And they also provide just enough power to produce a teeny bit of ice, McKeon thought, wistfully recalling the chill freshness of Honors water bottle. That coolness was already little more than a memory, and an ignoble part of him wanted to "borrow" her bottle for just one more sip, but he suppressed it sternly. That was her water, and so were the nutrients in it, just as the extra ration pack in the rucksack was specifically earmarked for her. Besides, he thought with a hidden smile, Fritz would hurt me if I took anything remotely caloric away from herand well he should!
The temptation to smile faded, and he shook his head. The enhanced metabolism that went with Honors genetically engineered heavy-grav muscles had turned her scarecrow-gaunt during her imprisonment. Unlike anyone else in her small command, she was actually gaining weight on a diet of e-rats, which spoke volumes for how poorly her SS gaolers had treated her. But she was still at least ten kilos underweight, and however much she might dislike the notion that her people were "pampering" her or "taking care of her," Alistair McKeon intended to go right on doing exactly that until Fritz Montoya pronounced her fully recovered.
"Have you had any thoughts on our next move?" he asked her, and she raised her right eyebrow at him. It was the first time hed come right out and asked, and she hid a grin as she realized he must be beginning to consider her truly on the mend if he was willing to push her on command decisions.
"A few," she acknowledged. She finished grooming Nimitz and slipped the comb into her hip pocket, then reached down and removed the water bottle from her rucksack. McKeon suppressed an automatic urge to take it away and open it for her. He might have two hands to her one, but he also had a pretty shrewd notion how she would react if he tried it, and so he sat and watched, instead.
She clamped the bottle between her knees to unscrew the top, then set its cap on the log beside her and held it for Nimitz. The cat pushed himself upright, lurching without the use of his crippled limb, and reached for the bottle with both true-hands. He took a long, deep drink of the iced water, then sighed in bliss and leaned back against Honor, rubbing his head against her breastbone as she replaced the cap and tucked the bottle away once more.
She spent a few seconds stroking the angle of his jaw, and his purr was much livelier than it had been. She suspected they were getting towards the bottom of even his ability to shed, and she shared the taste of his pleasure as he realized how much cooler he felt. She chuckled and gave his jaw another rub, then looked back up at McKeon.
"I think Im beginning to get the rough pieces into place up here," she told him, tapping her temple with her index finger. "Were going to have to move carefully, though. And its going to take some time."
"Moving carefully is no problem," McKeon replied. "Time, though. That could be a bit of a complication, depending on how much of it well need."
"I think well be all right," Honor said thoughtfully. "The real bottleneck is food, of course."
"Of course," McKeon agreed. Like most small craft aboard a warship, the shuttles had been supplied for use as life boats in an emergency. Normally, that meant a week or so worth of food for a reasonable load of survivors, but the escapees rattled around inside their two stolen shuttles like a handful of peas. What would have carried a "reasonable" number of survivors for a week would feed all of them for months, and his own initial estimate of how long their food would last had been overly pessimistic by a factor of at least forty percent. Yet there was still a limit to how long they could last without some alternate source of food, and he and Honor both felt it creeping up upon them.
"Has Fritz turned up anything at all?" he asked after a moment.
"Im afraid not." Honor sighed. "Hes run everything we could get our hands on through the analyzer, and unless the stuff you and Warner brought back is radically different from anything else hes checked, theres not much hope there. Our digestive systems can isolate most of the inorganics we need from the local plant life, and most of it wont kill us out of hand if we eat it, but thats about it. We dont even have the right enzymes to break down the local equivalent of cellulose, and I dont know about you, but I dont particularly want a big lump of undigestible plant fiber moving through my gizzards. At any rate, were certainly not going to be able to stretch our e-rats by browsing on the local flora or fauna."
"I wish I could say I was surprised," McKeon observed, then snorted a chuckle. "But what the hell, Skipper! If it was going to be easy, they wouldnt have needed us to deal with it, now would they?"
"True. Too true," Honor agreed. She wrapped her arm around Nimitz, hugging him for several moments, then looked back at McKeon.
"At the same time, I think its time we were about it," she told him quietly. "I know you and Fritz are still watching over me like a pair of anxious hens, but I really am recovered enough to get started." He opened his mouth, as if to object, then closed it again, and she reached across to pat him on the knee with her remaining hand. "Dont worry so much, Alistair. Nimitz and I are tough."
"I know you are," he muttered, "its just that its so damned un" He cut himself off and twitched a shrug. "I guess I should have figured out by now that the universe really is unfair, but sometimes I get awful tired of watching it do its level damned best to chew you up and spit you back out. So humor me and take it easy, okay?"
"Okay." Her soprano was just the tiniest bit husky, and she patted his knee again. But then she sat back and drew a deep breath. "On the other hand, what I have in mind for starters shouldnt take too much out of me or anyone else."
"Ah?" McKeon cocked his head at her, and she nodded.
"I want Harkness, Scotty, and Russ to break out the satellite com gear and figure out a way to sneak into the Peep com system."
"Sneak in," McKeon repeated carefully.
"For now, all I want to do is find a way to listen to their traffic and get a feel for their procedures. Eventually, we may need to see if we cant hack our way into Camp Charons computers, as well."
"Thats a tall order with the gear weve got here," McKeon warned. "The hacking part, I mean. And unless theyre total idiots, theres no way their central systems would accept reprogramming from a remote location."
"I know. Im not thinking of programming, only of stealing more data from them. And if things work the way Id like them to, we may never have to do even that. But I want the capability in place if it turns out that we need it. And if Harkness can hack the central computers of a StateSec battlecruiser with only a minicomp, I figure hes got to have a pretty fair shot at infiltrating a simple com net. Especially since the bad guys know no one else on the entire planet has any electronic capability at all."
"A point," McKeon agreed. "Definitely a point. All right, Skipper. Ill go collect the three of them and tell them to get started assembling their gear." He chuckled and climbed to his feet with a grin. "When they figure out theyll get to start spending time in the air-conditioned luxury of one of the shuttles, I probably wont even have to kick any butt to get them started, either!"
Chapter Nine
"You know," Lieutenant Russell Sanko observed, "if these people would just talk to each other every so often, we might get something accomplished here."
"Im sure that if they only knew how much theyre inconveniencing you theyd run right out and start gabbing away," Jasper Mayhew replied with a grin. "In the meantime, weve only been listening for two weeks, and" He shrugged, tipped his comfortable chair well back under the air return and luxuriated in the cool, dry air that spilled down over him.