That first step southward was so hard, she almost couldn’t take the second.
But inertia was a wonderful thing. Once her body was in motion, it was willing to stay in motion, and walking soon became no harder than floating at the bottom of the inlet had been. As long as she didn’t think too much about her destination. Not for the first time, she wished for the growl and sigh of sea waves for distraction.
“Oh, thank God.”
The Startide had only just begun to take shape among the limestone and granite of the coastal cliff face, with the stairs to the primary dock still another kilometer or more down the beach. Rahel stopped, wondering how likely a reporter would be missed so far from the main hotel, and whether there was any chance some maintenance robot would find the body before she left the planet.
“I am so glad you can’t hold your water as long as you can hold a grudge. Otherwise you might never have come home.” Nils shifted his seat on one of the drier rocks at the foot of the bluff, pulling his light daytime jacket tighter closed beneath his chin. “Are you all right?”
Just because he was a lawyer didn’t mean he couldn’t ask stupid questions. “What do you think?” Rahel moved slowly up the beach to stand in front of him, not wanting any unwelcome listeners to pick up on their voices. “How long have you been out here?”
Nils twitched a shoulder in a half-shrug, half-shiver, glancing around at the now-dark scenery as though surveying a gathering of old friends. “Oh, not that long,” he sighed with dramatic nonchalance. “Five, maybe six hours.” He looked up at her and smiled. Even his friendly smiles always managed to look priggish and thin. “Huan showed me a service tunnel just up the hill from here. It beats the hell out of going through the reporters, and I thought you might enjoy the detour.”
Because the nets want to ask me some horrible questions, and 1 don’t want to give the answers; I don’t want to have to know the answers. She didn’t even want to have to ask Nils, and he’d been sitting out here half the day waiting to tell her. She made herself look him straight in the face, but then could only squeeze her hands into fists when she knew she ought to be speaking.
Nils saved her with a nod. “Paval’s alive,” he said, very serious now despite his gentle tone. “The medical team got here just a little while after you left—” A slight smile broke through and he cocked his head in dry comment. “A record, Huan says. They brought a mobile ER unit with them, and took Paval into their ship for treatment the minute they got here. It was good you gave him oxygen so soon after his exposure, they said. You probably saved his life.”
Yes, but she shouldn’t have had to. “Where are the Greens?”
“Kicked off planet.” Nils slid to his feet with a tiny sound of discomfort, then scrubbed at his arms while starting down the beach toward the waiting hotel. “They’re talking about suing, you know.”
Rahel blinked into the darkness as she followed him, glad for his pale complexion and ivory coat. Until the moons rose, those were the only parts of Nils that she could reliably see. “Well, good for the Greens. Maybe it’ll give them something more constructive to do than attack apprentice proctors.”
“How nice that you can be so cavalier.”
“Sadena owns the planet,” Rahel pointed out. Rocks bit and pinched beneath her feet, and the occasional little something scrabbled away out of sight across the sand. She missed the taste of sea spray against her nose and tongue. “As long as he doesn’t violate Interplanetary Law, he can throw anybody off Uriel he wants to. Even us, if we’re so lucky.”
Nils stopped abruptly and turned about to stare. She nearly tripped over him in the darkness. “Not Sadena, Rahel,” Nils said in a slow, understanding voice. She wanted to hit him. “You. The Greens want to sue you for slander.” He caught hold of her elbow and kept her beside him when he started walking up beach again. “This is exactly the sort of thing I’m supposed to be here to avoid.”
Rahel snorted and pulled her arm out of his grasp. “Hell, if I’d known they were going to sue me, I’d have said a whole lot more of what I had on my mind.”
Nils rubbed at his eyes and sighed. “No, you will not.” He bit off each word with long-suffering precision. “Right now, the Greens are just posturing for the media. You haven’t really said anything destructive—nothing they can build a case on, anyway. And if you stick to your work from now on—” He angled a warning glare up at her, “—preferably by staying underwater, we can probably finish out this contract without landing half of Noah’s Ark in court.”
“Would we anyway? I mean, is it slander if it’s true?”
Nils shook his head, but obviously not in direct response to her question. “That isn’t pertinent unless you can prove it’s true.”
How come she had to prove her insults, and GreeNet got to print anything about the Ark it wanted? Deciding she wasn’t really in the mood for the answer, she continued her trudge up the beach without asking.
A bevy of shivering bellhops clustered around the entrance to the service tunnel, more than happy to converge on the proctors and usher them into the hotel. Rahel waved off Nils’s offer to see about sending dinner up to her suite, and abandoned him with the bellhops at the service lift. That he held up a hand to stop anyone from following her surprised Rahel even more than his own willingness to stay behind.
The elevator glided with the same silent perfection as everything else in Sadena’s hotel. For a change, it was nice to close her eyes and let the machinery do all the moving for her, nicer still to strip open her sandy skinsuit and drop it wherever she wanted as soon as she stepped through her suite’s sliding door. Her hair felt gluey and crusted with salt, but she stopped just shy of the bathroom to stare in shock at the living area with one hand still splayed on top her head.
Flowers. The largest, most elaborate, delicate bouquet she’d ever seen replaced the oval coffee table. A half-dozen iridescent insects floated from blossom to blossom like fairy gems in search of nectar. Rahel crept up on the construction as though it were a tiger, and used two fingers to slip a platinum card from between two glowing Lunar orchids.
My sincerest sympathies for the attack on your apprentice. Please let me know if there is anything I can do.
F.S.
Rahel decided not to bother with a shower that night. She took only long enough to put on clean clothes and throw the flowers into the hall outside her door, then collected her water samples from this morning and carried them up to the pachyderm. A night in the pachyderm’s bunk would feel good after this stuffy hotel, and, if she was lucky, the testing station AI could have all of the samples run before dawn.
The persistent beep of the pachyderm’s intership comm irritated Rahel out of sleep what felt like only minutes after she went down. In reality, the chronometer at the pilot’s station read 0816 when she finally stumbled over to slap the damn thing off, so she had to accept that it was well past sunrise outside and time to crawl back into the world of conspicuous consumption in search of answers. Leaning both elbows on the edge of the console, she keyed the comm answer sequence with a yawn.
A text-only message scrolled up the little screen in a swarm of turquoise letters that were disgustingly hard to take so soon after being asleep.
Mr. Kuvasc is doing well, although he still isn’t able to handle visitors. He sends his greetings to you, and his thanks. You handled the emergency superbly—the medics seem confident he’ll make an adequate recovery.