“Our ship?brain.” Lin stood to face the cringing man. “Is there something you want?"
“Please, won't you reconsider? Isn't it more important to take the healthy to safety, rather than leave them here where it isn't safe? You could kill people through the roughness of the trip."
Bain knew Juhan had a point. Lin had speculated that the water vector had strengthened the virus while aiding its spread. Yet, the water filtration plant was able to make the water safe again for drinking and washing. No more people would fall ill from the water, at least. Still, if people were dying so quickly, how would the rigors of launching Sunsinger and the stresses of going through the Knaught Points between Bareen and Mercy affect them?
Lin and Dr. Anyon were right, Bain knew. The ill had to be taken away, separated from the healthy, before more people caught the virus that had adapted to their Human hosts. More people would die from the delay than would die from the journey.
“This is the way it has to be done,” Lin said. She gentled her voice. Bain knew how much effort that took, when she was still so angry over the stubbornness of the people.
“Information accessed,” Ganfer reported.
“What information?” Juhan asked, his voice rising and cracking at the peak.
“Bareen was not scheduled to be settled for another thirty?four Standard years,” the ship?brain continued. “It was settled, quite literally, by accident. A shipload of colonists crashed here and lost all communication with the Commonwealth. They were counted as lost in a faulty Knaught Point jump or a meteor storm that had ravaged the area of their registered flight path. The thriving colony was not discovered until nearly fifteen Standard years later, when a colonization survey team came to verify the findings of a scouting team. Since the colonists were succeeding without any aid, they were permitted to stay. One note.” Ganfer paused. If Bain didn't know better, he would have thought the ship?brain was unsure whether to say what came next. “The colony which was the original destination had registered legal action barring them from landing. The legal action was struck down by Commonwealth Council action. Other colonies where the colonists of Bareen had applied also registered legal notice that they were not welcome."
“Why?” Lin asked after a moment of ringing silence.
“Why what?” Juhan asked. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead. He smiled, and it was a stiff, jerky expression. He rubbed one hand over his face, causing the beads of sweat to trickle off and stain his shirtfront.
“Why didn't they want you?"
“That was in my father's day, Captain Lin. I have no idea.” He stretched his smile a little wider. “When we crashed here on Bareen, many of our records were lost or the disks cannibalized to keep our computers working. There's quite a bit my generation never learned. Our parents were too busy fighting to survive and make a safe home for us to tell us about the stupid prejudices and injustices in the rest of the universe."
“Stupid prejudices and injustices? Interesting choice of words.” Lin nodded. She chewed on her lip for a moment as she thought, her gaze flicking from Bain to Juhan and back again. “Let's go home, Bain."
“Home?” Juhan squeaked. “You're leaving us?"
“Our home is our ship, Councilman Juhan.” Lin sidestepped him as she hurried out of the room, with Bain close behind her. “Nothing could persuade me to stay underground while I'm waiting for your people to come to their senses.” She stopped in the entrance of the room and turned to face him. “Consider this: for every hour that you waste trying to break the rules established for your protection, another child will die. Do you want that on your conscience? I don't.” Then she turned her back on him and sped down the dark shadowed hallway. Bain nearly had to run to keep up with her.
The elevator took so long coming down for them, Bain thought maybe it was broken and they would have to search for stairs up to the surface. There had to be stairs. He couldn't imagine anyone depending solely on machines for getting into and out of the tunnels.
Crossing the square, Bain flinched at every gust of dusty wind across the ground, every rustling snap of tree branches overhead.
“I'm worried too,” Lin murmured. She slowed her pace and slid an arm around his shoulders. Bain welcomed the gesture of protection, as well as the contact.
“Do you think they were criminals?” Bain asked after they had synchronized their steps so their hips didn't keep bumping each other sideways. It would have been funny any other time.
“Forty, fifty Standards ago, there was a lot of fear. I think fear was a big motivator for at least half the colonies established back then.” Lin tilted her head back and frowned up at the pale moon and the flickering specks of stars. “That's half the problem with the Commonwealth, I think. We should have concentrated on establishing one colony at a time and waited until it was strong and filled its new world before we let another set down roots. The way things are now, we have a good three hundred colonized worlds with little more than one good?sized city on at least three?quarters of them. That isn't healthy. That's why it's so easy for the Mashrami to attack. We're spread out too thin to be any real help for each other."
“We wouldn't have known the Mashrami were coming, if there weren't so many colonies,” Bain pointed out.
“True.” She managed a chuckle. “You're too smart for your age, you know that?” Lin sighed. “A lot of colonies were established by people who were afraid of their neighbors because they were different, or more powerful than them, or believed different life philosophies. Instead of trying to learn to live together and work together and appreciate our differences, our ancestors spread out into space. A lot of stupid prejudices were allowed to grow in the wide-open spaces. They would have died natural deaths if people had been forced to live and work together to survive."
“Like the fear of mutations that almost killed Spacers when we first appeared?"
“Exactly.” Lin led the way down the shadowed path between the colony's square and the administration building on the edge of the landing field.
Later, Bain didn't know if he heard the attackers rushing on them, or felt them. All he really knew for certain was that suddenly the shadows around them grew arms and legs. Fists that punched and grabbed and feet that kicked.
He ducked and rolled and came up spinning, as Jax had taught him. Bain twisted free of the hands that tried to take hold of his clothes and the heavy bodies that tried to pin him to the ground. He heard Lin shout. Suddenly, his defense changed to attack. He had to get to Lin.
Somebody shouted. Bain could hardly hear the voice, much less make out the words through the angry, terrified thudding of his heart in his ears. He dodged a fist heading straight for his nose and swung hard backwards with his elbow as he turned. Bain felt something crack under the impact, but he felt no pain. His attacker took the damage? He didn't have time to check and see. He fought through the twisting, solid shadows toward the sound of Lin's strangled voice.
“Hold him!” a man roared.
A body knocked Bain down. As he twisted and wriggled and tried to slide out from under the weight, another body fell on his legs. Another landed on Bain's shoulders, smashing his face into the dusty gravel of the path. He felt his lip split with the impact. Dusty blood flooded his mouth as he took a deep breath to shout his pain and outrage.
For half a second, the bodies got off him. Many hands flipped Bain over onto his back. A wet rag slapped down over his mouth. He took a deep breath, and gagged. The rag smelled worse than the disinfectant. It clogged his lungs with a rancid sweet thickness.
His head started to spin. Too late, Bain realized what the wet rag held.
Not again! his mind wailed. For a moment he was back in the warehouse, after being kidnapped by Jax's look-alike.
Bain tried to breathe out, tried to get rid of the sleeping drug before it penetrated into his blood. He twisted, trying to free his mouth of the cloth. In response, two hands clamped down on his face, holding him still under the wet rag.
“Br
eathe,” someone growled in his ear.
Bain held his breath. He would have tried to bite the hands holding the cloth over his face, but he feared swallowing the drug.
A fist punched into his gut, making him gasp. Retching, Bain doubled up. He took a deep, harsh, involuntary breath. More dizziness swept down on him with a solid, painful weight. Darkness hit him hard. Through the spinning, sinking sensation, Bain heard Lin shout his name.
Then nothingness.
* * *
Chapter Seven
Bain woke to the distinctly uncomfortable sensation of water in his nose. And he was lying on his back.
He blinked hard, but the darkness didn't go away. When he turned his head, dizziness wrapped around him and threatened to twist him like an old rag wrung out and hung up to dry. Bain held perfectly still and fought the nausea that twisted up through his stomach, with long, deep, slow breaths, as Lin had taught him. He closed his eyes, even though there was nothing to see but darkness. With his eyes closed, he could pretend there was something out there.
Maybe there was something or someone out there? Maybe they could see him, but he couldn't see them?
Shivering, Bain opened his eyes. Cautiously this time, he turned his head to the right. Rough, damp stone and the edge of a puddle grazed his cheek before he had turned more than forty-five degrees. He swallowed hard and tried turning his head in the other direction.
A soft, dim glow almost on the same level as his head rewarded his effort. He stared at it until his eyes began to ache and tear. The glow didn't change; didn't resolve into something identifiable, or come closer.
A drop of water hit his face, near his chin, and ran down his cheek into his ear. Bain lifted a hand to wipe it away. His arm felt heavy, limp, like it did when he had spent more than two weeks in free-fall and then landed on a planet with higher than average gravity.
Damp soaked up through the rough, bare rock under him, into his clothes. Grit plastered the backs of Bain's hands where they had lain against the rock. Gritty wet coated the strands of his hair, when he reached up to rub the growing ache at the back of his head.
“Hello?” Bain winced at the weak whisper of his voice. He had meant to shout, to see if there was anyone nearby.
The ache in his head doubled in size. Bain decided it was a good thing he hadn't been able to shout. That would have only made things worse.
What was he doing there?
He lay still and watched the soft glow so far away, and tried to get his brain moving enough to answer that question. Bain suspected it was important.
What was the last thing he remembered?
Another drop of water hit his face, splashing on his lips. Bain suspected he would have to move soon.
He licked his lips. The bitter-rancid-sweet taste that cut through the mineral taste of the water sent a flash of memories through his mind. Bain sat up, gasping. The movement made his head want to split open. He pressed his hands against the side of his head and ignored the pain as he remembered.
He was walking with Lin, back to Sunsinger. Someone had hidden in the darkness and attacked them. A lot of someones had held him down and drugged him.
“Lin?” Bain took a few more deep breaths, fighting more nausea from the mere effort of speaking. Where was Lin? Did she feel as bad as he did?
Bain hoped not. When Lin got sick, she got angry at her body's weakness. When Lin got angry, she fought hard and whoever got in her way was in a lot of trouble. Right now, lost in the darkness in a place he didn't know, Bain suspected it wouldn't be smart to make his captors angry.
“Lin, are you here?"
Since he was already up and the dizzy sickness finally started to fade, Bain tried to move again. He leaned forward and rested on his hands and knees and crept away from his resting place. The rock remained rough and damp, with little dips and rises in the surface. He decided he was very smart to stay on his hands and knees, instead of trying to walk. Bain's imagination painted him a picture of big holes or crevices in the ground, hidden in the darkness, and himself falling into them and breaking arms and legs or his head.
Since he had nowhere else to go, Bain aimed himself toward that soft glow of light. He reached out with one hand and balanced on the other, trying to feel for anyone who might be lying nearby, still unconscious.
The process felt like it took forever. Bain counted his heartbeats to give him a more realistic sense of the passage of time. He reached four hundred before he realized the light came through a partially opened doorway. Bain sat still a long time, staring hungrily at the light, begging it to come closer or for the door to open completely and flood his dark room with light.
Then he licked his drying lips and realized that he had to get moving again.
This time when he started moving, Bain was cheered to realize that his head didn't twist and weave on his neck quite so badly as before. The sick dizzy sensation in his stomach wasn't quite as strong. Maybe whatever drug his captors used on him was starting to wear off.
He managed to push himself along at a quicker pace and he only counted to one hundred ninety-four before he bumped against the wall. Bain slid his hand along the wall and nearly yelped when his fingers snagged the frame of the door.
He only felt like throwing up for a moment as he struggled to his feet. Bain closed his eyes and clung to the wall and took deep breaths, fighting the nausea. When it left, he reached out and balanced himself against the side of the door panel. His weight pushed it open, slowly, dragging against the uneven stone floor with a growling, hissing sound.
Though it was loud in Bain's ears, no one heard or came running. Bain waited a long time, breathing rapidly, fighting to get enough air into his lungs to stop the light-headed sensation that tried to lift him off his feet.
When the feeling passed, he opened his eyes and stared into the lighted hallway beyond the room.
At first his eyes teared, unused to so much light. Then as his eyes adjusted, Bain realized the passageway was as badly lit as the tunnels below the schoolroom.
Here, though, the walls were rough, unevenly shaped. The floor didn't have a black plastic coating. There were no corners, just rounded angles where floor met wall or wall met ceiling. The ceiling was even more rounded. Sometimes the hallway was more triangular in shape, with the point at the top.
What was Bain doing here? He still didn't have that answer.
More important: where was he? Where was Lin? How could he get out of here and find Sunsinger?
Bain grinned, and felt his drying lips try to crack from the stretching. He reached for his collar link, to contact Ganfer and have the ship-brain use the signal to trace him. He was probably already doing that; Ganfer hadn't needed to wait for Bain to contact him the last time someone had drugged and kidnapped him. Bain shivered a little, remembering how Sister Marnya had been shot and then healed with inhuman speed.
He shivered more when he realized he touched bare neck. His collar link was gone.
Now Bain was scared.
“Please, Fi'in,” he whispered. “What do they want?"
Bain clung to the door until the planet stopped spinning beneath his feet. He took long, deep breaths, fighting the dizziness that kept trying to tie his stomach and head into knots. Whatever was going to happen next, he knew he had to be ready. Jax had taught him the most important thing when he was in danger was to keep his senses clear and to listen to his instincts, even if they disagreed with his head.
Suddenly, Bain heard Lin's voice. Swallowing hard to muffle an urge to shout, he pushed off the support of the door and staggered down the rough hallway. He kept stumbling and banging into the wall as he went, but he didn't care. Fifteen steps took him to another doorway, this one with a curtain across it. He leaned against the wall and tried to peer through the gap in the curtain without touching it.
A man he didn't recognize sat at a table, talking into a very primitive communications pack; little more than a receiver box, power supply, speaker grid and microphone.
Other than a table and three chairs, a dozen or so gray plastic storage boxes, the communications pack and the man, the room was unfurnished and plain, little more than a hole in the rock.
The man had gray, frizzy hair, clipped short; a scratchy looking beard, almost pure white; and wore a dusty, muddy green jumpsuit and black boots. He had wide shoulders and slouched over the communications pack as he spoke.
“You know I can't do that,” Lin had been saying as Bain peered around the edge of the curtain.
“Yes, you can,” the man insisted. He had a scratchy voice, like someone had tried to strangle him once and cracked his voice box. “You're a Free Trader. You don't owe the military anything."
“I also can't dictate policy to them. My words will carry more weight with them if I'm not being coerced into asking for help for your people."
“You're not asking, Captain Fieran.” The man sighed. He sounded tired. “You're passing along my demands. As long as I hold your apprentice, I know you won't give up until I get what I want."
“But why do you insist on having the healthy colonists moved and the sick left here? They'll die without timely medical care.” Lin let loose a growling sigh of exasperation. Bain knew that sound, from other times she tried to reason with dense, overly-officious port officials.
“You still haven't figured it out yet, Captain, have you?” The man shook his head. Bain caught a glimpse of bloodshot blue eyes and a big, rounded nose. “Your ship-brain told you about us. No other colonies wanted us. Do you know why? We're all misfits. All with genetic tweaks and quirks that might not mean anything. Then again, they might create monstrosities ten or fifteen generations down the line."
“Or they could turn into talents like Spacers or Healers or Mnemonics in the Scholars Guild,” Lin hurried to say.
“Only someone who nearly got cast out of the Human race could think of that brighter possibility.” He chuckled. “We don't want our ill taken away from Bareen because we don't want them examined."
Fever [Sunsinger Chronicles Book 5] Page 6