came looking for her, she would conserve her strength. She needed all she could muster to withstand her own cooking, she thought, as she attempted to make a meal for herself and the cat. Other than the fish she had been given by Seamus and the one pan she had been given, she had found damned-all of any use through company channels in Kilcoole.

  The trouble did indeed come looking for her a short time later. She was in the middle of browning the fish when someone pounded at her door. She opened it to see Giancarlo standing there.

  “Maddock, where the hell have you been and why haven’t you reported in?” he snapped before she could invite him inside.

  “Nice to see you, too, sir,” she said with a growl, pumping his hand and pulling him inside. On the stove, the grease she was cooking the fish in crackled and spat. The cat scooted under the bed. For some reason, Giancarlo’s appearance suddenly infuriated her. Maybe it was because she was frustrated trying to keep house with the charity of the villagers because the store was so ill-stocked there was little her meager funds could buy to keep her alive. Maybe it was because they were no longer on shipboard or space station and so it didn’t look like the corps to her. Maybe it was because this guy was the kind of petty martinet she had always hated and had sworn she would get back at when she retired. Maybe it was because he was such a contrast to the polite and kindly locals. But she thought it was because after killing everyone around her and half killing her, the company still allowed brass-assed spooks like him to threaten to withhold medical treatment and to dump her unprepared in a place like this in order to use her. A couple of years earlier she would have taken it for granted that they had the right, that Giancarlo had the right. Now she felt anger rising up inside her high enough to choke her if she didn’t vent a little of it.

  “Do sit down and tell me how, sir, I’m supposed to contact you with no radio, no computer, no transportation, no contact person, not even a bloody goddamn pen, sir, or a fraggin’ piece of fraggin’ bloody paper, sir. While you’re at it, tell me how you expect me to maintain cover and gain the trust of the people here when you, sir, come barging in shouting my name like the ship’s bloody paging program. Sir.”

  She sat down in the chair, leaving him to remain standing or sit on the bed, she didn’t really care which, while she crossed her arms and glared up at him.

  “I see discipline has relaxed after only a few days of pretending to be a civilian.”

  “I am a civilian, sir. Maybe an employee, if the company cares to issue me anything to do my bloody job with, maybe not.”

  “You, uh, seem to be feeling better,” he said lamely.

  “Yes, Colonel Giancarlo, I am. Even we invalids have our good days. A weapon. I forgot. If I’m doing espionage here, I ought to have a weapon. If for no other reason than to hunt my own fraggin’ food. They do that here. They have to. Have you seen that company store? What’s the company trying to do here, sir? Incite another Bremport?”

  “That’s enough of that, Major. What I want to know is why the hell you didn’t inform us about this latest fiasco with the geologic team.”

  “Could be because I had barely arrived when it happened. Could be because I wasn’t briefed on who was here and who wasn’t to begin with. Could be because I have no means of communication, no liaison officer since you so impetuously dismissed the one who was already here—”

  “We had reasons to believe his loyalties were divided,” Giancarlo said. He was sweating now, bundled up in his outdoor clothing while the stove radiated heat throughout the room.

  About then she realized that the stove wasn’t just sending heat waves: the fish pan was billowing smoke. She began coughing, but she was so angry that, still bent double from the spasms, she grabbed her knife, stabbed the burning fish, and flipped it over in the blackening grease, still glaring at Giancarlo when her eyes weren’t clenched shut from the spasms.

  Giancarlo began coughing, too, and rose as she stumbled for the door and flung it open. They both stepped into the open air, breathing deeply, whil
e the smoke rolled out the door.

  “I want no repeat of this omission in the future,” he said. “Meanwhile, I’ll look into the problem of your special equipment. Good evening, Major.”

  She coughed and managed to blurt out “Colonel” only when he was well down the street. She covered her mouth and nose, reached around the corner of the door for the hook containing her parka, and grabbed Clodagh’s cough syrup and her muffler. Downing a swallow of the syrup, she rubbed the muffler in the snow and, holding it across her mouth and nose, dashed back into the cabin. She forked the burned fish from the pan and flicked it onto the snow for the cat to salvage later. Then, with the door still open, she put on her parka and sat outside, waiting for the smoke to clear.

  Fraggin’ bureaucrat! He was one lousy grade above her and thought he was some kind of fraggin’ deity. Idiots like him had assigned Bry that mission that had gotten him killed. Idiots like him had cut costs by shortchanging the colony on Bremer until the colonists had grown tired of watching each other and their children die of curable diseases and starvation, and had rebelled. What was that saying about “penny wise and pound foolish”? Damn!

  “Are you okay, dama?” her across-the-road neighbor, whom she hadn’t yet met, hollered out his door.

  “Fine!” she called back.

  “I saw smoke,” the man ventured, diplomatically not referring to the rest of the row.

  “Burned my dinner,” she said.

  “Want to come over while your house clears?”

  “No, thanks,” she called, trying not to sound as belligerent as she felt. “I’m out here for my health.”

  When she had literally and figuratively cooled off enough, she went back into the house. The odor of burnt fish was still very strong, but enough smoke had cleared so it didn’t bring on another coughing fit. She kept swigging on Clodagh’s bottle every so often to fend off hunger pains while she scoured the pan with her knife and fought off the cat, who kept climbing her leg, mewing piteously. It naturally wanted no more to do with the burnt fish than she did.

  Bunny knocked on the door and let herself in before Yana could answer.

  “Come in, sit down. No, better yet, I’ll be glad to feed you fish if you cook the dinner,” Yana told her.

  Bunny shook her head and took the pan away from her, filling it with snow to melt on the stove and plopping the fish in—all of them. Yana had forgotten to take the rest of the string back outside, and they had all thawed.

  “How did they expect you to live down here when they didn’t teach you how to survive?” she asked.

  “That’s what I was just asking my good buddy, Colonel Asshole Giancarlo, when he came to give me his hail-and-farewell address.”

  “I heard,” Bunny said.

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, all up and down the street. People thought you might be burning him at the stake or something until your neighbors saw him leave. They said you sure looked mad, dragging him inside. Then the smoke started billowing out of your house. You threw him out the door with burning fish and sat out in the cold.”

  “How could you know?” Yana asked, mortified at the picture she probably had presented. Some clandestine operative she was. Giancarlo would probably send some mercenary hit man after her after this incident, but it was worth it. Asshole. “It just happened.”

  Bunny shrugged. “It’s a small town, Yana. By the way, your face is black all down the middle from your eyes to your chin.”

  “Shit.” Yana pulled out the tail of her uniform blouse, dipped it in the fish water, and scrubbed. “Did I get it?”

  “Not all. Your nose is still dirty.”

  That struck Yana as funny, and she began laughing so hard she started coughing again, realizing as she fell into hiccoughs that she was also slightly drunk from Clodagh’s cough syrup. She collapsed on the bed.

  “Oh, shit, Bunny, what a week,” she said, her laughs subsiding into a flurry of silly intermittent giggles.

  That started Bunny laughing, too. She put a plate on top of the pan for a lid and sat down at the table, laughing louder than Yana until her laughter started Yana off again.

  “You’re as bad as me,” Yana said finally. “I’m a fine ‘zample to the younger gen’ration.”

  “I sure would have liked to see you haul that Giancarlo in and kick him out,” Bunny said. “I been driving him around for days and he’s—he’s—”

  “Yeah, isn’t he?”

  “He’s been browbeating Lavelle, even though she told him what happened. And he has poor Dr. Metaxos locked up in the crazy ward and won’t believe what Diego tells him, and Diego’s all by himself and can’t find his other father . . .”

  “Other father?”

  Bunny nodded. “His father’s partner, Steven Margolies. You know, they’re like Aisling and Sinead, and they’re Diego’s folks, but nobody’s even let the other father know about Dr. Metaxos. If Charlie were here, he could maybe have gotten a message to this Steve through people he knew at SpaceBase, but now there’s no one in town who can help Diego, and you can bet Giancarlo won’t do it.”

  “My my. You’ve sure taken up this Diego’s cause in a short period of time. I thought he was in shock and half out of it.”

  “He’s not. He’s just worried about his da and nobody will believe him.”

  “What’s he look like, Bunny?” Yana asked her.

  “He has really dark eyes, very big, and his hair is—Yana, you’re laughing at me!”

  “Yep, I thought so,” Yana said. “He’s cute, is he? ‘Sokay, Bunny. So you like this boy and nobody will help him and Giancarlo was his usual charming self to your buddy, so you’re glad I told him off and you came to tell me so? Or did you really just come down to cook me dinner so I wouldn’t starve to death?”

  “Well, I was talking to Clodagh . . .” Bunny’s face grew a little sly as she turned and pulled two steaming and fragrant fish out of the pan and arranged them on a plate. Carefully she picked the third one up by the tail. The cat was no laggard and had snagged it out of her hand before she could lay it on the floor for him.

  “What I told Clodagh . . .” Bunny began, managing to stand between Yana and the fish.

  “What?” Yana said, sobering now so that Bunny stopped playing and settled into the chair, handing Yana the knife so she could carve into her fish.

  “Was maybe you could help Diego. You know, maybe you could ride in with me to SpaceBase next time I have a run and like wear your uniform and maybe Arnie’s boyfriend would help you get a message to that man you said would help Charlie. Maybe he could let Dr. Margolies know what happened and—well, you did say he was in deployment. Maybe he could get him down here.”

  “Military deployment, Bunny.”

  Bunny shrugged. “It’s all just PTBs anyway, isn’t it? Can’t they pull strings or something?”

  “Hmm. Maybe they can. If anyone could, Ahmed could. Or if not, he’d find out who could.” And in the back of her mind, it occurred to her that she could also use her full uniform and access to SpaceBase as an opportunity to “requisition” some of the equipment necessary to the duties Giancarlo seemed to think she was so derelict in performing. If at some later date he actually got around to issuing her duplicates, she could trade the items for other locally produced items. She wasn’t really qualified for this kind of subterfuge, having never actually been a supply officer, but she figured necessity was going to have to be the mother of invention in this case.

  Yana was very popular that evening. Bunny hadn’t been gone more than a half an hour when there was another knock at her door. She opened it to find Sean Shongili leaning against the doorframe, astounding her again with how much less bulky he was than everyone else.

  “Come in,” she said. “You’ll catch your death. A virus or something . . .”

  The silvery eyes glinted with amusement and his mouth quirked at the corner. She had an unauthorized urge to brush back the lock of silver-brown hair that fell boyishly forward onto his fore
head.

  “I hear you’ve been taking on the Intergal high command,” he said, stamping his feet outside and entering, shrugging off his light jacket before even closing the door.

  “Oh, that.” She waved her hand dismissively, pretending more nonchalance than she felt. She was probably going to have to do a little creative groveling over that sooner or later if she was going to be able to help the boy—or maybe not. She was no longer feeling so smug. The smart thing for Giancarlo to do was to cooperate with her if he wanted results; but, although he was far from stupid, for someone in his specialty, he did not seem to have learned the value of cooperation, though no doubt he found it in himself to cooperate with those of higher rank. She would worry about it later, she thought, realizing at the same time that the effects of the cough medicine’s overdose hadn’t quite worn off. She was using a lot of her mental energy to keep from throwing her arms around Shongili’s neck and planting a kiss on the warm smile with which he was favoring her.

  “Uh, sit down,” she said, brushing her own hair back from her face and hoping her hands had gotten washed somehow in the midst of all of this and she wasn’t resmearing herself with ashes. “Can I burn you some tea?”

  “Please. I just got back from running with the search party.”

  “Any trace of the others?”

  He shook his head and sat on the bed. She lifted a finger to tell him to wait, ducked outside, dipped up a pan of snow from a high drift, where animals hadn’t been able to reach it, and returned to plop it back on the stove.

  “No,” he said. “Not a trace. And it started snowing hard again, so we had to give up for the time being. If your friend the colonel would just release Lavelle, I’ll bet Dinah could help. She’s the best leader of all of the dogs, and if our people are still findable, she’ll locate them. We’ve been out for three days now.”

  “You must be exhausted.”

  “A little. I just came by to ask if you’d finished with the recorder yet.”