The Sardonyx Net Part 48

Dana answered, "Administration, we've called our own medical team. We're not opening up till it arrives."

"We have authority to examine your casualty!"

Tori said, "This is Starcaptain Lamonica. Stuff your authority up your nose."

Dana rubbed his arm. He had forgotten all about the slave mark. He walked to the bunk. "Zed?" he said.

"Uh."

"How do I get this tattoo off my arm?"

"Gel. Sai. Will. Know." He lifted his head to stare at Dana. "Need." His face spasmed. "Water."

Dana brought him a cup of water, and held it to Zed's lips so that the handless man could drink it.

A woman's voice said, "_Lamia_, this is Sai Thomas. Sorry it took me so long; first they had to find me and then they had to wake me up. You have a patient for me?"

"Ja. Narayan," said Zed.

Dana said, "We do, Medic. Is Ja Narayan with you?"

"Ja's coming from home."

Dana looked at Zed, who nodded. "I guess we can open up."

Tori released the doorseal. People swarmed in. They were not familiar with stars.h.i.+ps. They climbed up awkwardly over the doorlip, not knowing what the ceiling bar was for. Tori Lamonica simply pointed toward the bunk. Zed said, "h.e.l.lo, Sai." The woman saw his hands and drew her breath in sharply. Then she started giving orders. The team stuck a needle in Zed's arm and attached a tube and bottle to it. They coated his hands with white foam. They slapped gel ampules on his neck and both his arms. They brought in a stretcher and put him on it.

One medic left the s.h.i.+p and came back. She approached the Hypers. "One of you needs a slave tattoo removed?" she inquired.

Dana tried to roll up his sleeve and discovered that he still had the pressure suit on. He took it off. The medic spread gel from a tube over the tattoo. It was cool. She said, "Let it harden. In about six hours you can peel it off and the tattoo will be gone. With your skin pigmentation, there should be no scar."

A long hand reached over the doorlip. A rangy body leaped for the ceiling bar. Dana stared at the stranger who swung himself onto _Lamia_ like a rope uncoiling. A voice said in his mind, _So you're Dana Ikoro. Thank you for taking care of my friend. I'm Chief Pilot Orion_. Dana opened his mouth and then closed it. He turned to Tori. "Chief Pilot Orion: this is Starcaptain Tori Lamonica."

Tori held her hand out. The tall man did not take it, but suddenly she smiled.

With quick steps, Orion went to Zed's bunk and loomed at the backs of the laboring medics.

The medics muttered at each other, and formed into a procession directed by Sai Thomas. They were taking Zed through the door. Tam Orion stopped them by standing in the doorway. "Please move," said Sai Thomas.

"Wait." Zed had opened his eyes. "Tam." Orion folded his thighs until his face was on a level with Zed's head.

"Hurt?"

Zed breathed out. "Not. Too. Bad."

"Help?"

"Nothing. You. Can. Do."

Sai Thomas said roughly, "The faster we get you to the Clinic, Zed, the sooner Ja can get to work on your hands."

"Yes," said Zed. He glanced at Tori Lamonica. "Tools," he said. "Replace.

Proper."

Tam Orion made a gesture of a.s.sent and stood aside. "_Did you understand that_?" he said. "_Zed's asked me to replace the equipment you lost effecting his rescue_."

d.a.m.n him, Dana thought, we want nothing from him! But his answer did not seem to reach Orion at all, and Lamonica, predictably, was accepting the offer with delight.

"_Have a good trip home, Captains_," the chief pilot said. He swung out of the s.h.i.+p. Dana watched the medics maneuver Zed's stretcher. The smell of the foam and of burned flesh lingered in the cabin. A Landingport mechanic delivered a heap of tools through the door, and went away. Dana munched on a food bar. His head was cotton. He returned to the navigator's chair and stared at the numbers bouncing on the compscreens. "I want to make a direct-line call."

Tori was watching the numbers. "Don't let it take too long. I want to get out of here."

He called Rhani. She answered instantly. "You look like I feel," he said.

There was little color in her face; it was the white of dried bone.

He said, "Darien Riis was a cop, pointed at Zed by Michel A-Rae. He decided he could break you if he could take Zed away. Darien killed Jo Leiakanawa and blew up the Net. She had strong anti-slavery feelings. Zed shot her with a cutting laser. He's at the Abanat Clinic in the care of a medic named Sai Thomas and a surgeon named Narayan. I'm leaving on _Lamia_."

She said, "They called from LandingPort Station. They told me he was alive." Her eyes were dark with exhaustion. "I'm grateful to you."

"We had an agreement."

She reached to him, touched the screen, and drew the hand back. Her shoulders straightened. "Good-bye, Starcaptain."

Inexplicably, it hurt that she should choose to call him that. He wondered what her waiting had been like. LandingPort Station would have told her that the Net was gone, blown to dust. Now she knew that she had Zed back again; Dana wondered what she thought of the price. "Rhani -- "

Her voice wavered. "Starcaptain?"

"Please don't call me that."

Her face came a little closer to the screen; he could see her weeping.

"Goodbye, Dana. Go away now. Don't come back to Chabad. I wish you good fortune.

Live on a green and pleasant world with a lover who treats you better than this one." She switched off. Dana rested his head against the chair back. He felt as if someone had just punched him in the heart.

Tori shook him roughly. "Go lie down."

He pointed at the controls. "What about ...?"

"Sweet mother, you think I can't fly this s.h.i.+p by myself? Get into a bunk."

"Where are we going?"

"To Nexus. Where else? Unless there's somewhere you want me to stop."

Dana considered Pellin. It was a green and pleasant world. His family would be pleased to see him. But he was not ready to go world-bound. "Nexus."

"Go lie down."

He levered his head up. It weighed a ton. "No." "As you please," said Tori. She talked to the Flight Tower. The gel warmed on Dana's upper arm. Sleepily, he realized that Lamonica was swearing into the com-unit; that something, somewhere, had gone wrong.

"What is it?" he said.

"f.u.c.king cops." Lamonica twirled the pilot's chair around to face him.

"We're grounded, man."

"Why?"

"Everybody's grounded, until they find that son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h who started this, A-Rae." She mimicked the Flight Tower's impersonal voice. "_All ve-hi-cles can-cel lift-off pro-ce-dures_." She chuckled. "The shuttles.h.i.+p pilots are going crazy. They've all got full pa.s.senger loads to deliver to the moon."

"When can we take off?" Dana said.

"Who knows?" She began to mutter the lift-off litany in reverse.

A voice from the com-line said, "_Lamia_, are you there? Stand by for boarding."

"What?" Tori slammed her hand on the chair arm. "Who's boarding my s.h.i.+p?"

"Drug Detail, Hypers.p.a.ce Police," intoned the com-unit.

Dana sat fully up in the chair. His left arm had gone to sleep, and he shook it. A trickle of alarm raced through his nervous system. "Hey," he said.

"Make sure you see a boarding pa.s.s."

The com-unit crackled wih a different voice. "_Lamia_, this is the Hypers.p.a.ce Police, Drug Detail, Captain Graeme. We request permission to board."

"Do I have a choice?" Tori said. She palmed the door switch. The stars.h.i.+p's door shot up. A hand found the ceiling bar, another, another -- bemused, Dana watched as four people in black-and-silver uniforms swung into the little stars.h.i.+p.

"I want to see a pa.s.s," Tori said, advancing toward them.

A man with a communicator in his hand extended a sheet of paper toward her. The other three were standing at near-attention, close to the stars.h.i.+p's door. Two hands gripped the ceiling bar and, with a smooth acrobatic heave, a fifth person entered the s.h.i.+p. The Hype cops stiffened. The newcomer glanced at each of them as she came upright and, stepping forward, extended a hand to Tori Lamonica. "Sorry for the delay, Starcaptain," she said. "Cat Graeme, Hypers.p.a.ce Police."

At first glance, Dana thought she was the plainest woman he had ever seen. She wore the black uniform with no special grace. Her hair was dusky and coa.r.s.e, her skin weathered, and her hands were lumpy and callused, as if she had once spent a long time doing heavy manual labor. She had a jagged scar on her right temple. Her eyes were blue. She was short and tough and, in the center of the MPL-cla.s.s stars.h.i.+p, she looked immovable.

"Starcaptain Dana Ikoro," she said.

Wearily Dana levered himself from his chair. "That's me," he said.

"The drug detail of the Hypers.p.a.ce Police respectfully requests your cooperation."

Dana sighed. He wanted, very badly, to tell this woman to do something anatomically impossible with a black hole. "What kind of cooperation?" he said.

"Dull, boring work," she said. "We want you to sit in front of a machine and tell it what happened on the Sardonyx Net, before it blew up."

He leaned on the chair back. "What if I don't want to help?" he said.

She said, "Come on, Starcaptain. You're tired and you want to go home, but you're also not a child. We need that testimony. You're the only person who can give it."

"Ask Zed Yago," Dana said.

Graeme shook her head. Dana decided that her nose had been broken at least once. It leaned to the right. "Zed Yago's in Main Clinic, and can't talk to us. And might not, even if he were conscious." Dana remembered, unwillingly, the sight and smell of Zed's seared hands.

The memory made his stomach ache. "All right," he said. "Since I can't get out of here anyway." He yawned. "Tori -- "

She nodded at him. "It's been fun," she said. "Let's do it again sometime." She slid into the pilot's chair.

"Let's not," Dana said. Cat Graeme gestured to the open door. Two of the cops preceded him; the others followed. The dark night was cold, but the lights over the Flight Field brightened it to day. Dana hesitated at the doorlip. I thought I was going home.... Leaning forward, he closed his palms around the cool metal of the ceiling bar.

In the Abanat Clinic, Zed Yago floated over a white bed in a silent room, gazing down at the form of a man with badly burned hands.

Until he realized that he was disembodied and invisible, it had disturbed him that the man in the bed could not or did not seem to see him. But then, no one else saw him either: not the medics or the guards in their blue-and-silver uniforms who stood near the bed. Two people entered the room, and he recognized them as Sai Thomas and Ja Narayan. They spoke to the man with the burned hands.

"I can do it," said the surgeon. "Medically it's simple; the light beam did most of the work for us. Your circulation below the elbow is fine. There's no infection. I can sc.r.a.pe the seared bone clean and graft new tissue in after I set the claw mechanism in place. CTD has an excellent tissue match."

Sai Thomas said, "Zed, are you sure you want this?"

"I'm sure," said the man on the bed. I'm sure, whispered Zed Yago.

He could see by the lines around her eyes that she wasn't happy. Don't worry, he said to rea.s.sure her, forgetting that he was disembodied and that she couldn't hear him. He wanted to tell her that he had been crazy, but also that he was sane again, as sane as he was ever gong to get. In another time and on another world, they might say that he had been bewitched.

"Don't worry," said the man in the bed.

"I'll tell Yukiko," said Sai Thomas. The medics left. Zed Yago climbed back into his body. It took a certain effort to stay there. He could not feel anything. The slack body had no more hold on him than a sh.e.l.l. He wondered what Ja Narayan would think if he knew that he was not simply inserting fingerclaws into those hands, but that he was reattaching a soul.

They put him entirely out for the surgery. As he felt himself sink into chemical oblivion, Zed regretted that he could not float above the table to watch the repair. Then he slept. He woke in Recovery, woozy and dry-mouthed, but whole, himself. He tried to move the reconstructed fingers within the plaster of the healing gel. He couldn't tell if they obeyed him.

A woman came to stand at the edge of the bed. It was Rhani. They had dressed her in green but he knew her. He wondered if Rhani was angry at him.

There was a reason why she might be, though he could not remember what it was.

His throat hurt; he had to whisper. "Rhani-ka."

"Zed-ka," she said.

A second figure in green stepped forward with a cloth and held it for him to suck. Water trickled into his throat.

"The Net -- " he said.

"I know," she said, "I know. Don't worry about it. I have other plans.

I'll tell you about them when you're stronger."

He wanted to tell her that he was no longer crazy. "I'll come back tomorrow," she told him. "They don't want me to stay now. Get well, Zed-ka." She mimed a kiss as she went through the door. Intense joy, like a bright light, filled Zed's mind. He groaned.

The medic stepped forward, alarmed. "Are you in pain?"