Rift (49 page)

Now, in Brecca’s strange room, she turned to Reeve. “I have no place,” she said.

He held her fiercely then, as though the strength of his arms could make it all better. And for that moment, it did.

3

Brecca was wrong, Reeve thought. She’d said that Loon wasn’t human. But Loon
was
human … with orthong mixed in; and if he loved her, it was for all that she was, not just part of her. Not just the easy parts. Her revelation made not the slightest difference in how he felt about her. With relief, he abandoned himself to another exploration of her body, and she responded, as eager for him as the first time.

Finally they rested, and Loon slept. As tired as he was, something kept him from following her into oblivion. Wrapping himself around her, he considered the possibilities embodied in this woman sleeping in his arms.

Loon was adapted by the orthong to survive. If the orthong could do that much, then they might know how to manipulate true germ line cells. The orthong—not the Somaformers—were the true gene engineers of the world. And if they were—Reeve concentrated so hard that he seemed frozen in place—Lord of Worlds, it was a small, dim hope, but wasn’t it at least possible that the orthong could help them, that somewhere in all of this was an answer?

It was a very long while before sleep came to him.

They awoke to an explosion of rock and dust on one side of the room. The lake had erupted, and a monster loomed out of its depths, barking and coughing.

“You two better put some clothes on—it’s cold in here, and your knees will get all scraped up. But you have to hurry.” Another cough, and a flurry of waving arms urged them forward.

“Dooley?” Reeve struggled into his pants, peering through a suspension of dust. Dooley was peering from a gaping hole in the wall.

“Yes. Hurry up.” He reached out a hand to help Loon into the tunnel. He looked at Reeve, and smiled a crooked, loopy smile. “I’ve decided,” he said.

4

Mitya stared at the data field as it scrolled interior heat readings, functions of depth and speed of the mole. With heat and pressure modeled, they could forecast the sloughing of the mole’s housing, the deterioration of the propulsion unit, and the timing of the blast.

Cross-checking the modeling runs had kept Mitya busy for days. He’d won the post after spotting a minor data slug that no one else had caught. After Lieutenant Roarke finished his rampage about the science team’s needing a thirteen-year-old to check its math, Mitya was assigned to the cross-check full-time. It was tedious work, though the quantum computer was as powerful as anything Mitya had ever been allowed to touch. Normally its sheer capacity would have thrilled him—even at this small node where he worked a parallel processor—but his heart wasn’t in it.

He kept thinking about the population of the
Quo Vadis
 … separated into the uniformed and the barefoot: the crew with spit and polish, and the majority packed together like lab rats and eating in the corridors. The bulkheads were dented and peeling, hatchways
missing and covered with curtains. It was nothing like he’d imagined. Nothing like the glorious flagship that it must once have been, hundreds of years ago …

Mitya stopped the scrolling numbers; his mind hadn’t registered what he was seeing for the last five minutes. He didn’t bloody care about the numbers or what the crew had jokingly come to call the dismantling project.

One by one his dreams were crumbling away. Since his parents had died with Station nothing remained but fake people and fake hope. He’d been eager at first to give his loyalty to
something
. The Captain could have had it, or Stepan, or the terraform project, or the great starship. But each had fallen apart in sequence, sinking in lies, falling away from him until he was left with empty hands, empty heart. In fact, he’d begun to despise the geo cannon and all it stood for. The planet might be harsh, and it might even kill them, eventually. But it was in some way their fate. Here is where they were. It was solid ground. They were still alive. Didn’t that count for
anything
?

Lieutenant Cody hovered for a moment behind his left shoulder. “Trouble?” she asked.

Mitya came to with a start. He poked the tab, starting the data run again. “No, sir, just resting my eyes.”

Cody was dogging him lately, eyes cross and voice tight. She couldn’t know he’d been talking to Bonhert—not unless Bonhert told her, and Mitya knew the man told as little to as few as possible. But she didn’t like the apparent friendship between him and the Captain, and it galled her to think she couldn’t do as she liked with a mere youngster. Meanwhile, Mitya thought it a stroke of luck about the data slug, since it lent unexpected credulity to the tale that when honest crew slept, someone—maybe Cody—prowled the clean room.

“You can take a break when the adults do,” she said,
embedding her little barb as she turned to other duties.

Mitya smirked, his expression hidden from her. She couldn’t know anything. She was just exercising her canines.

A dull series of thuds from outside the dome just had time to register on Mitya’s awareness when behind him a shout roused the entire room.

“Gunfire! Someone’s shooting out there! Stations!”

The room emptied so fast Mitya was left sitting in his chair, staring at the door.
Orthong
was his first thought. Excitement, mixed with dread, spiked his nerves. He bolted to the door to see the main room in an uproar: Stepan was headed through the air lock with a knot of armed crew, people were dashing for weapons, and Tsamchoe was shouting orders, while Bonhert strode toward the air lock, gun drawn—he wasn’t a coward, Mitya noted.

No one had ever said what Mitya should do in an emergency, but it was obvious: stay out of the way—a skill he had honed to a fine art.

From outside the dome came muffled shouts. Mitya wondered if the orthong would bomb the dome or try to overwhelm its defenses with sheer numbers. He imagined pulse after pulse of white-hided invaders, chests bristling with weapons strapped within easy reach, armature cuffs slinging lobs of plasma fire.…

A commotion at the air lock drew every eye and trained gun. But: “Coming through. Man wounded” was the cry from beyond the door. Then it slammed aside and a crew member backed in, carrying someone feet-first into the dome.

As crew gathered around, Stepan said, “We’re under control. This claver came in with one of ours. Stand aside and let Lieutenant Hess have a look.”

Medic-trained, Lieutenant Hess took charge as Mitya sidled into the crowd around the wounded man.
Someone brought a med kit, and while Hess worked, crew pressed forward to watch.

When Mitya finally worked his way close enough for a good view, he was astonished at what he saw: a giant of a man, and very pale, with a bluish tint in his hair. Across from him, he saw Oran openly gaping at the creature. Oran caught his eye and made a face at the odd fellow lying bleeding at their feet.

The man’s shirt was soaked red. Hess split it down to the claver’s waist and pressed a white pad onto the wound. Hess was talking, saying, “We’re going to help you, stay calm now.…” He administered an injection and the claver’s eyes opened wide.

Mitya saw that what he’d taken for blue hair was actually a blue pattern on the man’s skull, under a short brush of hair. The claver was staring up at the ceiling and saying something. Lieutenant Hess responded with a reassuring murmur, while behind them the air lock was opening again. Bonhert walked through, in the company of several officers.

“Home, home,” Mitya thought he heard the claver say.

Then Bonhert was talking to Lieutenant Tsamchoe: “They thought he was chasing her; he’s big as an ox and she was running like hell.… Sergeant Dias brought him down.”

Staring straight at the ceiling, the wounded man spoke again, this time saying clearly, “Dome home.”

Then, to Mitya’s amazement, Marie Dussault stepped forward. Marie, killed in the Station disaster—Marie was here with a giant claver! She stood looking down on the man.

“Medea,” the dying man said, his voice oddly deep and resonant for one in his condition. “Now we will live forever? In the dome home?”

Hess looked up at Captain Bonhert and slowly shook his head.

Marie stepped closer. “Live?” she asked. Her mouth
hardened. “Like those women of the Whale Clave? Like the youngster you threw from the distilling tower?”

His face went slack as he murmured, “Isis, I am dying.”

“Yeth,” Marie lisped at him. “But thanks for the ride home.”

Lieutenant Hess frowned at her sarcasm and pleaded with his eyes for the Captain to silence her.

“He’s a murderer,” Marie said to the crowd. “A petty king who liked to throw defenseless women off seventy-five-foot drops. Don’t waste your drugs.”

Bonhert took her by the arm and they disappeared in the direction of his quarters for a debriefing with Cody and the others.

When Mitya looked back to the claver, Hess was closing the dead man’s eyes.

Rumors and conjecture were all they had for the rest of the day, but it was enough to keep everyone talking. Mitya found excuses to leave his station at the processor and mingle with crew in the main dome, where he figured the best gossip would be. He refused to let himself hope his parents had been in the other shuttle; told himself, over and over, No, they’re dead. No last-minute reprieve. No more phony hopes. Dead.

But a knot of crew with more optimism refused to work and stood outside of Bonhert’s quarters, where he and his chiefs were holed up with Marie Dussault. Everyone hoped for word of a loved one, friend or relative, but they turned away disappointed when Bonhert came out to announce that along with Marie, only one other survived, and perhaps not for long: Reeve Calder. For a few minutes Mitya hated Reeve Calder and Marie Dussault, hated their good fortune, when it might have been … might have been … And then, to his surprise and relief, he let it go. He was no
worse off than he was a few hours ago: in a bloody awful mess made not one whit worse by the arrival of the woman and the blue-headed claver.

That evening the crew gathered to hear Marie Dussault recount her adventures, a seven-week-long Odyssey that held Mitya enthralled. She began with waking up on the crashed shuttle in the midst of a forbidding place called a swamp.