“No, but rock is what we’ve got.” She picked up a rock, carried it over, set it down. Another two. Another. Another three. “I’d rather have lumber and tools, but I don’t see any.”
“Very well, Admiral. I’ll get the work parties moving.”
That day, twelve of the crew carried rocks and dropped them into a long curving pile along the outside of one raft. It didn’t reach the top of the flotation walls, but it was a start, and it felt like doing something. They took turns, two by two, with those pumping the desalinators on the far side of the bay from the latrine. The others searched the rock pools and shallows for food. They came back with two small fish, sixteen of the black bivalves, and more seaweed.
Seaweed was more palatable, Ky decided, when people had worked hard all day. The daily ration, which had seemed just adequate on the rafts, left them hungry here; the seaweed and individual bites of fish with one or two scallops or pieces of clam stilled the hunger pangs for only a few hours. And the cold never let up.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Rafe Dunbarger looked up when his office door opened. His sister Penny had dressed in the exact shade of blue that best suited her, a flowered scarf at her neck. She closed the door behind her, thumbed the lock, and walked across the carpet to stand on the other side of his desk, a challenging look on her face.
“I’m busy,” Rafe said. He knew he had been scowling, glaring even, before she came in, and hoped he’d adjusted his expression quickly enough.
“Is it Ky?” Penny asked. Rafe looked at her, but staring his sister down did not work these days. “I saw the latest news reports,” she went on. “They’ve ended all searches; they’re saying survival is highly unlikely.”
“Stella told me not to come,” Rafe said. He unclenched his hands deliberately. “I could have gone—”
“And done what?” Penny shook her head. “You know what your old friend Gary said—”
Rafe snorted.
“He told you that you lacked the skills to rescue us. Why do you think you could do anything for Ky, on a planet you’ve never visited, a foreign state, where you have no connections—?”
“Stella’s there,” Rafe said.
“And do you think she and Ky’s family are doing nothing? Her aunt or great-aunt or whoever she is, that’s head of their military?”
Rafe took in a long breath and shoved all he wanted to say back down. Penny meant to be helpful. She was his little sister. She couldn’t possibly understand.
Except she could, and he knew it, and the unfortunate effect of being Ky’s—whatever he was—had been a contamination of his insouciant attitude toward truth with her absolute white-hot honesty. At least in some things. At least where it mattered.
“They are. I’m sure they are. But there’s something they don’t know, and you don’t know, about Ky and me. And I can’t tell you; it’s too dangerous.”
“If you mean the implant ansible, I do know.”
“What?” Terror and outrage met. “You can’t possibly—”
“I saw you use it, remember? You tried all sorts of ways to hide what you were doing, but that’s all it could be—”
“Penny, never talk about that. Never.” He felt cold sweat trickling down his backbone. “It could be fatal. For me, for Ky—”
“Of course I won’t. You were the prototype, right? And somehow she got hold of one—”
“The less you know, the better.” He scrubbed his face with one hand. “I shouldn’t even—the thing is—I know she’s alive. I can’t communicate, but I can tell if the implant’s still working. Which it wouldn’t be if she were dead.”
“Well, then?” She folded her arms.
“So—I need to be in range to get a heading from it. I can’t do that from here. And the report says her skullphone’s blocked—no signal they can detect—so either there’s some solid jamming going on, or she’s dead, but she can’t be dead because the implant’s still on.” He looked up at her. “I check every day. I have to know, Penny.”
Her expression this time was tender, more motherly than sisterly. “There’s only one way you can go, you know.”
“Go? What do you mean?”
She sat down in the chair across from him, leaning forward a little. “Arrange for someone to run ISC while you’re gone. That would be me, the only one who should be running this monster, other than you. Just step down, name me as your successor—”
“You!”
“You’re the one who told me once I had more head for the business than you.”
“Yes, but—but you’re—”
“Younger. Prettier. And have more friends on the Board than you do. They won’t worry about me falling in love with Stella or Ky Vatta, for instance.”
“But are you ready? After all that—”
“Shall we ask my therapist? Rafe, I know you started me working here as a kind of therapy—but you also know I’m long past that now. I haven’t been to my therapist for over a year now; we sometimes run into each other socially, but that’s all. You’re not stuck here anymore, Rafe, if you don’t want to be.”
“And you think I should go.”
Penny shrugged. “I think you should decide whether running ISC is the life you want. You’ve said before you hated it; you took it when no one else could have, and you saved both ISC—to the extent anyone could—and Nexus itself. But I don’t see you inhabiting the big office with the big windows forever, and I’ve seen you looking more and more dour these last months. You enjoyed your freedom before. I expect you’d like it again.”
“But Mother—”
“She’s doing well enough in Port Bergson. She has her friends and we talk several times a week. She doesn’t want to move back to the north, she says. So—if you want to go, go.” She tilted her head. “I would never push you out—”
Rafe laughed in spite of himself, a bubble of unreasonable joy rising through his chest. “But you are, Pennyluck. That’s exactly what you’re doing. And—you’re probably right. No, you are right. I never liked this job, even when I did it well—”
“Which you did, brother mine.” She smiled at him, the smile he’d seen her use on others: approval of his cooperation.
“And just the thought of getting off this stuffy planet—but what about the house?” The house their parents had given them, when they moved.
“We sell it. You sell it and take the money—I’ve got plenty, and I like my apartment. We’ll visit it one last time together, pick out anything we want. I’ll send Mother that damned potted tree she was crazy about; in Port Bergson it can grow outside.”
“Penny—it’s none of my business, but will you ever marry again, do you think?”
She flushed a little. “Maybe. But not for another two years. Frieda said I should wait five years before marrying. I am, as I think you know, seeing someone, but casually.”
Nothing would be casual with the heir to ISC’s CEO, but Penny knew that already.
“So,” she went on, “how about it? What’s on your schedule the rest of the day? We could go out to the house now, after asking Emil to call a Board meeting for… let’s see… two days from now? Three?”
Rafe raised his brows with intent. “You don’t waste time, do you?”
“No. I learned not to wait,” Penny said. For a moment memory darkened her gaze; then it lightened again. “Besides—I do want to be the boss. This office will suit me.” Her glance around it was somewhere between predatory and proprietary.