Dark Secret by Edward M. Lerner

Author:Edward M. Lerner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: politics, postapocalypse, dark matter, terraforming, ark, gamma ray burst, planetary colonization
Publisher: ReAnimus Press

CHAPTER 26

Rikki traced circles with her spoon in an otherwise untouched bowl of gummy stew: lunch, such as it was. Her back was to Blake, but she sensed his worried look. Between her foul mood and her broken arm, he hadn’t gotten much of a homecoming.

She tried to care.

“Are you all right, hon?” Blake asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, setting down the spoon. In the glow of lighting strips, the glop clinging to the utensil looked as insipid as it tasted.

“Yeah, right.”

“I’m a bit tired,” she admitted. Dog tired. Drained. Exhausted.

Whereas Blake had fallen asleep last night within minutes, oblivious to her tossing and turning.

“Uh-huh,” he said doubtfully. He gestured at the curtained opening of their little private alcove. “It’s almost time. If you’re done with lunch, maybe we should wander over.”

The last place she wanted to be was in another meeting, particularly a mysterious one. But if she stayed behind it would only bring attention, from Blake most of all. She didn’t want the attention. And so, she nodded.

He led the way, their footsteps echoing, to the soaring, stone-columned chamber that everyone called the cathedral. The two of them were the first to arrive. As they sat waiting, Rikki wished, or wished it mattered enough to her to wish, her sadness would go away.

Either way, the despair ignored her. As always.

From the corner of an eye Rikki caught Blake chewing on his lip, brow furrowed, debating with himself. No, Blake, I do not want to talk about it. She said, before he made up his mind, “At least here”—unlike aboard ship, crammed in among the coffin-like cold-sleep pods—“we have room to spread out.”

It wasn’t that she wanted to be far from Blake, returned the night before from a prospecting run. She just didn’t want to talk with him. And that was problematical because he had not let her out of his sight, annoyingly solicitous of her mood and her arm.

The latter was nothing: a clean break. Over the space of two days, industrious nanites already had the bone half knit. Also, it was her own stupid fault. A Martian weakling on Dark had no business levering boulders to help clear a more convenient landing field. Not, at least, till she’d given exercise and a whole different batch of nanites enough time to bulk her up.

The despair was different, whatever the hell had brought it on. Besides... everything.

Inside the cast her arm itched like mad. She almost welcomed the distraction.

“Seriously, are you sure you’re okay?” Blake asked her again as she scratched beneath the plaster cast with the tip of a pen.

“Suspense aside, yeah,” Rikki lied.

Li had requested the meeting. There was never any predicting what that woman had on her mind. Other than trouble.

“Just rest and enjoy the moment,” Blake told Rikki.

She tried. The soft breeze that ever sighed through the caves. The air that, if a bit thin, was eminently breathable. The sunlight that streamed through the sinkhole high overhead.

It only made her mourn for the generations who had labored in vain to make such a world of Mars.

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