This Alien Shore (42 page)

T
here was a knock on the door just as Derik was buttoning up his jumpsuit. Startled, he fumbled for a moment, then gritted his teeth and forced the small plastic disk through its hole. It wouldn't do to have anyone see him when he wasn't fully dressed; that would spoil everything. “Come in,” he muttered.

It was Sumi.

Derik, you want one of us to
—

Fuck off,
he told them. All of them. He managed a smile for Sumi, while thinking to the Others,
and thanks for the show of confidence.

“We're approaching the outstation now,” Sumi told him. “I came to see if everything was okay.”

He saw the Medusan looking over his body and he sat down on the edge of the bed; there was less to see, that way. “I'm fine. Thanks.”

“Anything you need?”

“No.” When that didn't seem to be enough, he turned his smile up a few degrees of warmth and assured him, “Really.”

Derik, you're missing signals here.
It was Katlyn.
Maybe I should help.

He kept the smile on his face, and sent her a firm denial. He was damned if he'd be sharing his bodytime with a girl. Any girl. Besides, what was Kat going to do? Get this guy so worked up that he tried to make physical contact? What then?
There's too much at stake here to play games, he
snapped at her.
Let me handle this.

“All right, then.” For a moment Sumi just looked at her—trying to define the change in her manner, perhaps, trying to come to terms with it?—and then he nodded toward the headset that sat beside her. “Immersion in thirty. You'd better put that on.”

From somewhere he dredged up his best charming smile, and picked up the headset. “Thanks.” Then he cast his eyes demurely down, trying to look embarrassed. “Sumi, I'm a little bit tense is all. After the dive I'll be okay. . . .” He left him to fill in the rest.

“That's all right.” He seemed to relax a bit. Whatever he had come for, now his job was done. Derik could imagine the captain's orders to him:
Get her in the fucking headset, whatever it takes. Make sure she wears it.

No, he wouldn't have said that. Only an idiot would go into the ainniq unchilled and unsedated, endangering them all. And the Earthie girl wasn't that stupid. Right?

One of the children snickered.

Sumi waited until she had put the headset on her head (so maybe that was it, after all) and then nodded his leavetaking and left him alone.

Not alone,
Derik thought with satisfaction.
Never alone.

Raven was still sorting through the files he'd inloaded from the ship's library. She had her own section of brainware to do it in, so it wasn't bothering anybody. Verina and Katlyn were holed up with some viddie of life on Paradise; he could see its ghostly images flicker in his field of vision, a necessary annoyance. Even the kind of brainware they carried didn't have totally separate visual tracks for everyone. Still, after years of playing hide-and-seek with each other in Jamisia's brain, they had pretty much learned to tune each other out. He did so now, ignoring the half-dozen efforts going on inside his head which, hopefully, would lead them all to safety when they finally got off this ship.

With a sigh he visualized the icons that would make sure his brain accepted no input for the next few hours, not from the headset and not from anywhere else. Raven had showed him how to disconnect its processor—it still worked despite his abuse of the instrument, though not well—but even so, this was not a time to take chances. His gut feeling was that some kind of trap had been set when Tam played with the thing, and he was damned if he'd give it half a chance to work.

The dragons will find us,
a child whispered.
They'll eat us.

He ignored that.

When the time came, he lay down on the bed and pulled the straps across his body, fitting them into place. Ankles first, then knees, then a pair across his torso. They withdrew slightly after he snapped them shut, tightening across his body. Like he was going to fall out of bed without their help, or something. The things he'd stuffed into his pockets dug into his body from all angles, and he had to squirm around a bit to get the pair of shoes in his thigh pocket aligned so they didn't dig into his leg.

Sumi hadn't noticed all those bulges, had he? Derik hoped to hell not. That would ruin everything. God damn those straps....

Jamisia shot him a picture of the thing they'd put her in the first time she'd gone through an ainniq, a kind of padded cocoon. Also of the bruises on her body afterward, and the ones she'd seen on other people.

He shrugged.

It was just him, then, him and this female body with its fearfully pounding heart. The wellseeker begged him to let it adjust something, anything, and at last he let it put the reins on his pulse, and neutralize some of the adrenaline pouring into his system. He'd need that back later, but right now all it was doing was making him restless.
But the minute these straps come off, you quit all that.
He made sure it understood that instruction, then tried to relax. But it was impossible. So much was riding on this little gambit, and the risk involved in trying it was so very great. What if the creatures who lived in the ainniq really could smell human thoughts, or hear them, or whatever? He knew that in the past manned ships had sometimes come back into safespace with the crew all dead. It didn't happen a lot anymore, but the odds were still there that it might. What if his little game skewed the odds enough to turn this into a doomed flight?

Shit. He called up a few drops of sedative to still his nerves. It bothered him, how much this was getting to him. The girls got scared like this often enough, that's how they were, but him? Fine example he was setting.

Then he felt the ship shudder, and a sound that was not quite a sound reverberated along his nerve endings. Something had grabbed hold of the vessel, he guessed, and was now dragging it along into the belly of a Guild transport. If that were the case, then everyone else on board would be asleep by now, or pretty heavily out of it. He wondered just how alert Allo was, and if he'd bother to check on the headset readings of his passenger. Probably not. He had enough things to worry about on his own ... like two hours of having his life in the hands of a Guild he hated, who'd probably arrest him on the spot if they knew even half of what his business was about.

Time enough to find that out later,
he told her.
On Paradise.

The ship shuddered again, and this time he could hear something straining against its surface, a low squeal that made his skin crawl. He slid his arms beneath the straps and waited. There were clangs in the distance, which he felt more than heard, and he almost thought there were human voices. Were the Guildfolk that close to the ship, or was he catching the echoes of some kind of public address system? It must have been from something in contact with the hull, he realized, for the compartment Allo's ship was in would have no air in it. No point in air. If they got into trouble while in transit, then no mere evacuation could save them. You either lived or died in the ainniq, period; there was no middle ground.

Better to sleep through that kind of death, he thought grimly.

There was a long time of silence, then, and with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach he realized that they were all set to go. MORE SEDATIVE? the wellseeker queried. He told it to go fuck itself. Enough was enough. He needed to have his head free and clear when they got to Paradise, enough so that he could beat out Allo if he had to. And if that meant riding out this thing with his heart beating bruises against the inside of his rib cage, so be it.

The ship jerked.

He caught his breath.

It started to move forward. The sensation was weird, not the kind of thing you usually felt in space travel. If the vessel had been moving on its own, it would have had its own G-web up to compensate for such things, which didn't mean that you wouldn't feel the acceleration, but it would have been ... well, different, somehow. This was kind of like what you felt on Earth, where all the gravity was natural. Or so Jamisia told him. She was the only one who remembered that sensation.

He felt a cold knot form in the pit of his stomach as the ship moved forward toward the ainniq. Would he know when they entered it? Would he sense the dragons, as it was said they could sense him? Panic started to well up inside him at the thought of lying there, strapped down, while the universe's most deadly predators homed in on him, but he refused to let his wellseeker do anything about it; finally, when it insisted once too often, he shut it down. It wasn't a question of safety, any more, or even common sense, but of sheer masculine pride. He could hardly bitch at the girls for their cowardice and then act like a baby himself, now, could he? He gritted his teeth as the ship jerked again, and he felt a faint queasiness stir in his gut at the
wrongness
of that motion. Safespace shouldn't feel like this....

Passage took an eternity.

Yes, he was sure he could sense things outside the ship: hungry, circling. Maybe it was just his imagination, but that didn't make it any easier to deal with. Worst of all, he could feel every lurch of the small vessel as its outpilot pulled it into one evasive configuration after another. Once he even felt something touch his soul—or so he thought—something colder than the deepest reaches of space, something so horrific that his skin crawled where it brushed against him. He thought for that one moment that he was surely gone, that he had taken one chance too many and was about to pay the price for it. But then the moment was gone, as quickly as it had come. Was that really some life-form of the ainniq, or just his overheated imagination? Sweat was running down from his face in rivulets, pooling on the synthetic mattress beneath him. What if you went into the ainniq awake, and the sheer terror of it drove you insane? Was that why everyone had to be sedated? Was that why no one was allowed to go through this journey with all his senses online? The ship jerked suddenly, so hard that the strap holding his left arm down cut cruelly into flesh.
This was a mistake,
someone wailed. Zusu? “Shut up!” he growled, as another wave of sickness welled up in his gut. Damn it to hell, they needed to be awake, they
had
to be awake, so they should just stop their bitching and deal with it. Another sickening lurch brought hot bile into his throat, and he swallowed back on it, hard. The ship would fly straight for as long as it could, so any time it didn't meant that something was out there. Right? And a series of rapid adjustments of direction and speed, like he was feeling now, could only mean one thing....

He shut his eyes and tried not to think of what was following them. Did they hunt in packs? Did they enjoy the chase? Were they intelligent, or just fast and hungry?

One of the children started crying.

Maybe this had been a mistake.

He shut his eyes and started counting backward from ten thousand ... which should, if he did it slowly enough, get him to Paradise. More of the children were crying now. He wished he could make them go away. He wished he could do his usual routine and yell at them to shut the fuck up, and they'd do it. But there was too much fear in his own mental voice now for that to work. He had no authority, and he knew it.

Nine thousand . . .

Eight thousand ...

Seven ...

A heart-wrenching lurch was followed by what could only be the ship pulling into a sharp turn. Something must be close, very close. His heart was pounding so hard he was surprised it didn't break a rib or something. Sweating profusely, he forced his mind back onto the numbers, envisioning them as he muttered their names.
Six thousand, five hundred and ninety-two
... How did the outpilots deal with this? What kind of nerves did those fuckers have, that they could dodge monsters for two whole hours without losing their shit? And this was only a short trip by Guild standards, he knew; some of the trips the Guild ran were more than five hours. How could a human brain handle that?

They're not human anymore,
someone answered. Verina?
The Hausman Drive warped their brains so they could live in this place. That's why we have to have them for space travel, because no “true human” can manage it.

He swallowed back on something hot and nasty in his throat and started his counting again. Eternity passed, measured in seconds, stinking of fear. When he finally heard the grating sound of a docking mechanism rubbing against the hull, he practically wet his pants. Which, given the dynamics of being in a female body, would have been really embarrassing.

He waited until the ship stopped moving and all was silent, then began to unclasp the straps that bound him down. The jumpsuit was plastered to his skin along with everything under it, but he hardly noticed. Shit, he just hoped he'd read the signals right and they were really in safespace once more; if not he was about to do something really, really stupid.

He went to the door, listened for a moment, and then opened it. He could sense two or three of the girls looking back, regretting all the stuff they were leaving behind. Souvenirs from teenage high points, memories almost too precious to part with ... hell, he thought, they knew why it had to stay here. They'd discussed it till they were blue in the face, and all but the children had agreed. If the crew came here and found nothing, they'd know this whole thing was planned. If they came here and found Jamisia's bags instead, and if those bags looked like they were full, then they'd be looking for a young girl running in panic, without change of clothing or other supplies. Big difference.