Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

Nita sighed. “I wouldn’t wish her on you. I can deal.”

“Yeah, but you may need somebody to vent on afterwards.”

She gave him a sideways smile that said both Thank you and Oh really? “And who do you vent on after I’m done with you?”

Kit thought about that. “Ronan, usually. Then he tells me I’m a gobshite, or some other rude Irish thing, and we move on.”

“Oh well,” Nita said, “as long as there’s a protocol, that’s okay then.”

“Also…” He wasn’t sure how to say this and not have it sound either overbearing or needy. “I kind of hate being split up, this time.”

“Why? Nothing bad’s going to happen. We’ll be fine.”

It wasn’t what he’d meant. “I mean… It’s easier to cope when you’re around. When we’re on errantry. And because of all these people who don’t want to go, even though we’re trying to help them… I think it might be harder than usual to cope.”

“For you and for me, is what you’re saying.” She gave Kit a penetrating look.

“Look, I’m not trying to get into a contest with you about who’s going to have more trouble with this…” Because I’m having trouble with it already!

Nita scowled: but it wasn’t an angry expression… more the one Kit had seen Nita turn on problems she was trying to solve. “Listen, I don’t like being split up either! It’s what you said before: you get used to working one way and then it makes you nervous when you get shoved out of your comfort zone. Or into something big and complicated like this, where it’s already running at full speed like some big machine.”

“And you don’t feel like a cog…”

Nita laughed, though it sounded as if the joke was at her own expense. “Maybe not. But that’s what I am today. What we both are. And I doubt anybody’d thank the cogs if they started deciding they didn’t like where they’d been installed, and just relocated themselves somewhere else in the machinery.”

“Back into the comfort zone…”

“And someplace where they make everything else grind to a halt. Not the kind of thing a wizard does…” Her eyes drifted back to Thesba. “It’s an honor to be involved in this, you know? That’ll help me cope. And you too.”

There were a couple of ways Kit could take that, and they were both good; so he just nodded and smiled. Nita, meanwhile, was still gazing at Thesba, her glance going back and forth between the heads-up display and the moon itself, when her eyes narrowed in sudden concern. “That one flow just keeps getting bigger and bigger…”

“Where?”

“There, that big one. No, on the left.”

“This one?” Kit reached out to toggle one of the touch-sensitive controls on the heads-up display, changing its focus and angle.

“No, the next one over. Is that changing faster?”

“Hope not, because you just know someone’ll blame us for it, and I’m really not up for that!”

Nita braced herself on Kit’s shoulder for a moment to reach forward and swipe the display controls into focusing on the magma flow that was bothering her. But for the moment all Kit could pay attention to was the touch of her hand on his shoulder. The contact was completely innocent, yet also suddenly and irrationally charged. Kit took a deep breath and commanded his body not to do anything sudden.

For once it seemed likely to cooperate… possibly because the exterior view made him feel anything but safe or secure. But this kind of thing keeps happening lately, Kit thought. It was as if the day she said the B word, actually said boyfriend out loud, that Kit’s body decided that it was now okay to start dealing with a simple matter of fact that he’d been—maybe not exactly hiding from himself—but at the very least not taking all that seriously. Especially as regarded the physical implications.

Well, he was thinking about them now. Though it would really help if I had the slightest idea what to do about all of this next! Because on this matter, even the manual had been no help at all.

“It’s okay,” Nita said. Kit snapped back into paying attention to the real world with an inadvertent and unavoidable blush caused by the thought that what she was saying might have been in response to what he was thinking. Because these days you never can tell!… But all her attention was on the heads-up display. “Just a short term phenomenon,” she said, “it’ll die down in a few minutes…”

This phrasing wasn’t calculated to stop him blushing either. All Kit could do, finally, was open his mouth to say “Good, let’s get out of here before somebody starts thinking we’re involved”, but he never got the chance. His manual chose that moment to start pinging softly, a repeated insistent sound.

Nita’s head came up. “They’re paging us, Bobo says; they’ve got the portals to our assignment gates ready.”

Kit sighed. “Well, now that you’ve doomed us, of course they’re paging us. Let’s get right down there and see what screwed-up things start happening because we’re here.”

She snickered at him, and together they and the force field vanished.

***

When they got back to the reception pad on Tevaral the whole area was still alive with incoming humanoids, though the focus seemed to have changed to ones who weren’t from Earth. Right now the pad was flooded with tall gangly blue-skinned Wasath loping off the gate hexes in bright robes charged with the heraldries of their home cities, a big flock of their mini-pterodactyl-looking symbiotes flapping along around them. “They’re a long way from home,” Nita said as the two of them got off the pad.

“So are we,” Kit said, for delta Geminorum wasn’t that far from Sol. He glanced up again at Thesba, which had slid a good ways down the sky but not nearly enough for him, and at the red eye of mu Cephei, which was beginning to remind him uncomfortably of something from a classic fantasy novel. “Where to now?”

Nita had her manual open. “It says there’s an outbound dispatch area off on the far side of the reception pad, by that structure where Ronan went to plug his puptent in. We should go there and wait for transport to our postings.”

So they did. The whole area had the feel of some kind of public parkland that had been co-opted for temporary use; there were walking paths and what seemed like recreational areas, many of them featuring massive tree-like plants with curious ornate carved wooden structures half-hidden high up in their branches—all of these more or less circular, some nearly globular, but all oddly spiny. As they made their way among these Kit found himself wondering if these were meant for Tevaralti kids to play in, not merely treehouses but some kind of stylized nest—or maybe a reference to the way nests once used to be when the Tevaralti’s distant avian forebears actually lived in trees. He knew even from the brief reading he’d had a chance to do so far that the plan was to move as much as possible of the Tevaralti ecosystem to the new planets that had been prepared for them. But what about things like this—places people had loved, favorite spots to visit or play in? Houses, buildings? There was hardly going to be time to save many of those when just getting the people out alive was going to be an issue.

The thought of the children who would never play in these trees again—assuming it was all kids doing the playing—left Kit briefly feeling a strange unfocused melancholy. Going to have to get a grip on that, he thought. Otherwise it’s going to make it hard to concentrate on being useful here. But he suspected that over time the feeling would likely reassert itself, and would make work more challenging no matter what he did. Might as well be ready for it…

The big circular reception-and-support building off to one side was alive with activity, as could be seen even from outside its glass walls; Tevaralti hurrying in all directions, appearing and disappearing off interior transport hexes, but no one in the place apparently paying any attention whatsoever to Kit and Nita as they came in. “Our pickup’s busy, probably,” Nita said.