The Dark Reaches (32 page)

Linnea stared at her. “You’re telling me that your people—the deepsiders—
you
made the Cold Minds.”

She saw Pilang wince at that. After a moment, the older woman shook her head. “My people,” she said steadily, “
fight
the Cold Minds. We die fighting them.” But the grief was clear in her eyes. “But, Lin. This is what I need to tell you. You walked in when you shouldn’t have, last night. You may have been exposed. I need—” She sighed and rubbed her eyes. “I need to inoculate you.”

Linnea felt herself go rigid with fear. “You mean—with bots.”

“With our own nano. Harmless nano.” Pilang looked her in the eye. “Look, you’ve already had them in you for short times—that’s how our drug patches work so fast, the nanobots carry the drug straight to the target. Then they destroy themselves.”

“But these would stay in me forever,” Linnea said.

“It is safe,” Pilang said firmly. “They’re dormant in your bones unless needed. They can’t even be detected in your blood except during an infestation.”

Linnea’s breath caught, and she looked toward the door. “Could this—Pilang, could your nano save Iain?”

“No, Lin. I’m sorry.” Pilang looked grim. “It would be as little use as giving someone an immunization for a disease when they’re in the last stages of dying from it.”

“If you gave him a lot of your nano at once—”

“The metals and toxins from all the dead bots would only kill him faster.”

Linnea looked at Pilang, her mind racing. “All right. Give me the bots. Then—let’s think of what you haven’t thought of.”

Linnea sat fighting nausea while a medtech carefully painted a patch of black on the inside of her left elbow. As she watched, the black faded, leaving a residual yellow like a bruise.
They’re burrowing in.
She felt a sudden chill, felt her face break out in a sweat. The tech got a bag over her mouth in time. As she retched she thought,
Now it’s happened to me, too, Iain.

Clinic hours were over, and Pilang had finished her rounds. When Linnea’s stomach had settled, she made her way a little unsteadily to Pilang’s office. As she came in, she saw that Esayeh and Hana were there as well. Esayeh looked up at her and shook his head slowly. “Dear God, Lin.” Then he filled a little bulb full of the fiery clear whiskey of the deepsiders, squeezing it from a half-full pouch hooked to the bulkhead beside him, and handed it to Linnea. “You could use this.”

She took a sip, held it in her mouth—sweet and mild, deceptive—then swallowed. Fire all the way down. “Oh,” she said with her eyes closed. “Oh, that’s—good.”

“No more for a bit,” Pilang said dryly. She coughed. “It’s time to consider our problem. The infested patient.”

“Iain,” Linnea said stubbornly. “He’s still Iain. Use his name.”

Pilang flung up her hands. “All right. Look, Lin. Here’s the outline. Iain’s blood is full of bots. And we can’t filter them out without filtering out his blood cells, too.”

Linnea looked at her. “Can you separate the cells from the bots somehow?”

“No,” Pilang said. “We don’t have the tech to do it fast enough when he’s warm, to keep up with the bots’ growth rate, the damage they do.”

“But in the cold—”

Pilang shook her head. “No, Lin. I’m sorry. We can’t do sorts in the cold—the blood is too viscous. And if we warm him even a little, the bots take over and—there won’t be anything left to do but kill him.”

“Can you—” Linnea shook her head, thinking hard. “Just drain out all his blood and replace it?”

“A complete replacement would kill him in his weakened state,” Pilang said. “Even if it didn’t, the blood would just be reinfested from the surrounding tissues.”

“But at a lower titer,” Hana said with a frown. “After a few cycles, it might be low enough for our own nano lines to handle what was left.”

“But by then, Iain would be dead,” Esayeh said. “Right, Pilang?”

“He’d be dead—” But Pilang’s eyes were distant. “Unless—”

The little room was silent, all eyes on Pilang.

“We could keep him cold,” she said slowly. “Run a line with his blood out of the cold, warm it, do a sort—low volume, we can handle that—cool it, and run it back in.”

Hana scratched her head. “Constant slow filtration.”

Pilang nodded. “His whole blood volume, running through enough times to bring his level down to where our bots can handle the rest.”

“That would take days,” Hana said.

“We’ve got days,” Linnea said, her heart thumping. “Don’t we?”

Pilang reached out and squeezed Linnea’s hand. “Okay, then. Esayeh, just you get me a snap of that whiskey, and Hana, get on the comm and see if you can track down Gunter, he’s the one who knows the sorter inside and out.” She took the bulb Esayeh silently handed her, drained it, coughed once, and said in a raw voice, “We’ll have to move Iain to Gunter’s lab, I don’t think he can get all the pieces here at once—”

 

 

 

The next days passed slowly for Linnea. She spent as much time as the irascible Gunter would permit hovering in his lab, watching the slow trickle of blood out of Iain’s container, into Gunter’s jealously tended and obviously patched-together sorter, then back into the container and into Iain. Day by day Iain’s bot count slowly sank; day by day his condition remained steady. Sometimes she let herself imagine that he was almost saved; sometimes she woke at night in terror, sure that he had died, that the long, unnatural process had led to organ failure, cardiac arrest, any one of half a dozen possible disasters Pilang had laid out for her at the start.

Tereu was a comfort to Linnea in the times when Gunter forbade her the lab. Linnea occupied herself with showing the Tritoner woman the sights of
Hestia
. She kept, reluctantly, the promise Esayeh and Pilang together had extracted from her the first day: She did not tell Tereu the truth of what was being done to Iain, or of what had been done for her. “It’s an edged gift,” Pilang told Linnea one night in Esayeh’s quarters, where the three of them were sharing a sack of tea. “If Tritoner children were immune to the bots, they’d be prey for the Cold Minds, too.”

“Shouldn’t the Tritoners have a choice?” Linnea demanded. “Why should you decide this for them?”

Esayeh sighed. “Look, Lin. I know those people, I was one of them. They like order, uniformity, efficiency. Zones and plans and grand civic games and ceremonies. They like what they know.” He sipped at his tea. “They don’t want to be deepsiders. They don’t want to hand themselves over to the unknown, let something they can’t control into their bodies. They don’t, they can’t trust us. And with reason.”

“With reason,” Linnea echoed. “After all, you’re going to leave them behind. When you all vanish into your ark.”

“
Tchah
, Lin, we don’t talk about that here,” Pilang said.

Linnea frowned. “I still think it’s a decision you have no right to make for them.”

“We have paid,” Pilang said with slow anger, “more than enough for our freedom. They have earned, more than earned, their fate.”

“Their pilots made a bad bargain, centuries ago,” Linnea said. “And so none of their people deserve any mercy.”

“Lin, we can’t save everyone,” Esayeh said, his voice tired.

“Not if you don’t try,” Linnea said.

“You saw that ship,” Pilang said. “Talk to me about mercy after you talk to those children about their parents’ death.”

“Hard choices,” Esayeh said.

“Ah.” Linnea felt a flare of anger. “ ‘Hard choices,’ yes. I’ve heard that a lot over the years. And do you know what I’ve noticed? Often ‘hard choices’ is code for something else. Code for ‘an easy choice I’m ashamed of making.’ ” She caught her breath, then looked up again. “I’m sorry.”

“We’re all under strain, until Iain is better,” Pilang said evenly.

“No,” Esayeh said—and something in the tone of his voice made Pilang turn to him, her eyes wide. “No, Pilang. Lin is right.”

Pilang gripped his arm. “Esayeh—”

“She’s right.” He rolled his bulb of tea between his fingers, his old face lined with sadness. “I was—those were words I was taught years ago. When I came to the first and last position of power I have ever held, and learned about the bargain with the Cold Minds. When I first had to try to—find a way to live with it.” He looked very old. “ ‘Hard choices.’ ”

“Let’s see if Iain lives,” Pilang said. “Then we’ll look at those hard choices, eh, old man?” She looked so weary, so deeply sad, that Linnea wanted to cry.

She closed her eyes, tipped her head back, let herself float.

Kimura Hiso reached out, almost without willing it, and picked up, again, the printed image of the guard who had betrayed him, who had struck him down and permitted the woman pilot to escape. The man deserved what had been done to him; yet sometimes, sometimes Hiso could not help but think about how far things had fallen, how far, far down from the nobility he remembered from his boyhood. . . .

He held the flat image in nerveless fingers, trying to wake his courage with self-contempt. The guard had allowed the woman pilot to steal the ship that should have been Hiso’s. The ship that should have been his, now, for the fight that was so clearly coming.

And so, and so it had been . . . necessary, to do what he had ordered done.

Hiso made himself look, one last time. The harshly lit image showed a gray-white pavement of water ice, blackness beyond, just outside one of the main city locks, marred by an odd arrangement of chunks frosted white. They made up the barely recognizable outline of a human corpse. The man had been pushed out, suitless, to freeze instantly, to fall and shatter. He could have felt nothing after the first instant of absolute cold. The effect was for others. . . .

Hiso clenched his jaw and fed the image into the cycler next to his worktable. It had been another hard and necessary act. Another act of courage.

He pressed his clenched fists against the smooth wood of the tabletop.
Courage.
It was too bad there had been time for nothing worse. If Hiso ever got his hands on Tereu, he would think of something.

The incursions were getting worse—sightings on all the long scanners, those that still functioned. The scanners were going off-line, one by one—were being destroyed, that was clear, just as it was clear that the Cold Minds were closing in on the Neptune system. Scouting it, for what action Hiso did not dare to speculate. The hideous vulnerability of his city, always real, did not bear thinking about. If they came, if they wished to kill, his city would die.

And it might be possible, for a weakling like Tereu, to argue that it was his fault. Hiso had thought the Cold Minds would not recognize the Hidden Worlds ship; instead, it was increasingly clear that they had known it for what it was, recognized its source—and assumed, when they saw one ship, that a stronger force would follow. They clearly intended to crush their potential enemies in the Earth system in advance of that illusory attack.

Which meant everything was coming to an end. Unless he, Kimura Hiso, could follow the example of his great predecessor six hundred years ago—and make a new bargain with the Cold Minds—

He leaned his head on his fists. Not possible. His position was too weak. Tereu had seen to that. He had nothing, nothing to give them. Nothing of enough value that they would spare his world—for a little longer, until he could find some escape, some solution. There had to be one.

He took a shuddering breath. He was a man of Triton, a pilot—he would die well, if it came to that. But until then he would think, plan, bargain as he had been taught to do by the example of his predecessors.

He had the end of a thread in his hand. He would follow it, and hope. He touched his comm. “Have Perrin Gareth brought to the interrogation room.”

A few minutes later, he stood in the shadows of the cold little room, studying his former aide, Tereu’s young cousin. Gareth was clamped into a metal chair, held firmly by wrists and ankles. His red prison coverall was too large, sized for a man who had finished growing; the loose cuffs at wrists and ankles hid the bruises Hiso knew were there, from the beating that he had ordered. The beating, for passing secure pilot information to his cousin Perrin Tereu, was only the beginning of Gareth’s punishment. He would have shared the fate of the guard this morning but for his family connections. Tereu was still popular within the city; her name was still something to reckon with. And so Perrin Gareth lived.

Hiso studied the boy, letting the silence stretch. Gareth’s thin face was unmarked by bruises or cuts—Hiso had ordered that no blows be given above the neck, unwilling to risk damaging the delicate piloting implants in the boy’s brain. Gareth might still be of some use as a pilot, if only as a sacrifice in a hopeless action. And it seemed all too likely that there would be a hopeless action soon.