“Yes, ma'am, Captain.” He sketched a salute.
Bain suddenly understood why Lin pretended to be fierce, why she growled and threatened and complained when a situation wasn't deathly serious. It was a way of fighting the fear and encouraging others.
“That's my boy, all right. You're the best crew I've ever had, and don't you forget it.” She shook him once more and released him. Lin turned to face Ivar, Miri and Mistress Harrol again. “I'll only ask you to leave one person behind to help Bain. Decide quickly, because we have to leave now.”
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Chapter Fourteen
Her name was Alyss. She was Miri's niece, and granddaughter by marriage to Ivar's aunt. Bain wondered if every single person on Dogray was related to everybody else in some way or another. On Lenga, it seemed like nobody belonged to anybody, but here the family connections were so tight he couldn't untangle them.
That was the least of his problems. Alyss was a full head taller than he was—and she was a girl. She wasn't a grown-up, like Lin. She wore a long skirt past her knees and a leather vest with pockets all down the front, and her hair was clipped shorter than Bain's. When Miri brought her over, the white-haired girl looked at Bain with pale blue eyes, and he just knew she was going to cross her eyes and stick her tongue out at him like the girls at the orphanage used to do, just before they threw dishwater at him or told lies to one of the adults.
“I think I know where Marco and Mattias were going to take the others,” Alyss said after a few seconds of silence. “What do we do when we find them?”
“Make sure the pirates don't find you, first.” Lin stepped back, hands on her hips, and looked the girl up and down. She smiled a little, and that made Bain angry. Didn't Lin see what a spoiled brat this girl was?
“You just sit tight and wait for the ship to come back,” Miri said. “Bain here will help us find you.”
“What? Is he a homing signal or something?” At least Alyss didn't sneer at him. She even looked interested. Bain still didn't hold much hope.
“Bain can explain it to you while you're walking.” Lin held out a backpack to Bain. “Rations, medic kit, thermal blankets, knife and a small beam burner. It has a limited charge, so don't waste it.” She waited until he slid his arms through the strap. “Remember, if you take any stupid risks, no chocolate for two moons—”
“You said three.” Bain grinned. He had finally caught on to her trick, and it was almost fun.
“Two moons is bad enough. Plus, you'll have to practice your harp every day and twice on prayerday.” She tousled his hair and gave him a little shove. “Get moving. I have a ship to launch.” She winked and stalked up the ramp into the ship.
“Be careful, Bain,” Ganfer said.
Alyss jerked, startled at hearing the ship-brain's voice come out of the link collar. Bain grinned at her. He walked away a few steps while Alyss hugged Miri good-bye. Ivar gave her practically the same advice Lin had given Bain. The boy noted that the man didn't tease-threaten the girl, and his worry was so evident that Alyss looked a little pale when she finally walked away to join Bain.
“What's chocolate?” she asked, as they watched the cargo ramp lift back into the ship's body.
“It's something you drink. Hot, sweet and spicy, and the best stuff you'll ever taste in the whole universe.”
“Oh.”
“I bet Lin will give you some when she comes to get us. If we do a good job,” Bain hurried to add.
“It'll be easy.” Alyss turned her back on the ship and started walking away.
Bain followed her. He kept glancing over his shoulder at Sunsinger as the engines growled into life and gusts of dust rose into the air around the ship's lift thrusters. He decided right then he didn't like to see Sunsinger launch without him.
* * * *
“What if they're not in that canyon?” Bain asked. He studied the lines of the map Alyss had scratched in the dirt with a stick.
“They will be. Marco said that's where they were taking the little kids.” Alyss tugged a few strands of hair back behind her ears and looked across the river. They had stopped to eat lunch with the sun almost directly overhead.
Scratchy bushes lined both sides of the riverbank, with stony, dusty dirt between them. Beyond the bushes were clumps of what Bain couldn't call grass or bushes. It looked like a combination of both, all twisted together like knots in a ball of dirty string.
“How come Mistress Coor didn't know about the canyon?” he asked after a few seconds of thought.
“We aren't stupid.” She took one more drink from her canteen and twisted the lid closed. “We believed the Rangers when they said pirates and Mashrami were coming. The grown-ups said, take the littles away and don't tell us where. Marco told me because everybody knows adults think kids don't know anything.”
“Okay.” Bain supposed that made sense. If pirates attacked the processing station, they would threaten the adults to find out where everybody was, but he doubted anyone would think to ask the children. “But what if they aren't in the canyon?”
“It's our favorite place to go. There's candy bushes there and lots of water where the fish are easy to catch, and lots of caves to hide in.”
“Candy bushes?” He grinned at the mental image of a bush with pieces of sweets hanging off it.
“The berries are full of sugar, and when they dry you can grind them up like rock candy.” Alyss grinned back. “If you eat more than five at a time, you get so sick!”
“I bet the grown-ups don't want you to eat them.”
“Of course not. They're grown-ups. They're always finding things that aren't good for us.”
“That's their job.”
“I suppose.” She tilted her head back and looked at the sun. “We should get walking again.”
“How much longer?” Bain stood and swung his backpack over his shoulder.
“Three, four more hours, I guess. Lots of time to go swimming and catch fish for supper before it starts getting dark.”
They started walking again.
“How come you don't have sleds or anything else to get places faster?” Bain asked after a few minutes of quiet.
“We're harvesters.” She shrugged and gave him a little frown that clearly said she thought he was stupid.
“What does that mean?” He hated to let those words past his lips. It was like standing still and begging Toly Gaber to hit him.
“We have to look at all the plants, real close, and every time we see something different, we have to stop to examine it and test it and compare it to what we found before.”
“Oh. Can't see much if you're flying five meters up.” He nodded. That made sense. Bain just wished he had thought of it before she had to explain.
“What's it like up in space?” Alyss asked almost in a whisper. She looked away so he couldn't see her face.
“It's ... scary and fun. And it's dangerous. And there's lots to learn.”
“And you drink chocolate,” she prompted.
“Well, yeah. But that's only for special times. Like treats after you do something really hard.” Bain grinned. “Like when we go through a Knaught Point, and we aren't sure where we're going to come out, but we come out right where we wanted to.”
“What's a Knaught Point?” Alyss turned back to look at him again. He only saw curiosity on her face.
“You don't know what a Knaught Point is? Even kids in the orphanage learned the easy parts.” Bain stopped short when her curious expression started to turn to a frown. “Well, Knaught Points aren't that easy to explain. Even the Fleet doesn't really know how to use them. That's why they hire Spacers to pilot them when it's tricky.”
“When my grandparents came here, they didn't have a Spacer for a pilot. They used a computer.”
“Yeah, but computers can make mistakes.” He shook his head. “I just sit and watch Lin when she takes us through Knaught Points. I won't be allowed to pilot for a long time.”
>
“Hard?”
“Uh huh. And it's fun, too.”
As they walked, Bain tried to explain what the dome looked like as Sunsinger approached a Knaught Point. He stumbled over words, trying to describe the sounds. As Alyss listened, her eyes grew wide, and sometimes she smiled. That encouraged him. She was older than he was, and a girl, but she wasn't making fun of him.
Everything was going fine until Bain stepped into a sinker hole.
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Chapter Fifteen
He felt the ground shake under his foot as he put it down and started to lift the other. Bain hesitated and glanced at Alyss and stopped talking.
“What?” she said and turned to look at him.
The same moment, Bain tried to step backwards but his feet tangled, and he stumbled forward.
The ground opened up like a mouth under his foot, and he fell forward and down. Bain let out a yelp and got dirt in his mouth. He dug his hands into the ground to stop falling.
Dirt slid down the hole around his leg. Roots and things Bain couldn't see scratched at his leg. Something stabbed into his knee. He tried to move his foot, and it snagged on something.
Bain lay on his face, one leg stuck in the hole, and his other leg folded up under himself.
“Alyss?” His voice shook like a baby that was about to cry.
“Hold still!” she whispered loudly. She sounded like she was far behind him. “The sinker got you.”
“What's a sinker?”
“They dig holes underground. When there's a lot of them, a whole field can fall a meter down in one day.”
Bain closed his eyes and regretted it a moment later. He had a clear mental image of a deck on Sunsinger falling out from under his feet and letting him drop into space.
“How do I get out of here?”
“Slowly.” She giggled, but it was a scared giggle. “You have to be really careful, or you'll just fall into more holes.”
“Okay.” Bain pressed down carefully with his hands, trying to feel for shaking ground before he pushed himself up. He turned his neck until it ached, and was able to look over his shoulder enough to see Alyss. She stood five meters back with her hands clenched tight together in front of her.
“Are you okay? I mean, you didn't break anything, did you?”
“I don't think so.” He thought of how pretend-angry Lin would be if he broke his leg. Bain would have grinned, but he started imagining dark shapes coming up through the ground around his leg. “Sinkers don't bite, do they?”
“No. I don't think so.”
“What do you mean? Don't you know if they do or not?”
“Don't yell at me!”
“I'm not yelling.” Bain took a deep breath. He had been yelling. “I'm going to try to turn around and crawl back the way we were walking.” He started turning. “Will that work?”
“I think so.”
“What do you do when people fall in?”
“Usually there are grown-ups around, and they throw a rope and pull us out.”
“We don't have any rope.” Bain kept turning. The ground felt like sand under the scratchy bush-grass. He stopped every time he thought he felt the ground shake.
Nothing grabbed his leg or stopped him from turning around. He thought that was good. What would Lin do if she had fallen in a sinker hole?
Bain decided after a second of thought that Lin wouldn't have fallen in. She would have asked questions and found out about sinkers and the signs of their burrows before she started walking across country.
But the question remained: what would Lin do in this situation? Bain dug his hands into the dirt and pushed a little with his free leg and turned himself a little more. He was halfway between where he had been facing and where Alyss stood now. That was good, wasn't it?
What would Lin do? He knew she would try to stay calm and find something amusing about her predicament. He knew she would say a short, fast prayer and get to work.
“Fi'in, please help me,” Bain whispered.
“What did you say?” Alyss didn't sound as afraid as she did a few minutes ago.
“I was praying.”
“Why?”
“Who else is going to help us?”
“Oh.” She nodded and closed her eyes and folded her hands. “Fi'in, please help us. I'm scared and Bain's scared—”
“I'm not scared!” He took a deep breath and bit his lip to keep from talking—he had started yelling again.
“We have to find the other kids and the littles and keep them safe from the pirates,” Alyss said, and opened her eyes. “Do you think that will help?”
“Lin says Fi'in listens to children more than anybody else.”
“Why?”
“I don't know.”
“Why do you call her Lin?”
“That's her name.” Bain stopped and rubbed the sweat off his face. Too late he remembered his hands were gritty with sandy dirt. He felt the dirt mix with the sweat and leave mud on his face. At least he didn't have to turn himself around any more. He was facing Alyss. Now all he had to do was pull his leg out of the hole and crawl back out on solid ground.
“I mean, why don't you call her Mother?”
“She's not my mother.”
“Oh.” She took a step closer and knelt and held out her hand. She wasn't close enough yet to reach his hand. “What is she, then?”
“She's the captain, and I'm her apprentice.”
“Oh. Then why don't you call her Captain?”
“I don't know.” Bain shrugged. He paused to try to remember when he had started calling her by name. Lin had never told him to stop, so he assumed it was all right. “She says being her apprentice is almost as good as family. Just not as permanent.”
“Oh.” Alyss crept forward a few centimeters and stretched out both arms. The tips of her fingers barely brushed Bain's fingers.
“Wait a second.” He dug his elbows into the ground, feeling for it to start shaking under him. Nothing happened. Bain took a deep breath and pushed up, hard. He wished they were in free-fall. Bain decided he liked free-fall much more than gravity, even if it made fun things like swimming and running and taking a real bath hard or impossible.
He pushed himself out enough that he felt his knee catch on the edge of the hole. Bain dropped forward.
Alyss gasped when the ground trembled a little from the impact. She glared at him. Bain grinned and wiped more sweat off his face, making more mud. She grabbed hold of his hand with both hers and started pulling. Bain pushed with his free hand and his leg. Less than a minute later, they were both standing up and on solid ground. Bain slapped his hands down his pants, trying to pound the dirt out of the material. He wished he had been wearing his sturdy, dirt-brown clothes from the orphanage instead of his favorite blue pants.
“Nothing torn. Doesn't look like you got cut, either.” Alyss wiped her dirty hands on her skirt. “You were lucky.”
“Yeah, I guess so. How do we get around the field so we don't fall in again?” Bain turned to look at the open field ahead of them. It was hard to tell where solid ground ended and shaky ground started until he actually stepped on it.
“Well ... “She frowned and turned to look in all directions. “I guess we have to walk on rocks and in the woods. Sinkers don't like tree roots and they can't dig through rocks.”
“Okay.” He shrugged his backpack into place and took a few testing steps. His leg didn't hurt.
Because of having to make long detours to find either rocks to walk on or forested patches to walk through, they didn't reach the canyon until almost dusk. The last scarlet and purple streaks of sunset were just starting to fade into a silvery gray sky when Alyss pointed at the top of the slope ahead of them. She smiled.
“When we get over that, we'll see the canyon. There's a whole bunch of candy bushes between here and the canyon, too.”
“Are they really that good?” Bain had been thinking about the candy bushes off
and on all afternoon.
“The really dark purple ones are the best. The green ones are harder than pebbles. My Aunt Needra bit into one and broke her tooth right off. The red ones and the red-purple ones are pretty good, though. You can eat a whole handful of those before you get sick. The purple ones are enough that one can make a whole pot of coffee sweet, my mother says.” She stopped and clenched her fists, and her mouth opened like she would say something, but she didn't.
“Are you okay?” He thought he could see tears starting in the corners of her eyes.
“My mother is sick. They wouldn't let me stay with her because they thought I would get it too.”
“Did you get your shot?” Bain tried to smile when the girl nodded. “Then you won't get sick.”
“Think they'll let me stay with her when your ship comes to get us?”
“Sure.”
Five more steps took them to the top of the slope. Alyss lifted her hand to point at the clumps of pale green bushes that looked like wads of feathers, scattered all down the length of the slope. She gasped.
Bain looked, wondering what was wrong. At the far edge of the slope, he saw jumbled piles of rock and a blob of dark shadows. That had to be the entrance to the canyon. It wasn't as far away as he had thought. After the long distance they had walked today, nothing looked very long.
Then Bain saw the three campfires and the tents set up between the last candy bush and the rocks at the canyon mouth. There were people moving around. They were too far away to be more than shapes, but when they stood next to the tents Bain could tell they were too tall to be the children. There weren't supposed to be any adults with the group.
A shift in the breeze brought the smell of cooking meat and bread to them. Bain's stomach growled and his mouth started to water.
“We're not allowed to make fires out in the open like that,” Alyss whispered.
Bain nodded. He remembered something else. Alyss had told him Marco and Mattias and the children hadn't brought tents with them. They had been planning on sleeping in the caves in the canyon and had only brought rolled cushions and big blankets to act as wind-breaks.
Spacer's Creed Page 11