Cataract. Part 20

Tsia stared at her. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Customs," Nitpicker repeated. "That's a useful trade. Lot of contact with aliens. Lot of credit in the

grayscale."

"Not for her. She's as straight as they come."

"No interesting stories? No small slip-bys for a little extra credit?"

Tsia eyed her warily. "Traders tried it, but Shjams-she never bit."

"Lot of inspectors go to the grayscale," she remarked. "They say hooking in with blackjack is a ticket to

Paradise. Information about a biochip s.h.i.+pment would pretty much pay your way to Paradise and back."

Tsia felt a coldness spread throughout her middle. "So through Shjams, I could be linked to the Ixia or blackjack. I could be a zek myself."

"You'd do most anything for her, wouldn't you?"

"She's my sister, for Daya's sake-"

Nitpicker glanced at the valley floor. The shadows didn't lengthen; they merely darkened as the sky

stretched black fin-gers where once the clouds had been gray. "It's two hours before dawn. We should

be moving on."

Tsia didn't s.h.i.+ft. "My gate, my resolution, my sister up at the docking hammers- If everything points to me, every accident, every death, why do you think I'd guide you rightly at all-to the freepick stake or anywhere else?"

"We have seven or eight kays left to go," the pilot said coldly. "If there is one more mishap-even a slip

in the mud- between here and the stake, I'll know then what to think of you."

She motioned sharply, and the flesh tightened along Tsia's jaw. Without a word, Tsia turned and gestured to the other meres. They fell into line behind her. Kurvan, Doetzier, then Wren like a shadow.

Nitpicker with that cold, intelligent anger still tightening her field like a knot. Striker with her blunter sealed tight in the rain, and Bowdie at the end. They were a winding snake of suspicion that followed her down the trail. A line of tension that stretched like a trip wire waiting for her misstep.

IS.

Tsia moved down the trail, her eyes seeing automatically through Ruka's eyes, and her mind lost in the thoughts that circled like loose river wood in an eddy. "I should be able to feel a circuit or feel a biochip..." Her voice was sarcastic, and she glanced back at the meres. "Biochips at thirty paces..." A sweep of rain stung her face in points. Her eyes widened abruptly. Points of water. Points of light?

Slowly, then more deliberately, she began to jog through the mud, and behind her, Kurvan cursed and picked up his pace. Doetzier, then the others sped up, till their feet slipped and slid with their speed.

Tsia stretched her gate to feel them. It was easier when their pulses were up-as if the way they expended energy brightened the pattern of each biofield. Wren, in the back, was still the easiest for her to distinguish: cold and distant and quick as ice cracking across a pond. Nitpicker: cool, not cold, and wary and sharp, like chilled needles. Striker like sand, without form or shape, but fluid and moving each minute. Bowdie with his gallows humor riding his eager, light-spotted field, and the haunted gaze so hidden behind his darkeyes. He loved a challenge almost as much as she did, but the heat of his field was nothing compared to the hot sense of Kurvan's. Eager, hunting, watching... And then there was the last one: Doetzier, whose cold, watchful eyes were like daggers in her back. Whose field was p.r.i.c.ked with points of light. Like tiny stars. Like living things.

Tsia had to force herself to remain facing forward. She let herself be drawn through the biogate into Ruka's mind until the colors she saw seemed to s.h.i.+ft, and movement became more acute. The rhythmic pounding of the booted feet matched the pulse she felt in veins that were not her own. She could see them clearly now-the way they kept their distance from each other. She could watch from the corners of her double-vision eyes the way each fighter breathed. She could smell the scents of men and women, and reach out for the points of light.

She came almost blindly to the first of the three rocky drops that led to the freepick stake. She took a deep breath, then stepped out over the edge. When she hit the wide, flat top of the column, her ankles jarred, and shock traveled all the way up to her knees. A second jump, more reckless, s.h.i.+vered up through her thighs and renewed the throb of the claw marks beneath the graft on her leg.

The cougar did not hesitate to follow. His tawny shape flashed by so quickly that Tsia jerked and banged her knee against a protruding stone. She stifled her curse with a taut grimace. Should she not have admired his grace? he seemed to say. Tsia opened her mouth to retort, then stopped herself abruptly. She jumped the rest of the way with her knees tucked and bent for the shock of the ground. And Ruka, his golden eyes glaring at her figure, slunk to the side and disappeared in the brush.

His hunter eyes, which watched the meres, made her turn and watch them as warily as he. The meres- one of them was blackjack. And it was Doetzier, she swore to herself, who was the final key.

On the marine platform, there had been that presence-that sense of being watched when she checked the location of the cats. Someone had not wanted her here-or Tucker either.

Doetzier hit the ground while Kurvan made his way awkwardly down. As soon as Striker started her climb, Tsia turned to the trail. There was blackjack here. She would swear it. A killer. Not a mere anymore, but a murderer.

Tentatively, she imaged a command through her temple links and felt it echo away. The one ghost she maintained-she found its trace again. The image of the made-up man who went about his business. A man oblivious to the fact that his false world was no more than the webs of the node. Like tapping into a holo on a dreambar channel, or catching a thread of someone else's conversation, the ghost man was not solid, but he was active. Active on an ID dot that Tsia had given up more than ten years ago. An old ID dot and an image that clung to the node like honey to a spoon... She wondered for a moment, as she watched Bowdie descend, what would happen if she made the ghost an active trace. And if she did so, would her old ID become fully active once again? How long would it be before the guide guild caught on that Tsia of Giordan, not Feather of the meres, was still on the node and active? The rain thickened as if in answer, and Tsia closed down gently on the traceline and let it settle quietly in her mind.

The dawn did not lighten the sky with color, but only cracked it with a faint gray light at the edge of the black horizon. Tsia quickened her pace and urged Ruka to move faster and ahead where his shape would be less visible to the limited range of the darkeyes.

She reached the second rocky drop and caught sight of the freepick stake, half a kay away. The lights were on and visible in the squat, brown-gray huts that surrounded the skimmer tarmac. Like a diamond with slightly rounded edges, the stake was perhaps two hundred meters across and six hundred meters long. Down the middle, in a long, clear stretch of tarmac, were the landing pad and maintenance deck. The main freepick structure was a clumsy hub with short, stubby arms. To the northwest was a row of construction huts. Farther down were four vehicle cradles and three skimmers that squatted like flies on the deck. On the other side of the hub, three rows of cylindrical storage units looked like rows of checkers. The northwest end of the landing pad was bare and flooded with puddles.

Across the tarmac were two more rows of huts and a cl.u.s.ter of vats, larger than those on the marine station. Near the middle of the landing pad, behind one of the rows of huts, a ma.s.sive pit yawned like an open mouth in the ground: the reclamation area. When it was finished, it would be a maze of tunnels and pipelines and wells that would carry and process the tailings until they were completely biodegraded. And it would all work, Tsia thought, because of one set of chips. One piece of biotechnology for which someone would kill.

Half a kay, she thought soberly, and she would know for sure. Seven meres, shut off from the node...

The blackjack who walked among the meres could not let them reach the stake-the meres would never live to use the com inside the hub. Time and their footsteps pushed them forward while blackjack simply waited, like cats on a cliff, for the meres to step under their claws.

She paused at the top of the stony steps and glanced back along the line. Doetzier was still first behind her, then Kurvan just behind him. She waited for the first mere, and as he came abreast of her, he raised his eyebrows in question.

"I have to talk with you," she murmured. He tilted his head to see her better through the steady rain, and she gestured at the rocks as if to give him directions down, but said as quickly as she could, "You're carrying the biochips."

He did not start. He gave no guilty glances or hard looks. It would have been fatuous, she supposed, if he had, but somehow, she expected something other than the blank response of silence.

"Did you hear me?" she demanded urgently. Kurvan moved up into hearing range, and she gave Doetzier an angry look before falling silent. The tall mere said nothing, but started down without her.

Kurvan waited while Doetzier climbed. His lean face looked almost gaunt in the darkness, as if his bones had become more prominent by the hour, and the handsomeness he once projected had retreated in exhaustion. "My stabilizers are shot," he said as Doetzier made it to the halfway mark. "Give me a hand, will you?"

She nodded and extended her grip. He took it and leaned out to lever himself down to gain a purchase on the next slick boulder. With her feet braced and the wind steady, she felt no unbearable strain. Then his antigrav shut down. His weight and that of his pack came full on her arm. He slipped. His fingers wrenched at her hand. She was yanked off her feet-full-length at the edge. Her legs slipped sideways and back. Heavily, she fell with a brutal thud that smashed her ribs to the rock, and her flexor broke free of her harness. Kurvan's fingers slid from her rain-slick skin. She stared at his face as it fell away in the gloom. His eyes-black eyes-bored into hers; then he twisted away to fall.

"Falling!" she shouted.

Kurvan hit Doetzier like a sack of rock. He knocked the other mere off the stone, and both men tumbled to the bottom in a tangle of blunt shapes. Doetzier hit first, and the thud of his pack across stone was almost as loud as the cracking sound Tsia's flexor made as it struck the rock beside them. A hand flung out like a small white flag; the dark bulk of Kurvan's body crushed it almost instantly.

Tsia was already scrambling down. She leaped, then grabbed a hold; sh'thered across wet rock, then swung off her hands. Something tawny blurred her vision, and her hands were, for a second, yellow-gold and furred. She shook her head and jumped recklessly to the ground, staggering with her momentum before she found her feet. What stopped her then was the energy surge and instantaneous shaft of pain that hit her biogate like a flood wall. There was an outraged scream, then silence.

For a second only, she froze. She was not aware that she clutched her forearm as if to break it; only vaguely did she hear the shouting from above. Beside her, before he faded into the half-light of dawn, Ruka's eyes registered the figures that clambered down behind. Tsia's own gaze was glued to the two meres. Kurvan s.h.i.+fted, and as if she broke free of some invisible hold, she lunged forward and yanked him up. Someone cursed. Steel fingers seized her arm from behind.

She wrenched free. "He's not hurt," she snarled. "It's Doetzier."

Still, the steel hand hauled her back. A tawny shape flashed to the side. Her eyes slitted. Her mouth twisted with the snarl she could not contain. The cat responded, and gathered his weight, and Tsia's biogate flashed wide. "Noi" she shouted. Her mind seemed to freeze. Ruka flattened out. Nitpicker's eyes flickered, but she did not take her gaze from the mere on the ground.

"He's broken," she shouted at Nitpicker's face. Some part of her brain registered the idiotic words. But the mere did not release her arm, and the pilot's wiry fingers dug steadily into her flesh.

"Let go of me," Tsia snarled.

"Shut up, Feather." Her voice was harsh, cutting.

Blue eyes bored into black. There was a warning there. A coldness that radiated out from Nitpicker's biofield like ice forming and freezing the air between them. Tsia shuddered and tried to pull away, but the other woman tightened her grip, and some part of Tsia's brain was amazed at the strength in that slim body.

"Stay." Nitpicker spoke as if giving a command to a dog, and the anger flashed in Tsia's eyes before she felt the message in those fingers. Pressing, tapping on her arm... Speaking to her skin.

Her lips clamped shut. The pressure tightened. Words. A message. Wait. Obey. And three words that made her freeze in place and stare at the narrow, lined face. Gepa'i cha'k. Vaka'kha. To take from the hunter the hunt. To provoke the hunter to expose himself to the arrow of his enemy.

Nitpicker tightened her grip one more time, then let go and turned to Kurvan. "What happened?" she snapped.

He dabbed gingerly at the sc.r.a.pe that bloodied his cheek. "My antigrav went out, and I slipped before I could get a purchase on the stone. Feather took the full weight on her arm." He gestured toward Doetzier, who sat, propped up, now against a boulder. "I knocked him off when I fell, then landed right on top of him. If it hadn't been for him, I would have broken my neck."

Nitpicker caught Striker's attention. "How is he?"

"His arm is cracked."

The pilot nodded. "Patch it," she ordered.

Bowdie overheard her words. "We can cast it, but that's about it," he said. He did not hide his glance toward Tsia. "We lost the scame in the meadow. And with the medlines down, he can't even block the pain. He'll have to walk to the stake as is."

Nitpicker nodded, and Bowdie turned to help Striker with a medpack. Quickly, they wrapped Doetzier's arm with the thin brown roll of the metaplas cast material. Doetzier cried out once as his arm was s.h.i.+fted and bone ends grated. A sharp, hot smell rose, then subsided. The cast molded itself tightly and shrank. Doetzier hissed this time and paled, and Bowdie gripped his shoulders. A moment later, only a faint lingering scent spoke of the newness of the cast.

Nitpicker's face was emotionless as she turned to Tsia. She said nothing, just looked Tsia up and down, and then turned away. The steady rain washed Tsia's forehead, and she felt the chill like a snake, curling into her skin.

Nitpicker knew.

The sabotage. The death. The accidents. The falls. That look on the pilot's face-Tsia should be afraid. There should be fear eating at her guts as if the guide guild had found her-as if she were betting her biogate against the certainty of the sunrise. There should not be this eagerness swelling up in her stomach. She motioned toward the freepick stake. Her voice was tight. "Half a kay."

The pilot nodded, her expression still cold, and Kurvan gave Tsia a sharp look before turning away to help Doetzier to his feet. Striker repacked the medkit and did not meet Tsia's eyes. Instead, she hefted Doetzier's pack and set it on her shoulders. Doetzier, who had been eased out of it, turned his drawn face to Tsia to give her a long and thoughtful look.

"Half a kay," she repeated quietly. She picked up her flexor from where it lay between two rocks, and turned it over in her hands. She flicked it experimentally, but the weapon did not respond: it was as broken as Doetzier's arm.

Without a word, she tucked it in her harness and turned back to the trail. Bowdie fell in line behind her, Kurvan behind him. Wren, then Doetzier, then the pilot and Striker. It was no coincidence that Doetzier was at the rear. Nitpicker knew.

Tsia slogged through the mud-deep gra.s.s. No one talked in the rain. One more rock drop. Wren and Nitpicker helped Doetzier down. Another quarter kay. Dawn was upon them, yet the gloom hung on like a leech. The brush thickened as it grew back into the areas cleared by the freepicks; the heavy clouds cut out any early daylight that thought to s.h.i.+ne through the gray.

Ahead, like tiny mountains, the rock-gray huts of the free-pick stake resolved themselves from darkness. Edges became sharp against the billowing, blowing trees. Windows and doorframes, outlined by the glowing edges of their filter fields, floated in the dawn like ma.s.sive eyes and mouths, just waking and waiting for breakfast. Day was upon them in a shroud of rain and shadow.

Tsia no longer worried that Ruka might be seen. The brush was so thick that not even a darkeye could pierce it. She did not bother to look for his shape; her gate was as open as she could make it, and he was as much a part of her as the rain that soaked her skin. She hunted now, and the cougar knew it. He could taste her determination through the gate, and his feline mind was eager for the taste of blood and flesh.

When they reached the road that led to the freepick area, Tsia paused to locate the gray-green metaplas stake that marked the freepick boundary. She and Kurvan opened its top to expose the com panel of its beacon, but only its manual links were active. She waited while he triggered the manual com and notified the freepicks that they were on the way in. After a minute, he finished up and closed the marker beacon. Tsia gave him a speculative look as they made their way down the road: he had said nothing about them being on foot.

He shrugged coldly when she asked about it. "I don't give out what doesn't need to be known. Especially to guides."

Her lips tightened. She turned her back on his expression, and let Ruka watch him instead.

When they came to the edge of the tarmac where the road widened, Tsia paused, and the other meres gathered in a ragged line. Nitpicker touched her arm. Anything? the woman finned.

Tsia returned a negative pressure.

They waited in silence while Tsia eyed the rain-gray surface. Up close, the tarmac was not completely smooth, as if it was so old that the earth had moved beneath it or it had not been flattened to begin with. The chemical and bacteria vats, when she looked closely, showed cracks at their seams and meld marks on their support legs. On the other side of the tarmac, the hub itself was a dingy gray-a thick, uneven primer color, not a deliberate hue. Even that shade could not hide the fact that, although the freepick stake was new, the pitting and scoring along a quarter of the prefab panels spoke of decades of use. Freepicks never wasted credit on construction details.

Anything on your scanner? she finned on Bowdie's arm.

His fingers pressed back his negative.

She did not move forward. Her skin p.r.i.c.kled, as if a hunter crouched close by, but she could see no sign of weapon-or even freepick-waiting there to meet them. On her other side, Nitpicker s.h.i.+fted, and she felt the hard line of the pilot's flexor press against her arm. She could smell the scent of the other woman on the weapon. Un.o.btrusively, she took it, then subtly she removed the custom wrap on her own hilt and slipped it over the other. Quietly, she pa.s.sed her broken weapon back to Nitpicker's hands.

She eyed the tarmac again. She could feel the eagerness of someone's pulse. When she went first out on the tarmac, toward the main hub of the stake, her heart was beating quickly, and her breath was short and shallow.

She did not go swiftly or directly across. Instead, she paused and turned and darted a few steps this way, then that. She ignored the ma.s.sive vats to the right; she gave only a bare glance to the open pit to the left. As if she were an animal, sniffing and testing the clearing, she advanced in hesitant spurts. She breathed shallowly to take in the scents, but it was Ruka's nose that interpreted the odors she sent to him through her gate. The hub-the main complex in which the freepicks worked-with its doorway faint and blue-glowing in the dark, beckoned like a hand, and Ruka knew she would enter. He snarled low in her gate.

Wait, she returned in her mind. Stay hidden. And wait.

She did not touch the hut as she edged toward the filter-field door. Scanners were triggered by proximity, but as long as she didn't touch the actual sensors, the bios.h.i.+eld in her blunter would project the scan signals for her heartbeat and body heat as that of a simple biological, not that of a human. She smiled faintly. With Ruka helping to guide her, her actions were animal enough to convince even the most discerning nodie that it was a beast who advanced, not a mere.

She took the flexor from her belt. Keeping it at her side, she tapped the access on the door panel so that her arrival was announced. The door field cleared automatically to transparency, and she could see that, although the door was open, the foyer inside was empty; the three hallways that led out of the entranceway were dim. That was not unusual, she told herself. Even a grounded stake didn't waste power. She spared the halls only a glance before she stepped inside. But she forgot to close down her biogate as she stepped through the door, and the tingling sense of the filter field made Ruka jump in the brush. Tsia jerked with his reaction, then flushed in the warmth of the foyer.

Idiot, she snapped at herself.

She paused inside, and behind her, the door opaqued again. She waited, her fingers loose and relaxed on the weapon, and her eyes and ears alert. But only a single freepick appeared, with a thickset body and a balding pate, and if there was anything but caution in his manner or voice, she could not sense it in him. The danger that made the cougar growl and her skin crawl on her back-it was here and not here, and she could only wait for its action.

She greeted him carefully, and added, "Guild contract BLL-tau-two-six."

"Tau, six-eight, double-XN," he returned. "Contract confirmation?"

She told him the code, and he nodded. For a moment, he studied her as closely as she watched him. She knew what he saw: a short-haired mere with rain-wet hair, who poised on the b.a.l.l.s of her feet. A woman with crow's-feet so completely overshadowed by the scars on her cheek that only the deep blue of her eyes was noticed. As for what she saw, he was a freepick-no mistake about that. The smell of mining oils and bacteria was thick on his clothes and his body. The light brown jumpsuit he wore had been through so many scrubs that it was actually thin, while his face was heavy and beginning to slide off in folds of flesh. His skin was coa.r.s.e with the large pores of a man who spent much of his time with dirt. His hands were thickly scarred, as though they had been cut and sc.r.a.ped so many times they could no longer remember how to make skin, and his fingernails, like Wren's, were so thick that they seemed like plates of cartilage, not nails. She glanced at his face and met his amber eyes steadily. They were clear and sharp, at odds with the deliberate-almost drawling-tempo of his voice.

"Decker got your call-in confirmation from the beacon," he said obliquely, "but the landing pad didn't activate."

"We came overland. Called you manually from marker on the road."

He raised his eyebrows, then nodded toward the outside. "You came through that?"