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"Pompous old goat," Ni Morgana muttered to Benden, but she smiled as the grandchildren were introduced as Meishun, Alun, and Pat, the two boys being in their mid teens.
"This stake could have supported many more families if only those who had said they'd join us had kept their promises," Kimmer went on bitterly. Then, with an imperious gesture, he waved the guests to the table and offered each a glass of rich, fruity red wine.
"Well come, men and woman of the Amherst!" Kimmer toasted, and he touched glasses with each of them.
Bendan noticed, as Ni Morgana did, that the others were served a paler red by Meishun. Watered, Benden thought. They could at least be equal to us, today of all days! Shensu hid his resentment better than his two brothers did. The women seemed not to notice as they passed dishes of cheese bits and tasty small crackers to everyone. Then Kimmer gestured for the guests to be seated. Benden gave a discreet hand signal to the two marines, who took the end seats at the long table and remained watchful, taking only small sips of the celebratory wine.
"Where to start?" Kimmer began, setting his wineglass down deliberately.
"The begi
"Of the end?" And Kimmer's spiteful expression served to increase Benden's dislike.
"If that is when you and the botanist Tubberman sent that homing device," Benden replied encouragingly.
"It was and our position was then hopeless, though few were realists enough to admit it, especially Benden and Boll."
"Could you have gotten back up to the colony ships then?" Ni Morgana asked, nudging Ross Benden when she felt him stir angrily.
"No way." Kimmer snorted with disgust. "They used what fuel the gig had left to send Fusaiyuki up to reco
"It was definitely established that the organism had been carried from the Oort cloud?" Ni Morgana asked, her usually calm voice edged with excitement.
Kimmer gave her a quelling glance. "In the end that was all they discovered despite their waste of fuel and manpower."
"There were only three shuttles left at the landing site. D'you suppose some people managed to escape in them?" Ni Morgana asked in a deliberately soothing tone. Benden could see the glitter of her eyes as she sipped calmly at her wine.
Kimmer glared at her with contempt. "Where could they escape to? There was no fuel left! And power packs for sleds and skimmers were in short supply."
"Barring the lack of fuel, were the shuttles still operational?"
"I said, there was no fuel. No fuel!" He banged his fist on the table.
Benden, looking away from the man's deep bitterness, noted the faint look of amusement on Shensu's face.
"There was no fuel," Kimmer repeated with less vehemence. "The shuttles were so much scrap without fuel. So I haven't any idea why there'd be only three shuttles at Landing. I left the settlement shortly after the bitch blew the gig up." He glared impartially at the Amherst officers. "I had every right to leave then, to establish a stake and do what I could to preserve my own skin. Anyone with any sense, charterer or contractor, should have done the same. Maybe they did. Holed up to wait out the fifty years. Or maybe they sailed away into the rising sun. They had ships, you know. Yes, that's it. Old Jim Tillek sailed them out of Monaco Bay into the rising sun." He gave a bark of harsh laughter.
"They went west?" Benden asked.
Kimmer favored him with a contemptuous glance and made a wild gesture with one arm. "How the hell would I know? I wasn't anywhere near the place."
"And you settled here," Ni Morgana asked blandly, "in the dwelling built by Kenjo and Ito Fusaiyuki."
Her phrasing was, Benden thought, a little unfortunate, for the question angered Kimmer even more. The veins in his temples stood out, and his face contorted.
"Yes, I settled here when Ito begged me to stay. Kenjo was dead. Avril killed him to get the gig. Ito'd had a difficult birth with Chio, and his kids were too young to be useful then. So Ito asked me to take over." Someone's breath hissed on intake, and Kimmer glared at the three sons, unable to spot the culprit. "You'd all have died without me!" he said in a flat but somehow cautionary tone.
"Most assuredly," Shensu said, his surface courtesy not quite masking a deep resentment.
"You have survived, haven't you? And my beacon brought us help, didn't it?" Kimmer banged on the table with both fists and sprang to his feet. "Admit it! My homer and my beacon have brought us rescue."
"They did indeed lead us to you, Mr. Kimmer," Benden said in a tone he barefacedly borrowed from Captain Fargoe when she was dressing down an insubordinate rating. "However, my orders are to search and discover any and all survivors on this planet. You may not be the only ones."
"Oh yes, we are. By all the gods, we're the only ones," Kimmer said, an edge of panic in his voice. "And you can't leave us here!"
"What the lieutenant means, Mr. Kimmer," Ni Morgana put in soothingly, "is that our orders are to search for any other survivors."
"No one else survives," Kimmer said flatly. "I can assure you that." He splashed wine into his glass and drank half of it, wiping his mouth with a trembling hand.
Because Ross Benden was not looking at the old man just then but at the three brothers seated across the table, he caught the glitter in the eyes of Shensu and Jiro. He waited for them to speak up, but they remained silent and inscrutable. Clearly they had knowledge that they would not communicate to their rescuers in front of Stev Kimmer. Well, Benden would see them privately later. Meanwhile, Kimmer was coming across as a somewhat unreliable opportunist. He might assert that he had the right to set off and establish a stake when the colony was obviously in terrible straits, but to Benden, it sounded more as if Kimmer had fled cravenly. Was it just luck that he had known where to find Ito, and this Kenjo's stake?
"My sled had a powerful comunit," Kimmer went on, revived by the wine, "and once I'd erected the beacon on the plateau here, I listened in to what was broadcast. Not that there was anything important beyond where the next Fall was. How many power packs had been recharged. If they had enough sleds able to cover the next Fall. A 1ot of the stakeholders had come back to Landing by then, centralizing resources. Then, after the volcanoes blew, I heard their messages as they scurried away from Landing. There was a lot of static interference, and transmissions got so fragmented that I couldn't hear most of what was said. They were frantic, I can tell you, by the time they abandoned Landing. Then the signals got too weak for me to pick up. I never did find out where they pla
"Oh," he said, waving one hand helplessly, "I tried when the last signal died. I only had one full power pack left by then. I couldn't waste that in futile searches, now could I? I'd Ito and four small kids. Then when Ito got so ill, I went back to Landing to see if they'd left any medicines behind. But Landing was covered in ash and lava great rivers of it, hot and glowing. Damned near singed the plastic off the hull.