"How much?"
Buneka Rourke blinked and then grinned companionably. 'From here to your place, it's on the PTBs."
"The PTBs?" Yana wasn't sure she had heard correctly.
Buneka's grin broadened, and her eyes twinkled with mischief. "Sure, PTB-the powers that be. Petaybee," she added. "You didn't know that's where this planet got its name?"
"The briefing said it was Planet, Terraformation B," Yana said.
The girl waved her mitten dismissively. "They would manage to make it sound dull. But it's really named after them-the Powers That Be that move us from A to B or Z or wherever they gotta plug holes or clean up disasters or fight wars. C'mon. Let me get you out of this mess and give you a proper welcome to Petaybee." The girl tugged at Yana's sleeve, pointing to a battered-looking but clean orange/yellow snocle with fluorescent numerals, MTS-80-84, that matched those Yana had seen on the plastic ID. But as Yana stepped off the curb, a big figure intervened.
"Yellow ticket? I take yellow tickets." The man glared menacingly at the girl. "You doan wanna ride with this flitter-face. She turn you over into snow drift. No one find you. Yellow ticket deserves big, warm snocle." He gestured toward a large, sleek affair.
"I've already-" she began.
"Terce, she's legally mine."
"You ain't cleared for yellows," the man said, hunching belligerently over the girl. He was a tall enough man, but the furs made him even more bulky.
"Am, too." She waved her ID at him; snarling, he batted at her hand, dismissing her qualification. "I got a passenger all legal, Terce," she went on. "You weren't even here."
Yana deftly inserted herself between them and made eye contact with the intruder. "I've already accepted Rourke's assistance, but I thank you for your willingness to transport me."
"I gotta, dama…"
At first Yana thought he was swearing at her and then realized that he was bowing with great subservience. There was an edge of anxiety in his voice and manner.
"You're safer with me," the girl said, glaring such a challenge first at Yana and then at Terce that Yana sensed that more was at stake than just a fare.
"Look, girl, another yellow ticket." Terce gestured toward a man whose yellow ticket was plainly visible in his hand, "you take 'im." Then he took a firm hold on Yana's upper arm and began to swing her toward his vehicle.
Deftly, almost automatically, Yana disengaged her arm and then strode across to the battered little MTS-registered snocle.
"Dama, dama," Terce cried, real concern in his voice.
Yana ignored him, lengthening her stride when she heard the triumphant exclamation from Buneka, followed by the sound of boots slithering across the snow mush behind her. Yana hit the door release on the passenger's side, then paused a moment to catch her breath before she slung her sacks onto the rear storage shelf. Still chuckling over her success, the girl slid into the driver's scat.
"You'd better button up. This thing takes longer to warm up than Terce's fancy sleigh."
"And I'm safer with you?" Yana asked at her driest, as she rearranged her hood and scarf and belted into the seat before slipping her hands back into the fur mittens.
The girl's eyes crinkled. "Well, Terce is known to do 'errands' for folk. My hunch is he was there on purpose to collect you. If you'd wanted to go with him, you could have, of course, but you didn't. So you didn't know he was there to meet you. So… you're safer with me-especially the way he was acting. He's not very bright." Her remark was couched in a kindly tone but held a hint of caution nonetheless. She glanced over at Yana, her eyes bright, alert.
Well, Yana mused. An hour on the planet and intrigue starts already. Never a dull moment, no matter what the spaceflot about Petaybee was. PTB! Powers that be. She chuckled at the thought but let that also be an answer for her driver.
The chuckle turned into one of her coughing fits, and between spasms she fumbled in her sack for her bottle of syrup. She was suddenly weak with the effort it took to draw enough breath between explosions that threatened to blow her ribs apart. The fur mittens made her hands clumsy, and she almost dropped the bottle before she could peel a mitten from her shaking hand and get the plastic cap off. As soon as the syrup began to coat her pharynx, the spasm eased. She cradled the bottle in her hands, against her chest. The preparation had a lot of alcohol in it, but she still wouldn't risk it freezing.
The girl slowed the vehicle and looked back at her with wide eyes. Poor kid looked as if she were wishing that she had let Terce take her fare.
"Are you-all right, Major?"
Yana gulped another swallow of the syrup, this time feeling the warmth spreading into the poisoned cavities of her damaged lungs. Every time she coughed,;-he images flashed through her brain of the graphic films the doctors had shown her when they had explained why she was no longer fit for active duty. As if the fact that she couldn't laugh or hoist a duffel bag without a paroxysm of coughing wasn't evidence enough of her disability. Still, she was alive, which was more than the others were. She recapped the bottle, tucked it into her parka pocket, and pulled the mitten back over her hand. It was already going numb with cold. She noted with satisfaction, however, that there was no blood on either mitten.
Catching the girl's anxious look, she said, "Don't worry, Rourke, it's not contagious. Took a little gas at Bremport Station was all."
"From the sound of that cough, you must have had a nasty time of it," the girl remarked, speeding up slightly again but proceeding more cautiously than before, as if afraid the jarring would set her passenger off again.
"You might say that," Yana said, thinking of the others. The hell of it was, she had been through a lot worse in her younger days and had come through without a scratch. Bremport was supposed to have been a routine training mission-new recruits, a couple of them from Petaybee, she remembered. She remembered just about everything from that mission, over and over again.
Using the technique she had learned a long time before from one of her old sergeants, she switched her focus, letting her eyes rest on the panorama of blue and white nothingness, the featureless landscape soothing her, helping her blank her mind, the cold in the air matching the cold inside her.
Ground-hugging vegetation pierced lumps of snow with frozen spines. Then she noticed that the snocle track was on ground slightly lower than the rest of the terrain.
"You guys dig a new road here, huh?" she asked her driver.
Rourke snorted. "Not a bit of it. Do you think they'd be spendin' money on improvements for the likes of us? This-is the river!"
"No kidding?" Yana looked out and down. Where the snow had blown away in one patch, she saw the translucence of powder blue ice. "Anybody ever fall through the ice?"
"Not lately. Even this late in the winter it's still between minus seventy-five and minus thirty most of the time."
"If everything is frozen, what do you do about drinking water?" Company leaders automatically considered such details.
"Oh, that. I'll show you." The girl grinned and continued on.
After a few moments the ground had more rise and fall to it. Beside it, stunted trees, rooted and branched in billows of snow, began appearing closer and closer together until they formed a sparse forest on either side of the snocle. The girl veered the machine over toward the trees, and around the next bend, Yana saw a little pavilion set up on the ice, smoke rising from a hole in the top. Rourke had been decreasing the speed of her snocle and now drifted to a gentle stop.
The tent shook slightly from within and what looked at first like a bear emerged.
"Slainte, Bunny!" the bear said with a wave, dispelling the illusion. The fur-clad man lumbered forward, lifting his great fur boots high above the snow. His face bristled with icicles from the ruff around his mouth and nose, which was only lightly frosted, to his beard, eyebrows, and mustache, which were thickly encrusted with ice.