Battleground (26 page)

“Bloodless,” he said again, and again, unpredictably, the shutter flashed open and shut, and she saw that he meant immediate sensual reward.

“You are speaking of the physical pleasure of coupling, are you not?” she said.

“You experience it, then?”

“At its best,” Hanna said again. She had no intention of going into the exceptions now, but she was not going to say
always
either. Unqualified statements might come back to haunt her in accusations of evasion or lies.

More thunder; a sharp crack this time, close by, and the charged air simultaneously was alight, then black again. Hanna was circling now, too. She thought:
I have never hated a place as I hate this one.

“Explain,” said Kwoort. “Explain to my mind. Make me
feel
what you feel when you breed.”

“No,” Hanna said, an outright refusal. Because she could (if all her senses were working properly) summon memories of men she had known who had pleased her, let fantasy summon the first tremulous excitement and the building urgency, and convey it in some form to Kwoort. But it would be an act, though mental, as generous as willing intercourse.
And I don't like Kwoort.

“Why do you ask these questions?” she said. “What is their importance to you?”

Another crack of thunder, and she jumped, nearly lost her balance again.

“Because if it is pleasure you seek, I offer it to you. In return for your service in speaking to the mind.”

“What?”
said Hanna.

“You will know the facilitators,” said Kwoort, but more thunder drowned out his next words, and Hanna smelled ozone. In the flash of lightning she had seen that they were farther away from the building—from Gabriel—than she wanted to be, and she started back with a sense of horror that she did not think was all hers. Something was happening to Gabriel.

“Hear me!” Kwoort shouted after her, but thunder boomed over his voice again, and the translator crackled deafeningly in her ears.

There was nothing to steady her, no clear connection to a human mind, no sure ground underfoot, no certain light. There was crack after crack of thunder, gust after gust of wind, and the lightning that blinded her left her blind in the intervals of dark. Somehow she was at the door but it did not yield to her push this time, and she began to pound on it. She could hardly hear the blows herself as thunder overrode them, and it did not seem possible that Gabriel could hear them. Kwoort was beside her then, bending and yelling into her ear—something in her crippled mind came to life for an instant, and she knew that he yelled as much because so small an ear must surely be hard of hearing, as because of the thunder.

“Think of it,” he cried, “every nerve in the body—!”

And Hanna shouted back: “That is insane! Think! My organs are not yours, the brain's receptors are not the same! This is a waste of time!”
And
you
are insane,
she thought, not caring if it got projected or not.

The door gave way suddenly, and Gabriel stumbled out and nearly fell into her arms.

She held him hard and he clutched her, rocking on his feet; she looked over his shoulder and saw the being Tlorr in the center of the bare gray chamber through the door, perfectly still. She recognized a smile.

“Gabriel,” she said into his ear, her voice low, counting on pitch to make him hear it under the noise of the sky. He shook his head and his eyes were horrified, but he could balance now; she stepped back a little, still holding him, scanning him as best she could, and saw no blood or other sign of injury. She let go of everything but his arm and pulled him away from the door, down the steps and toward the pod, which was a shape from a bad dream in the flashes of light. Kwoort stalked beside her, shouting, but he did not try to touch her and she did not try to speak to him. If he attacked her they would be all the way out of luck. There was an endless interval of stumbling across the short distance while wind battered them in ever-stronger gusts. Gabriel held onto her arm but did not need it now for support; he might have felt the need for sane human contact too, but Hanna did not know, she could not hear his thoughts or sense what he felt. Only nightmares had been as bad as this deprivation; she seemed to have been robbed of all her senses at once.

The pod responded to her voice in spite of the crash of thunder and the ramp came down much more slowly than she wanted it to. Time was skewed. Gabriel hung back and she thought,
He is trying to get between Kwoort and me, he wants to protect me
—and spared a curse for human males.

“Go,” she said, “go!” and he went up the ramp quickly, turning to call to her to hurry, but she was right behind him and shoved. Kwoort was actually on the ramp, still shouting, repeating the obscene offer; she thought he was elaborating on sensual delight, and she sacrificed an instant to claw at the circuitry at her ears, trying to tear the translator away and failing.

Kwoort fell back finally, the hatch closed behind them, and Hanna started the takeoff sequence before she was fully in her seat. She remembered that she had not called out to Metra for help, forgetting the communicator, and the thought froze her.
Idiot!
she thought. Another mistake; Kwoort could have attacked. It could have happened in a second.

Then they were off the ground, and it took every skill she had and every force and sensor the pod possessed to hold out against the storm until they got above it.

•   •   •

She lied to the medics, told them she was hallucinating, got them to strip the chemical compounds of the stimulant from her blood. It took an hour, and it was too late, too late, she thought, because she lay waiting for the time to pass and there was nothing but the inner sound of her own brain's electrical field where the complex mix of the medics' thoughts should be.
This is not possible
, she thought, denying it, and refused to see anyone from her team because she could not bear to tell them. They must think she exercised the block she had used before, which they thought some little-known skill of the Adept; she would let them think it as long as possible. She did not tell Gabriel the truth, either, but she let him stay beside her and could not let go of his hand.

By the time it was done she could barely move for exhaustion. She slumped at a table in a conference room on
Endeavor
—she could hardly have said which one, the thought required to place it needed too much effort—with Gabriel's arm around her. There were people in the room—Metra and some of her officers—and people who were faces on the walls, one of them Jameson, projected from
Heartworld III
. Another was Andrella Murphy, also in space in a craft of her own, and a third Zanté, on Earth; Adair Evanomen was there, too, and again Hanna wondered why. The idea of trading with Battleground for anything was ludicrous.

Real or virtual, all of them might as well have been only voices, because it was too much trouble for Hanna to keep her eyes open, and she could not feel the real presences telepathically. She kept trying to feel them, again and again, all the time holding down a tide of something that could become hysteria. She had seldom thought of what it meant to be a telepath, and now all she could think, obsessively, was that she had never sufficiently treasured what she had. The universe that was Hanna's was multidimensional in a way a true-human's could never be.
We are aliens too, we look like them, have the same ancestors, but deep down they feel it . . . no wonder they don't trust us . . . oh, God, don't make me one of them!

She managed to speak coherently, barely. She reported Kwoort's offer, or proposition, or attempt to bribe or seduce, and saw shock and disbelief and maybe embarrassment in some faces, before she closed her eyes. Hanna felt none of those things. She was too consumed by fear to feel anything else.

“Recommendations?” said Jameson's deep voice.

Subtle sounds of movement, as people thought of answers.

“We need to find a different contact,” Metra said.

Hanna put down the stifling fear once more and said with effort, “Won't work. There's nobody higher than Tlorr, and she and Kwoort are a team. He's crazy as hell and she probably is too, and they're
both
saner than the oldest one. Let's get out of here.”

And let me go home please please and maybe the healers can help

Gabriel moved a little. He said nothing, but Hanna felt agreement and lost the thread of conversation immediately; she had
felt
it, sensed it, oh, God, was she going to be all right? Something had happened to her breath; she turned her face to Gabriel's shoulder and went still.

Gabriel?

And oh, yes, there it was, the sense of a complex personality, not yet strong, still dim, but unmistakably Gabriel.

“Lady Hanna?” someone was saying, but she was reaching out:
Bella? Dema?

I'm here, what's wrong with you . . .

Me too, we could hardly feel you, it was like you were unconscious . . .

And Joseph: faint. But there. And she could tell that Arch was asleep.

They were asking Gabriel what the Holy Man had had to say to him, and Gabriel was saying it was nothing important.

It had not been unimportant. The contact with Gabriel intensified. She knew there had been something that had shocked him to the core.

Gabriel? Gabriel, dear?

She was as unconscious of uttering an endearment as he had been.

She opened her eyes and was looking into his. He shook his head. Something horrible: not clear, but it would not be at the best of times, because there were no words and no distinct images. He was not so much holding something back as holding it down, as Hanna still did with the hysteria that might, finally, slip away as she came back to being herself.

She looked up and caught Jameson watching her thoughtfully. Because Gabriel's arm lay across her shoulders? Jameson knew that D'neerans shared touch frequently and freely—with each other. Gabriel was not D'neeran, and Jameson also knew that Hanna did not allow true-human males to touch her casually.

She drew away, surprised at herself, and reached deep down for a last reserve of energy.

“I can't talk with Kwoort any more,” she said. “I'm ineffective with him. That must be obvious now. I didn't get any new information from him, no answers to all those questions. I suppose I could . . . try one more time . . .”

But Jameson shook his head.

“I agree it's not working with Kwoort,” he said. “He's dominated every meeting you've had with him. It might be as well to abandon Rowtt for the time being. There is another center of government and power on Battleground.”

“Wektt,” Hanna said. “I suppose Communications can identify some contacts there. Wektt would have its own Holy Man—the being Rowtt calls the Demon?—and its own equivalent of Kwoort. But maybe Wektt's Kwoort isn't quite as mad.”

“I wouldn't count on it,” Jameson said. “What about the area called That Place? I have a report in hand about the interview with the Warrior Kwek. Captain Metra talked to Harm about it and conveyed the information to me some time ago.”

Hanna looked at Metra and picked up a clear image of an exhausted Arch answering questions. It wasn't a pleasant image, but seeing it felt normal.

“That's not the place to go if you want to communicate with important figures on Battleground,” she said. “Kwoort never mentioned it. They don't put it on maps. It's an anomaly.”

“Yes,” Jameson said, “and as such worth investigation.”

“Another perspective,” Andrella Murphy said. She had spoken before, but it had been while Hanna was not paying attention.

“The hell with another perspective,” Hanna said. “There's nothing for us here,” and everyone but Gabriel looked at her as if she had caught Kwoort's insanity.

Murphy said mildly, “We need to be sure of that before we give up. You'll feel better when you've had some rest.”

Murphy—always perfectly groomed—looked at Hanna with a critical eye, and Hanna put a hand to her hair. She had tied it back for the visit to the surface but the winds had torn it loose and it straggled everywhere. She was aware of wind-driven dust and grit caught in the shirt and trousers she had put on in preparation for the flight.

“There is no common ground with these beings,” she said. “They don't have anything we could ever possibly want.”

Murphy said, “Not necessarily true.”

Hanna slumped against Gabriel again, staring at Murphy's face, wishing she could tell what was behind it. Because she was sure Murphy, and Jameson too, no doubt, thought there might be something here for humans that justified the whole mission. But she could not imagine what it was.

•   •   •

Some time later, she woke briefly. Gabriel lay next to her—was crushed against her—in her bed. They had come to her cabin together naturally, without exchanging any words about it, and neither of them had questioned the impulse. Gabriel had had to cajole Hanna into taking off her boots
before she threw herself down, and she did not remember him lying down beside her. But she was glad that he was there.

She lifted herself on one arm and looked at him. The cabin was as dark as it had been when he had come to wake her; maybe it was night everywhere, and endless. She could just make out his features, which had no special beauty but had become dear to her. He was deeply asleep and was not dreaming, but even so there was a vertical line of strain between his brows. She had been too exhausted to ask again what troubled him and he had been too exhausted even to think of telling her spontaneously.

The warmth of his body felt good against hers. It would be good to get the taste of Kwoort's suggestions out of her mouth.

She thought of kissing Gabriel's mouth, softly, and gently slipping the tip of her tongue between his lips. That would be so nice. It would feel so good.