Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  “Wonderful,” she said, “hallucinating.”

  The price you pay for not enough 02 to breathe.

  “You’re dead, Cobri.”

  I’m not the only one, sweetheart. Difference is, I know it.

  “Fuck you!”

  Nice mouth.

  “Fuck you, more!”

  She settled her burden across her shoulders in a fireman’s carry, baring teeth at how hard it was to bear the weight. That took almost all her strength; by the time she’d reached the next level she was too weak to go on and had to pause a while to catch her breath. Not that there was much left to catch, and she wondered (again in that damnably analytical part of herself) how close the Garden was to vacuum, and hoped she wouldn’t make too much of a mess when her bodily fluids boiled. She could dimly see the knoll, it looked like it was at the bottom of an abyss, knew that was where she had to go, figured she could make it no problem, right up to the moment she stuck her leg out for another step and hit ice.

  Her foot shot out from under her and she spun down hard on her back, scrabbling futilely for a handhold as she skidded along the slope carved for the stream before flying off into space.

  It wasn’t so far a fall but she landed badly, with the body she was carrying mostly on top of her. Something splintered high up in her shoulder, the pain skibbling across her back like cracks in a pane of glass, so sharp she gasped in shock and surprise. Which was a major mistake because she’d crashed through the surface of the pond and was mostly underwater. In a desperate reflex, she muscled herself onto the bank, sputtering and choking with such force that her vision went gray and the invisible bands about her chest tightened enough to bring a low moan of pain.

  Stubbornly, though, she refused to black out, and hunkered instead to knees and then feet, balancing on her forearms like an ape. She decided to think of this as one last test—she put Alex Cobri’s sneering, lovely, sarcastic face right in front of hers, filled her ears with his taunts, and used that as a goad, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing her fall and fail.

  She caught hold of her charge and hauled him up beside her. She couldn’t manage any more than that.

  “This is stupid,” she said calmly.

  This is true.

  Alex again. Some friends didn’t know when to quit.

  She was too tired to be insulting, so she smiled up at him instead, handsome man, breathtakingly so, with irresistibly lean, sleek lines, just like the boat he gave her.

  The ocean stretched away from them on every side to the horizon, a following breeze pushing Sundowner powerfully through long, lazy swells under a sun that shone with delectable brilliance through a cobalt sky. She was lounging in the cockpit, tiller in one hand, main sheet in the other, the boat completely under control. He was striking a pose above her, fully aware of how much she liked what she saw and letting her know the feeling was reciprocated.

  The wind shifted, and she trimmed sail and course ever so slightly to compensate, shivering at the sudden chill across bare shoulders, the flash of icy ocean spray on her skin. Something wriggled beneath her and she levered herself up slightly on her elbows—wondering why her hands looked so funny—letting her head loll forward so she could see better. Her belly had gone all fuzzy, wasn’t that strange? It had grown eyes, too, that glowed with a faint, golden iridescence. She heard a voice, so faint she almost took it for her imagination, the tiniest of groans, and decided she must be hungry.

  Food’s over there, Red.

  A new voice, right beside her, and she swung her head around—asking herself in the process why it felt as big and cumbersome as a wrecking ball, so massive that her neck seemed barely able to support it—to behold Ben Ciari. She wanted to reach out to him—his ponytail had grown, even as his hairline had begun to seriously recede from the temples creating a very dramatic widow’s peak, and was far more salt than pepper, the color of mountain birch bark—but her hands were full with the boat. A wave broke hard over the prow of one of the catamaran’s double hulls and drenched them both, making her shake her head violently to clear her vision. There was no sign of Alex.

  “Shit, Ben, you better not be dead, too,” she stammered, teeth chattering from the open-water chill.

  I’ll assume that means you’re glad to see me.

  The air was different, the sun darker than she was used to, the water like a rich burgundy wine, with red highlights instead of blue.

  If you’re hungry, Nicole, food’s over yonder, Ciari said, pointing to a small mound, just up the beach from where they’d come ashore. It was a small bay at the foot of a towering escarpment that struck a resonant chord within Nicole but no specific tag. Virgin sand curved away from her on either side in a wide “U” that formed a spectacular natural harbor, and a fairly deep-water one as well, she realized, from the color of the sea. She could hear breakers thundering in the distance, out of sight beyond the point, but the waves here were significantly gentler, the shape of the bay creating a natural breakwater. An ideal refuge from any storm.

  Her gaze returned to the cairn, and her eyes narrowed in confusion. Everything else was pristine sand and sun-stroked rock, yet that small hillock looked like it had been transplanted from the arctic tundra. Ice-rimed grass on grayed earth, with the sizzling glow of a flare perched on top. Damnedest McEats she’d ever seen, and decided she didn’t like it, no way was she going near it, better to stay where she was and soak up some rays.

  “No,” she groaned, gritting her teeth and uttering a cry that was in no way human, pulled from a place within her heart she never dreamed existed. “No!”

  She pushed with all her might and found herself once more on hands and knees. One hand grabbed hold of her companion while she rose the rest of the way; she almost fell again as he slipped in her grasp, thrown off-balance by the extreme shift in weight and the belated acknowledgment that he was as big as she and growing heavier by the minute. The beach was gone, the boat and its ghosts with it, she was back in the Garden. But one thing was different—the blinding brightness she’d enjoyed hadn’t vanished with the hallucination—someone had dialed the lights up to full intensity.

  In their glare, she noticed now that she’d grown fur, and thought, This is crazy!

  A fine russet pelt that matched her hair, marked with intricate indigo designs, and the hair itself had grown into a thick leonine mane cascading across her back in a style no spacer would dare risk. She grew claws and fangs, her eyes blazing like fiery emeralds as the pupils elongated into vertical slits and the shapes of face and body changed until it only vaguely resembled what was considered human. But was, in basic, a match for the body cradled awkwardly in her mostly useless arms.

  The slope was ridiculously easy, yet as far beyond her capabilities as the sheerest cliff on Everest. So she didn’t bother walking. Instead, she let herself collapse full length and dragged herself to the top, gouging elbows and toes into the frozen ground, her companion wedged as best she could under one arm, as though she were making a water rescue. Each breath—so shallow and fast by now they were almost impossible to register—drove another acid-coated spear through her breast. She welcomed the pain, she thrived on it—if she could feel it, feel anything, she was still alive—used it to drive herself on, knowing that if she stopped now, and yielded to the shadows closing in around the periphery of her vision, she was done.

  She grabbed for the flare, caught the post supporting it by mistake, flesh freezing instantly to the metal, tearing as she yanked her hand free. That knocked the flare from its perch, and she flailed with desperate clumsiness to bat it aside before she set herself afire. Wasn’t ’til later that she figured there probably wasn’t sufficient air to sustain combustion; the flare only functioned because it was a self-contained chemical reaction. She came away with some burns to add to her torn and bloody palm. No pain, though, she assumed that would come after, with a vengeance, when the numbness wore off.

  Cairn, she needed the cairn, switch at base, where’d it go, wh
y were they hiding it, no fair, refuse to come so far and lose, belated realization that she was lying on it, sneaky little bugger, playing tricks like that, fix you later sod, switch switch, seemed so simple last time, fingers moved last time, nerves transmitted sensation, maybe they still are, only the brain’s given up on receiving them, too much trouble, systems shutting down, failing, she was failing, put to the test and found wanting, just as Canfield had feared and Nicole herself always known.

  She hammered at the rock like a madwoman—fortunately, with so little strength that her hands were only bruised, not broken—sobbing her frustration and terror. Not knowing which was more awful, the thought of dying or surviving with a crippled brain.

  Wasn’t anyone in the airlock paying attention, couldn’t they see her out here, why can’t they open the frigging door, is that too much to ask? Someone turned on the lights, why not add some air as well?

  She lay the palm of one hand over the fingers of the other and leaned her weight on it, hissing with imagined pain—in actuality, she didn’t feel a thing—as the fingers snapped flat. Then, she shoved them under the cairn, grinning like a fool as she heard the activating click. She didn’t bother with her hands, but hooked both elbows through the handle, putting the last of her strength into this effort, the counterbalanced hatch opening so smoothly and easily that she was sent sprawling halfway down the slope. Too stubborn to admit she was done, she wriggled right way ’round and hooked her companion. She found herself at the lip of the hatch, staring down into its inviting, empty depths. No sign of the others, they’d exited to what she prayed was safe haven. Her turn to follow. Come this far, no sense quitting now.

  But her legs wouldn’t work. Try as she might, scream as loud as she could inside her head, they didn’t stir. She tried to twist her torso, use the open hatch as purchase to lever herself to a sitting position, so she could lower the two of them inside—there was a switch, a big, beautiful brute of a lever, outlined in glaring Day-Glo colors, all she had to do was pull and the compartment would flood with atmosphere, the hatch closing automatically behind her. Except she couldn’t snag a handhold. Her muscles were spasming, no part of her body was paying the slightest attention to any of her commands and most of what she was thinking was dribbling into gibberish.

  One more try—missed—then another—missed—then another, each attempt more widely uncontrolled and uncoordinated than the one before. Each also—without her realizing it—shifting her balance on the lip of the hatch, until, suddenly, she felt herself slip over the edge. She had time—and instinct—for a frantic grab that snagged her companion as well and yanked him with her as she fell.

  This time, the impact was more than sufficient to smash her instantly and completely unconscious.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TEN

  She’s yanked underwater so suddenly, there’s no time to grab a final breath. She bends double, to slash with both hands at what holds her ankle. But her claws make no imprint on the flesh and the only blood that’s drawn is hers, as the blow glances off the tentacle, to rake her calf. Worse, another ropy shape whips out of the darkness to catch her arms and bind them and legs together. She has no analog for the form that holds her, or the strength it manifests; she’d always been a match for all but the strongest of the family adults, yet her most violent struggles here don’t make the slightest difference.

  She coughed herself awake—so hard she nearly pitched herself off the bed—but when gentle hands reached for her shoulders to push her back into place, she lashed out, with a caterwauling wail. The hands jumped immediately away, and she heard a word she didn’t understand but which, from the tone, she registered as a curse. That realization came after the fact; at the moment, she was beyond coherent thought, acting solely on primal instinct. Fortunately, that spasm of resistance stole the last of her strength. Momentum left her with a shoulder hanging off the edge of the bed, too weak to lift herself up or offer more than feeble gestures as she was rolled back into place. She was panting—shallow little gasps for breath—because anything more felt like she was rubbing razor wire up and down her throat. While two sets of hands pinned her wrists, a set of fingers peeled back an eyelid; she tried to twist her head away from the dazzling flash of light, but that too was more than she could manage.

  A face moved into view, triggering the right set of switches inside her memory, and Nicole smiled wanly up at Jenny Coy.

  “Water,” Nicole tried to say, barely registering the thought, much less the sound—she wasn’t even sure her lips had moved—and wondered why Jenny looked so startled. She assumed the other woman simply hadn’t heard, and tried again, putting as much force into her voice as she was able.

  Jenny said something in response, words of comfort Nicole assumed from the expression on her face, but nothing made any sense. The sounds were little more than gibberish. She could feel her body tense, the reaction echoed by the increased chirps and beeps of the bio-monitor out of sight overhead.

  She tried sitting up, calling out to Hana, to Ramsey, but her skull felt like it was clamped in a vise of spikes, and she couldn’t help another yowl of misery. Worse, even this slight movement set her perceptions to swaying as though her skull were mounted on a set of frictionless gimbals. The pain gathered itself about her face like a caul and then settled deep into her shoulders and arms and to her shame she found she couldn’t help the burn of tears at the outer corners of her eyelids.

  A cloth to her cheek gently pressed the wetness away, and she heard a familiar, welcome, gloriously comprehensible growl from the shadows.

  “Isn’t safe to leave you anywhere.”

  Speaking was hard, her teeth felt swollen and her jaw didn’t fit properly together, but she managed.

  “A knack, I guess. Come all this way to tell me that, did you?”

  The growl deepened into a mostly subvocal rumble that was Kymri’s unique blend of Hal and human laughter. Her own response was a weary groan.

  Her eyes stayed closed, in part because that made it easier for her to cope with the pain but also because she was half afraid Kymri’s presence was part of some other dream; and if it was, she wanted to prolong it as long as possible.

  To her surprise, he said something in the same nonsense syllables she’d heard Jenny use. Her eyes opened sharply, closed again almost as quickly as she found the overhead light unbearably bright.

  “What did you just say?” she demanded, creasing her eyelids just a little and using her loose hand as a sunshade. Her other arm was plugged into a brace of IV lines; moreover, there were telemetry telltales scattered across her body and both temples. It was a full spectrum Intensive Care setup, applied to only the most critical of cases, and once more the monitor broadcast her surging anxiety.

  “Merely that you sound awful,” Kymri told her softly.

  “Then why the hell didn’t you just say so in English.” She’d begun a catalogue of her situation and could feel the puffball shape and weight of bandages where her hands rested on her thighs. She decided she wasn’t up to asking details just yet. “May I have a drink, please? My throat’s dry as the W’kans’qtll.”

  Jenny held a squeeze bottle close and pressed the straw between her lips. The water was laced with lemon and probably a whole brace of restoratives; Nicole didn’t really care, beyond the fact that it tasted wonderful. Unfortunately, the drink also provoked another burst of coughing.

  “Small wonder,” she rasped to Kymri and Jenny after the spasm passed, “about how I sound. My throat feels like it’s filled tight with barbed wire.”

  She was watching Jenny as she spoke, and knew from the first that her friend didn’t understand a word. Jenny looked at Kymri, who spoke more gibberish and saw comprehension sweep across the younger woman’s face. Nicole put her hand to her throat, and closed her eyes for what seemed a long time, ignoring the others while she set a random sequence of imagery cascading before her mind’s eye. There was no rhyme or reason to this interior slide show; she was simply rum
maging through the attic of her memory and seeing what was there, what she could put names to.

  At that first scattershot glance, nothing seemed missing, nothing whatsoever wrong.

  She wept. With grief. With rage. With a terror so stark it was almost palpable.

  She called for Hana, aware—now that she was looking—of how natural that name should sound and yet how difficult it was to wrap her voice around it. When Kymri hesitated, Jenny appearing totally confused and unsure of what to do, thrown by the exotic pronunciation, Nicole lunged from the bed. Kymri caught her, as she knew he would, held her fast in a grip she doubted she could break even in the best of shape as she roared, “Hana! ”

  She called again, though not as loud or with anywhere near the force, because that was all the strain her voice could manage. The door to her cubicle popped wide and Hana Murai thundered in, a samurai ready for battle.

  “Hana,” she cried, “help me!”

  She didn’t need any translation to understand Hana’s initial reaction; her friend rounded on the Hal ShipMaster with a vehemence that made him take a defensive step back. There was such raw fury in Hana’s tone that Nicole’s hands twitched in response, the biological triggering mechanism for claws she didn’t possess.

  The next line, Nicole understood; though the accent was rough and ready, nowhere near as proper as Nicole’s own, Hana got the job done.

  “You miserable, faithless son of a bitch,” Hana snarled, “what have you done to her?!”

  “Say that again,” Nicole told her, amazed that her voice was steady. “As you would to me, not him. ”

  And Hana did so, using two distinctly different arrangements of nonsense noises.

  Nicole shook her head.

  “Save your breath,” she said. “One was Japanese, yes?” Hana nodded; Nicole didn’t ask, she didn’t need to be told, about the other. That had to be English.