Unfamiliar Territory

If she was cold, Mac had to be much colder. Night was coming on, and she had no idea what survival gear the alien shuttle had been carrying or where such gear (if any) had wound up after the crash. But she had better find either that or the comm unit that the crash had knocked out of her hand when she'd been in the act of trying to use it, damned fast, or Mac almost certainly wasn't going to make it through a night here; and she might not, either.

So she left him, murmuring an apology she knew he couldn't hear, and headed for what remained of the fuselage. There she had her third bit of good luck (her survival being the first, Mac's survival being the second). Inside the battered hull she located blankets, and a lumipanel.

Warmth and light. At the moment she could ask for nothing more unless it was to find her comm, Colby thought while she was dragging her companion across what felt like an endless expanse of scraggly grass-like vegetation and exposed ledges that separated him from their critical bit of shelter. His comm was gone from his belt, too; Colby vaguely remembered the Harimi co-pilot turning around and snatching it away from MacKenzie during the last moment before the crash.

Had Octa thought Mac's comm was a weapon, when he had pulled it out to try to let the Serengeti know they were in trouble? She and MacKenzie were, after all, the first humans the two Harimi had ever seen-and although they'd been coldly polite, both Octi and Octa had been visibly uneasy with their passengers. Colby had the distinct feeling that if it were up to any of the Harimi she'd met since arriving in the Sacorra system, the evaluation of their climate-altering project on the sixth planet would have been called off the minute she showed up instead of her Denebian deputy whom they had been expecting to greet. And to think that she had been urged to come here personally because someone on the Council had wanted to impress the Harimi, and that she'd agreed to do so because the project had interested her!

Well, she'd impressed them all right; they had looked at her as if they couldn't believe the Council would insult them like this. And whether Octa had thought Mac was threatening her or not didn't matter, both comms were gone and there was no point trying to find them at night. She had to use the lumipanel's weak light as a beacon to guide her over the last few meters, as darkness came to the valley; but she made it. They made it.

There was nothing to do now except strip wet uniforms from both their bodies, to roll them up together inside the dry blankets; to hold this boy of twenty-five in her arms, him naked and she in her still-dry underwear, and wait nineteen hours for morning to come.

"What in bloody hell does he mean, the Admiral's shuttle disappeared?" Commander Kristen Nordstrom asked the question incredulously as much as angrily. She looked at her captain, and she waited for a response.

Thaddeus Worthington held out a hand toward his executive officer. He was usually such a mild person that those who didn't know him well wondered how Thad Worthington had ever come to command a starship; but those who did know him, Nordstrom among them, also knew that when he suddenly got through being mild you didn't want to be the person who had caused him to reach that point. He directed his next words to the viewscreen and the image it displayed, though, after he'd nodded toward ops so that he would be put through.

Which Nordstrom hadn't been, and for all her hot temper the Serengeti's exec would never have been indiscreet enough to ask that rhetorical question if she'd been on comm to-the enemy? Their allies?