Cataract. Part 28

"What is it that you need?" he returned softly.

"Are we bargaining now for something?" Inside her head, the cat feet crawled. "You want me to say that I need my biogate?" Her voice almost shook with the quietness of the fury that seemed to swamp her. "You could order a wipe through the node in an instant, and when you were done destroying my gate and erasing my self, I wouldn't even know I'd been a guide."

'There's always something left," he said softly. "Even after a thorough wipe. Have you looked in Striker's eyes? Do you want to be the same? Wondering where you came from? What crime had stripped away your person? Questioning with every reaction you had whether it was an old, unsurfaced habit or some new, conscious desire that pushed your emotions and thoughts? How often do you think she asks herself if she's descended from the lifers herself? One image from me to the node, and you would be just like that. But worse than a ghost; worse than a wipe-you'd be a naught forever."

Tsia's jaw tightened. "If you have the authority, then you also have the authority to negotiate a link."

For a moment, he did not answer. "A clear link," he said slowly. "Protected status. What would you give in return?"

Tsia's lips thinned. "No giving here, Doetzier." Her voice was almost a snarl. "No half bargains or promises with me. A contract, legal and verified-that's what I want from you."

"On what terms?"

"I get the biochips back. You give me a link."

"Those biochips represent a threat to your world, not just to yourself or your gate."

"A link," she repeated softly. "That's my price."

"Not your sister?"

Tsia's throat tightened. "I don't think my sister really exists." Her voice was so low, he almost didn't hear it. "She's gone from me. Giving up myself for her would not bring her back. It would only let her run further and destroy me with her running. I want a link, Doetzier."

"You're a guide," he returned flatly. "You can't bargain for a link. It's not in your nature to allow anyone -even your sister-to destroy your world through the use of the biochips."

She grinned, but the expression stretched her lips like a snarl. "The zeks are your responsibility, and your workload is nothing to me. I want contract, Doetzier."

"I want the biochips back."

"In exchange for a protected link."

"If you testify at the trial for the blackjacks we take in," he shot back.

She hesitated.

"Afraid to take a chance?"

"On what?"

"On yourself," he said deliberately. "Or have you lived so long within your fear that you've forgotten

what it's like to be free?"

Her lips thinned and curled back from her teeth. "Maybe," she returned. "Perhaps it is only fear which moves me." "No." His voice was flat and he studied her for a long moment. "Fear lies on you like a blanket, but it isn't a fear for yourself that you feel. It's the fear of what you'll find in your sister when you face her over the chips. It's the fear that you'll someday look in the mirror and see your sister's victim eyes staring back at you." He paused. "She'll have to stand trial," he added softly. "Like all the other blackjack."

Tsia forced her lips to move. "And me?"

"You were a rogue gate before, Tsia-nyefaz, and you're a rogue gate now. But I see no evil in you. The guilt you carry has never been justified away. You know what you did, and you know why you did it."

He paused, and his eyes flickered with something akin to compa.s.sion. "And I might have done it myself."

She stared at him, her hands still clenched. "A link, Doetzier."

Slowly, he nodded. "It is done."

Like a waterfall that tumbled through her brain, the words came, over and over:... a legitimate link a legitimate link... Her guts were still tight, clenched like a fist. Her lips were still pressed together, as if she had to hold in the exultant snarl that threatened to burst free of her throat.

Doetzier moved up to the window and eyed the landing pad carefully. "Have you gotten through on the node to link us back up?"

"No." She shook her head. "And my ghost line is still so thin that it could break at any moment. I did locate our ID dots-up skyside, in our skimmer. To the node, we don't appear to have left orbit at all. Scannet never registered our landing, let alone our crash. Kurvan did as tight a job as any three nodies put together: our DO dots are so buried in his webs that even if I had twenty hours instead of twenty minutes, I doubt that I'd get through."

She could feel Ruka to her right, distant and gliding through the forest as he approached the s.h.i.+p from the south. The landing pad, still gray and rippling with the water that ran across its surface, looked like a long lake, on which a silver cricket sat. The three huts on the one side and the two huts on the other were like guardians of a gate. The main hut-the hub- was behind the structure where Tsia and the other meres waited. Decker left the s.h.i.+p and walked toward one of the far huts, disappearing inside. A moment later, the last ghost line in Tsia's head went blank.

"The jam on the node," she murmured to Doetzier. "It just went on full. I lost my ghost line."

He shrugged. "If we can't use it, neither can they. We're all on manual corns."

"But if they jammed it, they're getting ready to lift."

"I know. We can't wait any longer to move on the transport."

Tsia glanced toward Nitpicker. "Van'ei," she called softly.

"I heard," the pilot responded. "Wren, help me with this stuff."

Wren took some gear from her hands and distributed it in the pockets of his blunter. The pilot pulled at her blunter, wincing at the burn on her shoulder. With a muttered curse, she moved to the doorway. "Where's Decker?"

"Middle hut," Tsia returned, "par side of the complex. Just went in."

"Anyone with him?"

"No one." She did not say that it was not her own eyes and ears which told her that, but Ruka's senses instead.

Nitpicker nodded. "Tsia, you have the flexor: keep Decker off our backs and in case he's got a com, make sure he doesn't see us. Wren, Doetzier, you're with me. Once we're done at the s.h.i.+p, we'll head for the main hub."

"You don't think the chips are in the s.h.i.+p?" Tsia asked.

"Kurvan wouldn't allow them out of his sight," the pilot returned shortly. "Nor would he put them on board before he himself is ready to go. If he's not at the s.h.i.+p, he'll be at the hub, and we can catch him there before he leaves."

Tsia nodded and eyed the hut where Decker had disappeared. Her mind snarled through her gate, and Ruka's ready answer was quick. When she stepped out in the shelter of the eaves, the other meres stepped out with her. Doetzier touched her arm, and she looked at him with glinting eyes. He pressed something cold and flat into her hand. She looked down at his bios.h.i.+eld, then up again with a frown.

He nodded. "Yours is fried."

"But you-without this..."

"I'm aware of the risks."

She nodded shortly, then tucked it in her lower blunter pocket. With the hole as big as her hand burned all the way through in the center, the jacket closed only at the bottom and hung open across her chest. The s.h.i.+eld should have been placed over her heart cavity, but the pouches there were crisped. She touched the s.h.i.+eld again and glanced at Doetzier. His biofield was still wary, but there was something else there now. A confidence. An eagerness that verged on certainty.

"I will get them back," she said quietly.

"I believe you." He started to turn away.

"Doetzier-" she began.

He half turned back. He regarded her for a moment as if he was watching her from a distance. "My name," he said softly, "is Ghoboza. Fleming Leshe Ghobhoza Mikhail Avyani Jantzanu Doetzier."

Tsia stared at him for a moment. Then she nodded slowly and turned away to feel for Decker's presence.

Decker was still far enough away that she could not sense him herself, but Ruka's ears listened to his cursing inside the freepick hut. Warily, she eyed the deck. Then, slowly, lithely, she ran. She no longer felt her bruises; she paid no attention to exhaustion. Golden eyes gleamed from the forest, and something else-black eyes? colored slits in the gloom?-gleamed from inside her mind. She tried to reach the strange cat in her gate, to feel its energy through her biolink, but that other feline was cold and irritated and foreign to her mind.

She picked up speed till she sprinted. She could hear the others behind her, skidding through the puddles in her steps. When they reached the transport s.h.i.+p, all four automatically dropped into the shadows of the landing legs. For a moment, Tsia poised on the b.a.l.l.s of her feet, listening through her gate. Ahead, still in the hut... She motioned an all-clear, and the meres opened two of the maintenance bays.

She stayed at the nose of the skimmer, one hand on the craft and the other out to the rain, her eyes on the freepick hut. Decker-still ahead. Still unaware of her presence.

Behind her, the other meres worked quickly. One minute pa.s.sed. Then two. The door from the hut opened. Decker had his hood up and his head down in the rain, and Tsia hissed at the meres to warn them. Silently, they closed the bays and pressed themselves to the s.h.i.+p. Tsia began to run toward the zek, sprinting silently as a cat. She could feel him now-his energy, cold as Wren's, but careless. Ruka's nostrils flared, and she tasted that other cat in her gate. Human scent and packing crates. And something else...

She drew her flexor as she veered toward the gap between huts, rather than running straight at him. Decker, upwind with his head bowed, did not see her until she came almost even with his feet. Then he caught sight of her in the corner of his eye. Startled, he let out a cry, then jumped into a run after her. He drew his laze, and the hot point of the beam sparked in the air. He did not try to fire; he was still too far away, but Tsia could hear the rain sputtering as it struck the tip of the weapon and exploded in tiny, white-sizzling b.a.l.l.s.

She dodged the corner of the last hut in the line, and her nostrils flared. Shaper scent-and upwind. Ruka crouched in the forest before her, and the cougar's scent mixed with mud and the sharp musk of the other beasts. Shapers... Neurotox-ins and blood-breakers and the speed at which they worked... Tsia skidded to a stop and whirled to face the blackjack.

"Don't move." Decker halted before her. His voice, breathless from his sudden sprint, was harsh even in the wind. She started to s.h.i.+ft subtly backward, but a beam from his laze sizzled toward her legs, only to bend into the tarmac at her feet. She jerked back, and he fired again, the beam cutting across her arm. The blunter sizzled, but the beam bent away like a curveball. She backed away another step. The forest spattered her with heavy water drops, and Decker followed her with menace.

"The bios.h.i.+eld," he hissed. 'Take it out. Toss it here."

Tsia's lips curled up from her teeth, and she bared them in a silent snarl. Ruka's golden eyes followed Decker's movements as if it were the cougar who hunted the zek, not Tsia. No, she sent to the cub. He's mine. Stay back.

"The s.h.i.+eld," he repeated. "Give it here, and I'll let you live."

She grinned, but the expression showed the fanged promise of a cat, not the humor of a human. "As long as I have the s.h.i.+eld," she said, backing away another step, "your laze is worth less than its energy pack." She flicked her wrist so that the flexor snapped into a long thin, tapering point. She could feel Ruka behind her, slinking to the side. Decker had eyes for no one but her, and he could not see, with the wind-motion of the brush, the tawny movement of cougar.

"You think that s.h.i.+eld will save you? You think you can hide in the woods?" He snapped his own flexor out of his belt.

Tsia stepped to the left and pressed back until her shoulders and hips felt the bending, wind-whipped brush. She could smell the water on the leaves. Her nostrils were clogged with the odors of mud, the broken twigs, the sharp musk scent of the shapers... Decker watched her slip between the shrubs; he moved like a snake to follow. Tsia had opened her gate, and her mind was clouded with the sounds from Ruka's ears and the scent of the shapers to her left. A tentacled hunger seemed to creep into her mind; the sense of danger grew. Then Decker closed in a rush.

Their flexors met with jarring force. Tsia's weapon snapped into a hook; Decker's whipped wickedly back. At the same time, the beam from his laze curled before her face and burned the air she breathed. She staggered instinctively, and he flashed forward to strike at her chest. The wind caught his clothes and whipped them in grotesque shapes; she flicked her flexor into a thin blade and stabbed at the core of his energy.

Her blade pa.s.sed between his arm and side. He overreached and drove his blade across her shoulder, then tried to hook it back. Instantly, she slammed her elbow in his gut and snapped her weapon to a curved blade, but the blackjack jerked his own hilt down. Something smashed into her collarbone. She gasped at the brutal blow. Something tawny flashed in her eyes. Decker cried out. Tsia leaped toward the musk scent.

Ruka-she screamed in her gate. Stay away!

The cougar did not listen. His claws raked the blackjack's back, and one paw reached around to Decker's face and hooked into the man's nose, jerking back his head as if the zek were an elk. With a harsh scream, Decker flipped the beam of his laze over his shoulder. There was a flash of light, the bitter burn of hair and flesh.

Pain seared Tsia's mind through the gate. A burning, crus.h.i.+ng fire flared along nerves that she reflected. She could not see through the flood of catspeak and claws inside her skull, and only Ruka's yowl echoed in her ears. There was something in her hand-the blackjack's arm, his flesh squeezed between her fingers. His flexor was gone; his laze beamed across her chest and curved away like a string before a fan. She leaned down as if in a dream, and Decker's face twisted in slow motion. She grabbed soft, fatty, tentacled flesh and yanked it up as if tearing a plant from the soil. Decker's laze was an infinite line of light, flaring out in a long, slow circle, moving toward her chest. Her own arm moved like honey, while the shaper's scent crawled into her nose like lice. Something whipped in lethargic curves around the palm of her hand. The tentacles touched and began to close. Venom glands compressed. The blue-white laze arced in a languid line that her eyes seemed to follow blindly. She felt, more than saw, the shaper's fangs open; the fluid sac scents were sharp in her nose. The toxins were an acrid odor, the saliva a yellow-white. Long teeth seemed to grow in size. Her arm released in a lingering snap. Venomous fangs bit down. On Decker's chin. And the scream that, m.u.f.fled by the fleshy body, was torn from his throat with his breath hung in the air for what seemed like an hour while Tsia continued, in that eternally slow-motion leap, to jump the shaper's den with the rest of her awkward momentum.

The chameleon clung to Decker's face for seconds before dropping back into the brush. The laze fell to the mud, where its point sizzled and popped. Decker clutched at his chin and stared at Tsia, but his jaw was already tingling, and his lips were going numb. He staggered back, then turned and ran toward the huts.

Tsia did not follow. Her mind was filled with Ruka's pain, and she screamed at the cougar through her gate. Stand still. Let me find you!

She twisted in the brush, searching for the cat with both her mind and her eyes. She couidn't see him, but she felt him close by, and she staggered in his direction. When she found him, she fell to her knees and took his paw in her hand. He jerked instinctively back. She snapped at him through her gate, and with a snarl, he allowed her to hold it. "Ah, Daya..." She searched her harness for her medkit before cursing as she remembered she'd lost it before.

Come, she told him. We'll find something at the huts.

He yowled, a low, hair-raising sound, and she could only send him a blanket of will to smother it through the gate. Then, painfully, with both of them limping, they eased out to the edge of the forest.

Tsia's mind, half-blinded by Ruka, was locked in a single thought: the biochips-where were they? She eased across the edge of the tarmac like the cat who slunk beside her. Their nostrils wrinkling, their shoulders hunched, they crept to the nearest hut and slipped inside. Tsia's hands shook as she broke open the medkit on the wall and tore it apart to find the salves and skin patches. Manually, she loaded feline biocodes-old codes from old memories--into the medscanner. It took time- minutes-for the scanner to s.h.i.+ft the chemical structure of the salve; it took three times as long to s.h.i.+ft the molecular build of the graft. And then it took her will to convince Ruka to let her dissolve his fur from around the burn and clean the area for treatment.

She tried to feel for a sense of time, but couldn't seem to focus. Not until the salve began to dull the cub's pain did her mind begin to clear.

She didn't bother to clean up the medkit mess. She just thrust the scattered parts of the kit into a clumsy pile and followed Ruka back out, snapping at him not to worry at the graft that itched and crawled on his flesh. Her hand throbbed with the dulled pain he sent through the gate. But it was half as much as it had been; and in days, if he didn't tear it off first, the graft would fall off by itself. He'd have only a scar to speak of the burn.

The heat in her hand seemed to focus her thoughts as she rounded a hut and caught sight of the landing pad. Points of heat, points of light-so faint in her gate-were they closer now than before?

She could see all three skimmers, silent and waiting, still standing on the deck. There was no movement beneath the largest s.h.i.+p; the meres, if they had not been caught, must have finished and returned to the hub. Relief tightened her guts like a fist. Her hand trembled against her forehead. The chips were still here-and her sister also. Neither could leave the freepick stake until the s.h.i.+elds arrived. Shjams could not abandon her again. As for the zeks...

Her mind began to churn again, but slowly. How many blackjack were at the hub, hidden within the warren? And where could she find her sister among those jacks? Her muscles trembled, and it was not chill, but an exhaustion she could not give in to. Her hands clenched spasmodically on her flexor as she wiped it along her side.

The points of light-she could almost feel them. Closer- they had to be closer than the hub.

How much time had pa.s.sed? She moved along the huts until she found Decker on the gray-washed tarmac, at the door to one of the storerooms. His outstretched hand, the bent body... He lay against the door as if to open it when he lost the use of his hands. She pa.s.sed him, ignoring his strangled breathing and the swelling of his skin.

She ran across the landing pad. Her eyes were slitted, not from rain, but from Ruka, and she didn't notice the way she clung to one hand as she ran. Behind her, the cougar limped across like a shadow. The pain that blinded him pushed him away, but the biogate pulled like a leash.

Fifteen seconds, and she was at the skimmer hatch. The points of light-her eagerness grew, hot, as if she sucked it through her gate. Three, four more seconds, and the hatch slid open.

And Kurvan turned around.

Tsia froze. The narrowing of Kurvan's eyes, the tightening of his jaw-those were the only reactions that showed the zek's surprise. His smile was slow and beatific. Some part of her brain wondered how wide that smile would be if he knew that Decker lay out on the tarmac with the fang marks of a shaper deep in his face. Her lips moved, but nothing came out.

"I should have known immediately," he said softly. "That you were still alive."

Her hand tightened its grip on the flexor. He eyed her with an almost satisfied expression, and she knew, suddenly, that he wanted to kill her as much as she wanted his death.

"How could you know?" she managed.

Carefully, he moved toward the hatch. "When an ID dot goes inactive, the node lines it carries are placed on hold. But when an ID dot goes dead, the effects ripple out through the node. Ghosts, schedules, contracts... Little plans and appointments-they all wink out. It's like a nearly invisible wave that strips you out of the node. I forgot that. I was so sure that you were drowned in the pit that I did not check to see."