Zenn Scarlett (2 page)

Everyone was shouting then, and a very bright, blue-white glow streamed steadily from the Indra chamber into the pilot room. It appeared to Zenn that no one there knew what to do, and this scared her more than anything. A deep, grinding sound came from the ceiling, and a thick slab of dull gray metal began to slide down to cover the viewing window. The groom yelled for them all to move back and a second later the slab hit the floor with an impact that shook the room.

“No!” her father cried, turning to the woman. “We can’t see into the chamber. We need to see.”

Zenn ran at the metal slab that now stood between her and the place where she knew her mother was in unspeakable danger. Zenn pounded on the cold, hard surface of the metal, but it didn’t move. She screamed – she couldn’t remember if she screamed words or if she just produced some meaningless sound.

“The blast shield deployed automatically,” the groom said, not looking away from the multiple virt-screens now dancing in the air around her. “It will remain in place until levels are safe again.”

“Levels?” her father shouted. “What levels?” She didn’t answer him.

The alarm continued to blare for a few seconds more, then cut off. The groom stood very still, staring at the virt-screens.

“No…” she said quietly to herself, as if she didn’t believe what the screens showed her. “It cannot be…”

The blast shield rumbled to life and lifted back up into the ceiling. They all waited. No one moved or spoke. When the shield was halfway up, Zenn ran and ducked under it. She rushed to the viewing window, strained to see into the room beyond. The walls smoked as if swept by some terrible fire. Except for the smoky haze and flashing emergency lights, there was nothing to be seen. It was empty. Completely, horrifyingly empty.

“She is gone,” the groom said, her voice low and strange. “My Stonehorse… gone.”

Her father stared through the viewing window. He covered his eyes with one hand, and then looked again. Otha reached out and put a hand on her father’s arm.

“Otha…” he said. “What happened?”

“I don’t know, Warra,” her uncle said. He looked out to where, moments ago, the Indra had been. “This shouldn’t… I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never heard of this sort of reaction. I don’t know what to say. Warra… I’m sorry.”

Zenn stood at the viewing window, her breath visible, rising and dying before her, fogging the glass. Her father came to stand next to her. He lifted both hands to lay them flat against the window’s surface. After a moment, he turned, reached out and brought her body in close to his. She pulled back just a little, so she could see his face, so she could see what this all meant, see what she should say, or do, or think. In the biting cold of the room, tears cut hot trails down her cheeks.

The one thing she did remember quite clearly from that day was what her father said next.

“It’s alright, Zenn,” he told her, looking at her but not seeing her, as if seeing something only visible to him, “…we’ll be alright.”

She knew her father meant what he said. He didn’t mean to lie. He was just wrong. But in the years to come, it wouldn’t be Warra Scarlett’s fault that their life did not even approach being “alright.” When things finally went from merely sad to utterly catastrophic, Zenn was quite certain of one thing. The fault… was hers.

ONE

Zenn could see herself reflected in the gigantic eyeball, as if she stood before a gently curved, full-length mirror. She didn’t like what she saw. It had nothing to do with being inches away from a two-foot-wide eye – she’d seen bigger eyes. It was the odd angle of the tank-pack strapped to her back. She hadn’t noticed before – she was too preoccupied with getting into position on the bridge of the whalehound’s nose. But her reflection revealed the pack was sagging badly to one side. It could pull her off-balance if the animal made any sudden moves.

This I can fix
, she told herself.
Just don’t let anything else happen. Please, don’t let that… other thing happen.
 

She tugged at a harness strap to center the pack between her shoulders, but the motion startled the hound. He blinked and flinched, and she wobbled violently, arms flailing. Her foot slid on the slick fur – she was going to fall off. Her hand closed around something – an eyelash thick as a broomstick. A quick pull brought her upright again. She let go of the lash as though it were a red-hot poker and froze.

Had she spooked the animal? Tense seconds passed. But the hound just regarded her calmly with his one good eye, huffed out a low groan and was still; waiting to see what the spindly little creature on his snout would do next.

She glanced at Otha on the pen floor thirty feet below. Apparently, he hadn’t noticed her misstep. That was a first. He was intent on monitoring the whalehound’s vitals and the sedation field, his attention on the virt-screens hovering before his face like oversized, translucent butterflies.

Congratulating herself on a disaster averted, Zenn risked a few extra seconds to savor the view from this novel vantage point. Stretching away below her, the hound’s sleek, streamlined body reached almost to the far side of the hundred-foot holding pen. Still damp from his morning swim, the animal’s thick, chocolate-brown fur released wisps of steam into the cool Martian air. Beyond the holding pen, the view encompassed most of the cloister grounds – over the clay-tiled rooftop of the infirmary building to the refectory dining hall. Looking past the open ground in the center of the cloister walk, Zenn could see all the way to the crumbling hulk of the chapel ruins. The chapel, like most of the cloister’s earliest buildings, was a massive, handsome structure constructed of large sandstone blocks quarried from the canyon walls. The more recent buildings, on the other hand, reflected the changing situation on Mars. Harvesting and transporting huge chunks of stone was energy intensive. Accordingly, most of the buildings put up in the past few years were made from any materials that could be scrounged, salvaged or recycled.

Visible over the rooftops of the nearby buildings, the sheer, two-thousand-foot red rock canyon walls shouldered in on both sides of the compound. Squinting against the sunlight, Zenn could just make out the metallic glint of the bary-gens. About the size and shape of a fifty-five-gallon drum, each barometric ionic generator was mounted some three hundred feet up, anchored to the cliffs on either side of the canyon at regular intervals. The pressure-seal created by the generators shimmered like a heat mirage where the oxygen-and-water-rich air of the valley pressed up against the thin, lifeless atmosphere above it. Terraforming the entire surface of the planet had never been an option; too expensive, too lengthy and complex. Modifying only the land they needed, piece by piece, down in valleys was the obvious solution. Now, sections of the Valles Marinaris and the other half-dozen enclosed valleys strung out across the planet’s midsection were the sole refuges of the remaining human colonists on Mars. Beyond these protected canyons, up amid the ultraviolet-blasted plains, towering volcanoes and ancient dried-up ocean beds of Mars, nothing grew, nothing breathed, and nothing moved but dancing dust-devils.

Here, in her home valley, the lush scent of freshly mowed switchgrass rode on the breeze that blew from the depths of the four-mile-deep canyon systems to the east. Above, a scattering of mare’s-tail clouds drifted high in the ruddy-pink sky.

The hound yawned beneath her, and Zenn bent at the knees to absorb the motion, bracing herself as the jaws clapped together again with a click of massive canines. Adapted for pursuing their equally huge prey through the planet-wide oceans of Mu Arae, whalehounds reminded Zenn of immense, eight-legged otters, but with more elongated heads and jaws bristling with double rows of teeth long and sharp as sabers. It was only during Otha’s rounds earlier this morning that he’d noticed the animal’s reddened, weeping eye. Zenn’s sleep-dazed state of mind had instantly cleared when, between bites of toasted muffin at breakfast, her uncle said she’d be allowed to handle the treatment. He said he was getting too old to go hound-climbing.

Otha’s confidence in her came as a pleasant surprise. The whalehound had been purchased recently by the royal family of the Leukkan Kire – and they were paying royally to have him housed at the cloister until they came to pick him up. If anything went wrong, they could lose that money. And the cloister, Zenn knew, couldn’t afford to lose any money right now. Just last week Ren Jakstra had come around again to badger Otha about the overdue mortgage payment. He wasn’t nice about it.

“Are you set up there?” The buzz of her uncle’s voice in her earpiece brought her back to the task at hand. “I’m boosting the seda-field to fifty percent… now,” he said. The effect of the general sedation field was immediate: the hound’s body drooped, and the lid of his open left eye lowered to half-mast. The right eyelid slowly crept up, allowing Zenn to see more of the infected tear-duct canal. “Alright. He’s under,” Otha said.

With the seda-field at half power, the hound should be just relaxed enough to let her gently rinse his eye with the solution in the tank-pack. Taking extra care to keep her movements slow and deliberate, Zenn eased the spray nozzle from the holster on her belt and took aim at the inflamed tissue in the corner of the hound’s right eye.

Then, without warning, it was there. Inside her mind. Waking, stirring to life under the surface of her thoughts, making her vision dim and knees watery beneath her.

No…
 

The sensation rose up like a fire flaring from hidden embers, writhing, probing… searching… releasing a wave of unnatural warmth, dizziness and nausea deep inside her.

Not again.
 

The hound craned his huge head to one side. She saw his left eye focus, the huge, inky pupil dilating, his attention fixing on her, keen, unsettling.

Not now.
 

But this time, there was something new, something she hadn’t noticed the other times she’d felt this, with the other animals. This time there was pain. Sharp, burning her eyes. No, not eyes. Just her right eye, as if scoured by sandpaper.

This can’t be happening…
 

“Remember,” Otha’s voice sounded far away. “Gentle on the trigger.”

Only half-aware of what she was doing, Zenn’s finger closed around the nozzle trigger. But then, at the merest touch of her finger, the nozzle activated. Instantly, there was a seething whoosh of rapidly released pressure. Solution sprayed wildly in all directions. Her safety goggles were immediately coated with a thick froth, and the salt-sweetness of antibiotic-laced saline solution filled her mouth. She spit and gagged and tore the foam-covered goggles off. A second later, the whalehound reacted.

The first, violent shake of his head sent Zenn sailing into the air. With a spine-wrenching jolt, the safety line attached to her pack harness snapped tight, pushing the breath from her lungs. The world spun around her, a multicolored blur. She swung back toward the hound, slamming hard into his neck. Her headset and goggles were sheared off by the impact, one leg wedged awkwardly between her and the animal. Pain shot through her, so sharp she thought the leg must be broken. Then she was swinging away again, whipped out and up, past one huge, whiskered cheek, then jerking around to fly past the other. She gasped for air, and glimpsed Otha far below, scrambling to get out of the way.

The half-blinded hound lumbered backwards. Zenn bounced viciously in the harness, the straps cutting into her flesh. With a screech of bending metal, the animal plowed into the side of the infirmary at the rear of the pen, sending wall panels flying to the ground. Still shaking his head, and Zenn with it, he lurched forward again, heading directly for one of the transmit posts of the pen’s energy fencing. She fought to get a grip on the safety line, the slick rope slipping through her fingers. Surely, the line couldn’t take the strain. Surely, any second it would break, sending her flying like a tetherball cut free.

And then, in an instant, it was over. The hound halted his headlong rush, and stood, breathing hard. The strange sensation gripping Zenn vanished, along with the pain in her eye, as if whatever connection she and the animal had briefly shared was now severed. Beneath his dripping jaws, she swung back and forth, each arc smaller than the next. She saw Otha, working the virt-screens again. He must have dialed the seda-field up to full power.

The hound’s eyelids lowered to slits, his massive frame curled in on itself and he crouched low, folding eight pillar-thick legs beneath him. The muscular tail swept side-to-side once before coming to rest on the pen floor. With a gust of exhaled breath the animal closed his eyes and was still.

Zenn hung limp, suspended from the safety line beneath the hound’s jaw. Beneath her coveralls, an ice-cold trickle of liquid snaked down her back. Otha was directly underneath her, his upturned face lined with concern. Bits of debris littered the ground around him.

“Zenn! Are you hurt? Speak up, girl.”

“I’m… I’m fine,” she sputtered through clenched teeth, struggling for breath, her body twisting on the line, her shoulders and thighs burning where the straps dug into her. “I’m alright.”

“Are you?” Otha said, hands on his hips, watching her dangling in midair. “That would be a matter of opinion.”

Zenn’s face flushed hot.

A simple eyewash. And I messed it up. Well done, Zenn, you just blew test number one…
 

Finally, she gathered herself sufficiently to grasp the safety line and regain her footing on the soggy fur of the hound’s chest. Releasing the line’s hand brakes, she rappelled to the ground.

Otha reached up to steady her as she touched down, his face stern. They moved away from the hound toward the transmit post that held the fence’s control panel. Her left leg felt as if it might buckle under her, but at least it wasn’t broken. She made an effort to keep Otha from seeing her limp. They stopped, and it took her a moment to realize Otha was waiting for her to shut down the fence so they could exit – a reminder that this was her patient, her responsibility.