Playing God (30 page)

David lifted his gaze and focused on her. He didn’t know what his expression was, but he watched Esmaraude’s ruddy face turn pale as she looked at him.

When he did speak, his voice was nothing more than a harsh whisper. “He has to.”

L
YNN BLINKED HEAVILY. SHE
was sitting up. The chair felt hard under her thighs and back. She lifted her head. The world outside her left eye was a blur of color. She squinted. Her right eye saw a bare, concrete room and four pinkish grey Dedelphi. Getesaph, or near family to the Getesaph. After another few seconds she could see the deep blue clothing they all wore was military issue. These four were soldiers. She looked down and saw the bands that clamped her forearms to the chair arms.

“Record,” she subvocalized to her implant.

Their faces looked wrong. Lynn blinked again. All four of them wore bulbous filter masks over their mouths and noses. Two of them had gun belts around their waists.

What…?

One of the four glanced toward her and saw she was awake. Lynn tried to speak in a normal voice, but couldn’t make her throat work. She swallowed painfully and tried again. Still nothing.

A second Getesaph walked over to her chair. Gloved hands found the catches on her helmet and lifted it off. Lynn felt suddenly naked.

“Which eye is your camera?” the Getesaph asked. Her breath steamed against her facemask. Then, Lynn saw the small knife in the soldier’s hand.

Lynn’s tongue froze against the roof of her mouth. Her heart fluttered in her chest. She considered lying. She could always get another eye grown, but the information and assistance from her camera were invaluable. She looked at the Getesaph’s grey eyes and knew if she told her the wrong thing, she’d just take them both and leave her blind.

She swallowed, coughed, and managed to croak, “The right.”

The soldier’s hand rose out of her line of vision. A moment later, she felt thick fingers pull her right eyelid open. The curved blade drove straight toward her. The soldier’s fist blotted out the room a split second before the scarlet cloud swirled in front of her.

She felt the blade curve around her eye. It didn’t hurt as much as she thought it would. It was the sight of the glistening orb and its trailing ganglia in the soldier’s hand that brought the blackness back down on her.

A voice cut through the swaddling darkness.

“Lynn? Come on, Lynn. Don’t do this to me. Wake up.”

The words entered her skull, making a counterpoint to the vague pulse of pain in her right temple. She did not want to open her eyes, but couldn’t remember why. Her left eye twitched under its lid.

She remembered. All her muscles contracted until she pulled herself into a little ball, cradling her wounded head in her still-gloved hands.

“Lynn, stop.” She felt hands and yanked herself away. “You’re making it worse. I just got you bandaged up…”

Arron. What was Arron doing here? Where was here? What was happening?

She was going to have to open her eyes.

She forced her hands slowly away from her face. Gritting her teeth, she lifted her eyelids. Light lanced into her left eye. She blinked it hard. Her right lid wriggled limply, brushing a cloth padding that pressed against her cheek and temple. They hadn’t cut the eyelid away. For some reason that made her feel better.

“Lynn?”

Her working eye saw a pitted, grey cement wall with a blobby shadow falling across it. She lay on a rough cement floor. Her skin prickled against her clean-suit as the cold and an impression of dampness seeped through. Her helmet had been removed. The air around her head and ears was dank and smelled of encroaching mold.

She licked dry lips with an equally dry tongue. “Arron?”

He sighed with relief. “Can you sit up?”

She wanted very much to say no, but instead she tightened her muscles and tried. His hands caught her shoulders and helped her. The world spun. She leaned her head back against the wall and tried to steady her breathing. She kept her eye open. Now that she had her sight back, she didn’t want to cut it off.

She could look around a little better. The cell was solid, unpainted concrete. A metal door with a flap-covered slot in the bottom provided the only way in and out. A metal drain had been sunk in the center of the floor. A metal bucket stood in the corner. That was all her one eye could see.

She felt Arron sitting at her right side. Gingerly, she reached up and touched the cloth that wrapped her darkness. It was rough, ragged, and warm. The tang of salt and iron filtered through her nostrils.

“Why’d they…” Arron’s hand flicked into her line of sight as he gestured at her.

“Cut out my camera.” Her throat felt like she’d swallowed a river of sand. “Is there anything to drink?”

“No. Sorry.”

She relaxed her neck and let her head turn toward him. He had drawn his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. One sleeve of his shirt had been ripped off at the shoulder, and she knew where her bandage had come from. He still had his helmet on. Hers lay next to him. A thin milky film filled the creases of the clean-suit around his elbows and knees.

Age marks. The clean-suit’s organics had about three days of life in them. After that, they dried out and cracked open. Lynn raised her hand and flexed her fingers. A spider-web of white lines creased her palm and fingers.

“Marvelous,” she muttered, and let her head rest against the wall.

“I don’t understand.” Arron spoke to the door. “I don’t understand how they could do this.”

“Somebody’s obviously decided that there’s something more important than saving the world, and we got in the way.” Lynn shifted herself gently so she could press more of her back against the wall. “It’ll be okay. Trace and R.J. will have already missed me. They’ll have Commander Keale and his people out looking for us. We just have to wait it out.”

“I hope they find us before anybody else does.” Arron flexed his hand the way Lynn had and watched more white lines form and spread. “We’re both going to be biohazards before long.”

Lynn decided not to waste breath agreeing with him. She wanted to sit quietly and nurse her eye. She touched her bandage again. Something else needed to be said. “Thanks for tying this up.”

“You’re welcome.” She heard him stir. “You should put your helmet back on. The last thing you need is some fungus taking up residence in…that.” His hand held the helmet out to where she could see it. She grasped it with both hands and managed to ease it over her head and lock it down.

She leaned her head back against the wall. “Is there anybody outside?”

“If there is, they aren’t answering. I banged on the door for about five minutes after they tossed you in here.”

No help there.
She hadn’t really expected any. Actually, now that the shock was wearing off, she was surprised they were still alive. Taking prisoners was not something the Dedelphi generally did.

“So we wait.” She wrapped her arms around herself.

“So we do.” Arron leaned back next to her.

Lynn sat there, breathing and hurting. Arron didn’t seem inclined to talk, and that was just fine with her. She dozed for a while, and woke to a sploshy sound coming from her blind side. It took her a second to realize it must be Arron using the bucket and despite the fact she couldn’t see anything, she turned her face toward the opposite wall. The sound reminded her how painfully thirsty she was, which made her stomach clench against sudden nausea.

The clank of a bolt being shot back sounded from outside the door. Lynn’s head jerked up. The door swung back, revealing a dark hallway and two Dedelphi sisters with a daughter held between them. As a team, they tossed the daughter in the cell. She sprawled belly down on top of the drain. Lynn stared.

“Hey!” yelled Arron. “You can’t—”

The door clanged shut. The bolt shot home. The daughter moaned, and Lynn finally identified her.

“Resaime.”

Dismissing her aches as best she could, Lynn crawled over to the child and raised her up onto her knees. Resaime blinked at her, obviously dazed. A vivid purple bruise with a black spot at its center spread across her arm. Lynn guessed she’d been given an intramuscular injection of some sort of tranquilizer, and it probably hadn’t worn off all the way yet.

“It’s good, it’s good,” said Lynn in t’Therian as she wrapped her arms around Resaime.
My God, what’ve they done with Senejess?
There was no question in Lynn’s mind that if they had Res, they had her aunt. Even Senejess would not leave a daughter alone in enemy territory.

Resaime didn’t resist the embrace, but she didn’t respond either.

“Who is she?” asked Arron in t’Therian.

“Resaime Shin t’Theria.” Lynn smoothed Resaime’s ears. The daughter’s eyes blinked heavily. “The last emerged of my friend Praeis Shin’s first bearing.”

He didn’t say any of the obvious; how could they throw her in here without any relatives? They can’t leave her here. Our suits are rotting. We’ll kill her just by sitting here.

“This could be a pressure tactic,” Lynn suggested, laying Resaime down on her side. “They’ll leave her in with us just long enough for someone out there to get panicky. She was…traveling with one of her aunts…”

“No,” said Arron in English. The flat finality in his voice made Lynn turn to look at him.

“She’s t’Therian. They’ve thrown her in here to die.” Arron hunched down like he was trying to guard himself from his own words. “They may bring her aunt in to watch when the anaphylaxis sets in, but she’s already dead as far as they’re concerned.” Lynn’s expression must have been horrified because he drew back a little and spread his hands. “They’ve got a blood hate for the t’Therians.”

“It’s thoroughly reciprocated.” Lynn collapsed backwards. She hurt, she hurt, she hurt. “They are not making this easy on themselves, are they?”

“No. But then they never have.” He flexed his hand and stared at it. Even from where she sat, Lynn could see the white threads covering his knuckles. “Your commander’s got maybe twenty-four hours to find us before we become lethal to her.”

“I know.” Lynn rubbed Resaime’s shoulder, wishing she’d wake up. “I know.”

Whatever you think about Humans
—Lareet leaned her elbows on the terrace railing—
you have to admit they’re incredible architects.

The apartment buildings, municipal buildings, and small factories on the
Ur
had a strange, squared-off look, but they had been opened up from their Human isolation to provide plazas, terraces, great halls, and meeting chambers. Rivers and canals cut through lawns, arbors, and gardens. Boats and gondolas floated on the water. Members of the prep team thronged along the banks, arguing in a pleased fashion over who should get which vessel. All the water was deep enough to swim in. There were even fish in the rivers and birds in the trees. Everything was so clean it glistened.

Lareet took a deep breath of the fresh air. It felt a bit too dry, but the temperature was just right for early summer. The cloudless sky was disconcerting, but she felt she could get used to it. She loved it at night, when the blue-tinted dome cleared, and they saw all the stars there were.

It’s almost a pity we don’t have more time to enjoy it.

She opened the railing gate and climbed down the stairs to the flagstone walkway. She strolled past the gardens full of big fleshy flowers and thick vines. It was hard to imagine that a hundred yards below her feet, there was a mirror image of this city, and between them was not dirt, water, and rock, but conduits for maintenance, the hundreds of gravity generators, and all the climate machinery. The only sign of this underground complex was a sealed hatch set into the walkway. Its silver surface was labeled
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
in four different languages.

Similar hatches were spaced about one every hundred yards in a tidy grid all across the city. Each one had a video camera hanging over it, mounted on the wall of a building or strapped to the branches of a tree. These were the only places you could see the cameras without searching for them. The Human soldiers…What was the word? The
Marines,
obviously wanted it known that access to the maintenance corridors was closely watched.

Which made Lareet uneasy. If this was what they could see, what couldn’t they see? The Bioverse managers had assured them they would be perfectly free to do whatever they wanted. What surveillance there was existed to make sure vital systems weren’t accidentally endangered, or to guide the maintenance jobbers to a site that needed fixing or cleaning.

That had all been echoed by the security chief, Commander Keale, during the welcoming ceremony and briefings. He had pointed out how carefully the hatches were latched, so that no Human poison could get in from the corridors below, how strong their transparent dome was, so they had nothing to fear from meteors or attacks, how good the video cover was so that any emergencies would be spotted immediately. He had gone on at length about how everything had been so carefully designed for the security of absolutely everybody. Absolutely everybody.

Lareet had found herself in complete agreement with Umat afterward. Umat had flicked an ear toward Commander Keale, and murmured, “I would not call him an enemy, Sister, but I believe we now know who our opponent in this game is.”

Lareet turned to a path that rambled beside the principal river. The Ovrth Vrand, Pavch and Zan, sat on the riverbank surrounded by a grove of fishing poles. Long lines trailed into the water. Members of the squad sat beside them, patiently knotting together thick cords to make nets.

Ovrth Pavch grinned up at Lareet. “We’ll eat well tonight.” She pointed to a net on the grass, already full of silver-scaled fish. “This is easier than going to market. The Humans haven’t bred any fight in the creatures.”

Lareet forced her ears back against her scalp. “Ovrth Pavch, as members of the preparatory team, we have important work to do. We are not supposed to be lolling about fishing.”

Ovrth Pavch’s face rippled with a concern that was as false as Lareet’s severity. “How else am I supposed to feed my
irthiat
who are busy inspecting, measuring, and generally surveying this city? Am I ordered to condemn them to Human food?”