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BOOK III
LOST AND FOUND
In retrospect, the trouble with Scott started immediately, but it took a few days before Amber caught on to just how bad it was. She knew she was as guilty as everyone else of letting him take over. She also knew that she didn’t want to be the one in charge when the whole human race was just forty-eight people on an alien world with a handful of supplies camping in spitting distance of the melted remains of a ship that could very well be radiating cancer into every living thing for miles around. Oh no. Fuck that. Scott could be in charge of that mess all he wanted.
And if there was one thing Scott was good at, it was putting himself in charge. Before the sun came up over the remains of the Pioneer, he’d made two trips to the top of the ridge and compiled a complete inventory of what they had left, which wasn’t much but was still more than they should have had.
Tents, for example. All the tents that had been up on the ridge had been incinerated in the Pioneer’s explosion. Not just burned. Erased. There was nothing left up there to prove there’d ever been a camp at all except a melted heap of glass and metal that had probably been one of the solar generators. But as bad as that was, it could have worse.
Not knowing how to set up an outpost, Scott had apparently just dumped the supplies in piles wherever he thought he might like to put a building someday. Most of those piles had been up on the ridge, but he did have a number of tents down by the lakeshore, marking the proposed site of the colony’s pump house and filtration station, to hold the necessary equipment and materials until he’d decided exactly when and where to begin construction.
“Tents?” Maria interrupted immediately upon hearing this. In her firm, furious tone, Amber heard again her threat to sue the Manifestors and their Director right down to the ground. “You said there weren’t enough tents! I was in a sleeping bag and you had more tents the whole time?”
“They’re for keeping the equipment dry,” Scott answered. “They aren’t for personal use.”
“Well they are now, bucko. It’s pouring! Where are they?”
“I haven’t decided how to assign them,” said Scott, and whenever Amber thought about it, she always came back to that as the only moment when someone might have been able to put a stop to things. But you can’t take out the guy in charge without replacing him. And she did not want that job.
So when people started arguing and those angry voices started climbing and Scott was holding up his hands in an ineffectual bid for silence, Amber said, “That was smart, Scott.”
He swung around to glare at her, holding up one hand against the storm—the miraculous storm which had probably saved their lives but which showed no sign of blowing off any time soon.
“I’m not being sarcastic,” she told him. “That was smart. If you hadn’t set that stuff aside, we wouldn’t have anything right now. How many did you save?”
And that was the word that did it. Save. Like he’d pla
Scott squared his shoulders and gave his crewman’s jacket a brisk tug. “Six. Two command units and four bivies.”
“What the heck is a bivy?” Maria wanted to know.
“How big are they?” Amber asked.
“Not very,” someone else answered. Eric Lassiter, one of the soldiers Jonah had sent her. “What he’s calling a command unit is just your typical one-room dome tent. Allegedly, it could hold eight people.”
“If they were greased up,” Crandall added dubiously. “And drunk.”
“And a bivy is pretty much a sleeping tube.”
“More like a body-condom,” inserted Crandall.
“Two people could share one if they were really, really cozy, but even if you packed them all full, most of us are going to be out in the weather.”
“Well, that’s bullshit!” said Maria, doubtless ready to add a few new names to her list of impending lawsuits for her brother to receive back on Earth.
“No,” said Amber, as quietly as the driving wind and rain allowed. “That’s just the way it is. Getting mad won’t help.”
There were mutters, but that was all, and even Maria didn’t protest when Scot kept one of the command units for himself, because he was in command. He gave the bivies to the Fleetmen—Eric, Dag, Crandall and Mr. Yao. The last tent, he gave to the women at the end of a chivalrous and deeply concerned speech in which he referred to those women, not just once or twice but at least a dozen times, as resources. And Amber let him. So it was her fault too.
She didn’t even get a space in the tent. Despite Eric’s assertion that eight people could fit, only six of them actually did and there were eleven women. Amber didn’t try to bully her way in, because she knew she was fat and didn’t need to hear it again.
As for the rest of the equipment Scott had set aside, they had another solar generator, but nothing that really needed ru
The medikit belonged to Mr. Yao and during the next morning’s debriefing, which Amber was not invited to but attended anyway, he opened it up and read out its contents: Six rolls of sterile gauze, one box of medium grade self-sticking bandages, a tube of burn relief gel, a tube of antibacterial ointment, a bottle of low-dose aspirin, a bottle of extra-strength aspirin, and a dermispray pen with twelve doses of nalfentypine.
“What’s that?” Scott wanted to know.
“A synthetic opiate used for pain management.”
“That’s part of the kit?” Eric asked, not quite smiling.
“Of course not,” said Mr. Yao. “It came with the surgical supplies you brought, but they were lost on the ridge. This was with my personal effects.”
“And how did that happen?”
Mr. Yao looked at him without emotion. “In my medical opinion, I required sedation.”
Eric held up his hands in surrender.
“I require sedation,” Crandall said hopefully.
Mr. Yao ignored him and looked instead at Scott. “I want you to know that I have this, and I want you all to know where to find it and how to use it, because this is now the only source of anything like anesthetic we possess. But I think it would be best not to let everyone know of its existence, because it would also make an extremely effective form of suicide.”
“So does that lake,” said Amber, the first remark she’d made at that meeting.
“Miss Bierce, if you’re going to eavesdrop, at least do it quietly. We’re trying to have a debriefing.”
Mr. Yao ignored Scott and turned to her. “Drowning oneself, like hanging oneself with one’s shirtsleeve or cutting one’s wrists with broken glass or any number of options presently available to us, requires a great deal more courage and determination than putting a dermisprayer against one’s arm and pressing a button. I would rather save it for our first broken leg than make it available to those seeking a quick, painless way out of our present circumstance.”
“Good point.” And because he was glaring at her, Amber looked at Scott and said, “I guess it should stay here, huh?”
They were all in Scott’s tent at the time, the command unit, the only place they could all squeeze together out of the drumming rain and wind. Scott blinked around all the same, as if he expected a bank vault to open up behind him. “Why here?” he asked.
“Shouldn’t the really important stuff be with the guy in charge?”
Mr. Yao waited, holding the medikit on his lap.
“Well, I…guess I have more room,” said Scott cautiously.
Mr. Yao passed it over.
“So…So I guess I’m in charge of the food and stuff too?”
That was a lot more unsettling than letting the man babysit the first aid supplies.
“Someone ought to be,” Amber said, hoping her hesitation hadn’t been too obvious. “And the rations do need to be kept dry.”
“And away from hoarders,” said Eric. “Because there will be hoarders.”
Amber started to nod her agreement, then noticed they were all looking at her. “You know, every now and then, I manage to go two, sometimes three whole minutes without eating,” she snapped, and they all looked away again. “I know the food is finite. I also think we need to start thinking now about what we’re going to eat when it’s gone.”
Scott frowned at her, but the severity of this effort only made him look younger and more uncertain. “You mean…” He eyed the other men in the tent and lowered his voice a little. “…people?”
Amber rocked back. “What?”
“We don’t have to talk about this until someone actually dies,” said Eric.
“Oh my God,” Amber said, staring at both of them. “No, I meant looking for fish or rabbits or whatever freak moose thing was shouting up the place last night! People? You thought I wanted to eat people?!”
“We’ll get to the native flora and fauna as soon as we’re able to arrange teams for reco
She could have pressed the matter. None of the Fleetmen seemed eager to jump in, and other than making sure the public was kept under control, Scott himself seemed to have run out of steam. So she could have easily forced them all to face the food issue head-on. Instead, she sat back and let the whole thing drop.
Scott opened the medikit and studied the contents, then closed it again and looked around at them. “Then I guess the only other thing we need to talk about is the Pioneer’s salvage prospects. Do I have a volunteer to head that team?”
“Salvage?” Amber checked the others, but they seemed as stu
“The escape bays were designed to survive catastrophic failure of the ship. The beacons may still be recoverable.”
Amber stared at him, utterly unable to make those words make any kind of sense, given the situation. “Mr. Scott,” she said at last, making a real effort to speak softly, reasonably. “How far are we from the ship?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”