Dawn For A Distant Earth, page 21
His feet carried him in a tight circle in front of the console. Two, three circuits, and he reversed direction automatically, feet moving him back around the circle, though he could hear the whispers from outside the closed door.
Twenty minutes ago, he had been reviewing a recon pattern for the southeast basin when a junior tech had tiptoed in and placed the flimsy on his console, bowing and scraping the whole three meters from door to console and the whole three meters back from console to door.
The major stopped his circling and took a single deep breath, then another, clenching and unclenching his fists, tightening the muscles in his forearms, loosening them. The inside of his left forearm brushed his waistband and the hardness behind it.
Without volition, the throwing knife was in his left hand.
Thunk!
Heavy and impenetrable as the plastic of the door was, it could not resist the knife buried there to half its depth.
He walked to the door, slowly eased out the heavy blade and replaced it in the waist sheath.
He opened the door deliberately, not looking back at the flimsy on the console and stepped outside his small office into the general Operations area.
Two of the techs at the end of the nearest row of consoles failed to look away quickly enough, but the major ignored them as he marched toward the duty console.
Frylar, Technician First Class, said nothing, waiting.
"Tell Vierio ... be back later. Sick leave ... if necessary. Need air. Be outside."
He stepped away, conscious of the faint click of his boots in the envelope of silence that seemed to surround him as he hurried toward the southwest lock doors.
Mechanically, his hands touched the correct studs, and he passed through the inner door, and, in turn, through the outer portal, and into the rain.
Rain sleeted from the low clouds, not cold enough to fall in ice droplets, instantaneously soaking the thin gray indoor tunic.
The man ignored the chill, and the cold passed from his awareness as if it had never been. His long strides carried him toward the practice yard.
He held throwing knives in each hand, advancing on the rain-swept targets as if they were the enemy.
Thunk!
Thunk!
He recovered his Weapons and stepped back, three steps, four, five, six, turning, hefting them as if to drive them through the plastic coated foam of the target heads.
Thunk!
Thunk!
The thin wail of the wind inched toward a shriek as the storm center neared the Imperial bunkers crouched under their cover of stone and heavy clay.
Thunk!
Thunk! . •
The rain sheets became waterfalls pouring from gray oceans overhead.
Thunk!
Thunk!
The wind shrieked like a corvette with its screens wrenched apart, and the waterfalls became solid walls of water from which the major emerged, still hefting the knives that seemed to cut through the storm itself, ignoring the calf-high torrents that pulled at him.
Thunk!
Thunk!
Chapter XLV
"You've been avoiding me."
The I.S.S. lieutenant had green hawk-eyes and tight curled black hair. Her eyes were level with the major who stood by the battered console.
Outside of the panoramic pictures of the western peaks spread on the wall behind the console, the small office was bare of decoration. The flat top surface of the console and the working surface to the right of the screen were also bare, except for the small pile of hard copy reports in the left-hand comer, and for the thin and tattered publication lying next to the console screen.
The lieutenant's eyes darted to the publication and drank in the title-Program Key Locks-Patterns and Uses-before returning her eyes to the hawk-yellow stare of the major.
"Have I?"
"Yes," she answered.
Each waited a moment, then another.
At last, the major's lips quirked slightly. "Guess I have." He shrugged.
"I said I'd be back. I know you didn't promise anything. But you're cold. Like the ice rain. And you're not."
Inclining his head, he returned her statement with a puzzled frown.
"Cold like the ice rain, but I'm not?"
"You know what I mean. Under your ice . . ." She broke off her own statement with a half-shrug, half-headshake.
"Suppose so." He cleared his throat, looked down at the smooth flooring, then back at her. "Didn't mean to hurt you. Or to string you along. Hoped you'd understand."
He looked away from the directness in her eyes.
"Techs say you lost the woman you loved. That you won't let yourself care again. That you throw your knives like hate."
She glanced over his shoulder at the halfholo view on the far right, the needle spire of Centerpeak.
He did not look up.
"Lost ... one way of putting it. Lost both." His head came up abruptly, and his eyes locked hers, both unwavering. He said nothing.
This time she looked away, her eyes seeking the thin volume on the console, noting the irregular print of the title, the yellowed tinge to the pages. Program Key Locks had all the hallmarks of an underground datapick manual. She wondered where the major, the devilkid dedicated to the Service and to the reclamation of Old Earth, had discovered it, and why.
Realizing that she was letting her thoughts avoid dwelling on his isolation, she forced herself to raise her eyes back to his.
"You make it hard to talk," she said.
"True. Hard for all of us devilkids. Harder for me, I suspect. Maybe not."
He took a half-step away from the console toward her.
"Kiedra ... not the one for you."
She did not move, standing perfectly still as if encased in solid ice rain.
He took another step, lifting each of her hands into his. Gently.
"Not now. Not ever."
He could see the glistening sheen building in her eyes, refused to let himself be moved, refused to let the ice that surrounded him crack, and stood, hands holding hers.
"Not ever?" She tilted her head fractionally to the side and back, moistened her lips.
Gerswin resisted the urge to brush her lips with his, instead leaned forward and let them brush her forehead. He stepped back, but did not release her hands.
Kiedra blinked twice, though no tears fell from the comers of her eyes, and swallowed.
"Still not easy," her voice husked, almost dry.
The major shook his head gently, squinting once as if the soft light in the small office were more like the glare above the clouds or on the peaks represented behind him on the wall.
"No. It's not."
"Can you tell me why?"
"Not now. When I can, you won't need me to."
"Should I understand?"
Gerswin shrugged.
"Depends on what you remember. Depends on what you value, and on what I value. Right now, we have to value different things."
He released her hands. His own tingled from the contact with the strong coolness of her fingers.
"Greg ..."
She did not finish the statement she began, but looked down, to the console, to the floor, then back to the yellow hardness of piercing hawk-eyes.
Finally, she began again. "Can't be Greg, can it? Has to be Captain. Or Major. Or Commander. You have too much to do, too much to let yourself go right now."
He did not answer, but met her eyes. Again, she looked away.
"So strong . . . and so hurt ..." She lifted her head, her chin, and gave a little shake. "So few will look past the hawk."
His lips quirked once more.
"Hawk? I think not."
"Hawk," she affirmed. "A hawk with a heart too big for hunting, and a purpose too vast not to."
He shrugged. "Hawk or not, poetic words or not, some have stood by you . . . and will when I cannot. Will be for you alone, when I cannot."
"There is that."
"Then do not disregard it."
"I do as I please."
"Do as you please, Kiedra. Do as you please."
"Do I sound that awful?"
Gerswin had to grin at the mock-plaintive note in her, question.
"Not quite."
The lieutenant studied his grin and the forced twinkle in his eyes. After a moment, she returned his expression with a smile.
"Should I laugh or cry?"
"Should I?"
"Both!"
The lieutenant followed her exclamation by throwing both arms around the major, kissed him hard upon the lips, and dropped away as quickly as she had struck.
"That's for what you've missed, and for treating me fairly. Not sure I wanted to be treated fairly, and I reserve the right to reopen the question."
With that, she turned.
The major did not move as he watched her cross the last few meters and leave the office, an office that felt barer than before.
He swallowed, then took a deep breath. His chest felt strangely tight, and he inhaled deeply again, shaking his shoulders and trying to relax. His eyes felt hot, not quite burning, but he blinked back the feeling, finally looking down at Program Key Locks.
"Hope Lerwin appreciates her . . ."
His words sounded empty in the office, echoed coldly against the flat walls.
He sat and stared for a long time at the console screen.
Long after the echoes had died, long after the lieutenant had vanished, long after, the index finger of his left hand touched the console keyboard.
He sighed once more, then resumed the work he had started what seemed ages ago, before an early spring had come and gone in the space of a few afternoon moments.
The red-headed lieutenant waved;
"Come on. Captain."
Gerswin smiled. The devilkids, as they trickled back to Old Earth, uniformly referred to him as "Captain," for all that he wore the single gold triangle of an I.S.S. major on his tunic collars or his flight suits.
The lieutenant waved again from the open hatchway of the dozer's armored cockpit. "Come on."
Gerswin broke into a quickstep for the remaining fifty meters across the tarmac.
"Getting slower there. Captain."
Gerswin shook his head to dispute the fact, but grinned and said nothing as he swung into the cockpit and closed the hatch behind him.
Lieutenant Glynnis MacCorson closed her own hatch and strapped in.
"Damned cargo run," she grumped.
"You still like it."
"You're'right. Since they didn't want any more flitter pilots, had to find something else to run. Didn't matter if it was big and ugly."
She turned to the controls before her, controls more like a spacecraft than a flitter.
"Everyone's aboard. Lieutenant." The tech peered into the cockpit through the hatchway from the small passenger/cargo/ living section of the arcdozer.
"Stet, Nylan. Commencing power-up."
Gerswin watched, unspeaking, as she ran through the checklist which centered on the fusactor powering the behemoth that could have swallowed an I.S.S. corvette for breakfast and converted it into constituent elements.
"GroundOps, Dragon Two, departing for town. Estimate time en route one point one."
"Understand time en route one point one. Geared for departure."
"Stet, Dragon Two on the run."
Gerswin shook his head. Speed the dozers weren't made for. The new town, as yet unnamed by the transplanted sham-bletowners, the few retired teens, the married Service techs, and the handful of immigrants, was less than ten kays away, down a wide and hard-packed causeway with no turns. What would have taken a minute or three by flitter was a major undertaking by dozer. But then, dozers weren't normally used for transport, except on their way to and from major refits at the base.
Before too long, Gerswin reflected, it might be worth the expense to set up a forward maintenance facility, particularly as the dozer operations moved eastward.
Dragon Two was carrying the back-up fusactor for the town. While it could have been airiifted in sections by flitter, assembly was easier at the base, and the arcdozer's slow and even speed made the transport practical.
Once the power source was deposited on its foundation, me structure and distribution system would be completed around it.
Glynnis smiled happily as she checked the monitors, and as the dozer tracs rumbled across the hard packed clay, compacting it still further.
Gerswin shifted his weight in the seat normally used by the senior tech and let his eyes slide over the blanked out bank of controls that would normally monitor intake, processing, and treatment of the tons of dirt, clay, and organic matter that a dozer processed hour by hour, day after day.
A movement caught his eye, and he glanced up.
At the top of a low embankment ahead of the dozer and to the right of the causeway stood a group of shambletowners, old shambletowners dressed in tattered coyote leathers. They stood, blank-faced, and watched as the dozer rumbled toward them.
Their eyes were slits, their faces hard in the bright light of a morning that was only partly cloudy, with a few traces of a cold blue sky above the mottled white and gray clouds.
"Not exactly friendly," observed Glynnis.
"No. We've changed a few things."
"And they don't care for the changes. Can't say I have much sympathy. Did so well under the old way, didn't we?"
Gerswin saw the leathers of the sling and repressed the urge to jump as the missile hurled toward the dozer.
Crack!
The stone slapped against the cockpit armaglass, leaving only a streak of dust.
A figure on the end of the line of shambletowners was reloading his sling with another smooth stone.
Fynian, Gerswin thought, although the man was looking down and not directly at the major.
Crack!
Glynnis shook her head.
"Really are out after us."
"Devilkids and Impies one and the same to them."
"We know different. Captain."
Gerswin smiled faintly. "For them, it's all the same." He looked back over his right shoulder at the shambletowners, still standing in a line on the embankment. "If we succeed, Glynnis, won't be the same for us, either."
"Take longer than I've got, Captain."
Gerswin nodded slowly and settled back to watch the lieutenant as the causeway rolled slowly by. He drank in the tall plains grasses that were beginning to fill in the spots where nothing had grown, and glanced from checkerboard field to checkerboard field where the organic sponge grains grew and would be harvested again and again until the soil was ready for grasses or food crops for people or livestock-not that there would be much livestock for a long time to come if he and the ecologists had much to say about it.
How long before the land was ready? He shrugged. Mahmood's prediction had been ten years after the first sponge grains and outcropping. So far, for the few lands that had completed the process, Mahmood had been right.
He missed the idealistic ecologist, but who could blame him for retiring to take the ecology chair at the college on Medina?
Time passed people by, slowly, ponderously, just as the dozer had passed the shambletowners, but with the same kind of unstoppable force.
"You know your records still stand, Captain?"
Glynnis' words broke his reverie.
"Records?"
"The ones you set for the Academy Ironman. Lerwin came within five minutes. No one else has come within twenty, and they never will."
"Someday, someone will. Time passes."
The cockpit lit as the clouds let the sun break through, and Gerswin absorbed the warmth momentarily before tapping the vent to bring in more cool air from outside. Too much light and heat still bothered him.
"They say ice water runs in your veins,"
"Anti-ice, maybe."
Gerswin knew he was being distant, but he hoped she would understand.
Whether Glynnis did or not, the lieutenant said nothing else as the dozer rumbled over the highest point on the trip and began the equally gentle descent toward the town.
Gerswin relaxed as much as he could, and tried to enjoy the slow pace of the trip, away from the base, from the constant flow of communications that cluttered the Ops screens, all of which had to be monitored and evaluated before Vierio had a chance to see it, much less act on it. With Vierio off with the base commander for the three days ahead, Gerswin could leave Lerwin to watch the screens and the day-to-day activities.
Anything really serious and Lerwin could reach him in seconds.
Gerswin watched as the town wall appeared ahead on the right. Before he knew it the dozer was slowing, gradually, heavily, but certainly.
Chapter XLVI
"GroundOps, Dragon Two at destination. Beginning cargo drop this time."
"Stet. Understand cargo drop. Report when drop complete and proceeding to station."
"Stet. Will report when proceeding to station."
Gerswin eased himself out of the operator's seat. He stood in the space behind the two front seats as Glynnis and Nylen began to maneuver the dozer around to place the materials drop section, where the fusactor sat, as close as possible to the reinforced ferroplast slab.
"Twenty reverse on the right rear."
"Twenty right rear."
"Bring up the left a touch."
"Stet."
"Stress load on the ramp is point nine five and steady."
"Lieutenant, we've got it on the downslope and clear of the joints. Hold the tracs."
"Locked and holding ..."
"... three more on the left ..."
"... right comer sticking . . . liquid slick it . . ."
"... clearing top section ..."
"... load factor on the ramp at point eight three and dropping ..."
". . . clear of the ramp, and in position."
"Understand clear of the ramp."
"That's affirmative. Lieutenant. You're clear to move forward."
Gerswin watched as Glynnis wiped her forehead with the back of her jumpsuit sleeve.
"On the roll."
Hands flicking across the console, Glynnis eased the dozer away from the uncompleted section of town wall and back down the incline onto the causeway, bringing the dozer to a stop.
