War World V: CoDominium - Revolt on War World by Jerry Pournelle

Author:Jerry Pournelle [Pournelle, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Published: 2010-10-29T23:00:00+00:00

It could have been much worse. It was summer. Also, the ship's captain hadn't been allowed to leave us with nothing at all. Before the shuttles had brought down the last of the people, Tom had sent out scouting parties to look for water and anything else useful. They didn't find any.

And it was almost hot, warm enough to sweat. The things I'd read had emphasized how cold Haven was. But there was summer, a long one. And when the sun is up for more than forty hours at a time, heat can build. I thought it might be early afternoon. The sun was high, but not as high as it should be at noon in the subtropics.

I told Tom what I thought. He squinted at the sky, then looked at me. "Forty hours between sunup and sundown? There was something about that in the little book your wife showed me, but a lot of it was confusing. Do we get forty hours of night, too?"

I'd known people like Tom: Intelligent, but only what they saw around them was real. Information about space or other planets was just noise. "It's not that simple," I told him. "This world is a moon. The planet it goes around, Cat's Eye, is big and hot, hot enough to glow in the dark. When Cat's Eye is up, we'll get both heat and light from it. When it's up but the sun's down; we'll have what's called 'dimday.' It will get cooler during dimday, but not as cool as during truenight." It also seemed to me that the sun would move around irregularly in the sky, because Haven circles Cat's Eye while they're both going around the sun. But I didn't tell him that.

He looked thoughtful, which was much better than if his eyes had glazed over. He was getting used to a new "here and now."

"It's complicated," I added. "We'll learn what we need to by experience." He nodded. Then the last of his scouting parties came back and told him they hadn't found any water. Nobody was surprised, up on a mesa like that.

"We'll go down into a canyon," he said to me. "If there's water to be found, that's where it will be. After we've found water, where do you think we should go? Down into the desert basin, or up on the plateau?"

"The plateau," I said. "We're going to need a lot of food, soon, and the Kazakhs up there are herdsmen. We need to steal some livestock from them. But they're armed, and they're supposed to be fighters. It will be dangerous."

His attention drew inward for a minute, then returned to me. "I'll send a raiding party to the plateau. Do these Kazakhs live in large bands or small?"

A raiding party. The Navajos had known about things like that, 250 years ago. Now-- Now I wondered. "I don't know," I answered.

"We'll have to go and find out," he said.

He told his scouting parties to find a way down off the mesa into one of the canyons that flanked it.

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