Rift (19 page)

From the corner his assailant retorted, “You’ll be sorry, all right.”

Now that his anger had subsided, Reeve’s muscles felt watery. He sank down onto the reeking straw covering the floor and hung his head for a moment, breathing heavily. He heard the woman’s breath as well, judging that he had at least one fine advantage in any claver fight: oxygen. However, he was beginning to learn that a fight in earnest seldom lasted long.

The craft pitched and rolled. He guessed it was under full sail, since he couldn’t hear the slapping of the oars. Numbly, he wondered if they were heading east or west.

“Are you OK?” Marie had drawn near.

He looked into her face. Her hair was matted with dirt, she had a welt on her cheek from a blow or a fall, and her skin was in tatters from sunburn. She looked like a claver. In two weeks they had regressed from the twenty-fifth century to the seventeenth. They were sick, ignorant, and now prisoners.

“Marie, I am still alive.” This was as much as he could say.

“Well, that’s something, under the circumstances.”

He snorted in response. Touching the bruise on her cheek, he asked: “What’s been going on down here?”

She shrugged. “They fed us once. Yesterday they let us collect our waste in a bucket and I took it up on deck to pitch it overboard. They inspected me and decided they don’t screw grandmothers. They hauled Loon off somewhere, but I don’t think they hurt her. What about you?”

“I must have been unconscious, or maybe I just slept. Their captain grilled me. His name is Kalid. The black one with his hair in a tail.”

She nodded. “The one with the boots. He would have killed us except for your claim to be a Stationer. He’s a mean son of a bitch.”

“What did you tell him?” Reeve asked.

“The truth. Except for … Bonhert’s plans. Told him Bonhert was trying to reterraform.”

“You told him the Station blew up?”

“Yes. Lies are hard to remember.”

“Damn.” He had her recount all she’d told Kalid. If they aligned their stories, maybe he could yet keep his fingers. Beyond that he hadn’t heart to think.

Loon had curled into a ball and appeared to be sleeping, indifferent to the fact that he’d just taken blows for her benefit. But maybe the girl had been roughed up and needed to rest. And, he had to remind himself, she wasn’t a
girl
. She was, as the other woman had said, of age. He wondered what had happened
between her and the first mate to make him think she was strange.

Many of her ways were bizarre, he admitted. She believed herself on a quest to find her tribe, people like her who ate the soil. Was she in fact deriving nutrients from the dirt in some extreme adaptation, or was she the victim of mental aberration? And what
did
the creature eat? He’d never seen her eat anything but dirt. And she seemed to sample the dirt like a child, exploring the world by putting everything in her mouth. Sometimes she would close her eyes as though savoring the taste. Maybe she was disturbed. Perhaps Lithia’s demise was being greeted by many forms of mental illness—dirt-eating probably having a certain logic to individuals who were starving.

His reverie was interrupted by the delivery of a meal, or what might be a meal if Reeve could manage to swallow it. It was a sodden lump of mashed grain, with a faint whiff of spoilage. It was delivered, without utensils, in a pot disturbingly similar to their waste pot. They passed it around, but Reeve could not bear to eat it, despite Marie’s admonishments. He fantasized about sucking on bones such as Kalid had—a reward for fixing the music box—and on the strength of that hope, he passed on the gruel.

“You got to get your strength back,” Spar said, taking a second handful of paste when the pot came round again. “For our escape, eh?”

Reeve almost said,
You’ve seen too many vids
, realizing just in time the absurdity of this comment. “Not hungry, Spar,” he said instead.

“Picky. You Station-folks, you’re real picky about what you’ll eat.”

“We miss our silver spoons and platters all right,” Reeve said.

Spar nodded gaily. “That’s right, silver spoons and platters. We got to ask the rats what they can do ’bout this here ugly pot!” He laughed silently, clapping
Reeve on the shoulder. As he chewed on the porridge, he handed the kettle on to the women across the room. Still chewing, he laughed aloud. “Silver spoons and platters!”

Reeve found himself smiling, despite his conviction that Spar was a few neurons short of a network. Looking down at Loon’s sleeping form, he asked, “What will Mam eat if they keep us locked up?”

The smile tumbled from Spar’s face. “I worry about that myself.”

The pounding of feet overhead and angry shouts signified a scuffle between crew. “Maybe they’ll kill each other,” Reeve muttered.

Marie remarked, “Did you notice they’re all strong as oxen and … young?”

Thinking back to the gang he’d fought on the beach, Reeve did remember thinking there was something odd about them—tattoos, he thought at the time, but now he realized that it was their youth. Beneath the grime and the scars, not one of them was likely over twenty-five—including Kalid.

After a moment Reeve asked, “How old are you, Spar?”

“Me? Well, I never kept track.” He paused as though trying to recall. “Young enough to give the rats a contest, I reckon.” He leaned back against the ship bulkhead and closed his eyes. “It’s bad luck to count your years, back where I come from.”

“Where do you come from?” Reeve thought one clave much like the next, but what he actually knew of the claves would have made a very slim book.

“I told you, Stillwater Clave.”

“I thought you and Loon”—here Spar’s near eye fluttered open, and Reeve corrected himself—“you and Mam came from the same clave.”

“Why’d you think that?” Spar shook his head, closing his eyes again. “No, Mam, she’s from Stoneroot—that’s a big clave, much bigger than Stillwater.” He
was quiet a long time, then added: “How we hook up, me and Mam, that your question?”

Now it was. Reeve had never wondered much about either of them. They were clavers; that told much. He never thought of them as his equals, never thought to share his breathers, or much of himself. He noticed a small pang of shame.

“Well sir,” Spar went on, “fact is, we got somethin’ in common, you and me, Reeve. We both got crunched by orthong.” His face tightened with the memory. “I used up two lives that day. The rest of my group … well, they must’ve used all of theirs. Up there in the Stoneroots, you get fogs so thick, it’s like the Lady’s plucking chickens. And they come on us all at once, twenty or thirty of ’em, and killed us with their shootin’ tubes, and some just gutted with their claws.”

“Shooting tubes?”

“Yeah, they got little tubes worked into the cuffs of their long coats, and they shoot somethin’ out of ’em. Those cuffs glow. By the time you see that, you a dead man. Me, though, I got a claw in my belly, and they left me for dead, which I wasn’t. After a day or two I wished I was, though. Then Mam, she come along and doctored my gut wound. And stayed by me. By and by the fever passed and when I could stand again, I knelt in front of her and offered her my sword.”

“But why?”

Spar sucked on his teeth. “Ain’t you heard of knights of armor? Thought you said you had literchure.”

Reeve smirked in the darkness. Always mistaking what clavers knew and what they didn’t know. “I heard of it,” he said.

“Well, then, you understand. She says she’s on her way to find the good soil. And I think, maybe she’s got somethin’ there. Maybe there’s hope for Terran folk, after all. Maybe folks like Mam are lucky enough to be part of somethin’ new. You heard of e-vo-lution? Well,
it’s like that. She’s the new Terran. Eats Lithia, so she’s got to be somethin’ new.”

Marie piped in, “Evolution doesn’t work that way, Mr. Spar. What are the odds that chance mutation would save us in this circumstance? If Loon is a beneficial mutation, she’s probably the only one. There is no grand scheme to produce higher and better. Humanity’s a fluke—a temporary one, it would seem.”

Spar didn’t bother looking at her, but continued talking into the gloom of the ship’s hold. “How come you so sure? All your big tech ever got you was patchin’ and fixin’ your big wheel, and sharin’ your beds in shifts. You don’t know much, old woman. You just think you do.”

Reeve wished Marie could just let Spar talk. What was the point of arguing? “So why didn’t you go back to your clave, Spar?”

“Had to follow Mam, is why—ain’t you been listening? Besides, why go back? I got only a few years left—though I
ain’t
countin’—and best way to spend it is to serve the Lady. I ain’t one of Mam’s people. I tried that soil-eatin’ and it’s no good for me, but I can make sure Mam gets where she’s goin’. When she finds her people, I can die happy. Die for somethin’, instead of for nothin’. So I offered her my sword.”

“And what did she say?”

“Why, she put that sharp edge right in her mouth, and bit down. When she gave it back, it had a little of her blood. So I figure we’re bound to each other, like as not.”

Marie had settled back to rest, murmuring, “Charming, Mr. Spar.”

But Reeve was strangely moved. “I never knew all that,” he said.

“No, you didn’t. Guess you never asked.”

2

Koichi snapped a kick high into the air, wearing his black-belt fighting face, calm and yet scary. He pivoted to say to Mitya, “You meet an orthong, you strike at the head. That’s the only place a blow will tell.” He threw the heel of his foot in the direction of a refrigeration hatch.

Mitya scraped at the burned pot and watched his galley boss practice fighting. He had been sadly mistaken in thinking that the Rift expedition three days ago had advanced him beyond these duties.

“You get one blow,” Koichi was saying, punching forward with a rigid hand. “The thongs are fast. One chance, before you’re sauce.”

Mitya nodded, unimpressed. All the crew learned to fight—part conditioning, part readiness for possible orthong hostilities. No one knew what threat the orthong represented.

He said to Koichi, “If the orthong wanted to fight, I think they’d just blast us from a distance.” Clearly they had the technology; their starship, apparently abandoned in orbit around Lithia’s moon, was testimony enough to that. “They could blow the whole dome up.”

Koichi smiled, shaking his head. “I doubt it. They like to kill up close and personal.” An explosive jab with his elbow made short work of another assailant.

“But they kept their distance when they destroyed Station.”

“Maybe so. And maybe I’ll never get a chance to break an orthong neck.” Koichi wiped his face with a galley towel. “What a shame,” he muttered, leaving Mitya with the rest of the cleanup.

Mitya scraped at the pot, thinking of the great white beasts and wondering how they’d
known
the Stationers had plans for reterraforming, and how they managed to fire a missile at Station without Station systems giving some warning. Deep in thought, Mitya took no
notice of the gradual quieting of the bustle and construction noise from the main room.

Koichi was long gone when Stepan ducked into the galley. “Here you are,” he said. “Let’s go. Captain’s called a meeting.” He disappeared again.

When Mitya emerged from the galley he saw that everyone had assembled, taking seats on the floor or standing toward the back.

In front of the crew, Captain Bonhert stood flanked by his chiefs of design, data systems, and geoengineering—Lieutenants Bertram Hess, Liam Roarke, and Val Cody. To the side stood several grim-faced crew, including Gudrun and Koichi. Mitya quickly found a spot and sat cross-legged. Bad news hung in the air like a fog.

“As some of you have heard, hard news came to us this morning,” the Captain began. His barrel chest and broad shoulders looked like they bore the weight of that message. “The retrieval shuttle bound for the Titan Mountains has crashed and, I am saddened to report, seven lost their lives. Survivors are Tielsen, Kingrey, and Shinn.”

Several among the audience cried out. Mitya stared at those around him. What retrieval shuttle?