Cataract. Part 4

"Like an ID dot?"

"Sort of. Once a sponge realizes that the animal next to it is another, similar sponge, the two animals bond. Their membranes merge. Their collagen fibrils and spongin fibers mix. That's when the algae grows into the holes between them. The algae, like the sponge, makes a calcite bond that can be hardened further with metaplas. The result is like welding two pieces of metal. But it's a living bond- one that can repair itself if broken and strengthen itself if stressed or fatigued."

He nodded. "Go on."

"You understand that sponges breathe? That they take in nutrients through the water as we take oxygen in from the air?" He nodded, and she pointed to a thin spot in the deck. Tiny spines stuck out like corkscrews where the mineral skeleton was still growing. "The tubes by which they breathe in and out form along the spine. They're helixes. Very flexible. When the sponges grow together, the entire structure is almost eighty times stronger than each would be by itself."

He looked surprised, and she pointed back at the flight deck. In this stage of construction, the lower and upper decks of the platform were the most fragile. Where the skimmer sat, anch.o.r.ed now to the platform, the deck actually seemed to bend. "A sponge by itself is strong-depending on the species-compared to a coral, but it would never carry the stress of a structure this big. And we have to use more than thirty varieties of sponge and twenty-two algaes to build above the tide line. This deck has another two years to go before it is completely strengthened. Then it will have to be sealed."

The rain slashed in a sheet across the deck, and Doetzier waited till it pa.s.sed before he asked, "The recognition molecules, they are the protection you spoke of?"

"Part of it. The mucus kills surrounding sea growth on contact. There's hardly a single type of coral, worm, barnacle, or weed that can live in the ring around the platform."

"A death ring," he said, more to himself than to her.

She fingered the deck slowly so that the sticky fluid rubbed into her soft skin, leaving it darkly stained. "It took six decades to develop," she explained. "Two more to adapt the process to the other colony worlds. As of last year, we've sold the biocodes for this sponge to forty-one colony worlds and six alien races."

"How do you know so much about the development history?"

She gave him a wry look. "My father worked those contracts. By the time I was six, I could identify the sponge mucus from ten different worlds, model the spicule structures from two dozen colonies, and build three-meter beach castles out of the leftovers he brought home. By the time I was eight, I'd been poisoned twice by fumes-once by taste-testing the mucus on a dare, and once from smoke, when my sister and I burned one of our castles in a siege against our brothers." Her lips twisted bitterly as she mentioned her sister, and as Doetzier looked back up, she turned away.

Daetzier carefully wiped his finger off on his trousers and glanced down at the roiling sea. "For all its toxicity," he said over the wind, "it seems to do a lot better repelling the fish than the jellies."

Tsia pointed, took a slash of wind right in the face, and shook her head to clear her sight. "Look a little closer. The jellies bloom up and are carried toward the platform by the currents, but they never quite touch."

He peered as she pointed. "Don't expect me to see that kind of resolution in this gloom. I don't have cat eyes like you."

She grinned, not knowing what she looked like. Doetzier had not been out in the storm for long, and his head was protected by his blunter. Tsia's short brown hair, exposed to the wind and spray, was whitened and flaring like a mane about her head. With each blast of seawater, more salt crusted in the strands and formed tiny, thickening crystals as the splashed water evaporated in the fierce wind. Her short hair, stiffened and standing up, gave her the look of an albino lion. Her eyebrows were solid crystals that dragged down to her eyes. Her eyelashes themselves were white. When she grinned, her white teeth looked like fangs in her face. "You could always put in your darkeyes. The rain is dying down."

"And the wind is rising up." The lean man got to his feet, letting a strong gust help him. "Salt-scratched eyes are not my idea of a good time. Those contacts start degrading as soon as the seamites eat into their filters, and you can bet this wind is full of creatures like that. I'll use my darkeyes when we reach the land. Not before." He nodded to her, then retreated to the shelter of the huts. A brief flash of light marked his entrance to one of the structures; then the decks were dark again.

Absently, Tsia raised her mucus-stained hand to her nose and sniffed the solventlike scent. She wished she could touch Doetzier's flesh and draw his scent into her lungs, as well. His tension was something she wanted to taste. His biofield, with those points of light, was something she wanted to suck into her brain and examine. It was like an addiction-her need to touch and smell each thing around her. Odors, heightened by her gate, became exquisite perfumes, which she had to rub on her face or hands. It was a hedonistic compensation, she thought, for the shame that came with her link to the cats. Some sort of primitive reward for the political obligation of her gate.

Spray burst over the deck and coursed across her face. The grit in the water felt like ash from a fire, and Tsia rubbed it on her skin. The virus that sustained her biogate caused the oils of a guide's skin to alter. Only heat-the firepit, the burning of free wood, or an open flame-would trigger the chemical changes that cleansed her body and promoted new oils to her skin. There would be no fire here, she knew. The mucus she touched was flammable, and the chemical heat from a fire with that substance was more than any guide could survive. Low-heat wood fires, cloth, and coals-those were the fire foods in which a guide could dance.

She ignored the cold kiss of the sky and stared down at the sea. In spite of the power with which it smashed the platform walls, the sea was not cresting with wind-stripped cascades of water. Instead, it was swollen with ma.s.sive, foam-streaked waves. The jellies were like oil on the water, subduing the sea and sating the hunger of the wind. Only where the water crashed against the platform and found the wind shadow against its walls did it blast up and off the storm-flattened surface.

Like worms in the sand, the jellies seemed called to the surface by the thin, slas.h.i.+ng rain. The jellies- some a hand-span, some two meters across-dragged their thin, yellow-white, blue-white tendrils beneath their nebulous, pumping bodies. They surfaced where their rippling edges could flare at the air; then they dove back to the depths, dragging their steel-strong tendrils with them. They churned. They drove the undersea to a boil. Rising, rolling, diving... The loose debris of the storm was caught in the twining tendrils and sucked down as they submerged.

Wren touched her arm, and she looked up absently, some part of her having felt his approach. He pointed. She followed his arm with a frown, then nodded. High up, barely visible in the drowned sky, a second slim craft shuddered through the falling, rippling rain. A burst of wind blinded her, and she lost sight of the tiny shape.

Wren gestured for them to retreat to the huts. Reluctantly, she followed, but she turned back to the wind with each gust, as if the twenty meters they withdrew was too far from the edge of the sea for her to be comfortable.

"Is that Jandon's s.h.i.+p?" she asked as they reached the windward side of the hut.

"Uh-huh. He picked up the rest of our team down south." Wren had to raise his voice to be heard. "Once he drops off Kurvan and the others, gives me my prototype breaker, and unloads the rest of the gear, he'll take you out to Broken Tree. You know the canyons there. Should be an easy scout for you." He grinned without humor. "And it's cat country."

The hum in the back of Tsia's mind seemed to surge. She raised one hand to her temple, as if to rub out the cat claws that padded across the inside of her skull. "Bunch of new breakers coming in?" she forced herself to ask.

"Breaker, singular," Wren corrected. "Widenet and portable- completely new technology. They say it'll recognize any bioconfiguration from human to Drayne. We'll even have Ixia codes if we need them."

She gave him a sharp look, her attention finally on his words. "Rumor had things hotting up skyside. Didn't know it had gotten so bad we were reconfiguring for aliens."

He shrugged. "By the time the biochips come in, even the Ixia could be actively looking for weapons. Bacts, biocodes- they'll take anything."

"Bacts?" She raised her eyebrows. "No guild has ever sold bacterial codes to an alien race."

"The guilds, no. At least, not overtly. But blackjack has been active, and if they're selling, they're doing it through the guilds in some way. All the s.h.i.+elds need is a single link between the guilds and the Ixia- anything to prove their involvement-and the s.h.i.+elds could move in in force."

She watched the second skimmer with a frown. "You think an alien is going to be so sloppy that a s.h.i.+eld could track it down?"

"No, but they don't trust humans any more than we trust them. You can bet there'll be at least one rep wherever they're buying from blackjack. If the node was up, you could image down the Ixia specs for yourself. Their jamming technology is prime, and they have some other interesting... features. I'd like to see you next to one. See how you reacted." He grinned at Tsia's expression and shrugged. "Call it curiosity that I refuse to spoil with an explanation. Did you ever get the details of your contract?" He changed the subject abruptly.

"Not yet. I signed with the job details on hold penalty." He grinned at the mention of penalty credit, and she nodded with a twisted smile. "Jandon said they'd let me know when I got there, but since he's contracted to Nitpicker, he said she-and therefore you-might know now what I'm to do. So what's the deal? Same as yours?"

"No-we're receiving biochips in a month. Freepicks where you're going have a new bacteria- developed it for reclamation. It's hot. The Ixia skyside, at the docking hammers, have been bargaining for two months for a sample."

"I'll be verifying the bact holds?"

"They've got a guide on that already-Hirsch. You know her?"

"Huh-uh, but she's got a good reputation. Why, if they have her, do they need me?"

"She's a full guild guide, not a mere. She can run a scanner like a century-vet, but she doesn't know spit about ghost lines. You do. The freepicks-they want a clean scan of the canyons for their defensive webs. You know them: they don't trust the guilders a meter away. So, they want you to tell them if the guilders have gotten a ghost web into their data banks. You'll spend your time verifying the terrain. When you're done, they'll compare a closed image of your manual scans to the data they read from the node. If the guilders-or anyone else-tries to move in, there will be differences in the scans."

She watched the slim shape of the second skimmer drop closer to the deck. "So who gives me my contacts? Jandon or Nitpicker?"

"Nitpicker. She'll want to make sure you know the routine before she sends you out."

Tsia felt her lips tighten in spite of herself. If Tsia had linked with the tealer fish or the herons instead of with the cats, would the pilot have trusted her more? She knew what Nitpicker saw when they worked together, but it still hurt to be watched like a zek-as if she were blackjack herself.

Wren watched her expression. "She's always careful, Feather. You know that."

"She never did learn to trust me."

Wren gave her an odd look. "Do you blame her? You're a guide."

"Yes, a guide. Not an animal, for G.o.d's sake."

Wren eyed her for a moment, then raised his hand to her cheek. She forced herself to remain still. But she could not help the curl of her lip as his fingers traced the scars. His gaze fell to her bared teeth. "Sometimes," he said quietly, "it's hard to tell."

She shrugged away sharply. "The virus no more mutated me into a half cat than it mutates a heron-linked guide into a bird, or a tealer-linked guide to a fish. The virus just changes the brain chemistry so I'm sensitive to biofields. That's all."

Wren raised his eyebrows against the rain. "Heard you started camping out on the Sinking Plains when you worked that route with Kurvan last year."

"I was tending to a wounded tarn," she retorted. "Its head k.n.o.b was cracked, and it couldn't hunt till it regained its equilibrium."

"Right," he said mock seriously. "The Landing Pact. I forgot. Protect the species and all-"

"I did full-spectrum scans and bacterial breakdowns the entire time I was there," she protested coldly. "The sensor poles in that area had not gotten in two years a tenth of what I brought back in a month-" She broke off at Wren's expression. "All right," she acknowledged. "The tarn wasn't hurt that badly, and I didn't need to help the species. I just didn't like Kurvan."

His gray eyes glinted. "Just as well you're going out to Broken Tree. You're like a cat in a cage when he's around."

"I'm better on the scans anyway. I wouldn't know a biochip if it bit me." She watched the second s.h.i.+p drop lower. "You'll be off-contract in a month?"

"It's scheduled, but you never know. s.h.i.+ppers never set a date for transporting biochips-security reasons."

"There have got to be some buyers chomping at the bit to get their hands on that load."

"Buyers including guilders," he said, with a glance toward the sh.o.r.e.

Tsia laughed shortly. "Guilders want everything. I'd rather work for a freepick."

Wren shrugged. "You're guild yourself, Feather. You belong with the meres, but you take contract as it comes, whether you work for the miners or the freepicks. Look at Striker. She hates the lifers, but she signed her ID on the node. That freepick at the Hollows who's descended from one of the lifer gang leaders-Striker will have to defend that woman as if she were the head of the meres. Like you'll have to -" "-defend the guild guide at Broken Tree," she finished for him.

"At least you once liked that guild."

Tsia's lips pressed together. She looked away from him, and her nose wrinkled at the sweet-bitter scent of the sea. She knew this smell as a baker knew bread. She fingered the scars across her cheek, ignoring the rain that washed the whitened skin. The guides had been more willing to admit her death than verify the untruth of it in the node; she owed them nothing now. No moral stance would convince her of an obligation other than the one she signed. The meres were the ones to whom she owed allegiance now. Ten years she had worked for the guild of fighters-seen for them, scanned for them, hid them in the terrain they crossed. A decade now they'd carried her link ID. It wasn't as if she held some kind of temporary job. The guides-they were no longer her life; the meres had become her future.

The heat of Wren's hand on her shoulder was a shock to her rain-chilled skin. When she reached up to touch his thick fingers, their eyes met: one cold, gray gaze; one dark blue. They stood for a moment till Wren dropped his hand. Tsia turned back to the sea.

Waves swept by, their foam streaking the sea. The platform shuddered with their rhythm. Around it, the jellies methodically rose and tore the underside of the floating rafts, dragging their spoils down. Down, lower, to bury the seedpods where they would feed the jellies' offspring. Caught in the rubbery, feathery bodies, the dim light of dawn faded to a gray-black gloom long before it reached the dark and rocky bottom of the sea. Tsia let her biogate expand so that she could feel far below the sea's surface. She turned slowly in a circle so that she could use her eyes like her gate to sense movement. But there was no threat in the jellies or the platform sponges, no sense of a predator that waited for the meres. Other than the storm and the growing sonic hum of the descending skimmer, there were no sounds from the ocean but the sea itself.

Beside her, Wren's presence was a constant shadow in her senses. His body, thickened with the age of 148 years, had a heavy feel. His short stature, his wide, wiry shoulders, and his long, lean arms gave him the look of a wrestler who had gone too long without food. His clublike hands were brutally built and far too big for his frame. His whole body radiated a cold power that gave his biofield a menace she could almost taste.

Her eyes drifted toward a growing shadow on the crest of a far swell. A moment later, the front end of a weedis bent over the moving hill of water and slid down the other side. The mental hum of the four sarga.s.so cats-the sea cougars- crouched on the raft was sharp, and Tsia licked her lips. Louder and sharper, the sense of them grew till it clogged her mind with its low-hum growling. It was her only real talent, she thought without emotion-this sensitivity to the cats. Her biology degrees were worth nothing without the gate-without the one thing for which the mere guild kept her safe. The rights-conditioning that let her use a weapon-they could have trained her for that, though it would not have been pleasant or easy. Guides did not take well to rights-conditioning unless they were trained before they took the

guide virus.

Wren peered at the sky from beneath his hands, watching the s.h.i.+p drop out of a streak of gray. He gestured toward one of the huts. Tsia shook her head. "I like the wind," she shouted. "It tastes like freedom."

His lips stretched in a slow smile, and in the murky light of midmorning, the expression somehow flattened his eyes even further. "Freedom? Yes, you would call it that."

"But not you?"

"No." The thick scar rings of white on his wrists stood out starkly in the gloom. " 'Freedom' is a word that's often confused with 'hope.' "

"And that's something you don't have."

"No. Do you?"

She studied him silently while the wind lashed the color from their cheeks and the rain beat the deck

around them.

He eyed her back. "Look at yourself closely, Feather. You're not one who's made of hope either, but rather will-or determination. You delude yourself if you think otherwise."

"Everyone has some kind of hope," she returned slowly. "They may not know it, but they do."

"Everyone? What about your sister? She's got no hope at all."

"That's different," she said quietly. "Her hope was stolen from her like credit from the node-blind."

"I don't believe that." He shrugged at her expression. "No one can take anything from you that you don't

willingly give. You make choices, not sacrifices. You take action or you decide to remain still. Only

victims blame others for their lives."

His gesture took in her braced stance and the gusting wind that whipped her. "You are what you make of yourself. Nothing less. Nothing more."

She licked the spray from her lips and smiled in a twisted expression. "I said that myself a long time ago. It's odd to hear my words on someone else's lips." She watched the spray puddle like tide pools in the mucus on the decks. "Ten years ago, I gave up everything, and I gave up nothing. And look where I am now: in a day that is night, in a sea that is solid"-she stomped her foot on the spongy marine deck-"in a life that does not really exist."

Wren watched the skimmer begin its long sweep to come around. "The mere guild isn't perfect," he said. "But it does protect its members to Vendetta, to death, and beyond. And the freepicks-or any of the people we work for-would not exist without us. They would be crushed by the fanatics, just like the lifers crushed old Earth. The people you protect... You defend your world now as much as any guide protects her a.s.signed plot of land. You just do it on a different scale. With shorter contracts."

With death instead of life. Tsia did not voice the words, but Wren gave her a sharp look. She wondered suddenly if he was esper. Or did he just know her so well that he could read her like a dreamer channel?

Wren rocked back with the force of the wind. Doggedly, he shoved his way off again. "It's getting worse by the minute. Let's go in."

She shook her head, her teeth bared to the sky. Wren raised his hand to take hold of her blunter, but her eyes glinted with challenge. He shrugged and stepped back.

She could feel the sea cougars from here-almost see them on the weedis. Flung up and down by the island's motion, the four shapes crouched in miserable huddles. As with the mind-shadows of the fish, Tsia did not see the cats visually; she felt them. The rough ride made their discomfort acute, and it was harder now to ignore them than to acknowledge their misery in her own guts. Up, down, and back across the crests. Whipped down into a trough and flung back up again... Like a sick-ness in her belly, or a rottenness in her nose, her body reacted as if it rode the weedis with them. Her lips twisted at the yowling of the cubs.

Wren's eyes watched the second skimmer hover above the flight deck. Tsia felt for his biofield in her gate. The contrast between him and the cougars was unsettling. Where Wren was a solidity that she smelled and heard more with her bodily senses, the cougars growled in a thick hum that filled the corners of her mind like fog. Where Wren spoke only to her ears, the cats snarled constantly in her head. Humans were dull and acrid compared to cats. With distance, they did not even leave an echo in her mind. Yet she could feel the weight of the sandcats on the beaches ten kilometers away. Could almost touch the grit that clung to their paws and taste the water they drank.

Wren eyed Tsia, then the drop to the surface of the sea. "So what's your range in all this now?" he asked over the wind.

"Human?" She shrugged. "Fifty meters, if it's a focused biofield."

"If it's quiet? Silent? Whatever you call it?"