Downtime (14 page)

“Bugs?”
Singh said curiously. “Is that why you had us disinfect the shuttle?”

“Shit,”
Marmion said, and when Singh still looked puzzled, Marmion shook his head. “I’ll
explain next time. Right now it’s getting too close to dawn. You need to be
going, and I’ve got a sack of fresh-frozen berries in the zephyr you can take
back with you. A big sack. I’ll need some help.”

The
two men turned to the zephyr; the sack they brought out was almost as tall as
Singh, who was a little man. D’Omaha watched them as they carried it to Singh’s
raider.

“That
will be a nice change from galley fare,” D’Omaha commented.

Calla
merely nodded. “How soon will you be ready to brief me on the new probability
models?” she asked.

“There
are five,” D’Omaha said. He was still thinking of Stairnon spinning nymph
thread into cloth as good as gold, cloth that would shimmer like danae scales.
He was supposed to be thinking about the probability of war. “Five will take me
most of the day, maybe longer.”

“See
that you call me the moment you’re finished,” she said, and with that she
stepped on the toehold in the fuselage of the zephyr, and climbed in. Marmion
was on his way back from the raider, and D’Omaha could hear the first whine of
the raider jets. D’Omaha climbed into the zephyr knowing Marmion was only a few
seconds behind.

Jason deliberately left his personal comm and nomenclator
behind this morning. Legion regulations required that he carry a comm strapped
to his wrist so that he could be contacted at any time. The regulations didn’t
take into account that personal comms were completely unnecessary indoors where
the network of jelly bean attendants was so efficient that anyone could be
located anywhere, thus making wrist-strapped comms obsolete. And, of course,
because the requirement to wear wrist-strapped comms existed, comms hadn’t been
built into the stellerator vests for outdoor work. And legion regulations didn’t
take into account that radio communication would be primitive on Mutare. The
planet had practically no ionosphere to bounce back radio waves, limiting
communication to line-of-sight, except for now while
Belden Traveler
was in synchronous orbit and willing to amplify and
rebroadcast for them. The ranger station on Mutare was a Class V operation,
which did not include a communication satellite in its supply list.

Such
travesties of coordination existed everywhere in the legions, and a younger
Jason used to be enraged by them. It took him years of painfully acquired
knowledge to realize that he would never single-handedly be able to restructure
all the legion’s regulations so that they were practical and fitting in every
instance of application to legion operations, years to understand that silver
moons and the like were awarded to people with enough imagination to understand
both the necessity and limitations of such regulations yet who could get the
job done anyhow. It took even more years to subdue his iconoclastic nature and
become a reasoning, understanding, and sometimes intuitive member of the very
establishment he used to attack so frequently.

On
Mutare, Jason had relaxed the requirement for wearing wrist-strapped comms
indoors, for the damn things itched when the sweat and dirt accumulated
outdoors dried up and the clean and almost omnipresent jelly bean network did
exactly the same job, better, since it could tell the caller where you were
and, in some cases, what you were doing. He had requested stellerators with
built-in comms, and when the request had come back marked
not available
he had added development costs to his next budget
request. The budget had been approved, so he would get them in another year. He
had been disturbed that his request for a passive communication satellite had
been back-ordered, for he didn’t believe they ran out of them back in the Hub.
He suspected the back-order reply had been given simply because his justification
couldn’t be refuted yet a synchronous satellite would point to the location of
Calla’s secret installation. He was certain the syncomsat would continue to
show up as back-ordered in future supply-ship deliveries. They had a little
tower on the mountain west of the complex, and the antenna could be improved.

But
even as he strived for better communications on Mutare, there existed a
dichotomy within himself. Jason resented the communication devices that
demanded his attention no matter what he was doing, sleeping, eating, or trying
to teach Old Blue-eyes to add two plus two. It seemed to him that there should
be some time to call his own, even if it were only a few minutes in the early
morning, long before anyone was likely to need him. So he had left his comm
back in his room.

The
nomenclator was almost as bad, providing information about people he sometimes
didn’t want to meet and giving him statistics he didn’t care to hear. In the
Hub, they were so ubiquitous that it was polite to greet everyone
only
by name, and possible only if you
wore a nomenclator. The statistical information came into fashion to prevent
social faux pas in the ever popular baths where it was not easy to distinguish high-ranking
persons from common folk. But there were no baths on Mutare, and until Calla’s
group came, no strangers either. He had worn his nomenclator disdainfully but
dutifully on occasions such as last night when he knew it was expected of him.
But even after all these years he felt a bit odd when it whispered intimate
details, such as what kind of food the person liked or if there had been a
recent tragedy in his life. There was also that segment of the population that
carried the excesses of nomenclator data to an extreme by advertising their
sexual proclivities, a practice Jason abhorred even though he would engage in
almost any kind of sex himself. Instead of getting accustomed to communication
devices, he had become more sensitized to their disruption in his life. As ranger-
governor of Mutare, he was duty bound to be available at all times, but some
mornings he took just a little while to be alone, no comm, no nomenclator. He
went to the terrace garden where no one else bothered to go this early, not
even Calla.

Except
today. Calla was sitting on a rock feeding something to Old Blue-eyes and
Tonto, the two danae crouched on their grasshopper legs with Tonto bobbing each
time she offered up something, whether or not it was for him. Old Blue-eyes
spotted Jason and half-unfurled his wings, as he was wont to do whenever he saw
Jason. The ranger-governor had come to believe the gesture was his personal
greeting, for Blue-eyes did it for no one else. Both Calla and Tonto turned,
the danae’s primary attention still on whatever it was in Calla’s hand, which
now dropped back to her pack. She snapped it shut and got up, waving to Jason
and walking to him. Tonto stayed behind, worrying the pack, but Blue-eyes
hopped to Calla’s shoulder with a graceful leap, letting her convey him along.
The danae, Jason knew, was not much heavier than her pack, but apparently
enough heavier for her to notice. She put up one hand to steady the danae’s
legs, the other on her hip to steady her leg. He could see her grimacing.

“Good
morning. I’ve waited for you,” she said.

“Good
morning,” he said to her. He lifted up his hand to the danae, and Blue-eyes
leaned forward to touch it. The avian’s little hand was cool, his blue eyes
unblinking. He looked back at Calla. “Just taking a little air this morning, or
is it business?”

“Business,
I’m afraid. I tried to call you on the comm, but you were gone. When you didn’t
answer the radio call, I checked to see if you’d taken a zephyr. When I found
you hadn’t, I figured you were here.”

“What
business do we have that you couldn’t leave a comm message for?”

“The
tunnel. You started to tell me the other day why it wasn’t finished, but we
were interrupted.” She still was grimacing under the danae’s weight.

“I
can’t finish it,” he said.

“But
you must!” Her eyes widened with alarm.

He
shrugged. “The water table thrusts up along the fault. If we cut through, we’ll
flood Round House and Red Rocks both.”

For
a moment she stared at him, her astonishment giving way to icy anger.

“You
call yourself surveyors? Why didn’t you hollow out the area behind Round House
for us? Why did you permit this catastrophe?”

“There
isn’t enough rock left behind Round House, and I’d hardly call the lack of a
tunnel between the two a catastrophe. It means a one-kilometer walk overland.
We have plenty of stellerators, and some people can use the exercise.”

“It’s
unacceptable. We must have the tunnel. All the support equipment is at Round
House. We could be cut off by . . . a blizzard.”

“A
week at most. You have enough storage for a week.” Calla straightened under the
danae and put her hands on hip bones that were plainly visible beneath khaki
trousers. Her chest, already large from stellerator vest and pendulous breasts
beneath, seemed to puff out. Her chin thrust out at him. Anyone else assuming
such posture with a giant pink and red bird on her shoulder would have looked
ridiculous. Calla did not. “It is unacceptable,” she said quietly. “The plans
call for an underground tunnel between Round House and Red Rocks with a track
for slave-waiters right down the middle. We will settle for nothing less.”

“Yes,
ma’am,” he said, cursing again this ridiculous situation that called for him to
be ranger-governor for all Mutare, yet gave him inhabitants that outranked him.

“Now
tell me how,” she said, softening ever so little, and bending under her burden
of danae once again.

“We’ll
go in through the top, drill a well, line it with plasteel, and cap it
underneath. Then we’ll drill through to the well. “He was thinking, too, that
work on the antenna tower would have to be delayed. One hundred rangers didn’t
go far when functioning as support and construction crew for a special project
in addition to their own duties.

“There’ll
be a skylight in the tunnel.”

Jason
nodded. “I guess we can cap that, too. Might even be a good idea, since there’ll
be a lake around it. Wind might whip the waves up over the edge of the well on
bad days.”

“Yes,
cap it,” Calla said thoughtfully, “right at the waterline so that it won’t be
noticed.”

So,
he thought, she wasn’t all that concerned about blizzards. It was siege she was
worried about. They would be safe underground; the entrances could be shielded
long enough to withstand almost any kind of assault. But what would happen to
the danae? Their beautiful Amber Forest was sure to catch the attention of any
bored siege forces. He reached out to Blue-eyes, and the danae jumped to his
shoulder.

“Thanks,”
Calla said. “Now tell me where the lake will be.”

“You’re
standing in it. I guess we’ll call it Garden Lake.” It was a verdant garden,
and the rangers had even added a few tended rows planted with seed from the
Hub. But mostly it was native plants that either grew here naturally or that
Jason or his people had brought from more distant places. The big loss was that
it was one of the few places close by that attracted the danae, who preferred
greenery to rock-filled and dry mesas.

“The
plants along the shore will thrive with more water,” Calla said. “They may continue
to come.”

He
hadn’t thought of that, and what she said was true. A few lush trees might keep
the danae coming. He felt a little better and smiled. “Had breakfast yet?”

“No,
and I’m starving.” She went back to get her pack from Tonto, who’d just
succeeded in opening it. He was eating dried fruit, not yet interested in the
equipment that had come loose with it nor the fact that there were three more
danae stopped only wingspans away by Calla’s return. Calla put it all back in
the pack, leaving the fruit for the danae.

***

No breakfast. At least, not a real breakfast. He and Calla
satisfied their hunger with rations from the compartment under the instrument
panel of the zephyr in which they were flying. Jason was at the controls, Calla
beside him staring at the flatscan images in her hand.

“The
wing must be gone,” she said finally. “No more than a stub left by the muscle.”

“The
ranger said it flew away, and look at that last exposure. That could be a
wingtip just outside the target area.”

“Maybe,”
she agreed, “but if it could fly well enough to get away, then why do we need
to go check? You said they heal rapidly.”

“That’s
true,” Jason said. “And if I can verify that he merely wounded the danae, that
ranger won’t have this one in his tally. But more likely, with that much wing
gone, it didn’t get far, and the ranger probably clubbed it to death so that he
wouldn’t have to show me a clean kill.”

“But,
what difference does it make? You won’t let him take more than three crystals
off the planet.”

“Say
he did kill this danae. It was his third and last one he’s permitted to take. I
know for a fact that he did get one good crystal, but his second kill was too
young. The crystal was so tiny it took him a half day of hacking his victim up
to find it. If he did kill this one, and if it had a good crystal, and if he
can convince me that he didn’t kill it, he still can make one more kill, maybe
replace that microscopic crystal with a big one.”

“Or
maybe this was another young one with a small crystal,” Calla said, “which just
makes him all the more eager to try for another. But how can you stop him,
Jason? These rangers are often in your outposts; you can’t be sure of what they’re
up to.”

“I
try to send them out in twos and threes, rotating the companions so that maybe
they keep each other honest. But mostly it’s what we’re doing now that keeps it
under control. I corroborate every miss by personally going out and making sure
the danae they shot is still alive and likely to survive.”