Survival (5 page)

To the surprise of everyone else at Norcoast, rowdy, raucous Emily had become the perfect foil to Mac's more reserved approach to life. Within moments of meeting, they'd recognized a kindred passion for the work; within a week, it was as if they'd always known one another.
Perhaps,
Mac admitted to herself,
it was because they were both such complete frauds in public:
herself wary of showing her intensity, Emily disguising hers with jokes and flirtation.

By now, in their third northern field season together, there was no one Mac would rather have share this moment. She hummed along, doing her best to follow the melody. The drumming of rain against hood, cape, and console was her private percussion section.

After a few moments, Mac activated her imp. The imp had a ten-year power supply of its own—and the ability to tap into local supplies, such as those maintained around most cities—but not so the consoles or Tracer. No need to verify the power feed from Norcoast's broadcast generators; it was obviously reaching them, as it would be other researchers in the field and at sea.

What concerned Mac were their results. The 'screen now hovering over the console mirrored the one in her office at Base, winking with tallies that showed the data stream making the return trip as steady, the system flawlessly making and sending copies.
She'd have it all.

Reassured, Mac let her shoulders relax and rubbed a wet hand over her face, putting the device away. “Ready to anchor it, Em?”

“Not yet. I want to make sure we don't get some lateral drift with that wind. It's not much up here, but there's a funneling effect closer to the surface I have to watch—
ai caramba!
—like that. How's the feed? Still okay?”

Mac gave a quick glance. “Nominal. This looks to be just the initial group. I'll heat some soup while you make sure we're stable. There won't be time for a break later.”

“Now this is why I keep telling you we should have brought along that helpful grad student of yours, John. Wonderful cook.”

Mac patted her console fondly before heading for the tents nestled against the cliff face. “I hadn't noticed it was his cooking you liked,” she tossed over her shoulder. The fact that the good-looking John Ward blushed so abundantly had been a bonus, as far as Em was concerned, likely the reason he'd requested Field Station Four this year. Emily's admiration tended to be outspoken and results-oriented.

“So I like men who are—Mac, get back here! Hurry!”

“What is it? What's wrong?” She returned to her console as quickly as she dared on the rain-slicked stone. “The wind . . . What the hell?” Blinking rapidly, then rubbing her hand over the screen didn't change the wrong-scale image now among the salmon. The display red-flagged its code.

Unknown
.

“You get whales up here?” Em asked shakily.

“No, but we get idiots.” Mac hadn't felt this infuriated since she'd found someone fishing a headwater lake with explosives, nets, and a truck. She left her console to go as close to the bluff's edge as she dared, then judged the distance. Grabbing a piece of jagged rock, she threw it with all the force she possessed.

Close enough.
Bubbles exploded on the surface, startling the ducks into flight. A shape appeared shortly afterward, bouncing up and down in the current. Before it could be swept downstream, a repeller activated to hold it in place, a telltale ring of vibrating water plainly visible. Offended salmon burst from the river in all directions as their lateral line sense reacted to the output from the device, dropping back to scatter into the depths.

Any chance of calling this a natural, undisturbed run was gone.
Emily didn't need to be told. Mac watched the Tracer's curtain snap out of existence, Emily's 'bots left hovering above the river as if lost.

Meanwhile, the begoggled head was turning from side to side as if hunting the source of the rock. Mac gritted her teeth and fought the urge to hunt for something else to throw. Something heavier—or at least pointy.

“You've got to be kidding.” Emily came to stand beside her. The rain conveniently eased into a light drizzle so they had a clearer view, but the diver floating below still hadn't thought to look up. “How'd that
cabrón
get this far without setting off an alarm?”

Mac thrust her arm downstream, as if her finger could impale what was coming toward them. “Like that.” The big skim moved above the water's surface, though close enough that spray from the rapids splashed over its cowling. It was heading for the diver. “Best bring in the 'bots before it bumps into one.”

With a growl better suited to one of the grizzlies they'd watched yesterday, Emily went to her console. Mac watched the 'bots break formation, a couple swooping near the diver's head so he—or she—ducked back under for a moment, then they all rose until level with the rock shelf. Like a string of beads, the tiny, and very expensive, devices came to rest at Emily's feet. One-handed, she began tucking them inside her console's locker without another word.

Silence, from Dr. Mamani, was not a good sign.

Feeling herself beginning to shake from head to foot wasn't good either. Mac made herself take slow, steady breaths through her nose, fighting back both disappointment and fury, forcing her heart to calm itself. They might—
might
—be able to salvage something if they could get the river cleared of interlopers before the big runs started to arrive—likely by tonight. She'd have more chance of that if she wasn't throwing more rocks, tempting as it was.

Especially at a skim bearing the insignia of her own research facility, hovering beside the diver.
They'd brought him, all right
. They were already lowering the harness of hooked cables that would connect to one of the high-end commercial dive rigs. Interference from those who knew better was worse than unwitting trespass.

Mac turned away, uninterested in the details of extricating her problem, refusing to speculate and have her blood pressure rise even further toward rock throwing. She spent the next few minutes locking down her console, its screen again mute and empty of code.

She was on her knees, struggling with the cover fasteners on the river side of the device, when a deep hum announced the skim had set down on the ledge. Mac ignored both the arrival and the sound of footsteps that followed, including the unfamiliar voice saying: “Dr. Connor, I presume?”

When she was good and ready, Mac rolled her head to gaze at a pair of soaking wet, though shiny, men's shoes, better suited to an office than lichen-coated, bepuddled granite. Her eyes traveled up a pair of damp beige dress pants, were unsurprised to encounter a suit jacket of the same color and condition topped by a conservative yet fashionable—and damp—cravat, and finally stopped at a face she didn't know.

And didn't care to know.
Even through the rain, she could smell a bureaucrat. Sure enough, he had a portable office slung under one arm, doubtless jammed with communication gear and clearances someone, somewhere, thought gave him the right to ruin her observations.

The bureaucrat offered her his hand. Mac stared at the manicured fingers until they curled up and got out of her way.

She rose to her feet, shoving her rain hood to her shoulders, and looked around for someone with answers.
There.
A familiar figure stood beside the skim. Tie McCauley, her stalwart chief of operations and the man who single-handedly kept all Norcoast equipment running through budget-pinching and Pacific storms. Catching her eye on him, he simply raised both arms and let them drop at his sides.

Mac found herself forced to look to the bureaucrat after all. Up at the bureaucrat. He was taller than he'd appeared at first glance, despite what seemed a permanent slouch. An ordinary, almost pleasant face, bearing rain-spattered glasses and hair that looked to have been actually in the river, so neither eyes nor hair showed their true color. Drips were running down both sides of his face, which bore an expression that could only be described as anxious.

That expression made Mac swallow what she intended to say, replacing it with a much milder: “Do you realize you've seriously disrupted our work?”

“I know, Dr. Connor. It is Dr. Connor?” At her nod, he continued, “Believe me, we wouldn't have come if it hadn't been so important to the Honorable Delegate—”

A booming voice interrupted. “That would be me, Mackenzie Connor.”

Mac's eyes widened as if that could somehow help her mind fit the figure now climbing from the skim into the reality of a field camp in the coastal ranges. He—she assumed it was a he—waved off Tie's offer of assistance.
Just as well,
Mac thought numbly,
since their visitor looked to outmass the chief several times over.

The diving suit, and distance, had helped disguise the nonhuman. Now, his head free and his body wrapped in what appeared to be bands of brightly colored silk, there was no escaping that she was standing three meters from a Dhryn.

Mac had seen the news report on the t-lev from Vancouver. Dhryn—the only oxy-breathing species within the Interspecies Union to never set foot—or more accurately, pods—on Earth, had sent a representative.

She licked rain from her lips and recaptured the hair strayed from her braid, pushing it behind one ear. “We're honored,” she said at last, after a quick look to Emily, who could only shrug and roll her eyes. The Dhryn finished piling himself out of the skim, which rocked as if in relief, and stood before her.

Xenobiology wasn't something Mac had cared to study—there being more than a lifetime's worth of Earth biology to learn, in her opinion—still, she couldn't help but be intrigued by her first, up-close look at an alien.

The Dhryn seemed a sturdy creature, capable of standing erect in Earth gravity—assuming a 45 degree angle from stern to head was erect. Mac thought it likely, given the placement of limbs, seven in number, appeared useful in that stance. Three limbs were paired opposite each other. These were jointed similarly to human arms, although movement at those joints suggested a more free turning ball-and-socket arrangement than an elbow, and the musculature implied greater strength. A heavier gravity world, perhaps.

The seventh limb, originating high and central from the chest, was—perplexing. It appeared to have several more joints, giving it an almost tentacle-like nature. Instead of the trio of grasping fingers at its tip, like the other six arms, the seventh had something more like scissors, with a hard, chitonous material lining the inner surfaces. As if her attention to this limb was impolite, the Dhryn tucked it under one of his other arms, but gave no other sign her inspection was at all unwelcome.

Legs and feet were one and the same, the being balanced on two elephant-like limbs. The limbs appeared to spread at their bases, ever so slightly. Perhaps the bottoms were adhesive.

The body might have been mammalian, what she could see of it past the gaudy bands; hairless, but with a thick, blue-toned skin that had a sheen, as if waxed. There were dark, pitlike ovals scattered over the body's surface.
Glands? Or sense organs,
Mac debated with herself, unwilling to rush to conclusions.

The head sat between narrow shoulders, and bore thick bony ridges that overhung the two large eyes. Their pupils were shaped like figure eights lain on their sides, black and lustrous, embedded within an oval iris of yellow that spread over the rest of what Mac could see of the eye. The nose and ears were also shaped by curved rises of bone beneath the skin, protected and also likely augmented in their function by those shapes. The mouth was unexpectedly small and tidy, with a pair of thin lips coated with what appeared to be pink lipstick. Now that she paid attention, there were signs of colored pigment applied, quite subtly, to accentuate the shape of eyebrow and nose ridges. There were tiny rings embedded along the top of each ear.

Mac found herself disarmed by a giant bearlike being who'd applied makeup to go diving with salmon, and warned herself—again—against drawing any conclusions at all.

“Mackenzie Connor.” The creature's low voice made her jump. From the way her skin shivered, it could well be uttering additional tones below her hearing range, possibly infrasound. “I deeply regret if my curiosity has interfered with your research. I had heard of the wonders of diving with the spawning run. It was never my intention to disrupt your fine work.”

Reminded, Mac couldn't help but scowl. “I hope you were bagged,” she said, eyes flicking to Tie.

That worthy managed to look offended and embarrassed at the same time, protesting: “Hey, Mac. You think I'd let him in without? There was no chemical contamination. The repeller was on auto—to hold him for pickup. The water's pristine.”

“It had better be.” Mac shuddered to think of the confusion downstream if the dissolved odors of the Tannu River this year contained added Essence of Dhryn.

“I repeat, Mackenzie Connor. I intended no disruption—”

“Intended or not, Mr.—What do I call you?” The bureaucrat leaned forward, as if this was a question he'd like answered as well.

A graceful, if ponderous, tilt of the head. “Having not yet served in
grathnu,
Mackenzie Connor, I regret I can offer only one name for your use. Please do not be offended.”

The Dhryn's face conveyed emotion that matched her human interpretation of his words, the edges of both eyes and mouth flexible enough to turn downward as if in regret. Mac felt chilled.
How much was true similarity in thought processes—how much coincidence—and how much the mimicry of an accomplished diplomat?