Hunting Party

by Elizabeth Moon

  * * *

  Ronnie watched Raffaele covertly, and wondered if she had heard about the opera singer. He hadn’t really noticed before, thinking of her as George’s girl, but she had a lovely line of jaw and throat when she lifted her head. Slender without weakness, she seemed hardly aware of her grace. . . . She was chuckling over something Buttons had said. Bubbles, beside him, waved a hand in front of his face.

  “Wake up, sweet—you’re staring right through Raffa, and it could make me jealous.” Bubbles exuded sensuality of a very studied sort, from silver nails to tumbled blonde curls, from the deep-plunging neckline of her clinging jersey to the cutouts on the long black tights. Next to the opera singer, he had always thought of Bubbles as the sexiest girl he knew, but at the moment he was finding her tiresome. She had been singing along with the lyrics from the cube, and the opera singer had spoiled him. Now he could hear the breathiness and the slight errors of pitch.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was wondering what we’re going to do all that time at your father’s. Surely not fox hunting.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Buttons said, looking up. “I rather like it, sometimes. If we jiggle the weather-sats, so it’s not as cold and wet—”

  “Father will find out,” Bubbles said. “He likes authenticity.”

  “I don’t see how you can have authenticity when the foxes aren’t even foxes,” Sarah put in. “Didn’t I read somewhere that they’re actually reverse-gengineered from cat genes?” Ronnie doubted her interest in bioengineering; she and Buttons had signed the second-level prenuptials, and this was her first official visit to his family. She would be trying to make points.

  “A chimaera,” Buttons said, settling into the lecturing tone that made him less than popular in the regiment. Stuffy, in fact, because he couldn’t just answer a question: he had to explain all the juice out of it. “Nobody bothered to save Old-Earth red fox genes, so what Dad’s people did was go from descriptions, and use what seemed to work. Luckily Hagworth had already done jackals from dogs, and two of the fox species that got publicity. . . . The real problem was getting the color and the bushy tail with a white tip. Our neo-foxes are part kit fox, part jackal, a bit of cat, and raccoon, for the tail.”

  “I didn’t know anyone had saved raccoon genes; I thought they were too common.”

  “Only to give an outcross for the red panda,” Buttons said. Ronnie would not have expected him to know, but after all his father was an enthusiast on many forms of hunting and preservation. Buttons went on to discuss the genetic possibilities at length. Ronnie let his mind drift . . . to the opera singer, in whose bed he had learned about things that before had been only rumors . . . to the prince, whose jealousy he had been glad to arouse . . . to that night in the mess when he had boasted . . . somehow it didn’t seem quite as clever now as it had then. Perhaps Aunt Cecelia was right, and he had been a cad. No. The prince should have been a better sport.

  He reached up and stroked Bubbles’s arm, wondering if anything would come of it. He could not think of anything to say, though, and after a few seconds, she withdrew the arm and stretched herself on the couch across from him. The same couch where she had been so unfortunately sick. . . . He wondered if she remembered. She looked healthy enough now, though her expression of mild sulkiness fit his mood as well as hers.

  “I suppose we should get into shape,” George said. “Your aunt has that handy little riding-thing. An hour a day, and none of us would have to worry about saddle sores.”

  “Her simulator?” Ronnie asked. “Do what you like, George, but I have no intention of bouncing around on a mechanical horse. It’s bad enough to contemplate bouncing around on a real one. Do you know she had the gall to order me riding attire?”

  “Well, you’ll need it.” Buttons had settled into a pose the male equivalent of Bubbles’s sprawl; together they took up both of the couches. Ronnie wondered why he’d thought exile would be more fun with these people than alone. They were looking at him as if he were responsible for entertaining them, when none of it was his fault. Buttons went on. “First of all, my father’s head instructor will check you out, before you’re assigned your mounts—”

  “And he’s a terror,” Bubbles said. “So far as I know, there’s not a military unit in the known universe that still uses horses, but he acts like a cartoon drill instructor. You’ll spend at least two hours trotting before he decides what to give you.”

  “I’d like to see him test Aunt Cecelia,” Ronnie said.

  “Not her,” Buttons said, grinning. “She’s an old guest, and he’s more likely to ask her to test the horses. ‘Pick what you like, milady, not that there’s anything here worth your time,’ is what he’ll tell her.”

  “Is she really that good?”

  Buttons stared at him, eyes wide. “You haven’t ever seen her ride?”

  “No. The family doesn’t think much of her hobby.” His father had said that, often enough, and he’d heard his mother talking to his other aunts about “poor dear Cecelia, what a shame she wasted her life on horses.”

  “It was hardly a hobby, Ron. . . . The woman won the All-Union individual cross-country championship five times, and ranked in the top five for fifteen years.” Buttons turned to Bubbles. “Remember when we were just learning to ride, and old Abel was yelling at us, and she stopped him?”

  “She got me over my first jump,” Bubbles said, sitting upright now. She looked less like a fluffhead than usual. Could she possibly enjoy hunting? Ronnie had a brief unpleasant view of himself married to a fox-hunting wife. No. It would not do. “I’d forgotten . . . that was that old gray pony, the one that seemed to like dumping us. She didn’t yell at me, just talked me through it.”

  “Yes, and then she got on one of the good horses and showed us what we were supposed to be doing. Abel fairly purred.”

  Ronnie felt a knot in his head tightening. It wasn’t fair that they knew more about his aunt than he did. That they admired his aunt for things he hadn’t known about, and that his family hadn’t respected. Things were not going the way he’d planned. He’d expected his friends to rally around him, support him, do what he wanted . . . and here they were swapping stories of his old maiden aunt.

  “Does everyone hunt together?” he asked Buttons. If he couldn’t avoid the topic of horses, at least he could get the conversation away from his aunt. “How many horses does your father have, anyway?”

  “To answer your first question, no. There are three hunts out of the main house, where we’ll be. Each has its own territory. We’ll each be assigned to one of them, depending on riding ability. As for horses . . . many thousands, I suppose, altogether. The main house stables will hold five hundred, though we won’t use that many. Hunters, hacks, young horses in training.” Ronnie tried to imagine five hundred horses in the same place, and failed. The Academy had had ten, for the training of its young officers, and he had no idea what a “hack” was. He was not about to ask.

  “We don’t hunt every day,” Bubbles put in. “Some people do, but most ride out on alternate days. Particularly in the lower hunts, where they’re not as good and get really stiff.”

  “I’ll get really stiff,” Raffa and Sarah said together, like a chorus.

  “Isn’t there anything else but hunting?” Ronnie asked, hoping he didn’t sound as desperate as he felt.

  “There are other kinds of hunting,” Buttons said. “Not all of it’s on horseback. You can shoot grouse and pheasant, that sort of thing. It’s the wrong season for fishing in the nearby streams. Indoors—well, the things my father assumes were normal indoor sports of the time: billiards, cards, amateur theatricals.”

  “Oh . . . dear.” Worse then he’d imagined. Worse than his mother had imagined, he was sure. Traveling with a wealthy aunt on her private yacht had seemed like a good idea when his mother mentioned it. Perhaps he’d have been better off going to some dull assignment in an out-of-the-way base. At least it wouldn’t have had fox hunting, and his work might have k
ept him busy part of the time.

  “There are other places on the planet,” Bubbles said. “But we can’t possibly get away more than once. We should save that for when you’re really desperate. Poor Ronnie.”

  He wanted to snarl at her. Poor Ronnie, indeed. He needed real sympathy, not the mocking look Bubbles had given him. He needed them to understand that it wasn’t his fault—none of it. “I’m not desperate,” he said firmly. “For all you know, I may take to hunting as easily as any other sport. I may be leaping over fences and dashing along at a run—”

  “Gallop,” put in Bubbles.

  “Whatever. I mean, I’m naturally athletic, perfectly fit: how hard can it be?” He tried to say it with complete confidence; Bubbles, Buttons, and Raffaele burst into laughter. Raffaele? What did she know about riding? He tried to hide his irritation, and forced himself to laugh with them.

  “Better try your aunt’s simulator,” Buttons said, still chuckling. “You may find a few muscles that aren’t quite perfectly fit.” Then he sobered. “You should do well, Ronnie, really. You’re right: you are a natural athlete; it’s quite possible that after a few lessons you’ll be up to riding in the field. But it’s not like anything else.”

  Ronnie forced himself to smile, and wondered if he could hide in his stateroom all day and night, watching entertainment cubes, until they got to Buttons’s home planet. Probably not. He was going to have to think of something they could do . . . something fun, something to reestablish his leadership of the group. Something mischievous, perhaps. Play a harmless practical joke on the old lady, or the crew.

  “You may be right,” he said, without meaning it. “I’ll see what you look like on the simulator first, and then . . . we’ll see.”

  “We ought to see about some swimming, I think,” Raffaele said. “C’mon, girls. Let’s go play in the water.” Before he quite knew how it happened, the girls had vanished, and his two bosom friends were watching him, bright-eyed.

  “Come on,” said George. “Tell us more about that opera singer. Is it true they have specially developed muscles?”

  Chapter Four

  “I didn’t ask you if it was ‘going fine,’” Heris said. “I asked you what the sulfur extraction rate was. Do you know, or not?” With each day, her unease about the yacht’s basic fabric and systems had grown. Getting answers from the crew had turned out to be harder than she expected.

  The moles looked at one another before Timmons answered. “Well . . . pretty much, Cap’n. It’s below nom at the moment, but it usually runs that way ’cause that dauber wants a sulf-rich sludge for his veggie plots.”

  It took Heris a moment to translate civtech slang and decide this meant Lady Cecelia’s gardener wanted more sulfur in the first-pass sludge. In the meantime, they still had not answered as she thought they should. She let the steel edge her voice. “Below nom is not what I’m looking for. What, precisely, is the number you have for sulfur clearance?” Again, the sidelong look from one mole to another. This time it was Kliegan who answered.

  “It’s . . . ah . . . zero point three. Of first-sig nom, that is—”

  “Which is . . . ?” prompted Heris; she could feel temper edging higher.

  “Well, the book says one point eight, but this system’s never worked any better’n one point six, just under first-sig. Mostly we run about two sigs below, say about point seven or so. System’s underutilized, so it’s not that important. It’s rated for a population of fifty, and we don’t have that many aboard.”

  Heris closed her eyes briefly, running over the relevant equations in her head. Sulfur clearance was only one of the major cycles, but critical to the ship’s welfare because errors could not only make people sick, but degrade many ship components as well. Delicate com equipment didn’t like active sulfur radicals in the ship’s atmosphere. She added ship’s crew, house staff, and owner’s family. “In case you haven’t noticed,” she said briskly, “we now have fifty-one humans and a long voyage ahead of us. I presume you flushed the tanks and re-inoculated them while we were in port—?” But the hangdog looks told her they hadn’t. “And the last logged maintenance by offship personnel was this—Diklos and Sons, Baklin Station?”

  “That’s right, ma’am,” Timmons said. “They couldn’t have done such a good job, fancypants as they are, ’cause the system never did pick up the points, but Captain Olin said never mind—”

  “Oh, he did?” Heris struggled to keep her thoughts off her face. First his demand for an odd, inconvenient course that did not meet the owner’s needs, and now a tolerance for malfunctioning environmental equipment—something no sane captain would have. Failing to order the tanks flushed and recharged at Rockhouse might have been spite—revenge for being fired—but until then he had risked his own life as well. What could have made the risk worth it? “We’d better see how bad it is,” she said briskly. “Suit up and we’ll go take a look—”

  “You, Captain?” asked Iklind. He almost never spoke, she’d discovered, letting chatty Timmons say anything necessary. But now he looked worried.

  Heris let her brows rise. It had worked on other ships; it should work here. “Did you think I wouldn’t want to check for myself?”

  “Well, it’s not that, Captain . . . only . . . these things can smell pretty bad.” Pretty bad was an entirely inadequate description of a malfunctioning sulfur loop, and she was sure more than the sulfur scrubbers were in trouble. Once the pH had gone sour, many of the enzymes in other loops worked erratically, as the chemistry fluctuated.

  “That’s why we’ll be suited,” she said. When they didn’t move she said. “Five minutes, in the number four access bay.”

  “Complete suits?” asked Timmons. “They’re awfully hot—”

  “You prefer to risk the consequences?” Heris asked. “With a system you know is malfunctioning?”

  “Ah . . . it’s just stinks,” Timmons said. When she glared at him, he said, “All right, Captain. Suits.” But as he left, she heard him mutter, “Damn lot of nonsense. Can’t be enough reaction in that loop to give us mor’n a headache at worst.”

  Quickly, Heris gave Gavin his orders for the next hour: which compartments to seal, which backup crew to have ready, suited, in case of trouble. Then into her own suit—the cost of which had come from the advance on her contract, and which she never begrudged. Whatever else on this gilded cesspool of a yacht did or did not work as designed, her own personal self-contained suit would . . . or her family would enjoy the large sum which Xeniks guaranteed if any of its suits failed. She wasn’t worried—only twice in the past fifty years had Xeniks had to pay out.

  When she was still a corridor away from the access bay, the alarm went off. For an instant she thought something had gone wrong on the bridge, but then she realized what it must be. One of those fools hadn’t waited for her.

  “Captain!” Gavin bleated in her ear. She thumbed down the volume of the suit comunit.

  “What is it?” she asked. “I’m at E-7, right now.” Ahead of her, a gray contamination barrier flapped down from the overhead and snicked tight, its central access closed.

  “Computer says dangerous chemical—sulfur something—and the motion sensor said someone was there, but isn’t moving. But they’re in suits—”

  “Get those backups down here,” Heris said, mentally cursing civilians in general and the ship’s former captain in particular. “Make sure they have their helmets locked on. I’m going in.” Despite her faith in Xeniks’s legendary suits, she shivered a moment. The gas in there was deadlier than many military weapons, but so familiar throughout human history that people just did not respect it. She wriggled through the access iris, which lengthened into a tube and sealed itself behind her. The suit’s own chemical sensors flicked to life, giving the readout she expected: hydrogen sulfide, here in less than life-threatening concentration.

  Heris hurried, even though she knew it would almost certainly be too late. Around the corner, she came upon Timmons, who had sui
ted up but not locked on his helmet. Presumably he’d planned to do so when he got to the access bay itself. He lay sprawled on the floor, one arm outstretched toward Iklind, slumped against the open access, wearing no protective gear at all.

  She went to Timmons first, locking his helmet in place and turning his oxygen supply to full with the external override. Her suit had all the necessary drugs for standard industrial inhalation accidents—but she’d never used it, nor was she a medic. She’d have to rely on the backup team. Iklind wasn’t breathing at all, and no wonder—the hydrogen sulfide concentration in here had peaked at over 1,000 ppm, according to the monitor above the open access hatch. Inside, someone—presumably Iklind—had cracked the seal on a sludge tank. It was brimful, far above the safety line. A black line of filth drooled over its lip.

  Heris picked up the wrench on the floor, closed the cover, and tightened the seal, then closed the hatch. Now the monitor indicated the concentration was below 200 ppm, still dangerous but not instantly lethal. They were lucky, she thought, that the agitator hadn’t been on in the sludge tank (and why not?) or the concentration could have been a log or so higher.

  A shadow moved at the corner of her vision. The backup team—that would be the number two engineering officer and the off-shift senior mole—came around the corner and stopped. Even through their helmets their eyes showed wide and staring.

  “Come on,” Heris said. “Get Timmons to the medbox—he might have a chance.” It seemed to her they moved too slowly, but they did wrestle Timmons back up the corridor toward the contamination barrier. Heris called the bridge. “Iklind’s dead,” she said. “Hydrogen sulfide—apparently he opened the sludge tank without any protective gear—” Gavin started to say something, and she overrode him. “We have three problems here—Timmons first: is that medical AI capable of handling inhalation injuries? Second: we’ve got to clear up the rest of the contamination, and the system is too overloaded to resorb it unless you can come up with a cargo section full of reactant. And third, of course, is Iklind. We need medical and legal evaluation; I will take that up with Lady Cecelia. Oh—and another thing—we’re not going to continue in this unsafe condition. I want Sirkin to plot a course to the nearest major repair facility, preferably on the way to our destination.”