Free Rift by Kay Kenyon Page A

for a moment before resuming their run down the beach. Alerted now, the deer wouldbe hard to catch. Still, the women had no choice but to track them.
    Eiko had ruined the plan, breaking position, and she needed dressing down, but Thallia’s pointed look at Nerys warned her off. They hurried down the beach in silence, Eiko having the grace to be ashamed.
    With the deer fled into the headlands, the mudflats stretched barren before them, pimpled with batches of old Lithia and the occasional dusting of birds. For the first time since their escape from the clave, the thought of starvation dipped into Nerys’ mind.
    Their course led them past their cliff hideaway. Anar was waiting for them.
    “Tell your brat to hunt shells,” Eiko murmured, pushing ahead. Then she stopped in front of the child.
    Nerys hurried forward, afraid that Eiko would take out her anger on the girl. But following Eiko’s gaze, she looked down to find a yearling deer bleeding into the sand, dead from Anar’s spear.
    “It ran straight to me, Mama!” Anar said, still wild-eyed from her exploit.
    Nerys laughed out loud as the women stared in amazement. The animal, with her daughter’s spear impaled in its gut, was as large as Anar herself. Her joy in Anar’s accomplishment was surpassed only by her ravenous hunger. Here was their feast, after all. Even Eiko seemed uncertain whether to laugh or scowl.
    Thallia shouldered forward, placing her hand on Anar’s shoulder. “Well done, child,” she said. “You are our best hunter, this day.”
    Anar’s smile almost lifted off her face.
    “Eiko,” Nerys said, “give Anar a hand to haul her kill up to the cave, will you?” They shared a long look between them. Eiko broke contact first, bending to her task.
3
    Mitya had taken to sleeping under the galley food prep table. There was no privacy to be had except here in the compartment allotted for meal prep, where walls and a door were thought necessary to keep dust out of the dinner. The only other rooms besides the main dome were the Captain’s quarters, the toilets, and the clean room for the geo cannon. At night the crew inflated their mats every which way on the dome floor, with officers preferring the perimeter wall, leaving lesser individuals to congregate in the middle. This often left Mitya next to Oran, whose constant hazing inched ever closer to outright meanness.
    This morning Mitya deflated his mat and crawled out from under his table just in time to meet Koichi as he ducked through the flap of the galley door. Koichi, a specialist second class in chemical systems, did double duty as galley chief.
    “Looking for scraps?” Koichi said, one eyebrow raised.
    “No sir,” Mitya said. He had learned that taking people’s gibes at face value saved him from complicated decisions like how to respond to sarcasm and insults.
    Koichi began selecting his breakfast menu, a choice among wet and dry cereal and two kinds of re-meat. As Mitya laid out the bowls, he heard voices on the other side of the galley wall. An argument, from the sound of it.
    “She doesn’t have the depth, damn it, you know that!”
    Another responded: “I’ve said I need you on the technical end, Stepan. Leave the administration to Cody.”
    “Administration? We’re a damn sight beyond administration! We’re stuck in the middle of nowhere and falling behind schedule. At this rate it’ll take months!”
    “No, it
won’t
take months.” Now Mitya realized it was the Captain speaking.
    “Damn it, Gabriel, we’ve still got calibration of the model and tests!”
    “Stepan, Stepan. I understand that. But
someone
needs to coordinate the science team. We could do worse than Val Cody.”
    “By rights, it’s my job—you know that. It’s a bitter thing to report to a woman fifteen years my junior!”
    “Don’t think of it that way, Stepan, it’s—”
    “Don’t tell me how to think!”
    Koichi caught Mitya’s eye. “Go check the water gauges,” he muttered.
    Mitya