Mudge looked astonished; Mac hid a smile. Dr. Cayhill showed no expression whatsoever. “It’s my understanding the captain requested this process, Dr. Connor,” he said. “I’m aware you do not always follow regulations or recommended procedures. However in this instance I must warn you failure to oblige this request will not be taken—”
“Shut up, Cayhill,” Mac suggested, turning back to the coffin. “I’m here.” She poked at a wire. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”
“As you wish.” He indicated one of the doors lining the near wall. “You’ll find a jumpsuit through there. It contains the necessary receivers and contacts. Put it on while I get ready.”
She nodded and took a few steps, only to be intercepted by Mudge. “Norcoast,” he whispered, “are you sure about this?”
Fourteen was with him. “Idiot.” His hands hovered near his face, as if he wanted to cover his eyes. “This procedure is intrusive. It could be dangerous. You should refuse.”
Not helping, Mac thought, but reached out to touch both of them. “That’s why you two are here,” she said, not in a whisper. Let Norris and Cayhill know she had brought not reinforcements but witnesses.
Mudge understood—or else he read her determination in her face—because he stood aside and let her go.
Reality was a dream.
Mac ran her finger around the viewport, skin catching on the tiny burr of metal she’d found there once before. Her breath again fogged over stars and Earth and Moon. The air entering her nostrils was familiar, metal-tainted and dry.
The Pasunah.
Much as she hated to admit it, Cayhill had been right in this much. It wasn’t like any vid game she’d tried.
The jumpsuit had clung to her skin, from fingertip to toe, the inside of the fabric prickly and uncomfortable, like shorts worn too long at a beach. That awareness had vanished the instant she’d lain in the coffin, swamped by overwhelming sensations of pressure and cold. She’d muttered something about improper calibration, only to have the words trapped as a mask was placed on her face. A moment of suffocation and utter darkness, then . . .
. . . she’d been here, in her quarters on the Dhryn freighter.
“Impressive.”
Mac would have been more impressed if Cayhill had told her how to get out of this. But no, he’d insisted her vitals would be monitored and that waking her—not that she felt asleep—would be done automatically should it be necessary.
“Hopefully in time for lunch,” she grumbled.
Her quarters looked exactly as they had when she’d first seen them. Walls met at angles closer to seventy degrees than ninety, well suited to the slant of an adult Dhryn’s body. The middle of the large room was filled with an assortment of Human furniture. She remembered breaking much of it.
Funny how she now saw it intact.
“Guilty conscience,” Mac decided, heading for the door.
Starting her in this place, if there’d been a choice, could be Norris’ first and last mistake. The Dhryn, frantic to escape the Ro who’d penetrated the way station, had rushed her on their ship and locked her in here for the duration. “Not going to explore much if that’s still the case,” she commented, hoping Norris could somehow hear her.
Then Mac spotted something new, a palm-plate beside the door. It hadn’t been there before, at least not on the inside, where a passenger could reach it.
She studied it, oddly nauseated by the deviation from memory. What else had Norris meddled with in the simulation?
There was one way to find out. Mac stretched her left hand toward the plate, only to freeze in mid-reach.
Her hand was flesh.
“Of course it is,” she scolded herself. She was experiencing the Pasunah as she’d seen it.
So much had been different then. She reached behind her head and touched the loose knot she’d half expected. It was still a shock to free the braid and bring it forward over one shoulder, to run the length of hair through her hands.
Mac shoved it back. “Move on,” she warned herself. Her thumb rubbed the emptiness of her ring finger. She wasn’t interested in reliving the past. The present was sufficiently complicated, thank you.
She touched palm to plate, determined to get this over with as quickly as possible. Norris wanted a Human perspective on the corridors and hangar deck, particularly where they would be entering the derelicts. It shouldn’t take long, if she could get out of here.
To her pleased surprise, the door retracted upward to reveal the brightly lit corridor beyond. “Nice,” she commented, stepping out. The corridor was more spacious than she remembered, which likely had to do with the Dhryn proclivity for carrying her from place to place like so much luggage.
Mac picked left and started walking, dutifully observing the occurrence of closed doors—three—and inset light strips—continuous. She counted her footsteps, on the premise that the more data she gave Norris, however trivial, the less argument he’d have for a return trip.
Which she wasn’t making.
The freighter wasn’t the Annapolis Joy. Thirty-one steps took her to the end of the corridor and the large doors that led into the hangar.
Mac frowned. It had seemed farther. Of course, being clutched by a running Dhryn tended to distort one’s sense of distance.
And she hadn’t been feeling observant at the time. In fact, she’d been shouting at the top of her lungs. They hadn’t answered her questions. They hadn’t spoken to her at all.
She hadn’t been Dhryn then.
Mac opened the hangar doors.
The space inside was empty except for a few cables along the floor and a large skim, crumpled nose-first against the near wall. Its front end wasn’t badly damaged, but apparently whomever had piloted it hadn’t bothered to slow down before entering. Or they’d used the wall for brakes.
Mac walked over to it, recognizing the skim. There’d been a jolt, she recalled. She’d put it down to alien driving, it being her first such experience. Norris must have made his own interpretation.
They’d been terrified. Mac ran her hand along the silent machine, walking toward its end. No matter what others thought now, the Dhryn she’d known had feared the Ro. “With good reason,” she said aloud.
“What are you doing, Lamisah?”
“Just looking around,” Mac said absently, reaching out to pat Brymn’s warm, rubbery arm. “There’s this annoying—”
She froze, whirling to look into those large golden eyes, their curious pupils like sideways eights. Violet sequins dotted the bony ridges above them, more traced the rise of cheek and curled above the ears. His lips, currently a rich fuchsia that matched the bands of silk wrapping his blue torso, shaped a cheerful smile as familiar as breathing. His hands were whole. Brymn, not Brymn Las.
“You’re dead,” she told him.
A hoot of amusement. “And why would I be dead, Mackenzie Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor?”
He wouldn’t be, she realized. “Damn Norris,” she said. “He added you to the simulation.”
“Why would ‘Damn Norris’ do that?”
“I—” she closed her mouth and thought about it. “You’re right. He wants to know about the Pasunah.” Then, she knew. “Cayhill.” The word came out like a curse. This had all the hallmarks of his well-intentioned interference.
When she’d become a “difficult” patient, he’d fixated on her inability to read and apparent lack of grief, believing her suffering from stress, if not outright brain damage. He’d declared her unable to make clear decisions and requested permission to take complete charge of her care.
She’d clearly decided to leave his care for good, Mac recalled. She’d stormed out of the medlab and refused to go back. There might have been some broken glass. Cayhill had been overruled not so much by Mac’s own fury as by the needs of the IU investigators, who desperately wanted her full cooperation and weren’t interested in inter-Human squabbles.
She had a great deal to thank aliens for . . . star
ting with this one.
Simulation or not, her eyes swam with tears as she looked at him, whole and blue and vibrant. “It’s good to see you again, Brymn,” she told him before she thought.
The golden eyes glistened, too. They shared that response.
“Have you missed me, Lamisah?”
The question caught her unprepared. Did it come from the simulation program or her thoughts? “We’re both on this ship,” she countered.
“Do you still grieve for me, Mackenzie Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor?”
The form was perfect, from the curious tilt of his big head to his padlike feet. The words weren’t.
Cayhill’s Brymn, not hers. Mac edged away until her back hit the skim and she was pinned.
The Dhryn with his dear face loomed closer. “Why do you not answer, Lamisah? Is it because you are about to run? You know you should. You should run as far and as fast as you can.”
Gods, no!
She covered her mouth with one hand, holding in a scream.
His eyes grew smaller and sank back. The intense blue of his skin faded, as if washing away with every pulse of his blood.
Mac lowered her hand, reached it out even though it trembled and her mind gibbered with fear. “Stop, Brymn,” she begged. “This isn’t what you were supposed to be. You were to be one of the glorious ones. A Progenitor. This—this is something the Ro did to you.”
The bony ridges that defined his features smoothed back into his skull.
Mac couldn’t get enough air. It was a simulation. She fought to see something else, anything else. She tried to imagine his arms growing larger instead of thinner; she tried to see his eyes as warm and gold and real.
She smelled rot.
His mouth opened, the only feature left to recognize. “Gooooooo.”
His hands had become mouths, his shoulders and sides grown shimmering membranes. He inhaled and soared from the deck.
Green rain struck her face and upraised hands, dissolving flesh as she finally started to run, washing away her back as she fell.
Fell into a pool of liquid.
Then the mouths began to drink.
13
POMP AND PROMISE
MAC AWOKE, SURPRISED to find herself whole. She opened her eyes, not surprised to find herself in the medlab.
For a series of deep slow breaths, she considered Cayhill. Specifically, she considered the most practical way to dismember his body before feeding the bits to young salmon. Who were, she thought with satisfaction, always hungry.
Aware she’d never inflict such a fate on any fish, Mac regretfully abandoned her fantasy and sat up.
“Norcoast!”
“Morning, Mac.” This from Doug Court, who gave a series of gauges by the cot a professional look before taking her wrist to check her pulse for himself. “How do you feel?”
Mudge hovered at the orderly’s shoulder, his face paler than she’d ever seen it. “Rested,” she said for his sake, looking around to see who else might be here. She relaxed when she saw the three of them were alone.
“Dr. Cayhill wants to be called when you wake up,” Doug said carefully.
Meaning he hadn’t made the call yet. Her hands found the sensors attached to her forehead and neck. She yanked them off. “Be my guest,” she said, swinging her legs around and sliding from the cot in one more-or-less easy motion. The easy part was the swing; standing without obviously tilting was harder. Mac focused on Mudge. “I’m done here.”
Without a word, he held out his arm.
“Your clothes.” Doug went to a cupboard and brought out her things. Mac glanced down, only now realizing she wore one of the ill-fitting blue gowns Human medical practitioners felt obliged to inflict on the sick.
Maybe she would just feed his fingers to the fish.
“Ah, Norcoast?”
Mac looked at Mudge, whose face looked more pained than she felt. Immediately she eased the tight grip her artificial hand had fastened on his wrist. “Sorry about that.” The lamnas were still on her other hand, she noticed with relief.
“What happened in the simulator?”
Cayhill kept recorders running in this room. She’d learned that lesson long ago. Mac arranged her face in its closest approximation to dazed confusion, not hard, and pretended to give Mudge’s question some thought. “Not a clue,” she said finally. “All I remember is falling asleep. Quite peaceful, really. Guess it didn’t work.”
Choke on that, she wished her listeners.
“There you are!” Fourteen came close to knocking Mac down when she arrived back at the Origin Team’s section of the ship. He settled for bouncing up and down on his toes, shirttails flapping. “The idiots wouldn’t let me stay while you were without clothes. I suppose one has to have external genitalia. Sexism. I left Charlie to enjoy the view.”
Mac saw the moisture along his eyelids, and the way the Myg couldn’t stand still. Beneath the foolery lay sincere concern. She was touched.
Mudge was insulted. “I did no such thing.”
“Enjoy or view? That makes no sense. Idiot!”
Mac slipped her arms through both their elbows—Fourteen’s being thicker and lower than Mudge’s—and steered them away from their interested escort. She’d lost enough time. The corridors had brightened to daylight shortly after they’d left the medlab, meaning she’d been out of commission for over fourteen hours. Time she should have spent working, eating a couple of meals, followed by a night in her own new bed.
A strike against Norris and Cayhill.
“What’s been going on?” she asked her companions, loath to let go. She didn’t want to admit, even to herself, how good it felt to hold them, how much she needed to know she still had arms and it had been nothing but a simulation.
No nightmare had been as real. Strike two.
If she was kind to Cayhill—unlikely—she’d try to believe he couldn’t have known how much memory she could bring to his little role-play, how accurate her sensory awareness of death by digestion would be. No physician would willingly put a patient through that, for whatever reason. Would they?
If she was paranoid—getting there—she’d believe he’d done it under orders to reinforce her fear of the Dhryn, to further taint her memories of Brymn so she’d view his kind as the prime threat instead of the Ro.
The idiot faction had Human members.
Unaware of her dark turn of thought, Fourteen rambled on, giving a typically personal answer to her question. “—I ate with the gorgeous Unensela, discovering that the most tasteless pap is exquisite if she is near me.” He gave a huge smile. “After that, I returned to the task of encoding innumerable boring messages. You Humans spend too much time reciting your irrelevant daily routines to one another.”
“And you don’t?” Mudge snapped. He’d pressed the elbow wrapped by her fingers gently to his ribs, as if promising that support as long as she needed it. “Are you psychologically incapable of giving a simple status report?”
“Idiot!” Fourteen stuck out his tongue at Mudge, its forked tips flailing the air in front of Mac’s nose. “Nothing. How’s that? Everyone spent last night worrying about our Mac. There was no work done at all.”
Strike three.
“Norcoast!” This as Mac tugged free her arms and started walking more quickly. The other two hurried to catch up.
“Find space and assemble everyone concerned—ten minutes,” she said over one shoulder. “Including the captain.”
It took forty-five minutes: sufficient time for a furious biologist to shower and change, albeit into an amber-and-blue silk suit the consulate staff must have deemed travel wear; abundant time for the vagueness of “everyone” when said to a certain Myg and a zealous memo-happy administrator to sink in.
So Mac was not completely surprised by the sea of faces that greeted her when she followed Lyle Kanaci into what must be one of the larger meeting rooms on the Joy.
New rule, she vowed, be specific.
However, th
eir arrangement stopped her in her tracks.
The Sinzi had set up court.
It looked like nothing else. Grimnoii stood at slouching attention to one side. The Frow, desperately straight and balanced, stood to the other. Humans and other aliens formed an interested mass in front. While the two Sinzi, Ureif and Fy, were slender white pillars to either side of—
She was not sitting in that chair.
“Macmacmacburblemacmac!!!”
Any potential dignity afforded by the now-appropriate silk suit vanished under the onslaught of anxious offspring, who clambered up her as if she’d been a tree. She winced as fabric tore.
Mac carefully shifted the one nuzzling her neck to her shoulder. Again able to breathe, she gave a small, resigned sigh and took the few strides needed to bring her closer to the Sinzi, but not the chair. At least there wasn’t a table, she told herself. “Hi, everyone.”
“What’s this all about, Dr. Connor?” Captain Gillis’ face was set in neutral. She decided that wasn’t because he didn’t have a strong opinion about being hauled from his bridge to this—whatever it was—but rather was waiting for her to give him the opening to express it.
She was going to lock Fourteen and Mudge in a closet and . . .
“Hello, Captain,” Mac said, setting her voice to confident. “Just a final strategy session. To—” There being no discreet way to stop an offspring from burrowing into an armpit, her smile became somewhat fixed. “To be sure we’re all clear on what’s going to happen post-transect. We are going through the gate this afternoon, are we not?”
“Eleven hundred hours shiptime.” Executive Officer Townee’s opinion was easy to read, her thinned lips and scowl cues to all Humans in the room. Mac appreciated that clarity. There was something to be said about dealing with your own species.
But Humans, in so many ways, weren’t the issue. “We find congruence in Dr. Connor’s desire to meet at this time,” Ureif said, dipping his long head in Mac’s direction. “This is a critical juncture, Captain. To all here, our thanks for coming.”
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