Cataract. Part 21

She followed his gesture, then glanced down at the puddle of rainwater still forming at her feet. She gave him a twisted grin. "Through that."

He looked more sharply at her face, then hair. "Guide."

She raised her eyebrows in a silent question.

He shrugged. "Short hair. No darkeyes, and you stand... differently." He made a small gesture over his shoulder. "Grunts are already down in the tubes, working on the tunnels. The rest of us have three bacts -bacteria biologicals, to you-"

"I'm familiar with the term."

He nodded. "-to set up before we can come in and talk. You want to bring your meres in now?"

There was no surge in her biogate as he mentioned the meres-no heightened sense of danger in his odor. She nod-ded. "We'll start contract as soon as you like, but we need to use your scame right away."

He tapped out a message on the com. "Thought you meres carried scames wherever you went."

She shrugged and motioned with her chin at the panel. "How long has the node been down?"

"Since dawn. Been using manual corns to keep in touch with the grunts." He pointed down the right

corridor. "Just turn in there. Puts you in the rec room-it's our main hall. All our med gear is on the left bank of panels, along with our manual corns."

"We'll need a manual map-some kind of overlay-for the layout of this place."

"Not much to see. There's the warren, the storerooms, and the labs for each type of bact."

"Quarters?"

"In the second hut. Mina will show you, once you've checked in with Laz."

"Laz-not you-is supervisor for this stake?" She did not hide her faint surprise.

He eyed her thoughtfully. "I should be flattered-I think. Laz programs our corers. I'm supervisor here."

"Ah. You have a sensor net?"

"Uh-huh. But our nodie won't be able to get it active again until the node comes back up."

"Why not? Manual scans should still be working."

"Had an accident a couple days ago. Fried part of the net and one of our grunt-techs with it. Node maintenance wasn't finished with the repair before it shut down again. So, no scans."

"You have skimmers and tracs?"

"Five tracs. All in the warren." He paused for a second. "You ask a lot of questions for a guide." He

watched her carefully, but she merely waited. "Three," he said finally. "Out on M-deck-the maintenance deck, to you."

Her blue eyes glinted. "I'll bring the others in."

"I'll be down in the warren. Call me-Bishop-on two-four if you need anything you can't find. Laz is

finis.h.i.+ng up right now. He and Mina will meet you in the rec room in about half an hour." He made a formal gesture. "You're on-contract as of now."

"On-contract," Tsia acknowledged.

She recrossed the tarmac warily and rejoined the other meres. "Seems clear," she said in a low voice to Nitpicker. The pilot's eyes glinted at the unspoken implication. "But," she added, "they had an accident a few days ago. Damaged the sensor net."

From beside the pilot, Doetzier's eyes narrowed. "Anyone hurt?"

"One grunt-tech. Dead."

His eyes shuttered, and he seemed to withdraw, but his biofield flared with energy. Tsia could almost hear him thinking. Puppets, she thought as she looked at the meres. And the puppet master was somewhere nearby, arranging his sticks and strings. She shook herself, then led Wren, Bowdie, and Kurvan across, while the other three waited behind. With only one manual scanner to work with, it took Bowdie twenty minutes to declare the rec room clean.

"No weapons," he said, as he closed his handscanner down and tucked it back in his harness.

Tsia eyed him blankly for a moment. There was something in this room, some scent that caught at her attention. Feline? Marine? It was an odor she ought to recognize, but it was so faint that it refused to trigger her memory. Bowdie gestured again toward the door, and she nodded slowly, then went back for the others.

Each time through the filter field, Ruka cringed, and Tsia found herself flinching as she never had before. Her skin almost crawled with the tingling field, and she finally realized that it was the cougar's muscles bunching and twitching that translated to her as the s.h.i.+vers. It was not until the fifth time through that the cougar began to get used to the sensation. Tsia tried to shut out the flinching, but found it almost impossible. Ruka seemed to insert himself deeper into her mind each time she opened her gate.

The rec room doubled as a staging area and meeting hall.

There were three tables at one end, and a stack of ma.s.sive crates at the other. Color bars in the painted designs delineated different sport courts; the grav plates set into both floors and ceilings alternated with the mag plates and bars in snaking diamond patterns. Two doorways led to the outer loading bays; two more led to the warren and labs. The wall behind the tables was a bank of panels, screens, and manual equipment. Three screens were active, the others blank. Doetzier was already seated by the scame. His arm, still cast in the thin sheet of hardened metaplas, glowed under the medical gear's scans as Striker activated it manually.

Tsia, jittery, shrugged away from Wren and paced toward the outer doors. That scent-it was still here, in this room. And it was cat, she realized, not cougar. When Ruka took in the odor through her biogate, he snarled and bristled until she rubbed her own neck to smooth down her hairs. Cat, but not cougar-a local creature? She didn't think so. She tried to concentrate, but exhaustion hit like a fist, and abruptly, she leaned against the wall. Even Striker's face, angular and flat as she moved across to speak with Nitpicker, looked drawn so tight that the skin was stretched like a drum across her cheekbones. Wren's tanned face looked sallow in the light. Where Bowdie's bent legs had seemed to carry the weight of the world, his face now looked as tired.

Wren, standing near her, pulled a pouch from his harness and popped a few nolo seeds in his mouth.

"Get rid of the cub yet?" he murmured, spitting a husk sharply into the hisser bin on the wall.

"No."

"Better do it soon. Nitpicker will catch on sooner or later-"

"She already knows." Tsia glanced over at Kurvan and Bowdie where they unpacked the two packs that had survived the hike. She motioned with her chin. "Didn't come out of this with much, did we?"

"Uh-uh."

"But maybe more than we were supposed to?"

Wren chewed thoughtfully on a seed. "Been wondering about that myself."

She opened her mouth to say more, but then remembered the deke in his medkit. She glanced toward the

outside doors. "Someone coming."

"That your senses or the cub's?"

"The cub's."

He got to his feet and loosened his flexor in his belt. "At least he's some use."

"Three humans," she murmured. 'Two men and a woman."

Wren caught Nitpicker's attention, and the pilot broke off her murmured conversation with Striker. Wren

nodded toward the outer wall. "Feather says there are three freepicks coming in," he said softly.

Nitpicker glanced at Tsia. "Are the scanners back up?"

Tsia shook her head. Two more freepicks entered from a side corridor, and the scents in the room s.h.i.+fted

subtly. Her nostrils flared.

The pilot's eyes narrowed. "You read it off the cub?"

"Yes," she said deliberately, her voice low enough that Striker could not hear. "And yes, he's still here. Outside near the tarmac." Nitpicker opened her mouth to say something, but Tsia cut her off. "Without him, I'd know nothing of what happens outside-"

Tsia fell silent as the outer doors cracked, throwing light out into the gray rain, and three freepicks' entered. The cargo doors had no filter fields, and the rain blew back in a whirl before the heavy slab closed but did not latch. One of the freepicks paused in midstep and reached back to yank it shut. Then the three of them shrugged out of their ponchos and shook off their boots. Air swirled. The foreign cat scent grew sharper, and the other smell-the solventlike thread--grew more distinct. Unconsciously, Tsia moved back a step behind Nitpicker and eyed the freepicks warily.

The tallest of the three was a man so skinny that Tsia could almost feel his nervous tension smothering the other two biofields. He seemed even taller with the cream-colored stripes stretching up the sides of his jumpsuit, and the cream-blond hair on his head. His dark, quick eyes seemed to dart like Wren's from mere to mere.

The woman beside him was average size, with a rounded figure that spoke of both shape and muscle, and a set of lips that should have been full, but were pressed together so tightly that they appeared as a thin line. She and the other freepicks wore the same off-white jumpsuit that the tall man did.

The third man was built like Kurvan. Fairly tall and broad, he had unnaturally white hair, with icy blue eyes and a square jaw. His eyebrows were almost solid across his forehead, and the only thing that saved them from giving him a brutal look was the amount of white in the color that tinged on blue.

The focus in the tall man's biogate fascinated Tsia, and she stared at him for a moment before she realized her muscles had tensed. Was it Ruka, not herself, whose curiosity held her so tightly? She closed the link to the cat until she could feel the cougar only dimly and could hear his snarls like faint wind. Her shoulders twitched. She tried to ignore the sensation. "Stay out of my mind," she muttered. "And let me do my job."

She stared deliberately at the other two freepicks who had entered the room from the other side, through one of the hallway doors. One, a medium-built woman, was black-haired, with dark skin, and eyes the color of amber. The other was a narrow-hipped man with the pale skin of a tunneler and skinny shoulders. His arms, long and stiff, hung from his shoulders like pieces of wood. Like the woman, he smelled of rock and dust even across the room.

The air in the room s.h.i.+fted, and Tsia smelled cat again. She snapped at Ruka through her gate to move away from the door; his scent had clouded the smells in the room, and she could not distinguish the odors. The cougar snarled in return and slunk across the tarmac.

Tsia became still. It was not Ruka whose scent tickled her nose. It was that elusive, foreign scent, the one she had smelled when she first entered the room. The heavy one, that spoke of something new-and the one she had sensed on the marine platform at yesterday's dawn. The feline smell mixed with the faint turpentinic odor of mucus and packing gels, and she c.o.c.ked her head unconsciously to separate the scents. Was her memory con-fused by the biogate? The mucus smell seemed to match the scent that Kurvan had had on his hands when they touched on the bridge, but it was not an odor from Risthmus- of that, she was now sure.

The woman with the thin lips greeted Nitpicker. "That's Laz"-she indicated the tall, tense man-"and Decker." She pointed to the man with the whitened hair. She used her chin to point at the freepicks who seated themselves by the door to the warren. "Narbon over there, and Wicht. Wicht is the one with the arms. They're both grunts, but they've got as high a tech rating as the rest of us. They can settle your gear while we talk."

Tsia's lips twitched. If there was one word to describe the lanky man, it was "arms."

"I'm Mina, and-" The freepick's sharp, acerbic voice broke off at the expression on Striker's face. The freepick gave the mere a sharp look. "What is it?"

Striker shrugged, but the closed, shuttered mask that came down over her face did not quite hide her disgust. Nitpicker glanced at the other mere, and Mina demanded, "Do you have a problem I should know about?"

"No," Striker said distinctly.

Nitpicker started to speak, but Mina didn't look at her. "You don't like me, is that it?" she said flatly to Striker.

Nitpicker stepped in front of the other woman. "You don't pay us for our likes and dislikes-"

"No," Mina returned sharply. "We pay you for your skills. It's your job to work here, and defend us if necessary-fight for our stake and die for us if you have to-whether you like us or not. That's your contract. And if you don't do that job one hundred percent to our satisfaction, I'll personally take you before your own guild, sue you for breach of contract, and crush you into dust through your own guild laws."

"That's just like a lifer-to destroy what you can't control." Striker's voice was quiet, but it somehow filled the room and echoed in the sudden silence. "Why bother to communicate to solve a problem when you can crush the differences between us?" She nodded at Mina's expression. "Did you get that atti-tude from your great-great-grandfather? Or did you develop it on your own?"

For a moment, Mina could only stand speechless.

"Striker," Nitpicker said softly, "go back and help Doetzier."

The freepick's brown eyes narrowed. Nitpicker nodded toward the panels. "Want our nodie to give you a hand?" she asked deliberately as Mina started to speak.

The woman's eyes flashed. She stared at Striker's back. It was Laz who, after a wary look at Mina, responded, "Won't you be busy setting up your gear?"

"We lost most of our gear on the way here," Nitpicker answered flatly. "It'll be a day of two before we get replacements."

Decker s.h.i.+fted, as if he would speak, but Mina nodded shortly. Her voice was still sharp with anger as she cut in, "Laz will get you set up with what we have. I'm the bact-stabber here, and I've got three vats to balance by dusk, so I can't help you till tomorrow."

Wren raised his eyebrows. "Bact-stabber?"

"I make up the bacts-bacteria, to you-and shoot them into the core samples and tailings with a tool that looks like a knife. Laz coined the phrase. It obviously fits me," she said nastily. She turned to Decker. "I'll be in lab three-B. Let Bishop know, will you?" She brushed past the others and stalked to the other side of the room.

Wren watched her stop and speak briefly with the two freepicks at the other doorway. "Mina," he murmured. "Know what that name means?"

Tsia shook her head.

"Earth child."