Powers That Be (12 page)

“You’ll dry out better if you only get your hide wet. If you can’t swim, there’s a lot of places where it’s shallow enough to wade, but you’ll prefer total immersion.”

She had already begun to unfasten her outer clothing. He jumped into the water with a flash of moonlight on his pale muscular backside. She caught a shadow-darkened glimpse of him sliding over the falls and heard him laugh.

Hoping this wasn’t another of those instances where everybody else was freezing their butt off while Shongili was warm and under—or in this case un—dressed, she quickly finished stripping and much more quickly waded into the pool, then glided into the water. The pool by the fountain was indeed warm, almost uncomfortably so, and it unknotted her chilled muscles and soaked her through and through with its heat until she felt lazy and languorous. The water carried a hint of sulfur and mint. She kept as much of her under the surface as possible, diving repeatedly.

The diving caused a ringing in her ears that sounded almost like music. She swam underwater as long as possible, listening to it, hoping to remember which tunes it called to mind.

She surfaced long enough to catch her breath before approaching the waterfall. It wasn’t a long one, a drop of just a few feet, and the lip of the fall was smooth beneath the tumbling water. If Shongili could do it, so could she, she thought, but she flipped over and went down feet first, her knees, belly, breasts, and face momentarily tweaked with the bite of the icy air.

The water in the lower pool was a little cooler, a little easier to swim in without falling asleep, but as she was surfacing, something flashed between her legs and up behind her.

She flipped around and grabbed, thinking to find Shongili, but her hand touched wet fur instead of wet skin and she found herself looking down into the laughing silvery eyes of a large gray seal.

She hadn’t thought seals liked fresh water, especially not warm fresh water, and especially not inland streams, but perhaps this was another of Petaybee’s permutations that Sean wanted her to see.

The seal flipped up and back under her and dived down into the lower pool. Where the hell was Sean? She felt a cold droplet on her face, and another, and looked up to see that light snow was floating down from a sky now only partially clear. She shivered and dove under, hearing the music again. This time, perhaps because of the closeness of the falls, she could almost hear the singing of lyrics as well.

The seal somehow or other had propelled itself back into this upper pool and now came up under her, as if inviting her to hold on to it while it swam around and around.

Yes! She did hear words, not lyrics after all, but spoken words, low and murmured. She thought perhaps Sean might have returned and was talking to her from the land. When she raised her head, however, he was nowhere near, though the murmurous words continued to the soft water music. She glimpsed the seal under the falls for a moment, and she decided she would get out of the pool. But first, she’d warm up beneath the water pouring from the hot pool above.

There was a narrow ledge under the pool, and as she climbed up on it, she saw the flash of gray fur again as the seal darted in and out. Ignoring the creature, she stood and let the deliciously warm water play over her face and hair, cascading down her shoulders, back, hips, and calves, caressing her face, throat, breasts, belly, and thighs. The water continued its tune, and listening for the rhythm, she realized suddenly that the air pressure had changed around her. It wasn’t water alone that was caressing her, stroking her abdomen, counting her ribs with splayed fingers, cupping her breasts . . .

“By the powers that be, I welcome you home,” Sean’s voice said, as if reciting a line from a song or a poem. His lips slid beneath her ear and kissed her throat, and she turned in his arms, knowing full well that this was probably going to mean no end of trouble at some point but not caring at all.

His skin was slick with water but almost as well furred as the seal’s. She turned in his arms and threw her own arms around his neck, kissing him hungrily. When the kiss was done, he held her for a moment, then looked down at her with silver eyes confusingly like those of the seal. She blinked and retreated a half step. The laughter in his eyes saddened briefly into wistfulness, then brusqueness as he held her away from him and said, “We’d better go now. You get out and get dressed. I’ll be right behind you.”

As if now was a time to be formal? She pulled away from him and dove back into the cooler pool, swimming briskly out and deliberately letting the cold touch her bare skin before dressing again.

Frag, what
was
it, anyway? Had her revelations been too much for him after all? Or had he really meant this little swim to be therapeutic and just gotten momentarily carried away when it became erotic instead? Maybe he had a serious interest elsewhere. Maybe he didn’t like women. No, she had had definite evidence to the contrary. Angry and baffled, she pulled half-frozen clothing over her wet body and began walking very briskly indeed back down the pathway.

Halfway back to the snocle, he joined her, resting his hand lightly on her shoulder, the thumb of his glove brushing her cheek.

“I think you’ll find you can write that song, now,” he said.

She wanted to hit him but satisfied herself with pulling away and riding in silence all the way back to her cabin. But, after he left and her frustration died down, she realized he was right.

The frustration didn’t stay with her. He had wanted her as much as she wanted him, she knew, and there had to be some reason why he had insisted they restrain themselves. When she thought back on it, she could see the cold snowflakes falling into the steaming water and hear the music beneath the falls again. She activated the recorder and spoke into it.

“Having only air for food,

They gave us poison to breathe

Even those who had never harmed them

Even those who would have helped them

Even those who were only children

Even those who were very like them.

“Holding a piece of their own world, I survived

Breathing through their own soil, I lived

I could not save anybody, not even all of myself.

They did not help anybody, not even themselves.

They died, as those around me died, and the

Food, and the medicine were taken back.

In the station, people choked and died

On the planet, people starved and died

When captured, the killers bled and died

I was sent here to die, too, here where the snows live,

The waters live, the animals and the trees live,

And you.”

7

Bunny knocked on Yana’s door early the next morning. “I’m heading out to SpaceBase. Can you come now?”

Yana had had very little sleep, between the ride out to the hot springs and back, and staying up late to record the poem. That had stimulated her far beyond her expectations; she had been unable to rest, kicking herself for not confronting Sean Shongili last night when it would have made sense. Now, except for a lingering twitchy nervousness, the encounter seemed hard to believe. She was both glad and sorry that he lived so far away: glad because she would not have to face him; sorry because there would be no chance meetings, no possibility of seeing him unless one of them deliberately sought the other one out.

What the hell! She had better things to do. She hauled herself out of her bunk and pulled on a uniform blouse that still bore insignia. She hadn’t removed her rank from her fatigue jacket yet either, and she slipped it on under her parka.

“Are you feeling better this morning?” Bunny asked owlishly as they set out down the river.

“As opposed to what?” Yana snapped.

Bunny didn’t seem offended; she just smiled and said, “Well, you were so upset over that Giancarlo making you burn the fish and then . . .”

“When you left me, I was doing fine, wasn’t I? Was that supposed to change?”

Bunny glanced away from the river road and over at her, then back again. She looked disappointed.

Yana heaved a sigh and leaned back in the seat. She would have preferred to sleep until they reached SpaceBase. “I’d like to know who it is who’s keeping a log of my activities and guests—then I could set the record straight when necessary. I’d hate for the whole village to be
wrong
about something. And that cough medicine of Clodagh’s should be a controlled substance, by the way.”

“He really likes you, Yana,” Bunny said.

“Buneka, I’m not going to discuss this with you,” Yana said firmly, settling herself and closing her eyes. After a few moments of not sleeping, she asked, “He hasn’t always been by himself, has he?”

“Sean? Oh no, he used to have lots of girlfriends when he was traveling around the world. He almost married Charlie Demintieff’s sister Ruby once, but she changed her mind at the last minute and married a guy from Baffin Point instead. How about you? Lots of old boyfriends?”

“Bunny!”

“Well, but have you had? We
know
all that stuff about each other.”

“I’ve had a few boyfriends, I guess you could call them, yes.”

“Anybody serious?”

“My husband,” Yana said shortly, not wanting to dig into her memories of Bry so soon after talking about Bremport. Couldn’t these damn people leave anything alone? And why did she feel like she had to answer anyway? “He died,” she said shortly.

“At Bremport?” Bunny asked almost reverently.

“No. Not at Bremport. Ten years ago. During a shuttle malfunction. Bunny, I
really
don’t want to talk about it. Now then, what was the name of Diego’s friend again?”

As Yana suspected, entering the base from the outside was different from being inprocessed through the cattle chutes. In places like this, with little of intrinsic value on the premises—by Intergal standards anyway—personnel were bored and security was lax.

“Whew, this is a hard, ugly-looking place,” Yana said to Bunny as they pulled up to the gate.

Bunny’s mitten described an arc around the perimeter. “There used to be lots of little businesses around here: bars, pleasure places, shops for the soldiers. Sometimes they’d bring in extra equipment that wasn’t actually needed and trade it for something to send to families on other colonies or stations. But about a year ago, that all stopped and the company had the whole corridor bulldozed and you had to be a soldier or have a pass to come onto the base. We found out later about Bremport.” She shrugged. “The elders were glad when the base closed. They said the soldiers were corrupting us, but heck, half of them were from here anyway, and related to us, so when their families were allowed out here, lots of us could go into the shops and buy cloth and other stuff that never makes it out to
our
store.”

Yana’s parka was uniform issue, and she opened it to let her rank show as they passed the gate guard, who nodded at Bunny’s ID and saluted Yana. The guard hut was a small “instant” building of composite material in a pale pastel. In the lights of the base—and the entire base was so strongly lit that Yana wondered that they couldn’t see the lights clear from Kilcoole—she noticed that the buildings all had some sort of a pastel tint: anemic pink, bilious green, jaundiced yellow. All of the colors were watered down with the familiar omnipresent gray, so that the squat, rectangular buildings merely stood out in ugly relief from the snowy surroundings but achieved nothing so frivolous as beauty or gaiety. The buildings were set in precise rows, down which the arctic wind roared. Beyond the hunkering buildings, abandoned launch gantries towered awkwardly, swaying in the wind like the writhing legs of dying insects.

Bunny pulled up to a building much like the others except that it bore a letter and a number—C-l000. “There’s my fare,” she said between closed teeth, then jumped out, ran around to hold the door open for Yana, and said with a large obsequious smile, “I thank you for your patronage, dama. Please remember to ask that Rourke be sent for when you wish to return to our village again.”

“Don’t overdo it,” Yana growled between
her
teeth and in a louder voice said, “Could you direct me, Rourke, to the infirmary and the communications depot?”

Bunny’s fare, in the usual anonymous company parka and muffler up to the eyes, walked around the front of the snocle and squinted at Yana.

“Major Maddock? Yanaba Maddock?” he asked.

Startled to be recognized so soon after arriving on the base, she counted to three and turned slowly to face the man, raising a rapidly icing eyebrow. “Yes?”

The man pressed his padding against her padding and gave her a stiff hug. “With all due respect, Major, I thought I’d never see you again. When I heard you were on Bremport . . .” He was struggling to unwrap his scarf and hood from his face.

“Rumors of my demise were greatly exaggerated, as the man said,” she told him. By then, he had pulled the hood back to reveal the longer-than-regulation bronze hair and smiling brown eyes she recognized from her days with the survey teams. “Torkel!” she said.

“Small universe, eh?” It was a very tired but often true spacer’s joke.

“What are you doing on Petaybee?” she asked.

“I was wondering that myself until I met you. Can I buy you a cup of something hot?”

“Sir . . .” Bunny began.

“I’ll make it worth your while to—uh, cool your heels, Rourke. Shouldn’t be too hard around here.”

“Yes, Captain,” Bunny said. Then she spoke more boldly, surprising Yana. “Sir, would it be possible for me to go see Diego? I mean, I just thought—”

“Good idea,” Torkel said. “A pretty girl his own age ought to cheer him up some. Building ten-oh-six. If anybody questions you, tell them I authorized it.”

Yana wasn’t surprised that Torkel was confident in the amount of weight he swung as a mere captain. The fact was, as she and a few others had reason to know, his rank had little to do with his true degree of power. His family had developed the terraforming process used by the company to create colony worlds such as Petaybee, and his father currently sat on Intergal’s board of directors. Torkel was a very competent officer, but he had been a captain longer than it took most to make general. Generals had a lot hidden from them, whereas captains tended to end up in the thick of things. No one had told Yana this, but she had figured it out, from shipboard conversation and a few remarks Torkel had made in jest.

It was a joy to sit across from him over steaming cups and energy bars in the dingy little canteen. They had removed hats, hoods, and mufflers but still wore their coats unfastened and peeled back, for the canteen was not well heated. Torkel studied her face as if he was memorizing her.

“It really is you. I can’t tell you how I felt when I heard about Bremport, and then heard that you were there that day. I wanted to execute the terrorists personally.”

“I know the feeling,” she said dryly.

“You’re looking wonderful. Better, really, than the last time I saw you.”

“Really? It’s amazing what a little toxic gas can do for a girl’s complexion. I did lose quite a lot of weight and I haven’t gained much back, trying to—” She started to say, “trying to figure out how not to burn my food,” but he was already interrupting, leaning forward and looking deeply into her eyes.

“No, it’s not that. You’re more relaxed—less locked up inside yourself. I guess it must have been that we met each other so soon after your husband’s death . . .”

“Or so soon after your divorce,” she reminded him. He had been going through the female crew members at an astonishing rate by the time she had left for another unit. He had never come on to her before, though, but always treated her as a senior Officer, with respect and what friendliness she had been able to allow. Still, if he thought she was less locked-up now, she had either become much better at hiding her feelings or she must have been more of a mess than she realized back then. “What brings you here, Torkel?” she asked, to get the conversation back on firmer ground.

“Oh, I’m sort of troubleshooting,” he said. “Nobody’s sure exactly what’s going on. Minerals we can spot from space but can’t locate on the surface, teams disappearing, unauthorized life-forms cropping up. The company asked me to evaluate the situation. I thought maybe you might be on the same mission, and we’d be working together again?”

“Well, I am in a way, but more covertly,” she said. “I’m living in the village.”

“Among the locals? That’s pretty rough. How badly were you injured at Bremport?”

“I got a discharge, but I’m recovering,” she said, and realized that it was the truth. The pains in her chest no longer plagued her and the cough was much less frequent, thanks to Clodagh’s syrup. “Anyway, Torkel, I’m glad I ran into you. Giancarlo is a little unreasonable.”

“I’ve noticed he was pretty heavy-handed dealing with that native woman.”

“How’s she doing, by the way?”

“She and the others are probably going to be sent offworld to be interrogated further. Nothing anybody says really adds up, Yana. Fifty teams have been sent down here in the past ten years, and this is only the second time that we’ve had any survivors at all.”

“How
is
the boy?” Yana asked quickly.

“He’s scared. Alone on a hostile world . . .”

“Torkel, I think Giancarlo’s been filling you full of shit about the natives here. They’re nice people, and they know a few things the company could learn to its benefit.”

“Sure they do. That’s what this is all about,” he said with a wry lift of one side of his mouth. “And I’m not surprised to hear you have a high opinion of them. I’m sure you bring out the best in them. Even the ips know a good thing when they see it.” He held her hand in both of his and kissed it, which both pleased and slightly alarmed her. If Intergal had a Prince Charming equivalent, it was Torkel Fiske, but she had never expected him to come after her, even in passing.

She patted his hands with her spare one, pressing her advantage. “No, they’re very caring people. They’re not only worried about Petaybeans who are being held, they’re also very concerned about the boy. His father, too, of course. Has anyone gotten ahold of his father’s partner?”

“Partner?”

“Yes, it’s on the computer. A Steven Margolies, Metaxos’s assistant.”

“Yana, you’re brilliant as ever. I didn’t know anything about this. I’ll have the man sent for at once. Metaxos is no good in the condition he’s in now. The boy, now, he might help us if we keep him on-site and with Margolies, a man intimately familiar with Metaxos’s work. That’s a good rationale for relocating the whole family unit to Petaybee.”

“Won’t Metaxos need better care than the infirmary here can provide?” she asked. “I heard his condition was pretty bad.”

“Oh, care here’s going to improve shortly. We’re bringing in more troops and support teams to try to crack this case. Between the two of us, there’s even some talk of evacuating the planet and doing some serious mining until it pays back.”

“I thought it was a high-recruitment area.”

“It is. Has been very good. But lately there have been fewer new recruits despite the austere conditions. Seems like the natives just don’t want to leave.” He smiled at her again, his eyes, even in this light, clear and a beautiful light brown, the color of Clodagh’s tea. “If you’re going to be here, I won’t want to leave either.”

“Good,” Yana said, softening her briskness by smiling warmly at him. “I can’t imagine anyone handier to run into right now. Giancarlo, as I mentioned, is being difficult. Now then, Torkel, repeat after me: ‘Is there anything you need, Yana?’ ”

He leaned closer, and she could feel his breath as he said, stroking her palm with his thumb, “Is — there — any — thing — you — need — Yana?”

“I have a list,” she said.

“What sorta hold you got on the captain?” Bunny asked as she helped Yana load the snocle. “He tol’ me to come back and get you.”

“It’s called the ‘old buddy network,’ ” Yana said, trying not to feel smug over the haul she had just made. “By the way, a burst went out to Steve Margolies. Diego’ll have company here real soon.”

Bunny paused in hefting the pack of “clothing, winter wear, one of each” Yana had freed up. “That’s great, Yana. Only how?” She gave Yana a searching look.

“I suggested that maybe the dad would come round faster if he had the support of his family unit.” Yana hesitated then, not sure if she should confide in Bunny some of the plans for Petaybee that Torkel had mentioned. “You may be busier than ever soon,” she heard herself adding.

“How so?”

“They’re bringing in more troops and some support teams.”

Bunny snorted. “What good’ll those do ’em if they don’t believe what they been told!”