Cataract. Part 27

"Keep quiet," Striker snapped.

Nitpicker eyed the lift, then glanced at Tsia, who still wore the frown on her face. "Clear?"

"Can't tell."

Laz reached up as if to help the lift down, heedless of the self-guiding sensors in the legs. Wren caught his skinny arm and stopped him from pulling himself up before it came to a rest. "Not yet," Wren said sharply.

"We've got to get out of here-"

Wren's ma.s.sive hands yanked him away so that he fell awkwardly in the pool. "Not yet," he repeated. "Feather?"

She shook her head. "Nothing human but us."

"Van'ei?" he asked the pilot.

She glanced at Doetzier. "You got anything you want to say?"

He shook his head, but his eyes were on Tsia. She caught his gaze and narrowed her eyes into slits. Nitpicker pulled herself through the water. "Striker, you and Bowdie head for the main hub. Take the freepicks with you. They can get you inside, show you where the gear is. Get the weapons-anything you can find-then meet us near the landing pad." She closed her eyes and thought out the configuration of the huts. "Third hut, closest to the pad; SE doorway."

Bowdie and Striker nodded. Tsia was first up the lift, and the water ran off her like a fountain for the first four meters she rose. The moment her head was even with the rim of the pit, she stopped the controls, looked from side to side with both eyes and gate, then moved up to leap to the deck in a catlike crouch. Below her, Wren, then Nitpicker rose. Bowdie was next, and his bowed legs made dark curves around the center pipe of the lift, while his long feet stuck out like flat-bottom boats.

One by one, as silent as the hissing rain, they moved to the lip of the pit. They crouched on the rim till they were all up top. Then Bowdie, Striker, and the three freepicks sprinted for the hub. Bowdie and Laz shortened their stride for the others to keep up. Striker, limping and paling with every step, forced herself to run. Wren and the rest took off for the landing pad.

They had gotten twenty meters when Tsia veered off.

"Where are you going?" Nitpicker snapped.

"My flexor-" She could see the blued hilt lying in a shadow against the wall of the main hut. It had been flung away when she had fallen earlier, and she had not seen it before when she ran.

"Doetzier, go with her."

Tsia had not waited for him. She felt the man's agreement almost before Nitpicker finished speaking. In her head, Ruka's snarl was one of approval at the mental sense of the weapon, and Tsia wondered if the cub somehow thought that the flexor translated as a sort of human claw. Silently running, her feet like cat paws on the tarmac, she made straight for it, stooped without stopping to pick it up, and sprinted back to the group. Doetzier ran easily beside her. His biofield still had that wary, watching feel, but Tsia understood it now. Anyone who transported biochips must be on edge half his life.

Doetzier sprinted beside Tsia. His longer legs forced her to take one and a half steps to his every one. "Can you feel the chips?" he asked as they rounded the edge of the hut and caught sight of Nitpicker and Wren.

"No." She slid the flexor into her harness straps.

"Stretch your gate."

Tsia stumbled as her foot came down on a ragged tarmac seam, regained her balance, and snarled. "I'm doing the best I can."

"If you can't feel for the chips, try to feel for Kurvan-"

"I am-"

A minute later, they caught up near the third hut along the landing pad, where they lined up along the wall, careful not to touch the sides with their bodies or clothes. There was a solid door, not a filter door, around the corner. Tsia, then Wren, moved to it. Tsia pulled the flexor from her harness and flicked it into a narrow, spikelike sword. They went in quickly, but the maintenance hut was empty of humans. Two small corers, flexible piping, shelves of thrust modulators and regulators and pumps...

"Clear," Tsia murmured.

Wren gestured, and Doetzier and Nitpicker slunk in. They closed the door and moved to the windows. From there, they had a clear view of the skimmers on the far side of the tarmac. A single figure moved beneath the largest s.h.i.+p, loading gear into a bay.

"Decker?" Nitpicker murmured.

Tsia nodded. Her hand rose unconsciously to the burned-through hole in her blunter. She could not mistake the movement of the man who had fired that laze. "So Kurvan and the others-at least ten, maybe twelve-are somewhere in the hub." Nitpicker's voice was thoughtful. "What about the chips?"

"I can't tell from here."

"Can you handle Decker?"

Tsia's eyes glinted.

"We want him alive," Doetzier said sharply.

She cast him a cold look. "I wouldn't have it otherwise."

Nitpicker chewed her lip. "Can you link us through your ghost line to the node?"

"I don't know... It's thin." It would take almost nothing to break it now. A thread of bare action without

the trappings of the sensor net to complete it and make it real... That was a traceline that anyone could

look at and log as unreal. Once flagged as a ghost line, it was useless except on a dreamer channel."Try it. It could be twenty minutes before Bowdie and Striker get back to us, and we can't move without weapons. Wren, help me scrounge something up out of this place. I want that transport grounded." She glanced at Tsia soberly. Then she reached across and touched her first two fingers, first to her own sternum, then to Tsia's. "Kai-al nyeka," she said in a low voice, using the old tongue of the meres: firedancer; one who fights with grace.

Tsia looked up into Nitpicker's black irises. The pressure of those fingers was light, but it seemed to

press inside her chest and touch her heartbeat."You've given me derori ka'eo-the freedom victory. And-" Nitpicker took a breath. "Ma'ke ka'eo-the death victory." Slowly, deliberately, she said, "Je paka 'ka chi."

Tsia stared deep into her eyes. She stretched her biogate and felt the steady coolness of Nitpicker's field.

Slowly, she inclined her head. For an instant, the two fields seemed to merge, then split through her biogate, and Nitpicker moved away.

Doetzier glanced at Tsia's face. "That was hard for her," he murmured.

Tsia stared after the other woman. "I know it."

He studied the landing pad carefully, watching the rain sheet across and the rivers run off in gray stretches. "How did you know?" he asked quietly.

She looked at him. "About the biochips?"

He nodded, "My biogate. They stood out oddly from your field."

He nodded again, slowly.

"Didn't you know they would?" she asked.

"I didn't think you had the resolution to distinguish them."

"I distinguished them right away; I just didn't recognize them for what they were. Without the biocodes

etched in, they were open. They felt like bacteria in your body. Floating. I felt Bowdie's chips the same way, though much more faintly."

"Jewel-like speckles in a black background?"

She looked at him in surprise.

"I've worked with other guides before you."

"Nitpicker says a guide can feel a bacterium at thirty paces. Why didn't you think I would? Was it what I said back on the platform about my resolution?"

Doetzier looked at her for a moment. His words were soft. "Your past is not that of a normal guide, is it,

Feather-nyefcz?"

There was something in his tone of voice... Tsia's guts tightened, and her eyes narrowed unconsciously.

"What do you mean, Doetzier?"

"There are things you should understand about your gate that you don't; and there are other things you've taught yourself that the guide guild has never known. Your past is different from that of other guides." She watched him like a songbird does an encroaching snake, unaware that her lips were curled back from her teeth. An image rose in her head: the memory of a body whose throat was torn by Tsia's hands. White hair and violet eyes, blank and staring in flaccid horror. Her past. Her crime.

Doetzier watched the expressions haunt her eyes. He said softly, "What would you do to be free of the past?"

"Free?" Of the fear? she echoed unconsciously."You've been running for years-for a decade, Tsin-nyeka. Didn't you realize that, in your flight from what you feared, you became that which you most hated?"

She stared at him, unable to guess what he meant."A victim." He answered for her."You don't know that, Doetzier. You don't know what I am.""I know you, Feather-guide. As well as I know my own sister."Her throat tightened at the term, but her eyes glinted. "Then tell me my name, if you know it."For an instant, something like compa.s.sion flickered in his gaze. But his words were like bullets of ice.

"You are the rogue gate, Tsia Matsallen. The illegal guide of the Ciordani guild."

She stared at him as if she stared at a corpse, long-dead, that rose up to touch her face. Her throat seemed to close; her breath cut off. The chill began in the bones of her toes and neck at the same time. "Daughter of the guides Bayzon Matsallen and Ellyn Jadietz," he went on. "Granddaughter of the guide and First Dropper Caitriona. Descendant of the Sirian guide Nordon Kadya. Of Niamh, of Jacob, of Ciaran-"

"Enough." Wren's voice stilled them both as he stepped between Tsia and the other man.

Tsia did not move. Her eyes, like those of Ruka's, stared at Doetzier as if she waited for his words to burn through her chest like a laze. "You're the s.h.i.+eld." Her voice was barely a whisper.

"Yes."

"Here for me?"

"No."

"For the biochips?"

He nodded.

"So you're customs, too."

"Yes." His voice was flat, but his eyes watched her closely, as if he were judging her responses to his

words. "I know about your sister." She was silent for a moment. "And now you know about me. My gate. The cats." A wall inside her seemed to break. Its bricks were fear, and its mortar antic.i.p.ation. He knew her past; he knew about her murder. And the meres, who had protected her, could no longer do that. The scent of the man was harsh in her nose. Wren's hand flashed out to steady her. Nitpicker's voice cut across Doetzier's expression. "Her link," the woman said quietly, as she moved back into the doorway, "is clear and fully licensed."

Doetzier did not bother to look at the pilot; his gaze was locked on Tsia. "Her link," he said, "was stolen

from the art guild. She killed an artist to take it." His eyes flicked to Wren's cold face. "You're not surprised."

Wren shrugged.

"You knew?"

"It didn't matter to me." His statement, quiet as it was, was almost a challenge to the s.h.i.+eld.

"And you?" Doetzier turned to Nitpicker.

"Why should I care for her past?" the pilot returned coldly. "She's been true to her guild. To my guild. I

owe her derori ka'eo. Ma'ke ka'eo." The debt of honor between friends. She met his eyes steadily. "As do you," she added softly.His eyes narrowed. "I acknowledge no such debt."Tsia's eyes glinted. "Then what is it now that you want?"