Cold Welcome

by Elizabeth Moon

  “Fine. Sleep when you need to. Pull all those components, bring them back here—though they may self-destruct so ask if there’s a good solid vault in the ship. Same codes for each, run the same Analytics before you pull ’em.”

  “I’m okay. See you when I get back.”

  Teague closed the maintenance hatch gently and wiped the surface with a cloth that left a slight glaze on the shiny paint. Maybe someone else would like to contribute trace data.

  Back in the ship, he asked about safe storage for something that might blow up or melt or otherwise self-destruct.

  “Safe? That would be throwing it into a star. How big is it?”

  Teague pulled it from the carry-bag. “This.”

  “Oh, well. And there’s more than one? They’ll all fit in the ammo storage; it’s supposed to withstand all the ammunition blowing at once. Never tried it, though.”

  He looked at her and did not ask. He had seen no signs of weapons aboard Morningstar. “You’re cold and you’re still in trans,” Daran said. “Sit here and I’ll fix you some tea. Strap in; Gin’s going to shove us again.”

  Teague did as he was told; Daran fixed him tea and handed him a couple of ginger biscuits, then headed aft. Through the open cockpit door, Teague could see the captain wiggling the handset gently, easing them away from the repeater before throwing them at the next. He sipped the tea, realizing he was in fact cold and hungry, and had finished one of the biscuits when Daran came back with a thick-walled box.

  “This should do it, unless they’re really suicidal,” Daran said. “And we can monitor what’s going on inside.” He pointed to a readout on one side. “Put it in there, and I’ll put this back in the vault.”

  Teague dropped the little object in the box; Daran closed it, carried it back aft…Teague thought better of looking around the corner to see exactly where. He himself was neither Vatta nor ISC. And he wished his bones would quit writhing around.

  Three hours later, they were hanging about three meters off another of the repeaters, and Teague suited up again, readying his carry-bag. The procedure was the same, except that he did not call Rafe this time, and he came back aboard feeling more tired than he expected, until he added up the hours since he’d slept last. “I need to rest before the next one,” he told the captain. “My hands aren’t steady.”

  “We’ll go back to the station,” the captain said. “Only safe place to hang out, close in like this. Bunk in Vatta’s crew overnight quarters, start again in eight hours. You can catch some sleep now, if you want.”

  “No thanks. Knowing I’ll have to get up and walk steadily when we reach the station, I’d better stay up until then.”

  “Hang on, then, it’ll be rough.”

  Teague had never imagined a pilot of anything—water-boat or spacecraft—taking such delight in pushing a vehicle near its limits. Then he considered what little he knew of the Vattas, the few he’d met and those he’d heard about. Apparently they liked a kind of danger he hoped never to encounter.

  By the time they reached the station, he felt nauseated as well as exhausted. Captain Vatta steered him firmly into the hands of the Vatta section’s medbooth, where he got a shot of something to settle his stomach and a tab for sleep. “You’d best stay here,” the medic said. She was entirely too cheerful, he thought, but he was asleep before he knew it.

  —

  Grace arrived home to the news that Teague was bunked in on the station, and Rafe had confirmed the blocking of scans over Miksland, and unblocked them.

  “We can expect whoever did this to notice,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t unblock normal communications channels, just the satellite visual scan. If Ky’s people found out their comunits were working, they might give the other side too much info.”

  “What about your special link?”

  “Nothing yet. Here—I’ve got the scans loaded up for you. I can block them again, from here, with the changes Teague made.”

  “Very resourceful,” Mac said.

  “My code still gives me access to all ISC equipment,” Rafe said.

  The scans came up on Grace’s main screen. “That cloud will pass,” Rafe said. “There—you can see the coast—that bay—that orange dot on the white?” He froze the image. “Zooming. It looks like some kind of fabric.”

  “Part of a life raft, it could be,” Mac said. He glanced at Grace. “So they made it that far.”

  “Now heading away from the water,” Rafe said, “you can see shadows on the terrain—and there are the buildings. And the runway.”

  “What’s the tower?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s there. Those two look like hangars, and these two look like ordinary military prefab huts. Guard post, maybe?”

  “If they could get there—” Grace did not finish the sentence.

  “Somebody’s there.” Rafe reached over and tapped out a code. The display darkened, but the two smaller buildings glowed. “Heat signature. If the bad guys can snag the scans—and they probably can—they’ll know someone’s there. That’s why I want to turn the scans off, now that we know for sure they’re there.”

  Grace nodded. “Do it.”

  Rafe tapped in another series of commands. “It’s blocked. We have these to look at—some from their night, a few from their day. But I’m still sure they have an automatic warning to let them know someone’s been tinkering with the satellites.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  SLOTTER KEY, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

  DAY 38

  Merced Tolganna frowned as a light blinked orange on the third box, second row, of a stack positioned in the last row. No lights ever came on there; she’d been told they were old tech, kept for scavenging spare cubes and connectors, but nobody had ever touched them, at least not on her shift in her twenty years in Central Data’s secure vaults. She looked up the manual she’d been issued the day she arrived, and scrolled along until she found the list. Inactive reserve units, outdated, no maintenance needed. Right. Then the curly mark that meant a footnote somewhere.

  “Should a unit spontaneously activate, inform supervisor—” followed by a list of names and dates. Her current supervisor was Nils Rolander. The one time she’d called him for an anomaly, he’d chewed her out for interrupting him and threatened to dock her pay if she called for “a simple matter you could have taken care of” again. She couldn’t afford to lose pay, not with Stan’s cough getting worse. “Include serial number, time of activation, and type of code.”

  Code? The box was ancient; she had no idea what code it might have started with. She called up the schematic, looked at that serial number, then walked over to the stack where she could see the original blinking light, just as it had been mirrored on her display. On, off, on off, very simple. Orange. Serial number…yes, the same.

  Maybe she could fix it herself and not have to call Rolander. At least she could check if some mischievous person on another shift had reconnected it to power, but the boxes fit snugly enough in the rack that she couldn’t see behind it. She put her hands on either side of it and tugged. It didn’t move. Been there so long it had grown onto the shelf. Probably the footpads had deteriorated into black goo. She tried to lift the front a little, break the contact. No movement.

  Back at her desk, she had a thin metal strip she’d used before for unsticking recalcitrant boxes. She fetched it and worked it under the front of the box. Sure enough, she could lever the front up a little, and as she’d suspected the footpads stretched a little. They needed to be replaced. She worked the metal strip vigorously until she had the footpads separated from the short front legs of the box, then—holding the front up perhaps half a centimeter—tugged hard. Harder. The box made a sort of scrunching sound and the blinking orange light turned red.

  Clearly it was malfunctioning, and the sooner she disconnected its power supply—if this wasn’t due to some chemical deterioration inside—the better. Merced braced herself and yanked hard, with all her strength. She felt the back legs c
ome loose and staggered back just as the box disintegrated in a bright light that was the last thing she ever saw.

  Alarms went off, emergency lights flashed all over the building, a recorded voice announced “Evacuate! Evacuate! Evacuate!” Not until all the regular employees had left the building did anyone enter the room where Merced had worked. One man stopped at Merced’s desk and called up the activity log for her shift. The mess at the far end of the stacks offered no more information than the log, but that was enough.

  “Stupid woman,” the man said. “Why didn’t she just inform her supervisor? She’d looked up the procedure in the manual.”

  The second man sighed, fogging the faceplate of his protective gear. “Now we’ll have to do a new background check on her. Maybe she suspected something.”

  “Or maybe she was just bored.”

  They cleaned up the mess, and by the time they’d satisfied themselves the area was safe once more, Nils Rolander had arrived. By then, another of the boxes was blinking.

  “What a shame about poor Merced,” he said. “I would never have suspected her of initiative.”

  “We’ll have to do another background check—”

  “Yes, of course, Ted. And I see there’s another signal gone off. Someone’s messing with our systems—”

  “Bet it’s that old woman.”

  “Old—?” Rolander raised his brows.

  “Vatta. She must’ve gotten around our fellow in AirDefense finally.”

  “Or her niece is alive. Or both of them—”

  The three men looked at one another for a long moment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  SLOTTER KEY, PORT MAJOR

  DAY 39

  Rafe Dunbarger jerked as if he’d been stabbed and dropped the plate of eggs he’d just picked up.

  Grace looked up. “What’s wrong?”

  “I—I have to go—” He turned on his heel and walked unsteadily, swiftly, in the direction of the guest suite.

  His face was a peculiar unhealthy shade; she wondered what he’d eaten the day before. “Does he do that often?” she asked Teague.

  “Not very,” Teague said. Grace glared at him, but Teague seemed impervious to her glares. “It may be his temporary biosculpt wearing off.”

  “I forgot about that,” Grace said. She hadn’t, but it was a possible explanation.

  “We should let him alone,” Teague said, spreading jam on toast.

  “Tell me, Teague,” MacRobert said as he walked in. “Do you like fruitcake?”

  “Fruitcake? That thing with dried fruit where they pour brandy on it and set it afire?”

  “No,” Grace said, with a quelling glance at MacRobert. “That’s plum pudding. Quite different. I must make you a fruitcake sometime.” She looked at MacRobert. “Just a plain one, nothing fancy.”

  “Where’s Rafe?” MacRobert said. “I have some information for him.”

  “He felt ill,” Grace said. “He dropped that plate.” She pointed with her fork.

  “Um,” MacRobert said. “Waste of good eggs.” He scooped it up and put the mess in the trash, then wiped the floor, finishing just as Rafe came back.

  “She’s there,” he said, looking straight at Grace. “We made contact. She’s in one of those huts, as we thought.”

  “How?” MacRobert asked as Grace said the same thing.

  Rafe lifted one shoulder: refusal to answer. “She described the buildings; they’ve gotten into only the two huts and a shed with a generator. There’s electricity, but not for long—not enough fuel unless they find more.”

  “She’s alone? How did she—”

  “She’s not alone. She’s with the others that were on the shuttle, twenty of them. Some died from sabotage of the survival suits—the Commandant, his aide, the pilots, two more. And then two after. She’ll get me a list of names. I warned her about using the comunits, even if they come alive—that whoever’s secret this is will be aware the scans were unblocked for most of a day. She was exhausted, I could tell—but she’s alive!” He paused for breath, then went on. “They don’t have enough food for the whole winter; there’s some kind of entrance to a bunker or a mine, but it won’t open to the same code.”

  Grace looked at MacRobert; his eyelid flickered. He thought he had figured something out. Teague had the totally blank expression he used when he was determined not to let anyone see anything of his reactions. Rafe—Rafe was excited, happy, ready to act.

  “I need transport,” Rafe said. “A plane—long-range—that runway is long enough—”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” MacRobert said. Rafe turned to glare at Grace.

  “We haven’t told you everything yet,” she said. “It will take awhile.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  MIKSLAND

  DAY 40

  Ky made it back to the first hut and found Marek awake in the kitchen.

  “All secured?” he asked.

  “Yes. Power shut down, though I didn’t lock the door,” Ky said. “If we find enough fuel, we can open it up again for the extra space.”

  “Open bunk, left side bottom,” he said.

  “Thanks. Wake me at shift change if I’m not up.” She lay down. She didn’t feel like sleeping; finally getting a contact with the outside world had her mind racing. Rafe was here; he knew why no one had come for them; he knew about dangers she’d barely guessed. And how was she supposed to warn everyone not to use their skullphones or comunits without creating intense curiosity about how she had come up with such a wild notion? She dozed off finally.

  In the morning, she woke determined to explore every possible resource in the area. So far they had found six empty barrels that had once held fuel for the generator, a half barrel more of fuel, no more full ones. No sign of a well house, or any pipe or pump for water. Ky wondered if the crew that had been here had brought water in by air. She looked down the smooth strip of snow that reminded everyone of a runway—because the land undulated, she couldn’t see all of it—then over at the two big humped buildings that might be hangars. She considered climbing up onto the cabin roof, or up on the tower, for a better view, but for now other things had more priority. Those two big humped buildings that might be hangars, for instance. They could explore the runway another day.

  “Over there, Admiral!” Corporal Riyahn said. Ky looked. Out from behind a rumple of land she hadn’t noticed, a file of at least twenty of the gray-brown animals she’d seen earlier ambled toward the runway, then pawed at the thinner snow and lowered their heads to eat whatever grew under it. Barely a hundred meters away—if she’d had a rifle, and not her pistol, she could have dropped one easily. With a pistol—she remembered her early training with firearms. She might hit one, or simply spook the herd.

  She walked slowly toward them, gesturing to the others to stay back. The animals ignored her for the first ten meters, fifteen meters, twenty, then one lifted its head and stared. Others looked. Ears waggled: forward, back, forward, back. She stood still. One stayed alert; the others went back to eating. She took one step. No reaction. Another. No reaction. Another. The sentinel waggled its ears and two other heads came up. She walked backward three steps and stopped. The sentinel tipped its head side-to-side, the antlers making a wider sweep. All the heads came up, but they didn’t move off. Ky turned and angled back toward the others, watching from the corner of her eye. Soon all were back to eating.

  “They’ve been hunted,” Marek said.

  “Yes. But not recently, and I think not often. Maybe only in summer, when people come here. I’d need to be a lot closer to get a good shot with my pistol and the ammo I have.”

  “I could hit one at that distance,” Marek said. “Maybe not a clean kill, but wound it badly enough we could catch it. If you’d allow—just two rounds, at the most.”

  “We don’t even know what they are,” Ky said. “Some kind of deer, maybe?”

  “Whatever they are, they’re probably good eating,” he said. “I wonder if th
ey’d get used to us, enough to let us get really close.”

  “I hope so,” Ky said. “Because they’re the best food source I see.” She glanced at the sky; clouds had thickened overhead, and even as they stood there, the first flakes of snow fell. “We’ll go back, see what we can find in those other buildings.”

  Snow fell more heavily as they walked, and by the time they were past the first hut and nearing the generator shed, they could hardly see their way. “We need more ropes,” Marek said. “Someone could get lost in this.”

  Ky said nothing. She could think of many things they needed more of—water, food, fuel for the generator, a working communications device other than her cranial ansible. They made it safely inside and set about cooking their boring and meager supper.

  “If I had my father’s rifle,” Sergeant McLenard said, “we’d have had fresh meat tonight. Easy shot. Admiral, did I hear Master Sergeant say you had a firearm?”

  “Pistol,” Ky said. “Optimized for short-range, in-ship use.”

  “Ah. Not as easy then. Too bad. But still, if we could get close enough—”

  “When the weather settles, I’ll certainly try,” Ky said.

  DAY 41

  They woke to blinding blue-and-white beauty. Ky squinted against the glare. Right in front of the hut door, some animals had left their mark: droppings and footprints. Not the hooved and antlered creatures but something with paws, and droppings that looked like those of big…

  “Dogs,” McLenard said, squatting down to look closely. “Really big ones. You can tell dogs by the arrangement of toes.”

  “Can you tell how many?”

  “Six at least. This sun is so bright…we could get snow blindness; we should go back in and make eyeshades.” Inside he spoke softly to Ky. “We shouldn’t go out alone at night. They might not be dogs, but wolves. There are some in the northern forests, but these tracks are of larger ones.”

  “Do wolves attack people?”