Cataract. Part 14

Doetzier studied Tsia carefully. "What do we look for?"

"Nothing." She shrugged at his expression. "Your darkeyes won't help you find them; shapers don't radiate much body heat, and they won't move till they're ready to attack. They have a layer of fatty flesh and muscle across their backs which they can reshape into a hundred positions. Rocks, leaf piles, roots- they can imitate just about anything. And you think your e-wrap is quick to configure? You should see a shaper swarm. You look at the ground and think you're staring at the wind shadows moving in the roots, but you could be watching a mess of shapers slide around the base of a tree."

"They are venomous, aren't they?" Striker persisted.

Tsia nodded. "Like old Earth snakes. The proteins in their venom do some of the digesting for them- break down cell membranes, liquefy your veins, ferment tissues... Basically soften up the meat so that they can fit it between their lips and into their gullet sacs." Unconsciously, she rubbed the back of one hand. "There's a neurotoxin, too. One bite and you get tin-gly in seconds, then numb. Your chest feels compressed. Your heartbeat drops. You can't breathe. Your heart slows some more till you go comatose and the blood-breaker proteins can go to work. It's kind of like a slow suffocation."

"Huh," Bowdie said. "Medlines can image down an anti-venom as easily as anything else."

Tsia shook her head. "Antivenoms are complex molecules. It takes time for your body to make them, even with direct chemical instructions to your brain. And once the body's nervous system is slowed, it can't process enough signals fast enough to get itself going again without help."

Doetzier watched the way she rubbed the back of one hand. The hollows under his eyes made him look ghostly in the darkness of the overhang, and Tsia wondered at the surge of focused interest she could feel. The expectancy-the antic.i.p.ation or eagerness-she was not sure that came from Doetzier at all. His energy-the flecks of light in his biofield-was steady and almost distant, as if he were holding himself behind a wall. She had to stop herself from reaching out to touch him as he asked, "You ever been bit?"

She glanced down and stilled her hands. "By a spiker," she answered slowly, "the shaper's cousin- once. On the hand. Friend of mine dared me to catch one."

"And you just couldn't resist."

She shrugged. "I won the dare."

He grinned in spite of himself, but the expression did not reach his eyes. "Can't have been very old if you did something like that."

"I was eleven," she admitted. "No temple links till you're twenty-one-till you learn to control your imaging patterns, you know-and we had lost our corns in the swamp. Jak had to sprint through mud and then a bristlebrush meadow to bring my parents home to treat me. Saved my life."

Striker snorted. "Jeopardized it first, if he challenged you to catch a shaper."

"Spiker," Tsia corrected.

Nitpicker resealed her trousers to her boots and stomped to check the seals. "Are you done with the lecture, Feather, so we can get back to work?"

Tsia stilled. She eyed the other woman carefully. "What trail do you want to take?"

"What's your recommendation?"

The pilot's tone was curt, not impolite, but Tsia could still see the tension in the woman's shoulders. "The trail south of here is called Derzat," she said slowly. "It's slippery and steep, but flattens out in the middle around the lakes and meadows. Drops off above the freepick stake in a fast, straight-up-anddown trail."

Bowdie groaned.

"It's doable," she said sharply. "Even in this weather. The other trail-Tabletop-runs along the lower, flattop hills and in and out of a dozen box canyons. I ran Tabletop twenty times or more, in all weather conditions, and I can tell you that, in this weather, it will be completely flooded. Derzat's tougher but more direct. Would save us eight kilometers and a heck of a lot of wading."

"Then we'll take Derzat," Nitpicker said.

Kurvan hoisted his pack to his back, and Tsia motioned at his bag. "What kind of weight do we have to port?"

Nitpicker looked at her without expression. Her voice was curiously flat when she answered, "About half what we started with. We lost four packs with the skimmer: Bowdie's, yours, Striker's, and mine. Bowdie had the antigrav units and half of the scanners. You had the rest of the scanners and the extra stabilizer for the configuration gear. Striker carried half of that config gear- Doetzier still has the other half-and I carried half the source gear for setting up the scannet at the freepick stake." She spat to the side. "Ironically, the two things we didn't lose were the two things that were heaviest-the config gear and the breaker."

Doetzier glanced at the status flap on his own gear. "Why the concern about weight?" he asked. "We've got antigravs and stabilizers. We could load up even more if we had to."

Tsia shook her head. "Antigrav offsets only part of the weight of your gear. You ever hiked in a gale?" she asked Doetzier. "Or a full-fledged storm?"

"I'm a skyside mere, not a slogger. I've swung through over sixty alien s.h.i.+ps, but this is only my third landside contract."

She studied him for a moment. A skyside mere with his technical rating usually worked salvage jobs or set up installations with high-profile gear. A defense setup for a freepick stake seemed trivial for a man with his experience. Unless he was going to stay at the stake and program the chips himself. Her gaze sharpened without her awareness, and Doetzier's unreadable eyes hid the cold speculation she felt in his field. She opened her gate more widely. His biofield was still flecked with color, as if he had dots of sharp energy attached to his own well-centered field. They were different somehow, from his other energy-like raindrops in the dust.

"Landside storm winds are gusty and unpredictable," she said finally. "They act like stabilizers on the blink. Jerk your pack around like a strong man learning to swing dance in zero gee." She glanced at the powerflap of his pack. "If your stabilizers and antigravs aren't already on high, you'd better set them there before you leave this overhang. You'll need all the help you can get to stay on the trail in this." She looked at Kurvan. "What gear are you carrying? The breaker?"

He shook his head. "I've got the other half of the source gear-for setting up a scannet into which I can start building webs." He jerked his head at the other mere. "Doetzier has the half of the configuration gear that didn't sink-for rafts, bivouacs, shelters, whatever. Wren bears the breaker."

Tsia turned to Nitpicker. "We should consider leaving some gear behind, cached here in the cave. Maybe not the breaker-prototypes are always expensive-but at least the config gear. The biochips aren't due for a month-there's plenty of time to come back tomorrow in one of the freepick s.h.i.+ps and pick it up. Maybe even raise the skimmer out of the mud-"

Her voice cut off. A resurge of tension struck through her biogate like an arrow. Tsia could smell the sweat odors in the cave as if her own sense of smell were heightened. Through her gate, the cub seemed to focus on those odors he could taste, as though he had scented a doe. The feeling flowed back into a flavor for Tsia; her tongue licked against her teeth. She rubbed harder at her wrists.

Un.o.btrusively, Wren s.h.i.+fted closer to her body; Kurvan edged away. Tsia's brain noted each movement as if it were a leap of muscle, not a subtle s.h.i.+ft. Hunger swamped her guts, and left her with glinting eyes and a hand pressed to her belly. Someone breathed behind her. She twisted quickly, startling Bowdie.

"Feather?" Nitpicker asked sharply.

Tsia stared at the pilot.

Deliberately, Nitpicker touched her arm. "Okay?"

She nodded jerkily.

"Okay?" the woman repeated meaningfully.

"I'm fine," she said shortly. "Just... hungry."

Wren dug a pouch of slimchims from his harness and tossed them to her so that she caught them with a

hard, instinctive slap. Doetzier eyed her thoughtfully. "How long since you've eaten?"

Ruka growled in her head, and she returned without thinking, "Three hours-"

Her voice broke off at the other meres' expressions. Three hours was not enough time to get a hunger

cramp; it sounded like a lie. She pressed her lips together and shrugged. "Using my gate makes me hungry, and slimchims just don't have the body of a real meal." Deliberately, she threw Wren's pouch back at him.

Nitpicker watched her carefully. "About caching the gear- that's a nogo. What's left can be carried as well as cached. Anything we have is too good to leave to the zeks."

Bowdie murmured, "If they've got their own scannet up, they could be watching even now-just waiting for us to leave, so they can take salvage rights under the guise of the law."

Wren gave Bowdie a sideways look. "I'll lay you three-to-one that the Ixia are a bigger threat than any

zek or blackjack."

"I'll take those odds," he murmured back. "Those aliens have done nothing harsher than sit up at the orbiting docking hammer and threaten to trade us bad scanners."

Doetzier raised his eyebrows. "They say that the webs of diplomacy can hide more murder than the node, Bowdie. I'd lay odds with Wren, not against him."

The other man shook his head. "I won't worry about the Ixia until they team up with blackjack. Now, that's the combination that could kill."

A chill crawled down Tsia's back. Blackjack. That tension she felt at the aliens' name. The smugness when she made mistakes... Ruka's senses had heightened her own so that she almost reflected the meres around her. And what she felt herself-it was as though someone was almost directing her actions and speech, like a puppet. Using her-for some purpose of his own. As though this person helped her place her feet in mud, then positioned himself like a crooked gambler, waiting to see her fall...

"Kurvan," she asked abruptly, "have you gotten anything from the node?" Her gate seemed to swamp with more tension at her words, and Tsia's nostrils flared with the heavy musk scent from Ruka. She looked at Kurvan hard. He looked too relaxed, too friendly-was it he who projected such muscle-taut focus? Was it Bowdie or Striker or Wren? Doetzier, with his careful questions? Nitpicker with her fear?

But Kurvan shook his head. "A flash of a web every now and then. Nothing other than that."

Tsia nodded slowly, her mind churning between her biogate and her thoughts. Though brief, the node flashes she received were strong. It was as if it was she, not the node, who refused to image correctly. She scowled unconsciously. Kurvan's eyes narrowed. Ruka bristled in the gate. The skittering of the cougar's feet pierced her mind, and she realized she was staring. Then she turned away.

"Check your stabilizers and antigravs before we go," she said sharply over her shoulder. "Windmites love organic circuits." She paused at the mouth of the cave. Ruka was there, waiting for her to leave, to join him in the forest. Again, she tried to shut him out and read the sense of the humans, but with the cub so close, the meres were still just points of light compared to the cats who blinded her.

A flash of lightning cracked across the ridge on the far side of the lake, and Tsia bared her teeth. Bowdie moved up beside her. A rush of wind struck them both, flapping their jackets back. Bowdie eyed the boiling sky, and murmured, " 'Risthmus roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air.' " He grinned faintly at her surprise. "The Marriage of Heaven and h.e.l.l," he explained. "William Blake."

"Isn't that supposed to be 'Rintrah,' not 'Risthmus'?"

"Seemed more appropriate the other way around." He shrugged at her expression. "Striker likes historians. I like poets."

She stared at his thick-shouldered frame, his pocked face and large hands. "Poets."

"It impresses the h.e.l.l out of clients."

She shook her head to herself. "With the node down," she said, "you'll have to remember to manually check the status bars on your pack every fifteen minutes." She leaned back to verify his pack herself.

He twisted so she could see. "I hate manual checks," he muttered.

"Might as well get used to them. Half a mere's life is working off the node just to stay out of its webs."

"Not this mere, and not this nodie. And I'll blame blackjack for this one."

"Can't blame blackjack completely. Could be a nodie like you who's gone to the grayscale for credit."

"Not like me," he retorted. "Customs maybe, or a tech on the hammers."

"You'd think the s.h.i.+elds would be watching them," Kurvan muttered, as she caught the end of his words.

Nitpicker glanced over her shoulder as she moved up behind them. "The s.h.i.+elds have a tenth as many line-runners as we do. Why do you think they subcontract to us? You expect them to keep up with everything?"

Striker pulled up her collar as she stepped out of the cave. "They do all right."

There was a faint bitterness to her tone, and Tsia eyed her thoughtfully. Striker's biofield was suddenly hot and sharp, and its shallowness seemed to stretch over a void.

Nitpicker did not glance at the other meres. She eyed the lake, then the hills. She motioned toward the trailhead with her chin. "Let's do it."

The storm was still growing as Tsia led the meres from the cave. In hours-maybe by dusk-the full force of the gale would hit. The sky would become a dozen hands tearing at the earth. The rain would become thin and lancing. And Ruka would be gone, thought Tsia, and she would stand in the Rus.h.i.+ng Forest with the rain in her eyes and scream through her gate for an answer to the snarls she heard in her head.

It took ten minutes to reach the trailhead, and by the time they did, the meres understood her caution about power settings. Even with the stabilizers, the three men carrying gear lurched like drunkards with every gust.

Tsia kept to the trail with a long, loose stride, ignoring the meres behind her. She wanted only the cub in her mind. He was like a brother, calling her to follow, to leave the trail and jump from rock to tree and down again across the trail. Not to go straight, but to wind between the trees. Not to stare ahead along the path, but to duck and flick her glance from side to side-to catalogue each movement like a hunter searching for prey. Somehow this cub had bonded to her through the biogate, and she could not shake him free. Her jaw tightened slowly as she realized the strength of that link, and she cast a sideways look back at Wren. She could not help but wonder, if she reached out long enough-far enough-through her gate, if she could just focus enough, like an esper who could stretch to contact a loved one, if she could force her biolink to reach her sister. If she could just stretch that bond so that she heard Shjams's heartbeat as she did the cat's. "If I can just make Shjams feel my presence..."

She bit her lip until she tasted blood. "Blood should make up for distance," she muttered. "The blood I sense through my biogate locks a cat to my mind, but there's not enough blood in my body to bring back my sister to me."

A low snarling answered her voice, and she blinked and shook her head to clear her suddenly blurred vision. Ahead, Ruka paused on a stone outcropping and eyed the line of meres until Tsia felt his attention like an alien p.r.i.c.kling on her shoulders. "Go east," she muttered. "You fill my mind like a fog in a valley, but you belong with your mother, not me."

He growled in return.

"Go back," she snarled. "Or hunt to satiate your guts. Don't settle your hunger on me." She stretched her legs until the meres behind her cursed.

At midmorning, she led the group around a stand of stinging cores closed tightly against the storm. By noon, they crossed a stretch of flooded mud. They climbed and jumped on the arching roots of a ma.s.sive stand of sinktrees. They circled a sleeping group of shapers, then a herd of bedded-down brown-backs. Near noon, she stepped out from behind a horitree and was blasted to her knees by the force of the wind. She threw her head back and laughed. The storm was a savagery she had come to expect.

Behind her, Striker, who had seen her fall, called out. Slowly, Tsia looked back. Her eyes still glinted and her teeth were bared to the wind. Ruka was too close. She could not feel the trees except as shadows that moved and whipped around her. She could feel the watercat crouched in its den. She could sense five tams on the ridge. But she could feel nothing else. Her gate was too strong. Too focused. She had to shut it down to see the woman who approached.

Striker eyed her warily. "You okay?"

She nodded jerkily.

The other woman was silent for a moment. With her auburn hair hidden beneath the hood of her blunter, and her black eyes and eyebrows the only edges of her expression, her flat-boned face looked like a mask. "Anything we should know about?"

Tsia shook her head slowly.

Striker just looked at her. Tsia knew the woman had dark-eyes in, but they made her look no different from normal. Her biofield, so shallow, struck Tsia suddenly. Shallow. No past. No history...

The node flickered, and Tsia stiffened. Automatically, she imaged a quick command to the webs through that one thin ghost line she had found. The trace became, for the first time, tight. Like a jumble of thoughts that suddenly tied together, the traces linked and flowed into a smooth story line. Webs-old webs, not just the one-were active still and strong... Images of false people who went about their unreal lives...

"You catch something through your gate?"

Tsia stared at the other woman. Had Striker not felt the flash in the node? "I felt a touch from a web," she said slowly.

"Felt that myself," Striker returned noncommittally. "Not enough to figure anything, though." She glanced back along the line. Bowdie was catching up, and his bent legs made it seem as if his blunter was somehow heavier than all three of the packs the other men carried. "Not that I've the experience to follow a trace like you."

Tsia turned slowly and studied Striker's face. "You're a wipe, aren't you?"

Striker's face went still.

"Are you?" Tsia repeated.

Striker stared at her. "How did you know? Through your gate?"

Tsia studied Striker carefully. "You say things," she said slowly, "and then there is the sense of you... It's different from the others."

The other woman took a half step forward. "Different- how? What do you feel in me?"