Sister Time lota-9 Page 25

  It took her all morning to go those five miles, leaving a trail a toddler could have followed. Half the time she was picking herself up, the other half falling on her face again. The sky was heavy and gray. She hoped it started snowing some more soon. The cold would be bitter, but it would do something about her tracks. At the river, she pulled out the buckley and hoped that it could at least pull up prewar road and terrain maps so she could figure out if she was east or west of the bridge.

  “Buckley, I need a terrain map of the area and a street map. Old is okay,” she said.

  “I’m calculating.”

  “That’s okay, you can interrupt it for this, but then go back to it, okay?”

  “I can’t display maps. They’re all fragmentary. Go left.”

  “What?” It made the skin on the back of her neck prickle. The buckley’s guess was probably better than hers, since she had no idea which way to go. She was good at her job, but she figured she was lucky she found the river at all. Part of being good at her job was knowing when to depend on her tech support. She turned left.

  “Not your left, my left!”

  She turned the other way and started plowing through more snow. And more snow. And still more snow. Snow that began to fall again. Oh well, skipping frostbite wasn’t going to happen this time. Hopefully there wouldn’t be too much to regenerate. Be a real bitch if she had to miss the big job over a little snow.

  It had to have been about sixteen hundred by the time she hit the bridge. She’d tried to talk to the buckley twice, but he was no longer answering. Either one of the falls she’d taken had knocked something else loose or he’d run out of numbers to crunch and crashed himself. She’d tried to reboot, without any luck. Buckley was well and truly hors de combat. Again.

  The bridge was a very welcome sight, since the winds had scoured it mostly clean of snow. The ice would be a stone bitch, but not so bad as the snow. Her adrenaline spiked as she caught movement from behind a snow drift. She dropped to the ground.

  Chapter Twelve

  The first go to hell rendezvous point was roughly one klick north and five clicks east of their entry point to the base. It was good that Sunday and Schmidt One had managed to figure out where they were right away, from the updated terrain features, and orient themselves towards their pickup. It was an especially good thing, since within just a few minutes the snow was falling so hard that visibility for more than a few feet ahead was damned near nil. As the snow started sticking and turning everything white, it got harder to even tell how much visibility they had. They had enough trouble just following the internal compass on their PDAs and putting one foot in front of the other. Heads down against the blowing snow, it was pretty hard not to bump into a particularly sneaky tree now and again.

  Getting to the pickup only took maybe twice as long as it would have taken in fair weather. Tommy was grateful for the snow, since it had screwed with the Fleet Strike people searching for them more than it had screwed with them. He hoped Cally made it out, but tried not to think about it too much. Not right now. He’d think about her when he got somewhere that he had a chance to do something about it. He’d only dared try to raise her once on the radio. Getting no answer, he didn’t dare transmit again.

  They would have missed the Humvee if George and Papa hadn’t been smart enough to leave the headlights on. As it was, they barely caught sight of the glow before they passed it. Damned nor’easters. All too many of them since the war. Why was a question for the academics — which they sure did love debating over lunches bought with other people’s money. Piling into the warmth of the vehicle was like heaven.

  “Anything from Cally?” It was the first thing out of Harrison’s mouth. It would have been the first thing out of his mouth, except it came out more of a grunt as he shoved his way into the truck after the other man and slammed the door.

  “No,” Papa O’Neal said brusquely. “We keep the snoopers active to give us as much warning of hostiles as possible, we keep the lights on, we camp here for the night.”

  “Not to get in the way of a good plan, but I have cherished personal needs. Like oxygen with low carbon monoxide levels.”

  “Fans. George brought fans. We take turns on watch clearing the snow from one side of the car outside enough to make a chimney. More snivel gear in the back.”

  “George?” Tommy said. “Remind me never to complain about you being a paranoid son of a bitch again.”

  “Bet on it. Just be glad this Humvee is a hybrid,” the blond said. “If we were running on prewar chemical batteries, we’d be toast.”

  “Mmm. Toast. What good does running this beast do that we can’t just do on its electric?” Tommy asked.

  “Engine heat,” Harrison mumbled. “It’s not like we’ve got electric heating coils or anything. We can run the lights, we can run the snoopers, we can run the fans, but every couple of hours, we’re going to have to run the engine enough to warm back up again so we don’t all freeze. Speaking of not freezing, do you think one of you could see your way clear to passing some chow forward? It’s about that time.”

  “What’s plan B if Cally’s not here in the morning?” Tommy couldn’t help feeling disturbed that of all the team members, it was the girl who was out in the snow.

  “She should be here. She had the same terrain and rendezvous data you did,” George assured.

  “If she loaded it, if her buckley didn’t break, if she didn’t get caught,” Harrison had dry clothes out and was changing, shivering.

  “Sounding a bit like a buckley yourself, aren’t you?” his brother quipped.

  “I didn’t see her load the cube. I saw her face when she took it. Bet you fifty FedCreds she never loaded the thing,” Sunday said.

  “Okay, so if she’s not here in the morning, we proceed to the bridge and leave a lookout — Tommy, I guess — then send a pair on foot to rendezvous two. We also alert Kieran that she may show up at the plane. The bridge and the plane are the most logical places for her to go if she somehow didn’t get the memo. If she can find them in all this,” George added.

  “You’re not suggesting we try to get the Humvee all the way to the second rendezvous, are you?” Papa clearly considered this lunacy.

  “Not if fixer-boy can come up with something for snowshoes—”

  “Blow me,” Harrison said mildly.

  “Anyway, if we can make walking in the snow a little easier, you and I will go to the second rendezvous, and Harrison will take the vehicle to the plane. Get it under cover. It’s more conspicuous in this weather than we are on foot. All three out in the cold pack some heater rations and beverages, first aid kits for Cally. If she finds us after a night out, she’ll need it. If we don’t find her by seventeen hundred, we get back to the plane and take the risk of hitting the radio.”

  “And if those don’t work?” Tommy asked. He would have been trying to offer help, but he was too busy cursing himself for neglecting to bring a change of clothes for himself. It wasn’t like anybody else’s stuff would fit.

  “We leave supplies at what’s left of that bounty farmhouse, marked as well as we dare. We figure she’s made it back to us from worse than this, and we get the hell out of dodge,” Papa O’Neal said. “We plan further search and rescue once we’re in the air and can phone home. We need IR and all sorts of things we don’t have to mount a search in hostile territory, in inclement weather. We need to move, communicate and coordinate.”

  “You know our best chance of finding her is in the hours immediately after the incident,” Harrison said.

  “You don’t have to fucking remind me. This is my granddaughter we’re talking about. If we don’t find her tomorrow, she’s either captured, dead, or found someplace to hole up while going to her own plan B. If she’s able, she’ll get to the LZ. If she doesn’t get herself to the LZ within a couple of days, she’s captured or dead. If the former, we need a planned extraction, not a half-assed one.”

  The Schmidt brothers had a rougher night than Tommy
or Papa. Former grunts had a special advantage in the combat skill of sleeping anywhere, in any situation, in any position. If sleep was not expressly forbidden by the regs or orders, taking any opportunity to grab a few extra winks was one of the things that separated combat vets from cherries. It helped that the ACS vet’s silks were dry again within an hour of getting out of the storm.

  The cold light of morning brought no Cally and too damned much snow. Their fixer earned his name by using some of the leftover bridge netting to give the hummer a surface it could drive over. Two pairs of improvised snow shoes and two sections of bridging allowed the truck to be stopped on one section while they went back to get the one they just drove over and move it forward. Since the material could be rolled and unrolled, their progress wasn’t comfortable, but it was reasonably quick. By early afternoon, they had detached Tommy to the bridge. In silks, with silks gloves and full headgear, which he’d sorely missed while fleeing the base, he could stay out here for hours and hours. The thermos of coffee was a luxury he savored; he just didn’t savor too much of it in case Cally showed up and needed the warmth.

  About sixteen-thirty he saw damp blonde hair, over a splotch of black, bob across the horizon. When she got close enough, he stood up, unsurprised that she immediately disappeared into the snow. “Hey, Cally! It’s just me!”

  The blonde head popped up again as she stood up and resumed slogging forward. Tommy just couldn’t take watching it. He went out and met her on the way, ignoring her protests to pick her up and carry her to the bridge.

  “I can just imagine trying to walk through this shit all day without snowshoes,” he said. He flipped open his PDA and opened a transmission, “Charlie Romeo, say again, Charlie Romeo.”

  “Roger Charlie Romeo. RTB, out,” Papa O’Neal answered.

  “Cally, you’re shivering. Here.” The big man pulled a Galactic silk survival blanket out of his pack and wrapped it around her, then poured her a cup of hot coffee as she huddled under the blanket. She warmed her frozen hands around the plastic mug as she drank it down, to have the empty cup taken and an energy bar shoved in her hands.

  “Eat that, one more cup of this, then we tackle the bridge.”

  “Where are the others?” she mumbled around a mouthful of food.

  “At the second backup rendezvous point. You didn’t load that cube in your buckley, did you?”

  “Forgot. Then on the way out, didn’t have time to go back for the stupid jumpsuit,” she said.

  “I win my bet,” he said.

  “Bet? Bastard.” She punched him on the arm.

  “You’re recovering fast. Here, wash the last of that down with this and let’s get going. You’ll warm up faster on the plane, the sooner the better.”

  “Let me guess, the truck’s at the plane where it’s out of sight,” she said.

  “You got it. In this mess, we can walk faster than it can move.”

  She looked down at his snowshoes, bent bars of metal strapped together and laced with five-fifty cord, and held up one of her own soaked, frozen, sneaker-clad feet. “Speak for yourself.”

  “I am. You’re riding over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry after we get to the other side, because I’m not staying out in this shit one minute longer than I have to,” he said. “So, why didn’t you radio in? Your PDA get smashed up?”

  “Yeah, somewhere along the way. Probably when I jumped out of the tree. Or I fell running a couple of times. Nothing to me, but a bit hard on the buckley. I had to run his emulation up, had to leave him on. Not real good for a buckley system. Of course he crashed, but he got me through some rough spots.”

  “Let’s get out of this and talk when we’re warm.” Tommy led her out onto the icy bridge, watching her carefully the whole way across. She was damned good, with the balance and stamina of the athlete she was, but she was also damned tired and he knew how she felt about heights. They went right up the center of the bridge, and it was pretty wide, but she still could take a nasty fall on that surface if she slipped.

  It was with relief that he hoisted her onto his shoulder on the other side, and a mark of her fatigue that she let him. It couldn’t have been a comfortable ride. He was really feeling it by the time he had walked the seemingly endless trek back to the LZ. People who had never “done” snow had no idea how much it took out of you to move in the stuff.

  Back in the plane, after they got out of wet clothes, both of them hit their seats, reclined them all the way, and didn’t wake up until they landed in Chicago.

  Friday 11/5/54

  The Darhel Heldan stood on the bridge of his dilapidated freighter, supervising his Indowy, who were making the final temporary repair to the control systems he needed to execute the return to normal space. His ship would not have made it out of Adenast Space Dock without full completion of its scheduled overhaul had it not been for the humans’ silvery-gray, rolled, adhesive strip that had proved so very useful for minor repairs. Repairs that otherwise would have required a custom-grown replacement part to install in place of the defective one could hold together almost indefinitely with enough of the stuff. His ship, whose name meant something like “Dedicated Industry,” was his life, but he managed her very carefully.

  Food runs as part of a cargo weren’t a bad deal. Everyone needed it, somebody had to carry it. Food runs as a solo cargo were the bottom of the barrel of merchant shipping, because they were so common and routine. Margins were thin, and there was no opportunity to distinguish oneself in such a large crowd. Heldan’s strategy to claw his way up the chain of power in the Gistar Group involved careful control of his expenditures. Whenever possible, he sent orders for his parts ahead, or made the order and deferred the pickup until his next cargo brought him back to the repair facility on his circuit. Allowing the Indowy to slot his repair part job in wherever it was convenient in their schedule obtained him the small but regular discounts that kept his operations in the black. Now came this extraordinary opportunity.

  He was a very young Darhel. So young he was fresh out of management school. So young he could still remember the perilous intoxication of the awakening of the Tal within him. Every moment of every day. Remember, crave, and fear — yet sublimate it all under discipline, always discipline. Discipline awake, discipline asleep. For a young Darhel, self-discipline was a matter of life and death. Give in to rage, or hunt lust, or allow himself the taste of meat — even dreaming too intensely of such things — even for an instant, out would pour the sweet, sweet, infinitely intoxicating Tal into his system from his own glands. Until he matured, his life would hang by a thread. Afterwards, it would merely be precarious. Once more than the tiniest foretaste of the Tal entered a Darhel’s system, the craving itself would trigger release of more, and more, and more. And who could fight the temptation to drown in bliss itself? Only one who had seen the dessicated bodies of the living dead, locked in lintatai until unassuaged thirst turned them into the truly dead; one who had smelled the smoke of the pyres floating on the air. Only one with the rare fortitude, will to live, and great good luck to embrace the discipline and survive.

  His reward had been selection and initiation into one of the great merchant groups of his race, and charge of this ship. A thousand-year-old clunker too old to have even been commandeered for refit in the war, but a ship nonetheless. Now, an unprecedented opportunity had leapt out in front of him like a gorlet from the brush and — he took a few moments to breathe, breathe deeply, hold it, count, release. Calm restored, he permitted himself a brief grin, exposing the rows upon rows of pointed shark teeth. The Indowy Melpil, on sensors, happened to be looking in his direction and shuddered. Heldan covered his teeth obligingly. No need to upset his crew. Not when the jump was so near and he needed them attentive.

  His eyes darted over to the human on watch at the gunnery station, suppressing the twitch of his ear that would have betrayed his annoyance. He saw that the man had been watching and no doubt reading his face. Above the space black of his Fleet uniform, the hu
man’s face was impassive, revealing none of the facial cues Heldan’s own studies had drilled into him. He had been warned that most of his six Fleet gunners would be of this harder-to-read strain. He resented humans. Envied them. Disdained and yet secretly admired them. Arrogant — far too sure of an equality with the older races that they didn’t even begin to approach. Dangerous, almost too dangerous to be allowed. But as a young race they had been spared the long term effects of having been made a “project” by an even older race. They could kill. He hated them for that, and for the twinge of desire that always accompanied the thought. What would it be like to be able to live, to kill and kill… He returned to his breathing drill as the deadly intoxication of the Tal began to make the edges of his vision sparkle. He truly loathed humans, but the loathing retreated to a cold thing as he reasserted his self-discipline, forcing the beast of his soul back into its cave.

  The Indowy under the console, whose name he did not know, finished its task and left the bridge with discreet haste. Control system patched, Heldan spoke, the liquid syllables to activate the return to normal space dropping from his tongue. It amused him to see the human lean towards him, just a barely visible amount, its eyes beginning to glaze as he spoke. They always did that — had a half-hypnotic reaction to his species’ voices. It was amusing. The only thing about the smelly, primitive beasts that made their presence on his ship barely tolerable.

  The large holotank in front of his chair lit up with the points of light that were the Dulain System. At this distance, its star was a bluish spark, barely brighter than the brightest of giants far, far off in space beyond it. Dulain, Dulain, Dulain. What a cargo. Eleven point three standard years cut off my time on this broken-down scow before I get my first real ship. Something that can stay on the trade routes for the entire time of my contract aboard it, never bogged down for the abomination of “routine maintenance.”