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  "I hope you had better luck than I did," Alysha said.

  "Probably," Taylitha said. She unrolled one of her blankets and spread the bounty. Alysha added a few shriveled clusters of greens and sweet-birch sticks, enough for tea and dessert. Grinding the nut meat with the roasted onions and mushrooms made for a generous meal. Taylitha was gnawing on the moist, fibrous center of one of the peeled sweet-birch branches when her companion spoke.

  "So what brought you to Fleet? You must have attended one of the satellite campuses . . . I don't remember seeing you at Terracentrus."

  Taylitha nodded. "I'm from the colonies. Terracentrus would been a very long ride." She wiped birch-juice from her chin and said, "And I joined Fleet because I like to meet people."

  "There are definitely easier ways to meet people," Alysha said, brows lifting.

  "As many people? As varied?" Taylitha asked. Her ears drooped. "I don't tell people this often because they make fun of it, but I'm hoping we'll discover a major new alien species in my lifetime. Maybe even during my tour of duty."

  "It could happen," Alysha said, stirring her tea with a birch twig. "There were the Flitzbe, and the Chatcaava, and of course, humans."

  "Humans don't count," Taylitha said. "That's like saying one of your aunts is an alien just because she's strange and you haven't seen her in twenty years."

  Alysha laughed. "Point taken. Still, I think wanting to explore the unknown is a good reason for joining. In fact, it may be the best reason." Her eyes lost their focus. "I thought it was mine."

  "It's not?" Taylitha asked. "Then what is?"

  "I'm not sure," Alysha said. "Not anymore. I used to feel very strongly about the stars for the sake of exploration. Now that desire seems to have waned. And yet, I still feel strongly about being here."

  "Maybe that's why you go around asking everyone's opinions on the Fleet," Taylitha joked. "You're hoping you'll turn up yours."

  "Actually, you're right," Alysha said, and grinned at Taylitha's start. "Or maybe I just like meeting people too."

  "No fair stealing my reason," Taylitha said, stretching her aching legs. "I worked hard on it!"

  Alysha held up her hands, smiling. And then continued, “So, command track?”

  “Yeah,” Taylitha said, warming her hands on the tin cup. “It seemed the best choice.” She grinned. “Not that I like telling other people what to do or anything. Just when it’s obvious they’re not paying attention to the little things.”

  “You’re good with that,” Alysha observed.

  “I try,” Taylitha said. “You’re command, of course. You already talk like an admiral.”

  “I had a good example,” Alysha murmured.

  “Really?” Taylitha asked, glancing at her. “I haven’t known any working captains. Well, I didn’t until I got to the Nightslip, but it’s not like I know her very well. I just had the teachers at the Academe, and I don’t think it’s the same. You don’t get to really see how they work. You have?”

  “A little, yes,” Alysha said.

  “And?” Taylitha asked, when her companion didn’t seem minded to go on. “What’s it like?”

  “It’s a lot of big-picture thinking,” Alysha said after a moment.

  “Like that bit with Kairell,” Taylitha said.

  “Exactly,” Alysha replied.

  “Great,” Taylitha said. “Just the opposite of what I’m good at, and here I am…!”

  They laughed, but the observation stuck with Taylitha. When the conversation began to suffer from the exertion of the day's hike, she did not revive it. Settling in her sleeping bag for the night, Taylitha wondered. Here I am, she thought. But should I be?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The next morning they scaled a narrow path to reach the checkpoint, a glade bordered by cliffs and encircled in trees. One tall and ancient pine rose from the glade's center, shading a tiny stream and a cabin the size of a closet. Its facilities included a rudimentary but very welcome shower head mounted on the outside wall. While Alysha washed, Taylitha explored the area around the glade. Several trees had tumbled down, their gnarled roots exposed and the topsoil beneath them ripped to reveal broken stone, ground almost to sand in places. The trees surrounding the glade cast a shade denser than seemed warranted by their numbers. Taylitha peered up through the heavy needles and found a cloud obscuring the sun.

  As she leaned back, her foot lit on gravel and skidded. She teetered between two pines, certain something behind her would stay her fall.

  Her back foot fell on scree and gave beneath her. She twisted, grabbing one of the pines, and discovered nothing between her and a ledge fifty feet down except a tree root she grabbed in utter desperation. That she screamed like a girl half her age embarrassed her, despite her larger worries. Hadn't Johnigan said something about Fleet not being in favor of dangerous training missions? What would he say when he found out she'd walked off a cliff while cloud-gazing? Probably "Curiosity killed the cat." He loved using that chestnut on her.

  The tree root was slipping from between her sweating hands.

  "Taylitha!" Alysha grabbed her wrist, wet strands of hair flinging water into Tayl's face.

  "Be careful!" Taylitha exclaimed. "The trees are barely rooted and the soil's skin-deep!"

  Alysha glanced around herself with a growl. Taylitha could hear flying gravel, but couldn't see what the other woman was doing. She concentrated on keeping her arms in their sockets.

  "Can you get your feet onto something?" Alysha asked.

  Taylitha made the attempt, but her pads slid off the rock. "Not reliably," she said, wondering at her own calm.

  "I'm going to pull you up," Alysha said. Her and what army? "Hold onto my arm." As if she was planning to let go. "Ready?"

  "Ready," Taylitha said, and took a breath.

  Alysha leaned down, let go of the tree and yanked backward. Taylitha grabbed a gray elbow in one hand and a gray wrist in the other and tried to wiggle upward, half-expecting the other woman to tumble off the edge with her.

  She didn't. Taylitha stared at the quivering of the muscles in that arm, at the shadows that lined their ridges. Pebbles and soil bruised her breast and stomach as she slid back up between the trees, and she scrabbled the last of the way onto level ground.

  Together the two sat, panting, shaking.

  "Let's," Alysha started, and took a long breath, "Let's get further into the glade."

  "Absolutely," Taylitha said, standing despite her shaking knees.

  She did glance backward once, and so see a certain impossibility; the bare stone revealed by the clearing of the gravel simply could not have claw marks in it.

  They returned to the center of the glade to await the rest of the team. As Alysha sat on one of the fallen trees, Taylitha struggled with her embarrassment, uncertain how to break the silence. She'd known the checkpoint was perched on several sheer edges; the walk here had given her plenty of opportunities to peer over similar ones. Had she been any clumsier, she would have gone over the edge completely, without even grabbing the root. She would have been severely injured landing on that ledge . . . or worse, had she missed it.

  Taylitha was not so intent on self-flagellation that she missed the surreptitious stretch and flex Alysha was attempting with her left arm.

  "What happened?" Taylitha demanded, catching the hand. She turned it over and found a long line of scrapes and torn fur from the side of the hand all the way up above the elbow. "How did you do that?"

  "I got a little too close to the ground while pulling," Alysha said. She didn't flinch when Taylitha tried to brush some of the dirt out of the welts, but her tendons rose against her skin.

  Taylitha fetched her first aid kit and went to work. As her embarrassment faded she noticed Alysha's stillness beneath the sting of the antiseptic.

  "You take this well," she said.

  "I'd rather not distract you by shaking or twitching," Alysha said with a wry smile.

  Taylitha swabbed the scratches near Alysha'
s elbow, which she recognized belatedly as her own claw-marks. Her ears flattened, but she continued after a moment, "I don't mean your arm. Most people don't like being tended. They get flustered."

  Alysha didn't answer immediately. Presently, she said, "I decided a while ago I might as well get used to it. I can't exactly administer my own medical care."

  Taylitha glanced at her while unwinding the bandage from the roll, hearing something in the quiet of the alto. "Is that your real reason?"

  "Part of it," Alysha said with a laugh. "The other parts have to do with being friends with healers, and being under their hands too often."

  So much hidden in so little at the end of a jovial reply! Taylitha wrapped the bandage around Alysha's arm, struggling not to ask what kinds of activities got someone who looked so healthy into a clinic "often." Sports? Manual labor? Perhaps Alysha practiced sword, as she did . . . but no, there were none of the calluses Taylitha had on her own hands. She forced her curiosity down and said, "I'm no healer, but this should work until the quick-sealers have a chance to integrate with your skin."

  Alysha flexed her fingers with caution, then smiled. "This is very well-done," she said. "How many other useful skills are you hiding in there, Ensign Basil?"

  "Probably not enough to thank you for saving my hide," Taylitha said, blushing in the ears. She didn't look away despite it. "I'm sorry I was careless."

  "It was an accident," Alysha said, putting a hand on Taylitha's shoulder. "It could have happened to either of us. Don't let it weigh you down."

  Taylitha took a deep breath, then nodded, letting the tension drain from her.

  "Ah, you're here! Good! I was expecting to wait!"

  The fur along the back of her spine shot up. Taylitha twisted slowly, hoping Mike Beringwaite would vanish in the moments between hearing him and seeing him. But no, there he was, standing with arrogant confidence, a tired-looking Tam-illee man just coming to a halt beside him.

  "You're ready to move on, I hope," Beringwaite continued, striding toward them. An almost cartoonish scowl spread over his face at the sight of Alysha's arm. "How did you do that? It's only been a day and a half! I hope you're not accident-prone, Forrest . . . I'm going to push us hard."

  "Leave her be!" Taylitha exclaimed.

  "It's okay, Taylitha," Alysha said, eyes never moving from Beringwaite's face.

  The human looked from one to the other. "What are you trying to hide?" he asked. "No one gets protective without someone having done something wrong. I don't want any muck-ups during my mission."

  "Your mission!" Taylitha burst out. "Just because you're the unofficial leader doesn't make you our commanding officer . . . and doesn't make this your mission! It's our mission, and we have as big a say in how we do it as you do!"

  "That's what you think, fur-for-brains. But the group has spoken, and I'm it. What I say goes, or you'll be the reason we fail."

  Alysha caught Taylitha's arm before Taylitha realized she was about to advance on the man. In her quiet alto, Alysha said, "We'll follow you, Mister Beringwaite. But a good commander doesn't use racial slurs on his subordinates."

  Beringwaite stepped back, then guffawed. "Right. It's just a joke."

  "Not to us," Alysha said. She smiled. "Though I suppose we could call you Skinny, or Devvy."

  Beringwaite paled, and even Taylitha and the silent Tam-illee bridled. It had been years since anyone had trotted out the derogatory terms assigned to humans since their rediscovery of the Pelted. "Skinny" was bad. "Devvy," from 'Devolved,' evoked all the Pelted's most prejudicial beliefs that after creating the Pelted humanity had become less than their gengineered children.

  "Don't call me that," Beringwaite finally said. "I'm your leader."

  "Don't do to us what you wouldn't have us do to you," Alysha said.

  "Whatever," Beringwaite said. "The day's getting old." He turned on them and started up the trail. The Tam-illee man followed him with drooping tail and bowed shoulders, awarding them only the most fleeting of glances on the way past.

  Alysha shouldered her pack and followed. Taylitha walked behind her, smoldering.

  If Taylitha had thought Beringwaite the mission commander irritating, she found Beringwaite the trail guide insufferable. She couldn't deny he did seem to know what he was doing, but he couldn't deliver a single fact without making it clear who was God on this particular mission. Nor could he bear any person with him making mistakes, and his definition of a mistake was so broad he had no end of excuses for his diatribes. More than once he told the Tam-illee man, whose name was Jender Forthstars, that the foxine's penchant for stopping to look at the scenery was stupid—what, had he never seen a tree before? Taking care of blistered feet made Jender a softie, ill-fit for Fleet. Even their choice of places to relieve themselves was subject to discussion and correction.

  Four hours after joining up with Beringwaite, Taylitha knew very well where Jender had acquired that beaten submissive look. One did not argue with Beringwaite . . . at least, not productively, as she discovered.

  "What are you looking at, Basil?"

  "There's a fallen tree in those shadows. It might have mushrooms on it."

  "Might," Beringwaite said with a guffaw. "Keep walking, furry."

  Taylitha bristled, but said, "The mission material says red oysters grow on trees in the shade in this area."

  "We have rations."

  "We could use them to supplement the rations. They're nutritious."

  "So are the rations."

  Taylitha growled. "It'll only take a minute to check!"

  "A minute we don't have, furry. Keep walking."

  She had not been in Fleet long enough to be in the habit of bowing her head to any authority figure... particularly someone her rank who had appointed himself as leader. Taylitha ducked away, into the brush.

  In moments, Beringwaite was behind her, grabbing her arm.

  "I said to stay on the trail!"

  "No you didn't," Taylitha said. "You said to 'keep walking.' I'm still walking. I'm walking to investigate this tree."

  "Get back on the trail," Beringwaite said. "This is a waste of time."

  "How do you know?" Taylitha asked, flattening her ears.

  "Because that's a mottled birch and red oysters don't grow on them. Their bark is too acidic."

  Taylitha allowed herself to be dragged back onto the path. She fell into step behind Jender and surreptitiously consulted her data tablet. Much to her irritation, Beringwaite was right.

  All the while, Taylitha could hear the soft scrape of Alysha's foot-falls behind her, and she wondered over and over why the other woman wouldn't put Beringwaite in his place and take charge.

  The sun disappeared over the horizon, and somehow this visceral reminder of time's passage aggravated her manifold aches and pains. Beringwaite had run them twice as fast as she and Alysha had gone the day before... nor did he show any signs of stopping. Taylitha was deciding how to express her frustration when Alysha's quiet voice sounded behind her, carrying clearly to the head of the line.

  "Beringwaite? Are we stopping?"

  "Not yet," the man said. "Or are you furries exaggerating when you say your night vision is better than ours?"

  "We can manage," Alysha said. "But you're not one of the Pelted."

  "No, but I know mountains. We'll keep going. There's a place we can stop in a couple of hours." He snorted. "We could have been there by now, but you people are a disgrace. I thought you would at least have tried to maintain some sort of physical condition on-ship."

  Taylitha scowled, but said nothing. She couldn't, given that she hadn't been in the gym as much as she should have been.

  By the time they reached Beringwaite's chosen campground, Taylitha was certain her legs weren't going to work in the morning. The muscles in her thighs were twitching, and her knees made unappealing sounds when she stretched. She erected the tent with Alysha's help and crawled into it, not seeing what was outside and not really caring. Her partially undone
sleeping bag was unrolled enough for her to flop onto it and groan, and while her ears registered Alysha's arrival, she didn't open her eyes until she smelled flowers.

  Alysha was offering her a handful of fleshy red and orange petals. "You need to eat, arii. Don't sleep yet."

  "I'm about dead," Taylitha said. "I couldn't possibly."

  "Sure you can," Alysha said. "I have some mushrooms and some kendrage too."

  Taylitha pulled herself upright and accepted a handful of the shiny green leaves and spindly mushrooms. "Where'd you find these?"

  "On the way up," Alysha said. "I noticed Beringwaite doesn't mind the back of the group as much as he does the front, especially if you don't attract his attention."

  "Yeah, I noticed," Taylitha said sourly. "What exactly were you doing back there? Besides foraging?"

  "Watching him," Alysha said. "Seeing if he was successful."

  Taylitha flipped her ears back. "Oh, he's plenty successful, if his intention is to so totally demoralize his people that they're ready to mutiny at the first fork in the road."

  Alysha nodded slowly. "He doesn't know how to treat people," she said. "A pity, because he does know the terrain better than any of us. He walks the paths with confidence."

  "Arrogance, you mean," Taylitha said. "He's a snot. I hate him."

  Alysha laughed softly.

  "I'm not kidding," Taylitha said. "There's no excuse for the way he treats us. When are you going to fix it?"

  "Fix it?" Alysha asked, ears flicking sideways in surprise.

  "Yes!" Taylitha exclaimed, exasperated. "He pushes us too hard. And he abuses us verbally."

  Alysha's expression stilled so quickly Taylitha hesitated, unnerved. She finished with more caution. "When are you going to stop him?"

  Her companion said nothing. Taylitha couldn't pin down how Alysha's face had changed, but she no longer looked friendly and detached. The hardness in her gaze frightened Taylitha enough that she squirmed and said, "Ah… Alysha?"

  "Sorry," Alysha said, touching her own forehead. She straightened and her eyes cleared. "Why me, then?"

  "Why... you? Why should you fix it?" Taylitha asked. At the other's nod, she said, "Because you can."