Cold Welcome

^{CHAPTER SIXTEEN}

Not dead yet. Ky reminded herself of that every time her thoughts drifted on the long slog up to the plateau. They had started under starlight, well before local dawn; the clear, still weather was too good to waste; recent snowfall had drifted in between boulders, slowing progress. When they finally cleared the deepest drifts, the flimsy shelters they’d left were now hidden by the swell of ground. Like those with her, those left behind were hungry, cold, weakening day by day since the bay had frozen over and put an end to fishing. It was Ky’s job to make them hang on, to ensure that they had the best possible chance to survive.

By the time daylight made visibility easy, they were past the tumble of boulders and onto the snow-covered slope above. Here the snow wasn’t as deep; walking was easier. They were, Ky estimated, halfway up the gulch when a gust of wind blew all the snow off a smooth slanted surface in front of them.

“I could almost believe that was a road once,” Betange said. “But if it was a road why would it stop—or start—here?”

Ky turned to look back down the slope. From here she could not see the shore at all, only the ocean end of the bay, dark water showing between slabs of ice. “So it couldn’t be seen from below, I guess. But it could’ve been seen from the sea—if anyone had looked. Or satellite surveillance. If it is a road.”

Soon it was clear that, if not a road, it was a much smoother path upward than they’d had before. Again and again gusts of wind blew the snow off it. Eventually the slope eased, then eased again. Now they could see ahead and to either side. Low hills with taller ones behind them rose to the right. Thirty meters away a group of large grayish animals she had no name for fled abruptly, kicking up snow. Ky had never seen anything like them—shaggy, heads high, strangely shaped antlers, slender legs, short tails sticking up like flags.

“I thought this was supposed to be barren,” she said. Whatever the animals were, they slowed to a bouncy trot about a hundred meters away, then to a walk, and headed off in single file.

“Just rock and ice, they said in school,” Betange said. “Terraforming failure, nothing grows there.”

“I wish we had a gun,” Sergeant Cosper said. “Real meat, and lots of it—”

“We’ll find a way,” Ky said. At the thought of meat, fresh meat, her stomach cramped. She looked away from the animals, now disappearing into a dip. There, ahead to the right, something looked odd. Straight lines, not natural. “There!” she said, pointing. “That’s got to be a structure.”

“How far away is it?”

“Do you think anyone’s there?”

“What is it?”

Ky didn’t wait to answer the questions. The road—she was sure it was one now—aimed that way, and she kept going. “We’ll find out when we get to it,” she said.

“But—”

“Let’s go.”

Another upward slope dragged at their feet, but the structure—clearly now a structure—loomed higher with every step, and they were clearly on some kind of intentional roadway, a surface smooth as pavement beneath the uneven covering of snow. When they reached the brow of the low hill, they saw a broad, shallow bowl with a tower rising from it.

“Bet it’s a mine shaft,” Betange said. “And buildings.”

“And that looks like a landing strip,” Ky said, looking beyond the tower and the buildings near its base to a long, straight, nearly flat stretch of snow at least three times wider than the road they’d been walking on. “And a hangar. Long enough for a shuttle landing, do you think?”

“Might be,” Yamini said.

The way down was steeper and slippery with ice under the snow; as they neared the bottom of the bowl, the snow to either side lay deeper. They hurried as much as they could; Ky knew they craved the potential shelter of real walls and a roof.

“Slow down,” she kept saying. “No broken ankles—we’ll get there—”

The sun was long gone and green auroras danced overhead before they arrived in that cold unwelcoming light. Finally they reached the first building, a simple rectangle with a steeply pitched roof. Corrugated metal walls, metal shutters over what Ky hoped were windows. A metal door, locked, had a weathered stenciled label, A-2, and a keycard reader that looked newer than the buildings. They banged on the door and yanked, but the lock held. “Who’s got a Spaceforce ID card?”

Yamini fished his out. “Try it,” Ky said. She didn’t think it would work, but she also couldn’t think of anyone using this place but the military, and just possibly it would open to any current ID card.

“It wants a code number, too,” Yamini said. “ID maybe?”

“Try yours,” Ky said. Yamini keyed in a string of numbers, but the lock didn’t release. The tiny illuminated screen read ERROR. ONE OF THREE ALLOWED ATTEMPTS.

“We’re done,” Yamini said, shoulders slumping. He leaned against the wall and slid down until he was sitting on the ground.

“I’ll try,” Ennisay said, reaching for the keypad.

Ky put out her hand. “No. If it won’t take Yamini’s, it won’t take yours. We need to think it through. We can’t afford guesswork. It must be working from either a list of those locally authorized, or some chain of command.” The others looked at her blankly, exhausted, clearly beyond hope. She felt like falling on the ground herself, but that wouldn’t accomplish any more than would her own command code from the Space Defense Force.

What might? An officer’s code number? They had none… unless her original number from Spaceforce, back when she was a cadet, would work. Had they disabled that number? Were officers’ numbers any more useful than enlisteds’? No way to know. But she had nothing else to offer, and they had—if she interpreted the screen aright—three tries. She knew her own number; she’d had to recite it many times as a cadet. She entered it.

The screen flashed twice. ERROR. TWO OF THREE ALLOWED ATTEMPTS.

“It’s no use,” Corporal Lakhani said. “Coming up here was just wasted energy and now we don’t even have a canopy to break the wind.”

As if to emphasize the importance of that, the wind strengthened, whistling under the eaves of the building.

“We’ll break in some way,” Ky said, though she had no idea how, without tools. Her mind felt stiff, unwilling to think. She needed numbers, the right numbers, numbers from Spaceforce, from some command position in Spaceforce… like Aunt Grace. But she was Rector of Defense, not in Spaceforce. She had no number… or did she? Even as she felt the wind sucking warmth from her suit, even as she struggled not to shiver visibly, a vague memory of Aunt Grace and numbers came to her.

That message granting Ky command of Slotter Key’s privateers had strings of numbers—routing numbers, she’d assumed. She hadn’t understood any of them, or needed to; the message had been clear enough. But one string, immediately under the Rector’s seal—could that be a code identifying the Rector? Was it the same as on the other messages she’d received?

She couldn’t remember—but her implant should have recorded every detail. Yes. Under the Rector’s seal on every message from Grace had been a single numeric string. She retrieved messages from the other Slotter Key ships, from the admiral who had come to Nexus: different strings. If only she hadn’t wasted that second try on her cadet number—stupid idea. Because now she had a choice of the Rector’s number or an admiral’s. The admiral was active duty; he was high on the chain of command. But this installation—on a continent declared uninhabited, a terraforming failure—this installation, combined with the sabotage of shuttle and officers, suggested a secret group within Spaceforce. The door code might be limited to such a secret group. Was that admiral in it?

She was certain Aunt Grace was not. But if she hadn’t changed her authorization number from the previous Rector’s—and the previous Rector, she’d been told, had been involved in the treason that killed her family and brought down the government…

Her hand was shaking, partly with cold and partly with anxiety, but she entered the numerals carefully, one after another. 4 1 1 9—“Are you sure, Admiral?” asked Kurin. “I mean, it’s the last chance—”

“Not entirely,” Ky said. Her voice was steadier than her hand as she entered the last digits: 7 6 0 1. Nothing happened for a moment, then the display blanked and the locking mechanism clunked. Ky tugged; the door resisted, then scraped a path through the snow as it opened. She glanced at the others. Most were still standing, hunched against the cold; Yamini still sat beside the door. “Let’s get inside,” she said. “Sergeant, use your pin-light. Staff, help Corporal Yamini up.”

She turned on her own pin-light. She could just see a solid smooth floor as the others shuffled and staggered past her, disappearing into darkness that looked solid after the flickering auroral light outside. As the last one passed her, she turned to go in, pulling the door almost closed and tugging off a glove to put in the gap to keep the lock from connecting.

In the darting shafts of Kurin’s pin-light and her own, Ky saw two metal-framed double bunks, a table with four chairs, two desks each with its own chair, and a door to the right. On the desks were dimples that might have been made by equipment feet, and each one had an electrical outlet mounted flush to one end.

It wasn’t actually warmer in here, but they were out of the pervasive wind, and the interior walls were smooth, not corrugated. Presumably, in this climate, the walls would be insulated. If they could heat up the interior, even a little—but as the cold bit into her ungloved hand, she turned her pin-light on the inside of the door. They needed it closed all the way, and they needed not to be locked in.

No emergency bar for exit, but also no card slot or numerical keys for a code number. It did have a lever. She focused her pin-light on the edge of the door, where a bolt—no, three of them—would come out when the door was locked. She moved the lever up and down. The bolts slid out; the bolts slid in. There was a push button on the door as well; she tried that, and found that it kept the lever from moving up and pushing the lock-bolts out. She set the button to prevent locking, picked up her glove, and closed the door.

The others had moved around the room; some were now sitting on the bunks, on the chairs.

Sergeant Cosper’s pin-light was now off to her right. “There’s a little kitchen on one side and a toilet and shower on the other.” He sounded excited. “Maybe there’s food. Supplies.”

“And there must be power, with those outlets,” Ky said. She looked on the wall near the door and found a touchplate. Nothing happened when she touched it, but her pin-light aimed at the ceiling revealed lighting panels. “But first—running water? Food in the kitchen?”

“There’ll be some kind of powerplant,” Cosper said.

“Of course. Thank you. One of the other buildings, maybe.”

They were all tired, stumbling-tired, but unable to rest until they’d explored a little more. They found a generator in the smallest building, primed and ready to start. Yamini looked at Ky, brows lifted.

“Go ahead.”

He pulled the lever and the generator came on. So did several lights, immediately blinding them to the darker night around, but showing up other details they’d missed.

“Power’s standard,” Kurin said, looking at the readouts on the generator. “Just like any other power source. And this thing’s a Foster-Moray Model 3100-D. It can’t be more than a few years old; there’s one of these on my cousin’s farm.”

“So the failed terraformed continent’s inhabited,” Ky said. “Did you ever see anything about that on the news—in the last few years, maybe?”

“No. If we can find whoever it is, they can call for help, can’t they?”

“If they’re friendly,” Ky said.

“Why wouldn’t they be?”

She couldn’t think. She was too tired, too hungry right now. “We’ll go back to the first building, see if there’s anything in the kitchen, any heat source, a furnace or something—”

“Right.”

The kitchen was basic—a very small version of the big kitchens in the houses she had known. A stove across from the door, its top marked with the circles of heat sources. A counter running along the wall to the right, with a large deep sink halfway along it. No programmable drink dispenser. No automatic recycling cleaner unit. No speed oven. But the simple stove worked when Betange turned the knobs, heating the circles quickly.

They all crowded into the tiny kitchen as the room warmed. On the shelves they found rows of sealed containers, none of them labeled, and several sizes of cooking pot, as well as a stack of plates and another of bowls, and mugs hanging from hooks. But water did not flow from the kitchen faucet, nor was there water in the toilet.

“Someone drained the pipes for winter, so they’re probably not coming back anytime soon,” said Cosper. “I guess there’s a well; we’ll need to find the pump.”

“In the meantime, we’ll melt snow,” Ky said. “Take the biggest pot and fill it with snow.”

Drawers below the counter contained cooking utensils, openers for the containers, and—in one drawer—eight each of knives, forks, and spoons. What, Ky wondered, would they find in those containers? Her mouth watered at the possibilities: canned stew, canned fish, any of the foods carried on spaceships. But the first opened container turned out to be flat round crackers, just like the ones in the life raft kits. They looked delicious. The next container had more of the same; the next was full of bean paste. They all looked at her, eyes almost feral with hunger.

“We need to be careful,” she said, remembering her earlier experience with hunger. She didn’t want to be careful; she wanted to eat the whole thing herself, now. “We don’t know how long this must last, and if we eat too fast we’ll waste it by puking it back up.” They looked sullen, but nodded.

“When Sergeant Cosper comes back with snow, we’ll melt that, boil it, make a sort of soup with the paste and the crackers and the protein strip from our rations.”

Though it took longer than any of them wanted to wait, the snow finally melted and then warmed to a simmer. Betange put some of the water into a smaller pot, stirred in some bean paste, two handfuls of crackers, and the protein strips from everyone’s ration pack. Ky handed out mugs, and Betange served out the mixture precisely.

“Drink it slowly,” Ky warned. “We don’t want to waste any.” She took a spoon from the drawer and tasted hers. It wasn’t raw fish. It wasn’t raw shellfish. It was hot, thick, bland with the bean paste. She could have wolfed down the whole mug in one go. She made herself use the spoon, methodically, spoonful by spoonful.

“More,” said Cosper.

“Wait a little,” Ky said. “We’ve been hungry a long time; we’ve all lost weight.”

In an hour she let Betange heat more; everyone had another half mug. She herself felt more alert, though still hungry. She began automatically making lists: what they would need here for the next few days. If they couldn’t get the water working again they would need some kind of latrine and a better water source than snow. They needed heat in the building, not just the kitchen. They would need to move everyone up here—even with just this one building, and crowded as it would be, this was better than the canopies of the life rafts down by the shore. Someone would have to go back. Tomorrow. Two, not one—one might be injured, and anyone who lay out alone at night would die. Did they dare delay one day to check out the other buildings? No—the situation below was too critical. In another day or so, some of those would not be able to walk up the slope. She could send a canister or so of food down to them; that would help.

Once it started, her mind buzzed on, busy as usual. She authorized another half mug of the warm mix, this time diluted with hot water. As she sipped her own serving, she considered how those who stayed could ready this place for the others and who should go. Some had struggled to make it here; they couldn’t possibly make a return trip so soon. But Sergeant Cosper could, and so could Sergeant McLenard. “You four”—she pointed them out—“get some rest now; we’ll be hot-bunking later. Double up on the lower bunks; if you find bedding storage in the next five minutes, wonderful—otherwise, in your suits, under the survival blankets. Betange, we need a complete inventory of food supplies here. A team will take a couple of canisters down to the bay tomorrow, share that food, and bring everybody up the next day.”