Free Scattered Suns by Kevin J. Anderson Page A

coffin while I’m waiting for you to finish goofing around.”
    “We’re bringing in a spare tank, Commander, but I don’t know if we can get it up the canyon fast enough. We locked it in a cache when we secured this quadrant from Team Jade.”
    “Commander, I need to abort the exercise! Call in an emergency rescue lift!”
    She scowled. “Instead of hitting the panic button—which will never work in a real emergency, dammit!—try some creativity. Find a different way. If his tank is leaking, then seal it!”
    “How? We’ve got nothing but wound sealant in the medpack, and that’s not for use in this cold.”
    “Slather it on anyway! It’s designed to hold up against spurting arterial blood; you can bet it’ll clog a pinprick in an air tank. And the cold will keep it harder than a metal weld. Should hold at least until you can get that spare tank humped up to you. If that doesn’t work, try something else. Solve the problem.” She shook her head, grinding her teeth together to calm herself. “Once you stop the leak, he’s got enough air inside his suit’s reserve bladder to keep him alive for fifteen minutes even if his tank is empty.”
    “We’ll try, Commander!”
    As they jabbered to each other, scrambling to fix the leak, Tasia continued, “In the field, you’ll have limited resources. You have to know your supplies and equipment and what exactly they do. Just because a purpose isn’t listed on the instruction label doesn’t mean you can’t improvise.”
    Not surprisingly, by working together they easily saved the kleeb with at least ten minutes to spare. She refused to let them bow out of the exercise, though they wanted to run back to base and lick their wounds after the close call. Team Sapphire lost a lot of ground, and would probably come in dead last in the scoring, but they had learned something...for a change.
    Out of the loop on Mars, Tasia gleaned whatever information she could about the continuing stupid strikes on clan outposts. Rendezvous gone, even Hurricane Depot...
    Tasia had been to Hurricane Depot only once, on a flight with Ross when she was twelve. Ross had been assigned to guide a water tanker from Plumas, and took Tasia along to show her the Galaxy. He had even let her do some of the piloting—at twelve she was already rated for most of the ships used around the water mines—but he himself had flown the vessel through the gravitational obstacle course to the stable island between two orbiting rocks.
    The Depot had been a marvelous example of Roamer engineering, a bustling trading bazaar and meeting point for all the clans. Tasia had eaten exotic foods there, listened to tall tales from clan traders, seen so many people and strange clothes and traditions that she felt her head would explode. She’d always wanted to go back.
    And now, after seizing everything they wanted, the Eddies had simply swatted Hurricane Depot out of its stable point and smashed it like a bug. A show of force. A demonstration of General Lanyan’s cold stupidity...
    After that provocation and show of force, the Hansa seemed frustrated that Speaker Peroni had not simply capitulated. Tasia couldn’t believe the bull-in-a-china-shop way the Chairman was handling the entire situation. When she was a young girl, she had heard that the Earth military was a bunch of bullies and thugs. Apparently those stories were accurate.
    While on board her Manta, and during R&R stops at EDF bases, she had listened to the Hansa’s smear campaign against the “treacherous space gypsies.” Many stories implied that the clans were in league with the hydrogues because they had cut off shipments of stardrive fuel “solely to weaken the effectiveness of the Earth Defense Forces”—which was ridiculous in so many different ways she couldn’t even count them.
    There was no official announcement of the newly declared “war” against the clans, but most of the EDF soldiers knew (and celebrated) the recent provocative