We sustained a lot of damage. We need to do the repairs. We have the time to figure this out.”
As he said the sentence, he felt the irony of the word “time.” They had a long adventure ahead of them, whether they were two hundred years behind the Fleet or five hundred years.
The emergency that he’d been feeling since the attack of the Quurzod more than two weeks ago had coalesced into something else. A situation, a crisis. But a slow-moving one.
One that would take patience and effort and a lot of hard work to resolve.
He would have preferred a fight to the death.
But he didn’t have that. Instead, he had to rely on his specialists.
He stood behind his chair and gripped its back. Then he looked at everyone, taking the time to meet everyone’s eyes before he spoke.
He wasn’t quite sure what he would say. He knew he had to reassure them. He also knew that he needed to set up a plan so that they could all move forward.
He couldn’t make that plan with a committee. He had to figure it out on his own.
He nodded at them, silently acknowledging what they all knew. Things had changed, and it would take a little while to get used to that change.
“Thank you all for the work,” he said. “You’ll have new orders tomorrow. We’re going to figure out exactly when we are. But know this: we’ll be all right.”
He sounded confident even though he didn’t feel confident. He felt as if someone had shut off the ship’s gravity and he was floating, unfettered, in a world he thought he knew.
The others, though, seemed calmer. Maybe it was the shared knowledge. Maybe it was the fact that they were not in charge of it; he was, and as their commander, he was the one who needed to solve the problem.
But he knew, as a commander—as a human being—that some problems had no easy solution.
And this problem was one of those.
* * * *
THIRTY-NINE
T
he rock pile grows smaller, and as it does, I realize something.
The dust pile is growing smaller as well.
The floor has absorbed the dust.
Now my questions become urgent. I want to ask Paplas how this functions. I want to know the answer immediately. It’s one of the stranger things I’ve seen—and I’ve seen a lot of strange things.
But I cannot ask, and Bridge looks too frightened and too confused to know that these questions might be important. I can’t even tap Bridge, like I had planned, and whisper a question to him. With his left hand, he clutches his ear protector as if he wants to pull it off. His other hand squeezes his knee.
Paplas grins as he moves forward. He loves this job, working alone, underground, using his gigantic machine to crush rock.
I can empathize. I love working alone as well, and I’d probably be just as annoying with strangers in my ship as he has been with us.
It’s a way of maintaining distance.
I grip the seat in front of me with one hand, wishing I could move up front. I want to watch the procedure. I want to see what the equipment’s control panel says, even though I really don’t understand Vaycehnese.
I’m fascinated and a bit worried about the vibration and the rock walls, although it seems to make no difference to Paplas at all.
It takes less than an hour to work our way to the crushed hovercart. All that rock, gone. The Bug slows as it reaches the back end of the hovercart, and those big legs move almost daintily across its back.
They take rocks and move them a few meters away, then pulverize them, takes me a moment to realize that Paplas is trying to protect the hovercart.
Does he think there are bodies inside?
I want to tell him that there aren’t, but I don’t. His admonition against me was strong enough that I don’t want to put my presence here in jeopardy.
Instead, I watch the deliberate movements he uses to get each rock out of the cart itself. Within fifteen minutes, the back end is clear. Then the front, with the controls.
Oddly, the seats are relatively undamaged. The benefit of a cart, I guess. It just filled with rock. I can’t see well enough to know if the floor of the cart is all right, but it just might be.
The Bug carefully lifts the rocks off the front end. Each rock seems larger than the last.
I finally understand why the cart is bent at