Balance of Terror (9 page)

Neither Moon nor Srin objected. The response appeared to satisfy Gauder because he grunted. “Right then, we need to load supplies. Dump yer gear in yer vehicle’s cabin, then start lifting. We’ll need fifty per cent more than I’d figured because there are two of yer, not one, so let’s get crackin’.”

Moon knew she was a hard worker, but that afternoon in Gauder’s shed was the kind of exercise she had never before contemplated…or wanted to again. If there was a simple or a difficult way to do things, it appeared that Gauder preferred the difficult way. Fighting gravity, they rolled heavy barrels into the rear holds of each tank, tipping them upright once they were in position. Almost every step of the way, they had to mark off their inventory against one or other of several checklists before moving on. They stowed ropes, large hooks and pulleys, harnesses, boxes, trunks and enough anachronistic equipment that Moon thought the tank should be driven into a museum rather than on a planet’s surface.

By the time the work was done to Gauder’s satisfaction, the sun was edging towards the horizon. Srin had taken to catching frequent rests in the hold, but he was far past his endurance limit. Moon tried to make up for it but caught Gauder’s occasional glances towards them.

“That’ll do,” the merchant finally declared. “Yer should get cleaned up, we’ll have a meal then get goin’.”

Moon lifted a finger. “Before we get ready for a meal, I’d like to know where the nearest shops are.”

Gauder frowned at her. “What did yer say? ‘Shops’, you say?”

“I always travel with a medical kit,” she replied, her voice even. “It needs re-supplying.”

“
I
carry a med-kit, and it’s fully equipped.”

“
My
med-kit is a little more specific,” Moon insisted.

Gauder grinned at her. “Is it now? Is this for yer friend’s ‘illness’?”

“For his recuperation, yes.”

“Well then, I s’pose you’d better go get whatever ‘medication’ you need.” He gave her directions then his gaze softened. “Yer not a bad worker. Still soft, but ye’ll harden up. Better than yer friend nappin’ in the hold. If yer want to cut him loose before we get goin’….”

“He’s still very ill,” Moon replied with a snap in her voice, “and recuperating. He’ll be
fine
in a couple of weeks.” She suppressed the childish gesture of crossing her fingers behind her back to mitigate the lie.

Regardless, Gauder didn’t look impressed. “Whatever yer say. Jes’ be back before we leave, or I’ll leave yer behind. Clear?”

“As always,” she answered through gritted teeth.

He laughed and turned his back on her.

The two giant gates that Moon had noticed when they first approached Gauder’s compound was not the only way to leave. She had wondered how their host was going to manoeuvre a pair of ungainly vehicles out of Colken South but shouldn’t have worried. With a flash of his teeth, Gauder whipped out a small control unit, pointed it towards the opposite fence and pressed a button. The entire border slowly sank, the metal disappearing into the ground. And beyond it….

The
Velvet Storm’s
shuttle didn’t have sightseeing on its mind when the crew dropped Moon and Srin at the Toltuk docking pad. All the pair had seen of Marentim was a patch of fast-approaching urban centres, joined by ribbons of rails and commerce. They hadn’t known anything else about the planet and, frankly, hadn’t cared.

But, as the fence slowly disappeared into the ground, Moon gasped and took an involuntary step forward. A little right of centre, Marentim’s sun was slowly disappearing behind the horizon, throwing red streaks into a huge bowl of darkening sky, and turning the undersides of thin streaks of cloud into pokers of fire. But the wonder of it was, there appeared to be nothing between her and the planet’s primary star, merely an expanse of ground so flat and even that it could have been the surface of a reflection pond, broken up in the distance by the dark jagged silhouettes of mountains. It was primal, savage, and indescribably beautiful.

She hadn’t noticed Gauder moving up to her until she heard his characteristic growl close to her ear.

“Magnificent, ain’t it?” he murmured. “Marentim in the raw. Disrespect her and she’ll chew yer up and spit yer out like so much
clawfoot
fodder. Once she gets hold of yer heart, though, she’ll never let go.” He was silent for a few moments then slapped his hand against a thigh, making her jump. “C’mon, let’s get out o’ here.”

Chapter Seven

Srin felt so useless. He thought back to the young man he knew, a youth who would have resented depending on a woman as fully as he was now depending on Moon. In all honesty, twenty years older, his masculine pride was still pricking.

He sat next to Moon in the second, older, tank – driving behind and to one side of Gauder to avoid being caught in the lead vehicle’s dust trails – and felt as if his body was still aching from that first day’s labour, shifting boxes and barrels into the vehicles’ holds without the help of any lifters or anti-grav units. He was ashamed of the weakness that caused him to half-collapse after an hour, a burning mortification that was magnified by Moon’s understanding solicitude. The primal ape inside him wanted to stand straight, beat his chest and bellow that he was capable of doing
twice
the work Gauder had set for them, but it was a lie, as everyone knew.

Looking out at the horizon, he tried computing the distance to reach an arbitrary spot, based on their current rate of speed. No, too easy. How about adding a second variable of a crashing meteorite? That made the equations a little more interesting, but no more difficult. Srin thought about adding a third variable, then a fourth, before realising that the medication he was on, contrary to expectations, hadn’t significantly impaired his thinking. If only he could talk Moon into adding another drug to the mix – a stimulant or even a cognitive enhancer, to keep him awake for longer – he might even begin to feel normal.

“Tell me about the
Differential
,” he said.

Moon, who had admirably mastered how to drive the giant metal beast, glanced over at him. “The
Differential
?”

“There’s always an element of, wistfulness in your voice when you speak about it. The problem is, I can’t remember any of it. Was it a sad time?”

Moon laughed. “Sad. Happy. Both.” She looked at him again. “You used to say that you get glimpses of the past, as if a vid is haphazardly playing behind a thick veil, but you really can’t remember that ship?”

“I get fragments,” he conceded, “but there’s not context around those fragments. I can remember an interior of a ship, but I don’t know whether it was the
Differential
or another vessel I might have been on years before that.”

Moon was looking through the windscreen, its curved corners caked with thick dust. She nodded. “That’s a good point.” She took a breath. “Okay, the
Differential
. What would you like to know?”

“There’s a special tone you use whenever you mention the captain.” Srin suppressed the demon of jealousy that began pounding on his head, threatening to give him a headache. If Moon had loved the
Differential
’s captain, he reasoned, then that’s who she would have been with, not driving halfway across a desert world with a
savant
who had serious health issues. But the primitive caveman in him refused to be mollified.

“A special tone with Drue Jeen?” Moon repeated, breaking into his thoughts. “Well, only because we owe him our freedom. He could’ve turned us in back on Slater’s End, you know. We had hidden out in a small miners’ town just as a sweep team landed. Drue himself led that team and he discovered us crouching behind some equipment in a shed.

“You know, I often think about that moment. What was going through his head? Did he pretend he didn’t see us because Consul Moises had humiliated him on his own ship? Was he trying to somehow follow in the footsteps of his rebel grandmother who had been sentenced to Bliss? I never thought I’d say this about a Republic Space Fleet captain, but I always felt that there was a core of decency in Drue. Maybe, at that moment when he had to decide whether to help or arrest us, he discovered that too.”

“Mmmmm. And have you always been this philosophical?”

“Only since I met you,” she said with a grin.

“Me?”

“You turned my entire world upside down, Srin Flerovs.”

That was only fair, Srin thought, because Moon had done the same to him.

The tank ate up the kilometres as Srin slowly pried more recollections from the woman beside him. She told him about how surprised – “No, that’s the wrong word. You
staggered
me with your abilities” – she had been when they first met. Her confusion when he failed to recognise her the following day, and her horror when his handler, Hen Savic, explained how they kept Srin’s abilities under control through the use of amnesiac drugs. She spoke of how it ripped her apart when, like clockwork, he would ask her out to dinner every two days, and how she fell deeper and deeper in love with him as the weeks progressed.

She laughed when she recounted a frantic session of love-making and Delfin whisky in her quarters, sobered as she recalled how Srin had saved her from a soldier’s assault and accusations that she was trying to kill everybody aboard the ship with her research. She smiled again, and sighed several times, when relating the story of how they had planned their escape from the
Differential
, and how close they came to not being able to pull it off at all.

“
That
time, we had Moises herself to thank for us getting down to Slater’s End.”

“The Consul you told me about?
That
Moises? But I thought you didn’t like her.”

“You’re right, I didn’t. I
don’t
. That puffed-up ego-driven bitch made our lives hell for the entire time she was on the ship. She made Drue’s life hell too. But she was so addicted to her power, so ready to show it off at the slightest opportunity, that she overrode Drue’s concerns about the both of us shuttling down to the planet together. Left to proper protocols, only one of us would have made it to the surface. And once they discovered the scramble-bombs I set through all the data and library units, it would have been obvious that we had been planning some major sabotage.

“But then, just at the right moment, at the very doorway of the transport shuttle, Moises swaggered up and made a snide comment about letting us spend some quality time together. Faced with her authority, Drue had to let us go.”

Srin listened carefully and tried to commit every word to memory. They might be nothing but anecdotes but, to him, they were the threads of his life, weaving together whatever disjointed memories he held in his head.

Differential
– experiments – Slater’s End – Lunar Fifteen

Srin dutifully ran the sequence over and over in his head until he thought he got it right.

“Do yer know much about Marentim?”

Moon had been looking up at the night sky and at a Milky Way that appeared so close she had to stifle the urge to reach out and touch it. At Gauder’s words, she shifted her gaze, staring at him over the top of a pyramid of licking flames.

“Not much,” she admitted.

Everything had seemed strange to her that first week. She had got used to the bumpy ride of the tanks, only to be confronted by the stark harshness of the landscape. Had come to grips with that, only to deal with Gauder disappearing every few days to hunt for meat. Actually
hunt
! Was finally wrapping her head around that alien concept, only to cope with outdoor fires, camp ovens, and tendrils of smoke wafting up to the sky as if in sacrifice.

She felt as if she was marooned in a land lost to primitive rituals and customs and, conversely, wasn’t sure that she was so eager to escape it. Life had devolved to a kind of simplicity that didn’t demand much, only that she live within the moment. A day could have passed, or a week. In the open spaces of Marentim, the kind of schedules and deadlines that Moon had once been driven by ceased to exist and, if she was honest, shewasn’t missing them as much as she thought she would.