Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

***

It took longer than an hour for her to throw him out, but it was an enjoyable hour, as simply having him there apparently greatly increased Nita’s confidence in gate handling. Or maybe it just makes her feel more aggressive and more like showing off, Kit thought. Either way, the gate that had been giving her trouble calmed itself down in fairly short order. And if it felt me looking over her shoulder, Kit thought, grimly amused, and that look was really dirty, well, this isn’t about how she feels, or how I feel. It’s about making sure all these people get out of here safely…

Shortly after that, her Natih frilly-dinosaur shiftmate turned up, and he and Kit got into a friendly but somewhat strange discussion about what humans sometimes did over campfires, and the possibility that barbecue was a sign of moral decay. “Beautiful, raw meat like the One intended,” Mr. Frilly cried, gesticulating wildly with his claws and wriggling his whole, beautifully tiger-striped body and shaking his neck-frill and snapping his long, sharp jaws, “what sacrilege is this, to set it on fire?!” It occurred to Kit that here was somebody who would get even more overexcited than his mama—who was one of the “when I stick a fork in it I want to see it bleed” persuasion—about a steak being overdone. He grinned. They have got to meet…

Eventually Kit and Mr. Frilly—whose name Kit kept mangling until he begged to be allowed to use the nickname—agreed that their cultural differences could and should for the time being be set aside in the name of interstellar amity, and pending further discussion over drinks that evening. Kit caught himself rubbing his eyes again at that point, so he said to Nita, “I’ve got kind of a free day because of the excitement last night, so I think I’m going to go back and have a nap so later on I don’t fall asleep in the buffet.”

Nita was presently standing with arms akimbo, deep in an increasingly assertive three-way conversation involving herself, Bobo, and one of the feeder gates that she hadn’t previously disciplined but was about to show the error of its ways. She just nodded at Kit and reached out with one arm to squeeze him around the waist, bumping hips with him while looking off into the distance like someone preparing to tell off the party at the other end of a mobile call. “Sunset?” she said to him.

“Or just after,” Kit said.

She gave him a thumbs up and went back to staring into space. “Now listen to me—” she said, in that tone of voice that Kit had learned over time meant that what you absolutely needed to do, if you had any brains at all or any desire for a quiet life, was listen to her. Kit grinned, waved at her and Mr. Frilly, who was leaning over her shoulder and giving her advice, and took himself back to the short-jump transport pad.

A few moments later he was walking back into the stone circle in early afternoon light. Cheleb was sitting there watching streaming video on one levitating screen and monitoring the gates on another. “Everything behaving itself?” Kit said, pausing by the gate monitors.

“Perfectly quiet,” Cheleb said. “Planning to get more rest?”

“Does it show that much?” Kit said, yawning.

Cheleb gave him an amused look. “Postural, mostly. Djam doing the same. Go on! Will get you up before sunset.”

“No, it’s okay, I’ll tell my manual to handle it.”

“As pleases you.” Cheleb reached out to touch some control on the streaming-video screen. “One thing before you go: watching some Earth children’s entertainment. Amazing your people make it past latency, considering lurking developmental challenges.”

“Oh?” Kit peered around the edge of the floating screen and saw that the image there was paused on the title frame of A Nightmare On Elm Street.

“Most resilient species, your people,” Cheleb said. “No wonder have been invaded so rarely.”

“Uh, yeah,” Kit said, and went to take his nap before he started finding out anything else he didn’t want to know.

***

By sunset Kit had had enough of a nap to leave him feeling energized again, and he came out of his puptent to find Cheleb and the newly awakened Djam setting up the Stone Throne as a food service area and laying out their own contributions to the buffet. Kit snagged himself a plastic cup of the blue “milk” and had a look at the gate-monitoring chart matrix, which Cheleb had used haes wizardry to embed into the back of the Stone Throne so that everyone could see it without trouble.

All the gates were running perfectly. Kit paused by Cheleb when hae was checking over the display; the streaming video screen was blank for the moment. “Finished with Freddy?”

“Oh yes,” Cheleb said. “Following some other lines of investigation now. When you have a moment, need a context-positive explication of Plan Nine From Outer Space.”

Kit spluttered into his sekoldra juice. What have I done! “You’re such a culture junkie,” was all he could say, and went off hurriedly to get some paper plates from his puptent.

Quite shortly people started wandering in from the short-transport pad—Ronan, levitating a deck chair behind him, along with a cooler full of assorted bottles: Dairine, with Spot behind her and toting a couple of Safeway bags full of sandwich makings and assorted junk food; and finally Nita, changed into a flowery blue minidress and leggings and flats, in company with Mr. Frilly, and also carrying some small bags the contents of which weren’t immediately obvious. Everyone gathered in around the “buffet” and started peppering Cheleb and Djam with questions about the food they’d brought, and nabbing the best bits of the Earth food for themselves.

The talk became very eclectic very quickly, but Kit noticed how for the time being at least conversation seemed to be avoiding anything to do with the reason they were all here. For the time being, that suited Kit fine. People sat down on the chairs they’d brought themselves, or on the bits of the Stone Throne that weren’t occupied by food or other people, and ate and drank and talked while the evening grew darker around them.

Djam and Ronan were in the middle of a lively discussion of whether anybody in their right mind should bother watching the three prequel movies of the series he and Kit and Cheleb had just finished—Ronan holding down the “Hell No” position quite strongly, and referring particularly to the first one as ‘a steaming heap of shite’—when a voice from the darkness said, “Well, I know opinion’s divided on that one, but don’t you think that’s a tad harsh?”

Heads snapped up all around the stone circle. “Tom?”

Kit was surprised to see Tom, normally very much the suburban polo-shirt-and-chinos type, come wandering in out of the dark in clothes more like Ronan’s than anything else: dark parka, black jeans, hiking boots, with a long dark slender something over his shoulder, hard to see by only the light of the electric campfire. Ronan looked him up and down in mild approbation. “Going stealthy tonight while you check up on the troops?”

“Worked pretty well for Henry the Fifth,” Tom said. “Just passing through: I’ve got a fair number of people to check on tonight. But I heard rumors of what was going on over here, and Carl sent me to see how the potato salad was.”

“That green stuff’s as close as you’re getting,” Dairine said, pointing at a bowl of one of Djam’s vegetarian goodies. “Kind of spicy. If you like wasabi, you’ll be okay…”

“Sounds lovely. May I?”

“Please, Supervisory,” Djam said, “anything you like!”

Shortly Tom was sitting down with a paper plate and digging in, having put down what he was carrying when he arrived. “Is that a wand I see?” Ronan said. “Would’ve thought you were above that kind of thing, the age you are.”