Despite my words, coming back together in the ship was a bit of a shock. For one thing, I was now much more pregnant, which made me feel like I was standing out, and awkward. And my natural modesty had had a small chance to come back on the planet, where I spent most of my time with just Andrew, and some time with Carl’s family… but now I was back 24/7 surrounded by people. Even sleeping, which had become harder being pregnant, got harder with the noise, the movement, the babies crying and nursing… all of it.

But I loved it, everyone loved it, except poor Carl. I saw his eyes when they came in the shuttle for us, he looked at me and looked disappointed, almost angry. “She’s not there?” I asked him, guessing from his look.

“No. they say it will be another three months, at least. There was some kind of battle or something, and her flight was diverted to take new colonists to a new planet.” He brightened up, “She is coming, though, I mean, I got that. And it’s not like she was killed in the battle or anything, they weren’t anywhere near the battle. They just got diverted. I think there’s a message for you on the ship.”

There was, too. I made sure that I was private when I watched it. “Hey, Aliya,” Bethany said. I could tell that she was sitting in a room in a transport. “It seems you can’t make up your mind. First you give me an exemption and then you call me out on a special induction.” She sighed, “You made a boy back home very unhappy, I think. You remember Drenden? I think he was working up his courage to ask me to partner with him, which I’m sure I would have accepted after what happened to you in finishing school. That is, if you hadn’t given me an exception, which he didn’t know about. I might have accepted him anyway, he was a nice boy, and you know I want to partner early and start having kids; unlike you, my brilliant if anti-social sister.” She grinned.

“I can’t figure out if I am mad at you or thrilled. Obviously this is a nice boy and all, or you wouldn’t have done it. And we were all exstatic when the news reached us that you had been assigned a pathfinder unit. No one, quite frankly, could believe it. We were forbidden from telling anyone, too, which made it freaky. Can you imagine, all my girl friends asking me, “how’s your sister” and my having to say, “oh, she’s fine, colonizing some boring planet somewhere. That’s what they told us we had to say, you know. In a couple years we will be able to tell them that you are then a pathfinder but.”

“But I had just gotten up my hopes for a sort of normal life when the military arrived. You should have seen it. The kids and all the neighbors were absolutely freaked, and mother was sure that it meant you were dead, even tho it was totally the wrong kind of military. I was actually at Jenny’s house, you remember Jenny, and the kids came belting over for me. Jenny offered to hide me and smuggle me over to Jenners, but I just couldn’t. I mean, a special induction… not a prisoner, not a regular recruit… someone important, or so I thought.”

There was a long pause, “Which he is, I suppose. Being part of your unit and all, even if I will be his first partnére. Well, I’ll see you soon, I doubt this message will get to you much before I will myself, you might even get it after we have partnered. Wouldn’t that be a joke!”

—

The joke was on her, I thought, thinking of how frustrated she must be going off to that colony instead of coming straight here. She would get a lot of training in, anyway.

Our next stop was only a month away, so I only barely got partially used to living together again when it was time to land on our next planet. We were all awake together, and standing watching a screen. If there was anything that could be more different from our last planet, this was it.

“It’s a jungle, ladies and gentlemen, YYY said, “from coast to coast on this mainland it is one solid jungle. Similar to large parts of South America, back on Earth, this entire mainland only rises, at its highest point, three hundred feet above sea level. The rain here is almost constant, so basically everything is wet, all the time.”

“I don’t  understand the reasoning,” Grant said. “How can we possibly settle here? It seems to me that the aliens can settle that entire jungle.”

“they can, and they can’t,” YYY said. “There is almost no metal on this planet, and there is almost no real areable land. Everywhere on the plant floods. So while they can live everywhere, their actual adult settlements are few and far between and not very successful. We are going to land and see if we can be more successful with our ability to work together as a group.”

The boys all discussed this for a good amount of time, but I, and I think most of the women and children, all just stared at the screen, at the jungle rolling out underneath the screen. It was a fascinating jungle, with enormous trees, and in incredible amount of vines. The livestock was incredible as well. Just in our little fly over I saw about a dozen different types of lizard like squirrel things. And in the water below there were hundreds of crocodiles, or the local equivelant.

“So we’ll be settling where, exactly?” Grant asked, and YYY turned the film off, put the map back on, and showed areas in red.

“These areas are reasonably far from any of the adult settlements we have been able to find. As you see the settlements will be in a circle, so that, when the colonists come, they will be able to enclose the circle against the Enemy, assuming we can figure out how to do that.”

“But how will we live?” someone else asked.

“Well, in a word, treehouses,” YYY said, and everyone laughed. “No, seriously. We have plans from several primitive groups back on earth for houses in trees, and we are going to be giving those to you, and each partnership can choose which type of house they would like to build.”

“What will the colonists eat?” I asked. We had our own food, of course, but we needed to set things up for the colonists that would come after us.

YYY looked almost embarrassed. “Well, there are a large number of fruits that are edible, and some vines that can be used as we would use vegetables. But mostly, well, meat: bugs and lizards.”

I flushed, and I was sure I wasn’t the only one. I had eaten lots of strange things, but most of them I hadn’t really know what it was. And I had eaten reptiles, of course. But these poor people would have to live on nothing but reptiles, lizards, for meat. And, of course, for the next few months, so would we!

“Come  love,” Andrew said, breaking into my reverie. “We need to choose our plan for our house.”

We looked them over and it didn’t take me long to decide on my favorite: a nice, light, airy house, all one room. Deciding how to cook was very awkward, but there was a kind of large bamboo that we could actually make a fire in, assuming we were careful. So we decided to put one of these in, literally, a hole in the very center of the room, in such a way that, if the bottom burnt through, the fire would just drop to the jungle floor… the soaking wet jungle floor.

“It’s going to be smoky!” I said. Always before, or almost always, even in the sims, I had managed to get at least a chimney. But that wouldn’t work here. I would have to keep the fire down or the house would be filled with smoke all day. Andrew probably wouldn’t care so much, but I would be stuck in the house pretty much all day.

“So, we’re ready to go?” Andrew asked, when I got done sketching a couple of cabinets and things. Very primitive cabinets.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“Great, I’ll tell the shuttle pilot.”

“See if we can go with Carl’s family, will you?”

“Sure.”

—

<emphasize dense jungle, rain, etc.>

It took us another twenty four hours before it came our turn to go down. And we did get to go with Carl and his family. And Carl was very excited. “It is cool, Adlephe,” he said. “We build the house from the slings! You’ll be the third I’ve gotten to help with!”

He wasn’t the only person to get to help, either. A half an hour after we got in the shuttle we were hovering over what seemed to be a spot of the jungle that looked like everywhere else. We had a dozen soldiers with  us, and they, along with Carl and his father, got out their sling  lines and began rappelling down.

Most of the soldiers went off into the nearby jungle to start cutting off various branches. Carl, his father, and Andrew, on the other hand, had long ropes on their shoulders and, going off to various nearby trees, began making a kind of web. Carl was actually best at it, scurrying along the ropes and branches, swinging wildly along with his sling propellant.

Soon they had a part of the web woven and I rappelled down. Andrew wouldn’t let me come down before. I stood, hesitantly, on the web and watched them work and then, as the soldiers started to bring up branches, I started to weave them into place, according to the plan. It was actually kind of fun.

—

“Wow,” I said, several hours later, looking at our house from where I stood, on what remained of the web, a few feet in front of our new house. It was tiny, of course, only about ten feet across. And rough, of course, as befitted a house put together with branches and vines in a day. But it was done, and it was ours, and I, quite frankly, was ready to get into it and lay down and go to sleep.

“Totally cool!” Carl said.

“Hopefully it will be dry inside,” Andrew said. True to form, it had been raining all day, although, luckily, just a light drizzle, almost light enough to ignore when you were working, but now that we were just standing here.

“Do you want to spend the night?” I asked Carl.

“Nah, I can’t,” he said. We have deliveries to make, tomorrow. We’ll deliver to you, what, third I think.

His father nodded, and then waved his hand, and the rappelling ropes pulled him and the others back up to the shuttle where, one by one, they grabbed handholds and pulled themselves inside. Carl was last and waved at us after he had climbed in.

“Come,” my love, Andrew said, as he took me by the waist as the shuttle roared off into the sky, “Let us enter our abode.”

I had started a fire earlier, and we both gratefully stripped off and towled ourselves dry in front of it. I laid down some blankets on the floor, more for protection against the roughness of the sticks than any need for warmth. In spite of the rain the temperature was much warmer than we kept the inside of the ship, and we hardly used covers there.

“Happy?” Andrew asked me, as we lay together, a half an hour or so later.

“Well, I can’t say I’m happy with the diet,” I said. “And I don’t know how I’m going to handle the  humidity. But the rain on the roof is kind of nice.”

“Those leaves do make a wonderful sound, don’t they?” He asked me.

I took his hand, and laid  it on my stomach. “Really?” he asked.

“I think so, but I’m not sure,” I said. We had been waiting for movement and, so far, the couple times I had thought I had felt something, I hadn’t been able to get Andrew there in time to…

“I felt it!” he exclaimed and I lay back, content, his hand on my stomach, listened to the rain, and fell asleep.

—

“Wake up, love, the shuttle is coming,” Andrew said. I woke with a start, how long had I slept? I threw on my dress and ran outside. Sure enough, the shuttle was here and Andrew was there, dangling outside the shuttle.

“They must have started early,” Andrew said. Like me he was dressed in about the minimum  he could be, just a loose pair of shorts. I looked and the sun was hardly up. “Carl looks happy, getting to bring down the guide line.”

He did. He was grinning and, with his free hand, waving. We watched him as he got lower and lower, till he was about twenty feet above us.

Suddenly there was a bright flash from off to my right. I had no time to turn, however, because it moved from the right to directly above me… a bright streak that went directly into the shuttle, and was followed by a tremendous explosion from the inside of the shuttle.

I screamed but, before I could even really register what had happened, two things happened. The first was that the shuttle began to move, off to my right, erratically. The second, seconds later, was that Carl began to fall, his rapelling rope shooting out of the shuttle.

“Aaah,” Carl screamed, adding his voice to my voice and the high pitched roar of the shuttle. The motion of the shuttle was horribly worrying, but Carl, almost directly above us, took up all of my attention. The movement of the shuttle meant that he wasn’t falling directly downward but to my right, toward the house.

“Andrew!” I shouted, having no idea whatsoever what he could do. He moved, however, and my heart stood still. Down and down Carl plunged, seeming to take forever. And then, to my mixed horror and relief, he hit… hitting the house almost at its very top. I watched, trying to decide which way to move, as the house bent, and bent… and then snapped back into place, shooting Carl off the house and… directly into Andrews arms who, catching him, fell to the ground with him.

I had a few seconds release to watch the shuttle which, to my horror, continued to fly erratically off to my right, and downwards, until it hit a tree, spun wildly, and plunged to the jungle floor.

“Here!” Andrew said, shoving Carl into my arms and yelling into my face, “Take him and hit the panic button!”

I looked, dazedly, into my arms and saw that Carl was truly in a bad way. He was unconscious and his right arm hung at a horrible angle. His clothes were ripped in several places, and he was all over blood. My medical training kicked in and I raced into the house with him, putting him on the blankets that I had so recently, and so happily, quitted. Then I raced to the locker and pulled out the emergency communicator, pushing the emergency button, designed for just this sort of situation.

Then I got out my medical kit and went over to Carl. In seconds I had his clothes off and was examining him. He had three deep puncture wounds and had  lost a lot of blood. Two them needed only a quick application of anti-bleed, but the third needed a quick surgical intervention to pull out a three inch long splinter, about an inch wide, from out of his thigh.

The sky overhead filled with noise, first the roaring of a combat shuttle, and then some deep crumping sounds. All around me I heard the snapping and crash of trees and parts of trees crashing down. I put all of that out of my mind, and went back to my surgery.

It took me a half an hour to stop all of the bleeding, and I had to give him three separate boluses of fluids to keep his blood pressure up.

“Come on, Carl, come back to me,” I kept mumbling. His pulse eventually came down, and his blood pressure stayed up. His face was strained so I gave him a dose of pain-down, and forget-me… two pain drugs that worked very well together, the one slowing the transmission of pain, and the other basically making the brain not care.

I had some time so I got out a rag, and water, and began washing him off, looking for other punctures and contusions and the like. The wand had showed me considerable brusing along the lungs, but nothing that looked like it would cause bleeding there, but I kept looking back every few minutes.

Finally I had him completely evaluated and began a replacement bolus. I hoped I had enough for any other patients they brought me. I hoped, desperately that there would be other patients.

After an hour or so I couldn’t stand the suspense and went outside. The shuttle noise had calmed down, at least as far as the weapons. The roar of the engines were still there and, the second I came out, a combat repel hole opened and a soldier came down a fast-rappel line. “Are you OK, ma’am?” he asked me, hitting the ground and bouncing slightly.

“I’m fine,” I said. “The shuttle crashed over there, and my partner went down to find out if they are all right. What happened?”

“We’re still working on that, ma’am. He glanced at my hands, “Are you sure your OK?”

I looked down at the blood and said, “I’m fine. Their son, Carl, he was injured in the accident.”

“It wasn’t an accident, ma’am,” he contradicted. “Do we need to evac the boy?”

“No, the young man will be fine here, I think, at least until we get his parents up.”

“We have sent several soldiers down to the crash site, ma’am, we should have news soon.”

“Thank you,” I said, and went back in the house, while he stood, scanning the jungle warily, his rifle in hand.

—

“They’re coming up, ma’am,” he said, “and they have a patient.”

A patient? I prayed that there would be more than that and rushed outside, peering over the balcony.

“It’s Julina!” Andrew yelled at me, from forty feet or so below me. He was coming up the line rapidly, obviously with a line shuttle, and he had a pack on his back.

“How is she?” I asked, as he made it the last few feet and I helped him over the edge.

“We gave her a shot of calm,” he said. “I think she’s just badly bruised, but there might be a break somewhere, especially in the ribs.”

I took her into the hut and, opening the pack slowly, I laid her besides Carl. They had field stripped her, of course, and cleaned her. I ran my wand over her. Sure enough she had a broken rib, not a bad one though. And she was badly bruised.

I examined her head carefully. My little wand was not the best for finding head bleeds, but I didn’t see any, and she didn’t have any symptoms of a head injury. I moved down the kidneys, and the suddenly became aware of my partner, watching me with worried eyes.

“Where are the rest of them?” I asked, scanning the kidneys. I heard nothing, looked up, and saw the answer in his eyes. “All of them?” I screamed, “They’re all dead?”

He came and hugged me, holding me until, guilty, I went back to my scanning. The left kidney showed a small amount of damage. “How?!” I asked, pleaded, “What happened?”

“We have no idea how they did it, but somehow the enemy managed to get an eplosive device into the shuttle. It killed everyone instantly,” he said. To this day I think he lied to me, but, if so, it was a lie out of kindness. “Everyone except Carl, who was outside, and Julina, who was in the bathroom. As she ship went down she must have been banged about rather badly.”

I spent the next hour watching over them, adding medication lightly to their dose to keep them under while they healed, and crying. Andrew stayed with me off and on, and went outside the rest of the time. They were all dead?

The noise of the shuttle, which had been fairly dull, now opened up so I could hardly hear myself think. “What are they doing?!” I asked Andrew, when he came in a few minutes into the noise.

“Pulling the other shuttle out of there,” he said. “It was so wedged in that they couldn’t run it.”

“It would run?” I asked, incredulously.

“Oh, yes, they’re incredibly tough. If they hadn’t had the door open to let the explosive in, it wouldn’t have done anything at all. But the explosive killed the people, so the shuttle, which was on manual, crashed into the trees, and then the autopilot tried to move it, and couldn’t, so it shut down and locked down, as they are supposed to do.

The noise changed just after he said, that, and we heard one shuttle leave and the other come hovering over. I didn’t want to be bothered with the shuttle, and stayed with my patients. A few seconds later the colonel, himself, came into our hut with Andrew. “How are they?” he asked, coming right to the issue.

“Not great,” I said.

“Will they be OK staying with you?” he asked.

“Yes, they should be fine, but I will need a restock of my medical supplies.

“That’s no problem, the boys are bringing down a full restock of everything, the stuff that was on Carl’s shuttle, your regular supply. So you’ll be OK with them?” he asked, looking at Andrew as well.

“Yes, Sir,” Andrew said.

“Well, good. You two are their closest family. Let us know if you need any special help. We are going to make some changes to our shuttle procedures, I can tell you that!” he finished, and stomped out.

I looked at Andrew, only now realizing what we had agreed to. “That’s OK, isn’t it?” I asked him.

“Of course,” he said. “They’re family, after all.”