Read Online The Last Hour of Gann by R. Lee Smith - Free Book Online Page B

whatever you have to do, but you keep quiet, do you hear me?”
    Nicci nodded. The action tipped a few more tears out of her. They trickled sideways across her cheeks, blown off-kilter by the wind, and fell into her hair. “I’m scared,” she said. Little Nicci, like she was all of six years old again.
    “Go ahead and be scared all you want,” said Amber, releasin g her. “Just do it quietly.” She looked back at the uniforms. They were still talking. She took Nicci’s hand ( cold jesus how cold is it going to get when the sun goes down i don’t see any animals no birds not even bugs maybe it gets like a hundred below and nothing can live here ) and started walking, trying to look aimless so she wouldn’t get too much attention, but movement has a way of attracting the eye and people were staring.
    Halfway there, Nicci started bawling. That helped. There was enough misery around here that no one wanted to see any more of it. The people who had been dully watching her found other places to send their thousand-yard stare.
    Nicci…
    Amber dropped back a little and put her arm around her sister’s shoulders. Nicci hugged on her like a child wanting to be carried and cried the same way, loud and graceless, soaking heat and wetness into Amber’s shirt.
    “It’s okay,” she heard herself say inanely. She rubbed at Nicci’s shaking back and watched smoke fly away in wind-blown stripes from the ship. So much smoke. “It’s okay, we’ll be okay.”
    “I didn’t want to be here!” Nicci brayed. “I didn’t want to do this!”
    Guilt knotted at her heart and sank all the way down into her stomach. “I know.”
    “You made me! Why did you make me?”
    “Nicci…please, it’ll be okay.”
    “I want to go home!”
    “I’m sorry, Nicci. I am. Come on.”
    The two men who seemed to be doing the deep talking stopped as Amber approached them. She recognized the Manifestor up close—Crewman Everly Scott, who she’d made such a great impression on at boarding—but not the Fleetman he was with. If she knew how to read pips, she’d know his rank at least, but all Amber could see was an older black man of distinctly military bearing, with a worried face and smudges of soot along the left side of his mostly-hairless head. “Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked, once it must have been obvious that she was really coming to talk to them.
    “I can’t think of how,” Amber replied honestly enough. She rubbed Nicci’s back some more, trying to quiet her so that they could talk without shouting too hard. The wind made that difficult enough. “I’m not trying to put you on the spot or anything, but if you guys ar e talking about plans, I’d like to hear them.”
    “Go sit down,” s aid Scott firmly. “As soon as we’ve debriefed ourselves on proper procedure—”
    “No offense,” Amber said, looking at him. “But I don’t believe for a second you actually have a procedure that covers something like this. I am all for postponing the main panic, but we all need to know what happens next.”
    “Go find a seat,” Scott began again, but the soldier stopped him there.
    “At this point, ma’am,” he said, “all we’re doing is talking out the situation.”
    “But we’re going to get rescued, right?” Nicci reached out to grab at his uniform. He gave her hand a pat. He did it a lot better than Amber had, using the gesture not only to pry her off, but also to sit her down on the ground.
    “If you’ve got any ideas ,” the soldier went on, taking off his jacket to drape around Nicci’s shaking shoulders, “I’m willing to hear you out. But if I can be as blunt with you as you’ve been with us, if you haven’t got something to say, you need to move on and let us try to do our job.”
    “You can tell us how you’re going to sue us later,” Scott added derisively.
    Amber shot him an angry glance, then redirected herself to the other man. “I feel like I need to get the stupid questions out first,