“Wait a minute,” the younger woman said. “You said she wasn’t sick…what about the others? Nobody’s seen or heard from them since they were rescued. Mally told me—” She stopped and glanced at the taller man.
“Mally’s her cousin,” the gray-haired woman said. “Married to one of them—”
“McLenard. Andrew Hugh McLenard. He’s a sergeant. D’you know if he’s alive?”
“Yes,” Rafe said. “At least, he was when we got him out of the transport.”
“You’ve seen him? Does Mally know yet? I have to call—”
The older woman stepped back and caught her hand. “No, Saneel. Not until we know more. Might not be safe.”
“I don’t know if your cousin knows yet,” Rafe said. “I was with the admiral; she had the whole plan but I didn’t, so I couldn’t be made to tell it. I do know she intended everyone to know, as soon as they were all safe.”
“And they aren’t sick?”
“No. Did you hear about the base on Miksland?”
“Base? There was some kind of mine or something they got into, right?”
“Military base,” Rafe said, saving the other part for later, if ever. “Could I have another mug please? My throat’s dry.”
“Be a wonder if you don’t catch your death,” the older woman said. She poured from a pot on the stove and handed him the mug. “Hungry?”
“I could eat—” He stopped himself from saying a cow and finished with “just about anything.” He had been smelling the food since he came to, and his stomach wanted it immediately.
She laughed. “That’s good because this stew has got just about anything in it. If you’re warm enough you ought to change into real clothes; eatin’ in a blanket isn’t handy.” She left the room and returned with a knitted pullover that looked like nothing Rafe had ever seen, a pair of rough trousers, and a pair of thick gray socks.
“That’s my—” the boy started, and got another flick to the head.
“Strangers in need,” the tall man said. “He sure can’t wear mine or Harley’s.”
“Thank you,” Rafe said.
“Come, Saneel,” the woman said. “And you, too, lad, while he changes.”
The men showed no signs of moving. Rafe stood up, let the blanket fall, stepped into the trousers, and yanked them up; they were only a little big. The shirt had only two buttons; he put that on, and then the pullover, then sat down and put the socks on.
“M’wife, she knitted that sweater,” the taller man said. “Wool from our sheep. Socks, too.”
“It’s beautiful,” Rafe said, taking a closer look at the pattern of light and dark wool. “And I’m already warmer. My feet, too.”
The taller man nodded, then glanced at the shorter one. He tipped his mug up, emptying it. “Well…the dogs didn’t eat you, and you have a story I’ve never heard, so I guess you can stay the night until your clothes dry and then we’ll figure what to do.”
“I need to find Ky—Admiral Vatta—and find out what’s happened. I’m supposed to help—”
The shorter man tipped his head to one side. “What you should want most is not to be found by whoever was chasing you.”
Rafe nodded. His head still hurt.
“And you got run over by at least one critter and hit your head on that rock. So you don’t need to be running around in the dark getting worse hurt, and if we go down the market road on a night like this, people will talk. Some of the people who will listen may be the ones you ran from.”
“You don’t have any way to call anyone?”
“Not until they put in more towers, and those so-called reps we got don’t want to spend money on us way out here. An’ yeah, there’s the ISC ansible, but that costs too much per call.”
“You still haven’t given us a name,” the taller man said just as the two women and the boy came back into the kitchen. “You’ve heard some of ours. Let’s hear yours.”
“Rafe,” he said. “Rafe Dunbarger, of Nexus Two.”
“Anselmo.” The tall man pointed to himself, then to the shorter man. “Enver.” He pointed at the boy. “Gill. Enver’s oldest.”
The boy gaped at Rafe, ignoring the introductions. “You’re—you run ISC!”
“Not anymore,” Rafe said. “My sister Penny’s the head of it now.”
The tall man—Anselmo—had scowled at the boy, and turned back to Rafe, all the friendliness gone again. “So you’re one of those rich city boys, never did a lick of real work—bring in more money a day sittin’ at a desk than everyone in this sector together makes in a year.”
“Not quite,” Rafe said, keeping his own tone friendly. “I was thrown out on my own—family wouldn’t have me. Never worked on a farm, true, but had to make my way.”
“What’d you do to get shunned?”
“Killed two men who wanted to kill me and my sister, one night when my parents weren’t home.” He didn’t want to tell the whole story again. His head hurt worse now.
“They kicked you out for that? How old were you?”
“Eleven. First they sent me for therapy, then the therapist said I needed a special school for violent offenders. A prison, essentially.”
“At eleven?” The older woman set a large bowl of some steamed grain on the table, then another of stew. The younger woman went around the table, passing out plates, and put one in front of Rafe. The tall man shook his head. “If a son of mine managed that at eleven, I’d have been proud of him. Saved your sis’s life, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Rafe’s mouth was dry again, his throat tight. “It’s—it’s different there. None of their friends’ sons would do something like that.”
“Huh. Better get some of that food down you. You still don’t look too good.”
He waited until everyone was seated, despite the invitation, and the older woman had handed him a spoon. “Grooly first, then the stew,” she said. “That’s how we do it here.” Then she piled a spoonful of the grooly—whatever it was—on her plate, and used the same spoon for the stew, before passing it to the tall man. Rafe did the same, passing the spoon to the younger woman, who now sat on his left.
Memory and headache had cut off his appetite, so he took small bites until his stomach agreed he could keep going. No one talked. The grooly tasted bland; the stew was spicy, tingling in his mouth. He put his utensils down before he finished. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s delicious; it’s just my head—” He felt nausea knot his stomach; his vision wavered.
The tall man looked across at him and pushed back from the table. “You’re green. Luisa, help me.”
Rafe locked his teeth, hoping not to spew at the table. Every movement hurt, and the first sour-salty taste came into his mouth. He felt them grab his arms, lift him up; someone pulled the chair away and they were half dragging him down the kitchen to a door. He tried to walk but his legs weren’t cooperating. They made it to the next room before he couldn’t help spewing. Someone wiped his mouth after.
“It’s his head,” the woman’s voice said. “I shouldn’t have let him eat so much.”
“We can’t call the doc; he doesn’t want to be found.”
“Sorry,” Rafe said. It came out weak. He could scarcely stand, even with support.
“We’ll bed him down in Chan’s room. With a bucket. Think he’s done?”
Rafe felt himself falling, then caught. Muttered curses, grunts of effort; he passed out then, and woke hours later to darkness and silence. His head didn’t hurt until he turned it, when his neck seized, then half the muscles in his back. He lay still, teeth gritted, until the cramps let go. He didn’t feel nauseated anymore, but he certainly wasn’t completely well. When the neck spasm eased, his head was pounding, though less than before.
DAY 11
The next he knew, dim daylight, cold and gray, came through a gap in the curtains onto his face. He could hear noises in the distance, and the ticking of more sleet on the window. He was inside, dry and warm. A good start to any day, he told h
imself. His implant informed him of time, date, “no location,” and “no contact” when he accessed his skullphone. The room was square, the walls painted cream. The curtains at the window were white with a pattern of red and yellow flowers at the top. A table and chair were in the left corner across from him, and a chest with a small square mirror on top in the right corner.
A few exploratory moves in the bed made it clear he was stiff, sore, but able to move without immediate cramping. He still had on the clothes he’d been given the night before. When he tried sitting up, his head swam for a few moments, and the ache intensified, but he was sitting, socked feet on a rug made of some animal skin on the floor.
A knock came at the door to his right, and it opened before he could answer, his voice being stuck somewhere in his throat.
“Good,” the gray-haired woman said. “You were too sick last night to notice, most like. My name’s Luisa. How’s your head?”
“It still aches, but less,” Rafe said. “I’m sorry I’ve been so much trouble.”
“We’ve done nothing yet we wouldn’t do for anyone,” she said. “There’s breakfast in the kitchen, or I could bring you a tray—but I don’t know what’s best for you to eat.”
“Little,” Rafe said. “Some bread, maybe? Toast? And I should get all the way up.”
She offered a hand, and he took it, unfolding painfully in sections.
“What kind of livestock ran over me?”
“Cattlelope, properly,” she said, letting go his hand as he steadied. She moved out into the passage; he followed. “We mostly call them cattle. Pretty standard large herbivore for meat and milk production issued to colonies. Slotter Key has old cattle now—bovines, not the hybrids—but we’ve stuck to the cattlelopes because they do well here.”
He’d eaten cattlelope steaks and roasts all his life but had no idea what a cattlelope looked like. He followed her down the hall to the kitchen. In daylight, the same gray daylight, he could see details that had escaped him the night before. The stone floor had a border, a ring of darker stones, about half a meter from the walls. Around the big table were children smaller than the boy the night before: five of them. Luisa had no implant, and neither had the men, he remembered. Nor the boy, nor any of the children. Were these Miznarii? His own implant was obvious…
Luisa smiled at him. “You’re right, we don’t have implants. But we’re not anti-humods. I got a prosthetic eye when I lost one to a stone chip.”
The food on the table smelled wonderful. Luisa set a plate in front of him and put a piece of toast on it. “Try this first. If it doesn’t make you queasy there’s eggs and sausage.”
It didn’t make him queasy. Neither did the eggs and sausage. The thunderous knocks on the door did.
“Go back to bed,” Luisa said. “You’re my cousin Jules. You’re sleeping off a drunk. And you children, go to the schoolroom and get to work on your books.”
Rafe couldn’t really hurry to the room, but he made it there before Luisa opened the outside door, fell into the bed, pulled the covers over, and was asleep again before he knew it. When he woke, hours later, sun had broken through the clouds. He stayed under the covers until he heard Luisa call the children.
“Yes, come on,” she said, looking down the hall. More quietly, as he came closer. “Some fellow in a military-looking uniform, said he was looking for dangerous fugitives. Described a couple of bald men. I said my cousin had a full head of black hair, a lot of bruises from stumbling and falling in the pasture in the dark, and wasn’t at all dangerous when sleeping off too much liquor. He looked into the room, and there was the back of your head with black hair, and you were snoring like anything, then he left. You know any bald men?”
“Bald men and bald women,” Rafe said. “They kept the survivors from Miksland shaved bald and drugged, so they’d look sick and damaged. We were getting them out.” He hoped by now they were all safe in Port Major. The last interception should have been the night before. He needed to get in touch with them.
Luisa showed him the rest of the rambling, one-story house, gave him a heavy jacket, and took him outside to see what had run over him. A line of them were watching over a stone wall, ears wide, noses sniffing. They had long pointed horns curving up from their heads, and a ruff of longer hair down the neck, broad bodies covered with a thick hair coat, white lower legs and bellies, tails with a tuft of longer hair on the end. And the attitude of animals that expected feed to appear shortly. Behind them, up the slope of the hill, stones broke through the meager grass. A few of their kind grazed higher up, but turned as Luisa shut the house door and started downhill.
“Those are cattlelope. Daresay you’ve eaten some in your life.”
“They’re…pretty,” Rafe said. Their coats were splotched and striped with dark brown and white; no two looked quite alike.
“They’re extremely useful animals,” she said. Then grinned. “And pretty, yes. Ours are considered one of the best herds in this area.”
Dogs barked in the distance; the cattlelope all lifted their heads to stare toward the barking.
“Back inside,” Luisa said. “That’s Tag and Porro; they’ve found a stranger.”
Inside felt much warmer. Luisa motioned Rafe back toward the room he now knew as his. The bed was a tumble of sheets and blanket; he straightened it out, went to the desk in the corner, and sat in front of it, head in his hands. It did still hurt some, though not too badly.
The stranger turned out to have been from the town, hoping to pick up news. Luisa sent him away, after questioning him. “I didn’t entirely trust him,” she said. “He’s local enough, knew the right names, but I heard that family’s had some bad eggs in their basket.” She stuck her hands in her pockets and looked out the window for a moment. “He did have news you’d better know. They found your ID and money in a jacket on the rail-yard fence.”
“I thought that might be trouble. I didn’t realize I’d forgotten to change pockets until I was partway up the hill,” he said.
“Did you kill those men in the truck?” Her gaze pinned him in place.
“One of them, yes.”
She nodded. “Higgens said there was a news message about it, and about the survivors being mistreated, and some men stopped it, smashed the transmitter station. But enough got out people are riled up.”
If they’d released the news about the rescue, then everyone must be back in Port Major. “Anything about Ky—Admiral Vatta?”
Her expression softened. “No, not that Higgens heard. And we’ll get you to where you can call, but we’d best think how to do it, now they’re looking for you in particular.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DAY 11
Ky made it back to Port Major and the Joint Services base shortly before dawn, exhausted from two nights with hardly any sleep and a lot of hard work. She would rather have been home in bed, but General Molosay insisted that all involved in the rescue of survivors stay on base for the time being. Ky wasn’t happy about being held at the base—for security reasons, they said, because of undefined unrest in the city itself. The Vatta residence had been attacked, she heard; Stella had had only minor injuries, but serious damage had been done to the house. She wasn’t happy about the condition of two of the survivors. Both Hazarika and Ennisay had been overmedicated, she was told, and might have residual damage when and if they woke up. Yamini appeared to be doing well now, but was still confined to bed. All had signs of abusive treatment, and all were now in the hospital. Some already had visitors; the families were streaming in, alerted by General Molosay that their lost had been found. She’d seen Betange’s siblings, escorted by a shy much older uncle, fall on him hugging and crying.
But Rafe had not reappeared, and her attempts to call his skullphone or the cranial ansible had no response. She wanted a shower, a change of clothes, a quiet meal sitting down somewhere, but most of all she wanted to know what had happened to Rafe. Teague had arrived in Port Major shortly after midnight with the next-
to-last group, driving a vehicle some relative of Rodney’s had lent him, with the three survivors crammed into too small a backseat for hours, but aside from that both the survivors and he were fine. He knew no more about Rafe than she did.
“Uh—Admiral—?” A very young officer, looking embarrassed, tapped the doorframe.
“Yes, Lieutenant.” Ky had explained that she wasn’t an admiral anymore, but military courtesy prevailed.
“The general would like you to come to the situation room.”
“Thank you,” Ky said, pushing herself upright. She wished she’d managed to get clean and into her own clothes; she felt ridiculous in the stripes and ruffles and fringed shawl. Her hair, once released from the neat braid she usually wore, had reacted to freedom and the weather by forming a shapeless mass that she had to keep pushing back from her face. She followed the lieutenant down a passage.
“—and we still don’t know how many units are affected, sir.” A commander in Spaceforce blue looked out of the viewscreen; General Molosay waved Ky over to a seat near him.
“Have you found the lost evidence from Miksland yet?”
“No, sir. They could have destroyed it—”
“Or not. They will want to have something from there to substantiate their claim that a dangerous disease or toxin existed. Keep looking.”
“Yes, sir.”
The screen blanked. Molosay turned to Ky. “How much of Greyhaus’s log did you read?”
“Not enough,” Ky said. “I found the part that seemed to pertain directly to our situation and read that, but we were busy and I didn’t read the rest. I expected someone here would, when I turned it in.”
“Pity. Here’s the situation as we know it now. Kvannis left the Academy after midnight last night, checked out through the gate, told the guard he was going to his family home in the city, which isn’t unusual. He didn’t show up there, and he never came back to the Academy. When he didn’t come down to breakfast this morning, residence staff checked on him and found his quarters empty, with signs that someone—presumably Kvannis—had taken clothes, his portable comp, and all his IDs. He left no explanation with anyone at the Academy that we’ve been able to find. The safes in his quarters and his office have been drilled out and they’re empty. Since he had access to official secrets, including personnel records and strategic planning papers affecting force organization, we have to assume he has them now, and that unauthorized persons have access to them.”