This Alien Shore (31 page)

“Shut up, shut up!” The words were barely whispered, but Verina's stem warning followed nonetheless:
Say nothing out loud, you don't know who may be listening.

God, if this went on much longer, she was going to go crazy for real.

Listen.
It was Verina again, always calm, always rational.
We've gotten away from the station, that was the most important thing. Whoever was looking for us doesn't know where to search next. The fact that the ship is changing nodes is a stroke of real luck That'll muddle the trail even further. We've got a little time to think now ... and to come up with some kind of long-term plan.

I want to see the ship,
Raven sulked.

Later,
Verina told her.
For now, can you alter that debit chip so it can't be traced as easily?
Raven was the closest thing they had to a programmer.

It's a fucking debit chip!
Derik snapped. It's got
a fucking account at the other end that it's got to connect to, and if it doesn't, there's no money. What the hell do you think she can do, conjure credit by magic?

I'd like to see that,
whispered one of the child-voices,

Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!!!!!
Jamisia put her hands up to her ears as if somehow that could shut out the noise.
Look, Verina's right. We need a plan. Now.

Startled by Jamisia's uncharacteristic aggression, the others subsided.

I don't think he believed our story,
Jamisia told them.
So he's going to keep asking questions, or else maybe get someone else to do it. Right? So we need some kind of story that he'll really accept, for a cover.

He'll know it's a lie,
Zusu warned.
We're not good enough to fool him.

Jamisia could feel Derik bristle angrily.
Speak for yourself, twit!

Katlyn, normally silent in such debates, moaned in exasperation.
Hello! Remember teamwork? Working TOGETHER? Isn't that what we're supposed to be doing here?

That quieted them all for a moment. Thank God. Silence.

Look,
Katlyn said,
We need an ally on this ship. Someone who'll work for us, maybe warn us of trouble coming our way. Cause we sure as hell can't trust them all, and I don't like the fact that we're helpless out here.

A “friend?”
Zusu said suspiciously.

Derik was less inhibited.
Jesus fucking ...

Jamisia thought of what it would be like, to sit back and let Katlyn take control, to watch her work her games on one of the crew members. To her surprise, the thought was less sickening than usual. Was she getting used to it? That was a very, very frightening thought.

Katlyn demanded,
Look, does anyone have a better idea?

For a moment there was silence. Then:
No,
Raven grumbled. A few Others reluctantly followed suit.

Jamie?
Katlyn asked.

Jamisia was startled. Never in all their time together had any of the Others asked permission to take control, or attempted to gain her cooperation in ... well, in anything. Was Katlyn really concerned with how much her actions might upset Jamisia? If so, that was a new development. She hardly knew how to respond to it.

Whatever we have to do,
she thought at last. She could feel-her heart pound as her brain formed the words, and she sensed that she and the Others were now moving into a new realm of relationship. Katlyn had made the gesture of asking for her input; now she had to prove that she could work with the Others, as opposed to merely enduring them.
I ... I trust you.

New words. New feelings. She could feel them sinking into the depths of her mind, where a dozen strangers absorbed them. Only not quite strangers any more. Not quite family. Something else.

Okay,
Katlyn said.
If there's an opportunity, then, I'll take it. In the meantime I suggest the rest of you try to learn what

you can from this ship.
And with a half-amused smile that the others could sense, she added,
Variants, huh? That'll be a new twist.

Jamisia tried not to shudder.

I
t was Sumi who was given the job of befriending their passenger. Any one of the crew could have done it, of course, but Allo had already come off as too aggressive, and Tam-Tam would probably confuse the poor Earthie, and as for Calia, she had a pretty strong distaste for the Earthbom, which might make things difficult. So Sumi it was.

Truth be told, he wasn't unprejudiced himself, and he knew he would have to work hard to keep an edge of hostility from his voice whenever he addressed her. This was, after all, a member of the race that had abandoned his own people when their need was greatest. Oh yes, he understood that the Hausman Effect had been terrifying, that the sudden divergence of human evolution into a thousand different directions was more than Earth could handle ... but did that mean all lines of supply had to be cut so suddenly? Granted, no living creature should ever have been subjected to the Hausman Drive again, for fear of creating monsters ... but did that mean that robots couldn't have made the trip? His people had just put up their first crude homes when the curtain of Isolation fell, they still needed seeds and embryos and medical supplies from home to insure their success as a colony. Supplies which would never come. That first winter was hard, so hard. Earth had made it hard. Callous Earth, who wrote off its injured children, rather than supporting them in the few ways she still could. Oh, yes, Sumi hated Earth as much as any Variant did, as much as Calia, if not more ... but this girl hadn't been around back then. She wasn't part of all that, except by an accident of birth. And so he tried to divorce his feelings about Earth from his feelings about her, and he was a fair enough man in his heart that for the most part he succeeded.

There was another advantage to having him approach her. The unique Variance which his people suffered had evolved in time into a sensory advantage, which might give him insight into her true nature. He remembered the last time he'd been in her presence, tasting the sour tang of fear rising up from her skin, molecules of hormonal exhalation that drifted through the air to be caught on the moist surface of his tendrils. Few humans knew just how acute the Medusan particulate sense was, or how much it could reveal of an individual's state of mind. Allo knew. Which is why Allo gave him assignments like this, where emotional insight was a key factor. Usually Sumi was the one who dealt with customs officials, and other situations where diplomacy was crucial; today it had netted him this job.

If only she weren't an Earthie.

Her door was closed, so he raised a hand and knocked on it. “Who—” she began, and then she seemed to realize that it hardly mattered who it was. “Open,” she commanded, and the door obliged.

Her smell was different than before; he noticed that immediately. There was still the lingering taste of fear in her exudate, but now other things were mixed in as well. He felt his tendrils begin to glide forward instinctively to catch a better sample, then saw the look on her face as they did so. So. The Earthie wasn't used to Variants. He stiffened, and forced the fleshy appendages back to the rear of him, where his own scent overwhelmed anything he might pick up from her. All right. He'd be subtle, then, and spare the Earthie from having to confront his “deformity.” Which was a good deal more consideration, he thought darkly, than her ancestors had ever shown for his.

“I came to see if you were comfortable,” he offered.

She had unfolded the monitor screen and was in the process of reading something on it, he saw. He'd have to warn Tam to make sure that all their private files were inaccessible. They so rarely had guests on the ship that it wasn't something they normally worried about.

It was strange to see her sitting there, without a headset on, reading thus; like a vision from another age. But that was often true of Earthies, he'd heard; they used their brainware for specific tasks, having not yet made that mental adjustment which turned it into a natural appendage. Without even thinking, he flashed up an icon in his own field of vision which gave him access to what she was reading. General information from the ship's library, mostly on Paradise Station. All right, that was safe enough. He flashed a quick note off to Tam about limiting her access to their database, then turned his full attention to her again. Outworld etiquette said it was rude to indulge in lengthy internal dialogue when there was a real person sitting right in front of you. Not that folks didn't do it all the time anyway, but with strangers he liked to be proper.

“I guess,” she said. Then she smiled; it was an expression of genuine gratitude, if not true relaxation. “Thank you so much for taking me aboard. I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't.”

There was his opening, clean and simple. And he didn't take it. She'd be far more off her guard if he didn't question her immediately. That was the mistake Allo had made, and he didn't intend to repeat it.

“You said you'd like to see the ship. I can give you the tour now, if you'd like.”

She stared at him for a minute, her eyes weirdly vacant. He might have assumed she was accessing the ship's net, if she'd had her headset on. But she didn't. Very strange. Was Earth producing brainware that could access a network directly ? It had been tried once before, with disastrous results. You needed some kind of portal mechanism to weed out garbage, lest some teenager's pet virus made it into your brain and started rearranging your neurons. Yet she had no headset on, and was clearly accessing ... something.

Was that why she was being hunted, for something that was in her head? Shit, he thought, envisioning the tangled mess of bioware and brain matter that was inside his own skull. You couldn't get at one without pretty much destroying the other.
If so, I'd run, too.

But when she finally said, “I'd like that,” she picked up her headset from the room's small folding table. Which meant that she needed it. So that wasn't her secret.

He took her on a tour of the few parts of the small trading vessel that a stranger was allowed to see ... all in all, not much. It was a functional ship with little room to spare, and half of its chambers were now filled with boxes of contraband. But if she noticed anything missing in the tour, she didn't mention it. She seemed almost more interested in him than she was in the ship ... and the result was a strange mix of signals, which he couldn't quite interpret. She was pretty clearly obsessed with his Medusan mutation, and he caught her staring at the proud crest of sensory tentacles whenever she didn't think he was watching her. He knew that their natural movement disturbed most Earthies, sinuous twining and unexpected flicks not unlike the movements of a cat's tail. He'd braided them into a mohawk pattern today—mostly to keep them away from his face—so they rose from his skull like the crest of some exotic E-bird, waving slowly as if in some unseen breeze. So all right, she had every reason to stare (by Earthie standards, anyway) and even to be marginally repelled. Given her background, he pretty much expected the latter. But she also stood very close to him, closer than normal, and that seemed very strange. Was it an Earthie habit? He'd met very few people who came from the planet itself, maybe this was normal for them. It was said the motherworld was hellishly crowded, maybe people there weren't used to having the room to spread out. She wasn't so close that he had to move away, or ask her do to so, but she played at the border of his personal space as if she knew exactly where it was ... oddly disconcerting, that. It made him intensely aware of her, even when she was walking behind him. Good thing she wasn't more familiar with Medusans, or she'd be able to read his agitation in the twitching of his tendrils.

Then, when they reached the bridge, the whole formula changed. Suddenly he was all but forgotten, and the suddenness with which she moved away from him was so unexpected that it felt almost physical. Quick and curious, she moved with eager steps from one control panel to another, pausing only to take the measure of a screen readout, muttering things to herself as she moved. There was nothing wrong with such behavior per se, but the suddenness of the change was ... spooky.

Calia was the only one there at the time, and she shot Sumi a quick flash: IS THIS WISE? He didn't answer. He was too intent on watching the Earthie, on trying to figure her out.

She was making comments about the equipment now, as she walked about the small chamber. “You have an Austin navicomp ... that's rare in a ship this size ... coupled with Microtech's 912-EX amp ... that's not really compatible, is it? Must be a customized interface ... bet that has a hell of a kick when you get moving....” She continued to rattle off technical terms, many of which he only half understood. Even Calia looked up from where she was working, and flashed him a quick thought. ENGINEER? He flashed back, DON'T KNOW, then checked the ship's innernet to see if the girl was requesting any information from their database. She'd put on her headset on the way here, so it was possible. But no, that link was silent. Whatever detailed knowledge she was drawing on, it was all in her head.