"Take her up to Medical, Magdalena's waiting," Gretchen said to Bandao. The gunner nodded silently and took Russovsky by the arm. The woman allowed herself to be led away.
"That was a stupid thing to do!"
The sound of Parker's voice sharp with anger, real anger, swung Gretchen's head around, eyebrows raised in surprise. She hadn't known the pilot for very long, but he seemed eternally calm. To her further surprise, she found Parker and Fitzsimmons glaring at each other in the shuttle airlock.
"…hang around for hours while you dink about recovering some salvage!"
Fitzsimmons's face grew entirely still as Gretchen approached, the corner of one eye tightening. Parker wasn't bothering to restrain his temper, his voice ringing through the entire shuttle bay. Heicho Deckard was watching from the top of the stairs, his face split by a huge grin. Gretchen looked behind her and was relieved to see none of the scientists had wandered into the bay.
"We don't leave equipment behind," Fitzsimmons replied in an entirely emotionless voice.
"Well, that's great," Parker snapped, "but we don't have unlimited fuel, like the navy, or some armored shuttle that can eat stone and bounce right back up!"
"What happened?" Gretchen settled on her stoic management-is-displeased face and shouldered in between the two men, looking up at Parker. To her disgust, she realized though the pilot was only a few inches taller, Fitzsimmons was head and shoulders above her. Despite her disadvantage, both men backed off a little – not so much as she'd have liked – but enough to put them at arm's reach.
"Your Marine," Parker said in an acid voice, "decided we should recover the Doc's Midge from down a freakin' hole today. I spent far too long juggling our wingtips between cliffs. We barely got back to base and I was flying on fumes the whole way. I don't think that was a good idea!"
"Her ultralight?" Gretchen turned and stared up at Fitzsimmons. "Why? Do we need it?"
The sergeant gave her a look – a considering, not-quite-baleful, not-quite-outraged look. "Fleet does not leave working equipment behind, ma'am. We recovered Doctor Russovsky and her Midge without incident and in a timely fashion." His voice was very clipped and precise. "Ma'am."
"We didn't need the u-light," Parker had calmed down a little, but Gretchen could feel his body trembling and she realized the pilot was coming down from a massive adrenaline shock. "All we needed was the doctor, whom we had extracted in two minutes, no muss, no fuss! Not thirty-five minutes wallowing around on top of razor-sharp stone with canyons on either side! Not thirty-five minutes with the air heating thinner and thinner every second!"
"Mister Parker." Gretchen managed to chill her voice appreciably and caught the man's eyes with her own. A baleful stare usually reserved for naughty children worked equally well on the pilot, who abruptly closed his mouth. "The cameras and geological sensors on the u-light are Company property, as is the aircraft itself. It is incumbent upon us – as specifically stated in our contracts – to recover any misplaced, lost or stolen Company property with all due speed. Failure to do so will – in some cases – result in the cost of the equipment being deducted from employee salaries, as appropriate."
She paused, watching an expression of disgust spread across Parker's face. How does that taste? She thought. Tastes bitter – realizing the Company cares more for the contents of a camera crystal or sensor pack than for a human life. Very bitter. "But I'm glad you came back alive, Mister Parker, with Doctor Russovsky and our Marines. And I'm glad you didn't have to walk home."
Gretchen turned to the sergeant. "I'm glad no one was killed, Gunso Fitzsimmons, and I am glad you brought back Russovsky's Midge. Her cameras and sensors might explain a mystery that's cropped up this afternoon." She smiled a little, seeing a glint in the Marine's eye. "But please don't risk your life this way again – you see how much you've upset Mister Parker." Gretchen patted the pilot on the arm. "He cares, you know. He'd weep to see your broken body scattered across some lava flow or field of calcite ash."
Deckard broke up – a big horse laugh – but neither Parker nor Fitzsimmons did more than stare at Gretchen in disgusted amazement. She didn't wait to see if they renewed their argument – she wanted to be in Medical. Russovsky, and the answer to so many questions, was waiting.
In comparison to the acrid heated-metal and testosterone smell in the shuttle hangar, Medical was quiet, cool and a little dim. The soft overheads had lost their matching pastel wall coverings during the "accident" and the bare metal of the ship's skeleton drank up what little light fell from the panels. Russovsky was sitting on an examining table in the main surgical bay, her pale hair glowing in a shaft of heavy white light. Gretchen paused at the doorway of the nurses' station. The geologist seemed entirely and unnaturally still to her.
"Doctor Russovsky? Victoria Elenova? Kak vui chuvstvyete?" Gretchen tried another smile.
This time Russovsky turned to look at her, brow crinkling in puzzlement. For some reason, she seemed tired now, her formerly straight shoulders slumped, her skin a little ashen. The light in here? Or is she starting to relax after so many weeks alone? Gretchen knew how hard a homecoming could be.
After her first tour on Mars, she'd taken a commercial liner home to New Aberdeen. After sixteen months crawling around on the ice, the thought of her mother's farmstead – of seeing her children, the gray sky pregnant with rain – the thought of domesticity had been overwhelming. A hunger she couldn't quench until she was in her own bed upstairs, listening to real spruce limbs brush against the roof, all three of her children packed in around her like loaves in an oven, so many quilts on top of them all, she could barely breathe. Mars had been bitterly cold.
For two days, she'd been entirely happy – able to smile again, able to feel safe again. Able to walk under an open sky without a respirator mask, without a z-suit chafing against her skin…feeling little hands clutch tight in hers.
On the third day, she'd come down sick. The rest of her vacation was spent shivering in bed, overcome with a succession of illnesses – flu, a cold, a sore throat, pneumonia and a racking cough. For three hundred and twenty days she'd lived and worked under terrible conditions at Polaris, never suffering any kind of sickness. Not so much as a sniffle. Then everything had caught up with her at once.
"I need," the geologist said, staring fixedly at Gretchen, "to get back to work."
"Of course," Anderssen said, nodding. "There are just a few things…were there more of the cylinder-shaped objects where you found the piece of limestone you gave Doctor McCue? Or just the two?"
"If," Russovsky said, in an inflectionless voice, "Clarkson wants me to do something useful, then he should let me do my work. I need to get back in the air."
Gretchen forced herself to remain standing at the edge of the examining table. She looked over to the nurses' station and was greatly heartened to see Bandao and Magdalena watching her with uneasy expressions. "Maggie, can you fire up the diagnostics on this table? Thanks."
"Gagarin could use more fuel," Russovsky said, as if to herself. "I'll top him up before I leave."
Gretchen turned back to the geologist, watching her intently, as if the woman were a particularly fragile artifact dredged from the bottom of a deep trench. "Victoria? Do you know where you are?"
Russovsky looked up sharply, her eyes glittering. The strange anger Gretchen had seen in her eyes down in the hangar returned, and now the lean old face was tight with fury. "Here's your geld for the water, Master Clarkson, and I hope you've the talent to find a return on your investment!"