Part 12 (1/2)

”We've got nose-breathers-”

”Does no good in mud or silted water. Move it! Now!”

Tsia glanced toward Nitpicker; Doetzier grabbed one more pack and jumped for the hatch. Bowdie jumped at the same time, and Doetzier hung for an instant as Wren and Kurvan grabbed the larger mere by his collar to help him up through the hatch. Water began to slide in over the edge. Clinging to the rim, Doetzier was blinded by the torrent, while the force of it twisted him violently. Wren had hold of his wrists, but the gray-brown cataract tore Doetzier down by his pack even as Wren yanked him up.

”Drop the pack-” shouted Wren. ”Unbend your arm. Get rid of the pack-”

Tsia's biogate seemed to surge, and Doetzier seemed to shout his rejection in her head. Wren cursed. His muscles bulged. Then he dragged Doetzier over the edge like a log hauled up through a waterfall.

As if his body had been a plug, the cascade turned into a deluge. Tsia was pounded into the corner of the cabin. She couldn't see Nitpicker or anyone else. Even with her arm over her face, she could barely breathe in the bone-smas.h.i.+ng torrent. In her mind, Ruka snarled and seemed to grow closer. Something snapped taut between them. Some part of her mind melted. She tried to scream, but the sound was not human, and it did no good anyway-the water smashed the shriek against her teeth and jammed it down in her throat. Her claws stretched up. Ruka's hands stretched down. The biogate was torn in two. And in its place, a mental cable of solid will twisted out from the gate and whipped around both minds: the one, in the lake, with furred, pumping legs that pushed his body through the waves; and the other, with her teeth bared and pounded by the water that crushed her against the walls.

Frantically Tsia groped for the pouch that held her nose-breather, but the enbee was not there. Panicked, she tore at every seal in her harness. It took an eternity to realize that her clothes had twisted with the flow of the water; the pocket was not where she thought. With her hands clumsy as paws, her lungs began to burn long before she found the enbee in its pouch. A second later, she shoved its tapers up her nostrils, sealing her nose from the lake.

The water immersed her torso now, and the savage pounding lessened over her chest and legs till it felt like only a hundred rubber hammers banging at her flesh. Now only her head was still smashed with blinding brutality against the skimmer wall. She dragged the collar of her blunter up over the side of her face, then forced herself to wait, pinned against the wall of the cabin while her pack tangled more in the webbing and the enbee's chemflaps glued themselves to her cheeks on either side of her nose. Finally, she drew a breath of air. In her mind, Ruka's lungs expanded. Her skin ruffled like fur in the whirlpool current that circled the cabin area. An arm brushed her body, and she grabbed it; Nitpicker twisted with the flow and squeezed a message back against her hand. Wait.

Tsia acknowledged the finger-tapped message with pressure of her own. A moment later, she struggled free of the webbing and followed the pilot to an air pocket at the front end of the cabin. Her head broke the surface with an audible gasp. She looked around quickly, while Nitpicker peered down at the submerged conn. The skimmer lights were still on, but the water was so thick with sludge that neither woman could see her waist, let alone her feet.

Nitpicker groped in her blunter for her enbee. ”We have a few seconds-” she managed as she caught her breath. But by the time she plugged her nose and sealed the chemflaps to her cheeks, the water had risen half a meter. The two women were floating with their toes barely brus.h.i.+ng the walls. Tsia made to move toward the hatch, but Nitpicker held her back. ”Wait-”

Her voice was m.u.f.fled by the sound of water and the closeness of the flooded cabin. Tsia nodded, but in her mind, the sense of the cat was overwhelming.

Nitpicker caught sight of the feral glints in Tsia's eyes. She dug her fingers into the guide's shoulders. ”Not now, Feather. Not yet.”

Tsia nodded jerkily. She could feel Ruka swimming, his thick, furred legs like pistons in the water. The water closed up to the hatch; the air pocket shrank to a half-meter's height. Tsia's back arched automatically as the shape of her pack pushed her hips down. Nitpicker kicked her legs in a scissors kick and fought to hold her position. They washed in a tiny circle. Tsia tried to see through her gate-through Ruka's eyes-for the mud that must even now be sliding toward them, but all she could see was the motion from the waves of the lake.

Ruka, she shouted through her gate. Look toward the mud!

The cat obeyed, and Tsia's eyes flooded with shapes that flickered and s.h.i.+fted. The trees in her mind bent like berry pickers. There were the tiny figures of meres who crawled out of the water. Cold water slapped her nose, and her ears twitched with the fluid that filled them. And to the cougar's right, in his mind and in her own, she saw the hill s.h.i.+ft down toward the lake.

”The mud's coming now,” she gasped. ”We have to go-”

But neither woman was prepared for the brutal slos.h.i.+ng that slammed them up against the roof and dropped them again with ankle-jamming force against the backs of the seats. The reaction wave washed them away from the hatch and up into the front of the s.h.i.+p. They hit the roof hard before being sucked viciously back down.

Tsia could not fight the awkward shape of the pack. Her ears popped. Depth, she thought. They had dropped at least five meters. Submerged, she breathed completely through the enbee while her hands grabbed on to rough fabric. She pulled herself along the wall till she found the gear webbing. She could feel Nitpicker nearby.

Black, stirred-up silt blinded her. Lake grit bubbled into her mouth. The enbee stripped oxygen from the murky water, but its silt-plugged filters gave her limited breaths. She gathered her legs beneath her and thrust herself toward the hatch.

Something caught her at her waist. She ignored it and hit the edge of the opening with her shoulder. The pack caught. She twisted, freed it, and grabbed the slick metaplas edge to pull herself out. Nitpicker was right behind her-she could sense the other woman in the water. Sense another mere nearby. Silt swept into her face and urgently she shoved herself away. Behind her, Nitpicker followed suit. And then the mudslide slithered over and buried the skimmer like a fat snake on an egg.

Disoriented, Tsia stroked hard, her body rolling as the pack fought her for buoyancy. A second later, her hands. .h.i.t mud and struck deep into waterlogged sludge. An eel slid across her wrist; instantly, she recoiled. Beneath her, the mud gathered speed and slid on past. The slick mire caught at her feet like quicksand. With sudden panic, she whipped her body madly, but as she twisted, the pack caught in the slide. She panicked and jerked one arm free of the straps. Cat feet seemed to tear at the surface she stirred up. Then she tore herself away from the gear, leaving it behind, buried in mud, while she clawed her way through the water.

She moved into a long-armed stroke that was instinct as much as training. Her boots felt like bricks on her feet; her blunter trailed and rippled like drags along her sides, and her flexor snapped against her thigh with every kick of her legs. She didn't know if she swam up or sideways; only that she was no longer in mud and that the cub seemed close-too close. The sh.o.r.e-she tried to image the sh.o.r.e to the cub, but Ruka hissed in return.

At the sound in her head, she stopped swimming. For a long moment, while her heart pounded and her cheeks poured then-heat into the water, she floated without moving. The cold water began to chill; the silt ground between her teeth. She could not see, but when she put her hand over her face, the bubbles floated out through her fingers, and she knew finally that she was on her back.

She turned over and checked her bubbles, and this time, she followed the air to the surface. Pressure did not allow the enbee to give her full breaths, and her nose sucked in as she pulled only shallow breaths from its filters. She hit a warmer clime in the water, and a cold one as she followed her gate toward the sense of the cat. Then she hit the surface so abruptly that her arms were half out of the water before her eyes registered the lighter, flat-reflecting gray. Something b.u.mped her from behind.

She twisted like a fish. Ruka? She cried out in a sound that was more sob than laugh of relief. Golden eyes stared back. The cub had not swum to sh.o.r.e. He'd stayed behind like a beacon to guide her. She opened her mouth to say his name, and her mouth filled with the slap of the water. She choked, went under, kicked back to the surface, and motioned through her gate toward sh.o.r.e.

The wind slapped water up against their two heads; the rest of the lake was flat. The storm had whipped off the crests that would have formed in calmer air; the spray from the missing crests was a vicious, horizontal rain. Tsia squinted to keep her eyes clear and began to swim toward sh.o.r.e, but her body did not lie flat in the water. Her legs dragged down with the weight of her boots, and like a sail, the blunter billowed around her.

A wave struck her in the head, and she didn't have a chance to struggle before she went under. In her mind, the cougar yowled, but she rea.s.sured it instantly. She had her enbee-she could breathe; air was not a problem. And swimming a meter underwater, she realized suddenly, was easier than fighting to stay on top. Even blurred, Ruka's sight through the gate told her where the meres were on the sh.o.r.e. There were two on the bank already, a third climbing out from the water with the aid of a fourth, and one more in the water ahead.

Tsia paused and kicked and recounted.

Five.

Not six. One of the meres was missing. With the wind and water blinding her, she could not tell which one. She opened her biogate to feel for the sense of a human, but she had to close herself to the cub; the sense of him swamped her so that she could not feel the other species. The void that she created ached with the faint sense of marine life that was left.

Floating, carried by the wind current on the surface, she forced herself to concentrate. She began to identify distances and the mental shapes of light. Below, there was a growing sense of eels, and a school of slim, blue-green tealers surged to her left. Wedge growths of weeds waved on the bottom. And each second that pa.s.sed, she felt the meres more clearly.

Wren was first and easiest-she almost smelled him as much as saw his cold, hard energy. Doetzier and Striker-a cool, wary tension; and a closed, shallow light. Kurvan up ahead, wading out of the water, his field as wary as Doetzier's, but his energy strong and hot. Bowdie with the heat of fear and irritation clear even at that distance, as though he forced himself to do something of which he was afraid. And Nitpicker...

She could not quite feel the pilot... She opened her biogate wide, and the weight of life in the lake swept in like a shadow that darkened her mind. It took a moment to separate her senses from the one that she sought. And she realized that what she felt was behind her with the eels. Behind, she thought, and down. As if Nitpicker was still with the s.h.i.+p. As if the woman was...

Trapped. Abruptly, Tsia kicked hard for the sh.o.r.e, moving partly against the wind current to reach Wren where he waded out to help her. ”Your enbee!” She shouted. She'staggered on the bottom and sat abruptly down, her neck deep in the lake. ”Your enbee--did you replace it on the station?” She yanked her blunter from her arms; it sank just below the surface, but she didn't care. Wren would pick it up. ”I need the breather.” Quickly, Wren dug his new enbee from his pocket as she ducked under again and struggled to wrench off her boots. A moment later, she surfaced, grabbed the enbee with one hand, shoved the boots and flexor into his arms, and threw herself in a long, twisting dive back into the lake. Wren was left, waist-deep in the water, staring at the flat-calm surface. His eyes narrowed, he stooped, groped in the water for the blunter Tsia had left behind, and hauled it up. He looked back twice. Tsia came up and stroked strongly along the surface, then went down and did not come up again.

Barefoot and free of her blunter, she moved smoothly down through the climes. The fabric of her clothing rippled against her skin. She could feel Nitpicker more closely now, but the biofield was weak.

With each meter that she dropped, Tsia found her heart pounding in her temples and her lungs beginning to ache more than her arms. She struggled for her breaths before she realized that she had closed off her own throat. Breathe, she snapped at herself. She had an enbee. She had air to take in. It was Nitpicker she was feeling-Nitpicker who had no air.

Air... The strength of the biogate brought her memories too close to the surface of her mind, and a vision of white hands seemed to stretch out in the water. She gasped and choked as water came in her mouth. The sense of children drowning... Tucker at the platform; Monument Rock in the past... Urgency clutched at her skin. The cougar growled, and the sound amplified the memories until it seemed as if a thousand voices flooded into her mind and deafened her.

”No!” She shouted the word underwater. This was not then-it was an hour since Tucker had died. Twenty years since the children had drowned: tiny hands, cold hands, little mouths begging her to get them out of the mud, out of the cold, out of the slough that choked them with every surge of tide. She tried to close the memories out of her mind and focus only through Ruka, but ghosts from the node flickered in her head and overlaid themselves on the hands. She shoved them away harshly. She stretched -she reached-she tried to feel only Nitpicker, but something interfered It was the beginning of unconsciousness.

An iciness struck for the first time through the waters of the lake. Desperate for speed, Tsia reached out to the cub and sucked up the strength he projected, but that was a mistake. In her haste, she shot past the woman below before she felt the change in the biofield's intensity. She twisted, sculled, and flipped around, stroking back along the bottom. This time, she went more slowly, her hands outstretched and searching above the sludge.

She could feel Nitpicker's panic grow as the first drowning blackness faded and the colors began to burst behind her eyes. Exhaustion clung to Tsia's legs, but as the mud churned before her, Tsia realized that she sensed not her own ache but the other woman's body. The weight-the fear... Nitpicker was pinned in the mud.

Tsia struck out widely, sweeping to reach as far as she could. Weeds, silt, a submerged snag... Then a hand that hit, then latched on to her arm like a talon, cutting deep in her flesh. She let herself be drawn in, needing to be closer to get Wren's enbee in place.

But Nitpicker's hand tangled in Tsia's s.h.i.+rt, and savagely, with all her desperate strength, she jerked Tsia close and struck unerring at her throat. Cold, steel-like fingers squeezed. Instinctively, Tsia jerked her chin down. The bone of her jaw jammed against the fingers that tried to crush her larynx. Her hands pried frantically at Nitpicker's fingers, palms, thumbs. Her flesh tore. Cat feet clawed with hers against the other woman's arms. Something snarled in her ears, and she could not tell if it was herself or the din in her biogate that deafened her to her pain. Frantically, she groped for the other woman's face. She punched, then clawed to loosen the pilot's grip. Clumsily, again and again she struck out, the extra enbee closed heedlessly in one fist. She twisted and wrenched until, in a panic, she jammed the enbee in Nitpicker's nostrils.

It was not a clean shot; only one of the tapers was up Nitpicker's nose. But the woman's hold froze instantly, then released. Tsia wrenched away, kicking up more silt and mud. Her mouth seemed filled with the grit. She gasped and took in water, gagged and coughed and doubled over, convulsing with the effort of breathing when her throat felt torn and collapsed.

The heightened tension radiated up like steam. The panic in the other woman's field was hot. But now, Tsia's own heartbeat pounded heavily in the water, and her breathing was harsh through nostrils that tried to gasp through the thin breaths of her enbee. The ghosts of the node weren't solid, but the medlines -the only part of the node still active-automatically took over. Electrochemical signals poured into her brain. Proteins that coded for clotting genes. Tissue regeneration... Nerves. The subconscious part of her brain whirled while Tsia tried to breathe.

Then, cautiously, she swam back down to the bottom. Warily, she reached out among the mud-buried weeds. She touched a shoulder, and the body beneath her jerked. She could feel the sudden spurt of fear, of panic. She was cornered- Immediately, Tsia withdrew. Then, kicking slowly to keep her position, she forced herself to extend. Mud s.h.i.+fted on the bottom; Nitpicker's biofield surged with controlled terror. Tsia touched the woman's arm and left her hand there so the pilot could feel who it was. The other woman's hand closed over hers and gripped it tightly, then moved up her arm to her face. Tsia allowed her hand to feel. She squeezed the pilot's bicep in pattern, finning quickly.

Her hands found the mudslide that had engulfed the woman's legs, and as Tsia dug her hands into it to see how solidly the pilot was trapped, it s.h.i.+fted like sand, surging forward another quarter meter and flooding up to the woman's waist. Nitpicker's hands dug into Tsia's arms. Tsia felt her heart begin to pound again in her throat. A white line of rock twisted in her sight. A line that sank in the slough in permanent memorial. And Tucker, with that safety one cutting through the surging sea... Daya, she whispered in her mind. Not another one, she begged.

How long had they been under? How long would the enbees last? She forced herself to think, then tapped her fingers against the pilot's hand. She repeated the finning, as the other woman did not immediately respond. She could feel the tension rising in the pilot's body with the message. Finally, Nitpicker finned back in agreement, and Tsia opened her gate.

Shadow forms of fish and snails played at the edges of her mind. Freshwater celphs floated past. She could sense the mud worms, benign and hungry, tunneling toward the looser silt. There was a pressure against the inside of her skull--a cacophonous resonance built out of energy itself. And within that din was one she knew well-and hated.

She called it. Found its resonance through her gate and matched it with a projection of her own. Food, she sent. Flesh cold and ripe for eating. Within seconds, a shadow grew around her. Something brushed her arm. Nitpicker's hand clenched suddenly on her own, and she knew the woman had been touched by an eel.

Tsia fed the force of her welcome into her biogate. With all her focus, she called out a cold, dead image and spread it in the water. Spread the sense of it down in the mud. The water stirred around her, and she tried to hold her position as the currents began to swirl. The pilot's grasp hauled her back and tapped out an urgent message. Tsia finned back a steady re-sponse, but as she did, a slick body slid along her side. Nitpicker's fingers threatened to dig all the way through Tsia's hand. The eels swirled around Nitpicker's head, and Tsia forced the woman to bend her arms to protect her face and neck.

One eel made a dive for the mud. It could sense the warmth of the woman's legs, and it hesitated. But it was hungry, and Tsia projected food and chilled fish flesh. It made one pa.s.s, ignoring the woman's exposed torso and arms; its prey was a bottom fish, flat and streaked with tapered gray-green stripes. It wanted buried meat-cold meat-not the warmth of a human body.