Part 2 (1/2)

The smoothness of the skimmer's flight was interrupted by an abrupt rise, then a fall, then a series of shudders. In Tsia's mind, the whine of the skimmer's motors translated into a soft yowl. Unconsciously, she projected the sound through her biogate. The catspeak in the back of her head sharpened until the hairs on the back of her neck bristled. She forced her pulse to slow until it no longer deafened her thoughts, and the feline' din subsided. The sensation of wind in her-their-fur became the stroking of Wren's hand on her arm. 'Like a lantern that moved to a distance, the mental voices of the cats no longer blinded her; instead, they merely filled the corners of her mind with a dull and rumbling purr.

Forrest heard this same type of noise in his head, she thought-not that of the cats, but the energies of the world, echoed into his mind from his own biogate. Wren, who sat beside her, knew her only through time. But Forrest-he understood the wildness of her heart. Her lips stretched in a faint, bitter smile. What Wren called intimacy, she described as the recognition of each one in the other. What Wren called love, she named their need to touch each other through their biogates. Love? Perhaps. But if it was, it would not be she who admitted it.

Wren followed her gaze to the slender hands that rubbed absently at her wrists. Her fingers were lean and strong and without ornament, except for a thin scar that ran across the back of one hand, and some faint puncture marks on the other. The wrists she rubbed were medium-boned and taut with long-used muscles. Forrest had held those wrists, Wren thought. Forrest had shared not just her biogate but her body, and that for almost ten years. It was an interesting match. Wren had not thought her able, with her wildness, to be heyita so long with one man. He smiled to himself. Somehow, the word for ”bed-mate” in the mere tongue seemed more honest than it did in any other. 'Too bad,” he said slyly, ”that Forrest didn't take the same contract you did. You'll miss him out at Broken Tree.”

”You sure it's not you who'll miss me at the Hollows?” she retorted.

Wren merely widened his smile. ”You and he touch as if you've been bonded for decades.”

She glanced down at her hands, and only then realized that she was rubbing her wrists. Abruptly, she stilled her fingers. Her lips thinned to a stubborn, set line. ”We are not making the bond.”

”Don't see why not,” he returned. ”You and he are ava, after all. You've shared together your intimacies -perhaps even what you call your love. It is not as if you are merely avya- bound by loyalty or need.”

”Like us?” she retorted.

He shrugged. ”I am your shok saadaa bhai-your brother in sadness; your brother in grief.”

”Brother? Hah. I took the guide virus ten years ago, Wren. I think differently now-I feel differently from you. And if you look at the guide-guild registers, we're not even the same species anymore. You can hardly call yourself my family.”

”You think the mutations from those viruses left you closer to your sister than to me?”

His words struck her like a fist, and her lips tightened to a thin line.

Wren noted her expression and lowered his voice still further. ”You love Forrest like an ava, but you won't make the bond. And why? Because of a sister you haven't seen in six years. Because of a woman who abandoned you for the docking hammers in s.p.a.ce. You throw away the chance of a bond because you waste your love on the ragged ideal of a family that doesn't exist.” His gray eyes sparked with cold light. ”When will you figure it out, Feather? When will you learn to let go?”

”When I'm dead,” she muttered.

”You've been dead before, Feather, and it changed nothing. Of course, that was when you were heyta,” he admitted softly, using the mere word for ”slave.” He nodded at the hands that still nervously rubbed at her wrists, as if she could still feel the chains that had once hung from her flesh. ”But you weren't dead only to the node, but to your guild. Now you're dead to your sister, too, but this is by her choice.” He eyed her closed expression. ”h.e.l.l, Feather, the guild guides are closer to you than your sister is-and at least the guides give you a feeling of danger. Your sister gives you nothing. You'd do better to keep your eyes open to your present, and forget about your past.”

Her lips tightened. The guides were a constant fear, but old; her sister was still sharp in her mind. Every time she smelled a certain flower, she thought of her sister's perfume. Every time she unpacked a crate, she almost sensed Shjams's hands on the customs labels. She swallowed the memories and forced herself to give Wren a deliberate shrug. ”The guides are more in my past than my sister is-and I've been dead to the guide guild for ten years. It's not as if they still actively search for me.”

”It takes only one sloppy trace, Feather, and you know it.” His voice was sharp and harsh in spite of its low tone. ”One loose line in the node, one image that isn't crystal-sharp and silk-tight, one public node ED from anyone-including a search trace sent to your sister-and the guides would glom on to your ID like a slug on a Risthmus rhubarb. They'd strip your biogate away as fast as they could get a skimmer skyside- with you strapped inside. You'd be a naught-a guide without a gate. Or worse: a wipe.” He stared at her face as if his cold, gray gaze alone could pound the words into her head. ”So don't give me that garbage about hanging on to family, Feather. It's family that will kill you dead. Not ghost-dead- not just cut off from the node or controlled by someone else. I mean blood-dead-ragat ka'eo. Dead like a corpse in a hundred-year grave.”

She glanced warningly toward the other meres, but Wren did not s.h.i.+ft his piercing gaze. The tiny lines that sprayed out from her eyes... the scars that reached from temple line to jaw... they were cat marks. Claw marks-the sign of her biogate. She reveled in that mental link-she couldn't hide that from him. She talked without fear, as if she rejected the threat of the guide guild, but she could not keep the dread from her eyes. The biogate was her life. Without it, she had no future, no life she wished to live. Even now, the felines were close in her mind, thick with the catspeak that clung to her thoughts like a shroud. As for his own voice, she heard him only as a sharpness among the growling din that seeped in through her biogate. He pressed his fingers against her slender, toughened hands as if he could somehow feel the wildness that pulsed within. As if he could put his fingers on her life force-or as though the stubborn hope she still held for her future was something tangible-so that by reaching for her, he could touch what he himself had mislaid.

Absently, he rubbed at his own thick wrists. The sleeves of his blunter hid the white rings that marked his own flesh, but the thirty-four years he had spent in the mines were still as sharp and clear in his mind as if they were his present. What was that saying she had told him? Once a ghost, never unspir-ited... His eyes flicked to the other meres in the cabin. He and Feather-they were the lucky ones. Most ghosts were erased from the node so completely that they had no chance again of ever imaging a command, even on an open line. Or they were wiped, so that they had no memories or personality of their own. Some survived on the grayscale-as slaves, or worse. Some became blackjack. And some, like Tsia and himself, killed to regain their freedom and so crossed the border of the law. They lived without the illegal protection of blackjack and outside the sanction of the s.h.i.+elds.

He stared at Tsia's tanned, scarred face. They were much alike, he thought. Caught between the s.h.i.+elds and blackjack by the threat of their pasts. Caught between the law and the lawless... They hung like paper shapes on a string, suspended between two fires. They twisted eternally, trying to escape the flames of their histories, while the wind that breathed its hope between them tore at their flimsy holds.

He glanced at his brutal, meaty hands, then at her lean and weathered fingers, still digging through the soft. So similar, he thought. So very much alike. He almost smiled.

Some s.h.i.+ft in his biofield caught at Tsia's attention, and she glanced up. For a long moment, their eyes met in silent understanding. Then the skimmer lurched, and the pilot cursed, and Tsia turned away.

The s.h.i.+p pierced the second storm system like a gravdiver in a low-gee tube with a high-gee boost behind him. The short-range view of the skimmer, fed only by the snip's sensors, flared up in the holotank and boiled with ghostly colored streams and coils. Instantly, the skimmer dropped, twisted, and spiked back up before Nitpicker got it under control. Tsia's knuckles whitened against the drab shades of the soft.

”Dammit, Estine,” Nitpicker said sharply. ”Keep everything under thirty kph out of the tank. I can't read that kind of garbage.”

”I'm trying,” he returned in a low voice.

”What do you mean, 'trying'?” Nitpicker's voice was as low as his.

The tightness with which they spoke did not escape Tsia, and she leaned forward unconsciously, as if she would be able to see from her seat what they stared at on their panels.

Estine1 hesitated. ”It's as if there's a node line coming in from somewhere else,” he said slowly. ”A line that's force-feeding us information. I can't keep all of it out of the nav-tank.”

The pilot's voice was suddenly chillingly intense. ”You think someone's tapped the s.h.i.+p?”

Tsia's biogate-heightened senses brought the pilot's voice clearly to her ears, and she eyed the holotank more sharply. In front, the copilot's brow furrowed as he tried to image a command through his own silent temple link. ”I've got nothing on my link,” he returned. 'There's no trace of a line in the s.h.i.+p's sensors.”

”If blackjack's behind the node going down-or if they're blocking our links, our sensors could be caught up in the same web of traces that's swamping the navtank with garbage.”

”You can find nothing, yourself?”

”Nothing.” Nitpicker's hands flashed across the panels almost in time to his. Slowly, the holotank cleared until only the major ribbons of wind flowed through. As she tried to match the feel of the s.h.i.+p to her body with the view she saw in the navtank, Nitpicker frowned. ”Nothing,” she repeated, more to herself than to him. ”But if there was a trace line tagging our sensors and feeding us a ghost web of data, it's either gone now, or so deep in the datacubes that it would take a line-runner a week to find it.”

Estine glanced over his shoulder. ”The guide's a terrain artist, isn't she? Put her to tracing it out.”

Nitpicker did not bother to follow his glance. ”A terrain artist 'paints' images into the node to hide our movements from the node's sensors. She doesn't have to be good at finding false images. Or at filtering through the false scans of a ghost web.” She watched the holotank from the corner of her eye as she adjusted the skimmer's yaw. She hesitated, and Tsia could almost feel the tension that grew in the set of the pilot's shoulders, as if a sudden thought had just bitten at her mind. ”No,” Nitpicker said quietly. ”If there's a ghost web hidden in these trace lines, don't trust it to Feather to find.”

The old saying rose in Tsia's head: Once a guide, twice un-trusted ... As if the virus that made her a guide had stolen half her human self and left her less than a beast.

”I heard she was as good a line-runner as you are.”

”Better,” the pilot admitted, her voice still low. ”She can run a ghost line as tight as a deep-pressure nail. But she's only half as good at tracing and breaking someone else's web as she is at building her own. Better to put Kurvan on it when he joins us on the platform.”

”Kurvan-the line-runner from DemyanT She nodded.

The skimmer lurched, and Tsia's stomach tightened. ”Wren”-she forced his name out from between stiff lips-”I thought Kurvan was working the Noose.”

”The s.h.i.+eld ring around the Gwaeth system?” The gray-eyed mere gave her a sharp look. ”Not for the last year. He's been signed onto this contract for six months-ever since it came open. Said no line-runner worth his credit pa.s.sed up a chance to code a set of biochips.”

The skimmer slammed sideways, then dropped sickeningly before Nitpicker caught it in the wind. Tsia's lips bared as if she would snarl. ”He might as well stay skyside now,” she said, forcing the words out. ”If the node doesn't come back up, he'll have game days for his entire contract. And as high as his tech rating is, the freepicks won't have to pay a tenth of his bill.”

”It's a short contract-only a month to set up the security webs for the freepicks to receive the chips. Node can't stay down the whole time.”

”Why not? Blackjack could be behind it, just waiting for the biochips to come within reach.”

He shrugged. ”Kurvan's one of the best line-runners in the business. If there's a problem from blackjack, he'll find it-no matter who's running the ghosts.”

Tsia opened her mouth to respond, but she stilled instead. Her temple link seemed to sputter in her head. ”Wren-” she said sharply.

Up front, the ghost images of the navtank thickened, darkened, and expanded rapidly into faint gray clouds; the holographic sky suddenly hung like boiling smoke. The sum, silver shape of the skimmer sharpened until it sped cleanly through the storm fronts. In the lower edge of the tank, gray images of ocean swelled and moved. And in one corner, a yellow glow showed their objective: the marine station ten kays from the coast.

A faint mental image sounded a tone in the back of Tsia's mind. It was a standby tone, created by a biochemical signal. But it triggered a trained memory. She keyed into the line of thought that flowed out of the memory. Instantly, an image spun out from her mind and into the temple link. The node read her signal. In response, a hundred biochemical sequences flashed back. Random memories were triggered in flashes so fast she could not follow them to make sense of their order. ”Wren, the node-”

”Felt it.” Wren's eyes were already closed in concentration.

From up front, Nitpicker called out, ”I've got chatter on the lines.”