Cataract. Part 25

When Decker stepped forward and grabbed Tsia's shoulders, jerking her to her knees, she did not resist. She just stared at the other woman and tried to project to her the memories that flashed in her head: Shjams and Tsia on a storm-roughened slough, racing skeeters across the water. Slamming into the waves and flying off their crests till they hit the next swell that washed in. Two girls huddled together in a cave, trading ghost stories as they tried to scare each other, until neither one could stand it, and they both raced back to the suns.h.i.+ne. Tsia standing in front of Shjams as the younger girl was picked on, and biting out the words in her defense... Two young women, lying in the gra.s.s and staring up at the stars while they spoke of dreams and goals...

Slowly, as if her mouth was full of distaste, Shjams spat to the side. Tsia stared for a moment, then, abruptly, closed her gate. Her face grew still; her eyes grew shuttered. Her jaw was tight as her fists. Decker looked from one to the other. He smelled like cat. So did Shjams. Tsia's nostrils flared, and she cursed the gate that overwhelmed her senses so that she couldn't even smell her sister over the scent of felines in her mind.

Decker stepped away from Tsia so he could point his laze at her from a safer distance. "Where did you find her?" he said to Shjams.

The woman jerked her chin. "Right here."

"She get into any of the s.h.i.+ps?"

"No."

Decker looked Tsia over and noted the burn hole he had placed in the blunter. "She give you any trouble?"

"No."

Decker raised his white eyebrows. "How did you do it?"

She said slowly, "For a moment, in the shadows, she thought I was her sister."

The zek raised his eyebrows. The two women looked similar only in the set of their expressions. Where Shjams had shoulder-length hair that curled even in the rain and wind, Tsia's hair was straight and short. Where Shjams had a clear, natural-olive complexion, Tsia's skin, even tanned as it had become, was still much lighter in shade, and the claw marks that had scarred her face twisted her expression into a feral mask so that even their noses could not be compared. Shjams was bustier; Tsia was taller. Shjams had green eyes; Tsia had blue. Decker looked from one to the other. " 'Always the shadow that reflects yourself,' " he quoted.

The woman shrugged.

Decker glanced at the still-open hatch of the skimmer. "You finish up here. I'll take her back to the hub."

"You know she's a guide."

Decker said coldly, "Her gate will be of no use here. She's going in the reclamation pit with the others. In less than an hour, there will be plenty of water in the pit, but there's no open pa.s.sage to anything nearby-nothing from which a marine animal can come."

Shjams, staring still at Tsia, frowned. "What does that have to do with her?"

"She's linked to some kind of eel or fish. Kurvan confirmed it on the hike."

His words hung in the air. Tsia held her breath while time spun out in a long, thin web like an ancient ghost from the node. There was no change in Shjams's expression as the woman turned away. A sound escaped Tsia's throat, even through her tightly clamped lips. Decker dug his fingers into her shoulder and hauled her up. He shoved her in front of him, then followed her across the tarmac. Tsia, her mind numb as ice and her thoughts as sharp as crystal, did not once look back.

Shjams stared after her, then triggered the hatch and climbed up into the s.h.i.+p. Blindly, she went forward and sank down in the pilot's chair. The soft molded itself to her hips and shoulders, and she cursed its calm complacency.

"She thought I was her sister."

Shjams stared at the blank set of flight screens as if they were a wall. She didn't feel the chill air that circulated from the open hatch. She didn't notice the rain that swept into the cabin from the door. There was a harshness in the air, as if someone breathed with difficulty, and it took her a moment to realize it was her own throat, so tight against the tears, that choked off the breath from her lungs.

"I was," she whispered to herseif. "I was."

Tsia rolled back against the wet rock. Above, a rough circle of gray light was filled with raindrops that seemed to fall as slowly as snowflakes. The edges of the reclamation pit, outlined with the silver light, glistened from the groundwater. Falling rain splattered her neck and face. The water at her feet was already ankle-deep from the seeps that flooded through the cracked rock walls, and since the gray light didn't reach all the way to the bottom of the pit, and the sallow pit lighting was faint as a lamp in a warehouse, it looked as if she stood in an ebony pool.

From beside her, Doetzier spoke quietly. "Did you get to a manual com?" His voice was so low that it barely reached Tsia's ears over the sound of the running, dripping water.

"No," she returned, her voice equally low. They stood close together with the zeks overhead, at the top of the dank hole. Like chickens waiting for the knife, they stood and stared up at the gray sky circle. Five meres, three freepicks... Nitpicker being lowered as they watched. Nine people waiting to die. And that hunter who crept on the edge of her mind still tested her gate with each breath.

She looked around the pit with distant eyes. Absently, she scratched the skin graft on her thigh. Around her, the cored-out walls were rough with sharp, circular cuts. Four meters-that was all the width there was. Four meters; twenty minutes, and the water already ankle-deep.

For a moment, she watched Nitpicker's limp body brought down the lift by the zek with the long arms. The blackjack and his victim dropped into the darker layer where neither sky nor pit lighting reached, then back into the dirty, yellow-lit area at the bottom.

"How far did you get?" Doetzier breathed the question without moving his lips, and Tsia dragged her attention back to his words.

"The skimmers-"

Wren and the thickset Bishop caught Nitpicker as the zek tossed her off his shoulder. Gently, they lowered her limp body to a bed of rock that stood knee-high above the growing puddle. Laz, his tall frame huddled on a rock, watched them work without moving. While Wren checked for Nitpicker's pulse, the zek rose immediately back toward the rim. He had not brought down a weapon. Blackjack wouldn't have hesitated to sacrifice him if they thought he'd be used against them. The ankle-deep pool reflected his rising shape as a twisted, dancing body.

Tsia looked at Doetzier as his own water-image split and shook and put itself back together. The skin was tight around his eyes, and she could feel in his biofield the control he exerted over his pain. The side of his face was egg-shaped, and the lump from the flexor red-blue with dead blood. His left eye was still half-shut from the swelling; his Up was split and fat. His shoulders were bent as if he were tired and in pain, but his gaze was alert and seemed to snap with the energy that filled his biofield. His hands, hidden in shadow, drammed against his trousers as if he waited, not for death, but something... else.

Tsia almost glared at him. His very stance seemed to challenge her to feel less old and weary. He poised like a runner at the mark, but she felt every one of her forty-eight years as a weight on her shoulders, dragging down on her arms. Forty-eight years, she thought. Half a century that somehow had never given her the words or way in which to touch her sister. She waited for the familiar wash of bitterness, but it didn't come. Only a tang, as if she bit her lip and tasted blood.

She did not think about the biochips. She did not consider Kurvan. The cold that radiated from the stone made her s.h.i.+ver, and she drew her burned blunter more closely around her exhausted body, then hunched against the rain and shoved her hands in her pockets. The sharp edges of the safety cubes pressed against her fingers, and she glanced at Nitpicker. She ought to give them back to the pilot now, she thought with irony. If blackjack had its way, she'd have no chance to return the datacubes later.

Daya, she had no energy left to think. She should be planning, thinking of how to escape, but she could not seem to focus. Her sister's name was like a cry that echoed and split the thoughts in her mind. Even above the background hum of the cats or over the snarling of the cougar, or around the splas.h.i.+ng, dripping sounds of the rainwater was.h.i.+ng in, her sister's name was a sharp knife in her skull. Shjams...

Doetzier's voice was still low. "Did you get inside to the corns?"

Tsia tried to focus. "No."

"Zyas, Feather." His voice was sharper. "Did you do anything at all?"

Daya, it was hard to form the words. "I yanked everything I could from the maintenance bays," she managed finally. Somehow, it seemed like weeks had pa.s.sed, not simply twenty-eight hours. And still it rained, as if the sky shed the tears that Tsia could not. She glanced at Bowdie. Poetic justice, she thought with gallows humor. It rained so that she could drown her sorrows with the very breath in her lungs. A fitting image-that she drowned in the tears of the world she tried to save.

"From what bays did you pull the gear?"

She could still see Shjams standing there, smelling of cat and packing crates; of the perfume she had used when they were young...

"Which bays?" he repeated urgently.

She dragged her thoughts back to the present. "The aft bays just behind the wing slots."

"How much damage did you do? What did you pull out?"

"I don't know," she returned sharply. She closed her eyes and took a breath and lowered her voice again.

"I'm a guide, not a s.h.i.+ptech," she whispered finally. "I just grabbed everything in reach-sensor boxes, power strips, datacubes. I cracked a few honeycombs and tore out a length of pressure tubing."

"And they didn't see the mess?"

"I closed the bays before they got there. Threw the gear in the forest."

Doetzier swore quietly under his breath. "Blackjack will be able to scan out that gear inside ten minutes."

"They'll find nothing before they lift."

He shook his head almost imperceptibly. "Every sensor box has a repair call sign built in. You can trigger its location through the scannet here at the hub. Datacubes too-they're no exception."

"Grounded scannets have a limited range."

"They're not as limited as your throwing arm."

"You don't understand," she said tiredly. "They will not find the gear."

He actually looked at her. "You got it outside the scan range?"

She nodded almost imperceptibly.

A ghost of a smile crossed his lips. "Trust a guide to hide the path beneath your feet," he quoted. "If they

can't lift off..." He seemed to straighten. "Did you get all three s.h.i.+ps?"

"No-only two. They caught me at the transport."

"Sleem take them, that's the one they'll fly out on, too..." He thought for a moment. "If the transport was

out of commission, we'd have a good chance of keeping the zeks contained long enough to get help-or to recover the chips before they lift off," he added, more to himself than to her.

"Zyas, Doetzier, don't you ever give up?"

"Not while there's breath in my family line."

"At least you could tell me what that is," she whispered sourly back. "Your family name, I mean-so I can die with my curiosity sated."

He gave her a wry grin. "Death isn't reason enough to give up the power of a name."

Tsia could not smile in response. She shoved herself away from the wall and paced the small pit like a tiger, shouldering past the other meres as if they were not there. In an hour, she and Doetzier would be fighting to stay afloat in an r-con field, not scheming to get back the chips. One hour, maybe two, and the zeks would, if the meres survived that long, kill them all like rats in a bucket. Her hands itched to climb up the slick sides of the pit, but her mind could see no way out. If she could image the node, she could lower the lift by command as soon as blackjack left. But in an r-con field, no one would be able to move to use a lift even if it was lowered...

The water swirled above her ankles. Wren glanced at the water level, then up at Tsia, while he held Nitpicker's head as gently as a child's. He grinned coldly, but there was fury behind his expression. "Well, Feather, at least you were right about the rains."

She stared at him for a moment, then turned back to the stone with stiff fingers. One hour, her mind repeated. She ran her hands over the slick rock wall, ignoring the other meres. The mud ground like sand on her fingers as she tested the protrusions. Too small, too slick to climb... One hour. Maybe two. That ghost line she had in the node-the old trace-could she make it active?

Her feet slipped on the rough, hidden rock and mud. She did not care. Like fingers reaching up, the brown-black water splashed along her calves. Like stones dropped into a well, the rain hit the reflection-torn surface of the growing lake. Shjams. Blackjack. The biochips...

Bowdie, one hand still pressed to his side, watched her as she stopped against the rock beside Striker. The water splashed off a protrusion over her head and splattered her eyebrows with droplets. Striker had pulled the hood of her blunter up so that the water ran off the fabric in tiny, constant runnels. Tsia turned her head to meet the other woman's eyes, and Striker s.h.i.+fted, bit her lip, and hissed out her breath. The burn on her leg had cauterized itself as it was made; there was no blood, but the stench of the woman's seared flesh was thick in Tsia's nose. Striker's face, taut and pale, seemed hollow around the blackness of her eyes. She had not been allowed a skin graft.

"All right?" Tsia asked in a low voice.

"Long as I'm breathing," Striker returned shortly.

Mina looked at Striker. "You took that burn for me," she said, her acerbic voice forced and halting.

Striker glanced at her but didn't answer.

"He would have killed me, and you stopped him."

"It's my job," the mere returned shortly.

Mina's eyes flashed. "That's right," she agreed. Her voice tightened with anger. "But there's some part of you that agrees with me, or you couldn't have taken that laze."

Striker laughed. Bishop murmured, "Mina, back off."

She turned on him roughly, but Striker cut in, "I get paid, Mina, so you can have the beliefs you want- no matter how I disagree with them. This burn"-she gestured at her leg-"is just a reminder of how far some people will go to take control over others."

The freepick stared at her for a moment, then turned away. But the s.h.i.+vering that hit her shoulders didn't hide the shake of her anger. Bishop touched her shoulder, and she shook him off abruptly. He glanced at Striker, then moved back to the wall as a shadow moved to the top of the pit.

Decker came halfway down on the lift. In his hands he held a small, red-black box. He used the extension bars of the foot and hand pipes to s.h.i.+ft his body close to the wall. Once there, he placed the box on a ledge two meters over Wren's head.

The meres, watching from the bottom of the pit, became very still. Tsia eyed the box without speaking. The chill that had settled in her bones was offset only by the fire that began to burn in her gut. She knew the shape of that box. She knew the touch of its burning field on her nerves. Knew the searing pain that would strike with every muscle motion-from her lungs expanding, to the blink of her eyes and the convulsive flare of her nostrils. She saw that box and felt her eyes shutter and her expression go blank, and her mind withdraw, deep inside herself, behind the walls of will and survival, where noth-ing and no one could touch her. She did not move, except to lean herself with her shoulder against the wall so that her weight was not balanced just on her feet. And then, slowly and steadily, as if she began to meditate, she began to breathe.

Decker moved back up the lift, and Mina got to her feet. She stared after the zek and demanded, "What is that? What did you leave?"

Bowdie snapped at her, "Move back against the wall."

She ignored him and shaded her face with her hand. Decker's figure disappeared in a silhouette at the rim of the pit. The lift rose up after him until the thread of its shadow vanished.

"What is that thing?" she shouted.

Tsia felt her lips move. "It's an r-con," she said almost absently. And then the field turned on, and fire swept through her body.

Muscles froze instinctively like rock. Lungs held their breath in shock. The eyelids, caught open, did not dare blink as the field from the r-con expanded into the pit. Tsia felt the burn grip her nerves, from the skin that held the roots of her hair to the toes that pressed for balance inside her boots. Her temple link became a whip of electrical pulses that flayed her nervous system. The movement of every muscle burned. The rise and fall of her chest with her breath was a bath in fire that scorched her ribs and lungs. The instinctive clench of her jaw was a punch from a fist of acid.

No one screamed. No one cried out. Each larynx was caught in that sudden, searing pain. This was not like a wash of heat from a firepit, nor the point pain of a laze. This was a ubiquitous burning that struck every cell in their bodies. The pulse that pushed the skin out in their throats-it was a drum of torture. The pumping of their hearts-it was a crus.h.i.+ng pain. And still the rain fell and the water seeped in, and the pit pool rose toward their knees.

Tsia hid within her mind from the burning of her body. She knew this pain. Her biogate was shut down tight-the single scream from Ruka had made her jerk it closed. She could not draw strength from him, or any other cat.