The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  Why there…?

  Telepathy made him nervous. He twitched. “He kept you in case of trouble. If they came after us somehow. We won’t be there long.”

  Why did you…?

  He jittered, moving toward the door. “I don’t know. I was a physician once. I learned some things too well to forget. Like relieving pain. You hurt. You’re going to die, I know that, it could be easier. I don’t know if I can come back again. Don’t tell him I did this. Please!”

  Him…? She formed a picture of the red-haired man. The medic shuddered and was gone.

  Heat not cold, fever not pain. On the whole a better set of problems. What fever? Could be anything. Reconstructed my blood, who knows what’s got in?

  The pain was easy to manage now, though she staggered when she got up because her head floated. She tried moving as if in free fall, but that didn’t work. She kept lurching against walls no matter what she tried. She gathered up the rags of her clothing and made knots in them and put on the result. A glint caught her eye in the dim light: a gold chain, broken on the floor. The opal was gone. The other chain was still around her neck, unbreakable. They had tried to break it; the skin under it was tender.

  She drank water, a lot of water; the thirst was worse than before. Then she sat down on the floor again. The heat and the fever were nothing. The pain was in abeyance, and that was all that mattered; she could anesthetize herself before whatever the medic had given her dissipated.

  And then? They would think her helpless. She would not be helpless. At the first sign of a chance she would act. As she had not acted on the Far-Flying Bird. They had waited, she and Rubee and Awnlee, civilized, rational, for an optimal opportunity. And so Rubee and Awnlee had died. It was necessary to forget about the civilized. There was no place for it out here.

  She put herself into trance easily. The fever helped.

  “Getting bored,” Shen’s voice said from Michael’s left wrist. “Every hour, every half hour, kid says—” her voice rose to a whine, “‘Can I go out?’ Theo’s gonna start doping pretty soon. How much longer?”

  “You ask me that every hour, every half hour. ‘How much longer, Mike?’”

  He tried to imitate the whine, with fair success. Shen snorted. He added, “Long as it takes. Stay there. I could need you fast.”

  “Know that.”

  “All right. Check in again—when you’re bored.”

  Shen signed off, grumbling. He leaned back against a rusty rock, bundled against the cold of an autumn night outside the City of the Rose, and stared into the darkness.

  He was bored, too, and perpetually cold. A week ago he had had all the warehoused beauties put aboard GeeGee—from motives of pure malice. Hope I see his face when he finds out it’s gone. GeeGee lay behind another pile of rocks at the horizon, far enough away, he devoutly hoped, to be missed unless B made a detailed scan of the region before coming in to land. Michael meanwhile lived in the rocks outside the warehouse like a rat, never really warm, as close as he could get to B’s customary landing site. Michael gambled B would use it again. His plan was simple: to stun everybody in sight as soon as B appeared, get him onto GeeGee, and run like hell. Subtlety was not the way to deal with B.

  He scanned the sky once more with goggles adjusted for infrared. Nothing. The sky had been empty all week. The planet’s single dim pocket-size moon was below the horizon. The sky was clear and stars spilled across it like sand.

  He pulled up an all-season tarp to cover his mouth and got ready for another uncomfortable night. He did not sleep well with rock for bed and pillow. For the sixth night running he slipped into the same interminable half-dream that was also half-waking, so that he could think oh no not again; slipped back through the chain of years on Valentine, back to Alta, inexorably back. It was like watching history run in reverse. He had to go through the part with B at the center all over again: the empty smile, the soul-killing, inescapable demands. Back: the night spared him none of it: flames and death and the agony of his shattered hands. You’ll carry no more messages, boy. Then memory ended and he stood on the edge of a void. Maybe there had been happiness there, but he did not know; would never know, without B.

  The transmitter on his wrist burped and pricked the skin, hard. It was the signal he waited for.

  He kicked away the tarp and grabbed the goggles. He had been sweating, and the icy air bit his face. I’m ready to sell out the whole operation for a hot bath, he thought, but he watched the spot of heat come in from high in the south. One fast coded answer to Shen and then silence, prearranged. He pulled the stunner, tested its weight in his gloved right hand, and crouched behind the rock, waiting.

  It had grown easier, with the years, to become a machine. That was one of the pitfalls on the path of the Adept, the teachers said. It was easier not to feel, not to cry, not to rage. It was easier to turn aside from rejoicing. The disciplines were seductive to certain spirits, and Hanna might be one of them. It came too easily to her. She was very good.

  Burning with fever and caged in ice she felt nothing. She held her broken bones upright and monitored the pain as if she watched a visible gauge. The pain was separate from her. No time passed. It was always the present moment. The sick life of the Avalon was visible to her as if she watched a play, though she did not use her eyes. Castillo was an empty black hole in which the commonest thoughts turned into things that crawled, more alien and more terrifying than any animal or sentient being she had known. She acknowledged the fact and filed it away without emotion. Gaaf the medic twitched inside all the time. He thought of Hanna with misery. The big blond man, Wales, wondered why he had wanted to take her, ugly from the beating as she was; he must have been too long in space. The one called Suarez thought with ordinary pleasure of someday going home, and what he had done to Hanna was a footnote to memory. Juel who had beaten her slept heavily. He always did after something like that. The release would relax him for days. She had no names for the other two. One was impatient: Get the rest of it and get Outside, get paid, head for Valentine, spend it all. God, how I want to get drunk. The other thought: That might have been too much. But they were only aliens. And a D’neeran. So what?

  No time passed for Hanna, but she watched time shrink in their perception as they came close to their destination. Revenge. The Rose. There was a great stir of landfall and night. They stopped thinking of her. But soon they would come to kill her, said the voice of pure reason. The landing pods screamed through the hull, and she saw or imagined there was dust blowing, rocks flying. The ship was down. The scream fell to an at-ready hum. Men went out.

  She monitored, distantly, consternation and rage. Something was gone. That did not matter. What mattered was that someone thought of her. There was a use for her, a last use before she died. They would take her into the open. That was good.

  When Juel came for her, she walked passively through the Avalon with the muzzle of a disruptor jammed into her back. He would have to be induced to move the muzzle. But it stayed against her skin and stayed there when they stopped. They had come to a lock in the side of the Avalon, open to the night. A short ramp led to the ground.

  She looked straight ahead into the night. There were presences.

  Castillo: “Look at this. Look at her. This is what your wives and daughters will look like when we get done.”

  From the ground, a shadow just starting to be afraid. “I tell you the truth. We did not touch the things. There are others on this world. I do not know what they did with your goods. I do not know!”

  In the darkness at her left, another presence, silent, invisible to eyes. Watching with animal alertness.

  Slowly she turned her head and looked into the dark at the tail of the ship. She said clearly, “Who is that?”

  The muzzle of the disruptor shifted away from her. Remotely, in no-time, she twisted and turned. Her left hand hard as a steel blade caught Juel on the side of the neck; her right had the disruptor and fired and he fell. In no-time she turned it on C
astillo—and jerked at a jolt of stun from the shadows at her back. She staggered down the ramp. In trance she could even fight stun, a little, for a while. The Castillo-target was gone. Running feet came toward her from somewhere and she swung the disruptor toward them, but it weighed more now than herself. Another wave of stun: the end. She did not get off another shot.

  * * *

  The ice of Revenge was in his veins, holding back the fury. He kicked the dead man aside, useless meat, whatever he knew was locked in the dead brain forever. The woman was another matter. He thumbed the emergency summons for GeeGee and pulled the woman away from the storm of coming liftoff, counting on darkness and luck and surprise. He threw her down behind rock and ducked just before light split the darkness where his head had been. The light quested, found its range, and began to melt away the rock. He measured the distance to the next one. Might make it. The high-pitched howl of GeeGee moving fast in atmosphere filled the night. The killing light blinked out; the ship without a name took off with a roar.

  He forgot it instantly. His blood had turned to liquid fire. He knelt by the woman and got his hand on a light; it shook. His ears rang and he instructed himself: I must not kill her. I must not. The light swung wildly and settled on her face. Crouching in the darkness, watching the shadowplay at the lighted lock, he had thought her skin strangely mottled. The mottling was as fine a selection of bruises as he had ever seen. Somebody didn’t like her much.

  Shen was out of GeeGee before the ship was fully down, running and yelling. “Goddammit, answer! You all right?”

  “Yeah.” He touched the battered face with itching fingers. He said, “He got away because of her.”

  Shen stopped at his side and said with interest, “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, but I hope it can talk.”

  The body stirred a little; eyes gleamed through swollen slits.

  “You can talk, can’t you, yes you can,” he said.

  “Later,” said Shen, but he did not hear her. The fury came out of its cavern and he lifted a hand high, all his strength gathered to strike. Another movement caught his eye and he stopped because it might mean threat. Lise stood on the edge of the light and they stared at each other. Her chin lifted and she took one small, perceptible step backward. Away from him.

  He let his hand fall, got control of his voice, and said, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  She said nothing. She kept looking at him with bright blue eyes, betrayed. Then she melted into the darkness, back toward the Golden Girl.

  Michael did not move. Shen knelt beside him and waited, silent and stony. The noise in his ears died away with the rage. He was sick and exhausted and his head throbbed.

  Shen said finally, “Cold out here. Turning blue.” She pointed at the body on the ground.

  “Yeah. We have to go. He thinks GeeGee’s armed, I guess. If he comes back shooting, we’re in trouble.”

  He felt a violent aversion to picking up the stranger. When he did, it was worse; she was too light, too limp, too helpless. When he reached the Golden Girl, it was a relief to hand her over to Theo.

  * * *

  It was night on GeeGee, adjusted to the cycle of the City of the Rose. The gentle light in Central Control was made for amusing conversations, leisurely journeys in luxury. He appreciated it. He never stopped appreciating it. Lise was tucked into her place against the wall. He tried to talk to her, I would never hit you, I would never do that to you, but he got only silence in return. Lise had learned early what kinds of evidence to trust.

  First things first. He took GeeGee into space and made the first Jump on a common route chosen at random so that for all practical purposes they were unfindable. When that was done, Shen said economically, “Well?”

  “Wait a minute…” He leaned back, soaking up warmth, sorting out what had happened, getting used to the idea that there were no more reasons to hurry.

  “There was a lot going on out there,” he said. “They landed without spotting me. A couple of them came out. They were starboard-on to me and they opened up portside. The ship was between me and the warehouse and I couldn’t see what was happening. I worked my way around behind the rocks. Took the last hundred meters without cover. Good thing they came in at night. There was a lot of coming and going. They’d found out about the warehouse. One of them took off into town and came back with one of the elders, Rann, I think. Poor old Rann. What happened to him, anyway? Think he’s all right?”

  “See his body?”

  “Good point. I was at the tail and coming up along the side by then. B was talking to Rann, accusing him of taking the stuff. Then they brought that woman out. Who the hell is she, anyway? I got in range and I was ready and she told them I was there. I swear I hadn’t made a sound. She was standing in the light and it was pitch dark where I was.”

  He hesitated, replaying the blur of violence. He said slowly, “There was another one holding a disruptor on her. She got it away from him and killed him. I was starting to fire at B. But she was going to kill him. So I stunned her first. It was that close.” He held up two fingers close together. “And while I was doing that, B jumped back in the ship. And then she almost got me before I stunned her again. Shen, there’s something wrong with the power pack in that gun. I shouldn’t have had to hit her twice.”

  Shen said, “Recruit her.”

  “One of his monsters? You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Shen shrugged. Michael got up and said, “I’m going to go see if Theo’s got her up to talking.”

  “Need help?”

  “Maybe later. Somebody’d better stay here for a while.”

  He had not told Theo where to take the woman. There was a medlab on GeeGee, as sophisticated as everything else on this ship. He went there first; when he opened the door the equipment hummed at him, but no one was there. He went to the two unoccupied staterooms, to Theo’s room, and to the smaller quarters over the engineering section before he decided that he should have asked GeeGee in the first place where Theo had gone. Now there were not many places left, and he went to his own cabin with some indignation.

  He went in and said bitterly, “What’s she doing here? Bleeding on my bed.”

  “It was the first one I got to,” Theo said simply. He stood by the bed and peered at a reader in his hand, scowling. A scanner pointed at the woman’s right side, looking more deadly than helpful. A tube in her left arm snaked across the bed and out of sight. Half a dozen metal cases of varying sizes littered the bed, some talking quietly to themselves. Theo had cut away what passed for the woman’s clothes. The bruises ran into one another, except in one place. Michael said, “Nice of them to leave her jaw alone,” and the body twitched for the first time, startling him. He said, “Can she talk yet?”

  “No.”

  “How long?”

  Theo looked up and shook his head. His eyes were watchful. Michael cocked his head and said, “You can’t talk either?”

  Theo said in an odd voice, “Maybe in a few days.”

  “You can do better than that.”

  Theo braced himself. “Her temperature’s forty-two-point-four. That’s critical. She’s got broken bones. She’s dehydrated and I don’t know how long it’s been since she had any nourishment. She might be dying.”

  “There’s heavy life support in the lab.”

  “I don’t know how to use it. I never got that far with the courses. You know that.”

  “Then I want you to wake her up now. I can’t talk to her if she’s dead.”

  “If I juice her nervous system now, she could be dead in an hour.”

  The reader trembled in Theo’s hand. Michael said experimentally, “I’m going to talk to her. That’s what I want. Wake her up and the hell with it.”

  “No,” said Theo. It was barely audible.

  After a while Michael sat down on the bed and rummaged in one of the metal cases. He found a pouch and opened it and took out the saturated pad inside. He began s
wabbing the woman’s bruised face. “I liked you better when you were a worm,” he said.

  Theo took a deep breath. He started talking, not quite in a normal voice. “She’s got Dawkins’ fever. I don’t know how she could, but she does. She’s got two broken ribs. I’ll have to go in. I’ll need your help. Shen’s, too, probably.”

  “Blood all over my bed.”

  “There won’t be much blood. That’s the other thing, her blood. I can’t make any sense out of it. I’ll have to take some to the lab where there’s more to work with. Somebody has to stay with her.”

  “All right. I will.”

  Theo was silent for so long that Michael finally looked up. He said, “What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s just—look at her. Think she got that way falling downstairs?”

  “I won’t hurt her,” Michael said, shocked.

  Theo said, “You haven’t been yourself lately.”

  “So tell me something new—” He waited a minute to make sure his voice would be steady. “Consider me under orders. Just tell me what to do.”

  Theo looked into his eyes and relaxed. He said, “Keep doing what you’re doing. Stay away from the right side. I don’t want accelerated healing there till I’ve done the bones. Don’t worry if she wakes up. There’s no pain in the side, I took care of that, and what you’re doing will block out the rest.” He started out with a vial of something red in his hand. At the door he said over his shoulder, as an afterthought, “I think she might have been raped, too.”

  When Theo was gone the room was quiet, except for the boxes talking to each other. Michael touched the woman’s side; the flesh had a spongy feel. How could he ever have thought of beating her? She wouldn’t be the first terrorized innocent to escape from B.

  The full impact of the possibility hit him; he dropped the swab and was still. When some time had passed, quite a lot of time, he felt heat under his hand. He looked at it and saw that it was cupped about the woman’s cheek. Her skin was on fire.

  He found a fresh swab and went on with the job very gently. When he touched her thighs, her eyes opened and she made the first sound of protest he had heard.