Migration (10 page)

“We’re leaving. Now.”

As if accustomed to having his breakfast interrupted by an infuriated woman in hiking gear, Mudge put down his coffee, calmly wiped his mouth with a napkin, and left the table to find his rainsuit. He pulled on the garment, still without a word.

Just as well
. Mac doubted she could engage in reasonable conversation at the moment.

She hadn’t found ’Sephe. She had found, however, the source of the stay-put, stay-dry order.

Dr. Mackenzie Connor.

Not by name, but ’Sephe—or someone—had used Mac’s codes to essentially shut down operations for the day, on a day when a good third of Base should be heading out to the field. The day before Mac herself planned to go, meaning she’d be delayed at least that long herself. She wasn’t the only one upset. Her incoming mail this morning ranged from polite protest to profanity, although Mac had taken a certain satisfaction from replying “wasn’t me” each time.

If the Ministry agent thought this would keep her from taking Mudge to the ridge,
Mac fumed to herself,
’Sephe hadn’t read the right files.

Meanwhile, Mudge had fastened his last boot and now looked at her interrogatively, his small eyes bright with anticipation. Mac jerked her head at the door, then led the way.

A shame security didn’t try to stop them
. Mac had prepared several versions of a scathing protest at such misuse of her codes, her people, and her facility. But no one appeared to notice another two figures in rainsuits wandering the corridors, so she filed her protest for later.

Mac waited for an empty lift to take them to the pod roof. Stepping out first, she reached back and punched in the command for the lowermost level, sending the lift where it would wait until someone from administration could be found to input the retrieval sequence. This early in the season, when students were having trouble finding their own boots, let alone responsible staff? Her lip curled with satisfaction.
Why make ’Sephe’s life easier?

“This way,” she told Mudge, walking through puddles. The rain hadn’t started again, but yesterday’s deluge had filled every depression and dimple on the roof. Not that the roof was large. In point of fact, it wasn’t supposed to exist at all, being another of those “handy, that” modifications. The original pod design had called for an irregular upper surface, transparent from within and appearing as mauve-and-gray stone from without. No one and nothing else was to be on it. Ideal camouflage, sure to appease those who wanted no sign of Human presence in Castle Inlet.

Which had lasted as long as it had taken the first grad student to find a hammer. Tell imaginative and curious scientists they couldn’t use the top of their own building?
Who’d thought that would work?
All but Pod Six eventually grew a small roof consisting of a labyrinth of narrow bands and bulges made of mem-wood, often, but not always, flat. Each new bout of construction had been justified with a scientific purpose: to secure an antenna or collector, to house a weather assembly, and so forth. Over the years, as the roofs became more useful and used, those purposes had expanded somewhat.

Mac led Mudge past planters filled with mud—the planters had withstood the Ro attack but last year’s vegetable gardens hadn’t fared well, around the jumbled heap of newly replaced lawn chairs belonging to the Norcoast Astronomy Club—though the frequent cloud cover made precious little difference to attendance at “meetings” and almost none of the members could tell a star from a planet—and, finally, to a small, sturdy shed that had, alone among all the structures perched on Pod Three, been constructed to look as much like a natural rock formation as mem-wood, plaster, and imagination could allow.

It had been a nice gesture. It might even have worked, had it not been for the giant parrot adorning one side of the shed.
Appeared five summers ago,
Mac recalled, patting the bird’s technicolor wing fondly. Preposterous thing, but with a cheerful, jaunty look. There was a pirate flag firmly in its beak; the traditional skull and crossbones replaced by a salmon skeleton. Barnacle Bill, they called it, and students learned to sing the parrot’s exploits in bawdy detail.
Emily knew every verse
. Mac had once accused her friend of making up the worst of them to shock her new students.

Emily had only smiled.

The memory might have been a floodgate. Mac tried to concentrate on stepping over real puddles, even as her mind swam with questions.
Had Emily left with the Ro? Had the aliens truly left? And what did “leaving” mean to beings who could make their own transects through space at will?

Swearing under her breath, hiding the trembling of her hands, Mac yanked aside the weather screen covering the end of the shed.

“It’s nothing fancy,” she warned Mudge, her voice less steady than would have been reassuring under the circumstances, “but it’ll get us to shore.”

“In one piece?” he asked, eyes dropping from the parrot to stare in dismay at the personal lev cowering inside the shed. It was, as Tie referred to it, at that delicate age between junk and vintage. To survive long enough to be vintage, it shouldn’t have belonged to Mac.

She wiped cobwebs from the yellowed canopy. “It’s this or nothing. Help me push it out.”

Together they wrestled the old lev out of its shelter. The gentle light of early morning wasn’t kind. There were more patches than paint on its sides, the upholstery had endured too many buckets of overripe salmon, and a regrettable, although essentially harmless encounter with a barge had permanently resculptured its prow. Remarkably, last year’s tip and righting of the pod didn’t seem to have added any more dents.
As far as she could tell.

Mac gave the lev a surreptitious kick for luck. She’d bought the thing well and truly used her first year of tenure at Norcoast. Granted, it had been shiny, clean, and intact back then. Even better, dirt cheap. It was only later that Mac learned why few people bothered with levs for anything smaller than freight transport. Compact antigrav units were, to be generous, finicky beasts prone to suicide.

Levs, boots. Same thing.
Mac was satisfied when either got her where she wanted to go with dry feet, although she had noticed footwear was more reliable. Little wonder everyone at Base conspired with Tie to arrange to ferry their co-administrator from place to place, keeping her lev in this shed and out of his workshop.

Which kept it out of inventory, too.
More problems for ’Sephe and crew,
Mac rejoiced.

Much to Mac’s surprise, the engine started on the first try. No death rattle or strange clanking marred the steady hum. That slightly strangled wheezing?
Hardly noticeable.

“You get in first,” Mudge said after a moment’s thoughtful consideration.

“Brave man,” Mac quipped, not entirely sure herself. Then she looked out at their destination, the outstretched arm of Castle Inlet, where mist hung like dust-gray garlands around the deep green trees. “Let’s go.”

Besides,
she told herself optimistically,
it wasn’t far.

Mac shut down the lev’s engine, which continued to wheeze and gasp noisily as if to prove its rise into the air, plunge to a handbreadth above the ocean, and subsequent erratic hobble over the boulders and logs of the shore to land here had been a fluke.

“WE COULD—” the last wheeze died and Mudge stopped shouting to be heard over the racket, “—swim back,” he finished.

Mac patted the lev. “It just needs a rest.”
Not a bad landing,
she congratulated herself, hands sore from holding the controls perhaps a little tighter than useful. The tendency of levs to simply drop if their antigrav failed had crossed her mind on the way here. Several times. Over a combination of height, wave, and rock that didn’t make such a drop appealing in the least, given the high probability of deer mice in the safety chutes.
This was much better.

Much. Mindful of the Trust, and her companion, Mac had brought them down on a bare outcropping on the ocean side of the ridge, close to one of the pathways leading up the ridge. The minimal damage caused by landing here would be easy to record. Mudge couldn’t fault her on this.
Could he?

Rather than ask, Mac looked out over Hecate Strait, the cool, salt-fresh wind playing with her hair and teasing the hood on her shoulders. Clouds were getting organized for the day, small puffs scudding above the waves as if on parade, longer wisps holding court above, a tumultuous line forming in the distance. There would be salmon beneath it all, driving through the depths. The young smolts preoccupied with filling their own stomachs while avoiding being food themselves; the mature, powerful adults who would never eat again, guided by the tastes and scents of home, answering that one final call, to spawn—

“Ahhh.”

The soft exclamation drew her around. Mudge had his back to the ocean. His arms were outstretched, his head tilted, his body dwarfed before the rising ranks of trees that began mere footsteps away.
To someone else,
Mac thought,
he might look foolish
. A man past middle age, wearing a faded yellow rainsuit that had doubtless fit better several kilos earlier, what hair he had tossed by the wind like stray grass. Standing in what could only be called worship.

Mac felt a tightness in her throat. She didn’t interrupt. Instead, she looked where he did, tracing the underlying ridge in the arrogant skyward thrust of pine, cedar, and redwood with her eyes, understanding one thing at least.

“I should never have brought you here,” Mac snapped, catching the branch whipping toward her face in the nick of time.

They were walking three meters above the forest floor, using the suspended walkway set up by last year’s researchers. That forest floor was visible beneath their feet, the walkway of a transparent material which allowed the passage of not only light, but rain and small objects.
Minimal presence
. It conveniently glowed a faint green with each footfall, so they knew where to step next. Repellers kept the surface clear of spiderwebs and other nests.

Repellers didn’t stop branches from growing or leaning across their path. Mac fended another from her face. Mudge either didn’t realize that what he pushed out of his way would spring into hers, or didn’t care.

His voice floated back to her. “Why? Do you have something to hide, Norcoast?”

Should she count on her fingers or pull out her imp to do the calculation?
Mac snorted. Aloud, she said: “No. I don’t have anything to hide. But you’re—OW!” The tip of a branch snapped against her cheek despite a last second duck. “Will you stop!” she shouted.

Mudge, for a wonder, did just that. Mac fingered her cheek and glared at him, breathing heavily. Ever since she’d showed him the path, he’d hurried along it as if possessed by demons.
If she didn’t know better,
Mac thought darkly,
she’d believe he had a destination in mind
.

As this particular path swung all too close to the Ro landing site at the top of the ridge, she sincerely hoped not.
There were some things she needed to believe,
Mac admitted to herself as she studied his sweating face. Among them, that Oversight was here for his trees, nothing more.

He was fumbling in a pocket. Before Mac could do more than tense—
when had she developed that appalling reflex?
—he pulled out a wad of white and pressed it into her hand. “Here. You’re bleeding.”