Chapter 5
Finding the overhang meant they could light a fire and it was still shielded from aerial view.
Ethan tossed down the sticks he’d collected, and then looked through the trees, tracking Velda as she returned with an armful of sticks herself.
She set them down more carefully than he had, and then moved to the fire, which had caught nicely. It was colder here than in Nanganya, and the heat it was giving off was more than welcome.
The little pot they’d hung over the fire began to shake a bit as the water boiled, and she carefully lifted it away with another stick and set it down on a rock.
“Jah?” she asked.
“Please.” He was glad he’d taken the chance to go back into the hover for the emergency packs for the jah supplies alone, but the ground sheets, the warm sleeping bags, and the pot and meals meant they could survive out here a lot more comfortably than he’d initially thought.
While she made their drinks with a competence that indicated she was no stranger to the outdoors, he began to lay out the ready-made meals they had, the water bottles with in-built purifiers, and the other equipment, so he could take stock.
Velda handed him a cup and stood close beside him, looking over their spoils.
“The hover takes a maximum of six people, and it looks like they’ve included supplies for six people for three days.” It wasn’t a massive amount, but it meant that if they were careful, they had nine days of supplies.
“Someone will come looking for us long before we run out,” Velda said. “And not all of them will be enemies.”
“That’s true, but how will we know one from the other?” he asked. “And if the observatory has been destroyed, and Ed and Wren are dead, then Defense will have a lot on their plate. We don’t even know if anyone knows we were shot down yet.”
“You want us to walk out on our own?” she asked, crouching down and studying the meals more closely.
“I think the less dependent we are on others, the safer we’ll be.
” He knew full well the conspiracy couldn’t be that far reaching.
The Verdant String had set itself up to be very corruption-resistant, but with a warship hunting them from the skies, all that was needed was for the wrong person to know where they were—or who had found them—and the innocent people coming to save them might also be in danger.
“You think that unless it was the enemy ship that was destroyed, and is providing such a gorgeous light show for us, they’ll circle back to take another shot at us, and whoever’s honestly looking for us might get caught in the crossfire?
” She looked out from under the overhang at the now constant flare and glitter of falling stars in the night sky.
He shrugged, not surprised by how quickly she’d caught his train of thought.
“All it would take is one person to let them know we’d been found.
And we know there’s someone in either the Demeter or Nanganya Defense Office giving them information, or they wouldn’t have known we were on our way back to Demeter. ”
“Yes.” She sounded very quiet all of a sudden.
Betrayal was a hard blow to take.
“Our comms units are off, and we’ll keep it that way unless we have no choice but to ask for help.
We’ll make our own way back to Demeter, and get the lay of the land.
” He was looking up as he spoke, and he realized he very badly wanted to use his comms unit to find out what was going on in nearspace.
“It makes sense.” Velda sounded like she wished it didn’t.
He crouched down beside her. “What do you want for dinner?”
She glanced at him, eyes steady, and then turned to the meals laid out in front of her.
He’d grouped them into roughly breakfast, lunch and dinner, and her hand hovered over the dinner pile, lightly touching the offerings until she made a choice and lifted out a meal.
“Have you had these before?” she asked.
He chuckled. “Yes.”
“Me, too. When I became Head of Defense, I insisted they work on improving the taste, and I see this is the new line.” She tapped the wrapping. “I’ve personally tried them all, and they are definitely better than the old ones.”
He hadn’t known that. He’d been steeling himself to swallow the meal down, but now he was interested in giving it a try. “So I know who to blame?” he teased, sending her a smile as he snagged a package.
She grinned back. “Even if I hadn’t had a hand in the new line, I’d be to blame. I’m in charge and that’s the deal.”
Ethan was still crouched next to her, and he forced himself to straighten up, suddenly flustered. “If you don’t mind heating the food, I’ll repack this.” He held out the meal he’d chosen.
She rose fluidly to her feet, took the package from him, and tilted her head. “Sure.”
He turned away from her, looking for where he’d put the two packs, and heard her walk back to the fire.
He needed to get himself together. They were going to be spending days and nights together, just the two of them.
The thought made him want to break out into a cold sweat.
He packed the heavier things into one pack for himself, and the lighter equipment in the other, but kept the ground sheets and sleeping bags out for them to use.
She called him over when the meals were hot, and when he got back to the fire he saw she’d pushed pebbles into the fire and then pulled them out to cover the packages and heat them without direct flames.
“You’ve done this before,” he said as he carefully opened the meal and began to eat.
“I put myself through basic military training,” she said. “Not all at once, not the whole three months, but when I had a clear few days that would work, I’d drop in to whichever group was going through it and do whatever was on the schedule for them at that time.”
He hadn’t known that. “It shows,” he says.
She gave a laugh. “I’m ridiculously pleased to hear that.
I know a lot of the admin staff in headquarters thought I was losing my mind when I started doing it, but it’s been useful.
I’ve gotten to know the generals better, and gotten to see what training our people go through.
” She shrugged. “The post usually goes to someone older, so it might be because I was young and relatively fit that it even crossed my mind as a good thing to do, but I think it’s made me a better Head of Planetary Defense. ”
“You certainly have the most exciting moment a Head of Defense has faced since Aponi bumped into a fleet of Arkhorans and Raxians in the Great Discovery,” he said. And that event had been a friendly meeting, the beginning of Aponi’s inclusion in the Verdant String.
“I think Dir Matala would argue his tenure during the Faldine War was pretty exciting,” Velda said.
Ethan had been a junior officer in Special Forces when Dir Matala had been Head of Defense, and had even deployed to Faldine for six months.
He shook his head. “The Arkhorans were all over that cluster. Along with Themis. We barely had a role. The way I remember it, we had to plead with them to let us get in there, because everyone thought it would be good on-the-ground training.”
“You went?” she asked, but she said it in a way that made him think she already knew. She’d probably read his file.
“For six months. It was . . . strange.” He remembered the auroras lighting up the sky every night. “Interesting.”
“You’re talking about the electromagnetic issues?” she asked.
He nodded. “Flying felt like taking your life into your hands. The pilots who managed to work around the issues were the most valuable people in the fight.”
“I wouldn’t mind talking to the current head of planet there,” Velda mused.
“Iver Sugotti encountered the same issues we seem to be having, with ancestral ships and ancient alien ruins. It sounds like the Cores tried to kill him because his new infrastructure was going to cut right through the ruins the Cores had found and were trying to strip.”
“I didn’t know that.” Ethan had heard the Faldine head of planet had been taken prisoner at some point, but he’d escaped. The details were above his clearance level. “Surely the infrastructure plans would have gone ahead with or without him?”
“Yes, but not for a while,” Velda said. “And time was what they apparently needed. Which also explains the attack on Wren and Ed. Ed was coming back to work for you, and Wren was about to join your unit and probably tell you everything she knew.”
“Trying to kill Ed and Wren, and put the blame on me, is one thing. Having a shoot-out with two battleships in nearspace is another altogether.” Ethan still could barely believe it happened. “And now we know something big was blown up, most likely the observatory.”
The night sky was still a sparkle of falling stars. It made Ethan’s chest tighten at the thought of Ed, Wren, Bailey and Hatch being in the obs station if it was hit. He’d sent them up there, and they may very well be dead because of it.
A warm hand suddenly touched his own and he turned to find Velda leaning in.
“That’s not on you, Ethan.” She glanced up. “It’s not even on me. I could not in a million years have thought they’d attack Ed and Wren with two battleships right there. It literally didn’t cross my mind.”
She was right. The idea was ludicrous.
“What does it say about them that they did attack?” he wondered.
“That they’re desperate. Really desperate.
They have to be.” Velda drew her knees up and hugged them.
“They were obviously desperate for the freighter to not be searched, and so whatever was on that freighter was more than just contraband. It would have told us something more. Revealed something bigger than just a smuggling operation.”
“That’s what really worries me,” Ethan said. “Because there are only a few scenarios that come to mind.”
Velda was silent for a moment. “What we need to do is separate the machinations around the ancestral spaceship on Ytla with the smuggling operation. They’re connected, but I think they’re two different branches off the same tree.”
“Agreed. Whatever Cores factions are left have been looking for ancient tech for a while, and they’ve gone after it in a few different ways over the last year or more.
But the smuggling issue, and the open attacks on our military, that’s something new.
” Ethan just wished he’d had an inkling about how aggressive they were prepared to be.
Maybe he could have protected his people better.
Velda suddenly gave a massive yawn and then reached for his empty meal package. “I need to sleep. I guess we’re going hard tomorrow to put some distance between the wreck and ourselves.”
He wished he could tell her they could relax here until someone came to rescue them. That would be the normal thing to do, but nothing about this situation was normal. “I wish it wasn’t so, but yes. I think that’s the only option.”
She nodded. “I’d be inclined to wait, but I trust your instincts. If you say we need to go, we go.”
She rummaged in her bag, came up with a toothbrush and toothpaste, and took the small pot they’d boiled water in and her jah cup with her to the small stream that rushed its way down the hill toward the river they’d crashed in.
He sat by the fire, watching her crouch by the water, splash her face and clean her teeth.
The trust she’d placed in him acted like a tight band around his throat, making it hard for him to respond to her, so he’d merely nodded.
Her slim, straight back and long dark hair was all he could see, but when she grabbed her hair and twisted it into a rope to keep it off her face, he turned to find his own toothbrush, the gesture almost too intimate for him to feel comfortable watching it.
It was going to be a long night.