Freedom's Landing Part 26

"We saw some working on others," Zainal said and stepped up to the face of the harvester to start removing its solar panels.

"Oh, my word, this planet's odd," Sarah said.

"You can say that again," Kris agreed. "They'll want panels and storage batteries back at the camp, or wherever. There's quite a herd of them here." She peered into the shadows of the garage to the indistinct forms parked there.

"Could we bed down here tonight?" Sarah asked with such a lack of expression that Kris almost grinned.

"I think so," she said. "I wouldn't mind being out of that wind for a night, myself."

"There're rock-squats back aways picking up her weapons.

"Kris, go with her," Zainal said when the woman started off on her own.

"I can handle myself," Sarah said indignantly.

"You go with," Zainal said. "This planet has dangers.

Kris knows dangers."

"Yeah, but I don't hear as well as Coo," Kris said, carefully setting down the comunit and the map case.

-" Sarah said, "Is he always like that?" Sarah asked Kris when they were out of earshot.

"Like what?"

"Don't bristle," Sarah said with a grin. "He's not half-bad for a Catteni. Not that I've met that many. But I heard ." and she let her tone rise up, a subtle prompting for Kris to expatiate.

"As Catteni go, he's pretty good," Kris said noffcommittally.

"And he's saved a lot of folks "Oh my word! You don't need to defend him to me. I came to on the outside of that b.l.o.o.d.y field and the guy next to me was being chewed up. I would have been next but for you stomping about like a brumby. Anyway, it's only good sense to go out with someone. Believe me, you do where I come from!" They came back with rock-squats and some of the tender-fleshed little avians, brushwood and a pile of droppings from the next field over. They had spotted only distant ffiers but Kris pointed them out and told Sarah how to avoid becoming a meal.

"Are they after one now?" Sarah asked, squinting at the aerial menaces.

"Who knows?" Kris didn't particularly want to find out. "Now, if you were back on Earth, you'd probably jump into your four-by-four and go investigate."

"Probably, but we're not on Earth now, are we?" and there was a world of regret in her tone.

"Sorry," Kris said in a rueful voice. She hauled her gaze away from the distant avians and they walked on in silence for a while.

Then they reached high ground where Sarah stopped to look out over the vista of neatly squared, hedged fields and sighed.

"Oh my word! My da would go spare. And no-one is in residence?" "Haven't found any one yet. And that's why we're dismantling the garages, to sort of give notice." Sarah's eyes bulged. "You mean you want to find out who made those - . - machines?"

"Did anyone tell you about the ship that collected the harvest?" Kris grinned down at the slighter woman, the braces of rock-squats swinging from the stick she carried over her shoulder.

"I heard something - a ship as big as a city?"

"Small city," Kris said with a laugh.

"You want to go on it?" Sarah's eyes went wide again but from respect.

"Not me, personally," Kris replied, though if Zainal was involved in the adventure, she'd probably be right there with him. And he probably would be in the boarding party. "It'd be interesting to see what species set up this planet, made it self-sufficient, self-repairing, yielding so much food "FOOD?" Sarah gulped and a brief panic almost made her drop her stick.

"That's what this planet does - makes food, and we don't know for whom. Or what. Except that they're probably omnivores like us." Sarah gulped again. "I hadn't thought about that aspect of it."

"Well, it's easier to concentrate on making out day by day at the moment," Kris agreed.

"Yeah, there's that all right," she said as they came around the bend of the smooth-domed rock that housed this garage.

The others had dismantled what could be taken back to the camp for recycling. Oskar had shown himself particularly adept with the disa.s.sembly and the others had started to defer to him. As he worked, he asked for English words for various items and cheerfully muttered them under his breath, committing them to memory. Joe was almost his equal but then, he said, from the time he was old enough to lift a screwdriver he'd been taught how to do repairs on his father's sheep station.

"You're looking at a heap of future handhelds and other useful gadgets,' Joe said, gesturing to the neatly stacked things, including wires, connectors, linkages and all kinds of curious gadgetry that had been inside the mechs. "A DIY treasure-trove."

"Would you know how to make something out of this?" Kris asked.

"Depends," Joe said cheerfully, "on what's needed." Zainal came up then, her comunit in his hand. "You are asked to call home."

"ET?" Kris asked with a grin but only Sarah and Joe caught the reference.

She shrugged and tapped out 369 and a strange voice answered.

"Worry here."

"Worry?"

"Ah, I'd be speaking to Kris?"

"You are, and you'd be Worrell."

"Since I landed here, it's been worry, miss, so "elp me.

Report?" She gave it to him and he expressed pleasure in the discovery of yet another garage and its reusables.

"Mitford's all right, isn't he?" she asked before she signed off.

"Never beuer," Worry said and even over the line his voice sounded sardonic. "A truly amazing man."

"No sign of any fly-bys?"

"You'd be recalled on the double if there were!

"I can believe that!" There was a laugh at the other end and then Worrell signed off with a reminder to register the approximate location of the new garage on the map. Zainal a.s.sisted her, as he was able to give her the relative distances from their previous camp and what he called a good guess as to the contours of the day's travel. Although Kris knew her legs could testify that they'd travelled far that day, her legs only knew they'd travelled, not how far up hill and down.

The next noon, they reached the top of a high ridge and saw the unmistakable shine of sun glinting off a body of water so large that a further sh.o.r.e was not discernible even from their vantage point. Then, to their right on the sh.o.r.e line, the obvious square outlines of an unnatural formation bulked large.

"A place for boats? They fish, too?" Astrid asked, shielding her eyes with one hand.

"Could be. They'd hardly let the wealth of a sea just sit there without harvesting it," Kris said.

"Too right," Sarah murmured, also peering ahead.

"Would it be a salt sea?"

"We'll find out," Joe said.

"Zainal?" Kris asked since the Catteni had said nothing but was staring hard at the building.

"We go careful. Fishing year long."

"True, but how could a machine fish? I mean, the sea doesn't follow any programme, does it?

Storms and stuff - - - unless they can control tides as well as the rain. Not that I wouldn't put it past them," Kris said, mildly bitter.

"They do not control us," Zainal surprised her by saying.

"Tell the others."

"About the flying darts and stuff?" She did and then turned back to Zainal. "However, if there are machines, surely they'd be specialized for use in the water. That building seems to be right on the edge. I don't think we have much to worry about them charging inland at us."

"Famous last words?" Joe said, nudging her with an elbow and grinning.

"I hope not. One trip to an abattoir is quite enough."

"Canning factory is what this'd be," Joe said, still teasing.

"Hmmm." Then Kris giggled. "Imagine him in a sardine can," and she tilted her head irreverently at their patrol leader, still looking intently at the building.

"We go slow. We do not approach until second moonrise "If you say so, boss," Kris said flippantly.

There were tides on this world, judging by the high-water marks and the flotsam deposited along the beach.

"With so many moons, tides would be complex," Joe remarked.

"Swim?" Astrid wistfully asked Kris, though she peered at Zainal for permission.

They approached the beach a kilometer or so from the building.

Hiking through the white sands had been hot work, for the shifting surface made the going difficult even where it was somewhat held in place by tufts of a st.u.r.dy gra.s.soid and, in one place, a plantation of reeds. Joe took samples of each plant in case one or more of these supplied trace elements that would help the Deskis. The sea might be several days' journey from the main camp but it was not inaccessible.

Another stumpy-branched growth which reminded Kris of wind-stunted cedars bore a hard fruit of some sort. Joe stuffed the harvest from two bushes in his pack.

Zainal swung his glance right to the building, which now seenied to be hovering above the sandy ground, an optical illusion, Kris was sure. Then, for a long moment, he watched the sea itself and finally shrugged It'd be ironic, Kris thought, to have survived all the dangers the land was providing to get drowned by some sea creature, but she couldn't see any disturbance on the lightly rippled sea: certainly nothing that would indicate underwater denizens. Then Zainal strode down to the edge of the water, and scooped up a handful from the next incoming ripple. He smelt it, then stuck his tongue into the liquid.

"Salt. You swim first," and his finger pointed from Sarah to Astrid to Kris. "We watch."

"Us?" Sarah piped up impishly but she was already walking down to the water's edge, opening her coverall.

Kris had lost a great deal of her conditioned notions of modesty over the last few weeks, so she followed Sarah, Astrid trotting ahead of both of them, shedding her coverall with haste, and nearly tripping as she removed the right trouser leg. She threw the coverall away from her, where the sand was still dry, and then ran the rest of the way into the water.

"Don't go too far out," Joe called and then he, and Oskar, hunkered down on the sand. Zainal remained standing, scanning the sea constantly.

The sea wasn't as salty as Kris remembered the Atlantic on her eastern seaside vacation, though there was sufficient to make it quite buoyant, and she settled into a crawl. Sarah was whooping and splashing.

"Hey, I like this. A sea I can swim in without worrying about sharks." "Don't go so far out," Kris called, all too aware that Botany was quite likely to put up a few seaborne surprises.

She was a bit surprised that Zainal had let them swim at all.

"Let's keep close enough to sh.o.r.e to get there before anything out there "and she waved at the innocuous spread of water, "can get us."

"Good thinking, mate," Sarah said and paddled back towards her.

Astrid swam with studied economy of stroke, Kris noticed, while Sarah thrashed about with little expertise.

They didn't stay in long, out of deference to the men who were keeping watch and who probably wanted the refreshment of a swim as much as they did. But Kris felt better for the bathe and waved to the men that they were comang out now. Zainal was still watching, but not the three nude women emerging from the ocean. Joe and Oskar had politely averted their gaze as the girls emerged.

"OK, guys, Kris called when they were dressed again.

"Your turn." She went up to Zainal. "I'll keep watch." He shook his head. Then, with a wide sweep of his arm, gestured Joe and Oskar to go in without him.

"Don't you swim?" Kris asked, amused.

"Too quiet," he said cryptically and continued his scanning, not just the horizon but the beach on both sides of them.

"On Earth - Terra - fishermen usually go out at dawn, or on the tide,' she said conversationally. "So the machines, if there are some, would be quiet this time of day, I think."

"I have never been to sea before,' Zainal replied in the same tone.

"You look a bit like a lighthouse, though," and Kris giggled, "standing like that."

"Light house?" He frowned but didn't pause in his vigilant and careful scrutiny.

"Hey, I think this planet has clams, Sarah cried.

She went down to her knees and started digging with her hatchet.

The next little wave ripple flooded over her legs.

"Didn't know you had clams in Australia," Kris said as she strode down to Sarah.

"Biggest clam-beds ever outside of Sydney. And oysters.

Kris's one seaside vacation had included hunting for quahogs on a Cape Cod beach so she recognized the little holes left where molluscs had opened an air pa.s.sage. She began to dig, too.

"What you do?" Astrid asked, joining them.

"Dig and. . . oh. . ." Sarah closed her fingers around something and hauled it out of the wet sand. "What on earth?" She rinsed the rest of the sandy mud off the sh.e.l.led creature and showed it to the others. It was oblong with a sh.e.l.l obviously "built' around it, rough like an oyster, not smooth like a clam.

"Well, it's like both clam and oyster," Kris said. "And with no claws it's not a crab. Oysters are good for you and so, for that matter, are clams. Might even have the trace elements the Deskis need.