Dulla waded through the stink of dead and floating marine animals, towing the coracle and staring about. “What a horror!” he exclaimed. “We are brothers now more than ever, Sharn-igon.”
“All of my brothers are dead.”
“What? Well, yes. But we must be as brothers, to take revenge! We must be allies against the Greasies and the Fats.”
Sharn-igon reared up, trapping him against the wall of a ruined shed. “I now need new allies, Ahmed Dulla,” he ground out, falling upon him. In the last moment Dulla saw what was to happen and tried to escape. But it was too late; his quickness was not enough when he dodged from the snatching claws only to take the full force of the murderous club of chitin that stove his head in.
When he was quite sure Dulla was dead, Sharn-igon staggered away, blundering through the dried shells that had once been friends, to rest creakily against the wall of a shop he had once known.
He took little satisfaction in the death of one more Poison Ghost. He did not even mourn any longer for the death of his city. A nearer pain touched him. His joints were aching, his body felt bloated, his carapace seemed to be sundering at the seams. It was not his time. But there was no doubt about it. Alone in the open tomb that had once been his home, with no one to care for him while he was helpless, he was beginning to molt.
EIGHTEEN
AT 0130 HOURS, Major Santangelo, along with the pilot-engineer who had brought in the third ship, reported in.
“Some good news, Margie. There’s a coal outcropping in the Bad Hills, two kilometers up. Plus we can burn wood and biomass, and Richy here says we can make a steam boiler with plates from one of the landing craft. If your turbine arrives, that means we can drive the generator up to full capacity, fifty kilowatts, without using up our fuel reserves.”
“When?”
Santangelo looked at the engineer. “Ten days? Call it two weeks.”
“Call it one week,” Margie snapped. “What about alcohol?”
“Well, Morrissey’s got a kind of a yeast — something like a yeast — anyway, he’s getting fermentation. Should be putting the first batch through the solar still tomorrow. You can probably smell it.”
“Saint, I can taste it. I need that alcohol to stretch out the airplane fuel!”
“I’ll goose him along,” Santangelo promised.
“Do it,” said Margie. When they were gone she picked up the handset and called the radio shack. “Any ETA yet?”
“No, ma’am. They’re still in orbit, figuring a minimum-energy descent.” She hung up. At least the resupply ship was in orbit around Jem, not light-years away. But that last little step was a killer. The captain had radioed that his maneuvering reserve was low and he was waiting for the most favorable approach. That might be days! Worse than that. If the Cape had launched them without plenty of reserve, that meant things were seriously wrong at the Cape. Even wronger than the coded tactrans from Earth had indicated, and that was wrong enough.
She looked at her watch: 0145. “Send in Dr. Arkashvili,” she called, and the medic came in on cue, bearing a cup of steaming black coffee.
“Medical supplies, Margie. But a little sleep would do you more good.”
Marge sniffed the aluminum cup rapturously and took a scalding sip. “I wish they’d land,” she said fretfully. Among the goodies on her shopping list were coffee beans, or seeds, or whatever it took to try to grow coffee for themselves. Otherwise the next couple of years, anyway, might be coffee-free. Of course, the Greasies probably had some growing already, to make that vile stuff they handed out in the little brass pots, but they weren’t likely to give any away. They weren’t giving anything away now, not even information over the radio; and the Peeps simply were not answering at all.
At least the camp was gratifyingly healthy, according to the medic’s report. The antiallergens were standing up well, and there was nothing else in the Jemman environment to make a human being sick. A few headaches, probably from the climate and from the switch to a twenty-four-hour day; some dentistry; an appendix that needed watching; a request for a vasectomy -
“No,” said Margie sharply. “Don’t do any vasectomies. Or laparoscopies, either.”
The doctor looked thoughtful. “You’re going to have some knocked-up personnel.”
“You’re supposed to be able to handle that, right? Anyway, give them the pill, diaphragms, condoms — anything reversible or temporary. I get along fine with an IUD, and I can always take it out if I want to have a baby.”
“Which you might?”
“Which all of us females may damn well have to, Cheech. That’s an order: everybody capable of breeding stays capable. How’s the baby bank?”
“Coming along fine. I’ve got twenty-eight ova in cryonic hold, and about a hundred sperm samples.”
“Good, Cheech, but not good enough. I want a hundred percent compliance with that. If anything happens to anybody, I don’t want his genes lost. Or hers. They don’t take up much space, do they? Then I want, let’s say, four samples from each, and — what are you grinning about?”
The medic said, “Well, it’s just that a couple of the ova turned out to be prefertilized. They’re fine. They’ll keep in the deep-freeze indefinitely, but whenever you want them reimplanted we won’t have to go to the bother of getting them started.”
“Hum.” Margie scratched thoughtfully. “I’m almost sorry you took the sample; we could start having kids any time now. Who were they? Come on, Cheech, none of this medical confidentiality; I’m your commanding officer.”
“Well, one was Ana Dimitrova.”
“No shit! Whose kid?”
“You can ask her if you want to. I didn’t.”
Marge shook her head wonderingly. “I would have guessed her about last,” she said. “And the other one? Now, wait a minute! It couldn’t be me! The IUD—”
“The IUD doesn’t keep an ovum from getting fertilized; it only prevents it taking root and developing.”
Margie sat back and stared at the doctor. “I’ll be damned,” she said.
Nguyen Dao Tree was ten minutes late for his 0200 appointment, and he arrived sleepy-eyed and irritable. “This twenty-four hour day of yours is not comfortable, Margie,” he complained.
“You’re not the one to bitch, Guy. I took the midnight-to-eight myself. If you’d spend your sleeping time sleeping instead of tomcatting around with every woman in the camp—”
“As to that, Marjorie,” he said, “I much preferred when you and I slept on the same schedule.”
“Yeah. Well. Maybe we’ll have to do something about that, Guy, but right now we’re late for inspection.” She swallowed the last of her coffee, now cold but still delicious, and led the way.
Complaints aside, the three-shift day was working well. On the plus side, the perimeter was well guarded, the hectarage under cultivation was growing by nearly two thousand square meters every day, the each-one-teach-one training schedule Santangelo had set up so that the skills of the community were shared among several persons (what if Chiche Arkashvili died? or their one and only surviving agronomist?) was on track. On the minus, aerial surveillance showed large numbers of Krinpit roaming around the woods, coffee was not the only food item to be running low, and the resupply ship still could not give a firm landing time.
Margie allowed one hour of each day for her inspection, and she used every minute of it. No white-glove chickenshit. The inspection was rough and dirty; if everybody was doing their job and the jobs were being done, that was it. Her Bastogne grandfather had not cared if the troops were shaved, only if they could fight. And Margie had learned the skills appropriate to a fortress under siege.
That was what they were. No one had attacked the perimeter, not even a wandering Krinpit. But they were isolated in a world of enemies. From spy satellites and balloonists, from the breaking of codes and from what little could be gleaned from their infrequent radio contacts, above all from the contents of the Indonesian’s pouch, Margie had formed a pretty good idea of what the Greasies were up to. Or had been up to a few weeks earlier. They had occupied the Peeps’ camp; they had requisitioned quantities and varieties of personnel and equipment that made her drool. Even her letter to Santa Claus (who might or might not be hanging in orbit, waiting to come down her chimney) had not been so greedy. They had subdued the local autochthons, apparently by killing off all the nearby Krinpit and shooting down any balloonist who came near. Their burrowers they seemed to have tamed. And they were using them for minerals exploration, because it seemed the Greasies had perched themselves on a Kuwait of oil and a Scranton of other fossil fuels. They had devised an enzyme, or possibly it was a hormone — the information had been unclear — which took Krinpit out of action as effectively as 2, 4-D had dried up the jungles of Vietnam, by causing them to molt. They had acquired something from their Creepies that let them make building materials out of dirt, as the burrowers themselves hardened the interior surfaces of their tunnels. They had — Christ, what had they not done! If only her father had listened to her and given her the support she demanded, how gladly and competently she could have done the same!