Now, on the sandy beach after a flitter wreck, Ronnie thought he knew what he looked like. He said nothing, but picked up two of the remaining duffles, staggered a bit, then dropped them.
“What now?” asked George.
“The beacon,” Ronnie said, clambering onto the flitter. He wished he could remember how he’d gotten out of it. “We need to signal for a pickup, unless you plan to swim back to the mainland.”
“You gave it to me,” Bubbles said. She looked worried. “You don’t remember?”
He didn’t remember. He crouched on the flitter’s canopy, suddenly aware that he was not functioning in some important way. He looked around, blinking. The sea, the sand, the trees: he remembered that. They’d crashed the flitter, and whoever owned it would be furious. Who had crashed the flitter? They weren’t designed to crash easily and he and George were both good pilots. He looked at the flitter itself, at the large hole in the engine section, the scorchmarks black on the outer skin. “What happened?” he said, knowing it was a stupid question, though it was all that occurred to him.
“Damnation!” George’s voice, closer. “He’s concussed; he doesn’t know what’s happened or—c’mon, ladies, we’ve got to get him away from here.”
He heard Raffa ask why, and Bubbles remind George that injured people shouldn’t be moved until medical personnel arrived, but someone stronger than Raffa or Bubbles pulled him off the flitter and slung him over a muscular shoulder. That completed his collapse; he spewed the breakfast he’d eaten down George’s legs and knew nothing more for a time he could not measure.
Ronnie awoke lying on his back with the sun prying his eyelids apart and someone beating his head with a collection of spoons. At least that’s what it felt like. He had no desire to move, though he would have appreciated quiet, darkness, and a cool wet cloth on his forehead. A sympathetic murmur would have been nice too. Instead the only voices he recognized sounded angry and frightened.
“If my father knew—” That had to be Bubbles, pulling off her best daughter-of-greatness act.
“And what makes you think he doesn’t?” asked a man’s voice, in a tone that meant Bubbles was making no impression at all. Or the wrong one.
An instant’s pause, then, “What do you mean, he knows?”
Laughter with no humor in it, the kind of thing Ronnie had heard only a few times in his life; it frightened him then, and now.
“I don’t suppose he knows his daughter’s involved, no.” The man’s voice had some familiar tone that Ronnie felt he should know but could not quite recognize. “But something like this, as big as it is, on his favorite resort world: how could he not know?”
“Something like what?” That was Raffaele, Ronnie thought. A girl who believed that the facts would explain themselves.
Another man’s voice, this one quite different. “Oh, I ’spect you know, little lady.” Every hair on Ronnie’s body rose at that “little lady.” He wanted to leap up and knock that voice into the sea, but he could not move. “It’s a hunter’s paradise, isn’t it? And your dad, or maybe it’s her dad, is a famous sportsman, isn’t he? And the whole point of sport is you give the prey a chance, eh? Isn’t it? That makes it a challenge, see?”
The reiterated questions struck Ronnie as false, theatrical, like something from a storycube. Certain dialects did that, he thought.
“Manhunting,” the first voice said. “As you very well know, since you came here for that purpose.” Ronnie tried to process that: manhunting? Manhunts were for escaped criminals, or lost children.
“But it can go two ways, see?” the second voice interrupted. “Hunting predators it can always go two ways, and men are the most dangerous. There was a story once—”
“Everyone knows the story, Sid; be quiet.” The command in that first voice finally made the connection for Ronnie. It sounded like Captain Serrano. It sounded like Captain Serrano the time she had ordered him off her bridge, or the time he had overheard her talking to Aunt Cece about battle. He struggled to open his eyes and found himself blinking up at a dark unsmiling face. “Well,” the man said. “And what have we here, young man? Who are you?”
“Ronald Vertigern Boniface Lucien Carruthers,” he heard himself say, as if in one of the practice sessions in the squad. “Royal Aero-Space Stellar Service.” He looked around, now that he could see, and there was the odious George, looking remarkably tidy with a gag stuffed in his mouth and an angry expression on the rest of his face. Bubbles looked almost as angry; he wondered if she was going to come out of her usual wild-blonde disguise for the occasion. And Raffa—whom he hoped would someday be his Raffaele—had no expression at all. He had never seen her like that, and he hoped he never would again.
The dark face above his did not smile. “Royal ASS, eh? And you probably think that means something here.”
Ronnie had heard that version of his service’s initials before; he ignored it now, as beneath the notice of a wounded officer. “And you?” he asked, as he wondered which of his limbs still worked. “I have not the honor—”
A snort of contempt, and a growl from others he had not yet noticed. “That’s the truth, little boy soldier—you have not the honor indeed. You don’t know what honor is.”
From a little distance, he heard another mirthless chuckle. “Little peep plonks down in a flitter and bumps his poor little head, pukes out his guts, and thinks he has a right to say the H-word. . . .”
“Shut up, Kev. We don’t have time for your nonsense any more than his.” A jerk of the head indicated George. The dark eyes contemplated Ronnie. “But you—you’re going to give us the truth, Mister Ronald Vertigern Boniface Lucien Carruthers of the Royal Assholes. You didn’t learn to fly with that bunch of old ladies, boy: who are you really from?” Hard hands grabbed his ears and shook his head. He had thought it hurt before; now he knew it had merely been uncomfortable. He felt his eyes water, and hated the man for that. His stomach roiled, and he choked back another wave of nausea.
“I told you,” Bubbles said, before he could get any words out. “We’re from the Main Lodge; we wanted to get away from the fox hunting—”
“And try other game?” suggested another voice he could not see.
“And just play around,” Ronnie said. At the moment he didn’t care if he did die; his head might as well have a real axe in it as whatever was causing what he felt. He knew his voice sounded weak and querulous; he felt weak and querulous. “My aunt Cece—you wouldn’t know her—and that demon captain of hers wanted me to spend all day every day on a horse chasing some miserable little furry thing over fields of cold mud and fences designed to make horses fall down and dump their riders.” He took a breath; no one interrupted. “And we got tired of it,” he said, closing his eyes against the bright glare of the forest canopy. “We wanted to rest. We wanted to have fun. I asked Bubbles if there wasn’t some place on this miserable dirtball that wasn’t cold and muddy and full of horses, and she said let’s go to the islands.”
“Oblo?” The first voice seemed to be addressing someone else; Ronnie gave himself up to contemplation of his headache and the mystery of his stubbornly unhelpful arms and legs. He finally thought he felt something weighing him down, or tying him down, or something of that sort. External, not internal—he was sure he was wiggling his toes. For some reason, the discovery that he probably didn’t have a broken neck did not make him feel better.
“No weapons—not with them or on the flitter, ’cept a cateye. That’s standard survival gear on flitters, most worlds.” Oblo, if that was the speaker, had the same businesslike tone as the first voice. “Food and minor medical supplies in stuff they’d pulled out to take with them. All the IDs check out, as far as we can know without accessing a link. Flitter ID was still in the active comp, no sweat getting it out; it’s Lord Thornbuckle’s all right.”