“I hope you’re right.” She wasn’t as sanguine about the future as Cody was but she wanted to be comforted by his optimism.
* * *
They left at dawn the next day, with only the captain and Ryan, who had the guard duty, to see them off. Tamsyn led the way on Blaze, following the track which had been worn into the earth over several centuries of her family members making this trek to take care of their herds. As they rode through the early morning chill, neither she nor Cody felt like doing much talking but as the sun rose higher, the air warmed and the day grew older, they fell into an easy conversation about the ranch itself and portions of the history she’d read to him while he was fighting the flu. Tamsyn was amazed how much he’d retained, considering she’d believed him to be pretty much unconscious during those long hours.
At noon she halted at a small grove of trees, where her family had set up a crude picnic table and benches. The tallest tree had been hit by lightning, burned and toppled at some point in the year since she’d last been here and as she dismounted, she stared at it, unsettled. “An omen, I guess.”
Cody swung down from his saddle, holding the reins and shook his head. “An omen for last year maybe, but we’re going to concentrate on the bright side now. Once we leave the ranch and head for Glastine, we’ll be gathering fresh intel and figuring out what to do going forward.”
She grunted to acknowledge his comment. “How’s your back? Are you saddle sore yet?”
“Not noticeably,” he replied, mimicking the horse hobble she’d used on Blaze to tether Mercury before turning him into the patch of grazing which had been created close to the trees. There was a small stream winding through the plot and Mercury went to get a drink. “How much further to the upper pasture?”
“Four or five hours at the pace we’re moving,” she said. Tamsyn pointed to the foothills in the near distance. “We’ll be taking the trail up to the plateau in the middle of those hills. It’s a solid day’s ride from the ranch house to the pasture. Best not to linger too long over lunch.”
Cody unpacked their lunch from his saddlebags, bringing the wrapped sandwiches to the table, where Tamsyn had already set out their nutrition drinks. “What do we do with the trash?”
“Pack it out,” she said, unwrapping her sandwich, which she’d made last night and put into stasis until morning. “No recyclers out here.”
“Makes sense.” Cody studied the horizon as he chewed. After swallowing he said, “At first I thought there was nothing here, flat and boring, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, but now I’m coming to see the austere form of beauty.”
Tamsyn tried to see the terrain she’d been living in all her life through a newcomer’s eyes. “I guess I take it for granted. Plenty of wildlife and birds around, like that flock of partridges we startled this morning.”
“The babies were cute,” he said, “Once I got Mercury to calm down from his reaction to the way they exploded out of the brush under his feet.”
“You did good,” she said. “Much better than I’d have expected from a new rider.”
“At least I didn’t end up in the dirt.”
“Is it because you’re a cyborg?” she asked. “Does it help you pick up new skills so rapidly? If you don’t mind me asking.”
He shook his head. “I don’t mind, ask away. Anything you want to know about me, I’ll tell you. Except maybe details of our combat missions. Those are too violent for civilian ears.” Cody gave her a look so intense she felt a throbbing between her legs not related to riding all day in the last. “I want to be an open book to you.”
Tamsyn didn’t know how to reply to his vow so she stayed silent, concentrating on her meal. Eventually she found a hopefully neutral topic. “What does your family think about you being a cyborg?”
“I don’t have a family, other than my brothers in the military,” he said with no apparent regret. “I only have a vague memory or two of my mother—a warm, sweet feeling of being hugged, the hint of perfume, a fragment of a song I think was a lullaby. She died when I was two and I got shunted into the Sectors orphanage system. Never knew my father, no record of him. There’s probably quite a story there but I’ll never know. I did track down my mother’s people once I was grown but other than distant cousins scattered among the Sectors, there was no one left.” He shrugged. “Not sure what I would have done if I had found a family.”
“So you enlisted?”
Cody’s laugh was harsh. “The Sectors has quite a pipeline from the orphanages to the military and other types of service. It’s pretty much a given. I wasn’t going to do anything else unless I rejected all of it and maybe ran away to join the Amarotu Combine. Which isn’t my thing. Organized crime,” he explained as Tamsyn’s puzzlement must have shown on her face. “Anyway, none of the required aptitude tests pointed to a future for me as anything but a soldier so here I am.”
She guessed there was a lot of history Cody was glossing over but didn’t want to push. She was grateful he was sharing anything about himself at all. “I grew up on the ranch. My mother died when I was ten, so at least I got to have some good memories. She taught me how to cook. Mostly though I learned ranching from my Grampa and my Dad.”
“Home schooled?” he asked.
“You would think so, given the long commute from here to Rosewater but my mother insisted I attend regular school and after she passed my Dad took her wish as a commandment. I graduated from Rosewater High with honors.” She buffed her fingertips on her shirt and grinned. “But going away to college or taking classes via holo didn’t appeal to me. I was all about the fact I’d be taking over the ranch someday and threw myself into that. There were some courses to do with agricultural accounting stuff I took and a bit of veterinary science.” Her smile faded. “But now it was all for nothing.”
“Not for nothing,” he said firmly. “Life has to be lived and at the time neither you nor anyone else had any reason to suspect there’d be a catastrophe. Knowledge is always useful.”
“Well right now my knowledge is telling me we’d better get a move on or we won’t arrive at the end of the trail till after dark and that ain’t a good idea.” She glanced at the horses and back at him and froze. “Sit very still.”
With painstaking deliberation she lowered her hand to the butt of her stunner and drew it from the holster. Cody remained motionless as she’d ordered but she’d have been amused by the expression on his face if the situation was less serious. His eyebrows were drawn together in a frown and his jaw was clenched. He’s used to being the one doing the defending. She shot a quick bolt at the tuft of brush beside the table support and Cody’s booted foot. There was a thrashing and a thick, long snake flopped and fell.
“Poisonous?” Cody asked with interest as he stood up and moved away a few feet. He didn’t seem alarmed. “My nanobots fight venom and other poisons, you know.”
“I didn’t want to take a chance, not out here.” She holstered the weapon. “Best we go. It’ll revive soon enough. Northern yellowfang and yes it’s highly poisonous.”
“But you didn’t kill it. You could have drawn your blaster instead,” he pointed out as they grabbed their trash and moved toward the waiting horses.
