Part 14 (1/2)
Doetzier studied Tsia carefully. ”What do we look for?”
”Nothing.” She shrugged at his expression. ”Your darkeyes won't help you find them; shapers don't radiate much body heat, and they won't move till they're ready to attack. They have a layer of fatty flesh and muscle across their backs which they can reshape into a hundred positions. Rocks, leaf piles, roots- they can imitate just about anything. And you think your e-wrap is quick to configure? You should see a shaper swarm. You look at the ground and think you're staring at the wind shadows moving in the roots, but you could be watching a mess of shapers slide around the base of a tree.”
”They are venomous, aren't they?” Striker persisted.
Tsia nodded. ”Like old Earth snakes. The proteins in their venom do some of the digesting for them- break down cell membranes, liquefy your veins, ferment tissues... Basically soften up the meat so that they can fit it between their lips and into their gullet sacs.” Unconsciously, she rubbed the back of one hand. ”There's a neurotoxin, too. One bite and you get tin-gly in seconds, then numb. Your chest feels compressed. Your heartbeat drops. You can't breathe. Your heart slows some more till you go comatose and the blood-breaker proteins can go to work. It's kind of like a slow suffocation.”
”Huh,” Bowdie said. ”Medlines can image down an anti-venom as easily as anything else.”
Tsia shook her head. ”Antivenoms are complex molecules. It takes time for your body to make them, even with direct chemical instructions to your brain. And once the body's nervous system is slowed, it can't process enough signals fast enough to get itself going again without help.”
Doetzier watched the way she rubbed the back of one hand. The hollows under his eyes made him look ghostly in the darkness of the overhang, and Tsia wondered at the surge of focused interest she could feel. The expectancy-the antic.i.p.ation or eagerness-she was not sure that came from Doetzier at all. His energy-the flecks of light in his biofield-was steady and almost distant, as if he were holding himself behind a wall. She had to stop herself from reaching out to touch him as he asked, ”You ever been bit?”
She glanced down and stilled her hands. ”By a spiker,” she answered slowly, ”the shaper's cousin- once. On the hand. Friend of mine dared me to catch one.”
”And you just couldn't resist.”
She shrugged. ”I won the dare.”
He grinned in spite of himself, but the expression did not reach his eyes. ”Can't have been very old if you did something like that.”
”I was eleven,” she admitted. ”No temple links till you're twenty-one-till you learn to control your imaging patterns, you know-and we had lost our corns in the swamp. Jak had to sprint through mud and then a bristlebrush meadow to bring my parents home to treat me. Saved my life.”
Striker snorted. ”Jeopardized it first, if he challenged you to catch a shaper.”
”Spiker,” Tsia corrected.
Nitpicker resealed her trousers to her boots and stomped to check the seals. ”Are you done with the lecture, Feather, so we can get back to work?”
Tsia stilled. She eyed the other woman carefully. ”What trail do you want to take?”
”What's your recommendation?”
The pilot's tone was curt, not impolite, but Tsia could still see the tension in the woman's shoulders. ”The trail south of here is called Derzat,” she said slowly. ”It's slippery and steep, but flattens out in the middle around the lakes and meadows. Drops off above the freepick stake in a fast, straight-up-anddown trail.”
Bowdie groaned.
”It's doable,” she said sharply. ”Even in this weather. The other trail-Tabletop-runs along the lower, flattop hills and in and out of a dozen box canyons. I ran Tabletop twenty times or more, in all weather conditions, and I can tell you that, in this weather, it will be completely flooded. Derzat's tougher but more direct. Would save us eight kilometers and a heck of a lot of wading.”
”Then we'll take Derzat,” Nitpicker said.
Kurvan hoisted his pack to his back, and Tsia motioned at his bag. ”What kind of weight do we have to port?”
Nitpicker looked at her without expression. Her voice was curiously flat when she answered, ”About half what we started with. We lost four packs with the skimmer: Bowdie's, yours, Striker's, and mine. Bowdie had the antigrav units and half of the scanners. You had the rest of the scanners and the extra stabilizer for the configuration gear. Striker carried half of that config gear- Doetzier still has the other half-and I carried half the source gear for setting up the scannet at the freepick stake.” She spat to the side. ”Ironically, the two things we didn't lose were the two things that were heaviest-the config gear and the breaker.”
Doetzier glanced at the status flap on his own gear. ”Why the concern about weight?” he asked. ”We've got antigravs and stabilizers. We could load up even more if we had to.”
Tsia shook her head. ”Antigrav offsets only part of the weight of your gear. You ever hiked in a gale?” she asked Doetzier. ”Or a full-fledged storm?”
”I'm a skyside mere, not a slogger. I've swung through over sixty alien s.h.i.+ps, but this is only my third landside contract.”
She studied him for a moment. A skyside mere with his technical rating usually worked salvage jobs or set up installations with high-profile gear. A defense setup for a freepick stake seemed trivial for a man with his experience. Unless he was going to stay at the stake and program the chips himself. Her gaze sharpened without her awareness, and Doetzier's unreadable eyes hid the cold speculation she felt in his field. She opened her gate more widely. His biofield was still flecked with color, as if he had dots of sharp energy attached to his own well-centered field. They were different somehow, from his other energy-like raindrops in the dust.
”Landside storm winds are gusty and unpredictable,” she said finally. ”They act like stabilizers on the blink. Jerk your pack around like a strong man learning to swing dance in zero gee.” She glanced at the powerflap of his pack. ”If your stabilizers and antigravs aren't already on high, you'd better set them there before you leave this overhang. You'll need all the help you can get to stay on the trail in this.” She looked at Kurvan. ”What gear are you carrying? The breaker?”
He shook his head. ”I've got the other half of the source gear-for setting up a scannet into which I can start building webs.” He jerked his head at the other mere. ”Doetzier has the half of the configuration gear that didn't sink-for rafts, bivouacs, shelters, whatever. Wren bears the breaker.”
Tsia turned to Nitpicker. ”We should consider leaving some gear behind, cached here in the cave. Maybe not the breaker-prototypes are always expensive-but at least the config gear. The biochips aren't due for a month-there's plenty of time to come back tomorrow in one of the freepick s.h.i.+ps and pick it up. Maybe even raise the skimmer out of the mud-”
Her voice cut off. A resurge of tension struck through her biogate like an arrow. Tsia could smell the sweat odors in the cave as if her own sense of smell were heightened. Through her gate, the cub seemed to focus on those odors he could taste, as though he had scented a doe. The feeling flowed back into a flavor for Tsia; her tongue licked against her teeth. She rubbed harder at her wrists.
Un.o.btrusively, Wren s.h.i.+fted closer to her body; Kurvan edged away. Tsia's brain noted each movement as if it were a leap of muscle, not a subtle s.h.i.+ft. Hunger swamped her guts, and left her with glinting eyes and a hand pressed to her belly. Someone breathed behind her. She twisted quickly, startling Bowdie.
”Feather?” Nitpicker asked sharply.
Tsia stared at the pilot.
Deliberately, Nitpicker touched her arm. ”Okay?”
She nodded jerkily.
”Okay?” the woman repeated meaningfully.
”I'm fine,” she said shortly. ”Just... hungry.”
Wren dug a pouch of slimchims from his harness and tossed them to her so that she caught them with a
hard, instinctive slap. Doetzier eyed her thoughtfully. ”How long since you've eaten?”
Ruka growled in her head, and she returned without thinking, ”Three hours-”
Her voice broke off at the other meres' expressions. Three hours was not enough time to get a hunger
cramp; it sounded like a lie. She pressed her lips together and shrugged. ”Using my gate makes me hungry, and slimchims just don't have the body of a real meal.” Deliberately, she threw Wren's pouch back at him.
Nitpicker watched her carefully. ”About caching the gear- that's a nogo. What's left can be carried as well as cached. Anything we have is too good to leave to the zeks.”
Bowdie murmured, ”If they've got their own scannet up, they could be watching even now-just waiting for us to leave, so they can take salvage rights under the guise of the law.”
Wren gave Bowdie a sideways look. ”I'll lay you three-to-one that the Ixia are a bigger threat than any
zek or blackjack.”
”I'll take those odds,” he murmured back. ”Those aliens have done nothing harsher than sit up at the orbiting docking hammer and threaten to trade us bad scanners.”