Survival (20 page)

His praise was unexpected. Mac had begun to believe “foolhardy” and “stupid” were better descriptions of what she'd done. “Fair's fair,” she suggested, replacing the lantern in her pocket. “How did you know to be here?”

Trojanowski frowned,
but not, this time, at her,
Mac thought. “There was a collision yesterday, northeast of here, involving a low-orbit freighter. All hands were lost. No evidence of what it collided with until this—” he nodded at the flattened clearing, “—appeared on the monitors. I was contacted to check it out as soon as I could get away from Brymn. I played a hunch and stayed.”

“Do all diplomatic liaisons check out freighter crashes and holes in the forest canopy?”

“Not all.” He had the grace to look embarrassed, a reminder of the man she'd met yesterday. “I'm not supposed to get caught like this, Dr. Connor. I'd planned a quiet investigation, no one the wiser.”

“Why the pretense? I mean, it's not as if Base is full of—” She closed her mouth into a grim line.

“Spies?” Trojanowski's expression matched her own. “I'd say my precautions were well advised, given your visitor.”

“Who was it? What was it? You know, don't you?”

“Even if I did, Dr. Connor,” he said with what seemed sincere regret, “I couldn't tell you. Secrecy is more important than ever now.” With that, he turned and walked away.

“Oh, no, you don't!”

Mac caught up with the bureaucrat-cum-spy at the opposite side of the clearing, where he'd started removing a camouflage net from what turned out to be a one-person lev. “We aren't done here, Trojanowski,” she told him fiercely. “Not by a long shot.”

“Duty calls. I'm sure you know the way back.” In one easy motion, Trojanowski straddled the seat and activated the lev. There was barely a whisper of engine noise.
Not your average off-the-lot weekend toy,
Mac thought, unsurprised. Probably maneuverable enough to fly under the canopy, out of sight. “Good day, Dr. Connor,” he said, donning a black helmet and visor.

Mac stepped away as the lev lifted, contemplating several things, including what she'd transmit to Trojanowski's boss before the day ended. Her foot caught in a fragment of toppled cedar and she fell on her rump within its branches.
Perfect
. As she sat there, she glared up at the lev, which was now almost at tree height, and added a few others to the list to “speak to” about Mr. Trojanowski.

A breeze free to roam the new clearing slipped through her hair, scented with bruised leaves. Leaves bruised by the intruder in her office. Mac said “Damn,” to herself, but squirmed to her feet. Once standing, she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted: “I heard it.”

The lev paused, then plunged groundward to rest over her head. Mac swallowed hard, but stood her ground. Trojanowski flipped up his visor and looked down, his expression noncommittal. “What did you hear?”

“Not words I could understand. Other sounds. When it was in my office, when I was following it, I heard—”

“That's enough. Stop,” he ordered, emphasizing the command with a raised hand.

Mac obeyed, but pressed her lips together and scowled fiercely.

Trojanowski's expression became slightly more conciliatory. “Please don't take offense, Dr. Connor. You're right—this is important and I'll want your full report, but we need an audio expert to help reconstruct the sounds. Please don't talk to anyone else about what you think you heard until then—not even yourself. Premature verbalizing can distort recall. In Humans, at least.”

He probably thought he was making sense, but Mac wasn't inclined to listen. Her toes were icicles, her legs ached, and her face was beginning to burn along the right side, from chin to forehead. “Then I suggest you call a transport to get me home.”

“Call—? Does the concept of secrecy hold any meaning whatsoever to you?” Trojanowski actually sounded frustrated, likely the closest to an honest emotion he'd shown her since she'd arrived. “No one can know we've been up here.”

Somehow, she doubted he was worried about the Wilderness Trust Oversight Committee. “Our ‘visitors' already do,” Mac pointed out.

“Which is more than enough. This isn't a debate, Dr. Connor. I'm very sorry, but you'll have to go back the way you came. I'll contact you as soon as I can.”

Mac prided herself on keeping her temper. She found nothing productive or appealing in the furies the more volatile Emily would unleash without warning at targets ranging from slow drivers to political leaders. Now, however, she put her fists on her hips, stared up at Trojanowski, and let fly: “You're right. This isn't a debate, Mr. Trojanowski. You will arrange for me to be transported back to Base, or the moment I get back I'll be in touch with the Secretary General and everyone else I can find.” She drew a shuddering breath, but kept going. “I'm sure some of the media are still around.”

He lowered the lev until it brushed the ground, making it easier for her to read his expression. Not anger.
Regret
. Mac felt her blood chill as he spoke.

“You leave me no choice, Dr. Connor. One word about any of this—our encounter, what you chased, what happened here—and I'll have you arrested and removed from your facility as a threat to the species. And before you ask, yes, the Ministry of Extra-Sol Human Affairs has that authority, as an agency of the Interspecies Union. There would be no recourse or question. You would disappear.”

What could she say to that?
Mac stared at him, feeling as though her feet were sinking.
Which could well be,
part of her acknowledged.

He leaned forward. “I don't want to do that to you. But I will, if I have to—no matter how beautiful your eyes are at sunset. Your word, Dr. Connor, please, that you won't tell anyone.”

Mac could only nod. Trojanowski's face was replaced by the black sheen of his visor. The lev shot toward the forest and vanished.

A squirrel complained furiously and Mac snorted, feeling—she wasn't sure what she felt. Angry, maybe. “Losing your temper never helps,” she advised the squirrel. “Trust me.”

She'd been about as effectual as the tiny creature.
Worse,
Mac realized with dismay,
she'd been wrong.
Trojanowski hadn't lied. There were secrets to protect, even if she hated being part of them. And it was her fault, no one else's, that she was part of them now.

She could already hear Emily's voice, providing a scathingly complete list of why she, Mac, should leave secrets and the pursuit of invisible aliens to professionals.

“Then she'll want to know how he looked without glasses,” Mac told the squirrel. “Sorry, Em. I forgot to notice.”
But he'd noticed her eyes
.

She made her way back through the clearing, dodging shattered stumps and piles of leafy debris. This couldn't possibly be overlooked by the Wilderness Trust and their satellite monitors.

“Who am I kidding?” Mac grumbled, about to step over another scar in the ground. “He probably has authority over Mudge, too. I'm so far out of my league it's . . .”

She paused. This scar was another that was too regular, forming an indentation longer than it was wide. Unlike the others, it was marked along one edge in a pattern of narrow scrapes similar to the one Mac had seen near the pillar, where the creature had dropped to the ground.

Mac sank on her heels to look out across the clearing. The other large depressions she'd judged the imprints of landing gear were at even distances from this one. She twisted on her heels to check behind her. The log where she'd crouched under the alien was in a direct line from this point. “I'll be . . .” she breathed. “This must have been the hatch.”

They'd literally watched the creature enter its ship, and seen nothing.

Mac whistled between her teeth. “Now, that's camouflage.” She unzipped the right-hand pocket of her slicker and shoved its contents—tissues, pencil remnants, and an unused t-lev ticket—into the left with the lantern. Taking a piece of torn bark, she removed soil from the longest of the scrapes, putting as much into her empty pocket as she could fit.
A little present for Kammie
.

Mac smiled, wincing as it stretched the tender skin of her cheek. Now to see if Trojanowski's fancy scanner was as good as one of the top soil chemists on Earth.

Maybe she wasn't a professional whatever, with a fancy lev and helmet,
Mac told herself.
But she was used to looking for answers—and finding them
.

The shadows cast by ruined branches and trampled ground abruptly lost their edges. The forest, already dim under the canopy, became as inviting as the door of an unlit basement and Mac heard the rain approaching through the trees. “Perfect,” she said aloud, then pulled her hood over her head in time to keep her hair only damp, and stood.

“Why sneak around my . . .
omphf
. . . office?” Mac muttered to herself as she slid down the next dip on her rump, grabbing whatever handholds she could find. It might not be dignified, but between the rain-slick slopes and her growing fatigue, she judged it safer than trying to climb down on her feet.

On reaching the next patch that was more or less level, she levered herself to her feet, casting an eye to what lay ahead. A choice between vertical rock or slightly less than vertical rock covered in wet roots. “This was all so much easier on the way up—and in the dark, so I couldn't see what an idiot I was.”
Time to catch her breath
. Mac leaned on the nearest tree to mull the question troubling her. “Em,” she decided, “your radar was off for once.” She gave a lopsided grin, avoiding the damaged side of her face. The figure on the terrace last night hadn't been Trojanowski—he'd been here. But if the spy on the terrace had been the creature—or its more visible accomplice—then its search of her office later made an ironic kind of sense.

Mac shook her head. Had it thought the bag with the soufflé contained some secret Brymn had brought her? “Well, that must have been a shock,” she told the finger-long banana slug climbing the bark near her ear. An unhappy thought, an accomplice on Base, but it would have been easy enough. After all, they'd been invaded by fifteen kayak-loads of local media folk disguised as badly dressed tourists.
Even
she
could have infiltrated that group.

Trojanowski's insistence on secrecy, however uncomfortable it made her trip home, suddenly seemed more reasonable.

The thought of more spies wandering around Base got Mac moving again, not to mention a distinct longing for the simple things in life. Although Mac couldn't make up her mind. “Shower, then breakfast,” she decided, checking for the next foothold. “No. Strip and sleep, then shower. No. Breakfast, then more answers from that Dhryn.”

She'd have plenty of time to work out the order
. The return trip was less straightforward than the one up. For one thing, the trails she and the creature had left had been obliterated by the rain. For another, landmarks looked remarkably different viewed from above.
Oh, she wasn't lost.
Mac knew the overall shape of the landscape well enough to be sure she was heading toward the arm's inner curve, not the Pacific side. She intended to follow the ridge that led to the arm's tip, which should bring her out of the forest near one of the three walkways or perhaps the gate itself.

“With luck, Oversight will never know I was here,” she reassured herself before starting her next, cautious descent. Mac wasn't proud of such a hope. She hung on tight, reaching with her boots for a foothold, and promised herself that despite Trojanowski's oath of secrecy she'd document every bruised leaf for Mudge, in case a researcher ever climbed this ridiculous excuse for a—

As if paying attention, the root clutched in her right hand chose that moment to pop free of the rock, ripping away with it an appalling number of connecting rootlets, ferns, and moss clumps. Mac wedged her boot in a crack in time to save herself from joining them at the bottom of the tiny cliff. “Oops,” she said, staring down at what was undeniable proof of anthropogenic interference.

Then again, she could hope that Mr. Trojanowski had every bit of the authority he claimed when threatening her. He'd need it. The amount of damage she'd done climbing up and back would be enough to rescind Norcoast's land access permanently. It wouldn't matter that the alien ship had smacked a hole the size of a transport lev in the forest.

She
was supposed to know better
.

“Aliens,” Mac muttered darkly.