Adela crossed her arms in front of her, pretending to be unimpressed. “I thought it was going to take my head off.”
He grinned. “Nah. I weren’t aimin’ for your neck.”
Adela smiled at the way his accent thickened and his speaking patterns changed whenever he was at ease and enjoying himself, as he obviously was now. In the time they’d been here at the station he seemed, almost literally, at home. “You can’t really aim that thing, can you?” she asked dubiously.
“Course not.” He turned again, looking away from the station. “See that tree there?” he asked, pointing at a fat-boled growth about sixty meters distant. She nodded and he handily flipped the boomerang away at a sharp angle that appeared to be taking it nowhere near the tree. It sailed out in a level arc this time, curving gently across the landscape until it impacted the tree, neatly impaling itself into the fleshy pulp of the cactus-like growth. Adela raised an eyebrow and noted that it had hit the tree at a point which, had she been standing in its place, would have been at her eye level.
“Nice.” She tried to insert a tone of annoyance in her voice, but found herself smiling at him.
He laughed again and trotted off to retrieve the boomerang.
“I’m going inside,” she called after him, then turned for the coolness of the station.
The pressure-tap station was well appointed and comfortable, if spartan, in its furnishings. The two-person crew had been informed by Speaker Niles himself that once the process of taking the station off-line had been completed, the station was to be used as guest quarters for the two Imperial visitors. They had cleaned the place thoroughly, even going so far as to put fresh linens in each of the small bedrooms.
Guest quarters, Adela thought sourly as she poured herself a glass of cold water. More like a holding cell.
She had refused to return to the ship and had attempted to convince Montero that it would be better if she and Woorunmarra were closer at hand. After all, she had reasoned, with more than a hundred Levant crew members helping the Westland techs in their efforts to isolate the Leeper control grouping, this whole thing just might be over before anything serious happened.
With warring factions squaring off along the length of the fault line, and with Westland troops now surrounding Leeper at a discreet distance, Montero was not nearly so optimistic. Still, with Woorunmarra echoing Adela’s concern that immediate negotiations would be imperative should an agreement be reached, the Commander reluctantly agreed that the two of them should remain accessible, but safely away from any potential hostilities.
Allowing them to use one of the vacated stations had been Speaker Niles’ idea. Located more than a hundred kilometers south of Leeper, they would be safe from anything occurring at the control station, and yet close enough to organize a settlement between the factions should their presence be needed on short notice. Montero had wanted to station a combat shuttle there, but Adela argued that the presence of the Imperial vehicle at an out-of-the-way spot like this was just asking for the Eastlanders to consider the station a target. The Commander had agreed with her reasoning—again, with reluctance. Besides, she argued, there were dozens of combat shuttles on standby at the Westland capital at Newcastle, and one could be sent if the Congressional Guard Captain in charge of this squad thought it necessary.
As it had turned out, the most dangerous things they’d experienced in the seven days they’d spent here so far had been boredom and the heat. And only she seemed bothered by the latter.
The centrally located control room, where Adela now stood, was dominated by a wall screen displaying a large overlay of the surface structure surrounding the station. Like the overlay they had watched in Niles’ office, this one also showed the location of each station to which it was linked and extended in a four-hundred-kilometer-wide circle. The pressure tap itself was located below the station and, even though off-line from the network, she felt a humming vibration coining from below. The screen display fascinated her. While she had felt nothing since arriving on Pallatin, she knew that minor tremors occurred almost constantly on the planet, and the screen seemed to confirm that fact: Dim flashes of color appeared here and there as the automatic monitors showed even the slightest tectonic activity whenever it occurred.
The flashes came and went randomly, with no set pattern, and yet occasionally followed minor fault lines as they flickered out. The effect reminded her of the way lightning teased the distant sky on Gris whenever a thunderstorm formed. She remembered once, back home, how she and her father had sat on a hillside and watched an approaching storm sweep angrily across the de Parzon valley. The storm itself had never reached their settlement and remained in the distance, too far even to hear the thunder as the flashes played over the horizon. As a child she had always been afraid of the frequent storms on Gris, but remembered how, on that day when her father had called her up from their underground home to watch the silent lightning in the safety of his arms, she had overcome her fear.
She smiled, feeling herself becoming lost in the memory when the screen suddenly winked out, along with all lighting in the station except a dully glowing emergency lamp mounted above each doorway.
There was a low rumbling coming from outside, crossing overhead. The sound carried with it an odd presence that confused her for several long seconds until it struck her why the sound was so clear inside the station: The pressure tap beneath her feet had fallen silent. There was no reassuring vibration, no hum coming from below to indicate the station was alive at all.
Her eyes grew accustomed quickly to the dimness and she found the exit with little trouble, flinging the door wide. A wall of heat hit her in the face as she left the sheltering coolness of the station, and within seconds Adela found herself perspiring beneath the glaring sun as she sought out Woorunmarra.
He and the commanding officer had climbed atop the GEM the guardsman had used for a lookout post, and the three of them, their arms raised to shade their eyes, stared into the sky. He had put his boots back on and retrieved his shirt, tucking it into his belt. The others had come out of the shelter and were likewise trying to follow whatever it was that had attracted the lookout’s attention.
“What is it?” Adela called out, trotting up to stand alongside the GEM. She leaned against the side of the machine, but pulled quickly away from the hot, sun-baked surface. “What happened?”
“Don’t know,” Woorunmarra replied, still gazing skyward. “An aircraft with Eastland markings circled us once at low altitude, then headed in that direction. Didn’t do much, though. Captain Radaker’s already called it in.”
“Could it have had anything to do with the power shutdown inside the station?”
Woorunmarra and Radaker looked at each other, then scrambled down from their perch. The guardsman remained atop the GEM while Adela and the two men headed for the station.
It was still deliciously cool inside, but by the time the three of them finished an inspection of the station searching for the cause of the outage, they could tell the air was beginning to warm considerably. Unfortunately their search turned up nothing that might have been responsible for the power failure; at least, nothing that could be detected and repaired on the site. Whatever the cause of the outage, it didn’t seem to be located here.
“I don’t know what it is,” Radaker said once they were back outside. He stared into the sky in the direction the aircraft had disappeared. “Maybe it did have something to do with it. A magnetic pulse, maybe, tuned to the frequency of the receiving dish—but there should be a buried cable backup.” He cupped his hands over his mouth and called to the lookout on the GEM. “Tell Wyand to get her kit. Tell her to pick four of the others to help her do a complete check on the circuitry.” A young woman, a compact electronics case tucked under her arm, and several of the others came up and, after speaking briefly to the Captain, hurried inside the station.