Undertow (17 page)

Just in time, as the black tendril slammed after them. It sparked and arced, withdrew, shedding ragged bits of eviscerated foglets. Some of the component machines stuttered and twitched on the corridor floor. Heaney kicked one away as it grabbed at her suit; the armor held. The thing went flying.

She looked up to see the tendril coming apart into hundreds—thousands—of crawling machines…

Morrow cut the feed. Closs slumped against his desk chair, rolling his shoulders back. His right hand ached from clenching on the trigger of Heaney’s weapon. “All of them?” he asked.

Boarding, making sure that the marines and crew saw the enemy, interacted with them…when the enemy could have just shot a big rock at the
True Blue
. Starships were impossibly easy to destroy. This didn’t make any sense. He looked at her, image to image, light-years between them, and waited for her to give him an answer he could accept.

She shook her head, and failed him. “It took the ship apart,” Morrow said. “Find me a solution, Tim.”

Clean, dry, illegally skinned, and wearing stolen clothes, Cricket spent the next morning and afternoon hiding in plain sight. It was both easier and harder than she expected, and quite strange overall, because she didn’t dare connex.

She could surf news through a public terminal, but she wasn’t confident that the false persona she’d chipped off the stuff in her jump kit would hold up to a Rim security scan. She had a nasty suspicion that something had come in with the information that Lucienne had sent her.

The data was tagged, maybe. And the data was in her head. And there didn’t seem to be much she could do about it, because Cricket couldn’t find the tag, or beacon, or whatever might be in there.

Which was a problem long-term, if she wanted to live. Or if she ever wanted to work again. And a problem immediately, in that activities as simple as hailing a water taxi or paying her lunch tab became infinitely more complicated when you couldn’t just connex the bill. She had money; her jump identity was supplied. But accessing or using it was going to be a real trick.

There
was
somebody she could talk to, if she wanted to take the chance. André trusted him. But André trusted Cricket, too, which wasn’t exactly a testimonial to his excellent judgment.

How far she’d fallen, if Nouel Huc was the best she could do for an ally.

She was waiting at the Zheleznyj Tigr when the doors opened. She paid at the door, with a dwindling cash card, and was the first one into the club. Uncool, but she wanted to beat Huc here.

At least André was unreachable. Huc couldn’t ring him up and spill the beans; whatever Jean Kroc said about André’s motivation, Cricket didn’t trust him either. She didn’t trust his ethics or his glib head full of self-justifying stories and she didn’t buy his motives for wanting to learn to conjure. But she’d had that fight with Jean, and Jean was as stubborn as they came. It didn’t matter how many times Cricket pointed out that André was the worst kind of sorcerer’s apprentice—the sort that lied and snuck and eventually betrayed. Jean was sure he could save André, and if he couldn’t save André, that he could use him.

And Jean was mad enough to see it as a challenge, too. A test of his dedication, to reclaim the man who had killed Lucienne.

She wasn’t going to make excuses for Jean Kroc. He knew the parable of the snake as well as she did. He was just crazy enough to think himself immune.

She picked a round table at the front, near the stage. Nouel Huc’s habitual table, with its red-handkerchiefhemmed tablecloth and its white waxflowers nodding sleepily in the vase. The server tried to talk her into another seat, but she tipped her head and said, “I’m expected.”

She wasn’t pretty enough to be believed, not dressed like this. But Huc did his own species of business, and his clients weren’t all as natty as André.

“Will you be on M~ Huc’s account?” the server asked, with at least a show of politeness.

Cricket thought of the dwindling balance on her cash card. “Yes.”

Let Huc take it out of her hide. She had enough to offer that he could stand her the cost of a meal.

Whether the staff of the Zheleznyj Tigr called him, or whether he was just running early, it was less than a quarter before she looked up to find his shadow falling across her. “M~ Huc,” she said, placing a hand on the edge of the table to help her balance to her feet. He laid a hand on her shoulder and she sat back.

It was a reassuring hand, whether or not he meant it to be. “I understand we are acquainted?”

She relaxed into the chair as he stepped away, moved around the table, and sat. She liked the way he set his elbows on the table, too, wide apart, and leaned forward between them, not bothering to hide an amused smile. He wanted her to soak in that warmth, she thought. Soak in it, drown in it. Trust him.

He was better at it than André, and she thought he could probably also beat up her father if he had to. But she really didn’t need to go about collecting spare thugs. Not right now.

“Not under any name it’s safe for me to use,” she said. Her skins were pretty good; they’d hold up even under a parser filter. “But I’m a friend of André Deschênes.”

“How close of a friend?”

“Very,” she said, calmly.

He nodded. “We’ve met before. You’ve changed your hair.”

“And everything else,” she answered, and he laughed. “I’m in trouble, M~ Huc.”

“Call me Nouel,” he said, and patted her hand. “You may speak freely here. Though I’m recording.”

“Thank you, Nouel.” She hesitated, and he stepped in smoothly to fill the silence.

“And what shall I call you?”

Cricket hesitated. There was the name on her false ID, of course, but that was intentionally bland. She wanted something that was less of a lie, at least as much hers as
Cricket
. “Fisher,” she said, after consideration. “Like the cat.”

“There’s a cat named Fisher?”

“No,” she said, laughing. “There’s a kind of weasel they used to have in the part of Earth where I grew up. They were called fisher cats. They weren’t cats. And they didn’t fish.”

“Ah,” he said. He looked up and waved the server over. “I see. And you’re not what you pretend to be either. One moment”—as he ordered wine in a lowered tone—“please, continue. Are you a fisher, Fisher?”

“I’m a data miner,” she said. “And I have some information I will pay very handsomely to get to Jean Gris.”

“And there’s a reason you can’t deliver the information yourself.”

She had her mouth open to answer as the wine came, and held her tongue while Nouel pronounced it acceptable. The server filled their water glasses. They ordered, and as the first course was brought to the table, Cricket reminded herself that it was unwise to let him penetrate her defenses so easily. Formidable charm and a formidable wit did not translate to unassailable honesty.

When she had eaten the first few bites, he smiled and said, “So. You owe Jean Gris money.”

Cricket had been waiting for it, and so she managed a cool look, rather than bursting out laughing. “If it pleases you to think so.”

“If there are greater risks,” Nouel said, with a negligent gesture of his snail pick, “it would be clever of you to inform me of your reasons. It will affect the precautions necessary to see that your message goes through.”

“I have several reasons, all of them excellent.”

His right hand rolled through the air, two fingers extended as if winding the words from her throat onto a ribbon.

She shook her head. “It would be safer for you not to know.”

“M~ Fisher, you have just described my stock-in-trade in its entirety. Perhaps you would be so good as to explain to me exactly what you need, and what you are willing to pay?”

Which was the challenge she would have to meet, of course. She sipped wine, rolling it over her tongue, almost shocked by wood and vanilla. It had been a long time since she’d had wine like this. Part of successfully reinventing one’s self, of shedding an old personality, was reinventing
everything
. Likes, dislikes, favorite places, the type of people one associated with. Not just the hair, the clothes, the skin, the postures. To become someone new, you had to swallow it whole, without reservation.

Cricket Earl Murphy wasn’t a wine drinker. Maybe Fisher would be, when Fisher became more real. “I have an entire clean established legal persona to offer,” she said. “Also, five thousand demarks in cash or cash-equivalent. And a favor from an archinformist. In return, I want a message taken to Jean Gris, and I want assistance in documenting another legal persona, though I’ll do the hackwork myself. I just need somebody who can forge the necessary. The problem is that the message I need sent to Jean is all in my head and I need a clean isolated system to download it to, because I think I have a beacon in my head as well, and I can’t connex. Jean, by the way, is no doubt being watched. Which is why I don’t dare go to him.”

“You’re offering a lot for some pretty simple requests.”

She wasn’t going to tell him about Lucienne. If he’d helped André do it, she didn’t want to force him into a conflict of interest. “I have proof that Rim is covering up a major ecological disaster in progress,” she said baldly, and forked up a mouthful of scallop sashimi and shredded radish. “I’d like to force them to do something about it before they poison Greene’s World so badly that Novo Haven goes the way of Patience Station or Port Katherine.”

Fifty years after a reactor core excursion, a radius of a hundred miles around the former planetary seat of Enlil was still uninhabitable. Cricket couldn’t be held personally responsible for
that
one, but the long shadow of Port Katherine had been one of the cudgels used to bludgeon her from office…when she had been someone else. She scratched a nail across the tablecloth, feeling the tip catch, bend, and release on each thread. “Nouel?”

He seemed suitably impressed, still staring into his wineglass with his lips pursed out and twisted. He glanced up when she said his name. “You trust me not to go to Rim with this? There’d be a lot of money in it.”

“Enough to retire on,” she agreed. “And you’d have to.”

In an industry where contracts were unenforceable and a deal was still sealed by a handshake, she wasn’t exaggerating. If he turned Cricket in, there wasn’t an archinformist on the Rim that would give him so much as the time of day or the local acceleration due to gravity.

He scratched his thumb across his chin. His nod did nothing to ease the tightening wire of tension laced across her spine. This was merely embracing danger in a new shape.

“Stay through the play,” he said. “Come home with me tonight. We’ll set you up. Now sit tight, won’t you, and finish your supper? I have to make a couple of calls.”

In the morning, the earth shook. This was not uncommon, and Gourami would usually have slept through it, drifting weightlessly for sleeping, anchored by se toefingers in the bottom mud and with eyes and nostrils just protruding from the water. But it was se watch, predawn, while Tetra dreamed, the human slept in his temporary structure, and Caetei swam hunting. And so Gourami was sprawled on slick mud churned up by mudskitters—driven from their tunnels by the previous day’s rain—waiting for the human to awaken.

Gourami calculated quickly, decided that they were far enough up the bayou that any water surge would spend itself among the reeds and hillocks before it reached them, and rolled supine to sun se belly. Rustling shook the tent; the human struggling into his clothing, no doubt. Gourami licked eyes to clear the night’s grit from them, the warm sun flooding se veins with heat and energy. Se couldn’t sun too long, but se could certainly use a little exothermal assistance in digesting last night’s excellent meal.

And then the earth shook again, harder and sustained, and Gourami flipped upright and crouched. Se trilled an alarm note. There was a thrash, a splash, Tetra jerking awake, and now thumping inside the tent and some humen noises. A moment later, André flailed out, his boots flopping unsealed. Gourami lurched forward, croaking in dismay, already certain what would follow.

Se did not reach the human in time.

He hit the fallen reeds, which were covered in the layer of wet silt and rotting plant matter the mudskitters had expectorated. He took three staggering, sliding steps, windmilling his arms, and for a moment Gourami almost thought he was going to regain his precarious biped balance. Their mode of locomotion was just falling forward and catching themselves anyway; how hard could it be for them to stop an unintentional falling?

Hard enough, apparently. He went down ugly, all weird angles and wiggling, whatever noise he made audible to a person’s ears as a high-pitched yelp, and he hit the mud with a quick green-sounding pop. The earth was still shuddering, a long hard rumble, and Gourami wanted to be in the water so badly se skin itched. Instead, se dragged across the splintery reeds on all fours, scratching palms and ankles, miraculously making it to the fallen human’s side without putting a stick through webbing.

The human lay on his back, one leg tucked under him and the other splayed out. He panted heavily. That was good; he was alive. His eyes were screwed up like fish mouths, though, little puckers in a sweating face, and his hands clutched into the mud and reeds, fingers sunk deep. Gourami did not think that was promising.

Se reached out, tentatively, and touched the back of a humen hand. He groaned, and se flinched back, realizing as se did so that the earth had stopped shuddering. Whatever noises he was making weren’t words, se didn’t think, except occasionally when his mouth moved in the shapes of profanity.

He couldn’t read a slate if he didn’t open his eyes, and se made a louder, insistent noise. A vibrato thrum, as one would use to summon egglings. Se remembered something about humen bones; they were all hard, calcified, like skulls and jawbones, and like skulls and jawbones they could shatter.

Se tapped his hand again, harder. His eyes opened this time, pupils contracted. Sweat stood out in beads across his scalp and trickled down the furrows alongside his nose; humen did that because they could not secrete mucous, and also when they were in pain or shock. Gourami had seen injured humen before.