Ten Thousand Fleets Chapter 15: 15. The Lake

Read chapter 15 of Ten Thousand Fleets by DavidNiemitz on NovelPedia.

15. The Lake Jungle southeast of San Teodoro, Vidako Imperium Stellarum September 12, 2847 By the time they’d cleared the camp site by the lake, there was plenty of freshly chopped wood and cleared brush to burn, and soon half a dozen large camp fires lit the jungle evening. The cadets who weren’t occupied in standing guard as sentries, maintaining the vehicles, or cooking gathered around the fires to eat their meals. Arc had never been camping before. The mulberry groves on Zurah V weren’t meant for recreation; they were home to the moths that produced silk for the mills. No one was going to let a few teenagers go out and hack down branches to burn, and the fear of forest fires was pounded into the head of every child who grew up in Avataran Shahar. As a result, he had, at first, felt distinctly uneasy with the idea of deliberately burning wood, right in the middle of a jungle. But when Arc saw how much work it took to get the green wood to catch—and how, even once the alien branches were burning well, they popped and sizzled as moisture ran out of the wood into the fire—he realized that there was about as much chance of accidentally starting a forest fire here as there was of him knocking a Tyro over by bumping into it. Once he accepted that, Arc was able to enjoy parts of the experience. There was something about the flickering light of a natural fire, the way it cast the faces of his friends with a warm orange glow, picking out the shapes turned toward the fire pit, while casting everything outside that circle of light into even darker shadow, that made him feel closer to them. Cassie sat on one side of him, Vee on the other, with Rain and Pika across the flames, as they ate their evening meal. Rations were good enough for a quick lunch. They filled your belly, and if you weren’t too picky some almost tasted good. But Arc was grateful that the grav-trucks had brought actual food, as well. There might come a day when he was forced to live for two weeks on fleet rations alone, but he hoped to put it off as long as possible. Surrounded by his friends, he bent over a bowl of stew, and tried to decide what animal the meat came from. “It’s definitely not fish,” Vee said, and Pika nodded. The Torean was sitting close enough on Arc’s right side that their hips touched, and the delicate feathers of her head crest occasionally brushed against his ear, tickling his skin. “What’s the name of those big herbivores?” Arc asked. “The ones the spiked terrors eat?” Doctor Vogel hadn’t spent nearly as long lecturing them about indigenous fauna that she didn’t consider a threat. “Leatherbacks,” Cassie answered, scraping her spoon around the inside of her bowl to get at the last bits of her stew. “But this isn’t it. I had some with the commandant, and it tastes different.” “It’s vat grown,” Cadet Second Class Vijay Iyer said, walking up out of the night with a bowl of his own and taking a seat on the other half of the log that Rain had claimed. “Sir!” Arc scrambled to his feet, along with his friends. Pika fumbled his bowl, which looked comically small in his enormous hands, and nearly dumped what was left of his stew into the fire. “At ease,” Iyer said, waving at them to sit back down. “It’s vat-grown meat. You can tell; there’s a particular taste to it. Lab meat’s always almost right, but just a little off.” “I like it,” Rain said, and everyone, including Arc, looked at her. The Alu’kan girl hunched around her bowl. “It feels familiar.” Of course, he realized. She would have been raised on vat-grown food on the Torean ark-ships. “Any word from the mechs in the jungle, sir?” Arc asked. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it since he’d watched the Janissary and the Culverin disappear into the trees at the edge of the lake. Iyer’s mouth was full of stew, so he simply nodded. “Ireti says they’ve chased off a spiked terror,” he explained, once he’d had a moment to swallow. “They’re going to push it as far away as they can before coming bac