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Tara K Harper - Cataract
"On-contract," Tsia acknowledged.
She recrossed the tarmac warily and rejoined the other meres. "Seems clear," she said in a low voice to
Nitpicker. The pilot's eyes glinted at the unspoken implication. "But," she added, "they had an accident a
few days ago. Damaged the sensor net."
From beside the pilot, Doetzier's eyes narrowed. "Anyone hurt?"
"One grunt-tech. Dead."
His eyes shuttered, and he seemed to withdraw, but his biofield flared with energy. Tsia could almost
hear him think-ing. Puppets, she thought as she looked at the meres. And the puppet master was
somewhere nearby, arranging his sticks and strings. She shook herself, then led Wren, Bowdie, and
Kurvan across, while the other three waited behind. With only one manual scanner to work with, it took
Bowdie twenty minutes to declare the rec room clean.
"No weapons," he said, as he closed his handscanner down and tucked it back in his harness.
Tsia eyed him blankly for a moment. There was something in this room, some scent that caught at her
attention. Feline? Marine? It was an odor she ought to recognize, but it was so faint that it refused to
trigger her memory. Bowdie gestured again toward the door, and she nodded slowly, then went back for
the others.
Each time through the filter field, Ruka cringed, and Tsia found herself flinching as she never had
before. Her skin al-most crawled with the tingling field, and she finally realized that it was the cougar's
muscles bunching and twitching that translated to her as the shivers. It was not until the fifth time
through that the cougar began to get used to the sensation. Tsia tried to shut out the flinching, but found
it almost impossible. Ruka seemed to insert himself deeper into her mind each time she opened her gate.
The rec room doubled as a staging area and meeting hall.
There were three tables at one end, and a stack of massive crates at the other. Color bars in the painted
designs delineated different sport courts; the grav plates set into both floors and ceilings alternated with
the mag plates and bars in snaking di-amond patterns. Two doorways led to the outer loading bays; two
more led to the warren and labs. The wall behind the ta-bles was a bank of panels, screens, and manual
equipment. Three screens were active, the others blank. Doetzier was al-ready seated by the scame. His
arm, still cast in the thin sheet of hardened metaplas, glowed under the medical gear's scans as Striker
activated it manually.
Tsia, jittery, shrugged away from Wren and paced toward the outer doors. That scent it was still here,
in this room. And it was cat, she realized, not cougar. When Ruka took in the odor through her biogate,
he snarled and bristled until she rubbed her own neck to smooth down her hairs. Cat, but not cougar a
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lo-cal creature? She didn't think so. She tried to concentrate, but exhaustion hit like a fist, and abruptly,
she leaned against the wall. Even Striker's face, angular and flat as she moved across to speak with
Nitpicker, looked drawn so tight that the skin was stretched like a drum across her cheekbones. Wren's
tanned face looked sallow in the light. Where Bowdie's bent legs had seemed to carry the weight of the
world, his face now looked as tired.
Wren, standing near her, pulled a pouch from his harness and popped a few nolo seeds in his mouth.
"Get rid of the cub yet?" he murmured, spitting a husk sharply into the hisser bin on the wall.
"No."
"Better do it soon. Nitpicker will catch on sooner or later "
"She already knows." Tsia glanced over at Kurvan and Bowdie where they unpacked the two packs that
had survived the hike. She motioned with her chin. "Didn't come out of this with much, did we?"
"Uh-uh."
"But maybe more than we were supposed to?"
Wren chewed thoughtfully on a seed. "Been wondering about that myself."
She opened her mouth to say more, but then remembered the deke in his medkit. She glanced toward the
outside doors. "Someone coming."
"That your senses or the cub's?"
"The cub's."
He got to his feet and loosened his flexor in his belt. "At least he's some use."
"Three humans," she murmured. 'Two men and a woman."
Wren caught Nitpicker's attention, and the pilot broke off her murmured conversation with Striker. Wren
nodded toward the outer wall. "Feather says there are three freepicks coming in," he said softly.
Nitpicker glanced at Tsia. "Are the scanners back up?"
Tsia shook her head. Two more freepicks entered from a side corridor, and the scents in the room shifted
subtly. Her nostrils flared.
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Tara K Harper - Cataract
The pilot's eyes narrowed. "You read it off the cub?"
"Yes," she said deliberately, her voice low enough that Striker could not hear. "And yes, he's still here. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]