Powers that Be

Chapter 6

The wind roared down the pass from the mountains, through the foothills, and across the snowy plain that hid treacherous muskeg, rattling the snocle with bullying gusts. Bunny sat inside in full outdoor dress, watching the big shots prowl around and point as if they knew what they were doing.

They didn't. Even after they hauled Siggy's team back out here, way before the team had had a chance to recover from their ordeal, they knew no more than they had before. Of course, being stupid ips, Siggy and the others had no idea what the technical readings actually said, but this was where the storm swept down upon them, losing both ips and company men in a whiteout. Bunny had been in whiteout conditions herself several times along the river with the snocle and going back and forth between Scan's place and Kilcoole. White snowy ground underfoot, white sky overhead, and white haze and snowfall obscuring any other features of the surroundings, whiteout was disorienting and dangerous. It was a little like she'd heard space described, only white instead of black.

You could either keep driving, if you knew your trail, and hope you'd come out on the other side or find a landmark, or you just stopped and waited it out. The sensible thing to do, this far from any villages, would have been to bed the dogs down and wait it out, but the geologists had brought a lot of equipment and only allowed space for as much food as they felt they would need on the strict timetable they had set for themselves.

Lavelle told the company men, "We said, 'You better stop here until we can see something' but they said, 'Aw, no, we'll just be usin' our instruments.' Only problem was, their instruments broke 'cause of the cold."

The company men insisted that the instruments had been made for this climate and that it was impossible that they would break, and Lavelle had just shrugged. Thereafter she didn't know much except that the sleds had gotten separated, and the other three had been lost, drivers, dogs, geologists, equipment, food, and all. She had been driving the sled with the boy in it, so she had had room for a few more supplies. Brit had been driving the sled with the father, with Siggy running between them to keep them connected, as he had tried to do with the other sleds before they got lost back up to Moose Lake. Maybe they hit a thin patch of ice. Then, as they were coming down a pretty steep slope, the sleds overturned and both passengers were thrown out of the sleds, to roll down the hill and vanish.

"Didn't you think it was a little strange, them just vanishing like that?"

"No. What I thought was strange was that they couldn't find us. We were hollering like everything and the dogs were barking. Brit wanted to start searching, thinking maybe they were knocked unconscious, and we did look around where they should have logically been. But when we didn't find any holes or anything, Siggy said the safest thing to do for everybody was stay put, light a fire, keep warm, and make noises all the time while the whiteout lasted."

'Trying to save your own skins, huh?" asked Colonel Giancarlo, the one who had sent Charlie away.

"No, no," said a younger captain with a handsome weather-beaten face and a much pleasanter manner. "Very understandable," he said soothingly to Lavelle, who had started to bristle. "What happened then?"

Lavelle looked straight at the colonel and said, "Then the weather cleared a little and Dinah kept whimpering, so I unhitched her. She run off and pretty soon we heard her howling; then she came trotting back with the boy. He said she dug through a drift to get him but his father was hurt and could we come and help him pull his father out. He got trapped in sort of a little avalanche, but fortunately, there was a cave in the side of the hill where he was trapped. They made it to the cave, but the snow blew back against the entrance again and it was real dark. The boy said he knew we wouldn't find them there but it was shelter and he'd been afraid to leave for help for fear he wouldn't find him again. He'd called out but we didn't hear each other for the wind."

"You didn't even try to find the others?" Giancarlo snorted contemptuously.

Lavelle had started yelling then, a rare event for the gentle and mild-mannered woman. "We didn't even know where the heck we were, mister! If Odark hadn't found us, I don't know if we'd have any of us made it back alive. Siggy couldn't even walk by then, and Brit and I would never have been able to dig the father out without the dogs helping us."

All the while the conversation was going on the boy, Diego, stood out there in the cold listening to them natter on, his face closed except for the occasions when something said or done seemed to make him angry; then his dark eyes would glow like fresh-stoked embers in the snow-burned red rawness of his face.

Bunny didn't know what to make of any of it, except that she was tired of acting just smart enough to drive her snocle, but dumb enough and friendly enough so that the big shots would keep talking in front of her, continuing their interrogation as she drove them to the ill-defined area where the party had been discovered. Terce was carrying on as if he had already become part of the inquisition, and the company men didn't make a move without consulting him.

It took two days on the snocles, driving them out to where the hunting party had run across the survivors, and then, with the recent snowfall in these parts and the wind blowing drifts everywhere, they could only approximate the location. Bunny shivered. She was out of the wind here in the snocle, and the sky was clear, but outside the wind picked up veils of snow and flung them across the landscape. Behind her, the trail was already drifted over in places. The company men had sent Terce back to make camp at the halfway point with Odark and Brit. Lavelle and the boy had remained behind to "assist with inquiries," and try to help them determine what had become of the other team members.

Bunny opened the door and climbed out of the snocle, trudging over to where the men stood arguing. Diego's adrenaline seemed to have run out while the company men wrangled around him. He had been radiating tension and at times anger at the interrogation, but now he slumped against Lavelle, who put her arm around him. He looked exhausted. He really shouldn't have been out here again so soon, but his father couldn't be moved. Siggy definitely had to rest and look after his frostbite, or gangrene might get the rest of his foot. Clodagh had given him some stuff, but the company men had taken him back to SpaceBase and "accommodated" him in a separate room from the crazy man, Diego's father, until he could be moved with the others to "another facility." Bunny didn't know what that meant, but she didn't like the sound of it.

"Excuse me, folks," she said to the party, "but we better make tracks while it's daylight."

"I say when we move," Giancarlo told her. "You do realize, lady, that if I decide to, I can see to it that your license is revoked?"

"Oh, yes, sir. I know what an important man you are-how important all you people are. And that's why I'm telling you. If we don't get going now, I might lose my snocle instead of just my license, or another hunting party might have to find us. Our weather here, sir, as you may have noticed, is tricky. It has lots of-uh, different things-"

"Variables?" the captain suggested helpfully.

"Yeah. Those. Lots of variables. And right now a bad storm's making. Also, sir, that lad looks to me as if he's all done in."

"She has a point, Colonel," the captain said. "Maybe we should make for camp now that we've seen the approximate site and come back better equipped when the weather clears."

The colonel glared but waved his mitten toward the snocle.

Diego Metaxos sat by himself in the corner of the shelter while the soldiers cross-questioned Lavelle. He wished they would let her alone. She had tried to help them-in fact, he thought, she had helped him a lot. And she could help him more, if only the interrogators would go away so he could talk to her.

Dad's delirious ravings seemed incredible to those men, and Diego knew they hadn't really believed him either when he had tried to tell them about the cavern, even though he was obviously unhurt. In a way he didn't blame them. Now the whole thing seemed like a dream to him-or it would have, except that his father had emerged from the same time and place looking as if he were still trapped in a nightmare.

Diego wasn't sure exactly what he and his father had gone through. All he knew was that their experience of that time in the cave had to have been wildly different for Dad than it had been for him, because while he felt fine, something awful had happened to Dad in there. Even after the icicles had melted from his hair, it remained white, and his face was drawn and sunken, like a skull's, the skin dried and far more wrinkled than it had been. The worst part was that except for the initial babblings, he wasn't responding too much of anything, just staring straight ahead, as if he couldn't see at all. The doctors said he was in some kind of severe shock, but how could that be? He and Diego had been together, and whatever it was Diego had experienced, it hadn't been anything to produce such an effect-at least not in him.

At first, he had told the rescuers and the company investigators everything, but when he saw their immediate skepticism, he had sense enough to clam up, beginning to doubt and second-guess his own perceptions. He needed to sort it all out, and he didn't intend to say any more until he was sure Dad would be tended to by someone who cared about him as more than an employee or a subject for study. Unfortunately, civilian dependent teenaged sons didn't have much clout with the company hierarchy. Dad needed Steve, and he needed him quick.

And maybe when Steve came Diego could talk with him and go over everything again in his own mind. But right now he shied away from thinking about it.

One thing was for sure, and that was that the company investigators weren't going to be able to answer any of Diego's questions. They were too busy third-degreeing everyone for answers to listen to questions.

The girl was looking at him funny. Most of the time she stared straight ahead, pretending to listen to the men as they talked amongst themselves or barked questions at Lavelle. But when they were looking the other way, or at each other, the girl's eyes slid sideways, trying to meet his, and her mouth opened, as if she were about to speak.

Finally she got up and went outside, and he thought she had to go check on her snocle or pee or something. When she came back, she casually sat down beside him. None of the company men seemed to notice.

"I'm Bunny," she said, sideways out of her mouth.

"I know. I heard them talking to you. I'm Diego." He realized he was talking out of the side of his mouth, too. But he felt relieved that someone was finally talking to him rather than around him, and he knew immediately that this girl understood that what had happened to him and his father was not just another academic problem or fact-finding mission.

Her eyes gleamed the same way the dogs' eyes had gleamed in the darkness, and her lowered voice reminded him of the whisper of the sled runners on the snow.

"I know," she said. "Are you scared?"

"No-well, scared about Dad, maybe. But otherwise, no."

"You ought to be," she said in a tone that implied she knew something he didn't know.

"Why? Is it going to storm again or something?"

"Probably. But I don't mean that, I mean them," she said, nodding to Colonel Giancarlo and the others.

Diego shrugged. "They're just doing their jobs, trying to find out what happened," he said. He watched Giancarlo's fierce expression as the colonel tried for the fiftieth time to catch Lavelle in a lie, and added, "Not that they seem to believe anybody."

"They're like that. Look, I'll be around. If you need anything, let me know, okay? I mean, with your da sick, is your mum going to come down here, too? Does she need a place to stay? My people would help."

He felt another flare of resentment and gave her a dirty look, then decided that wasn't fair. She was just trying to be nice- maybe nosy, too, but at least she wasn't browbeating anybody the way Giancarlo and the others were. "Nah, my mom's, uh, not available-but I think Dad would want Steve here."

"Who's that?"

"His assistant, and his partner," Diego said, daring her to make something of it.

But she just nodded and said, "Okay, I'll see if I can find out what's being done officially, and if nothing is, we'll try to do something unofficially. I just wanted you to know you've got friends here. Night."

"Buenas noches," he whispered back.

You did good, Bunka," Clodagh said later, when Bunny had returned to Kilcoole. She had dropped Giancarlo off at the company station to await word from the head of the search party, and delivered the others back to SpaceBase before returning to the village. "The boy is alone. Do you think he saw anything, or was it just the father?"

"No," Bunny said. "I think he did, too. I can't say why-he's denying he remembers a thing now, but they wouldn't believe him if he told them the truth anyway. The father's in the high-security ward at the infirmary. The flot around SpaceBase is that he's crazy."

"Poor boy," Clodagh said, her eyes blinking rapidly through the steam from the teacup she held to her lips. "All alone. I can't feel much for his father, but the lad is so young to be left to the company wolves, especially when he has passed through what he has. If only we could initiate him, it would be better. Has he no one?"

"Just this Steve," Bunny said. "He is Dr. Steven L. Margolies, assigned to the same branch and regular duty station as Metaxos. I found that much out from Arnie's soldier boyfriend at the communications shed. He put up the name Metaxos on the computer and it was there, under the info on Metaxos. I don't know how we could find Steve though."

Clodagh shook her head regretfully. "It's not really our place to find him, but the boy will need help when he goes back out there-" Her head jerked up. "I wish Charlie was still here."

"Maybe Yana can help," Bunny suggested.

"Maybe," Clodagh said slowly. "But be careful. Charlie was one of us. He would know, the way you do, what the boy is going through, as well as how the PTBs are. We don't know Yana so good yet."

"Sean likes her," Bunny said.

"He does, does he? What did he say?" Clodagh smiled a very pretty smile that transformed her face, her eyes twinkling with gleefully prurient interest.

"Nothing, but I could tell," Bunny said. "Don't worry, you'll be the first to know-well, maybe not the first…"

"Yana could be a good ally, but she's real closed up. That's better than being too friendly, I guess, but I'd feel better about her being here if we knew more about her."

"Give her a break, Clodagh. It's not her fault she was born at the wrong time and place for you to have delivered her the way you've done half of us. I'm going to go down there now and see if she has any ideas. Don't worry. I won't give anything away."

Over the next ten days Yana gradually accustomed herself to the new environment. She slept a lot, in between the necessary chores of keeping warm and eating. She kept Clodagh's medicine near her so that every time she felt the tickle that was the prelude to a cough, she could take a swig and forestall a spasm. Whatever was in the stuff was far more efficacious than what the medics had given her on Andromeda. She practiced taking deeper breaths of the marvelous fresh air of Petaybee, expanding her capacity, flushing out the last of the gas from the depths of the lobes. She would never be much use here on Petaybee if she couldn't even breathe without coughing.

She had just finished making another futile trip to the virtually useless company store when she saw the snocles pulling into corps headquarters way up the street. Some game or the other was definitely afoot, but until the trouble came looking for her, she would conserve her strength. She needed all she could muster to withstand her own cooking, she thought, as she attempted to make a meal for herself and the cat. Other than the fish she had been given by Seamus and the one pan she had been given, she had found damned-all of any use through company channels in Kilcoole.

The trouble did indeed come looking for her a short time later. She was in the middle of browning the fish when someone pounded at her door. She opened it to see Giancarlo standing there.

"Maddock, where the hell have you been and why haven't you reported in?" he snapped before she could invite him inside.

"Nice to see you, too, sir," she said with a growl, pumping his hand and pulling him inside. On the stove, the grease she was cooking the fish in crackled and spat. The cat scooted under the bed. For some reason, Giancarlo's appearance suddenly infuriated her. Maybe it was because she was frustrated trying to keep house with the charity of the villagers because the store was so ill-stocked there was little her meager funds could buy to keep her alive. Maybe it was because they were no longer on shipboard or space station and so it didn't look like the corps to her. Maybe it was because this guy was the kind of petty martinet she had always hated and had sworn she would get back at when she retired. Maybe it was because he was such a contrast to the polite and kindly locals. But she thought it was because after killing everyone around her and half killing her, the company still allowed brass-assed spooks like him to threaten to withhold medical treatment and to dump her unprepared in a place like this in order to use her. A couple of years earlier she would have taken it for granted that they had the right, that Giancarlo had the right. Now she felt anger rising up inside her high enough to choke her if she didn't vent a little of it.

"Do sit down and tell me how, sir, I'm supposed to contact you with no radio, no computer, no transportation, no contact person, not even a bloody goddamn pen, sir, or a fraggin' piece of fraggin' bloody paper, sir. While you're at it, tell me how you expect me to maintain cover and gain the trust of the people here when you, sir, come barging in shouting my name like the ship's bloody paging program. Sir."

She sat down in the chair, leaving him to remain standing or sit on the bed, she didn't really care which, while she crossed her arms and glared up at him.

"I see discipline has relaxed after only a few days of pretending to be a civilian."

"I am a civilian, sir. Maybe an employee, if the company cares to issue me anything to do my bloody job with, maybe not."

"You, uh, seem to be feeling better," he said lamely.

"Yes, Colonel Giancarlo, I am. Even we invalids have our good days. A weapon. I forgot. If I'm doing espionage here, I ought to have a weapon. If for no other reason than to hunt my own fraggin' food. They do that here. They have to. Have you seen that company store? What's the company trying to do here, sir? Incite another Bremport?"

"That's enough of that, Major. What I want to know is why the hell you didn't inform us about this latest fiasco with the geologic team."

"Could be because I had barely arrived when it happened. Could be because I wasn't briefed on who was here and who wasn't to begin with. Could be because I have no means of communication, no liaison officer since you so impetuously dismissed the one who was already here-"

"We had reasons to believe his loyalties were divided," Giancarlo said. He was sweating now, bundled up in his outdoor clothing while the stove radiated heat throughout the room.

About then she realized that the stove wasn't just sending heat waves: the fish pan was billowing smoke. She began coughing, but she was so angry that, still bent double from the spasms, she grabbed her knife, stabbed the burning fish, and flipped it over in the blackening grease, still glaring at Giancarlo when her eyes weren't clenched shut from the spasms.

Giancarlo began coughing, too, and rose as she stumbled for the door and flung it open. They both stepped into the open air, breathing deeply, while the smoke rolled out the door.

"I want no repeat of this omission in the future," he said. "Meanwhile, I'll look into the problem of your special equipment. Good evening, Major."

She coughed and managed to blurt out "Colonel" only when he was well down the street. She covered her mouth and nose, reached around the corner of the door for the hook containing her parka, and grabbed Clodagh's cough syrup and her muffler. Downing a swallow of the syrup, she rubbed the muffler in the snow and, holding it across her mouth and nose, dashed back into the cabin. She forked the burned fish from the pan and flicked it onto the snow for the cat to salvage later. Then, with the door still open, she put on her parka and sat outside, waiting for the smoke to clear.

Fraggin' bureaucrat! He was one lousy grade above her and thought he was some kind of fraggin' deity. Idiots like him had assigned Bry that mission that had gotten him killed. Idiots like him had cut costs by shortchanging the colony on Bremer until the colonists had grown tired of watching each other and their children die of curable diseases and starvation, and had rebelled. What was that saying about "penny wise and pound foolish"? Damn!

"Are you okay, dama?" her across-the-road neighbor, whom she hadn't yet met, hollered out his door.

"Fine!" she called back.

"I saw smoke," the man ventured, diplomatically not referring to the rest of the row.

"Burned my dinner," she said.

"Want to come over while your house clears?"

"No, thanks," she called, trying not to sound as belligerent as she felt. "I'm out here for my health."

When she had literally and figuratively cooled off enough, she went back into the house. The odor of burnt fish was still very strong, but enough smoke had cleared so it didn't bring on another coughing fit. She kept swigging on Clodagh's bottle every so often to fend off hunger pains while she scoured the pan with her knife and fought off the cat, who kept climbing her leg, mewing piteously. It naturally wanted no more to do with the burnt fish than she did.

Bunny knocked on the door and let herself in before Yana could answer.

"Come in, sit down. No, better yet, I'll be glad to feed you fish if you cook the dinner," Yana told her.

Bunny shook her head and took the pan away from her, filling it with snow to melt on the stove and plopping the fish in-all of them. Yana had forgotten to take the rest of the string back outside, and they had all thawed.

"How did they expect you to live down here when they didn't teach you how to survive?" she asked.

"That's what I was just asking my good buddy, Colonel Asshole Giancarlo, when he came to give me his hail-and-farewell address."

"I heard," Bunny said.

"You did?"

"Yeah, all up and down the street. People thought you might be burning him at the stake or something until your neighbors saw him leave. They said you sure looked mad, dragging him inside. Then the smoke started billowing out of your house. You threw him out the door with burning fish and sat out in the cold."

"How could you know?" Yana asked, mortified at the picture she probably had presented. Some clandestine operative she was. Giancarlo would probably send some mercenary hit man after her after this incident, but it was worth it. Asshole. "It just happened."

Bunny shrugged. "It's a small town, Yana. By the way, your face is black all down the middle from your eyes to your chin."

"Shit." Yana pulled out the tail of her uniform blouse, dipped it in the fish water, and scrubbed. "Did I get it?"

"Not all. Your nose is still dirty."

That struck Yana as funny, and she began laughing so hard she started coughing again, realizing as she fell into hiccoughs that she was also slightly drunk from Clodagh's cough syrup. She collapsed on the bed.

"Oh, shit, Bunny, what a week," she said, her laughs subsiding into a flurry of silly intermittent giggles.

That started Bunny laughing, too. She put a plate on top of the pan for a lid and sat down at the table, laughing louder than Yana until her laughter started Yana off again.

"You're as bad as me," Yana said finally. "I'm a fine 'zample to the younger gen'ration."

"I sure would have liked to see you haul that Giancarlo in and kick him out," Bunny said. "I been driving him around for days and he's-he's-"

"Yeah, isn't he?"

"He's been browbeating Lavelle, even though she told him what happened. And he has poor Dr. Metaxos locked up in the crazy ward and won't believe what Diego tells him, and Diego's all by himself and can't find his other father…"

"Other father?"

Bunny nodded. "His father's partner, Steven Margolies. You know, they're like Aisling and Sinead, and they're Diego's folks, but nobody's even let the other father know about Dr. Metaxos. If Charlie were here, he could maybe have gotten a message to this Steve through people he knew at SpaceBase, but now there's no one in town who can help Diego, and you can bet Giancarlo won't do it."

"My my. You've sure taken up this Diego's cause in a short period of time. I thought he was in shock and half out of it."

"He's not. He's just worried about his da and nobody will believe him."

"What's he look like, Bunny?" Yana asked her.

"He has really dark eyes, very big, and his hair is- Yana, you're laughing at me!"

"Yep, I thought so," Yana said. "He's cute, is he? 'Sokay, Bunny. So you like this boy and nobody will help him and Giancarlo was his usual charming self to your buddy, so you're glad I told him off and you came to tell me so? Or did you really just come down to cook me dinner so I wouldn't starve to death?"

"Well, I was talking to Clodagh…" Bunny's face grew a little sly as she turned and pulled two steaming and fragrant fish out of the pan and arranged them on a plate. Carefully she picked the third one up by the tail. The cat was no laggard and had snagged it out of her hand before she could lay it on the floor for him.

"What I told Clodagh…" Bunny began, managing to stand between Yana and the fish.

"What?" Yana said, sobering now so that Bunny stopped playing and settled into the chair, handing Yana the knife so she could carve into her fish.

"Was maybe you could help Diego. You know, maybe you could ride in with me to SpaceBase next time I have a run and like wear your uniform and maybe Arnie's boyfriend would help you get a message to that man you said would help Charlie. Maybe he could let Dr. Margolies know what happened and-well, you did say he was in deployment. Maybe he could get him down here."

"Military deployment, Bunny."

Bunny shrugged. "It's all just PTBs anyway, isn't it? Can't they pull strings or something?"

"Hmm. Maybe they can. If anyone could, Ahmed could. Or if not, he'd find out who could." And in the back of her mind, it occurred to her that she could also use her full uniform and access to SpaceBase as an opportunity to "requisition" some of the equipment necessary to the duties Giancarlo seemed to think she was so derelict in performing. If at some later date he actually got around to issuing her duplicates, she could trade the items for other locally produced items. She wasn't really qualified for this kind of subterfuge, having never actually been a supply officer, but she figured necessity was going to have to be the mother of invention in this case.

Yana was very popular that evening. Bunny hadn't been gone more than a half an hour when there was another knock at her door. She opened it to find Scan Shongili leaning against the doorframe, astounding her again with how much less bulky he was than everyone else.

"Come in," she said. "You'll catch your death. A virus or something…"

The silvery eyes glinted with amusement and his mouth quirked at the corner. She had an unauthorized urge to brush back the lock of silver-brown hair that fell boyishly forward onto his forehead.

"I hear you've been taking on the Intergal high command," he said, stamping his feet outside and entering, shrugging off his light jacket before even closing the door.

"Oh, that." She waved her hand dismissively, pretending more nonchalance than she felt. She was probably going to have to do a little creative groveling over that sooner or later if she was going to be able to help the boy-or maybe not. She was no longer feeling so smug. The smart thing for Giancarlo to do was to cooperate with her if he wanted results; but, although he was far from stupid, for someone in his specialty, he did not seem to have learned the value of cooperation, though no doubt he found it in himself to cooperate with those of higher rank. She would worry about it later, she thought, realizing at the same time that the effects of the cough medicine's overdose hadn't quite worn off. She was using a lot of her mental energy to keep from throwing her arms around Shongili's neck and planting a kiss on the warm smile with which he was favoring her.

"Uh, sit down," she said, brushing her own hair back from her face and hoping her hands had gotten washed somehow in the midst of all of this and she wasn't resmearing herself with ashes. "Can I burn you some tea?"

"Please. I just got back from running with the search party."

"Any trace of the others?"

He shook his head and sat on the bed. She lifted a finger to tell him to wait, ducked outside, dipped up a pan of snow from a high drift, where animals hadn't been able to reach it, and returned to plop it back on the stove.

"No," he said. "Not a trace. And it started snowing hard again, so we had to give up for the time being. If your friend the colonel would just release Lavelle, I'll bet Dinah could help. She's the best leader of all of the dogs, and if our people are still findable, she'll locate them. We've been out for three days now."

"You must be exhausted."

"A little. I just came by to ask if you'd finished with the recorder yet."

"Oh, frag! No, I haven't, really. Clodagh came by once, too, but I completely forgot to ask her when she wanted to do the song for Charlie. If you need it, maybe I could-"

"No, no, that's okay." He peered over her shoulder. "Your water's boiling."

"Thanks."

He took a deep breath and said, "What I actually wondered was, well, while you've got it, have you given any more thought to making the song about Bremport?"

"Oh, Scan," she said, sitting back down hard. To her annoyance, she began to cough again, not because she had to but out of reflex. "Scan, I just can't do that. It's too soon. A lot of it's classified. And I just don't want to think about it. People here don't want to hear it, either, trust me."

He reclined on the bed, propping himself up on his elbow, and gave her a long hard look. "I could say the same thing, Yana. Trust me. You need to do this. We need to hear it."

"Sean, I can't. I'm no songwriter and I can barely stand to talk about it. Anyway, I only saw one small, awful part. The rest I've put together from what I was told before or since about Bremen"

"I'd like to hear about it," he said, quietly insistent.

"Did you have someone there? Did you know someone there?" she asked.

"You," he said, making and holding eye contact. "At least, I'm trying to know you."

That unsettled her for a moment. She put some of Clodagh's herbs in a bag and steeped them in the tea water while she thought. Maybe she should talk about it, not only because Shongili wanted to know, but because she was still furious about the whole thing. She couldn't keep popping off at superior officers on whose goodwill she was dependent and get away with it.

"Okay," she said. "Since you think it needs to be told to everybody else, let's turn on the recorder. I don't believe I could go through this twice." He said nothing, but raised his eyebrows inquiringly and she said, "My coat. In the pocket."

He moved with natural, lanky grace, rolling across the bed and onto his feet, striding the step or two to the doorway and extracting the recorder, rolling back across the bed with the machine in one hand. He set it on the table beside her chair and punched in the recording sequence.

She put the cup of tea beside him, then realized it was her only cup. Giving a shrug, she carefully raised the pan in both hands and sipped the tea from the lip before settling down again.

She could have gone next door and borrowed a cup, perhaps, but she didn't know the people and she felt that if she interrupted this moment, it wouldn't return. She might never again have the courage to discuss it. She certainly would never again have the kind of total attention she had from Scan Shongili.

"I'm not sure what's classified," she said to begin with. "Except that I'm not supposed to tell you how the terrorists infiltrated the station." She shrugged. "Hell, I don't know that for sure anyway, though I could speculate. The thing is, Scan, the deaths were unnecessary. None of those people had to die. None of them should have. The terrorists were after food, medicine, and supplies."

"How do you know?"

"Because I lay there on the floor playing dead, watching them loot the place, and that's all they bloody well took."

"We heard that they systematically ran through the place executing everyone they found alive," Sean said.

Yana shook her head. "There was no need of that. I think they did make sure of a few of the crew, but the station commander and supply officer just happened, by pure coincidence mind you, to be visiting another ship that day. My ship. It had just transferred supplies, and I was bringing fresh recruits over to familiarize them with a Class One station and demonstrate some of the equipment. I-um- I was just showing them how the snorkel worked."

"The what?" Scan asked, leaning forward.

Her voice had been clear and matter-of-fact so far, but suddenly she was having trouble forcing it above a whisper. Her throat began to spasm and she started coughing again. Scan held out the bottle of Clodagh's medicine, and she took a good swig before she continued.

"The snorkel. It's for short repair jobs in airless sections of the ship, so that you don't have to suit up. There's an exchange unit in it that returns oxygen for CO2, breath for breath, without the need to carry heavy tanks or wear a full space suit that might be too bulky to do some of the inside repairs in tighter places. Also, you can send snorkeled personnel into certain areas of the ship without having to flood the whole area with O2. New invention. They discovered the exchange material on Bremer."

She stopped and watched him. She had lit the lamp earlier, and now its glow and that of the moons and stars through the window illuminated the room. The planes of his face were shadowed, and his eyes held hers, silently pulling more out of her. The tension was broken when the cat jumped up onto her knees and settled down, purring, as if knowing she needed reassurance that she was here, on firm ground, with living people and in no immediate danger, instead of back there.

He nodded slowly, an almost imperceptible movement.

"I stepped back into an air lock with the mask in place and let the inner door close. The students were looking through the view plate and watching me on the screens on either side of the door, as I explained the mask to them.

"I saw the vapor pouring in through the ventilation duct before any of them did, but I couldn't speak to them because of the snorkel. I signaled them to stand back and hit the O2 button for the lock, waited a beat, and hit the exit panel for the door. But then I realized the vapor was pouring in behind me, too. 1 heard an explosion-felt it really-and the door jammed half-open between us. The recruits were coughing and crowding the outer door."

She stopped for a moment and took a swig of cough syrup, seeing the faces in front of her. "An eighteen-year-old girl blocked my way back into the hold. She was trying to get through to the outside, I guess, and was coughing so hard she couldn't straighten up. People were vomiting, crying. The girl's nametag said Samuel-son and she had almost white hair, cut into a crew cut. You know, trying to look the part of a company cadet. Her scalp was bright red through her hair, and her eyes were bulging. I exhaled into the mask, tore it off, and tried to wrestle it over her face, but she fought me. I-uh-had to knock her down to get past her, into the room. I put the mask back on and breathed into it but the O2 that came back wasn't pure. I must have let some of the gas leak in while I was trying to rebreathe her. The yellow vapor was still swirling, and through it I saw the viewscreens. Masked figures were running around, carrying weapons and containers, grabbing all the new supplies. My first thought was that they were station crew investigating the gas in the ventilation system. But that didn't jibe with the weapons and the way they were ignoring the people dying under their feet. I tried buddy-breathing with the nearest cadet who still had some life in him, and he seemed to realize what I was trying to do, but when he breathed into the mask, it fouled it, and he died too. They all died. Every damned one of them died and I just lay there, playing dead, on the floor breathing through the contaminated mask, exhaling the gas and CO2, sucking in poisoned oxygen while the terrorists ran through the station. The alarms were blaring and the station computer calling for help, but the last thing I saw was the masked face of one of the terrorists through the viewport leading to the main corridor.

She looked surprised to see us lying in there. I had my face against the floor so the mask wouldn't show, and I was wedged among the cadets' bodies. I did-not-cover myself with glory."

She didn't realize until he pulled a rag out of his pocket and wiped her face that she had been weeping. She took the rag from him and scrubbed at her face vigorously, not wanting undeserved sympathy.

He withdrew gently, asking, "How did you get out?"

"The station computer alerted the ship's computer, and they sent medical teams and oxygen. It can't have taken very long, any of it, but I was unconscious by then. I woke up at Andromeda Station, unable to move. I was on an automatic respirator. Four or five of us survived, I understand, but we weren't allowed to meet. Once we were well enough to talk, we were questioned for weeks about how we managed to survive the others. At first I think they thought I was in league with the terrorists. But then some of the administrators on Bremer got scared and turned over the terrorists. We were exonerated, they were executed…" She shrugged, at a loss for any more to say. "Some song, huh?"

This time he rose from the bed and put his arms around her. She tried not to cry, not to play for sympathy. She had no need of it. But she developed a very sudden and crucial need for being held against Sean Shongili-since he had volunteered.

"I-urn, I can't tell you anything specific about the kids from Petaybee," she said into his shoulder.

He hugged her more tightly and she relaxed into him, closing her eyes, relieved to have talked about it. Relieved that so far he hadn't told her what she should have done instead of what she had done to save the kids who were in her charge.

He surprised her then by saying, "Get dressed."

"What?"

"You're not tired, are you?"

"I wouldn't want to try to go to sleep now, no," she said, wiping her face with the heels of her hands so she could look him in the eye.

"I want to take you somewhere."

"Where?"

"A place we use for cleansing. Come on."

She pulled on her quilted pants and parka, her mittens, hat, and muffler, and stuck the cough medicine back in her pocket.

"Let's take this, too," Scan said, sticking the recorder into his own pocket.

"You don't still think I could sing…"

"We'll see what you think," he said, prodding her toward the door with a hand that lingered between the bottom of her cap and her folded-down hood, at the base of her hairline. A rush of longing for him made her feel weak-kneed and ashamed at the same time, as if she were exploiting the tragedy to hold his attention.

She sat with him in the cab of his snocle, the motor obscenely loud in the silent village. In a moment they were through it, past Bunny's sleeping dogs and Clodagh's house, past the company station and out onto the snowy plain.

The machine slid over the snow and parted drifts, spraying white glitter in its wake, the engine's hum the only sound, as if they were riding the wind. After a few moments Sean leaned forward and pointed up, and she looked above her to see a long weaving band of rainbow-striped feathers undulating across the sky like the warbonnet of an old-time cinematic warrior.

They watched and rode in silence. A big cat sprang away from them; then the lights of their snocle snared a wolf and they had to tack around him to keep from injuring him. They didn't really need the lights, it seemed to Yana. The snow reflected back the light from the moons and stars and the aurora, casting deep shadows against which prominent objects were etched in a sharp relief. For the first time, she saw that the settlement was within sight of hills and mountains, off to the east and southeast. They passed between the first pair of hills and cut behind them, following a winding pass that didn't assail the mountains directly, but nudged gently into them. Within this shelter was more of the vegetation she had seen along the river, tall conifers and a great deal of brush.

It was darker here, in the shadows of the hills, and Scan stopped the snocle.

"We have to walk in," he said. "There's no way to get back there by snocle or sled, but it's an easy walk."

She nodded and followed, thinking she could use the crisp air to clear her head of cough-medicine fumes and the leaden emotional aftertaste of Bremport. She could taste the gas on her tongue again and smell it deep inside herself.

The air here was not as cold as that at the village. Stunted trees and brush grew along the man-made walkway fashioned of carefully pieced bits of flattened machine hulls and suspended over the snow and humped mounds of undergrowth.

Sean had been taking the lead, and now he reached back for her and pulled her forward.

"Look," he said, pointing to a large animal watching them from the shadows.

"It looks just like I do in this getup," she said of the burly furry form.

"That's because you look like a bear," he said, his voice husky, whether from whispering and cold or emotion she couldn't tell. "This is all muskeg underneath here, spongy, swampy. You'll soon see why. Berries stay on the bushes much later than elsewhere, which is what interests him." He nodded at the bear. "Come, we're almost there."

And around the next bend she saw the rising steam, curling above the snow-laden tops of larger trees, and two steps farther she saw the pools and the falls.

"Sean, it's beautiful," she said, taking in the upper pool, closest to them, where water bubbled up from the center in a fountain and formed a deep wide well reflecting the moons and stars in its ripples. Some hidden current sent the water cascading into a second pool and a third. A narrow path, almost free of snow, ran alongside the banks, leading in steps down to the lowest pool. Scan was already shucking his clothing. He turned and grinned at her.

"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 Scan wanted her to see.

The seal flipped up and back under her and dived down into the lower pool. Where the hell was Scan? 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 Scan 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," Scan'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."