Part 20 (2/2)

Still, the steel hand hauled her back. A tawny shape flashed to the side. Her eyes slitted. Her mouth twisted with the snarl she could not contain. The cat responded, and gathered his weight, and Tsia's biogate flashed wide. ”Noi” she shouted. Her mind seemed to freeze. Ruka flattened out. Nitpicker's eyes flickered, but she did not take her gaze from the mere on the ground.

”He's broken,” she shouted at Nitpicker's face. Some part of her brain registered the idiotic words. But the mere did not release her arm, and the pilot's wiry fingers dug steadily into her flesh.

”Let go of me,” Tsia snarled.

”Shut up, Feather.” Her voice was harsh, cutting.

Blue eyes bored into black. There was a warning there. A coldness that radiated out from Nitpicker's biofield like ice forming and freezing the air between them. Tsia shuddered and tried to pull away, but the other woman tightened her grip, and some part of Tsia's brain was amazed at the strength in that slim body.

”Stay.” Nitpicker spoke as if giving a command to a dog, and the anger flashed in Tsia's eyes before she felt the message in those fingers. Pressing, tapping on her arm... Speaking to her skin.

Her lips clamped shut. The pressure tightened. Words. A message. Wait. Obey. And three words that made her freeze in place and stare at the narrow, lined face. Gepa'i cha'k. Vaka'kha. To take from the hunter the hunt. To provoke the hunter to expose himself to the arrow of his enemy.

Nitpicker tightened her grip one more time, then let go and turned to Kurvan. ”What happened?” she snapped.

He dabbed gingerly at the sc.r.a.pe that bloodied his cheek. ”My antigrav went out, and I slipped before I could get a purchase on the stone. Feather took the full weight on her arm.” He gestured toward Doetzier, who sat, propped up, now against a boulder. ”I knocked him off when I fell, then landed right on top of him. If it hadn't been for him, I would have broken my neck.”

Nitpicker caught Striker's attention. ”How is he?”

”His arm is cracked.”

The pilot nodded. ”Patch it,” she ordered.

Bowdie overheard her words. ”We can cast it, but that's about it,” he said. He did not hide his glance toward Tsia. ”We lost the scame in the meadow. And with the medlines down, he can't even block the pain. He'll have to walk to the stake as is.”

Nitpicker nodded, and Bowdie turned to help Striker with a medpack. Quickly, they wrapped Doetzier's arm with the thin brown roll of the metaplas cast material. Doetzier cried out once as his arm was s.h.i.+fted and bone ends grated. A sharp, hot smell rose, then subsided. The cast molded itself tightly and shrank. Doetzier hissed this time and paled, and Bowdie gripped his shoulders. A moment later, only a faint lingering scent spoke of the newness of the cast.

Nitpicker's face was emotionless as she turned to Tsia. She said nothing, just looked Tsia up and down, and then turned away. The steady rain washed Tsia's forehead, and she felt the chill like a snake, curling into her skin.

Nitpicker knew.

The sabotage. The death. The accidents. The falls. That look on the pilot's face-Tsia should be afraid. There should be fear eating at her guts as if the guide guild had found her-as if she were betting her biogate against the certainty of the sunrise. There should not be this eagerness swelling up in her stomach. She motioned toward the freepick stake. Her voice was tight. ”Half a kay.”

The pilot nodded, her expression still cold, and Kurvan gave Tsia a sharp look before turning away to help Doetzier to his feet. Striker repacked the medkit and did not meet Tsia's eyes. Instead, she hefted Doetzier's pack and set it on her shoulders. Doetzier, who had been eased out of it, turned his drawn face to Tsia to give her a long and thoughtful look.

”Half a kay,” she repeated quietly. She picked up her flexor from where it lay between two rocks, and turned it over in her hands. She flicked it experimentally, but the weapon did not respond: it was as broken as Doetzier's arm.

Without a word, she tucked it in her harness and turned back to the trail. Bowdie fell in line behind her, Kurvan behind him. Wren, then Doetzier, then the pilot and Striker. It was no coincidence that Doetzier was at the rear. Nitpicker knew.

Tsia slogged through the mud-deep gra.s.s. No one talked in the rain. One more rock drop. Wren and Nitpicker helped Doetzier down. Another quarter kay. Dawn was upon them, yet the gloom hung on like a leech. The brush thickened as it grew back into the areas cleared by the freepicks; the heavy clouds cut out any early daylight that thought to s.h.i.+ne through the gray.

Ahead, like tiny mountains, the rock-gray huts of the free-pick stake resolved themselves from darkness. Edges became sharp against the billowing, blowing trees. Windows and doorframes, outlined by the glowing edges of their filter fields, floated in the dawn like ma.s.sive eyes and mouths, just waking and waiting for breakfast. Day was upon them in a shroud of rain and shadow.

Tsia no longer worried that Ruka might be seen. The brush was so thick that not even a darkeye could pierce it. She did not bother to look for his shape; her gate was as open as she could make it, and he was as much a part of her as the rain that soaked her skin. She hunted now, and the cougar knew it. He could taste her determination through the gate, and his feline mind was eager for the taste of blood and flesh.

When they reached the road that led to the freepick area, Tsia paused to locate the gray-green metaplas stake that marked the freepick boundary. She and Kurvan opened its top to expose the com panel of its beacon, but only its manual links were active. She waited while he triggered the manual com and notified the freepicks that they were on the way in. After a minute, he finished up and closed the marker beacon. Tsia gave him a speculative look as they made their way down the road: he had said nothing about them being on foot.

He shrugged coldly when she asked about it. ”I don't give out what doesn't need to be known. Especially to guides.”

Her lips tightened. She turned her back on his expression, and let Ruka watch him instead.

When they came to the edge of the tarmac where the road widened, Tsia paused, and the other meres gathered in a ragged line. Nitpicker touched her arm. Anything? the woman finned.

Tsia returned a negative pressure.

They waited in silence while Tsia eyed the rain-gray surface. Up close, the tarmac was not completely smooth, as if it was so old that the earth had moved beneath it or it had not been flattened to begin with. The chemical and bacteria vats, when she looked closely, showed cracks at their seams and meld marks on their support legs. On the other side of the tarmac, the hub itself was a dingy gray-a thick, uneven primer color, not a deliberate hue. Even that shade could not hide the fact that, although the freepick stake was new, the pitting and scoring along a quarter of the prefab panels spoke of decades of use. Freepicks never wasted credit on construction details.

Anything on your scanner? she finned on Bowdie's arm.

His fingers pressed back his negative.

She did not move forward. Her skin p.r.i.c.kled, as if a hunter crouched close by, but she could see no sign of weapon-or even freepick-waiting there to meet them. On her other side, Nitpicker s.h.i.+fted, and she felt the hard line of the pilot's flexor press against her arm. She could smell the scent of the other woman on the weapon. Un.o.btrusively, she took it, then subtly she removed the custom wrap on her own hilt and slipped it over the other. Quietly, she pa.s.sed her broken weapon back to Nitpicker's hands.

She eyed the tarmac again. She could feel the eagerness of someone's pulse. When she went first out on the tarmac, toward the main hub of the stake, her heart was beating quickly, and her breath was short and shallow.

She did not go swiftly or directly across. Instead, she paused and turned and darted a few steps this way, then that. She ignored the ma.s.sive vats to the right; she gave only a bare glance to the open pit to the left. As if she were an animal, sniffing and testing the clearing, she advanced in hesitant spurts. She breathed shallowly to take in the scents, but it was Ruka's nose that interpreted the odors she sent to him through her gate. The hub-the main complex in which the freepicks worked-with its doorway faint and blue-glowing in the dark, beckoned like a hand, and Ruka knew she would enter. He snarled low in her gate.

Wait, she returned in her mind. Stay hidden. And wait.

She did not touch the hut as she edged toward the filter-field door. Scanners were triggered by proximity, but as long as she didn't touch the actual sensors, the bios.h.i.+eld in her blunter would project the scan signals for her heartbeat and body heat as that of a simple biological, not that of a human. She smiled faintly. With Ruka helping to guide her, her actions were animal enough to convince even the most discerning nodie that it was a beast who advanced, not a mere.

She took the flexor from her belt. Keeping it at her side, she tapped the access on the door panel so that her arrival was announced. The door field cleared automatically to transparency, and she could see that, although the door was open, the foyer inside was empty; the three hallways that led out of the entranceway were dim. That was not unusual, she told herself. Even a grounded stake didn't waste power. She spared the halls only a glance before she stepped inside. But she forgot to close down her biogate as she stepped through the door, and the tingling sense of the filter field made Ruka jump in the brush. Tsia jerked with his reaction, then flushed in the warmth of the foyer.

Idiot, she snapped at herself.

She paused inside, and behind her, the door opaqued again. She waited, her fingers loose and relaxed on the weapon, and her eyes and ears alert. But only a single freepick appeared, with a thickset body and a balding pate, and if there was anything but caution in his manner or voice, she could not sense it in him. The danger that made the cougar growl and her skin crawl on her back-it was here and not here, and she could only wait for its action.

She greeted him carefully, and added, ”Guild contract BLL-tau-two-six.”

”Tau, six-eight, double-XN,” he returned. ”Contract confirmation?”

She told him the code, and he nodded. For a moment, he studied her as closely as she watched him. She knew what he saw: a short-haired mere with rain-wet hair, who poised on the b.a.l.l.s of her feet. A woman with crow's-feet so completely overshadowed by the scars on her cheek that only the deep blue of her eyes was noticed. As for what she saw, he was a freepick-no mistake about that. The smell of mining oils and bacteria was thick on his clothes and his body. The light brown jumpsuit he wore had been through so many scrubs that it was actually thin, while his face was heavy and beginning to slide off in folds of flesh. His skin was coa.r.s.e with the large pores of a man who spent much of his time with dirt. His hands were thickly scarred, as though they had been cut and sc.r.a.ped so many times they could no longer remember how to make skin, and his fingernails, like Wren's, were so thick that they seemed like plates of cartilage, not nails. She glanced at his face and met his amber eyes steadily. They were clear and sharp, at odds with the deliberate-almost drawling-tempo of his voice.

”Decker got your call-in confirmation from the beacon,” he said obliquely, ”but the landing pad didn't activate.”

”We came overland. Called you manually from marker on the road.”

He raised his eyebrows, then nodded toward the outside. ”You came through that?”

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