Dreamfall (57 page)

Protz gestured, and one of the guards took hold of me.

“What’s happening?” I said, but they didn’t answer. “What is
tt?” I shouted at the tech, feeling my sense of reality slip further as they
pulled me away. He only shrugged, watching me go.

Protz and the guards forced me to take a tram ride that
ended in a hike through more corridors in what looked like a storage annex. At
last we stopped in front of a closed, windowless door. Whatever was behind it
was listed in a coded display I couldn’t read.

Protz kept looking over his shoulder. One of the guards put
a hand on the door lock; the door slid open. I stared into total darkness;
before I could react== someone shoved me through. I turned around just in time
to see Protz point a stungun at me. He fired.

And then everything went black.

Everything stayed that way for a long time. When I came to,
the room was still totally dark. Panic caught in my chest as I realized I didn’t
even know if I was still where they’d left me. Crawling, groping, I found what
felt like the door. My hands were still numb and heavy with stunshock, like my
brain.

I pulled myself up and beat my fists against the panel. The
sound echoed back at me. When it faded the silence was total again, like the
darkness. Not even a crack of light outlined the door frame. No sound reached
me from the other side. Probably no sound I made reached beyond these walls,
either.

I felt my way around the edge of the door, searching for a
touchplate that might let me out, or at least give me some light. The walls
near the door frame were seamless ceralloy, slick and cold, like ice. There was
no touchplate, no motion sensor.

“Lights on—?” I said finally, not expecting any better luck
trying the obvious.

Light flared around me. I was inside a space about ten
meters by twenty, full of storage lockers and equipment I didn’t recognrze. I wasn’t
sure if I felt more relieved or stupid. The unheated air made me shiver, but at
least it was fresh. They hadn’t left me here to suffocate, then, and probably
not to freeze to death. I leaned against the cold wall, trying to imagine what
the point of this was.

Why would Protz come here? Had someone heard Natasa hadn’t
killed me after all, and sent Protz to take care of it? But Protz—? That didn’t
make any sense. Protz was a career asskisser. I could hardly believe he’d had
the guts to stun-shoot me.

“Oh, fuck—” My hands knotted as I suddenly realized what
would make sense:
Protz had come here with the FTA special investigators.
Natasa
had said they weren’t coming back here. But these weren’t just any Feds. What
if they’d been smart enough to change their itinerary without warning? Protz
would have to bring them here ... alld Protz would have to shut me up, make
sure I couldn’t get to anyone and they couldn’t get to me.

I sat down on the floor, hugging my knees, holding my body
together. My nerve endings still felt like stir-fry. I had no sense of how much
time had passed. For all I knew, the Feds had been here and gone already. The
Natasas must have kept their mouths shut, too afraid for Joby’s safety to risk
losing Tau’s support. I wouldn’t be trapped here without the cooperation of
Natasa’s guards.

A deep shudder ran through the floor I was sitting on.
Around me, the heavy machinery began to rattle and sing. The lights flickered,
dimmed, and went out; something big crashed to the floor about two meters away.
I struggled to my feet, shouting for help. My voice rang back at me from half a
hundred surfaces as I flattened myself against the wall in the utter blackness.

The lights came back on—stayed or, dimmer than before. “What
the hell is going on!” I shouted. Only echoes answered me. There were no more
tremors, no more things falling—no sound beyond my own ragged breathing.

I swore softly, keeping myself company as I paced off the narrow
space between the sealed door and the piece of equipment that had crashed down
into the middle of the storerooffi, blocking it off.
An explosion
It
would take an explosion—a big one—to explain everything I’d just experienced.

I wondered, with a sudden, sick prescience, if it was the
anomaly I’d found in the reef-face just before Protz forced me out ... what
that meant for everybody involved, and especially what it would mean for me.
And then I wondered how long it would take before somebody remembered that I
was locked up in here. I slid down the wall again and began the wait.

It probably wasn’t as long as it seemed like before somebody
opened the door. I was on my feet at the first trace of sound, blinking the
sudden glare out of my eyes.

I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t Burnell Natasa==alone,
his hands empty, his face and uniform smeared with something indescribable.

He swore as he saw me, but I only saw relief in his eyes. “Come
or,” he snapped, nodding his head at the hall behind him. “I need you.”

“Yes, sir,” I mumbled, automatically dropping my gaze.

He gave me a surprised look, as if he’d been expecting me to
react like a Human being. Like he’d forgotten where I’d been since the last
time he saw me. “Please,” he said, awkwardly. “Cat.”

I followed him out of the storeroom and down the hall. “What
is it?” I asked. “‘What happened?”

“There was an explosion.” He kept walking, looking as grim
as death now.

“fn Reef Sector 3F. Blue Team was working the face—they hit
a volatile pocket. A big one.”

He stopped short and turned to stare at me. “How did you
know 1fu41—I”

“I found it just before Prctz put me away. The Feds are
here, aren’t they?”

He began to walk again, faster. I had to push myself to keep
up. “The Feds were right there when it blew,” he said. “So was my wife.”

“God,” I breathed. ‘Are they—”

“I don’t know,” he said heavily. “No one knows. The work
atea is inaccessible. Whatever happened sent some kind of massive feedback
through our power grid. All our basic life support is running on emergency
generators. But the whole fucking infrastructure is fried. All our equipment is
off-line: everything’s got to be reprogrammed before any readings we take will
mean anything. We can’t locate any survivors until we get our systems up again.
God knows how long that will take. That’s why I need you.”

I shook my head, not understanding.

He caught hold of me, jerking me around. “Because you’ns a—”
Freak.
He ate the word, grimacing. ‘A telepath. A psion. You
know
why,
dammit! You can find her ... the111—” He broke off again. ‘“I want you to save
my wife.”

“I can’t ... I can’t do that anymote.” My own voice fell
apart as I saw the desperation in his eyes. “There’s nothing left inside me.
You need a real psion. You need Miya—”

“I don’t have Miya! You don’t! You were at that monastery
too. Janos told me it affected you: you were still helping Joby on the flight
back. There’s something left of it in Joby; there’s got to be something left in
you!” He shook rre, like he could shake my psi loose. “My wife saw it—the way
you could read the reefs.”

“That’s different. I—”

“She trusted you—God knows why, after all the grief you’ve
caused us. She made me trust you. Now you can pay her back, freak, or you can
die trying—” Suddenly his gun was in his hand, pointing at me. His hand shook.

I looked at the gun. I looked back at him. I stood, silent
and unmoving, until finally the hand holding the stungun dropped, and his gaze
with it. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. He looked at the gun like he didn’t know
what the hell he’d been doing, like a man who’d been hit too many times in a
fight. He put the gun away.

I rubbed my face. “I’ll W,” I murmured. “That’s all I meant.
I’ll do anything I can. I just don’t know if I can do anything.” I looked up at
him. “If somebody hadn’t put a gun to my head once before, I might still be a
telepath.” I started on, and this time he followed me.

We reached the tram stop, and a tram was waiting there to
take us back through the complex. He didn’t say anything during the ride. He
never asked me how I’d ended up where he found me. He probably knew exactly how
I’d gotten there. I couldn’t imagine how knowing that must make him feel.

I let him take the lead again until we alrived at the site
where I’d been working ... what was left of it. An entire section of the reinforced
corridor leading to the face they’d been excavating had collapsed. Crews were
already working to clear away the debris, but I could tell from the curses and
arguing that whatever had crashed the programming of the entire installation
must have lobotomized their equipment all down the line.

“Protz ...” I breathed. He was standing in the open space beyond
the dust-fogged sea of Tau workers, talking to some officials, gesturing at the
smoking wall of debris. I pushed my way toward him. “Protz!” I shouted, saw him
look up, saw the look on his face as he recognized me.

Someone caught my arm just before I reached him, hauling me
around: Feng, ffiy old crew boss. “What the hell are you doing here?” he
demanded. “‘w’here the hell have you been?”

I stared at him. “Locked in a closet.”

“What?” His face hardened. “You were supposed to be in
there. You were supposed to keep this from happening, for God’s sake!”

“Ask him.” I jerked loose from Feng’s grip, pointing at
Protz. The vips around Protz looked up. ‘Ask him!” I shouted.

Natasa caught up to me again, waved Feng off as the vips
started toward us. Protz stayed where he was. I saw him wipe his face as he
watched them cross the room.

“What’s this about?” It was Sandusky, the installation’s
Chief of Ops. I remembered him from the tour I’d taken with the first group of
Feds. He looked at Natasa, and then at Feng, before he looked at me without a
twitch of recognition. “’W’hy weren’t you at your duty station?”

I opened my mouth—f1s7e, as I tried to think of how to make
them believe me, or even a way to explain it.

“Protz ordered him taken away from his work, just as he
found the anomaly—” Natasa broke in, like he’d realized the same thing. “Suarez
and Timebu will verify that they were told to take him away and isolate him
where the Feds wouldn’t find him.”

“Why?” some other vip asked incredulously.

Natasa took a deep breath. “You’d have to ask Protz about
that, sir.” He glanced at me, his mouth a tight line, his eyes telling me to
keep on keeping my own mouth shut.

I watched them turn awz!, like they really intended to do
just that; saw panic begin to show on Protz’s face.

“All right,” Natasa said to me. “What do you need to do
this?”

To use my psi.
It took me a minute just to realize
what he meant. I looked out across the sea of noise and chaos, seeing nothing
but Humans, no different from their useless machines when I tried to see them
with my mind’s eye.

I forced myself to look at them with clearer eyes than I had
anytime since I’d come to this place, shell-shocked with loss, and begun to
lose myself in the reefs. I watched them struggling, arguing, trying
desperately to rescue friends and strangers who might not even be alive. And
then I tried to close them out of my mind, so I could do what I had to do to
help them: reach into the void, move through the trackless darkness, and find a
distant star of consciousness ... touch another Human mind.

And then I finally understood why my Gift had been stone
dead ever since I’d come here, even though it had been easy for Miya to reach
into my mind and into my heart. It was nothing as simple as guilt or fear that
kept me from using my psi ... it was them, The Humans, the Others—the deadheads
who’d abandoned me, sold me out, given me up, and let me down, fucked me over
again and again. The few of them I’d known who’d ever been decent or kind to
rre, decent or kind at all ... their humanity had only made them easy victims
too.

The Hydran in me would always need to feel alive, connected,
so desperate for it that there’d always be a part of me that would give
anything, suffer anything, to have my Gift back again.

But Miya had been right when she’d said the Human in me
could never really trust another Human being, not even the Human part of me—the
thing that had forced me to go on living when I had no right to, or any reason
....

I looked up and Natasa was speaking again, probably telling
me to answer his question.

“I can’t,” I muttered, shaking my head. “Not here. Not like
this.”

“Then where?” he said impatiently. “What do you need?”

For everything to have been dffirent.
I looked at
him, through him, with my mind as empty as a dead man’s. ‘A phase suit,” I said
finally. “I have to go into the reef.”

“The equipmpnt’s scrambled—” he said, his patience slipping
another notch.

“You mean even the suits don’t work?”

He shook his head. “They should be functional—but there’s no
way you can interface with the techs; no way they can get a reading off you.
There’d be no one to guide you or pull you out of trouble.”

“I don’t need a tech. I need—” I looked toward the ruins of
Human technology and alien dreamfall joined like lovers in a suicide pact. “That.
I need to be inside.”
Need to be somewhere I want to be.

He looked at me, his face caught between expressions, like
suddenly he wasn’t sure if I was just a freak or actualty insane. ‘All right,”
he said finally, like he’d decided it didn’t matter either way. “I’ll get you
one. Stay here.” He held his hands up, as if he was putting a spell on me so
that I didn’t disappear.

I waited, watching the vips surround Protz again, not able
to hear what they were saying, not able to read their minds. I didn’t know
where keiretsu had the strongest hold here: Would the installation’s officials
turn on Protz because he’d caused this disaster, or would they try to bury
their mistakes? I hoped Natasa got back before they made up their minds.