Regs

By Nina M. Osier

“You can get out of here now, Rudy. No need to hang around, and have both of us in trouble if this goes bad.”

When I said that to Technical Specialist Tasker, I wasn't a bit sure whether he would take me up on the offer or not. But I owed it to him, to give him an out; bringing me, his team leader, down in one of the Ishtar's shuttles didn't guarantee he'd get charged with breaking regulations. He could claim I'd given him a direct order, after all.

I wouldn't be able to make such a claim. I knew what I was doing from the second I began planning this little expedition, and I couldn't even bother to pretend otherwise.

It didn't matter. Either I would come back with my missing team member, my stray lamb as it were; or I wouldn't come back at all, and in either case the consequences of my actions would be mine to suffer.

But Tasker deserved an out, and I was going to give it to him if he wanted it. He stood there staring at me, both of us with our boots crushing the clearing's grass and sending up sharp aromas in the pre-dawn mists, and I could just barely see his face as this world's sun tried to break through and reach us.

He looked so young. Just a kid, with dusky brown skin that hadn't a line on it yet—with big eyes, and full lips that trembled a bit even though he was trying to hide his feelings as young males always think they must.

Why hasn't that changed, in all the hundreds of years since humankind moved outward from Sol? But maybe it's got nothing to do with gender, after all. Because now that I think about it, I used to try to appear totally calm, too, when I was Tasker's age.

That was a long time ago.

“How were you going to get back to the ship, ma'am?” Tasker asked me, with just a hint of a much older man's wry humor glinting in his dark brown eyes. “If I was gonna leave you here, I mean.”

He was staying, and although I'd felt duty-bound to offer him an honorable escape I was only going to do that once. Because the truth was, I was going to need him in order to complete my self-assigned mission.

Even with him, I probably didn't stand much of a chance; but I was doing what I had to do. A team leader doesn't abandon one of her own, not for any power in the whole universe.

“If I didn't know already that this planet has people of human descent on it, I'd realize a colony ship had landed cargo here.” Tasker said that because he was nervous, and he needed to say something. But he was right. As the sun finally cut through the mists, the clearing where he'd set us down was revealed; and it was a meadow filled with Terran wildflowers.

Black-eyed Susans. Painted daisies, or pyrethrum as they're more properly called. Queen Anne's lace, a pest plant in so many people's minds; but I've always thought its white filigree quite beautiful, even though I realize it never yet found its way onto a colony world by design.

It always finds a way to hitchhike. Like blue chicory, like European yellow flag.

Come to think of it, I've always been partial to those flowers, too.

Down by the stream at the meadow's edge, I could see clumps of something scarlet. Cardinal flower, or bee balm? The forest in this temperate latitude was part conifer, part deciduous; and the rhododendrons setting buds for the next spring's far-off blooms made me slightly homesick for my native Rigel 5.

“The people are why Cranshaw's in trouble,” I said to Tasker, as we started the short hike from this concealed landing site to a traveled road and—hopefully, soon after that—civilization as the locals knew it. “Damn all anthropologists for idiots, anyway! What did he think he was going to learn, that was worth risking getting caught on the wrong side of a shifting border?”

I was blandly ignoring, of course, the obvious reality that Tasker and I were taking the same risk. And that when Marcus Cranshaw obtained clearance for his ill-advised one-man recon, he at least got that approval properly (something he must have damned well known wouldn't have happened if I'd been on board the Ishtar, but that's another story!).

I was on my own now, and Tasker with me. Of which reality my tech spec didn't know better than to remind me out loud. “Ms. Falconi, it's been twice that long since Dr. Cranshaw disappeared. And we'll be in Ast territory if we're still here in twelve more hours,” the kid said, looking at me again with those innocent eyes of his. “The border shifts at 1700, Standard Shipboard Time.”

Author NINA M. OSIER

Nina M. Osier, author of REGS, EXILE'S END, and SILENT SERVICE, as well as many other books, was born with a sun tan in the village of Camden, Maine. Her first home was on Friendship Long Island, off the Maine coast. She started “writing” at the age of two, when her parents decided to write down her stories and read them back to her. A librarian in the central Maine town of Gardiner, where the family lived during Nina's school years, introduced her at age 11 to the novels of Andre Norton, Madeleine L'Engle, and Alan E. Nourse—after which science fiction became her genre of choice.

Nina's first novel, EXILE'S END, was published in 1998 by Electra-Light Books of London, Ontario. She has completed several science fiction and mainstream fiction manuscripts that are in search of homes, and is currently at work on another in spite of the best efforts of her three cats.

Nina graduated from New Hampshire College, and has worked as a high school teacher and as an accountant. She now directs the Division of Records Management Services at the Maine State Archives, where she gets some of her best ideas! She lives in a turn-of-the-century Victorian house in Augusta, Maine, where she writes, gardens, and wishes humans didn't have to waste time sleeping. You can visit her webpage at http://www.geocities.com/nina_osier/ or email her at  nina_osier@yahoo.com.

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Cover Art/Fanny Glass