Free Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel by C. J. Cherryh Page B

moving to push a little more out of the cylinders he was using: you could do that if you got your breathing down.
    "They're gone!" Bianca said, then, looking around, and for a second his muddled brain didn't know what she was talking about. "I didn't see them leave."
    He hadn't seen Melody and Patch go, either. Desertion wasn't like them. But downer brains grew distracted with the spring. Did, even on the station… and was this it? he asked himself. Was it the time they
would
go, and had they left him? Maybe for good? Or were they just scared of the storm?
    The lightning flickered hazard above their heads…
danger, danger, danger
, a strobe light would say on station. It said the same here, to his jangled nerves. He walked, lightheaded and telling himself he could make it further without stopping for a change—at least get them past the place where the trail looped near the river:
that
was what scared him, the chance of being stranded or having to wade. The tapes they'd had to watch on what the monsoon rains did when they fell chased images through his head, of washouts, trees toppling, the land whited out in rain.
    Melody and Patch, he said to himself, must have sought shelter. There were always old burrows on the hillsides, and hisa grew afraid when the light faded. When Great Sun waned, there was no place for His children but inside, safe and warm and dry.
    Good advice for humans, too, but they daren't bed down anywhere but at the Base. He heard his heart beating a cadence in his ears as, through the last edge of the woods and the gray haze of rain, he saw the fields and the frames.
    "We'll make it," he gasped
    "But we're late," Bianca moaned. "Oh,
God
, we're late!"
    They were fools. And Bianca was right, they were going to catch it, catch it, catch it.
    They reached where he'd been working—close to there, at any rate. He'd left a power saw up on the ridge, and if he didn't have it when he checked in, he'd catch hell for that, too.
    "Keep going!" he said to her. "I'll catch up!" And when she started to protest he shouted at her: "I left my
saw
up there. I'll catch up!"
    She believed him, but she was arguing about the failing cylinder he'd complained of, about how he was already short, and he couldn't run. "Change cylinders!" she said, and held onto him until he agreed and got his single spare out of his pocket.
    Rain was pouring down on them and you weren't ever supposed to get the cylinders wet, even if they had a protective shell. You got them out of the paper they were in and all you had to do was shove them in, but you had to keep your head and eject one and replace one, and then go for the other one. You weren't supposed to run out of both cylinders at the same time, but he realized he'd been close to it, and light-headed, as witness, he thought, the quality of his decisions of the last few minutes.
    Bianca tried to help his fumbling fingers, and opened the packet on one cylinder of little beads. She was stripping it fast to hand it to him and he ejected one of his.
    Her tug on the packet spun the cylinder out of her wet hands and she cried out in dismay. It landed in water, with its end open. Ruined. In the mask, it would have survived a dunking. Not outside it.
    And he was on one depleted cylinder, with his head spinning.
    "All right, all right," he tried to tell her.
    "I've got mine," she said, and got out one of her spares, and opened it while he sucked in hard and held his breaths quiet, waiting for her to get it right, this time, and give him air enough to breathe.
    She got it unwrapped and to his hand this time. Shielding the end from the rain, he shoved it in, then drew fast, quick breaths to get the chemistry started.
    Then the slow seep of rational thought into his brain told him first that it was working, and second, that they'd had a close call.
    He let her give him the second cylinder, then: they still had one in reserve, hers. You could lend a cylinder back and forth if bad came to worse, but