“Maybe it’s not as cozy as those special jackets, but I won’t freeze, feller-me-lad. A glass of good brandy, now, but…” He licked chapped lips wistfully. “You worry about yourself and not old Skua.”
“Just how old are you, anyway?” asked Ethan curiously, eyeing the long ropes of muscle that bulged the fabric. He hoped the other wouldn’t be offended.
He wasn’t. If the broad smile that creased his face was any indication, he was more tickled than anything else.
“I’m older than that pudgy pullet du Kane has for a daughter, and a bit younger than the moon. But about garments, again. All your survival suits are a dark brown. My own outer clothing is white. You stand out against this landscape like an old raisin in lemon cake frosting. Me, I’d just as soon be a little chillier and a mite less conspicuous. Old habit.
“Those recordings give you any way to judge how cold it’s likely to get tonight?”
Ethan squinted up to where the sun hung like a failed flare in one corner of the sky.
“If we came down anywhere on a line with the settlement, meaning on the equatorial belt, it will probably only drop to minus 30 or 40 tonight. You can add to that a steady wind of anything from 80 to 100 kph. We seem to have come down in a positive calm.”
“Absolutely sybaritic, hmmm?” September murmured. “Remind me to stay out of drafts.” He kicked at the scruffy thin snow. “Wonder if the du Kanes know anything?”
“I dunno,” replied Ethan. “They’re a funny pair. The old man seems pretty shaky for someone holding the reins of empire. And the girl…” Ethan’s expression wrinkled in confusion when he thought about Colette. “She seems competent enough… maybe even more than that. But she’s so full of bitterness and bile…”
“About her looks?” prompted September. Ethan nodded. “Too bad… all that credit and built like a marshmallow. Sinful, positively sinful.
“But she won’t be a burden on us, I don’t think, and on this world I wouldn’t mind a few extra kilos of insulation myself.” His thought changed abruptly. “Might be an idea to mount a watch tonight.”
He put both hands on either side of the hole and heaved himself up into the boat. Turning, he knelt and gave Ethan a hand up.
Ethan noticed a flash of dark brown forward as he was hauled aboard. He gestured toward the pilot’s compartment.
“What exactly happened? As we were coming down, I mean.”
“Ummm? Oh, that.” September gave a shrug. “It was bloody peculiar. See, I’d been drinking a tinge… not that I was drunk, you understand!”
“Perish the thought,” said Ethan placatingly.
“Yeah, well, I’d been sipping a little. And while it’s difficult to believe, it’s not entirely inconceivable that I might have gone just a teensy bit over my limit. Anyway, an assortment of misbegotten crewmen of indeterminate ancestry got it into their lighter-than-air skulls that I was acting in a manner not conducive to the general well-being of your usual milksop passenger. So they jumped me.
“Next thing I know, I’m thrown out of a sound sleep into near total darkness and zero-gee while a bunch of dwarf miners are using my skull for sinking an exploratory mine shaft. And to top it, I’m all tied up.
“Well, there were several possibilities. One, I was having the DT’s, which I haven’t run across in a long age, lad. Or maybe I was paddling through the great-grandfather of all hallucinatory hangovers. When it finally dawned on me that my misery had purely human causes, I was pretty upset.”
“I see,” said Ethan. “The crew tied you up and dumped you into the lifeboat to sleep it off.”
“Sure!” agreed September. “If they’d taken me to the brig, or whatever they use for a brig on those big luxury ships, they’d have had to get formal about things. Swear out affidavits, make out forms in triplicate. Much easier to chuck me into an empty lifeboat.
“At first I thought all the tumbling and jolting was a gag. But knocking about in freefall back in those seats hurt, dammit! Wasn’t a bit funny, no. Then it occurred to me that the boat had separated from the ship and was diving on an unscheduled jaunt dirtward. I don’t like kidnapping on principle. It’s worse when I’m the kidnapee.
“Pretty soon the boat is skipping through atmosphere like a rock on water. And none too gently, as you know. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I hadn’t been consulted. So I broke loose and went forward to find out. Most of you had been slung around pretty bad. I don’t remember who was conscious and who wasn’t, but no one offered any advice.
“That fella in there,” he jerked a thumb in the direction of the pilot’s cubby, “was awful surprised to see me. First thing, he goes to pull a beamer on me. Now right away I know I’m not going to be able to reason with this bloke. So we had a bit of a tussle. Meanwhile that punk Walther can’t make up his mind whether to stick by his controls for the landing or pull his own beamer and help his partner.
“He ended up trying to do both and did neither very well. He did get his beamer out and he did get us down. The ship got broke and so did his arm. As for the other chap, I didn’t intend to kill him. It just happened. He was sure trying to kill me, though.”
He dug into a pocket, showed Ethan the other beamer. “Want it?”
“No thanks. I’d probably shoot myself in the foot. You keep it.”
“Okay.” September shoved it back into a fold of clothing. “If it really gets rough tonight we can heat one of the walls. I’d rather not do that, however. I don’t know how much of a charge is left in these things and we’ve no way of re-priming them.”
Ethan had handled beamers before, despite his refusal of this one. Business occasionally made it necessary. There were planets where the natives would decide in a stroke of primitive brilliance that the best bargain was to do away with the trader and confiscate his goods, thus apparently proving the old adage about getting something for nothing.
This time, however, the gun would prove more useful for warming his own backside instead of some ignorant savage’s. Better that September kept charge of it.
The latter broke into his reverie. “How about food?”
“You mean local? I don’t know. Don’t you think there’s enough in the ship?”
“A shuttle of this size is built to hold about twenty people,” informed September. “There are only six of us. But it’s presumed by the powers that be in their infinite wisdom that such ships as these will only be used to get from an uninhabitable ship to an inhabitable planet. Whereas we seem to have gone vice versa, what? So I wouldn’t count on finding more than a couple of weeks concentrated survival rations back in there, with plenty of vitamin pills.
“That ought to give us enough food for about four terran-length months. Longer, if we husband the stuff. That’s assuming,” he added, “that everything came through the landing in edible condition. At least we don’t have to worry much about spoilage. Not in this climate.”
There was a question Ethan had put off asking long enough.
“What do you think of our chances?”
September looked thoughtful. “Two weeks plus concentrated food for twenty people will mass a fair amount. We’ve got to find a way to transport it. And also a better way to get around on this frozen cue-ball than this.” He indicated the makeshift ice-shoes. “That would be a beginning.
“Then we’d have to find a way to keep warm during really cold nights, and to block off this damnable wind. We have to figure a method of determining where we are now, where Brass Monkey is, and how to draw a straight line between the two we can stay glued to.