This Alien Shore (38 page)

And then the tube was gone and so was something else, a small bloody bit that dangled from its tip. It was hardly as thin as a hair, and not even an inch long. As Zusu watched, it seemed to her that the thing squirmed slightly, as if alive, and a small circle of barbed tips flexed open like the struts of a parasol, then closed again. She felt suddenly sick, at the sight of what had just recently been inside her flesh.

“It's a trace,” Calia announced.

Sumi cursed.

Allo's voice was all business, cold and clean and utterly devoid of emotion. “Guild?”

“Can't tell yet. Have to clean it off first.” Calia held it up to the light, where the sharp highlights of direct illumination made it somewhat more visible. “Biotech, I'd guess. It'd have to be, to bypass the wellseeker programs.” She glanced at Zusu, then fixed her eyes on Allo once more. “She really may not have known it was in her.”

“What is it?” Zusu dared. Her voice was trembling.
Don't cry in front of these people. Don't. It would be bad, bad, bad....

“A trace,”
Allo said harshly.

“Someone's been following you,” Sumi explained. “Or someone wanted to be able to follow you in the future. Probably Guild, from your description. They must have slipped this into you under cover of your little accident; within a day or two you'd never have known it was there. It must have picked up a germ or two on the way in or there wouldn't even have been that much sign of its existence.” “Nasty little sucker,” Calia observed. “So what do we do with it now?”

Allo studied Zusu. She could sense the unspoken question inside him, could feel just how close it came to being voiced.
Why are they after you?
But there was no point in asking her that, and perhaps he sensed that. At last he turned away from her, and seemed to dismiss her not only from the conversation, but from his entire consciousness. “We'll stop at some hub station long enough to get rid of it. Slip it on some tourist headed out to nowhere. Damn!” He struck a fist into his open hand. “They may have traced us to that last stop—”

“You want me to warn them—”

“No. No. They probably won't take any notice of it, not if the girl wasn't left there. Safer not to draw their attention to things. If they ask, we'll say it was a social call. I'll have Tam draw up a dossier on the owner of that station, just in case we have to fake some details for the Pol. Damn!”

He turned to Zusu, his blue-streaked face scowling. “You may have cost us an awful lot here,
Jamisia.
I think you'd better give some real thought to letting us know what's going on.” Sumi started to protest; Allo waved him to silence. “At least as much as you know. We can hardly protect you if we don't know who we're protecting you from, now, can we?”

Is that what you mean to do?
Derik demanded.
Protect us?
His tone was dry, but he wasn't in control of the body now, so his sarcasm went unheard. Zusu was in control, and her own response was to whimper softly and draw her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs in a posture that was purely protective. As if someone was about to hit her in the gut, and she couldn't stand the pain if he did. That was how she felt.

“She doesn't know anything,” Sumi said softly.

Allo's lips tightened in a hard line, but he nodded finally, accepting that interpretation. “All right. We'll talk it out later, see if she does know anything that can shed some light on this situation. For now ... Calia, get that cleaned and IDed and ready for transport. And keep it at body temperature, just in case they're scanning for possible removal.”

She nodded and started to put her hand around it, but the tiny barbs flexed, and she clearly had second thoughts about touching it. “Let me get it down to med, then.”

He nodded. “Go.”

He looked at Sumi, and at the girl. There were tears running down Zusu's cheeks, channels of glistening fear that spoke volumes for her state of mind. If it occurred to Allo that such a total breakdown was uncharacteristic for the girl they had taken on board, he didn't say that out loud.

“You're turning into a lot of trouble for us, Jamisia.” He was trying to make his voice gentle, it seemed, but the tension underriding it was too marked for that subterfuge to work; Zusu's self-embrace grew even tighter as he sat down by her side. “You will help us try to figure all this out, won't you? We can't help protect you if you don't.”

The lie was so blatant that even Zusu understood what was behind it ... and the danger so evident that even her young mind, normally oblivious to the fine gradations of social dishonesty, caught on. “I'll tell you all I can,” she whispered. “But really, I already told Sumi everything.” To her surprise, Allo seemed to accepted that. Perhaps it was the tears in her voice; some men, Katlyn explained, mistook that for honesty. Perhaps it was simply that he needed to be elsewhere, and saw no further use in pandering to her fears.

Well done,
Verina told her.
We'll get through this yet
...
together.

With a muttered word of leavetaking Allo quit the room, leaving her alone with Sumi. The Medusan had placed a gentle hand on her shoulder in comfort, but when they were alone together, he withdrew it.

“I'm sorry,” Zusu whispered. Sorry for causing him trouble, sorry for his obvious sexual embarrassment, sorry for everything. It was a generalized guilt, rather than a specific apology, and she hoped he understood it that way.

He didn't meet her eyes. “Look, we've got a few more hours in Reijik Node because of this mess. Try to use it to relax, all right? Calia will find out exactly what that thing was, and who made it. Then maybe you can help us put two and two together, and we'll figure out what to do about it.”

He didn't go on to the part of the speech that should have come after, about how he was going to help her. Maybe that was too much of a lie for even him to stomach.

Jamisia felt sick inside. So did Verina. So did most of the Others who were watching now, their consciousness crowded about Zusu's own like tourists at a small viewport.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered again. No answer.

He got up silently from the bed and walked to the door. For a moment it seemed he might leave without even looking at her, but he did glance back, and there was as much sympathy as frustration in his expression. “It'll be okay,” he said shortly, and then he stepped close enough to the door for it to open. In another second he was gone, and the door slid shut once more; she—
they
—were alone.

Jamisia could have taken the body back then, but Zusu wanted it for one thing more. One thing she needed more than anything else, to deal with the emotions that had built up inside her. Frustration and despair and a thousand other things she didn't know how to handle. The Others had their ways of dealing with such things. She had hers.

The Others understood. The Others sympathized. They were family, after all.

They let her cry.

G
UILDMASTER ANTON VARSAV was calm.

It scared his people.

He knew that.

It pleased him.

They knew him well enough to worry when the frenzied motion of his restless body eased, for it signaled that his brain had found something to focus on so closely that it couldn't be bothered with extraneous motion. They knew that when his language flowed smoothly and easily it was because there were no inappropriate phrases being edited out by his brainware, the usual case. And they knew that he only found such focus in danger, and conflict, and vengeance. So when they saw these signs, it scared them.

As it should.

He had spent the last E-week buried in Isolationist research. Saturating his mind with images and arguments from the two most hateful station colonies in civilized outspace. Tract after tract of the New Terran Front passed before his eyes, proclaiming the natural superiority of humankind's hated ancestors. As always, he wanted to take them by the shoulders and shake them violently, demanding, “Why did you come out here if you hate Variant space so much? Why not stay at home and nurture your precious barbaric genes in peace?” As for the New Aryan Nation, merely looking at a picture of them was enough to make one's bile rise in disgust. It wasn't enough for them to declare Earth stock superior, but they must cordon off a small section of Terra's gene pool and declare it sovereign over all that Earth had ever produced. To see a picture of them standing together, with their meticulously engineered features, perfectly matched in color, height and form, beautiful on the surface but cankerous with hatred underneath, was to understand just how corrupt ancient Earth must have been to have given birth to such a movement.

How they must hate him, all of them. How they must hate his race in general, but him most of all. This alien who ruled their node, who forced Guild law down their throats, and who flaunted his Variation before them as if it was not some kind of deformity, merely a normal state of being. How he hated them, and how he wished that Guild law would allow him to squeeze the life out of their colonies, so that the universe could be cleansed of such garbage forever.

But the law was the law, and he was sworn to uphold it.

Until they transgressed.

He hoped they had done so. He prayed nightly that they had done so. He dreamed of discovering that they were behind Lucifer—of being free to wreak vengeance upon them for that unspeakable crime. He would grind their stations to dust, and then package that dust and sell it to tourists, so that it reached every comer of the universe with its message:
Your kind is not wanted here.

It was going to happen.

He had done all the things that were asked of him, and more. He had placed so many spy programs in his node's network that one could hardly buy a pod ticket without tripping over one of them. He had all the mail from both those problem stations diverted, analyzed, and tagged for a trace, and even the regular correspondence from more worthy humans was being watched as well. It was a monumental effort. Another person would have despaired of coordinating it all. Another would have been overwhelmed by the sheer mass of data, unable to give it order and focus and purpose. But for him it was merely an exercise of intellect, more challenging than most but not at all daunting, and the diverse parts of the investigation fit together in his head like the pieces of a puzzle.

That was Hausman's gift to him, a precious talent he expressed all too rarely. Setting his brain to this project was like stretching muscles too long unused, and he gloried in the sensation. Others noticed nothing, save that his walk was easier, his hands roved less in search of sensation, and he wrestled less with his language inhibitor programs to get speech out. Those who had served him for a long enough time knew what that meant, of course. And they knew to fear. He could see it in their eyes as they passed him in the corridors of the waystation, their glances quickly averted ... but not quickly enough.

They were afraid of him.

Good.

Day after day he went over the data, giving his people key words and phrases to search for, never giving them quite enough information to know exactly what he was looking for, or why. Unlike Ra and so many others, he never trusted his hackers. He never forgot that the same talent which made them so valuable also made them unpredictable as well, and that more than one Guildmaster had been brought down by a disgruntled employee with access to confidential files. Like so many before him, he had learned that hiring conventional programmers was not enough, that one needed a mind hungry to devour secrets, in order to find secrets out. Unlike so many before him, however, he was not going to make the mistake of ever thinking they were loyal to him, or giving them a chance to work their mischief.

But they could sort through this mess in search of key patterns, and weed out the ten million letters that were of no interest whatsoever. Meanwhile his more prosaic programmers could come up with sorting programs for what was left over, searching for that all but invisible hint of insurrection in the making.

The hint would be there. He knew it.

If they did not find it for him, he could always create it.

What power she had placed in his hands, the Prima! Did she even know? Did she think in those terms? One hint of Lucifer, and he could sent an army into Destiny Station. And not his own army either; an army of the Guild itself, hot with the hunger for vengeance, ready to make an example of the Isolationists for all to see.