Cold Welcome

^{CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR}

When the general wake-up went off, Ky had showered and dressed, and the ’fresher had finished a second round of cleaning and cycling. Her uniform looked clean but worn, the fabric scuffed where her PPU had rubbed on knees and elbows. The PPU itself showed only minor damage outside, and on the inside no longer smelled of too many days of continuous use. She put the new clothes she’d worn the day before into the ’fresher and pinned her insignia to the shoulders of the utility jumpsuit. If it made Jen Bentik feel happier, it was worth looking as if she thought the Slotter Key personnel would fail to recognize her.

Down the passage she heard the bustle of others waking up, hurrying to and from the showers, and readying their bays and rooms for inspection. She let Marek and Staff Sergeant Chok take that. Breakfast was hot cereal with a sweetener stirred in. Not that different from the gruel they’d been eating, but more of it, and it tasted better.

“Lunch will be soup,” Gurton told her. She had Betange with her this morning. “And if the bread isn’t out by then, it will be by supper.”

“Sounds great,” Ky said. “Good work.”

“We’ll get started on the inventory as soon as the bread’s rising; Master Sergeant’s sending us two more helpers.”

Ky took a working party up to the surface to clean the two huts and bring down anything they might use. When they were done, she stayed behind to lock up and shut down the generator. That allowed her privacy to call Rafe on the cranial ansible and explain where they were now.

“Can you call every day?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t tried yet. Let’s say at least every ten days, just in case I have to come back to the surface to make contact in privacy.” If she did, she’d have to turn on the generator and electricity; that made secrecy difficult.

By the time she got back down, the others had opened all the doors they could, including three on the left arm of the T-intersection before the door that closed the corridor off.

“That one won’t open to the same code,” Yamini said. “We could pry it open, but Master Sergeant Marek said not. He thinks it might lead to something dangerous.”

“We can leave it for now,” Ky said. “At least until we’ve explored what we can open.”

The first door on the left side opened into a small clinic. Ky had Lundin check it out. “Most of the meds are missing,” she said. “Anything that would be considered dangerous or easy to abuse; I imagine they take those along when they leave. But there’s plenty of stuff for headaches, stomachaches, wound care. Nutritional supplements, too. And an older-model medbox for serious injuries. If it’s all right with you, Admiral, I’d like to check everyone’s health status, get baseline weights, and so on.”

“Excellent.” Ky marked off “clinic” on the clipboard she now carried with her. “If you can open the clinic after lunch, I’ll pass the word.”

“Yes, sir,” Lundin said. “Thirteen thirty? I’ll have a sign-in sheet.”

The laundry was the second door on the left, easily big enough to deal with clothing, PPU suits, table and bed linens. Another concern off her list; Ky jotted down a reminder to set up a schedule for laundering linens as well as clothes.

Across from the clinic, the door opened on a gym with a row of different exercise machines, mats in a stack in one corner, and other exercise equipment stowed neatly on shelves and racks. Sergeant Cosper led Ky around, showing it off. “Can I set up PT sessions?” he asked. “We really do need to start work on conditioning.”

Ky nodded. “Yes, as soon as Tech Lundin has baseline weight and nutritional status for everyone. She’ll tell you about any health problems she finds that may require a change in program.”

By the evening meal, Ky knew they had enough supplies to last for most of a year. If the power stayed on, if the water flowed, they were safe, warm, and would lack nothing until someone could rescue them.

“It feels more like a classic hog trap than rescue,” Ky said to Jen as they ate.

“Hog trap?”

“Legend. You build a fence with an opening, put grain in it every day, and wild hogs start coming in to eat. After a while, when they’re used to standing in there to be fed at a certain time of day, you feed them and close the opening. Fatten and kill them. Mind you, I’ve never seen either a wild hog or a hog trap, but that’s the story. A warning not to be seduced by unexpected good fortune.”

“But who would want to trap us, and if they did, why not do it down by the shore?”

“I don’t know. But why is all this”—she gestured—“here? Power on, ready for us to use?” She remembered Rafe’s warning suddenly. “And if your skullphone pings, don’t use it. I’ll tell Marek to tell the others. If there’s someone who doesn’t want us here, no use advertising our location.”

In a few days, Ky could tell that her crew, as she thought of them, were recovering rapidly from the earlier ordeal. They moved more briskly, following the routines she and Marek had laid out, and seemed more alert. Clean, in clean clothes, their hair trimmed, they looked and acted more like ordinary personnel, not desperate survivors.

The only thing that bothered her was hard to define, a growing sense that there was tension in the group that never came to the surface where she could analyze it. Were they hiding something from her? And if so, why? The only thing she could think of was Jen’s persistent fussing about standards—something Slotter Key personnel might find irritating, but be too polite to tell Ky. But Jen didn’t seem to interact much with the others except Marek, and he didn’t seem bothered.

Perhaps there wasn’t anything going on. Perhaps it was just the whole situation, the change from constant peril and fear of death to safety and relative ease, from constant exposure to cold, wet, and wind to the sameness of their new environment. Irritations and tensions suppressed by imminent danger now being released. Perhaps creating a competition of some sort would help. She mentioned that to Marek; his response was noncommittal. He was perfectly polite, as always, but he seemed, now that they were in a safer place, more remote than he had been, more immersed in managing the day-to-day activities. But again, there was more to do.

She shrugged mentally, making notes in her own log. Hard to believe it was more than forty days since the shuttle crash. Jen developed the annoying habit of knocking on her door several times a night to ask a question or complain about something, whether it was her turn on watch or not, so she was never sure when she could safely use her internal ansible. She had told Rafe she would try to contact him every ten days—and that was now only a couple of days away. She needed to know more—what Grace knew and surmised, what Rafe himself was doing, what her command back at Greentoo was doing. She didn’t even know if Grace had contacted her flagship—if Pordre and Vanguard II were still in Slotter Key nearspace.