Freedom’s Choice (28 page)

“I liked the buff so that's what I made, and then added more buff to the red ones,” Kris said, observing the effect objectively. They'd put the darker bricks around the door, window ledges, corners, the chimney, and the hearth surround. They had a back door, too, out of the smaller room, so they had easier access to the latrine. And a sleeping loft, which had become a popular idea, especially among those families that were increasing. “I think it looks good.”

“Does at that. I can help hand out nails, too. Brought you my handy-dandy nail apron, too.” She handed over the object and, laughing, Kris tied it about her waist, while Sandy started filling the three commodious pockets with the nails. “Is Zainal going to fill that big mouth of his with nails?”

Kris chuckled. “No, Lenny already warned him about
swallowing nails. Even a Catteni gut couldn't handle a mouthful. He's got a pail.”

Zainal had the ladder in place now, and before he could pick his pail off the ground, she was up the ladder, a bundle of shakes and the hammer in one hand and the other helping her up the rungs.

“Hey,” Zainal protested.

“You'd never know he was Catteni,” Sandy said conversationally to Sally, “unless you had to look at him.”

Sally smothered a giggle as Zainal made as graceful a climb up the ladder as Kris had. Mitford and Lenny Doyle appeared on the roof from the other side and then the hammering began, echoing in the little dell and picked up by the rat-tat-tat of other hammers on other roofs.

With so many to help, passing shakes and replenishing the supply of nails, the cabin was roofed by the time the sun went down. Then Zainal passed around beer while Kris served up tea from the kettle in the fireplace.

“Looks bigger somehow, with the roof on,” Kris remarked, glancing up at the rafters and taking a deep breath of the fragrance of the new wood of the shakes. They could have had slate but Mitford thought shakes were nicer and easier to put up.

They lounged about outside until first moonrise and then the guests left.

“We'd better hike to the hangar and get to bed in the scout,” Kris said, moving toward the doorway. They had no door yet.

Zainal stopped her. “I want to stay under my own roof, which I have built…”

“Helped build,” she said, teasingly.

“Tonight,” he finished, and gestured toward the pile of blankets which she hadn't noticed in the rush to get the roof done.

“That would make the evening complete.”

“Not quite,” Zainal said in a low voice, drawing her
into his arms. “It is good to have our own place. Very good indeed.”

* * *

And that should have been an idyllic time for them. Except that when she got up in the night, between moons, she didn't want to disturb the soundly sleeping Zainal, and on her way back from the latrine she tripped over the leftover bundle of shakes and broke her right arm.

She was furious with herself for being so clumsy and for losing her chance at going on the mission.

“Why couldn't I have broken the left one? I'm right-handed,” she said, weeping more from disappointment than pain as Zainal carried her to the nearest available air-cushion, one of the flatbeds, and drove her the rest of the way to the hospital. Both bones had been broken, although Leon Dane comforted her with the thought that it wasn't a compound fracture. That would have been nasty with their limited facilities.

Then he poured her a tot of the grain alcohol that was currently in use as a painkiller. They hadn't quite got a decent smoky taste to it but she wouldn't complain.

“This is quite nasty enough,” she said, as Zainal held her against him while Leon maneuvered the bones back into place. She fainted after, not during, and regained consciousness while he was fixing the last of the bandages into place around the splints.

“I would like to have immobilized it in plaster, only we haven't got that kind yet,” Leon said. He poured her a smaller tot, “to help you sleep,” he said.

Then he led Zainal, who carried her, to an otherwise empty ward. Zainal set her down gently by the window and then moved the next bed against hers.

“Let's not make a practice of that,” Leon said, caught between severity and amusement at Zainal's preemptive rearrangement. But he put out the solar-powered light and closed the door quietly behind him.

Kris could almost have wished that Zainal had let her
suffer on her own, but the whiskey had dulled the ache in her arm and the warmth of his body, and his concern, comforted her so that soon enough she was asleep.

* * *

He was gone in the morning, when the noise of the scout's takeoff woke her. The bed had been put back in its proper position. It was dawn and he had blasted off on time. She wondered who had taken her place and then didn't want to know. She tried to go back to sleep but couldn't with the ache, so she got out of bed and, with a blanket draped around her, went in search of someone to help her make a hot cup of herbal tea. Maybe that would help the ache in her arm.

What helped her arm was a more judicious shot of the grain whiskey in the tea.

“I can't spend the next few weeks drunk as a lord,” she said to the attendant in the hospital's kitchen.

“Ah, the ache'll ease off,” Mavis, the duty nurse, told her, grinning. “At least we've got a decent tipple to help. Now, let's get back to your room and I'll help you dress. Can I bring your old coverall up to your cabin when it's clean? And have a look round it while I'm there? Cumber and I are building, too, and I like to get a notion of what others have done. Did you use bricks or timber?”

Mavis was deft in the dressing and kept Kris' mind off her awkward and painful arm as she helped.

“Stop at the pharmacy and they'll give you a bottle—for medicinal purposes,” Mavis said with a grin, and pointed toward the right door. “I'll call for a ride but you may have to wait…”

“I can perfectly well walk…”

“You can perfectly well not,” said Pete Easley, coming in the hospital at that moment. “I promised Leon I'd collect you. Got your bottle of medicinal? Sit there while I grab one. I know where they stash it,” and he went into the pharmacy and was out again before Kris
could take a seat. Then, with his hand under her left elbow, he escorted her out to the runabout.

“Mitford lent it to you?”

“For you, crippled as you are, Mitford is ready to do a great many things. Besides,” and Easley looked down at her with a devilish grin, “he promised Zainal he'd look out for you.”

“Hmmm, how kind,” she said in an acid tone, knowing just what might be going through Zainal's mind in asking Mitford to be on hand.

“You could take another day in the hospital, you know,” Easley said, his eyes intent on her face.

“I'm not sick,” she said peevishly, and walked ahead of him to climb into the runabout.

The space on the driver's seat was not very wide, though it usually accommodated two people easily. But not one with an unwieldly cast and a brown bottle of hooch. Easley ended up sitting slightly canted so he wouldn't inadvertently bump her. She felt clumsier than ever and definitely out of sorts. She couldn't be hung over from what she'd had last night but she'd've given her eyeteeth for an aspirin. Then she remembered how Zainal laughed at all the eyeteeth she'd given away, and somehow her mood improved.

“He got off all right?” she asked.

“Right on time. Laughrey took your place.”

“Laughrey, the former Concorde pilot?” Her good humor increased. She liked Laughrey and he'd be in heaven, literally as well as figuratively. “At least it wasn't Scott's little pipsqueak…” She would have hated it if Beggs had gotten the empty chair.

Pete Easley laughed. “The guy's good at what he does but Scott only tolerates him because it keeps him out of other people's hair. He's a natural yes-man but he's got an eidetic memory.”

Early risers waved a greeting at Kris and Pete, some of them pointing to her arm and signaling “Tough
luck.” She wasn't sure how to respond to the sympathy, so waved back, smiling. She glanced skyward, knowing that Baby was probably over the other hemisphere about now.

“Could I sneak onto one of the bridges, d'you think?”

“Only when you've had some breakfast. You're white as a sheet,” he said, pulling in to park at the mess hall.

So she had breakfast, which Pete Easley brought over to the table where he had sat her, one not visible from the door.

“Don't think you need condolences right now,” he said, sitting so he blocked her from casual glances.

“Is news of my accident all over the bay?” she demanded, her mood swinging back to annoyance again.

“Well, there had to be an explanation when Zainal showed up with Laughrey. We all know how keen you were to go on the mission,” he said. “And you know how news goes through Retreat.”

“Hmmm, yes, indeed I do.” She grimaced then because even to herself she sounded cranky.

“Don't worry about it, Kris,” Pete said. “I'd be a lot crankier.” And he escorted her back to the runabout without too many people commiserating with her.

“I think I'll take you home, Kris,” he said, making the turn toward her cabin where he should have turned toward the hangar. “You still don't look like yourself.”

“I'm not,” she agreed. “I am definitely
not
myself.”

But she also didn't want to go to a cabin that was empty of Zainal. She tried to think of the things she could do one-handed and came up with very few. Even dishwashing required two.

“Look, Kris, they won't reach the Bubble for a couple more hours. How about I drop you off at your cabin and come get you in time for that? Okay?”

“Yeah, that sounds pretty good,” she said as he slowed the runabout right at her front door. She was
getting out when she realized the doorway was no longer empty. “Hey, how did that get there?” and she pointed to the brand-new addition.

Pete grinned. “Lenny Doyle brought it down at first light. He thought you might prefer to be miserable in privacy.”

She was delighted with the surprise, and worked the latch up and down.

“If you pull the string to the inside, it's like locking it,” he said, and demonstrated.

“Like the pioneers used to do,” and she grinned as she experimented, pulling the latchstring in and out.

Pete gave her a gentle push inward. “Get some rest now. And I'll be back for you.”

He shut the door and she pulled the string in again.

“Thanks, Pete,” she called, and heard his cheerful “No problemo” and then the whispering sound of the air-cushion driving off.

Someone had also tidied up the bedding, and increased the fluff content of the mattress. She blessed whoever had done her that service. She nudged one of the stools across the flagstone floor with her feet, knocked it over and kicked it into place by the bed, uprighted it, placed the bottle on it in handy reach, and sat down on the bed to take off her boots. She wouldn't sleep, she knew that, but she took a pull on the bottle before she lay down.

A determined knocking and someone calling her name roused her and she sat up, knocking her arm painfully.

“I'm coming, I'm coming,” and she discovered it wasn't easy to get to one's feet with an arm in a sling. When she opened the door, Pete Easley was leaning on the frame, smiling broadly.

“You did sleep and you look one hundred percent better,” he said, but he took a pocket comb, one of those carved out of loo-cow bone, and ran it through her hair.
“That's better. C'mon. We've just time to make the hangar before they make the Bubble.”

* * *

When they entered the KDL's bridge it was crowded with an avid audience, but Scott made peremptory gestures for her to be let through and then installed her in one of the seats.

“You'll be interested to know,” Beverly was saying from Baby's piloting compartment, “that the Bubble does not register on any detection equipment. But it's visible…as you can see.”

Which they did, as from Baby's perspective. They could also see the scout ship on the KDL's screen, with its nose a scant ten meters from the barrier.

“We will poke it,” Zainal's voice said, and Baby drifted into the opacity of the Bubble and bounced slowly backward.

“Here, let me adjust the screen a bit so they can see what the warship left behind,” Marrucci said, laughter rippling through his voice.

“We'll need a touch of reverse for a proper view.” That was in Laughrey's amused baritone. He chuckled openly as the view screen of Baby slowly swung to starboard and then slowly reversed.

“See what we mean?” Bert Put said, and Kris could just imagine the grin on the Aussie's face. “Lost every array they had and every mast they had.”

“Outlined forever in the Bubble,” said Balenquah. “Madre de Dios, the Farmers make some clever stuff!”

“Can you make any analysis of it?” Scott asked.

“Can't if sensors can't pick up anything,” Bert Put said. “Not unless we go out and see if we can cut a patch of it.”

“No,” Zainal said. “If you wish, someone will go outside but we will not take sample.”

“Affirmative to defacing it, Zainal,” Scott said. “But I'd like an EVA inspection of it.”

“I go,” Zainal said, and immediately there was protest from both Baby and the KDL observers.

Kris discovered her left hand on her lips, to keep from adding her protest. Then she conquered her fear.

“He's the one to go, Ray,” she said firmly. “He knows the gear and the ship. No one else has checked out for a space walk, have they?”

“I have,” Bert Put said, “but not with this equipment. Zainal'll be just fine, Kris. He's already suiting up.”

Zainal's EVA suit also had its own camera, so after a nervous wait, the view was transferred to Zainal's helmet eye and they saw the shimmering veil of the Bubble as he slowly approached it. They could see his hands reaching out to prod it gently, and the reaction of even that light touch as he floated away from it.