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  Actually, she had no tools available. There had been several attached to the outside of the EVA pod. Though they were designed for satellite repair, several of them could be adapted for digging. If they were still out there after her rough descent. And if Waldo Egg still had its arms.

  At the moment her escape depended on either rotating the pod so its hatch faced the tunnel or making a hole in the transparent aluminum viewport big enough for her to crawl through.

  Pattie opened the emergency repair locker, extracting all of its contents and arraying them as best she could on the deck of the pod. There were a half-dozen spare isolinear chips, opti-cables of various refractions and lengths, a universal spanner, a first-aid kit appropriate for a variety of soft-bodied races, and a selection of hull patches. After a moment she removed her combadge and Klingon engineering dagger and added them to the collection.

  At first glance the collection of mismatched items did not look to Pattie like the tools she needed to break out of the buried EVA pod. However, being part of the S.C.E. meant learning to think outside the box, to see solutions that weren’t obvious at first glance.

  Pattie rearranged the materials, grouping them by function, and considered how she could combine their applications. In several minutes of intense thought, she brought all of her structural engineering knowledge, along with a few tricks from the other disciplines she’d picked up along the way, to bear on the problem. At last she realized she was right.

  These were not the tools she needed to break out of a buried EVA pod.

  She looked again at the frame of the viewport. Perhaps….

  The tunnel was collapsing.

  Not rapidly, and not by much, but there was a definite sway to the roofline. As she watched, a clump of material fell.

  “So the choices are sit in the dark for a week until the da Vinci comes looking for us or try rotating with the attitude thrusters,” she said. “Which might ignite the peat and maybe burn a hole down another hundred and ninety meters. Then I could sit there in the dark for a week.”

  There was no water or food aboard the pod; she’d only intended a three-hour duty tour, but surviving a week without either was possible. Barely. And the da Vinci would have no trouble finding the pod. Even if its beacon had been fried on the way down, her combadge would guide them in with little trouble.

  Reattaching her combadge, she keyed it on for the first time in half an hour.

  “Blue to Corsi. Commander? This is Pattie. Do you read me?”

  Nothing. Just like last time. And the time before.

  Pattie shut out the image of Corsi falling—in an EVA suit, not a pod—toward the planet below.

  I might survive a week at the bottom of a hole, but Corsi could be injured.

  Strapping herself back into the Nasat-supporting acceleration couch, Pattie reviewed the status boards. Main thrusters and all the attitude thrusters she could angle to point directly back had been burned out in her braking maneuver. That left her with four, which should be enough, and a choice.

  Her inclination was to make several spaced micro burns, allowing the surrounding peat to cool away from combustion temperatures between gentle thrusts. However, the rate at which the tunnel was collapsing suggested she didn’t have the time to spare on caution.

  Pattie unhooked her safety straps. If she was going to do this, she was going to need to move fast. She’d worry about the hundred and ninety meter drop if and when she felt herself falling. First priority was reaching the hatch.

  With that in mind, she triggered the hatch release. Hopefully, when it faced the empty tunnel it would pop open of its own accord, saving her precious seconds.

  It was possible all of this was unnecessary, that the EVA pod would simply turn in place and she’d be able to exit at her leisure. But one thing she had learned was to never count on things going well.

  A section of the tunnel sagged.

  Pattie couldn’t preprogram the attitude thrusters—there was no formula for plowing through peat. She adjusted their angles and triggered the all-fire, holding the contact down as the pod shuddered and began to turn.

  Thirty, forty degrees, then it seemed to hang up. Something more solid than the rest of the peat had snagged one of the pod’s few projections. Or perhaps the material had started to collapse, holding it more firmly.

  Pattie was already giving the thrusters full burn. There was nothing she could do but keep them firing, the chance of conflagration increasing with every second.

  With an abrupt lurch that almost threw Pattie from the couch, the pod came loose. The viewport became a mirror as it turned away from the tunnel.

  Pattie released the thruster control as the hatch popped open. A cloud of smoke and a rotting vegetable stench filled the tiny cabin as she dropped to all eights and scurried through the opening.

  The pod shifted beneath her as she leapt from the metal sill. There was a sucking, crackling sound and another billow of smoke and stench washed over her as she scrambled up the crumbling tunnel.

  The peat was not completely dry, she realized, then as quickly realized her pod wouldn’t have dug a tunnel if it had been. Perhaps in moist peat the danger of fire wasn’t as great as she’d supposed.

  She almost slackened her pace at the thought. Then a section of ceiling twice as broad as she dropped, nearly blocking her way.

  “I’m arboreal, not burrowing,” she reminded no one in particular as she frantically dug her way over the obstacle.

  Past the mound of fallen ceiling was another and a third. But beyond that the last thirty meters looked clear. The ceiling bowed but had not yet broken loose.

  She was going to make it.

  Then from behind her came a sullen fwump as though someone were dumping a massive load of pillows. Or dirt. A cold gust of escaping air washed up from behind. The tunnel was collapsing.

  She wasn’t going to make it.

  Chapter

  3

  “I should have gone with her,” Fabian Stevens said for perhaps the hundredth time.

  “What?” Bart Faulwell asked, pulling his attention back from the vista of aqueducts and canals stretching to the horizon and focusing on his friend at the other end of the narrow oval table. “And given up the chance to be Tev’s personal adjunct on Bundinal?”

  Stevens growled at the linguist with what was evidently his best impression of an angry Klingon.

  “You have the inflection wrong,” Bart pointed out mildly. “Unless, of course, you didn’t mean to call me a muffin, in which case you have the wrong word entirely.”

  Stevens sighed heavily and scowled at the view.

  The two friends had met for lunch at an open-air bistro perched on the brow of a hill overlooking the township of Brohtz. Though its cheerfully faux rustic decor was clearly aimed at the tourist trade, the Bundinalli librarian Bart was working with had assured him the food was excellent, faithfully representing the regional cuisine.

  From this vantage point they could see no less than four canals and three aqueducts. A major hub was a few hundred kilometers west of Brohtz. There was a haze from the water vapor above the elevated aqueducts; as Bart understood it, the humidifying effects of evaporation were nearly as important as irrigation to the ecology. With the sun over their shoulders, they could see hundreds of tiny rainbows hanging in the mist.

  Even if the food didn’t live up to expectations, Bart reflected, the view was worth the trek up the hill.

  Actually, he’d enjoyed the uphill walk past antiquated homes that exactly mirrored one another across cobbled streets. He’d spent hours combing through centuries-old civic records in the dusty bowels of the town archive. Library research, especially when it involved sifting through folios penned when the Romans were invading Britain, was always enthralling—the first few weeks. After that, it became a chore.

  Bart knew his search through the local archives of the Bundinalli was right on the cusp of transmogrifying from adventure to drudgery. Frequent breaks, like this native lu
nch with Stevens, were helping him stave off the inevitable.

  It was equally clear his friend and cabinmate Fabian had needed a break as well.

  The task of coordinating the various specialists trying to figure out the Bundinalli aqueduct system had fallen to Lieutenant Commander Mor glasch Tev, second in command of the da Vinci’s own S.C.E. team. Though the job Bart had heard described at the planning session had been that of facilitator, the Tellarite had—in typically Tellarite fashion—understood his role to be micromanager of all aspects of the endeavor.

  Realizing this would be a big job, even for him, Tev’s first official act had been to co-opt Stevens, who would otherwise have been idle, as his personal assistant. For the last dozen days the tactical systems specialist had been bouncing from one Bundinalli township to the next, personally following up on instructions Tev had already broadcast in meticulous detail.

  Tev’s specificity was in direct contrast to the vagaries of Bundinalli. The language, and the way the natives seemed to organize thought, guaranteed Bart stretched his intuitive translation skills as he tried to decipher—or even find—the original routing instructions for Bundinal’s ancient aqueduct system.

  Eons ago, generations of ecological mismanagement had turned seventy percent of Bundinal’s arable land into a dust bowl. The Bundinalli were facing planetwide famine. Extinction was a real possibility.

  However, it wasn’t a possibility they were willing to accept. At about the time humans first began experimenting with bronze, the Bundinalli were constructing a network of interdependent aqueducts and canals to irrigate their planet. Their job was made simpler—just—by the fact they inhabited only two continents, both on the same side of the globe and both extending from the poles almost to the equator. Still, it was a prodigious task.

  What fascinated Bart was the fact there had never been a centralized plan, no unifying vision. Instead, the network’s form had been governed by the Bundinalli’s absolute insistence on symmetry. Everything in their architecture balanced. Whether it was the airy stucco and tile arches of Brohtz or the stolid timbers of Prshdt, every culture on the globe was built with symmetry.

  Sometimes this led to amusing quirks, like houses with faux front doors to balance the real ones. But on a global scale it had enabled the Bundinalli to create an incredibly intricate system that had grown almost organically as they’d diverted runoff from their melting polar ice caps and desalinated great volumes of seawater to irrigate their planet.

  That last had seemed particularly suspect to Bart. He didn’t understand planetary ecology in any great detail, but he’d always thought worlds depended on their oceans to renew their atmospheres.

  Case in point was a pair of what the locals called birds flitting about the edge of the open-air bistro. They had serpentine bodies with two sets of wings arranged in tandem. As nearly as Bart could tell, the wings never flapped in unison, or in any pattern he could discern. The entire arrangement looked aerodynamically impossible. But there they were, dashing after crumbs the tourists tossed their way, blissfully oblivious to their evolutionary improbability.

  His reverie was interrupted by a trencher of hearty stew, thick with meat but steaming with the scent of walnuts and cinnamon, appearing at his elbow.

  “I thought this was supposed to be a soufflé,” Stevens said from his symmetrical position at the other end of the oval table.

  There was an elongated mass on the platter that had been set before him. It looked to Bart as though an indifferent artist working from a verbal description had molded a fish out of pudding.

  “Either it fell or it’s an omelet,” Bart agreed. “Though it’s possible the UT just used soufflé as the closet approximation of the name.”

  Stevens sighed.

  Calling the server back, Bart inquired into the dish’s preparation. This involved a particularly Bundinalli explanation of growing seasons and traditions, but before his stew had cooled he had the gist of it.

  “It’s a half-dozen eggs from our friends over there,” he explained, indicating the snake-birds he’d been watching earlier. “The whites—that’s the green part—and the yolks—that’s the grey part, are separated and whipped into a froth. Two froths, I guess. The bits of purple, burgundy, and blue are a mix of fruit, finely diced, which is called rastentha. The fruit involved change with the seasons. Alternating layers of whites, fruit, and yolks are then poured into a mold—fish-shaped for reasons I didn’t follow—and baked. Technically, I suppose soufflé comes closer than omelet, but it’s somewhere between the two.”

  Stevens sighed again and eyed Bart’s stew with obvious envy.

  “At least give it a try,” Bart urged.

  Choosing a forklike utensil, Stevens carefully pared off a sliver of the mass and popped it into his mouth.

  “Whoa.”

  “What?” Bart asked.

  “This,” Stevens swallowed and scooped a large forkful from the soufflé, “is marvelous. We have got to figure out how to replicate this stuff. We could make a fortune.”

  Bart grinned at his friend’s change of mood and attacked his own stew. Not the rousing sensation Stevens’s soufflé evidently was, but it was still pleasant. Chicken, mostly, he decided, with walnuts and celery. That he tasted no cinnamon despite the aroma confused his palate, but not unpleasantly so.

  The Bundinalli network of canals and aqueducts had worked well for centuries until the Breen swept through the system. Intent on more significant targets deeper in Federation space, the Breen had simply bombarded Bundinal in passing, a side jaunt to upset a bit of Federation infrastructure rather than a campaign of invasion. One of the Federation historians had called it a drive-by shooting. Abramowitz had appreciated the cultural allusion, though its significance escaped Bart.

  Whatever the Breen’s purpose, the effect of their raid had been to throw Bundinal into agricultural chaos. Flooding and drought had cost them years of growing seasons in both hemispheres.

  Repair of the irrigation network had been a priority.

  A straightforward retro-engineering of existing foundations and structures, it had been repaired by the S.C.E. within months of the war’s end. But even though everything was in place, the system hadn’t worked. The aqueduct network was so large and complex it had been subject to coriolis effects and lunar tides—a complex consideration on a world with two moons.

  Generations ago the Bundinalli had installed tens of thousands of locks, but never a centralized control. Village lock masters had known that when the sun was here and the first moon there and the second moon there they should open the lock. Or, in different positions, close it. Thus thousands of individuals, faithfully attending their singular duties without communication with any others, had kept the waters flowing.

  It was a balance almost impossible to regain once lost. But finding that rhythm again was why the da Vinci was here now.

  “I should have gone with her,” he said again once his soufflé had disappeared.

  “What would you have done?” Bart asked. “Useful to the mission, I mean.”

  “Anthropological survey satellites are tactical systems,” Stevens said. “There was a lot I could have done.”

  “The satellite transponder reported structural damage,” Bart pointed out. “That’s Pattie’s specialty. And you don’t have the training—or the security clearance—in stealth technology Corsi has. There was nothing for you to do.”

  Stevens shook his head, unconvinced, and frowned at the cavorting birds.

  Bart glanced at his chronometer and made a side bet with himself on how many minutes would pass before Stevens said he should have gone with Corsi to the Zhatyra system. Bart hoped she was having a better time than the one she’d left behind.

  Chapter

  4

  “What I need,” Corsi repeated, “are my clothes and all the equipment you took from me.”

  The chiptaurs continued to ignore her, chittering to one another as they worked.

  Two were chan
ging her bandages, slick membranes that looked like veinless leaves. Peeling them away revealed drying poultices of what appeared to be chewed leaves and several deep cuts to go with bruises and scrapes that covered the rest of her body. The third, which had disappeared with the feltlike blanket she’d been wrapped in, returned with a fresh blanket folded over its upper arms and its lower pair wrapped around a bundle of fresh greenery for her bed.

  Of course, it could have been a complete stranger bringing the new bedding. However, the mottled brown on brown pattern, distinctly darker along the left side of its face and upper torso, was familiar enough for Corsi to be reasonably sure this was the same one that had blocked her exit earlier.

  Corsi stood, remembering to keep bent to prevent bumping her head on the ceiling, and sidestepped out of the way. One of the nurse chiptaurs moved with her, continuing to wind a fresh leaf bandage around her shin. The other helped the newcomer put down the fresh bedding neatly.

  “In fact, keep the clothes,” she told the top of the head even with her knees as the nurse focused on tying off the bandage. “Just give me back my equipment. Can’t let you keep it anyway. Prime Directive and all that.”

  The chiptaur—the one she’d held hostage—stepped back and surveyed its handiwork. Apparently satisfied, it chirped and chittered at her for several seconds, ending its speech with what looked like a gesture for her to stay where she was. Corsi decided this one, slightly larger than the others, was the head nurse. It certainly seemed to give most of the orders. With a brief aside to the pair working on the bed, the head nurse flowed out the door.

  Deciding “stay where you are” did not include holding the same head-stooped position, Corsi eased down into a crouch, balanced on the balls of her feet.

  She watched the two chiptaurs removing the greenery from the low bed frame, trying to determine if there was any social order or pattern to their behavior. She decided the one with the darker left side was older, if only because the other, with a distinctive patch of lighter hair on the back of its upper torso at the base of its neck, seemed to make an extra effort to assist it.