“Get some light on this, Oliver,” Cordelia said, and he nodded and switched on his landing spots. Those individuals who were looking up shaded their eyes against the sudden glare. Cordelia counted six: one was waving at them frantically, another was trying to stop him; one sat on the sand with his head buried in his knees; one sturdy figure just stood spread-legged, staring up at them dourly. The other two…milled, Cordelia feared, although how only two people could create a mill was a bit of a puzzle. It looked like two females and four males, or rather—two girls, four boys. “It’s a bunch of kids from Kayburg. Good grief, isn’t that Freddie Haines down there?” She was the one glowering upward. “Maybe they’re brats from the base. That would be your patch, Oliver.”
Oliver’s gaze, too, swept the scene below. “Isn’t that lanky one Lon ghem Navitt, the Cetagandan consul’s son? That makes this a diplomatic matter. Your patch, Cordelia.”
“Oh, thanks,” she muttered, but accepted the return-of-serve. “Can you land us on that sandbar?”
Oliver eyed the proposed landing site with disfavor. “Land, yes. Take off again—depends on how solid the footing proves.”
“Well, it’s not quicksand, or those kids would be up to their necks by now.”
He grunted agreement and gingerly set the flyer down, as close as he could get to the middle of the bar and still be far enough away from the group to not squash anybody underneath. Touchdown was not quite the solid thunk one would prefer, but the flyer did not tilt precipitously, so it sufficed. Any landing that you walk away from is a good one the saying went, Cordelia was reminded.
They slid out of their respective sides of the flyer and closed ranks in front of it, starting toward the group. The boy who had been waving ran forward eagerly, only to skid to a halt and take several steps back as he recognized them. “It’s the Vicereine!” he wailed, unflatteringly appalled.
The other girl grabbed Freddie Haines’s arm in equal dismay. “And Admiral Jole!” Freddie gulped, but stood her ground.
Cordelia mentally ratcheted through a choice of several voices, and decided upon dryly ironic, as opposed to Crisp Command or Concerned Maternal. “So, what’s all this, then?”
Freddie’s female friend more-or-less pushed her forward, or at least ducked behind her. A couple of the others also looked toward her, silently drafting her as spokes-kid. By which Cordelia guessed that Freddie possessed the highest-ranking parent among the military brats here. Or that she was the ringleader. Or both, of course.
Freddie swallowed and found her voice. “We only wanted to show Lon how the vampire balloons blow up!”
The Cetagandan boy, looking undecided whether to speak or not, compromised by nodding. The larval form of the ghem, Cordelia reflected, was just as unprepossessing as anybody else’s teenagers. At age fifteen, Lon had acquired nearly his full adult height, and his people ran to tall; the rest of his development still lagged behind. The general effect was of one of those primary-school science experiments where Bean Plant No. 3 was raised without enough light, growing long and thin and pale and barely able to stand upright.
The boy who was curled up with his face to his knees lifted it long enough to cry, in a voice of anguish, “My mom’s aircar!”
Oliver broke in firmly. “First of all, is everybody here, and is anybody injured?”
Freddie braced herself under his cool eye. “Everyone present and accounted for, sir. We all waded out to the river when the fire…started.” All by itself, this seemed to imply.
“Ant got a little scorched,” volunteered the female friend, pointing to the boy crouched on the sand. “We told him it was too late to save anything!”
The picture slotted in rapidly. It had been an expedition to the backcountry for one of Sergyar’s more exciting sights, at least if you were really, really bored: exploding radials. The biggest ones, party-balloon sized, clustered in the watercourses and came out in force on windless nights. The animals did not, of course, explode naturally.
Had this expedition been parentally authorized, or not? Cordelia’s eye took in the sidearm holstered at Freddie’s hip, a military-issue plasma arc, and decided Not. Anyway, six kids were never going to fit into the absence of a back seat in Oliver’s lightflyer.
Several of the youths were wearing wristcoms. “Has anyone called their parents yet?” Cordelia inquired. A telling silence fell. She sighed and raised her own wristcom to her lips.
Kayburg’s municipal guard commander was home eating dinner, Cordelia discovered, which reminded her that she hadn’t eaten hers yet, which made her quite cheerily ruthless about interrupting his. While Oliver hauled the burned boy around to the boot of his lightflyer for a visit with his first-aid kit, she explained the situation bluntly and succinctly, and extracted a promise of the immediate dispatch of a guard flyer big enough to carry the miscreants back to Kayburg for subsequent sorting and returning-to-senders, or at least to families. She added a roster of names and parental names, extracted against some resistance from their catch. A couple of the youths looked as if they might have held out against fast-penta, but with the application of a sufficiently cold vicereinal eyeball, their friends ratted them out soon enough. Siblings Anna and Ant-short-for-Antoine were base brats; the other two boys were Kayburg civilian offspring, and Lon ghem Navitt was of course in a class by himself, though sharing a classroom at the Kareenburg middle school with the rest of them, hence their association.
Oliver returned with the singed Ant, the boy’s red face now glistening with a thick smear of pain-killing antibiotic gel, his blistered hands likewise anointed and wrapped in gauze. Oliver released him back into the concerned arms of his young comrades.
“Nothing too serious, but I’ll bet it hurts like hell,” Oliver murmured to Cordelia. “I gave him a shot of synergine to help calm him down. He was having a bit of a meltdown about the aircar, understandably.”
“That should hold for now,” she murmured back. “The municipal guard is sending a lift-van to collect them. I’d expect them within the half-hour.”
Oliver nodded in relief, and looked over the distraught little company once more. He grimaced and motioned Freddie aside.
Freddie Haines looked rather like her father, perhaps not entirely fortunately, though she was healthily robust and plump with thick dark hair. A trifle spotty, an affliction she would doubtless outgrow in due course. The few times Cordelia had glimpsed her heretofore, she’d seemed confident and not unduly shy for her age, but her current situation was enough to tax anyone’s backbone. She kept hers straight, but Cordelia sensed the strain. Oliver, staring down at her, took a moment to compose his opening line. Freddie seemed to take the stretching silence for an ominous sign, and swallowed in anticipation.
“Is that your da’s plasma arc?” he asked, quite mildly under the circumstances Cordelia thought, though Freddie wilted.
“Yes, sir,” she managed.
“Did he give you permission to take it off base?”
“He said no one should go out into the backcountry unarmed, on account of the hexapeds,” she returned.
Oliver allowed this ambiguous statement to hang in the air, palpably unaccepted. Freddie squirmed under that sardonic gaze, opened her mouth, closed it, and finally broke. “No, sir.”
“I see.”