Cataract. Part 1

Cataract.

Tara K. Harper.

Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as "unsold or destroyed" and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it. A Del Rey Book Published by Ballantine Books Copyright 1995 by Tara K. Harper All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 95-92016 ISBN 0-345-38052-5 Manufactured in the United States of America First Edition: September 1995 10 987654321 This book is for my sister Colleen Annice Harper with the hope that she might someday call Special thanks to Detective Bill Johnston, Portland Police Bureau; Mike Fleming and Special Agent John Colledge, U.S.

Customs Service; and Deputy Kevin Harper, Clark County Sheriff's Department. Also, a special thanks to Pam Ore, Stephanie Hirsch, Dr. Jill Mellen, Ph.D., and Dr. Mitch Finnegan, D.V.M., of the Metro Was.h.i.+ngton Park Zoo; Dr. Darin Collins, D.V.M., of the Woodland Park Zoo; Phillip Peck; and Dr. Ernest V. Curto, Ph.D., University of Birmingham.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the c.o.c.ks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!

Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once That make ingrateful man!

-Shakespeare, King Lear Gray, whipping rain tore the skimmer out of the sky. The stabilizers jammed; the sail slats became immobile; the extended wing refused to respond. Savage winds shook the small craft, then batted it aside. In seconds, the skimmer swung about, then down, steeply down-a pale, speeding spearhead in the gloom of the gale.

Tsia forced her lungs to breathe against the acceleration, compelled her heart to pound in even rhythm. Drove her mind to ignore the pressure of her lips against her teeth and register instead the silence of the computer node that should have been sending its images to the tiny transceiver in her temple. As her dark blue eyes flicked forward, they caught the last projected images in the navigation holotank. She formed a mental command and projected it by thought to the node. There was no response. And while she watched, the holographic shapes in the navtank faded to emptiness as the flight commands abruptly halted.

In the pilot's seat, Nitpicker felt the s.h.i.+p go on auto as her own temple link went dead. With a m.u.f.fled curse, the pilot watched the control screens fade and flash into manual patterns. The navtank had completely cleared; not even a ghost of a cloud remained in the imaging area. The storm vectors that had boiled through the tank were now nothing more than empty sky. The sea had become a nothingness. The shape of her s.h.i.+p was gone. New data-manual data-flickered across the flat piloting screens in patterns of light and color and text. And at the end of the sequence, the emergency-orbit commands flashed twice. Then they began to take control.

Nitpicker caught the warning with a curse; instantly, her fingers wrenched at the overrides. She did not look back at the other meres in the skimmer's cabin. Her lips tightened; she hoped five of them were enough to control the sixth-the guide, Tsia, who sat among them.

Beside her, the copilot's voice sharpened as he reported the skimmer's status. "Safeties are coming online-starting to override my screens."

"What's your control factor?'

"What I've got, I'm losing. We're looking at an orbital vector within four minutes-"

"Stall them!" the woman snapped harshly. "If the safeties kick in completely, we'll be shot up and out like a sneeze." She glared at the screens and punched the controls. Up and out, she thought, and into the supposed safety of a prea.s.signed orbit. She cursed under her breath and watched yet another screen rim itself with the purple shades of automatic control. Her fingers flicked faster, as if she could keep the violet hue from spreading like a virus to the next screen in line. "Zyas, but I hate that color."

"We're going to see a lot more of it," Estine retorted "Either the node is. .h.i.t big-time, or there's a pretty powerful someone who doesn't want us to reach that freepick stake down landside-" His voice broke off as the skimmer jerked, shuddered, and slewed as if it spun on ice, not air.

Behind the pilots, pressed back in her seat, Tsia's fingers were spread against the arms of her malleable chair. Her hands were not relaxed: tension kept her fingers so rigid she could not curl them into the fabric. To her left, Wren's weathered skin whitened while his hammerlike hands dug into the flexan soft as if it were mud, rather than the arm of a flexible chair.

Like Nitpicker, Wren did not look at Tsia-the acceleration toward orbit could hit any second, and he had no desire to have his eyeb.a.l.l.s flattened against the sides of their sockets. He could see Tsia, the guide, out of the corners of his eyes.

Her face was tight and her hands clenched; her dark blue eyes were almost blank with suppressed fear. Behind her, and out of Wren's peripheral sight, Tucker's pale blue eyes were steady, and that mere's skin, naturally white, did not show tension any more than Doetzier's weathered tones. Both meres deliberately relaxed in their seats. In the far back, Striker, her black eyes and brows set in a blank expression beneath her auburn hair, murmured to Ames, the brown-haired man beside her, while Ames stared at the ceiling and muttered to himself.

Six meres; three pairs of softs. The flexible seats took up the center of the skimmer's cabin, so that only narrow aisles were left on either side. The inner walls of the s.h.i.+p were covered with drab webbing that held gear and weapons. To Wren's right, the hatch, its edges glowing with pale green-blue light, hung on the wall like an eye that dragged his gray gaze to it as insistently as a magnet.

Still diving, the skimmer pierced a storm front and slammed into the wind like a bug hitting a wall. Violently, Tsia and Wren jerked forward before the backs of their softs caught up with them.

"Tight ride," Wren said.

His voice was flat, almost expressionless-as usual, Tsia thought-though his narrow jaw clenched like hers against the pull of the dive. She hated his calm demeanor; hated the fear that grew in herself. And she forced her lips to stretch in the semblance of a smile. The motion drew the claw marks on her tanned cheek into white-taut, jagged scars; her short, brown hair swept back against her forehead. In her temple, the node's metal socket remained cold and blank, as dead as the com, which should have been receiving flight commands for the craft. The skimmer almost stalled midair, then fell faster.

Wren took in Tsia's whitened knuckles out of the corner of his eye. "Think they'll ever reseal the walls of this thing with some design other than drab?" he asked deliberately.

Tsia turned her head to stare at him.

He touched her arm, forcing her to swallow her fear with the contact of his skin. "Think they'll ever reseal?"

Unconsciously, she gazed around the small cabin. There were no decorations, no paint or design to relieve the dull shades that met her eyes. The gear webbing was made of iridescent cloth in the same bland, earth-tone shades as her trousers. The flexan softs, each one shaped to the mere who sat in it, were drab and dirt-toned, as if they had been used too long without cleaning. The flooring was mottled with burn marks and patch-melts; the walls were pocked and old. The meta-plas-all metal tang and plastic stuffiness--flexed and bent with pressure and change, yet held its strength through impacts that would have crushed a similar s.h.i.+p made of folded or braced alloys and blends. There were a dozen stains from old crash foam, and the slit windows were dark with that faint opacity that comes from having their crystal lattices. .h.i.t too many times with a laze. Tsia's eyes darted from the thicker chunks of repaired webbing to the two long, thin laser tracks on the ceiling above her head. The craft was not four years out of the s.h.i.+pyards, but it looked as old as war.

The laser tracks led her eyes forward to the empty navtank, and then to the pilots' cubby. The skimmer's angle was still steep, but the purple-edged screens had made streaked bands of color across the front of the cabin. Fear, which grew as the color spread, became a solid chunk in her mouth. She could not stop herself from building another thought-image to project to the node. But her temple link was still dead. She glanced at Wren and forced her voice to steady. "Node's down," she said.

"Felt it," Wren replied shortly.

She s.h.i.+fted her weight, and just as the flexible soft caught up with the change, the skimmer hesitated, tried to straighten, bottomed out, then shot up like a searchlight. Tsia's body hung forward for an instant, then slammed back. Blackness swam in her eyes. Her slender fingers stretched out along the flight padding; she could not turn her head. In front, the mere pilot jerked at dead controls.

Estine reported almost under his breath, "Safeties are on. We're heading up."

"Time to orbit?" the pilot snapped.

"We'll be rounder in four minutes, fifteen seconds."

"Open the panels." Nitpicker's voice was low but sharp. "Get those safeties off-line."

Estine forced himself from his soft, bracing his feet against the seat while he groped inside the dash for the navigation cubes, which stretched in thin lines beyond his reach. His fingers fumbled along the edge of the honeycomb board in which the cubes were set "Can you reach them?" Nitpicker's voice was still low.

"I'm trying for the nav cubes-"

"The safeties," she snapped. "Not the nav cubes."

"There's a gale on," he snarled back. "You need the nav cubes if we're going to head back down-"

Nitpicker's dark hand struck Estine's shoulder and jerked him back. "I could fly this s.h.i.+p blind through a meteor shower. Now, get those G.o.ddam safeties out!"

Behind them, Wren glanced at Tsia's face. It was not the force of acceleration that stripped the color from her tanned and weathered skin; it was not the loss of the node that pushed her heartbeat into her temples. Her fear was growing into terror, and he could smell it on the quickness of her breath. He looked at her clawlike fingers, then back to her jawline. "All right?" he asked quietly.

She jerked a nod, but the edges of her face were white. Cabin pressure dropped, and Wren worked his jaw to pop his ears and sinuses. The skimmer was still on atmospheric settings, and full-seal pressurization was not in force. As the pressure sucked on her cheekbones, her fingers clutched the fabric of her soft like a lifeline. There was a crowd sound in the back of her mind that made Wren's voice seem like the buzz of a gnat next to the roar of a tiger.

Cats. Her mind latched on to that feline image. Pumas and watercats, sandcats and tams... Cougar voices growled in her head as their impressions leaked through the intangible mental biogate that opened her mind to theirs. She could hear those snarling feline tones as clearly as if the cats surrounded her in the s.h.i.+p, rather than huddled in the rain far below. She could sense their emotions in the mental yowls they returned in response to the fear she instinctively projected. The biogate ex-panded with that terror and her lack of control, and cat bodies seemed to leap inside her head. Cat nostrils flared; feline breath huffed in her face; fanged mouths hissed till she choked on the sounds.

"Wren?" Her voice was tight and high. "I can't go sky-side-" The other mere fought the press of their climb with his hand until he eased the distance between their seats. He touched her arm. The muscles in his fingers were taut, and his clublike hand had a brutal look at odds with the lightness of that touch. He pressed her forearm with silent rea.s.surance.

Up in the c.o.c.kpit, Estine yanked the covers off a second and third panel, ignoring the clatter as the covers fell clumsily to the floor. Burying his arms in the datacube cavities, he groped for the touch-codes on the honeycomb boards. He muttered, cursed himself, then found his target. Instantly, his hands began to dart from spot to spot, disabling links and pulling cubes from their honeycombs. One honeycomb broke, and half a dozen cubes shot back through the cabin, tumbling till they fetched up against Wren's feet. They wedged there like tiny mice huddling into an overhang. Tsia stared at them as if they were a set of parasites. Safety cubes, she thought, huddled together for protection. She felt a hysterical urge to laugh. She clenched her jaw till the sounds began to choke her.

"Still climbing," Estine reported. "We're in the storm tunnel, still heading rounder."

"Zyas d.a.m.n it!" Nitpicker cursed under her breath.

"We're queued with the Phoenix to fall in behind the Remorse. I can't find Jandon's craft. Could be hidden in the noise from the Saabadhanni."

"That's the alien s.h.i.+p-"

"Probably took the node down themselves so they could get a techno-trade option on Risthmus," Estine said.

"They're desperate enough to try just about anything," she retorted.

The skimmer hit a violent updraft, and Tsia turned wide eyes toward Wren. His hand tightened on her arm. "Remember," he said quietly, as if he did not notice the tension in the muscles that jerked beneath his hand, "when you didn't know that going rounder meant going into orbit around a planet?"

She swallowed convulsively. "I can't. I can't go rounder-"

Wren increased the pressure of his hand. "Stay calm, Feather. Talk with me."

She choked out an animal sound. Feather. Her name in the mercenary dialect. A joke without humor for a name that had no power. She tried to control the fear that crawled into her head, but it grew like a balloon of gas that bubbled up in her lungs and burst out of her mouth. She clenched her fists so tightly that her fingernails cut into her palm, and a runnel of blood slid across her whitened flesh. Her jaw locked shut. The skimmer lurched. Tsia's heart moved up another inch in her throat. Its pounding choked off her air. The feet of the cats that paced in her mind clawed at the inside of her skull. Her breathing

rate doubled. "Wren-"

He cast a warning glance over his shoulder. Behind him, one of the meres, Doetzier, forced his weight forward until he got his hands on the back handles of Tsia's soft. Tucker glanced at the other mere, then forward at Tsia's trembling frame, then placed his hands in the same ready position as his partner.

Fighting the acceleration, Wren leaned farther across to Tsia's seat till he could slide his hand down her arm. His thick fingers crushed hers. She barely noticed.

Up front, the pilot's voice was sharp. "Rounder height?"

"Two-sixteen kilometers at perigee," Estine returned. "Geosynchronous. Cabin will go to skyside conditions at twenty-eight kays. We're at ten kays now." The craft bucked and tilted as Nitpicker fought the controls to change the angle of the skimmer's sail slats. "I'm going to lose this rise rate any time..."

"I've got half the safeties out," he snapped back. "I'm working on the others."

On the floor, the discarded datacubes skidded against Tsia's feet. She jerked. Wren's hand tightened.

"The quarantine scans," Nitpicker bit out. "At what height do we hit Q?"

"Three minutes after we reach skyside conditions. One-eighty-one kays up."

Tsia's breath caught in a partial whimper. A hundred eighty kays, and she would be in quarantine.

Medscans and biofilters. The death of the virus in her body-of the biogate that filled her mind with cats... Her eyes turned toward the hatch in the side of the s.h.i.+p.

Wren's grip crushed her arm to the soft. "Don't even think about it," he breathed.

She did not see him. There was an animal fear in the depths of her eyes, and the sense of the meres around her faded as the strength of the mental catspeak grew with the tension that filled her mind. "Wren -" Her voice was so tight it choked her.

"Nitpicker has spun wind for you before."

"I can't go skyside!" she choked out. "The viruses-"

He stared into her eyes. "I know. Van'ei knows. She won't take you rounder." He glanced forward. Half

the physical changes that had made Tsia a guide were maintained only by a set of viruses in her body. If

the s.h.i.+p went rounder-if it went through the med filters and the Q fields-those viruses would be stripped away like the leaves from a tree in winter. And all s.h.i.+ps pa.s.sed through quarantine before they went on-or offplanet. Every e-orbit, every standard or docking orbit, every trajectory that pointed out of the system-they all went through Q. It was the one thing permanent about any planet setup. No one wanted to risk another Vendetta.

Up front, Nitpicker heard the panic in Tsia's voice. The pilot's face was tense; her hands flashed like lightning on the controls as she tried to steal the conn back from the automatic settings.

Outside, the storm tore at the side vents locked in the emergency-rise position. "Status," she snapped at Estine.

He glanced across the screens that stared him in the face. "Sixteen kays," he returned shortly. "Still climbing." He broke the last relay in the links and moved to the next panel. "It's smoothing out-we've cleared the storm."

"I can feel that."

"You've got the manual conn?"

"I'm on standby-waiting for you to get those safeties offline."

"I am trying..."

Tsia's attention was riveted to the feeling of pressure that filled her face, to the white skin that went whiter with each kilometer they rose.

"Height?" snapped Nitpicker.

"Forty-three kays. We're on auto for e-orbit."

Tsia whimpered. Her eyes were locked on the hatch. Wren glanced meaningfully at the meres behind her. Tucker looked the question at Doetzier, and the older mere nodded. Both men gripped Tsia's shoulders. She flinched at their touch. Bioener-gies seemed to hit her through her gate: one-hot and uncontrolled behind a wall of calculation; one cold and steady, spotted with points of light. Cat feet seemed to jerk across her mind with the interruption. Claws seemed to dig into her thoughts. She twisted her head and snarled at Tucker, then at the mere beside her. "Wren..." The sound that escaped from between her teeth was almost unrecognizable. Her air seemed trapped in her lungs.

"Eighty kays," reported the copilot. "Still heading rounder..."

"Stay calm," Wren snapped as Tsia began to struggle in earnest. "Stay down."

"I can't. I can't!"

He dug his fingers into her arm to hold her to the soft. With a surge of panic, she wrenched free of Doetzier and hit Wren to loosen his hold. The blow caught the gray-haired mere high on the cheek. His head rocked back, but he didn't flinch. "Feather!" he snapped. With an animal snarl, she kicked out of the seat, writhing and sliding down and away from Tucker's hands. Wren did not let go. "Doetzier!" he ground out. The taller, lean-bodied mere lunged around the soft and grabbed Tsia's arm, yanking her back as she struck out at Tucker. Her wrist and elbow twisted; she cried out. One hundred kays. Out of the biosphere, and queued for quarantine...