Part 10 (2/2)
She shook her head. ”For what?”
He was looking in Thayer's direction, but his eyes didn't seem to be focusing on her, or on anything else. ”For my part,” he rasped. ”For what...we did to you.”
His apology made Thayer wince. She hadn't spoken to any of the MACOs since the failed attempt to commandeer the control center of Mantilis, but she had confided to Graylock her fear and her resentment of them-Pembleton in particular, since he had been the one who'd pulled the trigger and maimed her.
”Not your fault, Eric,” she said. ”You're the only one who didn't point a weapon at me.”
”Still...sorry.”
She leaned down and kissed his forehead. ”No worries.”
A reedy breath pa.s.sed from his lips, and then he was perfectly still. For a moment, the only sound was the low cry of the wind and the snapping of loose fabric on the outside of the shelter. Steinhauer and Pembleton both touched forehead, chest, and each shoulder with their right hands. Thayer reached over and nudged Crichlow's eyelids closed.
Pembleton wasted no time on sentiment. ”Steinhauer,” he said, ”sanitize Crichlow's gear, and parcel it out to the rest of the team. When you're done, we'll take him up by the rocks and bury him in the snow.”
”That's it?” asked Graylock. ”We're just going to toss his naked body in a drift?”
Steinhauer and Thayer both turned away and pretended to be busy with other tasks as Pembleton replied, ”What would you prefer, Lieutenant? Should I dump him in the fjord?”
”He deserves a proper burial,” Graylock said.
”I agree,” Pembleton said, ”but the ground is frozen solid, and we're short of food. We need to save our strength for the trip, not waste it digging a hole.”
”What about a funeral pyre?” asked Graylock.
”We're low on firewood, too, remember?”
Graylock sighed and nodded. ”I know. It just feels heartless to throw him aside like this.”
Pembleton replied, ”Heartless would be carving him up as food. But since we don't know what killed him, we can't risk it.” He pulled the flap of Crichlow's bedroll over the dead man's face. ”After we put him outside, we should break down everything but the main shelter and get ready to travel. We need to be on the move by daybreak tomorrow.”
”So soon?” asked Graylock.
”We're losing light every day, sir,” Pembleton said. ”At this rate, we're looking at G.o.d only knows how many months of night, starting in just a couple of weeks. If we aren't floating to warmer climes by then...we're finished.”
A few days later, during their journey south, the survivors pa.s.sed another interminable night huddled for warmth inside a crude shelter, which they had insulated from the wind by burying it inside a snow drift.
Rows of metal poles and sheets of taut fabric lashed together kept their fresh excavation from imploding on them while they slept. It didn't keep the cold out, though. Drafts of air so frigid that they felt like razors slipped through gaps in the shelter and always seemed to find Kiona Thayer, no matter how deep in the huddle she hid herself.
Tucked in that cl.u.s.ter of bodies, hidden in the dark, she stayed close to Karl Graylock, her fellow officer. She relied on him not just for heat but to act as a barrier between her and the MACOs, whom she still viewed with anger and anxiety.
Though she had never been attracted to Graylock, the tickle of his beard on her shoulder was a comfort as he wrapped himself around her. She dreaded awakening each morning to another day in exile with Pembleton and Steinhauer. At night, she dreamed of the only thing she truly cared about any longer: Earth, home soil, so far away now, farther than she'd ever imagined it would be.
Memories of Earth haunted Thayer's every waking moment, so she tried to spend as much of her time as possible asleep. Growing up in Quebec, she had often thought of herself as being acclimated to the cold, perhaps even impervious to it. This world's arctic circle had taught her differently. Now the bitter wind was the enemy, and sleep's gray realm was her only haven from the constant discomfort of numb fingers and toes.
Some of her dreams took her to tropical locales; others put her fireside in her father's home, outside Montreal. She often dreamed of being back aboard the Columbia or in training on Earth or reliving her first day on campus at Dartmouth. Sometimes she was young again, and sometimes she was her current age but revisiting a past chapter of her life, like a tourist.
The one detail that was consistent in all her dreams, however, was that her left foot was whole. And that made it all the more terrible to awaken to her scarred, mangled extremity, which now required mechanical reinforcement.
She was running through tall gra.s.s in a Vermont apple orchard with her older sister, Winona, when a hated voice shattered the moment. ”Up and at 'em,” Pembleton barked, his baritone voice filling the tent. ”Only five hours of light today! We can't waste a second of it. Everybody up! Let's go!”
Quebecois epithets flew to her lips and no further.
Breakfast barely qualified as a meal. Steinhauer lit a small fire to reheat some weak broth they had saved from their last boiled rodent of several days earlier. They also drank as much wretched bark tea as they could swallow, because Graylock had noted that Crichlow, who had made a point of spurning the foul-tasting beverage, had been the one to grow sick and die.
”No more,” Steinhauer said after half a cup. ”One more drop, and I swear I'll vomit.”
”Drink it,” the engineer said. ”Quinine tastes terrible, too, but it helped people fend off malaria.”
”I think you only make us drink this p.i.s.s to take our minds off the cold,” Thayer said between lippursing sips.
Graylock smiled at that. ”Is it working?”
”No,” she said.
Minutes later, all traces of their camp had been cleaned up, stowed away, and hefted onto their backs for the continuing march toward the equator. Steinhauer returned from checking and collecting the traps, which he put out each night in the hope of snaring a few more small rodents to sustain them another day. That morning, unfortunately, he returned empty-handed. He packed away the traps, and Pembleton led the team onward, into a landscape concealed by dense, spinning flurries of falling snow.
The quartet moved in single file, with the three men taking turns as trail breakers, sometimes in s.h.i.+fts as short as five minutes. Thayer slogged along behind them, doing her best to keep up but knowing full well that she was slowing them down.
The survivors hugged the coastline rather than try to scale the rugged slopes and peaks of the barren arctic landscape. As a result, their journey often seemed to entail long periods of little to no forward progress, as they trekked parallel to their course, and occasional periods of backtracking, when the sh.o.r.eline switched back around one body of water or another.
A few hours out of camp and less than two hours shy of nightfall, they found themselves circ.u.mnavigating a frozen, narrow fjord. When it was Graylock's turn to take the lead, he started breaking a trail across the ice sheet.
Pembleton shouted ahead, ”Lieutenant! What the h.e.l.l are you doing? Trying to get us killed?”
”It's less than a kilometer across,” Graylock said. ”But it's got to be at least nine kilometers long. It'll take hours to go the long way around, but if we take the shortcut, we can reach those trees and still have time to set traps before dark.”
Despite the fact that Pembleton was swaddled in layers of fabric that looked like a portable tent, his contemptuous slouch was easy to detect. ”That's a salt.w.a.ter fjord, Lieutenant,” he said. ”There's no guarantee it's frozen solid all the way across or that the ice is thick enough to hold your weight. If you feel like taking a bath in water that'll shock you dead in less than thirty seconds, be my guest, sir.”
Graylock reversed course with a series of kick turns and waved Pembleton ahead on the original trail around the fjord. ”Lead on, Sergeant.”
”Yes, sir,” Pembleton replied, moving down the desolate sh.o.r.eline, breaking a trail through the snow with smooth but flagging strides. On either side of the fjord, high cliffs of bare, black rock ascended into the violet sky.
From the back of the line, Steinhauer said, ”I would give anything to be on Earth right now.”
”Right now, it's around 4500 B.C.,” Pembleton replied as he fell back behind Thayer and let Graylock take the lead again. ”You'd be living in the Neolithic period.”
”That'd be fine,” said Steinhauer. ”Someone in Sumer is inventing beer about now.”
”That's right!” Graylock hollered back from the point position. ”Mein Gott, I could use a beer.”
Trying to distract herself from the acidic churning and pathetic growling of her empty stomach, Thayer asked, ”What about agriculture and written language? The Sumerians are inventing those about now, too.”
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