“Avril favors us so seldom with her company that I don’t worry that she’d discover the hoard,” Emily said with a wry smile. “I’ve also managed to have Lemos, Kimmer, and Nabol assigned to different sections, with few occasions to return here. ‘Divide and conquer,’ the man said.”
“Inappropriate, Emily,” Paul replied, grinning.
“If, and I do stress that improbability, Avril should discover and use Kenjo’s purloined fuel,” Ongola began, holding up a finger for each point, “manage to find the missing pieces, and fly the gig out of here undetected, she would have a half-full tank. She would not then drain the ships’ reserves to a danger point. Frankly, we would be well rid of her and whoever she deigns to take with her. I think we dwell too much on the matter. Those seismic reports from the eastern archipelago are far more worrying. Young Mountain is smoking again and twitching its feet.”
“I agree,” Paul said, quite willing to turn to the more immediate problem.
“Yes, but for what purpose did Kenjo take so much fuel?” Emily asked. “You haven’t answered that question. Why would he risk the safety of passengers and cargo? And he is a genuinely eager colonist! He’s already chosen his stake acreage.”
“A pilot of Kenjo’s ability risked nothing,” Paul replied smoothly. “His shuttle flights were without incident. I do know that flying is his life.”
Ongola regarded the admiral in mild surprise. “Hasn’t he done enough flying for one lifetime?”
Paul smiled with understanding. “Not Kenjo. What I do completely appreciate is that flying a mere power sled is a come-down, a loss of prestige, face, considering the kind of craft he’s flown and where he’s been. You say that he’s chosen his acres, Emily? Where?”
“Down beyond what people are beginning to call the Sea of Azov, as far away from Landing as he can get but on rather a pleasant plateau, to judge by the probe report,” Emily replied. She hoped that the meeting would conclude soon. Pierre had promised her a special meal, and she found that she was enjoying those quiet dinners more than she had thought she would.
“Howinell is Kenjo going to get those tons of fuel there?” Benden asked.
“I suspect we’ll have to wait and see,” Ongola replied with the trace of a smile on his lips. “He’s got the same right as everyone else to use power sleds to transport his goods, and he’s done some close trading with work units at the commissary. Shall I have a word with Joel about Kenjo’s requisitions?”
Emily glanced quickly at Paul, who was adamant in his defense of Kenjo. “Well, I don’t like unsolved riddles. I’d prefer some sort of explanation, and I think you would, too, Paul.” When Benden nodded reluctantly, Emily said that she would speak to Joel Lilienkamp.
Which brings us back to that third tremor,” Paul Benden said. “How’s work progressing on buttressing the stores warehouses and the one with all the medical supplies?
We can’t afford to lose such irreplaceable items.”
Ongola consulted his notes. He wrote with a bold angular script that looked, from Emily’s angle, like ancient manuscript ornamentations. All three of them, as well as most section heads, had made a point of reverting to less sophisticated methods of note-taking than speech processors. The power packs, whose rechargeability was good but not infinite, were to be reserved for essential uses, so everyone was rediscovering the art of calligraphy.
“The work will be completed by next week. The seismic net has been extended as far as the active volcano in the eastern archipelago and to Drake’s Lake.”
Paul grimaced. “Are we going to let him get away with that?”
“Why not?” Emily asked, grinning. “No one’s contesting it. Drake was the first to see it. A community settling there would have ample space to grow, and plenty of industry to support it.”
“Is it scheduled for a vote?” Paul asked after an appreciative sip of his brandy.
“No,” Ongola said with another hint of a grin. “Drake is still campaigning. He doesn’t want any opposition, and whatever there might have been is now worn down.”
Paul snorted, and Emily cast her eyes upward in amused exasperation with the flamboyant pilot. Then Paul pensively regarded the remainder of the brandy in his glass. As Emily went on to the next point on their informal agenda, he took another sip, rolling the liquor around in his mouth, savoring the soon-to-be-exhausted beverage. He could and did drink the quikal but found it harsh to a palate trained to subtleties.
“We are proceeding well in general terms,” Emily was saying briskly. “You heard that one of the dolphins died, but Olga’s death was accepted by her community with considerable equanimity. According to Ann Gabri and Efram, they had expected more fatalities. Olga was, apparently,” she added with a grin, “older than she said she was and hadn’t wished to let her last calf go into the unknown without her.”
All three chuckled and followed Paul’s lead as he raised a toast to maternal love.
“Even our . . . nomads . . . have settled in,” Emily went on, after checking her notepad. “Or, rather, spread out.” She tapped it with her pencil, still unused to handwriting notes but struggling to get accustomed to archaic memory assists. The only voice-activated device still operable was the surface interface with the main computer banks on the Yokohama, but it was rarely used anymore. “The nomads’ve made rather a lot of inroads on clothing fabrics, but when those are depleted, that’s the end of it and they’ll have to make their own or trade, the same as the rest of us. We have located all their campsites. Even on foot, the Tuareg contingent can travel astonishing distances, but they camp for a while, in two separate sections.”
“Well, they’ve a whole planet to lose themselves in,” Paul said expansively. “Have they posed any other problems, Ongola?”
The dark man shook his heavy head, lowering the lids of his deep set eyes. He was agreeably surprised by the nomads’ smooth transition to life on Pern. Every week each tribe sent a representative to the veterinary sheds. The forty-two mares brought in coldsleep by the colony were all in foal, and the nomads’ leaders had accepted the fact that a mare’s gestation period was eleven months on Pern as it had been on Earth.
“As long as the vets keep their sense of humor. But Red Hanrahan seems to understand their ways and deals with them.”
“Hanrahan? Didn’t his daughter find the dragonets?”
“She and a boy, one of the travelers,” Ongola replied. “They also provided the corpses which the bios have been clucking over.”
“Could be useful creatures,” Benden said.
“They already are,” Emily added stoutly.
Ongola smiled. One day, Ongola thought, he would find a nest at the critical hatching point and he would have one of those charming and friendly, nearly intelligent creatures as a pet. He had once learned Dolphin, but he had never been able to overcome his fear of being constricted underwater to share their world properly. He needed space about him. Once, when Paul was sharing one of the long watches with him on the journey to Pern, the admiral had argued most eloquently that the dangers of outer space were even more inimical to human life than those of inner sea.
“Water is airless,” Paul had said, “although it contains oxygen, but when and if the Pure Lives’ hold on human adaptations is broken, humans will be able to swim without artificial help. Space has no oxygen at all.”