Cataract. Part 11

"Yes-" If Daya gave her strength, she could hold him.

Doetzier pressed himself against the far arm of his soft. "If a man is afraid of the teeth of a cat, he'd better not let go of the tail."

"The guide guild," she gasped, "gives us some protection."

"You're no longer of the guild."

"You noticed?" she snapped back. "Then think of the Landing Pact and pray."

Ruka's face was a blurred and snarling vision. Tsia's hands were full, buried in writhing fur. When Doetzier slipped his jacket across her lap, she wriggled it down her legs only to have Ruka's claws hook the fabric and drag it down around her ankles. "Take this wing out fast," she snapped at the pilot. "I won't last three minutes like this."

"Then we'll make sh.o.r.e in two and a half." Nitpicker set the sequence for manual liftoff. "Bowdie, hit the navtank. Let's spike this s.h.i.+p out like a beam from a laze."

His hands flashed from one set of controls to the next. "Gyros on," he reported as the screens before him displayed the skimmer in prep. "Vents cleared. Sh.o.r.e's in the tank now-"

"Sh.o.r.e?" Kurvan's voice was sharp from the rear of the cabin. "I thought we were getting rid of the cat at the freepick stake."

Tsia barely turned her head over her shoulder to answer. "He'd never find his family from there-" Her voice cut off abruptly as something from the node flickered through her mind. Like a whisper heard in pa.s.sing, like an image caught with the corner of her eye, she lost the flicker before she recognized it. But Ruka felt her hesitation and jerked against her grip. "Sleem take you," she gasped as she yanked him back against her legs.

Up front, Nitpicker did not seem to have noticed the flicker in the node. No one else said anything; Kurvan's eyes were still narrowed from Tsia's tone. She didn't care. At the moment, with the cub clawing the floor to fight her grip on his scruff, Kurvan was not her concern.

"Launch ring cleared," Bowdie said tersely.

"Locations mapping now," said Nitpicker as the lower half of the holotank flared into a dim display of the platform and sea.

"Thrusters on." Bowdie talked right over the pilot. He knew she would hear him even as she reported her own control status, just as he listened while he talked himself.

"Resetting," she returned.

"Flap configuration verified."

"Sensors coming in now." In seconds, the onboard sensors read the wind power from the skin of the small s.h.i.+p and poured the data into the top half of the navtank. Wind speed and shear became swirls and corkscrews of color. The sea remained calm and gray.

"Cabin decoupled. Stay on manual?"

"Yes. Keep the safeties off. And disable the bodychecks," she added sharply. Each soft was configured to its pa.s.senger, so that the stretch pads could shape to each flier and slow his deceleration more. But no one was sitting still enough for a bodycheck. Doetzier and Striker had both crawled twice from one soft to the next. Wren had not yet sat down, and Tsia, with the cub between her legs, was not likely to stay seated at all.

Bowdie stretched his long fingers across his screens. "Bodychecks disabled."

"Flight status cleared."

"Give me a lock on direction?"

Nitpicker flicked her fingers across the panels. Colors s.h.i.+fted, and columns of data flashed, then disappeared. "The plan is in the can."

"Got it. Launch when ready."

The skimmer rose off the deck with a painful shudder. Power flowed along its sail slats, and the flap sets turned and responded to the wind. In Tsia's hands, the cub sensed the vibration and lift. The surge of acceleration that hit them both pressed him into Tsia's legs. He panicked. Her grip was so tight, she almost twisted his skin beneath his fur. "Two minutes," she said desperately. "Just two minutes to sh.o.r.e."

If Ruka understood, he gave no indication. As the skimmer tilted, his paws scrabbled for a hold, and finally hooked into the sides of her boots, snagging the seals and popping them open. She grunted and twisted her feet to keep him from tearing her footgear off. The muscles along her arms were taut. When he writhed up again and got his paws on her thighs, Doetzier reached across to shove the cub back down.

"No!" snapped Tsia.

The other mere jerked back as if bitten. Ruka, wild at the proximity of the unfamiliar hand, broke free and lunged across the cabin. Wren cursed. Kurvan snarled back as the cougar brushed across his boots. Tsia sprang from her seat and staggered as her unsealed boots flopped at her ankles. The skim-mer angled up like a laze. Falling, Tsia barely caught the edge of a soft in time to blast out a mental command. To the others, the expression that tightened her face was shocking: her skin went rigid; her lips pulled back from her teeth; her upper lip curled and her nose wrinkled. Even her eyes seemed to flash with an odd golden light.

She did not see through those eyes. Her mind was locked in her biogate, and there was a deafening snarl in her mind. Cat feet in her skull skidded to a halt. Ruka froze as her presence stretched like a claw, hooked into his mind, and jerked him back to stand before the webbed-in packs.

He hissed.

She snarled.

He edged back and slunk along the wall.

"Ruka-" Tsia forced the words out between taut lips. The sound made no sense to her ears, and it took a moment to realize that her throat was tight with the din she heard in her mind. She was locked to the cub by mental cables of scent and image and fear. The thread of panic made her already taut muscles rigid. Instinctively, she tried to pull back from the biolink-to close it down, like shutting off a light. She tried to pull the talon of her presence from Ruka's mind so that she could use her own eyes and ears. But the moment she moved back, something hit her like a hammer in the head.

She cried out. The biolink went wide. Like a hand on her throat, the gate choked off her breathing and squeezed hard around her heart. Fear and wildness-a desperate anger- tightened their grip when she tried to pull away. It was as if the cub had in turn anch.o.r.ed himself in her mind. There was only one thing in this alien, unfamiliar craft and swamp of smells to which he could cling: Tsia. And he clawed her with all his strength.

Odors beat at Tsia's senses: metaplas, flexan, weather cloth, boots... The hot points of the rasers on standby. The flat, old-dirt, salt smell of the harnesses that had been wet by the sea spray. Black nolo seeds. Acrid sweat. Human scent. Fear.

Tsia tried to image through her gate, but the mental claws dug into the very bones of her skull. Frozen, torn with wild-ness, she burst open the biogate so that her mind matched the cougar's, and her emotions reflected his. Air seemed to rush to her lungs. Her tendons stood out like cords. Somewhere in her ears, Striker gasped and a man's voice cursed softly. The cub grew still, huddled in on himself against the cabin webbing; his soft, steady yowl was a constant din in Tsia's mind.

The skimmer shuddered, and Tsia swayed. Slowly, as if her bones dissolved, she crumpled to her knees, then her hands. Striker reached to help her, but she flinched away with a snarl.

Still, she faced the cat. Unfocused blue eyes gazed into unblinking gold. She stretched one hand toward the cub and felt its instant, instinctive withdrawal. Only her will, pushed through the biogate, forced him to remain where he was. Fear and bewilderment remained in his thoughts. He could taste the pain in her mind.

Not your fault, she whispered in her gate. Just one more minute. Maybe two.

She didn't know what the other meres were doing around her; she could see nothing but the cub. The skimmer's vibration settled into a rhythm that hummed in her bones, and she knew in the back of her brain that they flew with the wind. Gradually, as if she hummed herself, she let the resonance of the s.h.i.+p seep through her gate to the cub. Slowly, her eyes began to take in light. Blurred images sharpened; edges became clear. She could see, not just feel through her gate, the cougar that crouched before her. His big paws were tucked and taut beneath his body as if he would launch himself at any time. His tail was crooked and flicking.

/ can't hurt you, she breathed through her gate. It would be like cutting myself.

Ruka growled.

Nitpicker looked back over her shoulder. She could almost feel the strain in Tsia's hands as the guide kept them from reaching for the cat. "Feather," she said sharply. "We're coming in on the sh.o.r.e. Pick your spot."

Tsia did not seem to hear, and Nitpicker motioned sharply for Doetzier to repeat the command. When he s.h.i.+fted to speak, Tsia stiffened. She blinked and looked toward the pilot. "Landing spot?" she asked unsteadily.

Doetzier, careful not to move again, indicated the navtank with his eyes. s.h.i.+vering, then steady, then trembling again, Tsia eased back from the cub so that she could look toward the tank. Although Ruka growled without stopping, he did not move from his crouch.

The node seemed to flash again in Tsia's head. For an instant, the holographic skimmer shape hovered in the blackness of s.p.a.ce with sunlight glinting off its sides. The land below seemed deceptively calm, as if it were hidden beneath a thin canvas of ghosts. When the flash faded, she was left with memories, not overlays, which she could not follow clearly. But she had grown up in the sloughs of this coast. She knew the cold-packed sand and flattened dune gra.s.s; knew the flooded estuaries that stretched back for kays with their gray brine and their dark shrub tips sticking out of the water. She remembered the rocks and mudflats that clung to the bluffs. Saw, long before the navtank recorded it, the white line of sanded rock that snaked down into the slough and disappeared beneath its waves like the children that had drowned so many years before.

"There's the bluff," she said to the pilot, as she watched the faint images display themselves in the tank. "Demon Bay," she murmured. "Pelican Slough. Halona Slough. The dikelands."

"The dikelands?" Bowdie caught on that. "They're flat, and we're already four kilometers inland."

"In this weather, they'll be flooded like lakes. Keep going. Five... maybe six kays. Look for a landlocked lake with a broad bank on the west side and a narrow canyon on the east."

Nitpicker's voice was sharp. "You know this place well enough to verify it for a landing?"

"Yes, but I can't verify it as we come in-we descend too fast. I need time to read a... creature's memory of the area. It looks clean in the tank; that's all I can say for sure."

Bowdie's brown eyes narrowed and his face pulled with his frown so that the b.u.mps on his nose were as prominent as his cheekbones. "A lot of good the tank does us when the node itself is down."

Nitpicker's hands were a flickering blur on the controls. "Check as much as you can, Feather. We're approaching fast."

Again, the node seemed to flash in Tsia's mind. Images from webs she had spun years ago seemed crossed with overlays that flickered fast away. A woman ghost seemed to walk from one station to another. A shadow skeeter skimmed the surface of a slough-it was a ghost image created ten years ago; it had never been erased. One thread, thin as spider's silk, was so old that she barely remembered creating it: a simple man, an imaginary home... She traced it in an instant and realized abruptly that it was one of her first successful webs- she'd made it two full decades before she had become a mere. She'd even had a running bet with her sister about how long that web would last...

She would have followed the flash further, but the skimmer hit a wind pocket and dropped with a sickening lurch. The node flickered out, the ghost woman faded, and the false skeeter image dimmed; but the man and his home remained in her mind like a physical line that tied her temple link to the node. Up front, Nitpicker's neck tensed and Ruka yowled in her ears. Quickly, Tsia touched him through her gate, forcing a mental purr to soothe him.

With a frown, she looked forward again. The holotank now showed only the skimmer's sensor pictures: the lake with its thin and rocky sh.o.r.e, the dense forest dark and still; while the real trees she saw out the window bent with the force of the storm. "The southwest side," she directed the pilot. "The sh.o.r.e opens up below the hill. There's no trees for fifty meters, and the rocks don't start again till you get underwater." She paused and stared at the images for several seconds before she realized what was different than she remembered. Some years ago, a den of reavers had built a dike across a small ravine. Now, Cras.h.i.+ng Creek was no more than a still, gray-water pond. It was not a false scan, she knew. The pond had the depth of real water-the detail that spoke of hundreds of scans and dozens of node affirmations.

Nitpicker caught Tsia's expression. "How long has it been since you've been here?"

"Fifteen years," she returned slowly. "That pond wasn't here before, nor was the sh.o.r.e so wide."

Bowdie glanced over his shoulder. " 'It is memory, not history, which moves backwards.' " " 'And guilt, not time, which stands still,' " retorted Nitpicker. "Time pa.s.ses, Feather. It was bound to change."

Tsia pointed curtly toward the images in the tank. The lake, filled in her memory with eels and bottom fish, was murky and cold; gray and flat and chill. "Go on down," she said finally. "I feel nothing... wrong."

The skimmer slowed and dropped. As it turned, the storm winds grasped it like a giant's hand and shook it in long and shuddering bursts. Humming and turning, jerking and dropping, balanced only by Nitpicker's hands, the small craft hovered lower until the wet hills rose around it. Tsia watched their familiar shapes: Chameleon Ridge, Tarbar Gully, the Plain of Tears, and the Trial of the Seven Toads... The ravine where her sister had broken her leg, and Tsia had held her out of the water till their brothers could arrive... The falls where she used to go diving...

The peaks grayed with the rain that fell outside the window, while in the holotank, each geologic shape became transparent to keep the s.h.i.+p in view. Down and across the navtank water, the s.h.i.+p shape skimmed the lake. Circling gusts shook them from one side, then the other. The resonance of the skimmer rose as it held its place roughly; then it dropped as the sensors first calculated, then compensated for the chaos of the wind.

Tsia reached for Ruka to calm him, and the cub growled in her mind. She tightened her physical hold. He seemed to give-in her mind-and she realized suddenly that she was almost not speaking with him, but projecting the emotions that reset his mental images, just as he projected senses that triggered her response. There was a softness to this link-a kind of malleable texture to the touch of one on the other's mind. As if something was being woven, or a hardener was being mixed.

Then, abruptly, the skimmer s.h.i.+vered in a long, drawn-out ripple, and dropped to the bank like a brick. Tsia staggered; Ruka jerked at the impact and bolted toward the window. Wren scrambled aside as Tsia dove for the cub and caught him by the scruff. Like lightning, he swiped at her face. For an interminable second, his claws hung over the scars on her cheek. Then the s.h.i.+p smacked into the bank like a fist hitting dough. The two of them skidded across the floor and slammed into the bulkhead.

The skimmer slowed abruptly, then oozed forward in a slow, slick motion till it stuck in the mud. Stunned, Tsia had both hands in Ruka's scruff, pinning him to the floor. Up front, Nitpicker stared at her panels. For a moment, no one moved. Then Ruka snarled and Tsia shoved him so that she held him against the wall. Doetzier's eyes were on the navtank; Wren's were on the hatch.

Bowdie glanced at the holotank, then over at Nitpicker's frown. "d.a.m.n, 'Picker," he said in a drawl. "You should've been a pilot."

The woman did not smile back. "We shouldn't have landed this easily," she muttered.

"You touch down in storm winds like a feather kissing the ground-no reference to you, Tsia," he said quickly over his shoulder, "and you complain?"

She shook her head. "Something cut out just before we hit. Shunt the control systems to my panels, will you? I want to see the settings..."

Slowly, Tsia got to her knees as Nitpicker fingered the screens. The skimmer shuddered and settled further. Tsia glanced around the cabin. For a second, the node flickered, and ghosts rose again in her head. The auburn hair of Striker and the black hair of Doetzier superimposed on each other like opposites. Striker's black eyes and eyebrows were framed by Doetzier's black, short-cropped hair, and her auburn ma.s.s was set off by Doetzier's tanned expression. Tsia blinked and tried to clear her sight. "Nitpicker," she said urgently, "release the hatch."

"Just a minute," the pilot said sharply. "It's not clear here. There's something wrong."

Wren, braced against the side of the cabin, eyed Tsia and the cub and tightened his grip on the hatch panel. The skimmer tilted again, s.h.i.+fting in the sludge. Nitpicker's eyes were on her scans, but her tension had not abated. "No, no, that's all wrong..." she muttered.

Beside her, Bowdie seemed lost in his thoughts, but Tsia knew he watched his com as intently as the pilot did. Kurvan seemed almost expectant. Doetzier watched the others as if he waited for one of them to move; and Striker, in the back, was silent. Tsia stilled herself, and almost imperceptibly, Ruka crouched lower against the wall. The cub yanked on her arms, and Tsia staggered before she realized that it was the settling of the skimmer, not the weight of the cat, that unbalanced her.

She glanced out the window. The hills were bare and open to the rain: a mudslide had-perhaps hours before-scoured the slope of brush. The brown-black rocks that were now exposed had just been born to the world. Water ran down the slide in new erosion channels and filled the puddle that spread beneath the skimmer's weight. Tsia leaned closer to the window. The gray expanse had stretched almost to the skimmer's half-folded wing. She squinted at the bank.

The navtank showed the skimmer resting on a pebble-strewn bank about three meters from the lake, but Tsia could not see any rocks that would indicate a more solid base than mud. Around the craft was the narrow, caved-in trough where the skimmer had scored the sludge as it came to a stop. Even as she watched, the trough overfilled with water and began to flood the bank. The skimmer tilted again. "Now why..." Her voice trailed off.

Nitpicker heard her. The pilot's hands paused above the control screens. "What do you feel?" she asked sharply, though her voice was low.

Tsia opened her biogate. Ruka's presence was like a blanket that enveloped her in fur and teeth. It was too strong, and she pushed it away, heedless of the snarling that grew in her mind with her rejection.

Nitpicker, Wren, and Doetzier... The meres were like moving clouds that grayed her vision. But there was something more... She stretched, and realized that the senses she felt were familiar. Strong. Marine. The lake. She staggered again. But thick enough to feel without good focus. Closer than it should be...

"Rise us," she shouted abruptly at the pilot. "Get us off the bank-this isn't solid!"

Nitpicker reacted almost before Tsia finished her first word. "Thrusters on!" she snapped at Bowdie.

'This is mudflat not rock," Tsia snarled.

"Gyros on!" Nitpicker ordered "I can't," said Bowdie. "There's no power."

"Break it free!"

"It's not the landing gear-"

"G.o.ddam it, where's the boost?"

"Get soft! We're sliding."

"We have to get out!" Tsia was not aware that she had shouted again till Wren jumped toward the door.

"Bowdie," he snapped, "get the hatch open."

Doetzier's voice barked in the background. "Get the gear. Move it! Now!"

Tsia didn't think. She clutched the cub instead of her pack, controlling his panicked claws from attacking

the meres in his fear. Wren had to tear her arm from the cougar and thrust it through the strap of her gear bag. Her training took over, and she stuck her other arm back blindly, while Wren shoved the pack up against her spine. The force of his push made her stagger, and her shoulder hit the wall with a thud. Ruka yowled. His claws bit deep in her arm. The s.h.i.+p lurched again, throwing them against the line of softs. The cat yowled, and the fear in his tone doubled her heartbeat hike a drum.

The s.h.i.+p listed like a dunken man, and the mud at its base disappeared beneath the water like a slough when the tide came in. Then, as if the s.h.i.+fting of the s.h.i.+p had given the mountain, permission to drop, a portion of the slope slid away from the hill and swept toward the bank of the lake. Both window and navtank showed it clearly. The front edge of the slide hit the s.h.i.+p like a hand slapping the craft across the sh.o.r.e. In a comically precise movement, the meres fell forward into the walls, then staggered back violently to their seats. Wren landed on the floor; his back struck the arm of the soft behind him before Kurvan could catch his weight.

Tsia hit the holotank hard and fell through the images so that they swam on her face and arms. The cougar yowled, and Tsia did not notice that the sound was in her brain, not her ears. It was all she could do not to cry out in turn as his claws bit into her mind. One side of the s.h.i.+p flipped up; the mud forced the other into the lake. The only thing Tsia could do was twist so that Ruka landed on top as they fell back against the webbed-in packs. Her spine bent across her pack; Ruka fell onto her gut, then broke free and leapt away.

The s.h.i.+p slid along the bank like a crate across a floor. Up front, Nitpicker grabbed for the panels. The skimmer did not respond. In slow motion, the bank collapsed. One instant, the skimmer sat hatch-sideup in a puddle on the sh.o.r.e; the next, the s.h.i.+p lurched with a new wash of mud and moved smoothly, bottom-first, into the lake.

Wren used his seat like a trampoline and leaped to the hatch controls. With his narrow legs dangling below him, he triggered the portal open. As a gap appeared, Striker sprang up to hang beside him from the edge. Wind and rain slapped into their faces. Striker, then Wren levered up and onto the rim.

"The gear," Striker shouted, crouched on the edge of the hole. The skimmer jerked and tipped; the woman lost her balance with a splash. Ruka shot up and out of the cabin like a streak of light. His forelegs barely touched the rim of the hatch, and Wren did not even have time to s.h.i.+ft as the cougar whipped on by.

Tsia, tangled with Bowdie's legs, struggled wildly to free herself as she screamed at the cougar's back. "The water. Go for the water. Stay away from the sh.o.r.e!"

Doetzier grabbed her arm and yanked her clear of Bowdie's long legs. He grabbed up a pack, only to have Tsia s.n.a.t.c.h it from his hands and throw it up to Wren. Behind her, Kurvan grabbed another pack and jumped for the hatch. He hauled himself up with one hand until Wren grabbed him and yanked him clear. A second later, he crouched on the edge with the older mere and reached down for the rest of the equipment.

Wren yelled down at the pilot, "Van'ei, get up here. We're going under-"