Part 11 (1/2)
”Yes-” If Daya gave her strength, she could hold him.
Doetzier pressed himself against the far arm of his soft. ”If a man is afraid of the teeth of a cat, he'd better not let go of the tail.”
”The guide guild,” she gasped, ”gives us some protection.”
”You're no longer of the guild.”
”You noticed?” she snapped back. ”Then think of the Landing Pact and pray.”
Ruka's face was a blurred and snarling vision. Tsia's hands were full, buried in writhing fur. When Doetzier slipped his jacket across her lap, she wriggled it down her legs only to have Ruka's claws hook the fabric and drag it down around her ankles. ”Take this wing out fast,” she snapped at the pilot. ”I won't last three minutes like this.”
”Then we'll make sh.o.r.e in two and a half.” Nitpicker set the sequence for manual liftoff. ”Bowdie, hit the navtank. Let's spike this s.h.i.+p out like a beam from a laze.”
His hands flashed from one set of controls to the next. ”Gyros on,” he reported as the screens before him displayed the skimmer in prep. ”Vents cleared. Sh.o.r.e's in the tank now-”
”Sh.o.r.e?” Kurvan's voice was sharp from the rear of the cabin. ”I thought we were getting rid of the cat at the freepick stake.”
Tsia barely turned her head over her shoulder to answer. ”He'd never find his family from there-” Her voice cut off abruptly as something from the node flickered through her mind. Like a whisper heard in pa.s.sing, like an image caught with the corner of her eye, she lost the flicker before she recognized it. But Ruka felt her hesitation and jerked against her grip. ”Sleem take you,” she gasped as she yanked him back against her legs.
Up front, Nitpicker did not seem to have noticed the flicker in the node. No one else said anything; Kurvan's eyes were still narrowed from Tsia's tone. She didn't care. At the moment, with the cub clawing the floor to fight her grip on his scruff, Kurvan was not her concern.
”Launch ring cleared,” Bowdie said tersely.
”Locations mapping now,” said Nitpicker as the lower half of the holotank flared into a dim display of the platform and sea.
”Thrusters on.” Bowdie talked right over the pilot. He knew she would hear him even as she reported her own control status, just as he listened while he talked himself.
”Resetting,” she returned.
”Flap configuration verified.”
”Sensors coming in now.” In seconds, the onboard sensors read the wind power from the skin of the small s.h.i.+p and poured the data into the top half of the navtank. Wind speed and shear became swirls and corkscrews of color. The sea remained calm and gray.
”Cabin decoupled. Stay on manual?”
”Yes. Keep the safeties off. And disable the bodychecks,” she added sharply. Each soft was configured to its pa.s.senger, so that the stretch pads could shape to each flier and slow his deceleration more. But no one was sitting still enough for a bodycheck. Doetzier and Striker had both crawled twice from one soft to the next. Wren had not yet sat down, and Tsia, with the cub between her legs, was not likely to stay seated at all.
Bowdie stretched his long fingers across his screens. ”Bodychecks disabled.”
”Flight status cleared.”
”Give me a lock on direction?”
Nitpicker flicked her fingers across the panels. Colors s.h.i.+fted, and columns of data flashed, then disappeared. ”The plan is in the can.”
”Got it. Launch when ready.”
The skimmer rose off the deck with a painful shudder. Power flowed along its sail slats, and the flap sets turned and responded to the wind. In Tsia's hands, the cub sensed the vibration and lift. The surge of acceleration that hit them both pressed him into Tsia's legs. He panicked. Her grip was so tight, she almost twisted his skin beneath his fur. ”Two minutes,” she said desperately. ”Just two minutes to sh.o.r.e.”
If Ruka understood, he gave no indication. As the skimmer tilted, his paws scrabbled for a hold, and finally hooked into the sides of her boots, snagging the seals and popping them open. She grunted and twisted her feet to keep him from tearing her footgear off. The muscles along her arms were taut. When he writhed up again and got his paws on her thighs, Doetzier reached across to shove the cub back down.
”No!” snapped Tsia.
The other mere jerked back as if bitten. Ruka, wild at the proximity of the unfamiliar hand, broke free and lunged across the cabin. Wren cursed. Kurvan snarled back as the cougar brushed across his boots. Tsia sprang from her seat and staggered as her unsealed boots flopped at her ankles. The skim-mer angled up like a laze. Falling, Tsia barely caught the edge of a soft in time to blast out a mental command. To the others, the expression that tightened her face was shocking: her skin went rigid; her lips pulled back from her teeth; her upper lip curled and her nose wrinkled. Even her eyes seemed to flash with an odd golden light.
She did not see through those eyes. Her mind was locked in her biogate, and there was a deafening snarl in her mind. Cat feet in her skull skidded to a halt. Ruka froze as her presence stretched like a claw, hooked into his mind, and jerked him back to stand before the webbed-in packs.
He hissed.
She snarled.
He edged back and slunk along the wall.
”Ruka-” Tsia forced the words out between taut lips. The sound made no sense to her ears, and it took a moment to realize that her throat was tight with the din she heard in her mind. She was locked to the cub by mental cables of scent and image and fear. The thread of panic made her already taut muscles rigid. Instinctively, she tried to pull back from the biolink-to close it down, like shutting off a light. She tried to pull the talon of her presence from Ruka's mind so that she could use her own eyes and ears. But the moment she moved back, something hit her like a hammer in the head.
She cried out. The biolink went wide. Like a hand on her throat, the gate choked off her breathing and squeezed hard around her heart. Fear and wildness-a desperate anger- tightened their grip when she tried to pull away. It was as if the cub had in turn anch.o.r.ed himself in her mind. There was only one thing in this alien, unfamiliar craft and swamp of smells to which he could cling: Tsia. And he clawed her with all his strength.
Odors beat at Tsia's senses: metaplas, flexan, weather cloth, boots... The hot points of the rasers on standby. The flat, old-dirt, salt smell of the harnesses that had been wet by the sea spray. Black nolo seeds. Acrid sweat. Human scent. Fear.
Tsia tried to image through her gate, but the mental claws dug into the very bones of her skull. Frozen, torn with wild-ness, she burst open the biogate so that her mind matched the cougar's, and her emotions reflected his. Air seemed to rush to her lungs. Her tendons stood out like cords. Somewhere in her ears, Striker gasped and a man's voice cursed softly. The cub grew still, huddled in on himself against the cabin webbing; his soft, steady yowl was a constant din in Tsia's mind.
The skimmer shuddered, and Tsia swayed. Slowly, as if her bones dissolved, she crumpled to her knees, then her hands. Striker reached to help her, but she flinched away with a snarl.
Still, she faced the cat. Unfocused blue eyes gazed into unblinking gold. She stretched one hand toward the cub and felt its instant, instinctive withdrawal. Only her will, pushed through the biogate, forced him to remain where he was. Fear and bewilderment remained in his thoughts. He could taste the pain in her mind.
Not your fault, she whispered in her gate. Just one more minute. Maybe two.
She didn't know what the other meres were doing around her; she could see nothing but the cub. The skimmer's vibration settled into a rhythm that hummed in her bones, and she knew in the back of her brain that they flew with the wind. Gradually, as if she hummed herself, she let the resonance of the s.h.i.+p seep through her gate to the cub. Slowly, her eyes began to take in light. Blurred images sharpened; edges became clear. She could see, not just feel through her gate, the cougar that crouched before her. His big paws were tucked and taut beneath his body as if he would launch himself at any time. His tail was crooked and flicking.
/ can't hurt you, she breathed through her gate. It would be like cutting myself.
Ruka growled.
Nitpicker looked back over her shoulder. She could almost feel the strain in Tsia's hands as the guide kept them from reaching for the cat. ”Feather,” she said sharply. ”We're coming in on the sh.o.r.e. Pick your spot.”
Tsia did not seem to hear, and Nitpicker motioned sharply for Doetzier to repeat the command. When he s.h.i.+fted to speak, Tsia stiffened. She blinked and looked toward the pilot. ”Landing spot?” she asked unsteadily.
Doetzier, careful not to move again, indicated the navtank with his eyes. s.h.i.+vering, then steady, then trembling again, Tsia eased back from the cub so that she could look toward the tank. Although Ruka growled without stopping, he did not move from his crouch.
The node seemed to flash again in Tsia's head. For an instant, the holographic skimmer shape hovered in the blackness of s.p.a.ce with sunlight glinting off its sides. The land below seemed deceptively calm, as if it were hidden beneath a thin canvas of ghosts. When the flash faded, she was left with memories, not overlays, which she could not follow clearly. But she had grown up in the sloughs of this coast. She knew the cold-packed sand and flattened dune gra.s.s; knew the flooded estuaries that stretched back for kays with their gray brine and their dark shrub tips sticking out of the water. She remembered the rocks and mudflats that clung to the bluffs. Saw, long before the navtank recorded it, the white line of sanded rock that snaked down into the slough and disappeared beneath its waves like the children that had drowned so many years before.
”There's the bluff,” she said to the pilot, as she watched the faint images display themselves in the tank. ”Demon Bay,” she murmured. ”Pelican Slough. Halona Slough. The dikelands.”
”The dikelands?” Bowdie caught on that. ”They're flat, and we're already four kilometers inland.”
”In this weather, they'll be flooded like lakes. Keep going. Five... maybe six kays. Look for a landlocked lake with a broad bank on the west side and a narrow canyon on the east.”
Nitpicker's voice was sharp. ”You know this place well enough to verify it for a landing?”