Dave Duncan - Wildcatter

The mere thought of water made Seth thirsty. “What choice do I have?”

“We can collect rainwater, but you’ll have to boil it with your blazer, and I honestly don’t believe that will sterilize it.”

He hadn’t brought a blazer.

“That’s a last resort. I can dehydrate a bit longer.” This shuttle would still contain everything they could possibly need, but they couldn’t get at it. Niagara would be hours away yet. He stood up, weary all over from the constant gravity overload. “I’ll go and report.”

“Shine your light around for me. There’s a bra about somewhere.”

He laughed. “Modesty at a time like this?”

“Necessity in gravity like this.”

He apologized and found the bra for her.

As soon as he clambered through into the laboratory he heard almost continuous thunder. Gusts of rain sweeping across the plain had cut visibility down to a hundred meters or so. His external thermometer told him that the temperature had dropped twenty degrees. He had estimated that he could stand three hours on the surface, but now that seemed hopelessly optimistic and he had a lot more of this ordeal to look forward to. Even after the storm passed, Golden Hind might have to wait an hour or two for its orbit to line up with Sombrero before it could launch Niagara .

“Prospector to Golden Hind . Do you read?”

“Yes!” JC bellowed. “What the flaming shit have you been doing for so long?”

“You know how time flies when you’re with a pretty girl.”

“They’re alive?”

“Meredith Tsukuba is. She’s suffering from dehydration, malnutrition, probably nitrogen narcosis. Perhaps emotional trauma, but she’s a very tough woman.”

“What about the comas and hallucinations?”

Seth hadn’t made up his mind yet. “Nothing obvious. She’ll need a long decompression after this and certainly quarantine.”

“Master, this is Jordan.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bad news. Prepare for a major storm surge. That hurricane will make landfall right at high tide.”

“No problem,” Seth said. “Let me restate that: I mean, no decision needed. We’re in the shuttle and that’s as safe a place as we’ll find. Our problem is going to be drinking water. We have none left. We’ll try collecting rain; the air is wet enough to swim in right now.” If he opened his vizor to take as much as one sip of rainwater, he would be exposed to biohazard and faced with a long quarantine.

He uploaded his plog, bringing Golden Hind up to date on his situation and what he had learned. He didn’t ask how long the storm would last because he didn’t want to hear the answer. The rest of the team came on to wish him luck, or prayer in one case.

The drawer he had noticed earlier was now explained. He dragged it behind him as he crawled out of the cave on hands and knees—the storm had barely started and already he did not dare try to stand up in it. He scooped a hollow in the sand to anchor the drawer; he packed sand in around it. The rain was almost horizontal, but enough was going in to fill it fairly soon.

A good prospector should never miss a chance to sample. Back in the shuttle, he wrapped up some fish bones, a couple of beetles, and some more fecal pellets, larger than those he had found earlier. Those took him past the total of twenty he had promised JC. Now he just had to deliver them.

He headed back to find Meredith. She had reached the decon room, crawling out on hands and knees. She was doing fine, but did not object when he steadied her as she climbed down into the former lab. In addition to the bra, she wore a bed sheet as a sort of sarong.

“I have always believed that women look sexiest in garments that promise to fall off at any moment.”

“Sexy? If you think I look sexy in my present condition, you really are deprived. Close your eyes.”

“Not likely!” He turned his back instead.

Meredith draped the sheet over him in case he cheated. She crawled outside for a brief needle shower. Once she was dressed again, still wet but not chilled in the muggy heat, they made themselves as comfortable as possible, sitting on the lab table that stood half buried in sand. As a bench it was awkwardly tilted and not high enough for Seth’s legs, but it beat standing.

Her hair was still a tangled disaster and her long ordeal certainly showed, but a few days’ decent diet, some grooming, and something daring to wear, and she would turn all the heads in the dance hall. Her face was broad, showing the bone, portraying strength, not grace. Her eyes were large and steady, very pale gray. She was an Amazon.

“A steak about this size,” she said. “Rare. Fried onions, fried yams, and a magnum of ice-cold champagne. To celebrate my rescue.”

“Is that the biggest steak available?” He realized he was ravenous.

“And decent rags. And a comb, fergawsake.”

“Indecent rags have their good side.” He was amazed by her courage. What she had been through would have reduced most people to gibbering idiots, and it wasn’t over yet. “There’s a dead fish outside.”

“They go stinky very fast in the heat.”

With a roar like the end of several worlds, the rain turned to hail. Stones the size of eyeballs thundered on the shuttle, many bouncing in through the gap. In that gravity they would have battered Seth to pulp if they had caught him out in the open, going to fetch the water from his packs. The cataclysm stopped after ten minutes or so, and he recovered the drawer, pulling it inside. Meredith was waiting with a cup.

“ Votre champagne, madame. Steak to follow.” The hail should melt quickly in the tropical-type heat. Outside, rain and thunder continued. The shuttle trembled as ever-stronger gusts hit the remaining wing.

“I was warned that there’s a storm surge on the way,” he said.

Meredith pulled a face. “We may have to go back inside, then. I’ve seen water almost high enough to flood through into the decon room. If it gets past that, we could be in some trouble.”

He wondered if the whole shuttle could shift, maybe break apart; didn’t say so.

“And the centaurs will come visiting,” she said. “They may bring me fish, but if they see you in that suit, they’ll go for you. That’s what they did to Dylan.” She sipped rainwater.

At this point Reese would say that it wasn’t the centaurs that bothered him, it was the unicorns.

Seth said, “While we’re waiting, and if you’re up to it, I’d like to record your account of what happened from the time you landed on Cacafuego.”

“That’s what you call it? I like our name better. But I’ll try.”

“Prospector to Golden Hind . Can you hear us over the racket?”

Maria’s voice. “Barely, but Control can filter the background out later.”

“Ok. We’re twiddling thumbs here. It’s raining on our picnic. I have Prospector Meredith Tsukuba with me, and she’s going to tell us what went wrong for Galactic’s landing party.”

“If I tell you what went right,” Meredith said. “It will be quicker.”

“When ISLA’s report on GK79986B came out,” Meredith said, “everyone got very excited and also furious that Mighty Mite had cheated and jumped the gun. Galactic rammed us through our final prep in record time and we left orbit just a few days after you did. The scuttlebutt was that Galactic had told Old Doddery not to spare the horses. So he didn’t. We squandered a lot of ferrets on the way—I mean we didn’t wait for them all to return, so our navigators could choose the safest possible haven to aim for in the next jump. That’s standard procedure, of course, but what I heard was that as soon as one came back with readings that met minimum safety standards, we took that route and jumped, abandoning any probes that returned later. We entered orbit around Hesperides on our Day 354 , right about Hesperides’ northern summer solstice. I don’t know what that date would be by your ship’s calendar, but we knew we had won, because there was no sign of you, the Mighty Mite Pirates.”