Cataract. Part 2

The smoothness of the skimmer's flight was interrupted by an abrupt rise, then a fall, then a series of shudders. In Tsia's mind, the whine of the skimmer's motors translated into a soft yowl. Unconsciously, she projected the sound through her biogate. The catspeak in the back of her head sharpened until the hairs on the back of her neck bristled. She forced her pulse to slow until it no longer deafened her thoughts, and the feline' din subsided. The sensation of wind in her-their-fur became the stroking of Wren's hand on her arm. 'Like a lantern that moved to a distance, the mental voices of the cats no longer blinded her; instead, they merely filled the corners of her mind with a dull and rumbling purr.

Forrest heard this same type of noise in his head, she thought-not that of the cats, but the energies of the world, echoed into his mind from his own biogate. Wren, who sat beside her, knew her only through time. But Forrest-he understood the wildness of her heart. Her lips stretched in a faint, bitter smile. What Wren called intimacy, she described as the recognition of each one in the other. What Wren called love, she named their need to touch each other through their biogates. Love? Perhaps. But if it was, it would not be she who admitted it.

Wren followed her gaze to the slender hands that rubbed absently at her wrists. Her fingers were lean and strong and without ornament, except for a thin scar that ran across the back of one hand, and some faint puncture marks on the other. The wrists she rubbed were medium-boned and taut with long-used muscles. Forrest had held those wrists, Wren thought. Forrest had shared not just her biogate but her body, and that for almost ten years. It was an interesting match. Wren had not thought her able, with her wildness, to be heyita so long with one man. He smiled to himself. Somehow, the word for "bed-mate" in the mere tongue seemed more honest than it did in any other. 'Too bad," he said slyly, "that Forrest didn't take the same contract you did. You'll miss him out at Broken Tree."

"You sure it's not you who'll miss me at the Hollows?" she retorted.

Wren merely widened his smile. "You and he touch as if you've been bonded for decades."

She glanced down at her hands, and only then realized that she was rubbing her wrists. Abruptly, she stilled her fingers. Her lips thinned to a stubborn, set line. "We are not making the bond."

"Don't see why not," he returned. "You and he are ava, after all. You've shared together your intimacies -perhaps even what you call your love. It is not as if you are merely avya- bound by loyalty or need."

"Like us?" she retorted.

He shrugged. "I am your shok saadaa bhai-your brother in sadness; your brother in grief."

"Brother? Hah. I took the guide virus ten years ago, Wren. I think differently now-I feel differently from you. And if you look at the guide-guild registers, we're not even the same species anymore. You can hardly call yourself my family."

"You think the mutations from those viruses left you closer to your sister than to me?"

His words struck her like a fist, and her lips tightened to a thin line.

Wren noted her expression and lowered his voice still further. "You love Forrest like an ava, but you won't make the bond. And why? Because of a sister you haven't seen in six years. Because of a woman who abandoned you for the docking hammers in s.p.a.ce. You throw away the chance of a bond because you waste your love on the ragged ideal of a family that doesn't exist." His gray eyes sparked with cold light. "When will you figure it out, Feather? When will you learn to let go?"

"When I'm dead," she muttered.

"You've been dead before, Feather, and it changed nothing. Of course, that was when you were heyta," he admitted softly, using the mere word for "slave." He nodded at the hands that still nervously rubbed at her wrists, as if she could still feel the chains that had once hung from her flesh. "But you weren't dead only to the node, but to your guild. Now you're dead to your sister, too, but this is by her choice." He eyed her closed expression. "h.e.l.l, Feather, the guild guides are closer to you than your sister is-and at least the guides give you a feeling of danger. Your sister gives you nothing. You'd do better to keep your eyes open to your present, and forget about your past."

Her lips tightened. The guides were a constant fear, but old; her sister was still sharp in her mind. Every time she smelled a certain flower, she thought of her sister's perfume. Every time she unpacked a crate, she almost sensed Shjams's hands on the customs labels. She swallowed the memories and forced herself to give Wren a deliberate shrug. "The guides are more in my past than my sister is-and I've been dead to the guide guild for ten years. It's not as if they still actively search for me."

"It takes only one sloppy trace, Feather, and you know it." His voice was sharp and harsh in spite of its low tone. "One loose line in the node, one image that isn't crystal-sharp and silk-tight, one public node ED from anyone-including a search trace sent to your sister-and the guides would glom on to your ID like a slug on a Risthmus rhubarb. They'd strip your biogate away as fast as they could get a skimmer skyside- with you strapped inside. You'd be a naught-a guide without a gate. Or worse: a wipe." He stared at her face as if his cold, gray gaze alone could pound the words into her head. "So don't give me that garbage about hanging on to family, Feather. It's family that will kill you dead. Not ghost-dead- not just cut off from the node or controlled by someone else. I mean blood-dead-ragat ka'eo. Dead like a corpse in a hundred-year grave."

She glanced warningly toward the other meres, but Wren did not s.h.i.+ft his piercing gaze. The tiny lines that sprayed out from her eyes... the scars that reached from temple line to jaw... they were cat marks. Claw marks-the sign of her biogate. She reveled in that mental link-she couldn't hide that from him. She talked without fear, as if she rejected the threat of the guide guild, but she could not keep the dread from her eyes. The biogate was her life. Without it, she had no future, no life she wished to live. Even now, the felines were close in her mind, thick with the catspeak that clung to her thoughts like a shroud. As for his own voice, she heard him only as a sharpness among the growling din that seeped in through her biogate. He pressed his fingers against her slender, toughened hands as if he could somehow feel the wildness that pulsed within. As if he could put his fingers on her life force-or as though the stubborn hope she still held for her future was something tangible-so that by reaching for her, he could touch what he himself had mislaid.

Absently, he rubbed at his own thick wrists. The sleeves of his blunter hid the white rings that marked his own flesh, but the thirty-four years he had spent in the mines were still as sharp and clear in his mind as if they were his present. What was that saying she had told him? Once a ghost, never unspir-ited... His eyes flicked to the other meres in the cabin. He and Feather-they were the lucky ones. Most ghosts were erased from the node so completely that they had no chance again of ever imaging a command, even on an open line. Or they were wiped, so that they had no memories or personality of their own. Some survived on the grayscale-as slaves, or worse. Some became blackjack. And some, like Tsia and himself, killed to regain their freedom and so crossed the border of the law. They lived without the illegal protection of blackjack and outside the sanction of the s.h.i.+elds.

He stared at Tsia's tanned, scarred face. They were much alike, he thought. Caught between the s.h.i.+elds and blackjack by the threat of their pasts. Caught between the law and the lawless... They hung like paper shapes on a string, suspended between two fires. They twisted eternally, trying to escape the flames of their histories, while the wind that breathed its hope between them tore at their flimsy holds.

He glanced at his brutal, meaty hands, then at her lean and weathered fingers, still digging through the soft. So similar, he thought. So very much alike. He almost smiled.

Some s.h.i.+ft in his biofield caught at Tsia's attention, and she glanced up. For a long moment, their eyes met in silent understanding. Then the skimmer lurched, and the pilot cursed, and Tsia turned away.

The s.h.i.+p pierced the second storm system like a gravdiver in a low-gee tube with a high-gee boost behind him. The short-range view of the skimmer, fed only by the snip's sensors, flared up in the holotank and boiled with ghostly colored streams and coils. Instantly, the skimmer dropped, twisted, and spiked back up before Nitpicker got it under control. Tsia's knuckles whitened against the drab shades of the soft.

"Dammit, Estine," Nitpicker said sharply. "Keep everything under thirty kph out of the tank. I can't read that kind of garbage."

"I'm trying," he returned in a low voice.

"What do you mean, 'trying'?" Nitpicker's voice was as low as his.

The tightness with which they spoke did not escape Tsia, and she leaned forward unconsciously, as if she would be able to see from her seat what they stared at on their panels.

Estine1 hesitated. "It's as if there's a node line coming in from somewhere else," he said slowly. "A line that's force-feeding us information. I can't keep all of it out of the nav-tank."

The pilot's voice was suddenly chillingly intense. "You think someone's tapped the s.h.i.+p?"

Tsia's biogate-heightened senses brought the pilot's voice clearly to her ears, and she eyed the holotank more sharply. In front, the copilot's brow furrowed as he tried to image a command through his own silent temple link. "I've got nothing on my link," he returned. 'There's no trace of a line in the s.h.i.+p's sensors."

"If blackjack's behind the node going down-or if they're blocking our links, our sensors could be caught up in the same web of traces that's swamping the navtank with garbage."

"You can find nothing, yourself?"

"Nothing." Nitpicker's hands flashed across the panels almost in time to his. Slowly, the holotank cleared until only the major ribbons of wind flowed through. As she tried to match the feel of the s.h.i.+p to her body with the view she saw in the navtank, Nitpicker frowned. "Nothing," she repeated, more to herself than to him. "But if there was a trace line tagging our sensors and feeding us a ghost web of data, it's either gone now, or so deep in the datacubes that it would take a line-runner a week to find it."

Estine glanced over his shoulder. "The guide's a terrain artist, isn't she? Put her to tracing it out."

Nitpicker did not bother to follow his glance. "A terrain artist 'paints' images into the node to hide our movements from the node's sensors. She doesn't have to be good at finding false images. Or at filtering through the false scans of a ghost web." She watched the holotank from the corner of her eye as she adjusted the skimmer's yaw. She hesitated, and Tsia could almost feel the tension that grew in the set of the pilot's shoulders, as if a sudden thought had just bitten at her mind. "No," Nitpicker said quietly. "If there's a ghost web hidden in these trace lines, don't trust it to Feather to find."

The old saying rose in Tsia's head: Once a guide, twice un-trusted ... As if the virus that made her a guide had stolen half her human self and left her less than a beast.

"I heard she was as good a line-runner as you are."

"Better," the pilot admitted, her voice still low. "She can run a ghost line as tight as a deep-pressure nail. But she's only half as good at tracing and breaking someone else's web as she is at building her own. Better to put Kurvan on it when he joins us on the platform."

"Kurvan-the line-runner from DemyanT She nodded.

The skimmer lurched, and Tsia's stomach tightened. "Wren"-she forced his name out from between stiff lips-"I thought Kurvan was working the Noose."

"The s.h.i.+eld ring around the Gwaeth system?" The gray-eyed mere gave her a sharp look. "Not for the last year. He's been signed onto this contract for six months-ever since it came open. Said no line-runner worth his credit pa.s.sed up a chance to code a set of biochips."

The skimmer slammed sideways, then dropped sickeningly before Nitpicker caught it in the wind. Tsia's lips bared as if she would snarl. "He might as well stay skyside now," she said, forcing the words out. "If the node doesn't come back up, he'll have game days for his entire contract. And as high as his tech rating is, the freepicks won't have to pay a tenth of his bill."

"It's a short contract-only a month to set up the security webs for the freepicks to receive the chips. Node can't stay down the whole time."

"Why not? Blackjack could be behind it, just waiting for the biochips to come within reach."

He shrugged. "Kurvan's one of the best line-runners in the business. If there's a problem from blackjack, he'll find it-no matter who's running the ghosts."

Tsia opened her mouth to respond, but she stilled instead. Her temple link seemed to sputter in her head. "Wren-" she said sharply.

Up front, the ghost images of the navtank thickened, darkened, and expanded rapidly into faint gray clouds; the holographic sky suddenly hung like boiling smoke. The sum, silver shape of the skimmer sharpened until it sped cleanly through the storm fronts. In the lower edge of the tank, gray images of ocean swelled and moved. And in one corner, a yellow glow showed their objective: the marine station ten kays from the coast.

A faint mental image sounded a tone in the back of Tsia's mind. It was a standby tone, created by a biochemical signal. But it triggered a trained memory. She keyed into the line of thought that flowed out of the memory. Instantly, an image spun out from her mind and into the temple link. The node read her signal. In response, a hundred biochemical sequences flashed back. Random memories were triggered in flashes so fast she could not follow them to make sense of their order. "Wren, the node-"

"Felt it." Wren's eyes were already closed in concentration.

From up front, Nitpicker called out, "I've got chatter on the lines."

"Reading it," Doetzier returned from behind Tsia. Tucker had broken off his argument with the woman in the back, and now murmured almost nonstop to Doetzier. She glanced over her shoulder, and the younger man broke off; Doetzier caught her attention instead. "How clean are your images?" he asked her.

"Clean," she said slowly, "but I can't find Jandon's s.h.i.+p. Shouldn't he be skimming in behind us?"

"That's what Nitpicker said when she picked me up on the docking hammer. He left orbit an hour behind us, and we stopped for most of that to pick you up in the north. He should have been on our tail by now."

She turned to Wren. "Can you read anything on your link?"

He shook his head slightly. "Images are too confused. What have you got?"

"The node IDs for the other skimmers are listed skyside. E-orbits are locked. They're folding into Q in standard order." She cursed her s.h.i.+ver silently as she stated the quarantine order. "But I still don't find his skimmer."

Wren shrugged. "If he's not up there, he overrode his safeties, like us. We'll see him down on the platform."

A wave of wind smashed the small craft sideways. The skimmer straightened, dropped again, and leveled out. "If he overrode his safeties," she returned, "he'll be trying to land on manual, like us."

Wren gave her a sly look. "What do you want to bet that he hits the drink first, not the deck?"

"That's not much of a bet, Wren. Nitpicker has four decades' experience on Jandon."

The s.h.i.+p bucked violently as it dove into the second storm front, and Nitpicker cursed in a steady stream of profanities that mixed human and alien speech together. Tsia closed her ears and tried to concentrate. She couldn't quite catch the images from the node. Thin-they were like ghosts blown through a wispy fog-and almost too sharp to remain in her memory. It was as if they had no substance, but were perfectly defined.

"Signals are too d.a.m.n faint," Wren muttered.

Faint, yes, but clear-he should have been able to see them at least as well as she did. She glanced over her shoulder again. Doetzier caught her look and shrugged, but there was something speculative in his expression, and Tsia felt a s.h.i.+ver crawl down her spine. She turned back in her seat and absently tapped the tiny metal socket in her temple. She could almost feel the heat of the images that pa.s.sed through its circuitry. The sensation seemed to wash across her brain, and unconsciously, she opened her biogate to soak it up and project it onto the distant cats on the sh.o.r.e. Instantly, the force of the feline voices strengthened. It was like a draft that seeped from under a loose-fitting door, then turned into a blast when the door suddenly opened. Her lips bared, as if she wanted to hiss, and her fingers dug into the flexan fabric of her soft. She concentrated. Seconds, minutes pa.s.sed before the thick shadows of the meres' bioenergies obscured the catspeak around her and the cold tang of Wren's biofield was strong again in her mind.

Now, faintly, she could feel all of the meres in the skimmer: Nitpicker, with the tension still set in her shoulders, was a strong, steady light--a quiet energy-like a deep pond, cold, but without the glacial chill that Wren projected so clearly. Estine was a fuzzy brilliance that sharpened and faded like a pulsar. Doetzier, behind her, seemed speckled with light, while Tucker radiated a knifelike heat that she thought of as antic.i.p.ation. And in the back, Striker relaxed in her soft as if she lounged in a dreambar, so that she felt to Tsia's biogate like a wide, shallow pool of energy that sat like water on sand. The last mere, Ames, projected almost nothing. Like Wren, he had built the walls around himself so thickly that he admitted almost nothing he felt to himself, let alone to anyone else.

From behind, Doetzier spoke up again. "The e-lines-* medlines and the like-are up again."

"Nothing more though," Wren returned. "Node lines are thin as a Sirian on slimchims."

Tsia said nothing. She had opened her biogate too wide, and now the roar of the felines grew in the back of her mind so that it drowned out the sense of the meres. The closer the s.h.i.+p flew, the stronger became the sense of the life-forms to which her biogate was linked. The scent of musk and blood and earth... The feel of fur beneath her fingers... She shook herself and looked up to see Wren regarding her with wariness. She shrugged.

He grinned, and his mouth looked like a beak in his sharp face. He glanced at the stubborn set of her jaw, then down at her slender hands. There was strength in her hands, in the will that drove them to act. But it meant little compared to the strength of the gate. Closer to land, and the sense of the cats became a crawling feeling in her skull. Her nostrils flared as if she could smell more sharply with their influence. Wren pressed against her arm to catch her attention, and she looked at him with difficulty. She forced her eyes to focus so that his image no longer blurred.

Striker opened a packet of black nolo seeds and popped one in her mouth so she could suck on its sh.e.l.l. A moment later, she spat a seed like a bullet into one of the hisser bins and listened with satisfaction to it dissolve. Doetzier glanced at the thin smoke trail that wafted out of the decomposition bin. The deke scent made Tsia's nose wrinkle. She tried to breathe out to force the odor from her lungs as her imaged commands spun out to the node and hung in its emptiness like balloons.

"Still nothing but e-lines," she murmured to Wren. "I've tried all three standard sets: maps, IDs, and library codes, but nothing comes back."

He did not bother to nod. "I'm not reading anything from the standard node. Just partials from the mersat. No overlays. No trace lines. Nothing."

The skimmer lurched its way into the third storm system like a toddler learning to walk, and Tsia asked tightly, "How long before we land?"

"Ten minutes. Maybe more. Relax," he said sharply. "Think about something else. Or start an argument with Striker-that's what Tucker always does."

Tsia glanced over her shoulder. The black-eyed woman in the back had her mouth full of nolo seeds, but was already agitated enough to talk around them. "... look at history," she was saying flatly. "The lifers who cried 'murder' over abortion were the same ones who sanctioned genocide and war in the overpopulated countries."

Tucker grinned. "Bet you can't believe you're going to have to defend one here."

She grimaced. "Even this long after the war, it's like agreeing with their policies."

"You should have checked the freepick rosters before you signed your ID dot." Tucker ducked the seed she threw at his head.

Striker gave him a disgusted look. "Did you know that the lifers didn't even adopt out the children that they 'saved'? They wanted the luxury of being moral without the responsibility of their stance." She spat another seed into the hisser bin. "That freepick is probably as rigid-minded as her ancestor."

"There are a few generations between them. She might have learned tolerance somewhere."

"If she did, it wasn't handed down from her great-grandmother. I can't stand people who condemn others to a life they don't themselves have the guts to lead." She almost glared at Tucker. "Ayara's eyes, do you realize that the lifers forced girls as young as twelve years old to have babies, but refused to support those teenage mothers with training, education, or family skills? With clothing or baby food or homes?" She chewed a seed vehemently, and Tsia could smell the sharp scent of it all the way up front. "The sponsors, now," added Striker. "They were the movement the lifers should have been."

"Sponsors didn't last long, Striker."

The other woman shrugged. "It costs money to support and educate another family. It takes time to allow them to change. And it takes tolerance and wisdom to allow them to find their own way. Lifers gave mothers none of those things..."

"How long now?" Tsia asked Wren.

"Five minutes," Wren said, then added, "Zyas, Feather, I said go pick on Striker, not me. You can see as well as I where we are in the holotank."

She shrugged an apology and studied the navtank before them. Although its images were sharp, the navtank showed only a bare outline of the s.h.i.+p and the sea that surged below it. Tsia squinted at the platform that was beginning to take shape in the imaging area. It was ghostly gray, and she frowned. It should have been purple-white-thick and st.u.r.dy- and s.h.i.+ny with the rain of the storm. Instead, it looked like a spider squatting on top of the water. The skimmer hung like a gnat above the station, and the sky boiled overhead.

Nitpicker started to image a command to the node link to split the tank's images, then cursed under her breath and repeated the command on the manual controls. One side of the navtank zoomed in to the s.h.i.+p and the station. The other side remained scaled in its primary images. Watching them both, the woman banked the skimmer into the wind till the projected image pointed directly at the marine installation. The sail slats responded; the skimmer's ride smoothed out.

The skimmer lurched its way into the third storm system like a toddler learning to walk. The s.h.i.+p dropped lower; the shuddering became a more constant rhythm. In the holotank, the two shapes of craft and platform converged. The s.h.i.+p swung wide, and the waves of wind through which it moved created a series of groans in its metaplas skin. Tsia tried to close her mind to the sound; her sensitive ears cringed at each whimper of metaplas pain.

On the floor, the loose datacubes rolled awkwardly. First one, then another hit the side of her foot, rattled across to Wren's boot, then skidded back with each s.h.i.+ft of the skimmer. At the third tumbling roll, Tsia stretched down and scooped them up, then flipped up the arm of her soft to drop them into the blank slots within. She started at the fingers that dug suddenly into her wrist.

"Don't." Wren's voice was soft, but something in his tone made her freeze. "A safety will override a manual from any location in a s.h.i.+p." He gestured at the open slots. "All s.h.i.+ps are still on e-orbits. You put those cubes in there, and they will send us back up like a shot."

Slowly, he released her arm. Tsia turned her hand and opened her palm to stare at the tiny cubes. She looked up at his narrow face, then back down. "I didn't know."

Wren sat back and closed his eyes again. "If you spent more time traveling by skimmer, you would."

She hesitated, glanced forward, then stuffed them in her pocket. "I'm a guide, Wren. My place is on the land, not above it."

He shrugged. "Not what I would have guessed from the way you hang on to your past. You spend more time thinking about those docking hammers than any guide I know."

"Daya, Wren, my sister's up there," she returned in a low voice.

"On Orpheus? Eurydice? You don't even know which hammer she works on now. Customs won't tell you-they keep their inspectors protected. Your sister is your past," he said harshly. "Your future is your freedom from that."

Anger sparked in Tsia's eyes. "Freedom is like a memory," she retorted. "Once lost, twice gone."

"You can't lose what you've never truly had."

"Which? My freedom or my future?"

He turned to face her, and his cold, gray eyes seemed to bore into hers like screws that turned through to her heart. "Does it make a difference?"