Migration: Species Imperative #2

by Julie E. Czerneda

  Given they arrived at the lake to start with.

  “I’m ready,” Fourteen said, making that faint click of distress as Mac checked the tightness of his repeller belt for the third time. “I don’t plan to swim to across the lake,” he protested.

  Time to share her final worry. “This isn’t going to be like your last paddle, Fourteen,” explained Mac, pushing hair from one eye. “The wind’s gusty; waves are already white-capped. We could very well tip and that water is cold enough to put you back to sleep. This—” she patted the belt, “—will be all that stops you sinking like a rock.”

  “If I will be a hazard, Mac, you should leave me here.”

  They’d talked about this before, too. But the dawn had made its way into the kitchen through a ruined portion of the back door. While they’d slept—or more accurately passed out—sitting at the table, the little weasel had almost made its way inside. It wouldn’t take much for it to succeed.

  She wouldn’t have risked Fourteen before. Now, she couldn’t, not with the meaning of Emily’s message in his head.

  “I need you for ballast,” Mac said. Not altogether untrue . “Let’s go.”

  Pride had nothing to do with their progress from the cabin. More dizzy than not, Mac sat to skid down the steep sections, waiting for Fourteen to do the same. It had the added advantage of speed; although, she sighed inwardly when they reached level ground, there’d definitely be gravel to remove.

  Even the cove had turned ugly, slapping at the beach with crisscrossing waves. The sky was the next best thing to sullen. Mac could see a dark band of rain on the other side of the lake. Spring had an edge in the north the weather regulators left alone.

  “Wait here,” she shouted over the wind and splash. Fourteen leaned on his paddle in answer.

  The novice canoe—where they’d left it, but not how. Mac glared at the burned-edged holes along the hull. Doubtless the “rescue me” signal device was in need of more help than they were. Kay was thorough, she gave him that. Probably all the catering.

  Her canoe rested beside it, untouched. It didn’t have the toys of the novice, but she knew and trusted it. Mac reached down and flipped it over.

  The Trisulian came with it, a grimy mop of snapping claws that just missed catching hold of her face, but snagged in her shirt.

  So much for getting a good look at the thing. Eyestalk up and closed against the light, it curled like a scorpion over her chest, aiming an immense hornlike structure at her eyes. Mac couldn’t move, couldn’t raise her hands in time.

  Smack!

  The swing of a paddle blade in front of her nose freed Mac from the paralysis. She staggered back into someone’s arms, knocking him down as well. She landed in a smelly heap of upset Myg and Human, squirming around to try and see.

  Where was the damned weasel?

  Then she saw it, a pile of broken claws and hair, like so much storm wrack washed ashore. It gave a last twitch and was still.

  “What was that?” a horrified woman’s voice. How odd, Mac thought, clinging to Fourteen, that it wasn’t hers.

  “Rabid skunk,” a man replied in no uncertain terms. “First things first, Wendy. Help me get them up to the cabin.”

  It couldn’t be.

  Brain damage, Emily. That’s what it is. Mac thought this very clever.

  Until Oversight, in his familiar ill-fitting yellow rainsuit, leaned down and offered her his hand. “Hurry up, Norcoast. It’s going to rain.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Better. Thank you.”

  Mac cradled a mug of hot cocoa in her hands, her feet and legs tucked up beneath her in the big chair, and watched Charles Mudge III deftly apply a field dressing to a Myg. In her father’s cabin. On Little Misty Lake. Earth.

  And in case she doubted the veracity of her senses, she had only to look in a mirror to see the Trisulian blood drying on her face, splattered there when Oversight had—

  —had saved her life.

  “May I help you wash up, Mac?”

  She turned her eyes to Wendy’s anxious ones and lifted her cocoa a few millimeters. “Let me get this down first.” And have a chance of standing without falling over, Mac promised herself.

  Wendy nodded and sat in a neighboring chair. “Charlie’s amazing, isn’t he?” she said very quietly. “You should have seen him leap from the canoe, straight after that—” she hesitated.

  “Skunk,” Mac supplied helpfully. Charlie?

  “Right. Skunk. I didn’t know old guys could move like that.”

  By the slight stiffening of Oversight’s shoulders, he’d overheard Wendy’s comment. Mac smiled. “He’s not old,” she explained. “He just dresses that way.”

  This drew an indignant look. Mac lifted her mug again, this time in salute. “Welcome to Little Misty Lake, Oversight.”

  He made a noncommittal noise and went back to bandaging Fourteen’s hands.

  “We’ve contacted the authorities, Mac,” Wendy went on. She’d half carried Mac up the slope, then gone back to help Oversight with Fourteen, who’d been near collapse. Quietly competent, making no comment about the state of the cabin—or its occupants—she’d sent a call for help, found her way around the kitchen to make hot drinks and sandwiches, and located the first aid gear for Oversight. The kind of person who radiated comfort and competence. Mac was mutely grateful.

  Oversight, of course, was nothing of the sort. He finished with Fourteen, making sure the Myg was settled comfortably on the couch, then came over to glare down at Mac. “Authorities?” he barked. “Which ones will show up? Real police or your friends? You do realize it took every connection I had to get out of that ridiculous house arrest—”

  “They aren’t my—well, maybe some are,” Mac corrected herself. “Let’s hope it’s them, Oversight. Sit.” When he didn’t, she sighed. “Please. We have to talk before they arrive. Wendy—I’m sorry to ask, but would you go out on the porch and watch for the lev? That path will be a minor river by now. Whoever comes might need help finding their way up.”

  “Sure, Mac.” Wendy stood and shrugged on her coat. The wind was whipping rain against each wall of the cabin in turn from the sounds of it. The porch screens wouldn’t be much protection. There was a deep rumble of thunder as well.

  Oversight scowled and bent over Mac. “Hold still.” She did, scowling back at him. He gently tilted her face toward one of the lights in the room, thumbs easing open her eyelids. Mac winced. “You know you have a concussion,” this in a tone that implied she’d probably earned it.

  Diagnosis complete, he sat where Wendy had been, pulling the chair toward Mac’s until their knees almost touched. “At least we had the sense to beat the storm here. What were you thinking, trying to canoe in your condition?”

  Mac took a sip of cocoa, feeling it warm her throat. “As I remember, I was thinking I was about to die.”

  He harrumphed, as if she’d embarrassed him. “I admit, Norcoast, I wasn’t expecting to see a Trisulian male going for your head.”

  “You know what it was?” Mac was astonished.

  “Of course.” His round face creased in disapproval. “Didn’t you? I took my share of xeno at university. Jokes about those walking gonads have been a standby of frosh parties for years.”

  Was she the only Human who hadn’t studied aliens? Mac could hear Emily’s answer to that. “Yes, I knew what it was.” Then, because she hadn’t said it yet, she did. “Wendy’s right. You are fast for an old guy. Thank you, Oversight.”

  That look, the one saying he was set to be stubborn. “If you want to thank me, tell me what the hell’s going on. I was flying over the Trust, cataloging earthquake damage, and see the pods being towed. I try to find out where, and lo, your staff’s dispersed. You? Gone again without a word. Why?”

  “I had no reason to stay,” Mac ground out. “Norcoast’s suspended all research until the pods are reanchored at the mouth of the Tannu River and the main systems are running.”

  “And you le
t them get away with that?”

  Mac shrugged, her head instantly making her pay. “What should I have done, Oversight?” she asked wearily. “Chain myself to a pod?”

  From his expression, Oversight thought this a perfectly reasonable notion, but he didn’t pursue it. “At least your father had a good idea where you were this time,” he said with considerable satisfaction. Enjoying being a detective, Mac judged. There, Em, was a scary thought. “What are you doing here, Norcoast? With him?” a nod to Fourteen. “Like this?”

  “You deserve to know,” Mac agreed. She gazed at the man she’d fought with most of her professional career, over what they both loved. Funny, how clear that could make a relationship. “But be warned, Oversight. If I tell you—you’ll be caught in it too.”

  “I am already. You’re wasting time.” He steepled his pudgy fingers and leaned back in the chair, regarding her with a placid, already-bored look Mac didn’t believe for a second. “Get to the point, Norcoast.”

  Typical. Her lips twitched. “Fine. I’ve never been to the IU consulate, Oversight. Or New Zealand, for that matter. You were right. They were lies. I didn’t make them up, but I was ordered to live with them.”

  “By your friends in black.”

  “Who work for the Ministry of Extra-Sol Human Affairs. The Secretary General himself enlisted me. You’ve heard of the Dhryn.”

  Fingers waved dismissively, then returned to their positioning. “Implausible hysterics.”

  “The Dhryn are deadly,” Fourteen interjected, his eyes staying closed. “Everything you’ve heard about them in your news is true—and more. Idiot. The Chasm will be only the beginning of the devastation, unless they are stopped.”

  “He’s right.” Mac continued. “Last fall, a Dhryn—Brymn Las was his name—came to me at Norcoast. At that time, none of us—not even Brymn—knew the truth about his species.”

  “The media covered that—the first of his kind on Earth. I couldn’t believe you’d let him interrupt your work.”

  Mac smiled into her cocoa. “You know me pretty well, Oversight.” Her smile faded. “The Ministry asked me to help Brymn investigate some mysterious disappearances that seemed related.” Her hands shook and she took a moment to cover it by drinking from her mug. “They were. That’s when the trouble began.”

  “The incident at Base,” Mudge frowned. “More lies, I take it.”

  “Yes. It wasn’t sabotage or any ‘Earth-First’ protest. We were attacked by the Myrokynay, the Ro.” Mac shifted into lecture mode. Easier that way. “No one alive knew they still existed except the Dhryn, who feared them. We—experts believe the Ro invented the transects in the first place, thousands of years before the Sinzi found the remnants of their technology in the Hift System.”

  “I know all that.”

  “What you don’t know is that the Ro watched the Dhryn destroy the Chasm worlds. They’ve been hiding ever since, waiting for the Dhryn to stir again. To stop them.”

  “So they’re the good guys.”

  Mac raised her eyes to his. Whatever he read there made him add: “Or not.”

  “The Ro’s methods,” Fourteen said for Mac, “are repugnant by the standards of cultures like yours and mine. They wanted Mac and her Dhryn companion to flee Earth, so they attacked the salmon research station with no regard for life. They used Mac to locate the Dhryn Progenitors, in order to attack them without warning. Even now, they use members of other species as their agents, altering their bodies with no-space technology.”

  “Including Em—Emily Mamani,” Mac continued, finding her voice again. “She went with the Ro, to help them stop the Dhryn. To—to push me in the direction they wanted. She hasn’t come back. Not yet. The rest—” she reached out with her mug blindly, trying to find a place for it. Mudge took it from her hand. “—Brymn thought I was in danger from the Ro, so he took me with him to his home world. Yes,” Mac said, fully understanding the stunned look on Mudge’s face, “I abandoned my research and went offworld. Amazing what a little carnage and kidnapping can do to a person.

  “As a result,” she finished, “I now speak and read Dhryn better than any Human language—and, I’m told, better than any other Human. So far as I know, I’ve spent more time with Dhryn than any other non-Dhryn being. I’ve even been semiadopted, I guess you could call it, as a Dhryn. All in time for the Dhryn, for my dear friend Brymn Las, to be revealed as the greatest threat civilization has ever faced.” She showed him the remaining fingers of her new arm. “Did I mention surviving a Dhryn attack? And helping kill my friend?”

  Mudge didn’t say a word, staring at her as if she’d changed into something he couldn’t recognize anymore.

  She knew the feeling. Mac patted Oversight’s knee. “Oh, it gets better. Our walk in the Trust the other day? A chance for Emily and the Ro to slip me a message that only Fourteen here has been able to translate. That earthquake? Deliberate. Someone, and I don’t know who yet, making sure the Ro landing site wasn’t explored by you, or I, or anyone else. And this?” Mac waved at Fourteen and gestured to her own cap of dried blood and first-aid patches. “One of the side effects of a threat to members of the Interspecies Union. Which does, you see, include us.”

  “You’ll come with us, now, Dr. Connor.”

  Mac turned her head slowly, completely unsurprised to see the cabin porch filled with rain slicked black-visored troops, three more coming in the door, all with weapons not quite not aimed their way.

  “Welcome to my world, Oversight,” she told him.

  “A sight to warm the hearts, Lamisah . . .”

  Mac nodded. She didn’t move, letting puppy-sized oomlings explore her lap and arms. Their white down quivered as they cooed to her, the sound itself low and soothing. Tiny hands, six from each, stroked her clothing, patted her cheeks, investigated her eyelashes. Each touch was feather soft.

  They hadn’t touched her.

  “Our future . . .”

  The cooing grew louder, gained an undersound that raised hairs on her skin, intensified her emotion. It came from everywhere around her, though there was nothing but precious, vulnerable oomlings as far as she could see, all reaching their tiny hands to her over the low walls of their pens.

  But she’d only glimpsed the crèche from above.

  “We haven’t time to waste . . .”

  Shadows passed overhead. The first green drops fell at a distance. The oomlings beneath cried out and crowded together, but there was no escape.

  No. They weren’t trying to escape. They were raising their faces, opening their rosebud mouths, calling eagerly for their share.

  It hadn’t been like this.

  All but the ones in Mac’s lap. They were changing—their down falling away from pulsating transparent flesh, their shape lost, eyes vanishing. They were rising from her hands into the air . . .

  She screamed as drops fell from mouths that insisted, in their sweet cooing voices: “We told you to go, Lamisah. We warned you. Didn’t we?”

  The ground beneath shook as the Progenitor laughed . . .

  “Promise to let me know the next time you feel so much as drowsy,” Oversight warned Mac in no uncertain terms. “I’ll sit with someone else.”

  “There isn’t anyone else,” she pointed out.

  He couldn’t argue, since they were alone in the rear compartment of a large transport lev. There had been three crowding the storm-tossed cove. Another had taken Fourteen. Mac presumed the third had been courteous enough to return Wendy Carlson to the Little Misty Lake General Store, where she’d have an interesting, if mysterious, tale to relate to Cat and Russell. A tale doubtless provided by one of their companions in black.

  One day, Mac swore to herself, she was going to park herself on the dock, shoo away the pelican, and tell the truth to everyone who stopped or paddled by. Her head dropped back against the seat. Maybe she should tell the pelican, too. She wished she’d washed her face. The dried blood was itchy.

  Mudge’s movements disturbed he
r. “Can’t you sit still for two minutes?” Mac complained.

  He finished unbuckling his safety harness and turned to face her. Without asking, he grabbed her chin and tilted her face upward, checking her eyes again. “We’ve been in this thing over an hour. You need medical help.”

  Mac pushed his hand away. “I need sleep,” she muttered irritably. “You keep waking me up.”

  “You keep screaming,” he countered. “What do you expect?” Mudge stood, presumably to storm the door to the pilot’s compartment where the large persons in black armor traveled—persons who’d refused to say anything more than “hurry” and “now.” Mac caught his arm.

  “Don’t bother, Oversight. I’ll be fine.” He didn’t look convinced. She was touched by his concern, but tugged a little harder. “Sit. I promise to do my best to stay awake until we get there. No more screaming.”

  He gave the sealed door another look, then sighed and sat down. Probably remembering the “large” and “armored” part of their hosts. “Get where?”

  “Where?” Stealth vehicle with the latest tech or not, the lev vibrated in a way that didn’t help her head. “Last time, Oversight,” she managed to say, “I ended up in orbit.”

  Rather than alarmed, Mudge looked intrigued. “Really?”

  It didn’t help her stomach either. “Really.” Mac leaned back and closed her eyes, pressing her lips together and breathing lightly through her nose.

  He didn’t take the hint. “I’ve a pilot’s license, you know.”

  Ye gods. Oversight doing small talk. “Really.”

  “Really.” Definite smugness to his tone. “My brother, Jeremy, designs golf courses. Travels more than a diplomat. Before I joined the Oversight Committee, I’d copilot his jumper. Racked up enough transect passages to go commercial, if I’d wanted.”

  Mac cracked open one eye to stare at Mudge. “You?” Realizing how this sounded about the same instant he drew an offended breath, she opened both eyes and added: “You seem so focused on Earth.”

  He seemed mollified. “I can understand why you’d get that impression, Norcoast. Certainly, the Trust has been my mission in life these past years. But I was first and foremost an explorer in my early days. Quite miss it, at times.”