Next
Still, the impact was enough to stun her momentarily.
The feel of something cold at her feet slowly brought her back to consciousness. Where was she? What was she doing sleeping while sitting down? And why was there water --- cold water --- swirling around her feet?
The memories all came back to her in a flash. The Jiltan'th. The explosion. The lifeboat. The crash landing.
Shaking her head and looking around, she saw that the starboard wall had cracked open, allowing the water to pour in. Looking out the viewport she saw that the lifeboat was floating in a large body of water. Though with the water pouring in it didn't appear as if it would remain floating for very much longer. She hadn't come all this way since the explosion of the Jiltan'th only to die of drowning, especially as it was a slow and agonizing process for a Prime such as herself.
She fumbled with the buckles of the straps holding her to her seat. They wouldn't open. She pulled at the straps. The webbing still stubbornly refused to yield.
She was starting to panic when she remembered that she was still wearing a gold chain around her neck. Forcing herself to remain calm, she reached up to her throat to unclasp it. As she dropped the chain into her pocket greenish sparks shot out between her breasts, burning small holes in her coveralls around her nipples.
The sudden release of energy did more than merely burn holes in her coveralls, flinging her back into her seat. The impact tore the seat off of its moorings, causing it to crash into the seat behind her. Lying on her back she quickly tore off the straps holding her to the seat, the tough webbing unable to withstand her strength --- the now fully unleashed strength of a young Prime --- for even a single second.
Getting up to her feet she struggled to the exit hatch and tried to open it. It was jammed; not even the full strength of an Arion Prime could dislodge it. The water kept rising, now it was almost up to her knees. She moved to the adjacent viewport. It was cracked, but seemed to be still holding. She was about to try to smash it open when she looked again. It would be too small to slip through, even for her.
Turning and making her way against the current, she reached the crack in the starboard wall. Even though the crack was more than wide enough to let in a good flow of water, it wasn't wide enough to let her out. But she wasn't about to stand idly by while water completely filled the interior. Especially since drowning would be an excruciatingly slow and agonizing process for a Prime. Grabbing the two sides of the crack and ignoring the jagged edges as they bit into her hands, she tried to pull the crack wider apart. The tough metal resisted her efforts. She strained harder.
The muscles on her arms and on her back expanded to their full size as she exerted herself. Some of the seams on her coveralls began to give way, unable to contain the expanding muscles. Finally the thick reinforced Vendorian steel began to give way. But only a little, still not enough to let her slip through.
Bracing herself against the flow of cold water, she sat down on the floor of the cabin where the crack was at its widest. Putting her back against one side of the crack, she was able to get one foot on the other side. Slowly, her strong thigh muscles were able to force open the crack a little further. Enough to let her put her other leg into play.
Finally the damaged metal gave way before the inexorable pressure of her strongest muscles. Once she was through the Vendorian steel, the ceramic heat shield barely impeded her progress. The increased flow of water almost knocked her over and forced her to swallow some water, before she was able to squeeze through to the outside, surfacing nearly twenty feet from the lifeboat.
Treading water and coughing her lung clear, she looked around herself. It was a bright sunny day. The water was cold but calm, the lifeboat bobbing gently in the swell. She was in a small cove--- she could see land no more than a couple of hundred yards away, a dark green forest beyond a narrow beach of brilliant white sand, with tall snow-capped mountains in the distance. Turning, she started swimming with powerful strokes toward land.
On the third stroke she remembered that there had been two men with her in the lifeboat. Stopping, she treaded water while she looked around again, considering what to do.
There was no sign of the two men. No heads bobbing in the water. No footprints marking the sandy beach. Deciding that they were still aboard, she turned around and swam back to the lifeboat, aiming for the cockpit at the bow.
Peering in through the cracked windscreen she saw the two men, still strapped into their seats, slumped forward. She was wondering whether they were dead, whether Betas could have survived an impact that had knocked her unconscious, even if they'd had the advantage of being able to see exactly where they were going and when they were going to hit. She breathed a sigh of relief when one of them stirred.
As she continued to look, Tillek reached over to Velder and felt for his pulse. Apparently he found it, for he quickly unbuckled himself and then unbuckled Velder. Lifting Velder up to his shoulder in a fireman's carry, he turned and went to the cockpit door.
The door leading to the flooded passenger compartment. The compartment with a jammed exit hatch. The compartment with a cracked wall, a crack wide enough for a young girl to slip through, but not wide enough for a grown man.
She quickly tapped on the windscreen to get his attention. When he didn't seem to hear her she tapped louder. cracking the windscreen further. When he finally turned around and saw her, she pointed to the door and shook her head. When he nodded to tell her that he understood, she motioned him to stand to one side.
Balling up her right hand into a fist, she swung at the cracked windscreen. One half of it disintegrated in a shower of reinforced transparent metal. Her hands made quick work of the remainder, opening up a hole big enough for a man to come through.
Holding on to the edge of the windscreen frame with one hand and reaching in with the other, she grabbed Velder as Tillek handed him up to her. Placing him on the roof of the lifeboat she then reached in for Tillek, also hoisting him onto the roof.
"How is he?" she asked, pulling herself up onto the roof to join them and wiping the wet hair out of her face.
"He's still breathing." His hands probed Velder's body. "And nothing seems broken. I think he just knocked himself out. It was a pretty rough landing."
A quick peek with her tachyon vision confirmed half of what he said. She'd had adequate personal experience with the other half. "You're telling me? The hatch is jammed, and the side is cracked. I... I had to break my way out."
He stared at her, as if noticing her torn coveralls for the first time. "You... you went through the hull?" Through the hull of an interstellar-capable craft? Through the thick Vendorian steel? He didn't even want to try to calculate how much force that must have taken.
She didn't care to dwell on the past. Not that dwelling on the future seemed to be all that much better. She crossed her arms over her chest and hugged herself. "Tillek, what do we do now?"
Just then a sudden swell lifted the nose of the lifeboat, tilting it at a dangerous angle. Tillek grabbed Velder's body as they both started sliding toward the stern. Leysen grabbed hold of Tillek's arm, at the last possible instant remembering not to close her hand too tight.
All three of them continued sliding toward the stern, Leysen and Tillek using their free hands to try to find some kind of handhold on the smooth roof.
Stiffening her fingers, Leysen jabbed her hand at the roof. Her fingers dug a gouge before sinking almost to their roots in the ceramic heat shield. Holding on to the roof with one hand and to Tillek with the other, she was able to halt their slide just as Velder's feet started to go over the side.
She held on until the wave passed. When the lifeboat leveled again, she pulled the two men back to the relative safety of the center of the roof. She then dug a few more handholds into the roof to prevent another occurrence of the near disaster.
"What do we do now?" she repeated her question as she turned to Tillek.
Tillek looked all the way around them, holding his arm where she had gripped it --- fortunately without breaking anything --- before finally settling his gaze on the shore. "Do you think you can push the lifeboat to the shore before it sinks?"
She followed his gaze, rubbing the bridge of her nose with her right forefinger as she tried to gauge the distance to the shore. "I... I think so. I can try." She quickly began stripping off what was left of her torn coveralls. He did not avert his eyes as she stripped down to her blue school uniform and then dived over his head and into the water.
Leysen quickly discovered that pushing something as big and as massive as the lifeboat was not the same as merely swimming. It took a while before she could see that she was making any headway at all. She tried not to think about the large shark-like fish that she had learned about, big enough to swallow a grown man --- let alone a girl --- whole. Eventually however, the nose of the lifeboat grounded about twenty feet from the shore, without her encountering any fish at all, man-eater or otherwise.
Swimming up to the bow she helped Tillek and Velder --- who had by now revived --- down from the roof. The three waded ashore with Tillek helping Velder. The two Betas immediately collapsed onto the sand. Leysen collapsed next to them, feeling more exhausted than she could ever remember feeling.
However, Tillek would not let them rest for long. He roused the others to begin salvaging what they could from the lifeboat. Not too surprisingly, the bulk of the work fell to Leysen, at least until she could open the door from the cockpit to the passenger cabin, pushing against the water pressure.
Quite by chance, Leysen had grounded the lifeboat right at the peak of the tide --- not that the planet's two small moons generated much in the way of tides. As the tide began to ebb, the water inside was less than waist deep. Still, even after unlocking the doors to the storage compartments under the floor of the passenger cabin it required the young girl's strength to open the doors against the weight of the water flooding the cabin.
Knowing that her own survival depended on salvaging everything that they could from the lifeboat, Leysen threw herself into the task, lending her strength wherever the man directed. Under the circumstances, the indignity of the situation --- that she was doing menial labor at the direction of two Betas --- did not occur to her.
Unfortunately, the salvage operation didn't take very long. It was exactly as they had feared. Storage compartments one and three had been holed and were now completely empty, all of their contents sucked out into the vacuum of space. They carried the contents of storage compartment two out, setting it on the beach to dry.
While the two men continued to dismantle what equipment they could from the lifeboat, Leysen found a stand of something similar to bamboo. Breaking off cane after cane and plunging them into the sand, she quickly built a crude lean-to in order to shelter them and their supplies. Most of the equipment was waterproof, but there was no point in taking chances. Especially since dark ominous clouds were building up on the western horizon, out over the ocean. She then helped tear out the superconducting cables from the damaged equipment. Even without electricity they could always find uses for the strong but flexible substance --- she overheard Velder mentioning something about bowstrings to Tillek.
Finally --- just as the light was beginning to fade --- Velder decided that they had gotten everything that they could from the lifeboat. Tillek called an end to the salvage operation. And just in time, as a cold rain began falling on them less than two minutes later.
With the salvage operation, such as it was, completed, the three of them huddled in the lean-to, trying to rest. Leysen was careful to stay in her end of the lean-to, and the two men were just as careful to remain in their end, resuming the routine that they had developed aboard the lifeboat.
The rain continued on through the evening and well into the night. The wind rose, threatening to blow away their little lean-to, until Leysen got out to chop down more branches to reinforce it.
The storm picked up in intensity. There was no way to keep themselves dry. Eventually the two Betas found themselves huddling together for warmth. Despite her misgivings, Leysen shortly found herself joining the men in order to contribute her body heat, and to share theirs.
The two men were too cold and too tired to do anything more than to lean against her back. Nobody felt much like talking.
Leysen tried to sleep but could not, despite the day's exertions. She started at every little sound, her eyes sparkling as she looked around to determine the cause.
There was nothing other than insects and a few small birds, all trying to find shelter from the storm.
A shiver went through Tillek's body as he felt something come to rest against his back. A shiver that had absolutely nothing to do with the chill.
He was fully aware that it was the young girl's body that was against his back. As attractive as she was --- and he had to admit, she was very attractive --- she was still a young girl. And a Prime. He had seen Primes in action often enough to know that he was much too close to this one for comfort. Never mind that she was helping to keep him warm. He'd rather die by freezing than by being crushed by a Prime's casual strength.
Not that he was about to tell her that. There was no point in deliberately giving her --- or any other Prime --- a reason to kill a Beta.
Velder had been lucky to survive his first encounter with her. If he hadn't come by when he had, to separate the two of them, there was no telling what might have happened. That had been as close as he ever wanted to get to a Prime --- especially an amorous female.
True, it could be useful to have her around. As long as she directed her muscles to their survival. But if she ever decided that she didn't need them, or even want them around...
Well, he would have to keep that from happening. He'd have to make her see that she needed the two men. After all they had been on this planet before, she hadn't.
That wasn't the only problem, though. Any girl her age has her own set of problems.
They'd already had a taste of it in their first encounter.
He knew that many male Betas fantasized about being with a female Prime. For all he knew, Velder was one of them. But fantasy and reality were two completely different things. A Prime lost in the throes of her passions could easily crush a Beta in her arms without even noticing.
It had taken all of their combined strength to pry Velder out of her embrace, and she had been wearing gold around her throat. Without the gold... He didn't even want to think about that.
She was attractive and her body looked deceptively soft --- the stuff that fantasies were made off --- but he knew that her body was far from soft. What chance would a Beta have against somebody who could tear her way through the Vendorian steel of the lifeboat's hull? That was something that he did not want to experience first-hand.
At the same time, she was a young girl, stranded on this planet. It would be up to the two adults to take care of her.
Finally he was able to fall asleep, ignoring the warm Prime behind his back.
The dawn broke bright and clear, with hardly a cloud in the sky. If not for the broken branches strewn on the beach there might not have been a storm at all the previous night. Leysen was the first one up --- after finally having gotten to sleep --- her Prime body having recovered from the previous day's exertions much faster than the men's Beta bodies could. Carefully crawling out of the lean-to without disturbing the two sleeping Betas, she went through some quick stretching exercises to work the kinks out of her muscles. She then started jogging to the far end of the beach. It wasn't much of a jog for her, since the far end was only a bit more than two miles away. After a week of being cooped up aboard the lifeboat --- and despite the previous day's exertions --- it still felt good to be able to stretch her legs.
At the far end of the beach she turned around to head back to the lean-to, looking out over the ocean as she did so. Something wasn't quite right. She stopped and looked out over the deep blue water, shading her eyes with her hands as they sparkled, looking all the way out to the horizon. It took her a couple of seconds to realize what it was.
Except for her and their crude lean-to --- and the debris from the storm --- the beach was empty. All of their tracks from the day before had been washed away by the rain and the wind. Other than hers there were no fresh tracks. Small waves lapped up onto the sand.
Turning around, she immediately ran back to the lean-to, calling out to the two men. When she reached it, the men were just starting to stir. She quickly shook them fully awake.
"What... what?" Tillek mumbled out. "Oh, it's you, girl. What is it?"
"The... the lifeboat," she blurted out, letting go of him and waving an arm out towards the water.
"What about the lifeboat?"
"It's... it's gone."
In silence, the two men stared out over the water. There was no sign of their lifeboat.
"The storm..." Velder began.
"We got what we could out of it," Tillek said. "But it's a good thing we did it yesterday."
"But... but what do we do now?"
"Were you planning on spending the rest of your life in it, girl?"
"No, but..."
"We got what we could out of it," he repeated. "So now, we eat. Then we take stock of what we do have, and make our plans accordingly."
Breakfast was a ration bar each, washed down with water from a nearby stream.
There wasn't much to take stock of. The portable hypno-teacher and a handful of memory crystals. Some handlights. Some short-range communicators. A few power cells, though nothing with which to recharge them. The signal beacon, which had been damaged in the landing. A medical kit. A small supply of emergency ration packs. Some spare clothes, including female, though none intended for Primes. Some survival gear, including ropes and knives. No blankets or other cold weather gear --- that had all been in storage locker one.
No weapons, besides the survival knives.
Unless one counted the young Prime. And she was hesitant to do so, knowing just how lacking she was in training and experience.
Removing her torn coveralls and putting on a new set, Leysen was about to throw the old ones away when she remembered that she had put her gold chains in the pockets. Feeling the pockets, she discovered that they were no longer there.
That wasn't too surprising, considering what she had gone through the previous day. They could have fallen out while she was widening the crack in the hull. Or perhaps while she had been swimming. In either case, her chains were now at the bottom of the ocean, probably washed out by the storm.
Oh well, as long as the men didn't have them. Though even if they did, they couldn't possibly force her to put them on.
They spent the rest of the day exploring their little piece of the world. Its day was about ten percent shorter than the Imperial Standard, but the men were able to adjust their wrist chronos to compensate. When Leysen checked hers, she discovered that it had been broken, either in the crash or when she forced her way out through the crack in the hull. There was plentiful fresh water from a small stream that emptied into the ocean near where they had come ashore. The gravity was well within tolerable limits; though quite a bit more than the artificial gravity that they had been accustomed to aboard the Jiltan'th --- even the two Betas suffered no significant discomfort from it. The atmosphere was breathable, though quite a bit thinner than anything that they were accustomed to breathing, despite the heavier gravity. It had a higher oxygen content to make up for it. The planet had an unfamiliar yellow sun, but they quickly discovered that it was invigorating, even if it was a bit chilly. At least for the two Betas. Leysen didn't mind the chill at all; she also found it invigorating. There was only one thing lacking.
They had scouted for food, for anything edible. There were no fruits or nuts to be found. They had seen no animals. Leysen had wanted to explore a little more, but Tillek had insisted that the three of them remain in sight of each other.
"It's the wrong time of year," Tillek announced when they had gathered together again. "It's the dead of winter."
"Won't there be a rescue ship looking for us?"
"The Jiltan'th wasn't due to return to Tiburon for another week, when it happened." Tillek looked at his wrist chrono. "It's not overdue, yet."
"But my..." She remembered that she hadn't yet told them who her father was. "But won't they come looking for us, when it doesn't come in?" Still, her father probably would turn the whole sector inside out to look for her.
"When it does turn up overdue, where do you think they'll look? It's an awfully big quadrant to search for one ship. And even if they find what's left of it, do you think they'll bother looking for survivors? Especially in a backwater like Talis?"
"But there were five hundred people aboard. Somebody's bound to come looking for us, aren't they?"
"How much effort do you think the military's going to spend looking for a civilian ship?"
Civilian ship or not, her father's bound to come looking for her. There's got to be some way to let him know where to find her. "If they won't come looking for us, then shouldn't we be trying to call for help, to let them know we're here?"
"Call it with what?" Tillek answered, pointing to the signal beacon and its cover, lying next to it on the sand.
With the cover off, she could see that some of the components inside were broken. "We... we're stuck here?"
"It looks that way, girl. We might be able to repair it, given the proper tools and materials. Though only the Stars know where we're going to find them on this planet."
She still hadn't fully recovered from the shock of losing all of her classmates. This revelation hurt even worse, if that was possible. To never go home again? To never see her father again? She choked down a sob, fighting to hold back her tears.
It was only her determination not to let the two Betas see her crying that allowed her to keep her eyes dry. That, and the fact that her father would not approve of her tears.
"How's it look?"
"The transmitter is completely shot." Tillek looked up from the damaged signal beacon to his companion. "I might be able to repair the receiver in a week, if I stripped the hypno-teacher."
"That bad?" Velder sat down next to him and leaned forward, trying to peer inside the black box. "Stars! I botched that, didn't I? It's been a while since I'd done any atmospheric flying. But I should have done better. That had to be the worst landing I've ever made. A Kintzi could have done better." He snorted in disgust. Everybody knew how well the Kintzi flew, in or out of atmosphere.
"You did your best, old friend. You've never had to fly anything that badly damaged. Not many pilots could have gotten us down at all." He gestured at the beacon. "And this damage certainly wasn't caused by the landing."
"Thanks, but I still should have been able to bring us down a little closer to civilization." He smiled weakly as he looked around. "Though I use that term loosely."
"With that second drive rod giving out just as we hit the atmosphere? I'm glad we're not still in orbit around this little dirtball."
"We're still a long ways away from the Talisi. And we're going to have to get there, if we're going to survive on this little dirtball."
Tillek nodded in agreement, replacing the cover on the signal beacon and started to tighten the screws. "We are that."
Velder looked up at the mountains beyond the trees. "It's going to be a long walk."
Tillek nodded again in agreement. "It's going to be that."
"Just what are we going to do with her?" Velder asked after a pause, keeping his voice low even though the girl was at the far end of the beach.
Tillek looked over his shoulder at the girl before replying. "Other than what you were doing with her when I found you?"
Velder started to stand up. "Give it a rest! It was her Stars-damned pheromones, and you know it. If it wasn't for the gold, she might have killed me."
"All right. Sorry, old friend." Tillek held up a hand. "And I suppose if it hadn't been for her, I wouldn't have been on the lifeboat when the main drive blew. In a strange way, I owe her my life."
Velder sat back down as Tillek finished tightening the screws on the cover. "We're going to need her, if we're going to cross the mountains, aren't we?"
"The question is, will she need us?"
"Stars-damned Primes," Velder muttered under his breath. At the same time he glanced over at the subject of their discussion. She was too far away for him to see her clearly in the bright afternoon glare, but there was no doubt that she was a beautiful young girl. That was quite obvious even at this distance, even without her sweet pheromones clouding his judgement.
"There's no doubt we need her. We need to make sure she thinks she needs us."
"How do we do that?" He glanced over at the girl again. She might not need them, but he hoped that she would want to keep them around. Him, in particular. Unbidden, the memory of their first meeting came flooding back. How it had felt to have her in his arms. How it had felt to be in her powerful arms. How it had felt to have her lips pressed against his.
He wondered whether that would ever happen again.
No, it never would. It was one thing for a Beta to fantasize about being with a Prime, he knew that many did. But fantasy was fantasy and reality was reality. What could a Prime ever see in a Beta? What would she ever see in a man who didn't have as much strength in his entire body as she did in her slender little finger?
Glancing aside, he noticed that Tillek was also looking at the girl. He wondered whether Tillek also entertained fantasies about her, and about female Primes in general. Somehow, they had never talked about that.
He looked back at the girl. Even at this distance he could see that she was a beautiful young girl, just coming into the promise of womanhood. As he continued to watch, she stripped off her clothes and went into the ocean to bathe. He suppressed a shiver, remembering just how cold the water was when they waded ashore the previous day. But then, she was a Prime, she probably enjoyed it. Maybe as much as the scalding hot baths that he'd heard so much about.
"She's still a child, no matter how strong she is physically."
Tillek's words not only brought his mind back to the present but also reminded him of her youth.
Tillek continued. "And what happens when she starts acting like a child? The first time she can't get what she wants and throws a temper tantrum? What do we do then?"
"She could kill us without even trying."
"We just have to make sure that doesn't happen."
"How?"
"We have to keep her under control at all times."
"Control? How? How the Stars do you keep a Stars-damned Prime under control?"
"How do any parents keep their kids under control?"
Neither of them had any children. "You're asking me?"
Tillek cracked a smile. "Your parents didn't do a very good job on you, did they, old friend?"
That was just the thing to lighten the mood of the discussion. Velder smiled back and punched Tillek in the shoulder. "Neither did yours." Both men broke out laughing.
"What's so funny?"
The laughter died as both men looked up at the sound of the sweet feminine voice. The young Prime had finished her bathing and had run back to join them. Velder wondered whether she had heard any of their conversation.
"We're shipwrecked here, and you two can laugh about it?" she asked, running her fingers through her long damp hair, trying to untangle it.
Velder immediately sobered up. "We weren't laughing about..." he started to say.
"Just because we're shipwrecked doesn't mean we're dead," Tillek said. "As long as we're alive there's hope. And if laughter helps keep us alive, we'll laugh."
"Okay." She sat down next to them, continuing to work the tangles out of her hair. "So what's so funny?"
Velder managed to hide his sigh of relief. Apparently she hadn't heard them.
"Nothing you need to worry your pretty head about, girl. This is between us men."
"Hmmpf!" She stood back up and turned away.
Velder watched as she brushed the sand off of her cute fanny and walked off, returning to the lean-to and rearranging the leafy branches to prepare her bed for the night. Apparently she decided that she wanted more, for she went into the trees to cut down more branches. "So, just what do we do about her?" he asked when he was sure that she couldn't hear them.
"Like I said, we have to keep her under our control. She already knows that we've been here before. We have to use that to our advantage."
"And treat her like the Talisi treat their females?"
"Exactly."
Velder looked up at Tillek. "Are you serious? We can't treat a Prime like that!"
"We have to let her know that our only chance for survival is with the Talisi. And the only way we can do that is to blend in with them, to pretend to be Talisi."
Velder shook his head. "She's not going to like living like that."
"She'd better learn to like it, unless she'd prefer not living at all."
"Just where are we?" Leysen asked over breakfast, looking around, before settling her gaze on the mountains visible over the trees.
"The northern shore of the main continent, as best I could figure," Tillek replied.
She searched her mind, trying to remember the hypno-teacher's lessons on the geography of this planet. Ah, yes. The northern shore. The uninhabited northern shore.
For parts of the planet was inhabited. By a race descended from human stock.
The academics back on Aria were still debating whether this planet had been seeded by the Ancient Ones, or whether the so-called natives were the degenerated remnants of an interstellar colony from another planet. One thing was certain, though. The human inhabitants --- the Talisi --- had not evolved on this planet.
If they were the remnants of a colony, there was no sign of advanced technology. No electricity. Not even steam power. They were a savage and barbaric people, continually warring amongst themselves. They produced food by farming and herding animals. And by stealing it from their neighbors. The most dangerous weapon these people possessed was the sword. Not a sword with the mono-molecular cutting edge of the Kintzi layer sword, but simple edged iron.
That still made the natives better armed than Leysen's party were. They each had a survival knife, but that was it. Not even a single Gar disruptor between them; those, along with the heavier weapons, had been in the storage compartments that had been blown out into space. The knives might be sharper, and made of a much harder metal than anything that the natives possessed, but they didn't have the reach of a sword. And the native edged iron was still more than sharp enough to kill any of them, with the sole exception of the young Prime.
This was no time for such academic concerns however --- they had a matter of survival to take care of. "But aren't the natives to the south, on the other side of the mountains? Why didn't we land over there?" She thought that it was an innocent enough a question as she looked over at their pilot.
Velder had just opened his mouth when Tillek replied. "Would you rather be on this side of the mountains, or in the mountains?" His tone was so vehement as to cause Leysen to flinch. "A couple of miles deep? We're lucky we had Velder to bring us down in one piece. Most pilots wouldn't even have gotten to this planet at all, as badly damaged as the lifeboat was. We had to come down over the pole to avoid the radiation belt. And then a drive rod failed just as we hit the atmosphere. Any other pilot and we would have died right there."
She looked down at the ground, remembering the image on the viewscreen of the debris and plasma that had been all that was left of the Jiltan'th after the main drive blew.
If Tillek saw her reaction, he pretended not to notice. He squatted down and quickly sketched a rough outline of the continent in the sand. "We're somewhere around here," he made a mark. "Velder and I spent some time with the natives here." He made another mark, well down the eastern shore. "There's another settled region here." He made another mark, on the western shore, quite a bit closer than the previous one.
"So, we're going to have to cross those mountains?" She pointed needlessly. She remembered back to her one wilderness survival class. She hadn't particularly enjoyed it. "On foot?"
"Unless you can fly us. You can't do that, can you, girl?"
"Of course not." Only a very small number of Primes had the flight powers that all Velorians possessed, and there was no history of it in her family.
"Well, we can't just stay here until we run out of food. We're going to have to go find the Talisi."
As he lay on his back in the dark, he watched through slitted eyes as the woman quietly dressed. He closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep when --- after she had finished dressing --- she leaned over him, and kissed him. He reopened his eyes just in time to see her slip out of his bedroom and close the door behind her. Looking at the clock on the wall next to the door, he saw that she still had plenty of time to catch her transport to the front.
With a sigh, General Estrad Strahzi rolled over and tried to go to sleep, to forget the night --- and the woman. As pleasurable as the night had been, he knew that he would not be seeing her again.
In a way, he envied her. To be going to the front. To not know whether this night would be your last.
To get sexual gratification wherever and whenever you could find it.
Ever since he had lost his wife, he had avoided any long-term relationships. Just --- as tonight --- an occasional fling with a woman on her way to the front. He didn't even know whether any of them were still alive.
Nor did he care.
He was getting used to not caring about another woman.
It wasn't that he didn't care at all. Like all good officers, he cared about the troops in his command. But they were just troops. Names on rosters, numbers on lists, figures on charts. While they were all people, Primes and Betas, they were just people. Nobody special.
A good commander couldn't afford to get too close to his troops.
He hadn't gotten close to anybody. Unable. Unwilling.
It hurt too much.
The only way to ensure that he wouldn't be hurt again was to avoid getting close to another woman.
Or maybe not.
She wouldn't want him to continue in this way.
There had to be something better than a series of empty sexual relationships. Somebody with whom to share his life.
It wasn't that he couldn't find a woman. He wasn't that old, and he knew that he wasn't unattractive. His rank, and post, would make him a prize catch for any woman.
Could any woman ever replace her?
Wasn't it time to get on with his life?
It wasn't fair to their daughter. While nobody could ever replace her mother, didn't she deserve to have a mother figure in her life? Something other than the vague and fading memories that she had from her childhood?
Stars knew he'd tried, but he couldn't be both father and mother to her.
Didn't his daughter deserve better than that?
Even she had suggested that he find somebody new and remarry. He would have to have another talk with her about that when she got back from her class field trip.
Didn't Leysen deserve the best?