Cataract. Part 5

"Fifteen. Maybe twenty."

"What if it's feline?" he asked slyly.

She raised her eyebrow. "There's a female with three cubs five hundred meters out."

The sky was still dark with clouds, but the sea was now light gray. The float platform s.h.i.+vered, and Wren staggered with the slam of the wind. "A storm like this is worth a month of energy to a marine station," he shouted. "We pa.s.sed gale force hours ago."

Tsia nodded. Storm force building. She could feel it in the tingling of her skin, in the eager pound of her heart. "Front will hit in the night," she shouted back. "Bet my bonus on it"

He grinned. "That's no bet. I read the weatherscan from the node before it went down. It hits by dusk today."

"You're wrong. I can taste it in the spray. Front is changing. It'll hit between midnight and dawn. We'll get the heaviest rains behind it."

"You never could resist a dare; I never could resist a bet. You're on. Ten credits?"

She nodded. The glint in her ice-blue eyes was echoed deep in her mind by the growling of a cougar. Her lips curved in a slight smile as she picked up the sea cougar's irritation with its stomach-churning ride. Ten years of growing into the biogate with the cats, and the distance from the platform to the island was no barrier to her gate. Like a thick purr that sat beneath her thoughts, the sounds of the cats kept her company. It had become music-the constant tuning of an orchestra that filled the wilder, darker corners of her mind.

Another gust slammed her off her feet and whipped the blunter off one shoulder. Wren glanced at the feral gleam in her eyes. "You always did get a little crazy in these, Feather." He pointed with his chin at the sea. "It's going to be a hard swim to sh.o.r.e for that litter."

Tsia squinted beneath the s.h.i.+eld of her hands and frowned at the floating island. Even though it was closer, the dark hump of the weedis seemed smaller than it had before. "No one swims a bloom. Not even a sargie. They'll stay on that weedis till it rubs the rocks of the mainland."

"Not this time," he returned. "That raft is breaking up. It'll be completely gone before we leave the platform, and I bet it'll be torn in two even before that s.h.i.+p locks down."

Reluctantly, Tsia turned to watch the other s.h.i.+p land. The subsonic hum of its engines caught in her bones like tension. The dim glints from the platform lights caught in rain runnels that streaked the sides of the craft. Lower, it dropped, hovered, then blew off to the side and twisted wildly with the shear. Wren gestured sharply. Reluctantly she nodded and followed him to the lee of the huts.

The s.h.i.+p came in high and dropped with the wind in a sudden, sickening movement. Its nose barely missed the edge of the platform. A second later, it burst up over the side and tried to drop down again. The wind gusted; the s.h.i.+p darted forward, then slammed down and slid with a metaplas scream. Tsia's hands clamped over her ears; Wren's eyes flinched. Tensely they waited while the s.h.i.+p, instead of skidding, b.u.mped back up, then slammed down a second time. It hit the brake bars hard and bounced back like a ball. The landing gear, unable to take the stress, crumpled like accordions back up into their bays. The wind lapsed, and the s.h.i.+p, still trying to fly forward, rammed the brake bars until it stuck finally-like a bee in a spiderweb-with its motors whining and churning on high.

Slowly the s.h.i.+p stopped shuddering, and the sonic sounds began to fade. The landing gear unfolded gingerly from the bays. With a grinding sound, the sectioned legs forced then-way down to the deck to brace the hull against the bars. Wren glanced at Tsia's expression. "He landed, didn't he?" he said sharply.

She pointed. "Isn't he going to straighten out?"

Wren peered at the s.h.i.+p. "The cargo hatches are clear of the deck. I don't think he's concerned with much else."

She grimaced. "We'll have to help unload then. Is everything on the antigrav sleds?"

"I wouldn't bet on it."

She gave him a sour look.

He shrugged. "After that landing, he'll be lucky to have the sleds intact, let alone packed and ready to go."

They made their way to the craft in time to meet Doetzier and Tucker beneath the skimmer's belly. There, they struggled with the manual clamps until two of the meres from the new skimmer jumped stiffly down to help them lock the s.h.i.+p to the deck. The faint smell of the cats mixed with the scents of packing gels, and Tsia paused at the triggered memory. Flowers, she thought, as if she could almost smell them. Shjams... Then Doetzier caught her sleeve, and she turned back to the clamps.

Once the other meres joined them, she left them to finish the cargo and followed the first cargo sled to the hut. Ahead of her, a tall, bowlegged mere guided the pack-laden sled across the deck as if the wind that made the motors whine were merely a breeze, not a storm or gale.

When they reached the hut, Tsia had to fight the door to open it against the wind and allow the sled on through. If the door had been a filter field, she would simply have walked through it and ignored the tingle of its semisolid wall. "Digger-d.a.m.ned primitive construction huts," she muttered. The door came open a handspan; then the wind slammed it back shut. She hissed and wrenched at the handle again. This time, the storm tore it from her hands and slammed the door against the wall so hard the entire building shook. Muttering, she motioned Bowdie on through, then looked for the access panel. Tucker, arriving behind her, beat her to it.

"You guides are all alike," he said in her ear. "Put you outside with your plants, and you're happy as a reaver on a full root dike. Give you a simple mechanical problem and you're lost as a lifer without her gang." He pushed her through the doorway and held the door crank as the rest of the meres from the other skimmer made their way inside.

"Yaza," she muttered, moving past him. Odors swept in with Doetzier and Kurvan, and Tsia wrinkled her nose. Cats and sea salt mixed with packing foam; the solvent-scent of sponges was sharp. She snorted and breathed in again to discern the difference in the sponge scent from the platform, but the sweat odors of the meres rose with the heat inside the hut, and the sponge scent faded away. Doetzier, giving her a glance, paused to speak to Wren, and Kurvan made his way over to Jandon, who was rubbing one elbow as if it was bruised. Tsia was left with Tucker, who added in her ear, as she turned to shut the door, "I probably know more about construction huts than you do about your gate."

She turned to retort, but Nitpicker cut in. 'Tucker, Feather," she snapped. She s.h.i.+elded her face from the surge of needle-sharp rain. "Get that door closed and leave each other alone."

The gap narrowed, and the wind began to whistle through the s.p.a.ce. An instant later, the door clicked shut. The sudden cessation of storm sound was almost deafening in itself. Tsia had to work her jaw to pop her ears. In the quiet, her ears burned from the cold, chapping wind.

Nitpicker ran her hand through her gray-streaked hair. Tsia eyed her automatically, feeling for her biofield. The quiet energy was tight as if the tension the pilot caught on the skimmer was still carried in her shoulders. Tsia regarded the other woman with a thoughtful expression. She rarely got to see a mere's true eyes. The darkeyes they wore, which let them see motion, heat, and contrast rather than color -almost like a cat, she thought-gave them all black irises. But here, with the salt spray, none of the meres had their darkeyes in.

Nitpicker's eyes were a startling green. Set off by her deeply weathered skin, the brilliance of that color made her gray-and-white streaked hair seem dingier, and her thin frame bonier than ever. Yet she moved with grace and balance, her feet almost gliding across a floor or deck, and her hands still, except when s.h.i.+fting deliberately here or there. It was different from Tsia's stride: Nitpicker, like Striker, had the walk of a s.p.a.cer with fifty years of service.

In contrast, Tucker was on only his tenth contract. Beside Tsia, the younger mere methodically checked his blunter pockets, then weapons harness and pouches. His youthful frame still looked gangly, as if he would fill out to a broad-shouldered man, and his large feet were deceptively quick in moving his tall, pale figure from one spot to the next. Tsia had watched him out on the platform. Even when carrying gear from the skimmers to the hut, he had not slipped once on the decks. Absently, she listened to him speak.

"... That set of holos from the war?" Tucker asked Striker as he picked up his pack from the sled to make a final check on his gear. "They're something to see."

Doetzier s.h.i.+fted his long legs out of the way.. "Can't really call what the lifers did a war, Tucker. The lifers were terrorists, not an army. They cut up the country every decade or so to try to rewrite the const.i.tution, and they always defeated themselves with their own bigotry."

The younger mere dug out a small scanner, examined it quickly, and put it aside. "Yeah," he returned, "but they did a h.e.l.l of a lot of damage with their so-called terrorism."

Doetzier shrugged. "So did the Year of the Yellow Death."

Striker scowled. "You can't compare the lifers to a plague, Doetzier."

"Why not?" He shrugged. "The population problem was never a technological issue, but an emotional and religious one-a problem of education and politics. And you can't cure those things without patience and tolerance any more than you can cure a plague without prevention. Both the lifers and the plague- they're parasites. Both look for a host to support them: the Yellow Death wants a human so it can breed; a lifer wants an ideal so he can feel he has power over someone else. Neither has regard for the law. Both of them kill. And neither one shows mercy."

"You do injustice to the plague," Tsia cut in, getting her pack from the sled in turn. "The Yellow Death at least was ubiquitous. The lifers were violently selective."

Striker nodded. " 'Selective' is kind of understating what the lifers did to the choicers. Once the lifers got onto the infochan-nels, they tracked down people who'd been involved in pregnancy options half a century before. It didn't matter that their victims had had children and grandchildren since then. They called them blood families, and killed them all. Whole generations. Murdered. Just like that." She snapped her fingers. "What do you want to bet that the freepick at that mining site still brags about her great-great-grandfather?"

"Daya, Striker," Tsia cut in, "but that freepick might not agree with her ancestors any more than you do."

The other woman snorted her skepticism.

"Choicers could have hired the meres," Tucker added. "That's what we're here for anyway: uphold laws, protect properties, bodyguard the veepees"-he leered-"when they're too scared to go to bed alone at night."

Doetzier, who had found a s.p.a.ce against the wall, chuckled, and Tsia glanced at his lazy pose with her frown. She could almost feel the tension in his tall, lean frame, and the contrast of that with his casual pose made her think of a cougar hunting. She switched her gaze to Tucker, comparing the two meres. They were almost the same height, but they looked nothing alike. Doetzier's shoulders would never broaden further; his was the wiry strength of a man who had honed his body to the quick. His weathered skin was tough and darker than hers by several shades, and its color emphasized, rather than hid, the muscles that rippled in his hands. His light brown eyes were steady and sharp, as if they somehow listened as much as his ears did to the movements of the meres around him; and his black hair framed his face like a shadow. She watched him for a moment till his quick gaze turned toward her. Their eyes met and held. The specks of light in his biofield were like tiny stars dropped in a bucket. When she touched them with her gate, they disappeared. She dropped her gaze, but Doetzier continued to watch her. She ignored him. She didn't notice, as she glanced at Striker, that one of her hands clenched like a claw in her pocket.

Striker, with her stocky frame and toned muscles, looked like a gravdancer rather than a runner. She had naturally black irises and black eyebrows, with short, almost shaved auburn hair. Her creamy complexion was stretched with the thin lines of eighty years of living, but she did not have a weathered look, as Tsia did. She would have been beauti&il were it not for the nose that listed slightly to one side, and the mouth that stretched just a bit too widely across her face. Her cheekbones were high and flat; her chin was narrow. The only scars she bore were a tiny set of lines that crossed her jaw like the teeth of a comb. The overall effect was as striking as a coral snake until one noticed her eyes. They were filled with emptiness, and made her look abandoned. When Tsia stretched to the limit of her senses, she could just feel the biofield of the other woman. That energy, which should have grown deeper with age, seemed shallow and uncertain in Striker.

Four meres squatted on the floor in front of Wren, and three more against the walls. Kurvan was next to Nitpicker, and Tsia eyed him warily. The five months she had worked with him last year was enough to imprint him indelibly in her mind. Brown hair, brown eyes, a strong chin, and on top of it all, a lean face, as if he did not eat enough to keep a smaller man alive. That gauntness, Tsia admitted with a s.h.i.+ver, lent his face a rugged handsomeness. And his skin was tanned evenly brown, not sallow or ruddy like some of the other meres. His teeth were even and white as if they had never been chipped, much less broken as Nitpicker's and Wren's had been. No scars marred his face or hands. There was only the flat hard-ness of his eyes to speak of his profession. That, and the eagerness in his biofield.

Nitpicker's voice cut into her thoughts. "All right, listen up. Jandon needs more shooters for the Broken Tree team," the pilot said without preamble.

Jandon nodded, and the wisps of hair that stretched across his balding head fell off to the side. "The rest of my team won't s.h.i.+p in till tomorrow, and with the node down, the mining guilders could move on Broken Tree immediately."

From the floor, Bowdie looked up from fixing a setting on the cargo sled. His dark brown hair was thick and wavy, with an unruly lock that fell across one eyebrow. His nose had been broken three or four times, and one of his cheekbones had been shattered and restructured with coral implants. His skin was we&thered and tough, coa.r.s.e with the pockmarks from some obscure disease. It somehow matched the mottled coloring of his weapons harness, where age had worn away at the fabric. And although some part of her brain registered his coa.r.s.e complexion, her whole attention was struck by his eyes: beautiful eyes, wide and haunted, as brown as the earth, with long, thick lashes that belonged on a woman's face. Instinctively, she opened her biogate to search for the sense of his biofield. There was a heat there, she discovered. An eagerness like Kurvan's, but steady and strong, with sparks that seemed like challenges, where the other mere's seemed reckless and sharp with disdain. As if, in Bowdie's field, confidence and fatalism had combined in a deep, banked pit of fire. As Bowdie regarded Jandon, his brown eyes narrowed, and he paused in fixing the sled settings. "You have the guide," he said. "Won't that give you the edge?"

Jandon shook his head at Bowdie's question. "A single guide can't check every trail. And yes, we have a second guide"-he forestalled Bowdie's automatic protest-"but she's working the reclamation vats."

Wren s.h.i.+fted almost imperceptibly, and Nitpicker nodded at him to speak. "If you take our shooters," Wren said slowly, "you're crippling our team. Our setup relies on a number of bodies to be effective."

"Yes, but you're going in early, and you're going in for setup, not defense, like us. You won't have any action for three, maybe even four weeks. You don't need all your shooters right now."

From beside Tsia, Tucker paused in his weapons check. "What if the s.h.i.+ppers send the biochips in early?"

Kurvan glanced at the younger mere. "No freepick would take s.h.i.+pment an entire month early."

"Why not?"

"The Hollows is a new stake, and the freepicks there won't have finished their preliminary scans, let alone the detailed scans of the biologicals they'll have to work around. They won't know half the biocodes they'll need for coring, processing, or reclamation. You program a set of biocodes in a chip, and that chip can be used only in the gear for which it was set-and only for the codes it recognizes. Nothing else." Kurvan tapped the hilt of the laze he carried on his harness. "Like this won't recognize a biological-only humans. Take a corer," he added, "one of those wide-beam, short-range lazes. They're programmed for whatever ground-mineral deposits-the freepicks have at their stake. Without the codes for worms and insects and roots, even the best corer couldn't break through rock that was protected by a layer of those things. Without the right biocodes, the chips in the corer won't acknowledge organic matter as licensed for disintegration. They also won't recognize any bacts-bacteria-over the amount specified by the site license. One pocket of roots over the licensed amount, and the corers automatically halt. You stop the corers, and you stop the mining. No cargo, so no s.h.i.+pping, so no payment. Freepicks almost always work hand-to-mouth as far as credit goes. And with the cost of a set of biochips and the codes that go into them, they can't afford to make mistakes. All it takes is a single missing or mispro-grammed code, and they'd lose their entire stake. An early s.h.i.+pment could make those chips as worthless as if they'd been left hissing on the sand."

"You're as bad on nodie stuff as Striker is on the Fetal Wars," Tucker said. "So the chips come in early.

There's no reason they have to be programmed right away."

"You want to sit on a s.h.i.+pment of chips for a month, just waiting for blackjack to heist them?

Unprogrammed biochips are practically priceless, and they have a subtle but distinct signature. With the right gear, hiding a set of biochips on-site would be about as effective as painting them with neon colors and hoisting them on a scanpole. And until the programmer sets the biocodes, anyone can move in.

Blackjack, Draynes, Ixia... One blank biocode bank and-"

"-a chip can become a weapon." Tucker resealed the other side of his pack.

"Yes," Kurvan agreed sharply. "Not only could you code for a crop-plant or livestock species, you could code for an alien or human. Unprogrammed, a biochip is as dangerous as an idea in a house of fanatics."

"Maybe not as bad as that," Wren said casually.

Kurvan paused, then grinned in spite of himself. "Maybe not, but it is dangerous. To have them on-

site... That's just asking for a raid."

Nitpicker glanced at Jandon. "You have two of the new handscanners?" He nodded. 'Take the rest of

ours. We'll keep the old, shorter-range ones. Take half our config gear, too. We'll replace ours tomorrow after we get a message through to the guild. How many shooters do you want?"

Kurvan glanced at Jandon. "You going to set up a manual scannet?"

Jandon hesitated. "Have to now. So, four, I think."

Tucker paused as he checked the antigrav on his pack. "Four of our shooters? Are you crazy?"

Doetzier straightened from where he leaned on the wall. "Who gets the guide?"

Tucker turned to Nitpicker. "If Jandon gets our shooters, we get the guide. She knows all the ridges and

half the scree beds between here and the northern Vulcans."

Nitpicker looked at Doetzier. "What do you think?"

Doetzier tilted his head at Kurvan. "He's the line-runner in this group-ask him, not me. I'm just the

configuration grunt. I haven't a clue how long the node will stay down, let alone how it got down in the first place."

Wren popped a slimchim in his mouth. "It's not hard to knock down a node," he put in. "Especially if you have inside help. One crooked tech or nodie, and the traders can slip in and out through a darkened net like rats through a shredded screen. Remember that customs tech four years ago? He went on the grayscale and jammed up the s.h.i.+pping for more than a week. He took his credit and ran to blackjack, and he's so far away now that even the s.h.i.+elds can't touch him."

s.h.i.+elds and s.h.i.+pping, customs and Shjams... Tsia stretched her gate unconsciously. To touch her sister... Catspeak flooded into her mind and made her lips curl. Cougar heartbeats pulsed with hers. Seasickness rose up in her gut and stabbed her with a twinge of discomfort. She wiped her hands on her trousers. From across the room, Doetzier noticed the movement with sharp eyes. Tsia followed his gaze to her hands and stilled them.

"What do you think, Feather?" Doetzier asked.

"About what?" Tsia regarded him warily.

"Where you go. You're a terrain artist-almost the same thing as a line-runner. You should have as much say as Kur-van."

She shrugged. "If the node is jammed, my skills as a terrain artist are almost moot. Let the guilders get into the terrain before I do, and they can set a hundred prepared ghost webs before I finish a single manual scan. Anything I scanned out would simply pick up their preset signals, not the real terrain in the area. And although I could sense the life-forms fine on the trail, I'd never be able to cover all the ground before the guilders moved in on the stake."

Doetzier seemed to pounce. "You think the node is jammed, not down?"

She looked at him warily. "Daya, how should I know? I was just thinking out loud."

Nitpicker studied her expression. "It takes a lot less do-all to dark a net than to drop a node."

"If you have the technology," Kurvan added.

Nifpicker gave him a hard look. "There are three races in this quadrant alone who have better jamming technology than ours. One of them-the Ixia-is in orbit around Risthmus. You don't think the Ixia would sell a jammer to blackjack-especially if the price was right? If blackjack came up with some of the tech toys the Ixia have been after for the past thirty years? And what about the Draynes or the bug-eyes? They're in the same position as the Ixia, and their s.p.a.ce is even closer to ours."

Wren glanced at Tsia and made a subtle sign with his hands, finning a message. She nodded almost imperceptibly. The Draynes, Wren's finger motions told her, were a mammalian life-form-like badgers.

Doetzier's eyes flicked as he caught the last subtle finning from Wren, but he said nothing. Nitpicker added, "Blackjack have slipped through the scannet a dozen times in the last forty years. The word is that the mining guild has standing orders with them for any Risthmus biotechnology. One bad nodie on the orbiting hammers, as Wren said, is all it would take to dark the scannet enough to let a zek down and then back out."

Doetzier glanced at Kurvan. "You're a line-runner. How long would it take you to set a web that could hide a sabotage job well enough to dump the node?"

The other man shrugged. "Six to ten months minimum. Two years at the outside. Maybe more. Depends on how many webs get messed up by the construction."

"That second docking hammer?" Tucker queried. "The one on the elliptical orbit?"