Regeneration (Czerneda) (45 page)

Norris, with the inevitable escort of
Joy
crew, had brought them to this distant part of the ship. It was an area without the warm colors and natural light tones seen elsewhere; the corridors were lower, cramped, their walls curved in as if reinforced. Mac remembered it vaguely—she must have been carried through here when brought on board.

She made herself focus. The simulator lab was more of the same, function and form. The presence of life was mocked by sullen gauges and flickering displays. The center was taken up by a long, low box.

Great,
Mac thought, licking dry lips.
It would have to look like a coffin.

“Do you understand the procedure, Dr. Connor?” Cayhill asked.

She made herself walk to the box. “Incoming feeds supply the simulated environment I’m to experience. The firing of my nerves to move muscle will be translated into that environment seeming to move past me.” She shrugged. “Everyone’s played games on a sim.”

“This is far beyond anything you’ve seen within a game platform,” Cayhill stated dryly, opening the lid. Mac stared down into what appeared to be a nest of dark wire and somehow managed not to leap back. “We use a combination of sub-teach and other neural methodologies to induce a totally convincing experience. Your own memories will fill in any blanks. You’ll believe you are again inside the Dhryn ship, Dr. Connor.”

She’d briefly explained what Norris wanted to Mudge and Fourteen on the way here. Neither had offered an opinion.
Not out loud.
She could read their disapproval; she knew they understood why she wanted them there. Now Mudge stepped up, his shoulders squared. “Given you will shortly have three Dhryn ships at your disposal to examine, Dr. Norris, I fail to see how this is anything but an imposition and a waste of Dr. Connor’s valuable time.”

“And who are you again?” Norris demanded, sneering at Mudge.

“Idiot!” bristled Fourteen. “To begin, he is someone immensely more important than you, and obviously of greater intelligence. Bah. This entire process is irrelevant. You are irrelevant!”

Mudge looked astonished; Mac hid a smile. Dr. Cayhill showed no expression whatsoever. “It’s my understanding the captain requested this process, Dr. Connor,” he said. “I’m aware you do not always follow regulations or recommended procedures. However in this instance I must warn you failure to oblige this request will not be taken—”

“Shut up, Cayhill,” Mac suggested, turning back to the coffin. “I’m here.” She poked at a wire. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”

“As you wish.” He indicated one of the doors lining the near wall. “You’ll find a jumpsuit through there. It contains the necessary receivers and contacts. Put it on while I get ready.”

She nodded and took a few steps, only to be intercepted by Mudge. “Norcoast,” he whispered, “are you sure about this?”

Fourteen was with him. “Idiot.” His hands hovered near his face, as if he wanted to cover his eyes. “This procedure is intrusive. It could be dangerous. You should refuse.”

Not helping,
Mac thought, but reached out to touch both of them. “That’s why you two are here,” she said, not in a whisper.
Let Norris and Cayhill know she had brought not reinforcements but witnesses.

Mudge understood—or else he read her determination in her face—because he stood aside and let her go.

Reality was a dream.

Mac ran her finger around the viewport, skin catching on the tiny burr of metal she’d found there once before. Her breath again fogged over stars and Earth and Moon. The air entering her nostrils was familiar, metal-tainted and dry.

The
Pasunah.

Much as she hated to admit it, Cayhill had been right in this much. It wasn’t like any vid game she’d tried.

The jumpsuit had clung to her skin, from fingertip to toe, the inside of the fabric prickly and uncomfortable, like shorts worn too long at a beach. That awareness had vanished the instant she’d lain in the coffin, swamped by overwhelming sensations of pressure and cold. She’d muttered something about improper calibration, only to have the words trapped as a mask was placed on her face. A moment of suffocation and utter darkness, then . . .

. . . she’d been here, in her quarters on the Dhryn freighter.

“Impressive.”

Mac would have been more impressed if Cayhill had told her how to get out of this. But no, he’d insisted her vitals would be monitored and that waking her—
not that she felt asleep
—would be done automatically should it be necessary.

“Hopefully in time for lunch,” she grumbled.

Her quarters looked exactly as they had when she’d first seen them. Walls met at angles closer to seventy degrees than ninety, well suited to the slant of an adult Dhryn’s body. The middle of the large room was filled with an assortment of Human furniture. She remembered breaking much of it.

“Guilty conscience,” Mac decided, heading for the door.

Starting her in this place, if there’d been a choice, could be Norris’ first and last mistake. The Dhryn, frantic to escape the Ro who’d penetrated the way station, had rushed her on their ship and locked her in here for the duration. “Not going to explore much if that’s still the case,” she commented, hoping Norris could somehow hear her.

Then Mac spotted something new, a palm-plate beside the door. It hadn’t been there before, at least not on the inside, where a passenger could reach it.

She studied it, oddly nauseated by the deviation from memory.
What else had Norris meddled with in the simulation?

There was one way to find out. Mac stretched her left hand toward the plate, only to freeze in mid-reach.

“Of course it is,” she scolded herself. She was experiencing the
Pasunah
as she’d seen it.

So much had been different then.
She reached behind her head and touched the loose knot she’d half expected. It was still a shock to free the braid and bring it forward over one shoulder, to run the length of hair through her hands.

Mac shoved it back. “Move on,” she warned herself. Her thumb rubbed the emptiness of her ring finger. She wasn’t interested in reliving the past.
The present was sufficiently complicated, thank you.

She touched palm to plate, determined to get this over with as quickly as possible. Norris wanted a Human perspective on the corridors and hangar deck, particularly where they would be entering the derelicts. It shouldn’t take long, if she could get out of here.

To her pleased surprise, the door retracted upward to reveal the brightly lit corridor beyond. “Nice,” she commented, stepping out. The corridor was more spacious than she remembered, which likely had to do with the Dhryn proclivity for carrying her from place to place like so much luggage.

Mac picked left and started walking, dutifully observing the occurrence of closed doors—
three
—and inset light strips—
continuous
. She counted her footsteps, on the premise that the more data she gave Norris, however trivial, the less argument he’d have for a return trip.

The freighter wasn’t the
Annapolis Joy.
Thirty-one steps took her to the end of the corridor and the large doors that led into the hangar.

Mac frowned. It had seemed farther. Of course, being clutched by a running Dhryn tended to distort one’s sense of distance.

And she hadn’t been feeling observant at the time. In fact, she’d been shouting at the top of her lungs. They hadn’t answered her questions. They hadn’t spoken to her at all.

Mac opened the hangar doors.

The space inside was empty except for a few cables along the floor and a large skim, crumpled nose-first against the near wall. Its front end wasn’t badly damaged, but apparently whomever had piloted it hadn’t bothered to slow down before entering.
Or they’d used the wall for brakes.

Mac walked over to it, recognizing the skim.
There’d been a jolt,
she recalled. She’d put it down to alien driving, it being her first such experience. Norris must have made his own interpretation.

They’d been terrified.
Mac ran her hand along the silent machine, walking toward its end. No matter what others thought now, the Dhryn she’d known had feared the Ro. “With good reason,” she said aloud.

“What are you doing,
Lamisah
?”

“Just looking around,” Mac said absently, reaching out to pat Brymn’s warm, rubbery arm. “There’s this annoying—”

She froze, whirling to look into those large golden eyes, their curious pupils like sideways eights. Violet sequins dotted the bony ridges above them, more traced the rise of cheek and curled above the ears. His lips, currently a rich fuchsia that matched the bands of silk wrapping his blue torso, shaped a cheerful smile as familiar as breathing. His hands were whole.
Brymn, not Brymn Las.

“You’re dead,” she told him.

A hoot of amusement. “And why would I be dead, Mackenzie Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor?”

He wouldn’t be,
she realized. “Damn Norris,” she said. “He added you to the simulation.”

“Why would ‘Damn Norris’ do that?”

“I—” she closed her mouth and thought about it. “You’re right. He wants to know about the
Pasunah
.” Then, she knew. “Cayhill.” The word came out like a curse. This had all the hallmarks of his well-intentioned interference.

When she’d become a “difficult” patient, he’d fixated on her inability to read and apparent lack of grief, believing her suffering from stress, if not outright brain damage. He’d declared her unable to make clear decisions and requested permission to take complete charge of her care.

She’d clearly decided to leave his care for good,
Mac recalled. She’d stormed out of the medlab and refused to go back.
There might have been some broken glass.
Cayhill had been overruled not so much by Mac’s own fury as by the needs of the IU investigators, who desperately wanted her full cooperation and weren’t interested in inter-Human squabbles.

Simulation or not, her eyes swam with tears as she looked at him, whole and blue and vibrant. “It’s good to see you again, Brymn,” she told him before she thought.

The golden eyes glistened, too.
They shared that response.

“Have you missed me,
Lamisah
?”

The question caught her unprepared.
Did it come from the simulation program or her thoughts?
“We’re both on this ship,” she countered.

“Do you still grieve for me, Mackenzie Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor?”

The form was perfect, from the curious tilt of his big head to his padlike feet. The words weren’t.

Cayhill’s Brymn, not hers.
Mac edged away until her back hit the skim and she was pinned.

The Dhryn with his dear face loomed closer. “Why do you not answer,
Lamisah
? Is it because you are about to run? You know you should. You should run as far and as fast as you can.”

She covered her mouth with one hand, holding in a scream.

His eyes grew smaller and sank back. The intense blue of his skin faded, as if washing away with every pulse of his blood.

Mac lowered her hand, reached it out even though it trembled and her mind gibbered with fear. “Stop, Brymn,” she begged. “This isn’t what you were supposed to be. You were to be one of the glorious ones. A Progenitor. This—this is something the Ro did to you.”

The bony ridges that defined his features smoothed back into his skull.

Mac couldn’t get enough air. It was a
simulation.
She fought to see something else,
anything else.
She tried to imagine his arms growing larger instead of thinner; she tried to see his eyes as warm and gold and real.

She smelled rot.

His mouth opened, the only feature left to recognize. “Gooooooo.”

His hands had become mouths, his shoulders and sides grown shimmering membranes. He inhaled and soared from the deck.

Green rain struck her face and upraised hands, dissolving flesh as she finally started to run, washing away her back as she fell.

Fell into a pool of liquid.

Then the mouths began to drink.