“Then why in all this hell did you come here?” he croaked. “Why didn’t you stay with your Notouch?”
Her chin shifted left, then right. “I wanted to see if you’d be willing to leave. I didn’t want you and Lu hanging around making things hard…harder.” Her green eyes were honest and a little ashamed. “I wanted you to know I’m willing to get you both offworld, but if you decide to keep going on the assignment, then, as of now, you’ve got no pilot and you’d better watch your back, because I’ll be on it.”
The night was suddenly crystal clear to Jay. The fire didn’t even flicker. Cor’s headcloth didn’t stir. He could hear her breathing, even over the rush of blood in his ears.
“And you really don’t know where the Notouch have gone?” he said coolly.
She shook her head. “No. I really don’t.”
Jay lashed out. His fist caught her in the throat and knocked her backward. She choked as she fell. He grabbed hold of her shoulders and flipped her onto her stomach. Her spine was stiff and knobbly under his knees. He pressed all his weight against her back. Her neck muscles corded against his palms as he forced her face into the mud. She clawed at him, raking great long scratches down his hands. She screamed to the ground. Jay held on until her hands fell into the weeds and he felt her neck go limp.
He stood. He thought he would be shaking, but he wasn’t. He was perfectly calm. Cor was nothing but a crooked shadow in the grass. In a moment he’d call the watch back to toss her into the swamp.
Jay fished his translator disk out of his ear and tucked it into its slot in his torque and waited.
“Jahidh? Be quick,” came Kelat’s voice.
“I need you to do a satellite scan of the area about twenty kilometers around this transmission point.” Jay kept looking at Cor’s body, noting how it didn’t move. “Stone in the Wall’s relatives are on the run and I need to know where they’ve gone.”
“It won’t be easy,” said Kelat. “But I’ll make it my work.”
Kelat closed the line and Jay disengaged his disk from the torque.
Do you know, Kelat, he thought toward the canyon wall, you’ve just described this whole fool Reclamation.
Jay whistled and waved to a quartet of silhouettes that he was fairly sure were soldiers. He’d have to tell Heart. He’d have to tell them all that they’d been betrayed. He’d have to, if they were to keep going, and they had to keep going.
Because now there was absolutely nothing else to do.
It was four hours past dark before the transport was towered from the tether’s end. Avir had to order Ivale to come with her and she was ready to swear that if there had not been a host of Beholden to see, he would have balked at the assignment
Sealed in pressure suits, Avir, Ivale, and Nal walked down the steps to meet the transport. Darkness and the accompanying cold cleared the streets of even the most lost of the artifacts.
From the outside, the transport was little more than a computerized box with thick, heavy tires that could grip and climb even the Home Ground’s chaotic terrain. As they approached, a door in the side lifted away, letting loose a flood of clear light.
Nice dressing, thought Avir as she squinted up the ramp that was lowering and tried to find her footing. She wasn’t sure how she felt about a security team leader with a sense of the dramatic.
The door closed behind them and Avir’s eyes adjusted to the light. It was a standard transport: drive boards in the front, seating for a dozen passengers down the middle, comm terminals at the rear, and storage lockers lining the walls. Eight of the seats were filled with the security team; males and females with brown or pinkish skins and all as bald as Ambassadors. The team leader got out of the pilot’s chair as soon as Avir walked up the ramp, but did not make obeisance until her eyes had had a chance to adjust.
The name he handed her was Security Chief Panair of the Hundredth Core. Avir accepted it with a nod. She didn’t trust her voice. It felt too good to be between soundproofed walls breathing air that was free of any kind of reek.
Security Chief Panair was not one to waste time. He accepted her silence as she had accepted his name and returned to his station. He snapped the seat restraints across his waist and passed his hands over the controls. The hum of the engines heightened its pitch.
Avir took the farthest seat on the empty row. Ivale stood aside to let Nal sit next to her. Avir wished she was free to roll her eyes. Ivale was being positively childish.
The transport lurched forward and Avir tried to resign herself to a long, dull trip. Outside the windows, the night brought down lashings of rain and ice carried on a wind that shook the transport. Panair kept his eyes on the boards, Avir noticed. Despite his bright running lights, he was navigating more by the satellite transmission on the terminals than by line of sight.
The journey wore on. The transport lurched and rattled through a landscape that could barely be seen, and Ivale’s silence began to wear on Avir’s nerves. Nal was using the seat’s terminal, absorbed in his own work, but Ivale just sat with his eyes kept rigidly forward, watching the blobs of shadow that passed through the transport’s lights so quickly that it was often difficult to tell if they were trees or mere stones.
Avir sat back and tried to feel sympathy for him. This was not what any of them had been chosen for. They were supposed to convert a series of buildings for use by the Vitae and begin researches on the artifacts. They were not a boarding party, even if the team surrounding them were.
Panair swung the transport to the left and they lurched up a steep incline. The lights showed up nothing but rocks, boulders, and mud.
“Approaching the Unifier shelter,” Panair announced.
Avir looked out the window automatically, but there was nothing there except stone and shadow. The terminal on Panair’s board showed a smooth-sided dome, glowing with incandescent light and heat in the infrared spectrum.
Avir felt her beating heart rise until it filled her throat.
The white dome drifted into view. The transport ground to a halt and the door lifted itself open. The security team leapt out and dived straight for the dome’s entrance, leaving Avir, Ivale, and Nal trailing, a little stunned, in their wake.
“What…!” shouted a man’s voice inside the dome.
Avir stepped under the canopy over the entranceway but couldn’t see anything through the open door except piles of camp equipment and Panair’s back.
“Stand still and be identified,” barked Panair.
“All right, all right, I’m standing. Look, here I am.”
Avir stepped sideways, squeezing between the wall and a stack of storage crates. Panair, dart gun out and ready, faced a bony, brown-bearded man with a hand lamp and a tool belt raised up over his head. Behind him, incongruously, a fire burned in an empty crate. Next to it, an artifact lay on a pallet of blankets, staring at the ceiling. Its mouth moved constantly, but it made no sound, nor was it paying any attention to what was going on around it.
Avir, forgetting dignity and propriety, hurried to the artifact’s side. She knelt and unsealed her glove. She touched its skin. It was clammy and goose bumps prickled its dusky surface. Its eyes were glazed over and flickered back and forth, seeing something, but nothing that was in the room. Nal knelt beside her and also touched the artifact. He measured its pulse and fever with his expert hands and his mouth tightened.
“What did you do here?” Avir demanded of the bony man.
“It’s hard to explain,” he said. “Who in the backwaters are you lot?”