Almost an hour later, Orin gently set Nalina down on the grass in the shade while he went in search of water about the deserted oasis. He left little Lanimer with her to keep watch.
There was no pool near the charred hole where the dwelling had once stood, yet the grounds were still lush and green. Orin knew there must be a well somewhere. With just a pint of water left in his canteen, he wished he had taken the scanner from Farlo's pack before he fled. It certainly would have helped. Too late now, he would just have to look.
In a little while, Orin gave up temporarily and went back to where he'd left the woman and the boy. He shrugged off his full pack and jacket and threw down his heavy helmet, revealing a head of thick, tawny hair. Before he left again, he took up the three weapons---two hand lasers and his ion rifle. Orin felt pretty sure that Nalina would take his presence the same way Lanimer had a first, and he wasn't in the mood to have a hole burned through his back.
After nearly an hour of walking in a wider and wider perimeter around the bombed out buildings, Orin finally found the sheltered mound that held the artesian well's auxiliary pump in a half-buried concrete bunker.
There was a massive metal door without a lock at its entrance. Orin moved toward it cautiously, pressing his ear to the cold metal as he drew his blaster. When he flung open the door, the light streaming in from the sun revealed a cool, damp room about three by four meters. There were a large pump and a mass of pipes at the far end, but space enough in front of the apparatus to provide adequate shelter. Orin quickly found the water outlet and filled his canteen, hiding his two extra weapons before he returned to Nalina and Lanimer.
Nalina was conscious but disoriented. She didn't recognize Orin as a Tregan Raider. She saw only a man whose gentle hands pushed back her hair and held her head so she could drink from the cool water in the canteen that he held to her lips. Murmuring something in Zevian, she drifted back into her feverish sleep.
When he had moved his charges to the shelter of the bunker, Orin pulled his compressed sleeping pallet from the pack and inflated it to make a comfortable bed for Nalina. After that, he gave Lanimer some food wafers from his rations. Then there was little else to do but wait.
For nearly three days and nights, Orin waited while Nalina lay in a fevered delirium, taking food and water less often than he thought she should. He sat for hours, watching her restless sleep and bathing her delicate face with a cool, moist cloth.
She isn't stunning, Orin thought, but she has a lovely face. Her hair could be beautiful if it weren't all tangled like that.
Nalina was a native Zevian, a member of a golden-skinned race that had originally colonized the desert planet. Darkened by the Zevian sun, her skin was now a rich coppery brown, somewhat darker than Orin's own tanned fair skin.
Orin guessed that Lanimer's family were more recent transplants from one of the older colonies on Belderon or Aledus. The child would never say, but it was clear he wasn't a native even if he could speak the language like one.
"Is Nalina ever going to get better?" Lanimer asked on the third day as Orin sponged her face yet another time.
"I hope so," Orin answered in a grim tone. How the hell should I know? He was no physician. He had been a farmer before the Tregans dragged him from the only home he'd ever known.
"She can't die. Mother told me that she would take care of me before she died, and it was Father's wish, too. It came to me here." He pointed to his head. "... Before their essence left their bodies. Nalina has to be all right. She just has to."
"I'm doing the best I can," Orin told him. "But I don't have much medicine in my pack, and what I have isn't much good to Nalina. All we can do is wait."
Lanimer nodded thoughtfully. "Do you have parents, Orin?"
"I did once." Orin frowned and sadness filled his eyes. "I wasn't supposed to. Laboratory-bred fighting stock aren't raised like other children. Only my host mother ran away from Tregas and the project before I was born. She settled on one of the farm colonies inside Federation Territory. The Tregans seized control of that system a few months ago, and they found me. The authorities hauled me away, but my mother and father escaped. I don't know where they are or if they still live." Orin sighed.
"They tried to make me a soldier . . . Tried to make me forget they tore me from my home. But all of their training and brainwashing couldn't make me forget or make me like the others ...." Orin stopped suddenly. His eyes narrowed, and his mouth tightened at the unspoken memories of torture that clouded his thoughts.
He remembered being hung naked by the shackles on his wrists for hours while his tormentors took turns using pain sticks on him until he screamed in pain.
Or they would flog him with a whip that delivered an electric shock every time they struck him with it. He tried to resist until he realized that they would just kill him if he didn’t swear allegiance to the Tregan Empire. So he did, but only to save his life.
"Why?"
"I don't really know." Orin shrugged and slowly came back to the present. "The brainwashing didn't work. They couldn't make me a killer for their reasons---and it makes me sick to watch the others kill for pleasure. Killing isn't fun at all---not even when you think you have a good reason---I know that now."
"You killed the other Tregans, didn't you?" Lanimer asked suddenly.
"Yeah. It was the only way. I just couldn't watch them kill you and Nalina. "They had no right ...."
"I wish you had killed them before they killed my father and co-mothers. I wish they didn't die ...." Lanimer's eyes grew bright with tears that he blinked away, trying to hide them from his new friend. He wasn't a baby anymore.
"So do I, kid," he murmured huskily against the sudden tightness in his throat. "So do I."