“Now drink your tea. It will make you feel better.” “Sure, long as she didn’t make it,” Rams grumbled. During Rams; infrequent conscious periods he always complained about the food. Of course, on that matter, Pascal could only agree. The one skill that neither of them had mastered in all of their years of ocean racing was cooking. On their two person races they’d usually eaten prepackaged food, which required no cooking and could be eaten wherever and whenever necessary. Pascal’s own mastery of the culinary arts was limited strictly to a properly brewed “cuppa tea” and the boiled or microwaved pouch of whatevers when he had the time.

He couldn’t understand this ship’s advanced food preparation technology. No matter what he did, the best he could turn out were slabs of tasteless, tough, and practically indigestible generic foodstuffs (the package said it was meat, but he still wasn’t sure about that—it tasted too much of wood pulp to come from an animal). Foolproof, that’s what the instructions said; absolutely foolproof. Ha!

The only thing that was worse than his attempts at cooking were Louella’s cinders of burned organic matter, offerings, no doubt, to her unknown teacher in the culinary arts.

* * *

A week earlier Pascal had given Rams pain blockers for his smashed and broken leg. He had administered as much emergency treatment as he could with the limited medical supplies he found within Primrose, using medical skills that had been acquired in his years of ocean racing, when competent medical help for an emergency was, more often than not, hundreds of miles away.

He’d stabilized Rams, stanched the bleeding, evacuated the wound to prevent infection, and splinted the broken leg to prevent any further damage from inadvertent movement. More extensive treatment than that required a well-equipped medical center and trained staff who knew more than he, and that meant that they had to find their way to a station soon, before they ran out of pain killers.