The Dark Reaches (33 page)

Unless this worked.

“Tell me what you know,” Hiso said mildly, “about your cousin Tereu.”

“I know less than you do,” Gareth said, his voice low and steady. “I’ve never lived in her household.”

“Tell me what she did with the information you gave her,” Hiso said.

“I don’t know,” Gareth said. His hands clutched the arms of the chair.

“Who did she give it to?”

“I don’t know.” The boy’s expression did not change. He was afraid, yes, but he was fighting it. Hiso had to respect that. But he also had to break it, if he could.

“I know your cousin,” Hiso said. “She has certain people who are loyal to her, certain members of her staff. She doesn’t change. I believe that you have some idea of how she passed the information to the deepsiders. You’re clever, you observe things—or I would never have taken you on, family connection or no.”

“For all I know, she sent it by radio,” Gareth said.

“A transmission would have been intercepted,” Hiso said. “A coded transmission would have been logged—I would have been told of it. No, it must have been passed personally, face-to-face or as a note. Surely someone strikes you as likely. Someone who might have links of their own to the deepsiders.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” the boy said again. But Hiso caught the tiny hesitation before the answer. The boy was being brave, clinging to silence.

Which meant he had something to tell.

Hiso touched the comm. “Dr. DeVries,” he said briefly.

When the physician was brought in, his white cap of hair disarranged slightly from his confinement, Hiso smiled at him. “As we arranged,” he said, “I require you to make this boy willing to answer questions.”

The physician glanced at Gareth, who was regarding him palely. Then DeVries looked away, not at Hiso, not at the boy, and Hiso knew he had already decided to cooperate. Only a few formal objections remained. “You cannot ask me for this,” DeVries said.

“You will be freed, safe and well, when everything is finished,” Hiso said. “I want only to be assured of your cooperation. That you regret your actions in regard to my prisoner and Perrin Tereu. That in future you will be a reliable citizen of Triton.”

“I can’t drug a man against his will. My oath—”

“You have a difficult choice to make,” Hiso said softly. “And I can allow you no time to consider it.”
This will not, I think, be the last prisoner you help me with.
One name would lead to another. And what took threats to accomplish this time, a reward would accomplish the next. The downward path was an easy one, for the weak.

DeVries gave Hiso another frightened glance. Then turned and opened his medkit.

Hiso smiled. A thread, still; but he had hold of it now. And who knew where it might lead?

Early morning. Linnea scrubbed her face, hard, with a rough rag that she had soaked in cold water and then squeezed nearly dry inside the drain sack. Another night she hadn’t slept well; but no wonder. There could not be much longer to wait: soon, maybe even today, Pilang would have to pronounce Iain cleared of bots, would have to wake him. The bleak fear of the past few days would end.

Linnea ran the rag over her arms and chest and shivered in the cold, in Esayeh’s little kitchen cubby, then stuffed the rag into a clamp near the bag that covered the tap. Hastily, she grabbed her warmest coverall and slid into it. Even sealed, it still felt cold against her skin at first; she went on shivering.

Esayeh spoke behind her. “You could go to the baths, you know. It’s warmer there.”

She took hold of the wall and turned to look at him. “When did you come in?”

“An hour ago. Been out on an emergency run.” Then at her startled look, he snorted, and said, “I got
here
just a minute ago.”

“Hah.” Linnea floated to her sleep cubby, found her comb in her bag, and started working it through her hair. “How is it out there?”

“More and more sightings,” Esayeh said. “More ghosts, more shadows. Lin, I don’t like it. They’re stirring like a kicked beehive.”

“Or trying to panic us.” Linnea tucked the comb away and deftly tied a cloth over her hair. “There’s nothing we can do. Isn’t that what you say?” The old familiar fear had waked again: nightmares of Freija, nightmares of Nexus, nightmares of her nightmares through all those months and years.
Nothing to be done about it.
“There’s no way to fight,” she muttered.

“I know that, Lin,” Esayeh said. “We live in a metal bubble. My pilots are evacuating as many of our people as they can, four or five runs a day each. They can’t do more, what with having to break every jump into two or three to be sure they aren’t traced somehow. And you know our ships—all the runs we can do, that totals up to maybe a hundred people a day. It will take fifteen days, twenty days, to get the last of us off
Hestia
. And meanwhile—they’ll be watching. They can’t track our ships to—where they’re going. But they’ll see something is up.”

“The Cold Minds?”

“The Tritoners.” Esayeh ran his fingers through his short hair. “Soon as this place goes silent, they’ll start making guesses.”

“The Tritoners have problems of their own,” Linnea said flatly. “
They
have nowhere else to go.”

“You haven’t—said anything to Tereu,” Esayeh said. It was more than half a question.

“I’ve kept my word,” Linnea said shortly. She had said nothing to Tereu about
Persephone
, about the possibility of escape or refuge. Or about the immunity to infestation the deepsiders had been concealing for so long. The unspoken truths stuck in her throat sometimes, made her feel sick.

There were innocents on Triton, too. Waiting helplessly, without hope, for what the Cold Minds might choose to do with them. She had seen it before, on Freija; she was afraid she was about to see it again.

“I’m sending Tereu back to Triton,” Esayeh said abruptly.

“No,” Linnea said in a low voice. “Please, Esayeh—Hiso will arrest her.”

“She wants to go, Lin,” Esayeh said. “It’s her home. They’re her people. She wants to be with them at the end.”

Linnea looked down. She knew she had to respect Tereu’s choice. Still—“I wish we could stop her.”

“We have no right to stop her,” Esayeh said. “There is a division between Tereu and me. Between the Tritoners and our people. I know you have these notions, Lin, but it can’t be healed. Let her go the way of her people. And you and I will go the way of ours.”

“Let me be the one to take her back,” Linnea said.

“No,” Esayeh said flatly. “I don’t want them to know your ship is here. And”—he looked away—“word came today from Triton. Kimura Hiso is arresting deepsiders. I don’t want anyone getting into his reach who knows about
Persephone
.”

“I wouldn’t tell him,” Linnea said.

Esayeh snorted. “He’d get it out of you. For his cause. For his people. . . . No. I told Tereu I would send her over in a freighter, as soon as I can spare one. And that will be the end of it.”

“She was your wife once,” Linnea said unsteadily.

“It doesn’t matter, Lin,” Esayeh said, his old eyes distant. “It can’t.”

Linnea closed her eyes. She knew, too well, that Esayeh was the product of a society that could not afford mercy. She had learned, years ago and far away, how life in constant terror could make humans less than human.

And yet she had known some who transcended that. She had thought Esayeh might be another. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

“It’s not your worry, Lin,” Esayeh said. “You’ve got troubles of your own.”

Linnea looked up at him sharply.

He nodded. “Iain’s finally clean, Lin. Pilang said to say, it’s today. They’re waking him.”

Linnea’s breath caught. “When?”

“Soon as you can get there.”

But she was already out the door.

 

 

 

Linnea shot through the door into the cold room and swung to a halt on the opposite wall. “I’m here,” she said tensely to Pilang, who was waiting with Hana in the corner near the cold-sleep container that held Iain. Linnea pushed off and floated toward them. “How soon can we get started?”

“Now listen,” Pilang said, straightening and catching Linnea by the arm, halting her so that her own momentum turned her to face the older woman. “You have to understand, Lin. We do not know how he’ll be when he wakes.”

“He’s clean of the bots,” Linnea said fiercely. “Esayeh told me you said so.” She twisted away. “Please!”

“But, Lin—” Pilang roughly seized her, turned her so they were face-to-face. “Lin, listen to me! No one has ever been put in the cold with an infestation. No one. We know it slowed the bots. We know they’re gone now—our nano cleaned out the remnants, and the trace metal levels are down to undetectable.”

“That’s good news,” Linnea said raggedly. “Right?”

“Yes,” Pilang said, patience clear in her voice. “But you should be ready for there to be—damage.”

Linnea looked past Pilang to the hatch of Iain’s cold-sleep compartment. “Then let’s find out. Now. Please. I can’t stand it.” He throat closed, and she could not say more.

“You should go wait with Mick,” Pilang said, caressing Linnea’s cheek. “Really, Lin. This takes time. And he’ll look—alarming, at first.”

“I want to know everything you know,” Linnea said, her voice low but steady. “Right when you know it.”

Pilang looked hard into Linnea’s eyes. Then nodded and touched a control on the bulkhead. The lights in the room burned more brightly, and Pilang turned to the hatch of Iain’s compartment, the only one lit with a status display. “Lin, unwrap the thermal blanket—the packet next to my kit. We’ll start slowly—just collecting his own heat.” As Linnea shook out the silvery padded blanket, Pilang stuck a sheaf of drug patches to the bulkhead, where they would be in easy reach. Then looked over at Hana. “Ready?”

The younger woman nodded, looking past Pilang at Linnea. Her expression was serious, worried. Pilang opened the clamps along the rim of the hatch, swung it open. Cold mist puffed out. Pilang reached into the dark space with both hands, worked blindly but deftly, then tugged.

Iain slid out of the container all at once, in a folded lump. His sallow, naked body looked too small to be his—folded, compressed, pressed tight. As Linnea had expected, his eyes were taped shut. Linnea’s fingers itched to remove the tape, to see his beloved face clearly again. But it was not time.

Carefully, Pilang and Hana arranged him along the stretcher. Pilang straightened his arms and legs with gentle hands, then felt the pulse in his neck, wrists, ankles, her eyes abstracted. “Good,” she muttered, and a little of the singing tension in Linnea melted.

As if sensing that, Pilang looked at her sharply. “His heart hasn’t accelerated yet. That’s the dangerous part, when that happens. If you ever happen to pray, pray now.” She reached out and took the blanket Linnea was still holding in nerveless hands, and arranged it over Iain’s body. “We’ll move him down to the monitoring ward. We have cardiac equipment there. Then—we wait.”

“I’ll stay with him,” Linnea said firmly.

 

 

 

He did not know where he was. Fierce heat beat in his hands and feet. His heart felt swollen, squashed inside his chest, beating sullenly stroke after stroke.

Blackness filled his mind. There was something terrible, something he almost remembered—

The whispering in his mind, he remembered it beginning—remembered the fear—

He listened. The sigh of an air system, indistinct voices in another compartment somewhere. Human voices. They were real, outside him. The whispering . . . was gone.

But not the fear. He could not open his eyes.

He tried to protest—his throat made a rusty sound. His hands moved, but clumsily, as if cased in thick gloves; he tried to brush whatever it was away from his eyes, but he could not direct his movements at all.

A woman’s voice spoke, familiar, half-familiar. “
Ssst.
Hold still, Iain.” Tugging, pulling—then someone held his head still, and a warm ointment slopped onto his closed eyelids. Soft fingers rubbed it in, then rubbed away the excess. “Open slowly. We’ve got the lights down low. That and the gel will make it hard to see.”

He opened his eyes. Yellow light, lancing, and blurred ovals of faces. Tears flooded his eyes, and he blinked. He tried to speak again, made only a cawing sound, ragged as a crow.

Strong, warm hands took his shoulders.

Hands he knew.

A beloved voice said, “Iain.” Then again, brokenly—“Iain, you’re safe.”

He closed his eyes then, and pulled himself closer to her. Her warm arms enfolded him, and he breathed in, breathed in her scent. Clean soap, and the spice of her skin, the scent of her dearness that never changed.

“Stay,” he muttered.

Her arms tightened around him. “Always,” she said. And no more words were needed. He was home. Safe, enfolded, he let himself drift again into sleep.

 

 

 

L innea held Iain close and looked up at Pilang. “He’s all right,” she whispered. She was afraid to make it a question.

Pilang, floating within reach, looked down at them both. Unshed tears shone in her eyes. “Just hold him quietly for a while,” she said softly. “He’ll sleep on and off all day. Call one of us in when he wakes—we’ll check his vitals, make sure he’s oriented. . . . It looks good, Lin. So far.” She was working with Hana’s help to spread a soft, stretchy blanket over them both, anchored on three sides. It gave a comforting feeling of pressure, holding them both against the padded bulkhead. “You sleep, too, if you can. I—think it’s going to be all right. We’ll examine him more carefully in a few hours, when he wakes again. But I don’t see any danger signs, not yet.”