Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

The warmth and soft press of a body beside her told her Nicci had sat down too. Amber raised her head a little and looked at the Pioneer some more. This was what she’d spent six days bullying her baby sister into. This was what she’d lost her apartment, her job, and sixty pounds for. This was it.

She leaned forward again and opened her mouth, but apart from a groggy belch, nothing came out. She hadn’t had anything in her stomach for years, after all. Maybe a lot of years. Like…hundreds.

That made her want to throw up again, but since that was just futility, Amber made herself look around some more instead. She could see a cluster of uniforms standing apart from the rest, close to the biggest gash in the smoking side of the ship, and a little ways from them stood just two—one crimson and gold Manifestor and one military grey Fleetman, close together, deep in conversation.

She stood up.

Nicci caught at once at her hand. “Where are you going?”

The last thing Amber wanted was to start a mob. She bent over to speak softly against Nicci’s ear. “To see if I can’t find out what’s going to happen next.”

“Next?” Nicci’s hand tightened painfully. She didn’t seem aware of it. Her eyes were huge, glazed, pleading. “We’re…Someone’s going to come, right? Someone’s going to come from Earth and rescue us? We’re going home now, right?”

A few people looked their way. Amber made a point of patting Nicci’s hand, trying to look as if she were comforting someone. She wasn’t sure if people really patted other people’s hands for comfort or if that was just in books, but no one paid them too much attention, so she guessed that was all right.

“Keep your voice down,” she said, once she was fairly confident they had privacy again. “And don’t freak yourself out. Panicking can’t help anyone.”

“Amber…” Nicci’s staring eyes became a wondering, glassy gape. “Amber, the ship crashed! We crashed here! People are dead!”

“I mean it, Nicci, calm down.”

But Nicci either wouldn’t or couldn’t obey. Her voice kept rising, sending shards of panic through every quavery word. “We crashed here! Half the ship is gone! Amber, the ship is broken! We have to be rescued! We have to be rescued right now!”

Amber grabbed a fistful of Nicci’s shirt and yanked her to her feet, thrusting her face right up close. She hissed, “Shut up or I’ll slap the shit out of you and I guaran-goddamn-tee I’ll be better at that than you are! Shut! Up!”

Nicci did, trembling. She blinked and tears came bubbling out of her, but they were silent tears for now. Her lips pressed together, turned downwards in a clownish exaggeration of sorrow.

“If you panic, other people are going to panic and once that starts, we are not going to be able to stop it, so you take deep breaths or do whatever you have to do, but you keep quiet, do you hear me?”

Nicci nodded. The action tipped a few more tears out of her. They trickled sideways across her cheeks, blown off-kilter by the wind, and fell into her hair. “I’m scared,” she said. Little Nicci, like she was all of six years old again.

“Go ahead and be scared all you want,” said Amber, releasing her. “Just do it quietly.” She looked back at the uniforms. They were still talking. She took Nicci’s hand (cold jesus how cold is it going to get when the sun goes down i don’t see any animals no birds not even bugs maybe it gets like a hundred below and nothing can live here) and started walking, trying to look aimless so she wouldn’t get too much attention, but movement has a way of attracting the eye and people were staring.

Halfway there, Nicci started bawling. That helped. There was enough misery around here that no one wanted to see any more of it. The people who had been dully watching her found other places to send their thousand-yard stare.

Nicci…

Amber dropped back a little and put her arm around her sister’s shoulders. Nicci hugged on her like a child wanting to be carried and cried the same way, loud and graceless, soaking heat and wetness into Amber’s shirt.

“It’s okay,” she heard herself say inanely. She rubbed at Nicci’s shaking back and watched smoke fly away in wind-blown stripes from the ship. So much smoke. “It’s okay, we’ll be okay.”

“I didn’t want to be here!” Nicci brayed. “I didn’t want to do this!”

Guilt knotted at her heart and sank all the way down into her stomach. “I know.”

“You made me! Why did you make me?”

“Nicci…please, it’ll be okay.”

“I want to go home!”

“I’m sorry, Nicci. I am. Come on.”

The two men who seemed to be doing the deep talking stopped as Amber approached them. She recognized the Manifestor up close—Crewman Everly Scott, who she’d made such a great impression on at boarding—but not the Fleetman he was with. If she knew how to read pips, she’d know his rank at least, but all Amber could see was an older black man of distinctly military bearing, with a worried face and smudges of soot along the left side of his mostly-hairless head. “Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked, once it must have been obvious that she was really coming to talk to them.

“I can’t think of how,” Amber replied honestly enough. She rubbed Nicci’s back some more, trying to quiet her so that they could talk without shouting too hard. The wind made that difficult enough. “I’m not trying to put you on the spot or anything, but if you guys are talking about plans, I’d like to hear them.”

“Go sit down,” said Scott firmly. “As soon as we’ve debriefed ourselves on proper procedure—”

“No offense,” Amber said, looking at him. “But I don’t believe for a second you actually have a procedure that covers something like this. I am all for postponing the main panic, but we all need to know what happens next.”

“Go find a seat,” Scott began again, but the soldier stopped him there.

“At this point, ma’am,” he said, “all we’re doing is talking out the situation.”

“But we’re going to get rescued, right?” Nicci reached out to grab at his uniform. He gave her hand a pat. He did it a lot better than Amber had, using the gesture not only to pry her off, but also to sit her down on the ground.

“If you’ve got any ideas,” the soldier went on, taking off his jacket to drape around Nicci’s shaking shoulders, “I’m willing to hear you out. But if I can be as blunt with you as you’ve been with us, if you haven’t got something to say, you need to move on and let us try to do our job.”

“You can tell us how you’re going to sue us later,” Scott added derisively.

Amber shot him an angry glance, then redirected herself to the other man. “I feel like I need to get the stupid questions out first, just so we’re all on one page, okay?”

“Fair enough.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“More or less. We were hit by some sort of unmapped interstellar traffic…an asteroid field or maybe we passed through the tail of a comet or something. The shields are supposed to be able to repel collision, but…the hull was penetrated in a number of places…a lot of systems took heavy damage. There was massive explosive decompression. None of the active crew appear to have survived it.”

“Is this…all of us?”

“I don’t know.” The Fleetman’s gaze skewed away to stare at the ship, at the men’s dorms in particular, burning so hard they could actually hear it, even over the wind. “The military mods survived the crash more or less, but the asteroids…or whatever they were…” He trailed off, then shook his head and looked at her. “Most of the Sleepers I saw in my unit looked like Swiss cheese, ma’am. So did the people inside them. People I knew.”

“I…I’m sorry.” The smallness of that sympathy could not stand against the present horror. Amber groped for something better, then gave up and simply said, “So we’re it?”

“There could be others. I just don’t know. The mods sealed themselves as part of the emergency lockdown. None of the communication stations appear to be working. I have no idea what the situation is…underground. For all I know, parts of the ship could still be intact, but it’s…not likely. I’ve got some men trying to organize a search and rescue operation, but it’s been…slow starting.”

Amber nodded. “How long have we been flying blind?”

“I don’t know how long, but we can’t have been entirely blind or we wouldn’t be breathing this atmosphere, we’d be melting in it.” He broke off there, ran one hand over the side of his smooth head and started again, more calmly. “The ship has several emergency failsafes in place. Locating an Earth-class planet and landing was one of them, but…I don’t even know off the top of my head how many others had to fail for that one to engage. In the event of any major incident, the ship was supposed to take us home.”

“Do you know where we are?”

“No, although the guidance system itself has to be functioning or we never would have made it here. This planet is very Earth-like. And before you ask me which world it is, understand that there are over seven thousand Earth-like planets in the Fleet’s database, and we’ve mapped less than one percent of one percent of this galaxy. Without a working guidance system’s interface, we have no way of discovering where we are.”

“Can anyone repair it?”

He spread his hands, his expression pained. “With what?”

“All right. I have to ask. Is there an emergency beacon or any way to send a transmission of any kind back home?”

The Fleetman nodded back in the direction of the fractured ship while still holding her eyes. “At the very best, we have lost thirty percent of the ship’s structure, including the entire command center, and the primary and tertiary lifeboat launching bays. That number could be as high as seventy-five percent if none of the structure below the surface has survived impact. Even if the halls have collapsed, the skeleton could be intact. Right now, I have to hope that it is, because only if we can tunnel our way in to certain engineering portals do we have any hope of making the necessary repairs to the guidance system.”

“You said the primary and the tertiary bays were out. What about the secondary lifeboats?” Amber asked. “Is there a beacon or anything with them?”

“There is. And that—” The Fleetman pointed up at the extreme tip of the blazing men’s dorm. “—is the bay where it is located. It looks like it might be intact and if it’s locked down like the rest of the compartment doors, it might not even be burning. Getting to it is going to be a process, but I have to tell you, ma’am—”

“Amber. Amber Bierce.”

“Amber.” His brows furrowed slightly. “Jonah Lamarc, Lieutenant Junior-Grade.”

That was a lot further down the authority ladder than she’d been hoping to hear, and by the look on his face, he knew it. But he struck her as a thoughtful man and definitely not prone to panic. She put out her hand impulsively.

He shook it while Crewman Scott watched.

“It’s going to be a process?” Amber prompted.

“But I believe it can be done, once the fire burns itself out,” he finished, and then gave his head a grim shake. “Miss Bierce, I don’t think I’d say this to anyone else out there, but you seem to have a level head and I want to be honest with you.”

“Go on then. I’m braced.”

“I’m not sure we can launch a beacon from this location—planet-side, I mean—but assuming that it is possible, we first have to get guidance repaired, online and talking to the beacon so that it can orient itself to Earth. After that…” He paused again, looking down at Nicci, who had drawn up her knees and was now resting her head atop them and lightly rocking. He looked back at Amber, his expression drawn and greyed with strain. “I haven’t talked around much yet, but I served my second shift before the incident, so I know it’s been at least two years, plus however long the ship was flying blind to get to this planet after it was hit. But even if we magically crashed the instant after I went back in Sleep, we’d still have been Tunneling for two years before that. We can’t be less than five hundred light-years from Earth,” Lamarc said softly, slowly. His eyes communicated far more than his careful words. “And that is way more than we have mapped out along our pre-arranged route. Even if we were only knocked a little bit off-course, which I’m guessing—” He looked pointedly around, taking in the whole planet at a glance. “—may be overly optimistic, our guidance system might not be able to find Earth.”

Nicci moaned and began to sob again.

“Okay,” said Amber. “Now what’s the real problem?”

He shared her lackluster smile. “Believe it or not, there is a real problem.”

“Oh for God’s sake. Okay. What is it?”’

“The beacon doesn’t have tunnel-drive. It was never meant to travel at anything close to that speed, not even at light-speed. So even if we are only five hundred light-years away, and even if we can reach the beacon, repair it, program it, and launch it tomorrow through this planet’s atmosphere and onward straight to Earth, it will take more than six thousand years for the damned thing to get there.”

“So there’s no point in looking for it,” said Amber. After a moment, she hammered the reality home with a nod. “All right. So we’re here.”

He frowned at Nicci, then at her. “I didn’t say that and I wouldn’t, if I were you. For a while, that hope of rescue is all that is going to keep some of these people alive.”

“So what are you planning?”

“We haven’t decided,” said Scott.

Lamarc glanced at him, still frowning. “We’re discussing our options.”

“What have you come up with so far?”

“I believe our best hope of survival lies with the ship,” said Lamarc, and did not react when Scott heaved a short, hard sigh at him. “It was built to be a ready-made city. It provides shelter and security against the elements here and, most importantly, familiarity. We have food, moisture evaporators and purifiers, medical facilities, and general supplies to last easily a hundred years. Comfort is going to be our most precious resource for the immediate future and it should not be underestimated.”

Amber looked at the ship and said nothing. She could hear the logic in his words, but she could also see the smoke funneling out of dozens, if not hundreds, of wounds. And where there was smoke…

At last, just to demonstrate that she wasn’t a complete bitch and he shouldn’t feel the need to be a complete bastard, Amber looked at Scott. “What do you think?”

Even if she was a civilian and therefore an unnecessary component to this conversation, Scott seemed pleased to be asked. “I think the first thing we need to do is re-establish a chain of command. And maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to blindly adopt the ranks we held before. It’s clear that the disaster has taken a mental toll on certain members of the Fleet and I would be hesitant to put any of them in a position of authority. And we could even bring some civilians in,” he added, including Amber in a magnanimous sweep of his arm and completely overlooking the fact that, snappy uniform or no, the Manifest Destiny badge on the sleeve of his jacket did not put him on the same level as an officer in the Fleet, or in any other army, or even in the Cub Scouts. “Some of them, anyway. But the main thing is, if we’re going to establish any kind of a future here, we have to know who’s in charge.”

She had a feeling he had a name in mind. “Okay. Let’s pretend it’s you. What’s your plan, Commander?”

Scott threw Lamarc a fierce smile, the sort that could make even a handsome man like him look schoolyard-small and mean. “Like he said, we have enough supplies to last us for a long time, so nothing is more important than knowing what we’re up against. We need to organize units to scout out the terrain and establish a perimeter. We need to organize defenses. We need to arm ourselves.”

“And I told you, the munitions bay is gone,” said Lamarc flatly. He turned to Amber. “What about you? Do you have any suggestions?”

She scowled, her eye going back to the ship and the smoke pouring out of it. “Lieutenant Lamarc—”

“Jonah,” he said quietly.

Scott frowned.

“Jonah, that ship is on fire. And there aren’t enough words in the world to fully express just how bad a feeling I have about hanging around a burning ship where the extent of the damage is completely unknown.”

He nodded once, acknowledging without comment, waiting.

“I agree with what you said about shelter and security, but I’m sorry, until those fires are out, I think we’d ought to make camp somewhere else.”

“Which means we need to start scouting now,” said Scott. “Before we lose the light.”

“I haven’t made a count yet,” said Jonah. “But at a guess, I believe I’m looking at close to two thousand badly frightened people, some of them with missing loved ones, and all of them in shock. Present company most definitely included.” He rubbed at the side of his head again. “Moving that many people overland on an alien world away from the ship they rode in on would be disastrous to morale, not to mention devastating to the terrain itself. If it rains, which is damned likely looking at that sky, two thousand pairs of feet are only going to need a few seconds to turn this ground into quick-mud. Also, we might be able to carry enough food with us for a few days, but not water. We have evaporators and we have purifiers, but we have no actual water. And, I’m sorry, but where are we going to go to the bathroom? I can see you think that’s a pretty trivial point, but I guarantee it won’t seem as trivial when two thousand people have dysentery.”

“We’re going to have all those problems no matter where we are.”

“Yes, eventually. But here at the ship, we can postpone them. Amber, if we don’t give those people some kind of familiar routine, something safe to cling to, we’re going to lose them. People this lost, this desperate…don’t need a lot of help to die.”

“Okay,” interrupted Scott as Amber gazed out at the sea of survivors, “I think these are all valid points, but you’ve brought us right back to the issue of who’s in charge. You can’t develop a routine without someone giving orders.”

Amber shook her head and looked back at Jonah. “I admit it’s been a while since my last babysitting gig, but I’m pretty sure that making sure the babies don’t catch fire is higher up on the priority list than making sure they don’t have nightmares. Jonah, staying here is a bad idea!”

“I know it looks bad, but each compartment of the ship is designed to seal itself specifically so that fires don’t spread.”

“Yeah, and the ship is designed to turn itself around and go back to Earth if it gets hit by an asteroid. And who knows what else has been damaged? Things can be leaking and melting and overheating as we speak! We can’t afford blind faith, Jonah! We can only trust what we can see and I can see the smoke!”

“Can you see the people?” he asked quietly. “Can you see their faces? Can you see yourself marching them away when the wind is blowing this hard and this cold and no one knows what night will bring? And what about the people we can’t see? What about the people who may still be trapped behind those sealed doors, just praying that someone up here at least tries to find them? Amber—” He took her hand between both of his; she looked down at her small wrist being swallowed by his giant grip and thought of him patting Nicci as he guided her to the ground. He was awfully good at the comforting stuff. “Amber, if we don’t give these people some time to come to grips with what has happened to them, some of them never will. You may be thinking of them as two thousand survivors and I know Crewman Scott sees them as two thousand colonists, but they are neither. Right now, as of this moment, they are two thousand victims and they need to be taken care of. Please.”

Scott paced a few meters away and came back, looking profoundly annoyed with both of them.

“I want to take them in out of the wind for just two or three weeks. Let them dig for that beacon and fix a few broken doors. God willing, let them save a life, just one, to remind them that life is precious and hope can be rewarded. Put them back in control and then talk to them about survival. What can it hurt to give them just two or three weeks to learn how to cope? I want your support on this,” said Jonah. “Please.”

Amber looked at the ship. She tried not to see the smoke. She tried to look through the emergency doors at the hold and imagine two thousand people sleeping there tonight. She threw in a snowstorm to help weigh down the vision and a couple generic howling-monster sounds. She pictured Jonah with his jacket off the next day, arranging teams to work in shifts clearing the halls, repairing machinery, sorting supplies, and later, building gardens and houses and latrines. She saw him taking charge and it was an easy thing to see. She saw the ship turning into a colony after all, and maybe it would only be the shell of one at first, but as she pulled back the camera of her mind, she could see the ship in a better time, in the summer maybe, with crop-fields and canals in orbit around it, a thriving hub of life and hope and—

–or it could all blow up in an hour, she thought, in a voice so clear it might as well be someone speaking directly in her ear. And she saw that pretty damned clearly too: the wind, just like it was now, whipping the giant fireball of its belching destruction into an orange tornado for maybe two or three seconds before blowing it all away. Nothing would be left but the crater where they landed, the twisted skeleton of the hull, and a Rorschach scorch-mark burned into the stone, maybe in the shape of a butterfly.

“I can’t stay here,” Amber heard herself say.

Nicci raised her head and looked at her.

“Not tonight,” she amended. “I think…I think maybe Scott’s got a point about the perimeter thing. Maybe it would help these people start coping faster if we took some of the mystery out of where we are.”

Scott looked surprised for a second and then smiled.

“So here’s what I think. I think we should make a camp…” She looked around and pointed. “On that ridge. Call it a lookout post. We’ll organize a team and take whatever supplies we need to set up, you know, some latrines and supply tents. If nothing else, it’ll give people something to do who don’t know how to fix doors or program emergency beacons. And who knows? We might look down from that ridge and see…I don’t know, a lake or whatever they have for cows or someplace easier to live than this.”

Jonah shook his head, not in denial, but in mute helplessness. He looked out at the survivors and then down at her. “Can you give me until morning to work with them? Please. We can take a head-count, get some kind of inventory for our supplies…If nothing else, give me that time to see if anyone is trapped in there.”

That wasn’t unreasonable, she thought, and said instead, unexpectedly, “No. I’m sorry, but if anyone is trapped in there, they’re already dead. The ship is on fire. It is not a safe place. We have got to get away from it tonight.”

His gaze was troubled; his hands, warm. “They won’t be moved tonight.”

“Then move as many as you can. We…” can’t save everybody, trembled unspoken on her lips. She swallowed them, wondering where in the hell this was all coming from. She didn’t feel panicked, but maybe panicking was like being crazy or having a fever, where you couldn’t tell just by feeling at yourself. “We can’t stay,” she finished.

Jonah looked at the people again, watching them the way another man might watch the tides. His eyes went back and forth, tracking motion no one else saw.

“I think a lookout post is a great idea,” Scott announced. “I’ll start putting a team together.”

“I can’t leave them,” said Jonah quietly.

“I said I’d do it,” said Scott, frowning again. “I want to be in charge. Of the lookout team. You can be in charge of these people.”

“I wish you’d come with us,” Amber said. The words felt heavy, too much like a confession.

“Yeah, well…I wish you’d stay.” Jonah uttered an oddly thin laugh for such a big man. “When the lights go out, things are going to get a lot worse. I was really starting to hope you’d stick around because I’m going to need someone to roll around with if I’m going to get any sleep tonight.” He rubbed at his head, shook it, rubbed some more. “That was offensive. I’m sorry. I’m just…”

Scared. And fear does weird things to people.

“Jesus, man!” Scott was staring. “I can’t believe you just said that!”

Amber gave Jonah a lopsided smile and squeezed his slack hand. “I’ll help you sleep plenty at the lookout post, Lieutenant Lamarc. Just come with us.”

Scott gaped at both of them now.

“Another time, Miss Bierce.” Jonah pulled in a breath and let it out as a military man. “I can think of a few men who you might want along. I’ll talk to them.”

“I’ll come back,” said Amber. “As soon as the smoke stops, I swear.”

He nodded, started to walk away, and then stopped. When he came back, she thought for one dizzying, unreal moment that he meant to kiss her and she’d already made up her mind to allow it (total stranger old enough to be my father for god’s sake and what he’d want in a chubby little white girl like me i don’t know he probably doesn’t either but fear now fear does weird things oh yeah play it again sam fear can really fuck you up), but instead, he put out his hand.

They shook.

“Take care of things,” said Amber.

“I will,” he replied. “Come back safe.”

“I will.”

They walked away then, and as things turned out, those were the last words they said to one another and they both lied.

6

Crewman Scott put himself in command. This initially made for some tense moments when he was trying to recruit for what he was calling ‘reconnaissance and establishment of a forward operations base,’ particularly from the Fleetmen, who certainly seemed open to doing something but were visibly hostile to the idea of taking orders from a Manifestor in a make-believe uniform. No punches were thrown, but Scott quickly moved his efforts to the cluster of sobbing, shock-eyed civilians.

Amber left him to it without much hope and distracted her jangling nerves as much as she was able by venturing into whatever exposed areas of the ship she could reach, picking through the wreckage for anything they could use. Since the supplies had been evenly distributed among each mod throughout the ship, there was plenty to find, even if it was all mashed together in the aftermath of the crash. Unfortunately, the crates were all marked with such baffling examples of Fleet-speak that she had to bust them open to find out what the hell was inside. This was a lot of work with little reward; none of the really useful things were portable and most of the small stuff was ridiculous. Thumbtacks. Baby bottles. Yarmulkes. Replacement sponge-heads for the oscillating arm on a model Dynamo-3Z cleanerbot. Swimming goggles, for Christ’s sake, perfect for lounging around the colony pool on Plymouth.

The frustrating search ultimately turned up a stash of duffel bags (each one proudly screaming out the Manifest Destiny logo), which she started stuffing with the one useful item she had dug out of the wreckage: some Fleet-issue ration bars packed like bricks in a khaki-colored crate where the available flavors were listed as Choc, Van and Other. These were Other. Nowhere on the individual bars did it indicate what Other was, but she guessed as long as it wasn’t worm, booger or bubblegum, she was fine.

“Ma’am?”

She looked up without stopping, taking stock of the four Fleetmen coming toward her—three boys and an older man—and making up her mind right then that if they pulled some bullshit military rule out of their asses to stop her from taking this stuff, she’d kick it right back up there.

But, “Lieutenant Lamarc said you were looking for a few good men,” said one of them, putting out his hand. “Eric Lassiter. Engineer Second Class.”

“Engineer?” she said uncertainly. “Did Jonah, um, Lieutenant Lamarc tell you what I wanted was to get away from the ship?”

“Yes, ma’am. We’re here to help.”

“Are you sure? Wouldn’t you rather stay here with, you know, the other engineers?”

He was already shaking his head. “Enlisted engineer,” he said, putting the stress on the first word. “That’s construction. Well, that’s the grunt work for the construction units, but I’m pretty sure I can help you throw together your forward operations outpost or whatever that idiot out there wants. This is Crandall.”

“Brian,” said the next guy, also shaking her hand. “Electronics tech. And before you ask, I’ve already given this tin bitch my professional attention and concluded that she’s fucked. So I figured I could at least carry shit around.”

“Same,” said the third man. “Gunnarson, Dagwood D. Call me Dag.” He nodded at the duffel bag she was filling. “I was the main supply clerk in Corporate Mod G, so I know where everything was. I know it all got tossed around pretty good, but if nothing else, I can read the codes on the labels.” He gave the haphazardly-opened crates around her a meaningful glance. “Maybe focus on finding stuff we really need, like tents.”

“And medical supplies,” said the last of them. He was the older one, although it was tough to say just how much older. He was Asian and his face was creased but ageless. He had no accent, unless it was a trace of some southern state, but he bent his head to her instead of taking the hand she extended. “Yao. Lucas, I should say, circumstances being what they are, but I prefer Mr. Yao.”

“He’s a doctor,” Eric supplied, pointing at the little frills sewn onto Mr. Yao’s sleeve which apparently proved it.

“I am not a doctor of medicine.” The older man did not look around. “And I’d just as soon be Mr. Yao from now on. My service contract appears to have expired.”

There was a short, ugly silence while the five of them stood there, avoiding one another’s eyes.

“I’m Amber,” she said belatedly, just to get them talking again.

It worked.

“So you are the right girl,” said Eric, glancing once at Mr. Yao, who wandered off, righting crates and checking labels as he went. “Great. Lamarc said you were heading out with that other guy. Thought you might like a hand.”

“If we can ever get going. How’s he doing out there? Scott, I mean.”