Cataract. Part 29

He stepped closer, and she could see the pulse beat in his throat. "The skimmer crash-how did you fix

it?"

"Mixed signals from the node, plus a small projector that overwhelmed the links of the nav sensors and power couplings. I'd set up the node webs months ago for a crash sequence, but I couldn't install the overload projector until we landed on the platform-projector power supplies only last a few hours."

"And the deke in Wren's medkit-you put it in his pack when you were checking the gear on the platform."

He smiled. A wash of rain swept past. He edged closer.

Tsia felt his focus grow. "The fall on the bridge-you could have died yourself. Why did you risk it?"

"You think you're the only one with antigrav on your harness?"

Her lips tightened. "And Wren's pack-the loss of his antigrav?"

"A remote trigger. Installed at the marine station while you were playing hero to that Landing Pact cub."

"Why?" she almost snarled. "Ayara's Eyes, Kurvan, why bother with accidents at all? Why didn't you wait and kill us here at the stake as you planned to do with those of us who are left?"

"Because brute force always attracts more attention. My job was just to slow down the team. Eliminate as many of you as possible. Get the shooters away with Jandon so we had a better chance of taking over here."

"Jandon could have come back. We could have called him to help us."

"His s.h.i.+p would have fried its own controls the first time he tried to land." He s.h.i.+fted closer again. "You

just don't get it, do you? We've had our people in place for months, working as grunts in the tubes, hiding gear in rock pockets where the freepicks would never look. For the last two weeks, our buyer has been sitting up at the hammers, waiting for a signal that we had the chips and were ready to move out of this system."

"The Ixia..."

He nodded.

"But if you were only to slow us down... Daya," she breathed. "You didn't know about the chips at all, did you? You couldn't have-not if you still went after Doetzier."

He glanced behind her, but Ruka did not growl, and she could not tear her eyes from Kurvan's face. "We knew about the dummy chips. We knew the s.h.i.+elds were setting up a sting." He shrugged at her expression. "We've got credit and other... incentives to encourage people to help us. But we didn't know about the real chips till dawn."

"Dawn..."

He watched her closely as he said, "I received a coded message from Decker on the beacon this morning -you didn't even notice. He'd heard from our mother s.h.i.+p. One of our contacts had finally traced a set of webs he'd been working on for weeks. And what he found was a programmer with a high tech rating, a.s.signed to the same team that I was supposed to slow down."

"Bowdie..."

"His contract with you was only a ghost. He was to stay only a day-not six weeks-till the chips were set with their codes. The chips were here-with him the whole time. Under my nose like my chin." He shrugged. "I wouldn't have bothered trying to kill anyone had I known that someone was already carrying the real chips. I would have waited, as you say, till we reached the stake and I had backup to take you out. As it was, my job was to thin down the team so we could replace some of you with more of us. Make the job go smoother when the real chips came in."

"And Tucker?"

Kurvan's hand moved casually to the b.u.t.t of his laze. "He was careless. I locked the lift and let the wind and the bloom do my work for me. If he was the s.h.i.+eld, better for me to have him out of the way. If he was one of you, he was just one less mere to work on."

The pulse pounded in her bruised throat. "I should have known right from the start that it was you."

He smiled again, slowly. "How so?"

"You said, on the platform, that I'd be better at the canyon scans than you. You wanted me off this team. And then you said that you weren't half as good at trees and other biologicals as I. I'm a guide, Kurvan, but you've been working biological traces for over twenty years-twice as long as I. It was a stupid thing to say."

"And now your knowledge is too late to make any difference."

Slowly, as if he were an animal and she was trying not to provoke him, she backed away and unhooked the straps of her flexor. The blackjack noted the brown and green handle and smiled a slow expression. "That's no good," he said softly. "It's broken. Its biochips are fried."

She tightened her grip on its hilt. "How do you know?"

He followed like a snake. "Because I'm the one who broke it. When I fell on Doetzier. Remember? I

broke it like I snapped his arm. And do you know? I'm going to enjoy crus.h.i.+ng you the same way I broke your sister."

Her jaw tightened. "I'm stronger than she was."

"I don't doubt it. She was easy. Soft. Like b.u.t.ter in a frying pan."

"She was a person," she snapped.

"She was a victim, not a human being. She had no self-worth at all."

He was pus.h.i.+ng her deliberately, but her anger iced her heartbeat as if her blood had not the energy to compare to what she felt. "Self-worth can be built or destroyed-"

"You think / am her destroyer? She put herself in my power." He stepped forward again, and Tsia could feel the confidence in his field. "Oh, I made a few suggestions," he said. 'Took an interest in her career, told her how smart she was. Showered her for a year with what she thought of as love. But in the end, I merely took her for what she had to give."

"Daya," she breathed. "And you admit it."

"Why not?"

She stared at him.

He nodded as if surprised at her reaction. "I am conscious of what I do, Feather-guide. Your sister- she's useful to me, so I use her."

"But you're destroying her. If you loved her-"

"Love?" Kurvan snorted. "Love is a set of actions that gives one power over another. Just because I bind her or crush her the same time as I use her-that does not negate her skills. A blackjack like me can work for a decade just to get a single hook into a customs inspector. Here, I have a dozen hooks in her mind. I've strung her up like a puppet, and she can do nothing but obey."

"And when you've torn all the value out of her?"

He shrugged. "Then I get another victim to replace her pathetic life. There's always been more power in destruction than creation. It's fast. It's profitable. And it's far more exciting than living within some pathetic set of morals. It's power, Tsia-guide. It's control. And it's mine."

"You're wrong, Kurvan. There is power in destruction only as long as you're actively annihilating your goal. When you stop acting-stop destroying-you have nothing left. But when you create, there's always something left over, something to re-fleet your work, whether or not you stop. That's the true power of life."

Kurvan drew his flexor in a long, slow motion. "There speaks the idealist." He flicked the bar into a diamond-shaped blade and tested its edge on his thumb. He shrugged, but he was now at the edge of the hatch. "Blame me for your sister if you dare. She chose to be a willing victim."

"And I choose to be none at all."

She flicked her wrist, and her flexor spun out like a lance. The instant of shock on Kurvan's face did not keep him from moving. The lance caught in his blunter, not his chest, and he twisted into a dive as he brought up the point of his laze. Instantly, Tsia snapped her flex blade into a hook and jerked hard. Kurvan was yanked forward, down onto his knees. He fell through the hatch like a diver. But the point of his laze flared out in an arc, and Tsia ducked like a flash from the light.

She changed her grip, and the flexor became a thin bar, snapping itself out of his jacket. He threw himself to the side. The laze flashed across her chest, bending as it encountered the s.h.i.+eld's projection, and Kurvan cursed. He threw the laze away. Viciously, Tsia stabbed forward. But she had forgotten that her boots were not cat feet. She slipped.

Steel fingers grabbed her by the jacket; thick hands twisted the blunter collar tightly around her throat. With a single motion, Kurvan jerked her off her feet and flung her brutally in a short, sharp arc against the s.h.i.+p. Her shoulders. .h.i.t with shocking force. Her head cracked to one side of the landing leg.

Stunned, she lay without moving.

The pain of the fall seeped out of her bones. She tried to move her arm, and Ruka snarled violently in her gate. A tawny shadow flashed. Kurvan staggered. Then he screamed and fell in a tangle of flailing limbs. The clawing, silent demon on his back tore at his flesh like hate.

He screamed again. Tsia pushed herself to her hands and knees. Her mind was blind with pain and fury, and her fingers clawed at the tarmac as Ruka's paws tore flesh. Like a ragged work whistle that does not stop for breath, Kurvan's screams went on and on until Tsia realized that it was no longer his voice that broke her ears, but his rasping, dying breath.

The rain washed away his whimpers till his body was silent and still. Tsia's mind was still blurred by the pain that burned in the cougar's paw, and she could only crouch and stare at the huddled form on the ground. Finally, the rain blasted her in the face and forced her eyes to see. There was a keening sound in her ears, and the whimpering from her throat clogged her hearing in a duet of pain. Ruka's paw- burning still with nerves raw from the laze...

Silently, the cougar crawled from beneath the s.h.i.+p and huddled beside the landing leg. The bursts of pain that shot through Tsia's left hand with his motion made her clench her other fist. She snarled in her own silence, trapped between her mind and his while he licked the blood on his paws. Rain, mud, bile, blood; ash and flesh and fire... The rhythm of the odors was a morbid song, and Tsia gagged. She tried to hear the cleansing sounds of the rain that hit the tarmac. There was no life field in his body. No sense of stirring-of energy held in check. She felt nothing-nothing at all. Her breath began to speed up, and her heart pounded slowly and painfully in her chest. She felt nothing. Nothing but those points of light- some brighter, some dim-and somewhere close nearby.

She stared down at the blackjack. Breathing harshly, she forced herself to look, and did not flinch at the bloodied water that ran in thin runnels past his body. She looked up at Ruka. Their eyes met. Her head tilted, and she felt the rain, cold against her skin. The s.h.i.+vers that shook her now were neither chill nor exhaustion, but emptiness. There was nothing left of Kurvan. His body was just inanimate flesh. His blood no more than a running stain on the stone. Her eyes could register his shape, and it meant nothing to her mind.

He's stronger than you. Shjams's voice echoed in her head.

Tsia stared at Kurvan's body with lips pressed so tightly together that the muscles of her face were taut. "He's a user," she said harshly. "Nothing more." And as she watched his blood wash away to the soil with the rain, she realized his death gave back to the earth part of what he had taken: Blood. Life.

Fury rose in her guts. Her stomach tightened. "No final gesture," she whispered violently. "No absolution for the things that you have done."

Deliberately, she ducked and crawled to Kurvan's body. With trembling hands, she rolled him over. She searched him, yanking open his blunter, groping in his pockets, ignoring the slashes and tears in his clothes, the blood and open muscle tissue she had to touch. And there, inside the lower pocket of the blunter, she found one of the small, flat cases.

She opened it and stared at the biochips within. Then she sat back on her heels and looked up at the underside of the skimmer.

There were two more things she had to do.

She jammed the flat case into her lower blunter pocket, opposite Doetzier's bios.h.i.+eld. Then, clumsily, she turned Kurvan again. His boots hooked together so that his legs twisted, and she could only get him halfway over, but it was enough. She stripped his laze away. Violently, she threw it across the deck, then jerked a thin, black tube from his harness.

Deliberately, she flicked the tube to its active position and let the acrid scent of the deke reach her nose. For a moment, she held it like a flexor. Then she pressed the hisser's trigger. Like a twisted spirit in the rain, the spray shot out and settled on Kurvan's body. Like a fire, the smoke curled away. His clothes seemed to disintegrate; his flesh blackened and shriveled. And his face dissolved so that, for an instant, only his bones spoke of his presence before they too pocked and powdered and washed away with the rain.

She triggered the hisser off. For a moment, she just stood there. Then she backed away until her spine struck the side of the slammer. Blindly, her hands wiped at the rain on her face. White hands in the water... Tucker's hands in the sea... And here, the black stain of them on the tarmac, was.h.i.+ng away in the rain. The choked noise that came from her throat was harsh and animal, and the wind did not soften the sound.

The rain still slanted across the tarmac, and the flat streams of gray washed the landing pad like a delta. Thin cataracts fell from the skimmer's sides; thick clouds still rushed overhead. Tsia tilted her head back so that the rain beat on her face. It was clean of the scent of the hisser; bare of the odor of Kurvan's blood. She filled her lungs with wet air, then slid the tube on her harness.

Ruka growled. The scent of the hunter cut across the snarled paths of her mind. She crouched down and touched the cougar on his face, and opened her gate wide so that she could take the pain from his paw. The burn swept in and engulfed her, but she did not flinch away. She took it in like the touch of the r-con and pushed her mind beyond it.

Then she turned and moved to the hatch of the skimmer and levered herself inside. Ruka did not jump after her, but waited under the s.h.i.+p in the shadow of the landing leg while she paced the cabin above. With her arms outstretched, she looked like a sleepwalker in the s.h.i.+p. As if that physical motion somehow increased the sensitivity of her biogate, she let her hands trace the walls and cubbyholes.

The pilot's area... The main or aft cabin... The storage boxes in back? She could feel them close-those other energy points-like stars in a moonless night. But where? Her fingers thrust clothing and blunters aside and tore open panels, only to thrust them closed again. Urgency grew with every second so that she whirled in the cabin and ran toward the rear. What s.h.i.+elding would be thick enough to conceal those points of light? Kurvan had said that, with the right scan equipment, it would be easy to find the chips. Fifty thousand credits and Daya knew how much work in those bait chips, but Doetzier had simply had them sealed within his harness.

Tsia halted. She turned back to the clothing. Six sets of weather cloth; six pairs of boots. Four blunters, fully equipped with bios.h.i.+elds in their pockets. Three e-suits-one that could not belong to a human. Scanners and corns and hand units for freepick tasks... And four harnesses. She grabbed the straps and tore the seals apart. E-wraps, slimchims, medkits, enbees... Nothing like that second flattened case. But the points of light were almost under her fingers. She could feel them as close as her own feet. There was no pulse in their presence, but each point was like a tiny piece of fire that touched her through her gate.

Hurry, Ruka snarled. He projected the scent of humans strongly through the gate.

/ am, she snapped in return. She knew they would find her. There was no s.p.a.ce on the landing pad that wasn't filled with human scent. She threw the harnesses aside and stood for a moment with her arms clenched around herself. The hard flatness of Doetzier's bios.h.i.+eld pressed against her bicep. Slowly, she became motionless. Why not? she thought, staring at the pile of clothes. What better place to hide a set of biochips than in the one thing that could not be burned?

It took only a moment to check her theory out. It took a moment more to open up her flexor and disable its controls, then those of the three scanners she had found. She called Ruka to the hatch and explained what she wanted. And then explained it again. Ruka didn't like it. She didn't blame him. She would not have liked it herself. But in the end, he agreed. And two minutes later, the cougar dropped from the skimmer with a heavy limp and slunk away in the rain.

Tsia was halfway out the hatch when her thigh pocket brushed against her hand. The sharp edges of the safety cubes within sc.r.a.ped against her wrist, and she froze. She had forgotten about the cubes. Dormant without a honeycomb, they had not triggered the scans of the blackjack who had checked her before, at the pit. She still had them, but if they searched her again, coming out of the skimmer, with datacubes in her pockets...

She opened her gate and felt the presence of other beings. The hunter-it was coming, and even at its distance, it was sharp and clear in her gate. The dull shadows of two humans grew-much closer to the s.h.i.+p. She looked wildly around. She had to get rid of the cubes. If they found the safeties on her person, they'd search the s.h.i.+p for damage. If they found Nitpicker's sabotage, they'd try the other s.h.i.+ps too, and find the broken honeycombs. And missing sensor boxes and torn-out tubing...

There were access panels all over the s.h.i.+p, and Tsia did not bother to climb all the way back in. Instead, she hung on the lip of the hatch and jerked open the nearest bay. It was a configuration bay, and inside were amber, white, and blue honeycombs. All of them had empty slots. White-controls; those would activate the moment the s.h.i.+p was powered up. Blue- those were sensors, and the zeks would use those as they lifted. But amber... The yellow shade denoted weapons.

Blackjack would not need those until they reached the skyside quarantine fields and had to ran from the s.h.i.+elds.

Quickly, Tsia dropped the safeties in the slots. A second later, she snapped the panel shut. She almost lost her balance, and in her grab for a hold, caught her fingers in one of the harnesses, which came out of the hatch with her as she landed heavily on the deck.

The beam of the laze, which missed her arm, seared the harness in her hands and froze her like a breath in an ice storm. For a moment, nothing moved-not air, not rain, not time. Then, slowly, she turned around. Wicht had his laze pointed at her. Something burst in her head, and she snarled and leaped. The beam of light bent away between her arm and her side. Like a gravdiver, she tackled the zek and threw him to the ground. His head cracked back on the tarmac. In an instant, Tsia leaped to her feet. But she didn't run. She stood as still as if dead. It was not the tip of the second laze jammed into her gut that stopped her. It was not the sense of foreboding that swamped her like a lake. It was not the eager hunger that seemed to grow in her gate, as if that distant foreign scent was locked on her like a breaker.

It was Shjams.

Rain ran down the woman's face in pale, smooth runnels. Wind tore long strands from the braids of hair she now wore around her head. Like snakes or tiny whips, the loose hairs danced and dripped in a darting, moving frame. Tsia could not see beyond the shapes to the expression on her face. It was not until the woman spoke that she realized she sensed no emotion through her gate because there was none there to feel. Shjams's green, flat eyes, were hard and still as stone.

Neither woman spoke. The cold seemed to crawl down Tsia's skin with every drop of rain. Ruka began to slink back toward the skimmer, and his musk, carried through the rain, mixed with the perfume of Shjams. Unseen, a mere shadow flickered through the rain... The cougar's paws were silent. The two scents of her sister warred in Tsia's nose. Her body, taut with muscles still poised to run, held its position on the pad. Ruka reached the s.h.i.+p behind her, and his hair began to bristle. Tsia quieted him harshly through the gate and dropped the melted harness to the ground.

Shjams stepped forward and stripped the flexor from Tsia's side. Tsia did not resist her. Shjams flicked her wrist, but the flexor did not respond, and she cursed and threw it away. The blued bar skittered under the s.h.i.+p.

Tsia's hand clutched her pocket. "I won't let you take them offplanet."

"It's not something you can prevent. Give them here."

"No."

"G.o.ddammit, Tsia-"

"No, Shjams. Not this way."

"Then like this-" Like a flash, the woman struck Tsia across her head with the b.u.t.t of her laze. Tsia