Thirty-One
Thirty-One
A re you all right?” Holom Coombs asked. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” Jessyn said, but what she thought was I am exactly the same as I was when you asked me five minutes ago .
Ever since Garral’s “death” and her own brush with it, the other members of the human moiety had been treating her like she was made from spun glass.
Sitting in the common room and eating her morning meal, every time she grunted or flinched became an occasion for someone’s concern.
Holom Coombs insisted on preparing her food.
Manni cleaned it away, but at least she didn’t talk about it.
One of the other women had experience with combat medicine from her time in the military and came to change Jessyn’s dressing each day.
The human moiety was trying to come together around her, to support her through her vulnerable time.
The hell of it was, Jessyn recognized the kindness of it even as it chafed.
She’d spent long periods of her life being fragile, treating herself like she was fragile, teaching the people around her to treat her as though she were fragile.
And now, here she was, light years from the sun she’d been so careful not to spend too much time under, still just as vulnerable to the darkness that sometimes took over her mind, and bristling with annoyance every time someone treated her like she needed special care.
What made it worse, she probably did.
She finished her bowl of morning gruel, sipped her cup of something that passed for milky tea, and Manni put a gentle hand on her arm and reached over to take her dishes. Jessyn nodded politely because she was being polite and took herself off to the little plaza outside the five ships.
Walking still hurt and stretching hurt worse, so she stretched there in the morning sunlight until the pain made her sweat a little.
Two Carryx soldiers trundled along the edge of the common space, their massive fighting arms moving like a promise of violence.
One of the rocky sofa-sized things was splayed out on the ground, its thousand tiny legs flat against the earth.
She didn’t have any idea what that was about.
Some other alien social drama or distress.
It could have been dying or reveling in victory. Action without context was unknowable.
“You are recovered?” the calm, neutral voice of the translation half-mind said. She turned to Third Gardener. The Sinen overseer was waddling over from a group of True People of Hannic.
“I’m improving,” she said. “It may be a while before I’m back to full power.”
“Have you recalled any other details of your encounter with the enemy soldier?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t remember anything else, and the memories I do have feel like they’re getting muddled. That’s not unheard of for my species.”
Third Gardener trundled away, its quasi-tentacles twitching.
Every time she came out of the ship, the Sinen and its Rak-hund were there waiting and watching.
Every night when she returned to the ships, it was waiting to review what she’d spent her hours doing and examine her samples.
It asked her for more information about the imaginary attack the way that Holom Coombs asked if she felt all right.
It didn’t trust her.
There were changes in the local wildlife, small shifts that had happened in the time since she’d arrived.
The low scrub outside the semicircle of ships had bloomed in a million tiny white blossoms. Flocks of some migratory bird were passing over the ships now in long-tailed V formations that seemed to include dozens of individuals in perfect harmony, like a well-rehearsed dance troupe in the sky.
And somewhere on the other side of the thin layer of air shrouding the planet, ships were coming that were going to die if she didn’t get out to the orchard and back undetected. She settled her satchel against her hip and headed in the opposite direction.
When she’d been a girl in race-to-base games in the schoolyard, her favorite tactic had been to pretend she wasn’t playing at all.
While the child playing hunter counted up, she’d sit down on a bench and start reading her book and not run or scream or dart away when he came close.
Then when he was past her, sprint for safety.
This wasn’t that different. Everything in her body and mind strained for the orchard and its cache, and the most important thing was to keep the Carryx from knowing that.
Second most. The most important was finding her moment and sprinting for base.
Every hour she didn’t go was one less hour until it was too late.
And, as it so often did, too late came early.
She was in a copse of young trees, digging up root samples for their fungal symbionts, when Third Gardener shuffled into view.
The Sinen walked directly toward her, its Rak-hund guard curving along behind it.
Jessyn sat back, wiping the soil off her palms, and waited.
The Sinen stopped in front of her, its goatlike eyes flickering over her and the hole she’d dug like it was searching for something.
It made a little motion of its shoulders that, if it had been human, would have accompanied a sigh.
“You will complete your work and bring any equipment back to the ships by the end of day tomorrow,” it said.
“That doesn’t leave me a lot of time.”
“No.”
“Is there a reason we have to hurry so much?” she asked, but she knew. The enemy had reentered the system.
“You will hurry because I have indicated the necessity,” the Sinen said.
“I could do a lot more if I had another day or two.”
“You do not,” Third Gardener said. “What is, is.”
“Understood,” Jessyn said. “I’ll hurry.”
Then she forced herself not to.
Hour after excruciating hour, she let the day pass as if she were only what she appeared to be.
She took the last root samples, cataloging them as if they mattered to her at all.
She packed up her equipment from the copse and carried it all back to the ships as the evening sun touched the horizon.
Her body felt caught between exhaustion and a thin, tight adrenaline high.
The conversation in the common room was all about the evacuation.
Do you think they’ll take us back to the homeworld or on to another site?
and I can’t believe Shaina decided to sleep at her worksite with all this going on and I could have spent another year here and just be getting started .
She listened and contributed and ate, but her mind was elsewhere.
Her equipment was still in the orchard. She had an excuse to go out in the morning and retrieve it.
Maybe, in the rush of preparation, Third Gardener would skip checking her samples and equipment.
Maybe she’d convinced it that she was an innocent victim of the war.
But she didn’t think so. Better, then, to sneak out in the night when there would be fewer eyes on her.
“Long day tomorrow,” she said as Manni cleared away her plate. “I’ll see you all in the morning.”
“Take care of yourself,” Holom Coombs said earnestly as she headed for her cell.
“Resting up and hydrating,” she said, and made herself grin.
As soon as she left, she heard the tenor of the conversation change.
All of the things they’d wanted to say about whether there were more enemy soldiers, about whether they were in danger of dying like Garral P?r, all of the things they weren’t going to talk about in front of her.
Well, let them. She had things of her own too.
Jessyn kicked off her shoes, put her notebook with its tracking device beside her bed, and slid under the blanket on her cot, but she didn’t undress.
In the darkness, her biggest fear was that she’d accidentally drift off to sleep and the night would pass without her.
She stared at the ceiling of her quarters, singing old songs to herself and moving her legs until they were in uncomfortable positions. She trusted the ache to keep her alert.
When the last human voice had faded, she counted slowly to a thousand, then did it again.
And then, like an adolescent sneaking out to some hormone-soaked tryst, Jessyn slipped out of her bed, put on her shoes in darkness, and walked slowly, silently out through the quarters of the human moiety, out to the ramp leading to the plaza.
A dozen featherless, beaked aliens were clustered together by one of the other ships, but if there were guards she didn’t see them.
There was a freedom in being utterly expendable.
The night was cool and damp. Light as pale as milk spilled down from two small, dim moons.
As she walked, Jessyn kept looking up at the stars, the smear of the galactic disk.
The ruins of the city off to her right stood like a greater darkness in the night.
It had been a home once, not long ago. Everyone Omco and Manta had known.
All of the children’s parents and siblings and schoolyard enemies and pets.
All the things they lost to the Carryx. All the things they lost in the war.
Halfway to the orchard, she stopped, crouching behind a bush, and waited to see if she was being followed.
When the little moons had moved half the width of her hand, she started walking again.
At the orchard, the trees stood in their ranks like poorly disciplined soldiers in a rough, shoddy formation.
Her equipment was there, glistening in doubled moonlight with dew or the remnants of some soft evening rain.
Her feet squelched in the soft earth as she made her way to the stump with its secrets.