Survival

IT WAS A nightmare from which no one would let her wake. Mac turned herself into an automaton, answering questions in the order they arrived, steeling herself against any emotion, hers or those around her. As if authorizing a barnacle survey, she sent divers to search under the pods, and skims to follow the tide. As if making arrangements for the delivery of fresh fruit, she called Emily’s younger sister and gave the story as it stood: Emily is missing. There’s been no contact from a kidnapper. Yes, you’ll be kept informed.

Mac didn’t mention the slime coating every surface of Emily’s quarters, the smashed furniture, or the blood. Kammie’s report had been graphic. She’d been the only one inside Em’s quarters and, given what she’d seen, it was no wonder she’d immediately called the local police. They’d ordered Em’s quarters and Mac’s office sealed. A forensics team had arrived and set up at dawn, their warn offs extending to corridor and terrace.

As if she’d lost her dearest friend, those around her lowered their voices and hovered when they obviously had other places to be. To be rid of them, Mac finally agreed to be escorted to the Base nurse.

Because she refused to believe she’d lost her dearest friend, Mac left the nurse the moment her face was treated for its burn.

Now, she stood before the door to her quarters, seeking answers in the only place left. Emily had tried to warn her. Emily had known there was danger, that something was coming, that this wasn’t about risks to aliens at distances Mac couldn’t imagine, but to them, here, now.

It wasn’t locked. Mac hesitated, afraid Brymn wouldn’t be able to help, afraid of losing hope. Recognizing the weakness, she raised her fist and knocked.

Mac pressed her palm on the entry. For no reason she could name, she let the door open fully before she took a step inside.

They’d said Brymn was snoring. She should have realized that none of them would know if a Dhryn snored in the first place.

From somewhere, Mac found the strength to snap the paralysis holding her in the doorway, taking three slow steps into the room. The form hanging in the middle of her living room was Brymn. She could tell that much by the patches of blue skin showing between the glistening threads wrapped around him, if little more. The threads led upward to form a thick knot stuck to the ceiling.

He was alive. That much was clear from the regular, low moaning. It did sound a bit like snoring, Mac decided numbly.

Instead, Mac locked the door behind her, then went to the com, leaning her back against the wall beside it. “Dr. Connor. Is Mr. Trojanowski back yet?”

Mac rolled her head toward the familiar voice, her problem solver when skims failed to run or pods developed a list, but said only: “Trojanowski.”

Tie knew better than to argue. “Yes, he’s back. He’s been with the forensics guys. I’ll hunt him up for you, Mac.”

Mac stayed propped against the wall beside the com, studying the Dhryn. The one eye she could see was closed. Unconscious—or pretending to be. The netting that held him had an artificial look, but she was no expert.

Mac wasn’t a fool. She understood she was experiencing shock, made worse by physical exhaustion. She understood her calm was a brittle coating over emotions she wasn’t ready to face. It didn’t matter, as long as it let her find Emily.

Meanwhile, there was the problem posed by the netted Dhryn. Mac examined the threads. They looked sticky as well as moist. Stepping closer at last, she could see that each length had adhered to whatever it touched, puckering his skin into thick, tight creases.

“Explains the moaning,” she said to herself. His silks were on the floor, but laid out neatly, as if the Dhryn had been undressed before the attack. It wasn’t that his assailants had been tidy. Other than the fabric, the contents of Mac’s quarters showed the same disarray as Emily’s.

“Trojanowski. You sent for me, Dr. Connor. I’ve been trying to find you—” A pause. “May I come in?”

Seconds later, her locked door opened. Trojanowski took a quick step in, then another to one side, slapping the door closed behind him. “Practiced that, have you?” Mac commented, noticing he was back to his student garb: T-shirt and jeans, complete with glasses. The so-harmless look didn’t play well anymore.

His lips quirked to one side. “This,” he pulled a black flattened disk from the same pocket, “is a weapon.” It disappeared against the palm of his left hand. Then he raised that hand and pointed two fingers at the ceiling, where the threads combined into the holdfast.

A narrow beam of intense blue shot up. Where it touched the threads, they shriveled and broke apart, to become bits of soot drifting through the air. Trojanowski played the beam over the massive knot, flaking away more and more until Brymn’s body shifted downward a few centimeters.

“That’s my bed,” Mac protested, although she moved to help. “Was my bed,” she amended. It looked as though someone had attempted to shred the surface of the mattress, then glue it back together with slime.

They flipped it over before dragging it under the Dhryn. It was the work of seconds for Trojanowski to cut him down completely. He fell like a salmon, Mac decided, limp but firm.

Once Brymn was down, Trojanowski used his strange weapon to singe the ends of the threads wrapped around the being, careful not to ignite the mattress itself. Mac stood back and watched, her arms wrapped around her middle. She didn’t remember breakfast. She thought she’d gulped something handed to her while she’d been at her desk. Her stomach wasn’t happy about it.

Each singed thread continued to flake away along its entire length, as if losing some inner cohesion. Where they’d adhered to Brymn, the small dark pits of his skin oozed a clear liquid, presumably the source of an almost palpable odor, musklike and with a hint of sulfur, that began to fill the room. Mac took tiny breaths through her nose. She’d smelled and seen worse. Walking on bloated salmon corpses in July came to mind. No matter how carefully you put your feet, one would always pop.

“Good thing you checked on him,” Trojanowski said, continuing to work. He’d been watching her, too. She’d seen his eyes slip her way every few seconds, their expression inscrutable. “I might not have for another hour or so—might have been too late.”

Mac pointed to a cupboard. Trojanowski rummaged inside and returned with a sheet, which he laid over Brymn with care.

Then, he looked at her. “I’m sorry about your friend, Dr. Mamani.” His eyes were presently more hazel than green, lending them an unexpected softness. Mac doubted she could look away of her own volition. She also doubted she could so much as flex her fingers without throwing up.

Mac had the impression he was taken aback by the question. “The police will do all they can,” he said after that almost imagined hesitation.

“You brought him here,” she managed to say. “That—thing—followed. This is your fault. You have to find Emily.” Tears welled up in her eyes. She hated tears. “You should have been protecting us—not—not—”

“Dr. Connor, you should be lying down. Wait.” Trojanowski shut up and dropped to his knees beside the Dhryn. “Listen,” he urged, waving her closer with one hand.

Mac copied his position, finding it all too easy to answer to gravity. He was right. The moaning had changed. She leaned forward, wary of her body’s wobble.

Oddly enough, that was the last thing Mac heard before Brymn’s midsection rose from the mattress to smack her in the face.

From the thickening of his Aussie accent, the nurse, Dan Mandeville, was ready to do battle. Considering he stood slightly over two meters and was built, in Em’s terms, like an antique forklift, that couldn’t be a good thing. Mac’s eyelids felt glued shut, but she found her voice somehow. “It’s okay, Mandy. I’m awake.”

“Then only for a moment. The woman needs rest!” A door closed with sufficient force to vibrate through the floor.

Her arm felt strangely heavy. Somehow, Mac brought her hand to her face, and scrubbed her eyelids until they cracked open. “What happened?” she asked, less than surprised to find herself flat on her back in what passed for a hospital room on Base.

Wonderful. Mac tried to rise to her elbows, but the room tilted in the oddest way so she dropped back down. “Emily?” she demanded.

She’d returned midday of what was now yesterday. Nothing she could do about time already wasted. Mac assessed herself, finding a musty taste at the back of her mouth. She remembered it from some minor surgery a couple of years ago. Mandy must have given her a sedative. Hopefully, it was wearing off by now.

Mac rolled on her side and swung her legs over the bed, using the momentum to pull herself upright. She hung on to the mattress with both hands, waiting patiently for the universe to finish sloshing back and forth. It helped to focus on her visitor.

There were dark smudges under Trojanowski’s eyes and a grim set to his mouth. The plain black T-shirt and jeans he wore glistened in streaks. Slime from the rooms. So he hadn’t slept yet. “Brymn?” she asked, resisting a certain amount of remorse. “Is he all right?”

“I don’t know.” Trojanowski gave a half shrug, clearly frustrated. “The experts at the Consulate were no help. Said to leave him alone until he recovered. They did offer to pick up his body, if he dies.”

“ ‘A Dhryn is robust, or a Dhryn is not,’ ” Mac quoted. At his questioning look, she shrugged. “Something Brymn told me.”

Even behind the glasses, there was something in his eyes that made her swallow, a distancing, as if he felt the need to somehow protect himself—or was it her?

Mac shifted on the bed, then realized part of her discomfort was an IV wrap around her upper arm. She ripped it free, in case the device was delivering more sedative.

Mac stared down at herself. Bad enough her legs and feet, swinging freely above the floor, were bare, too, her toes and ankles decorated with lovely red blotches from her boots. But this?

Someone had dressed her in an orange, knee-length flannel nightgown, trimmed with purple lace and covered in vivid yellow spots. Spots with eyeballs and tiny, pointy teeth.

“This is not mine,” Mac assured Trojanowski, determined to straighten at least that much out. She knew better than to check her hair.

The corner of his mouth deepened, producing a dimple in one cheek. Emily would probably notice something like that. Mac’s eyes started to fill and she blinked fiercely. “Ask your questions.”

Mac felt a thrill of hope. Em lost in the woods would be an irritable, grumpy, miserable Em, but a living one. Then she thought it through, and shook her head. “It was pitch-black around the pods. Even if she’d somehow seen me heading for shore, the gate wasn’t working. Anyway, Em—Dr. Mamani—is a techhead. She’d have gone straight to the main power node to see what was wrong before looking for me.”

He pressed his lips together, then nodded as if she’d confirmed his own conclusions. “A slim chance, at best. I had the police run scans for her genetic markers on the bridge and up the slope a considerable distance. Nothing.”

Mac ignored the implications of the police doing what he asked, too dumbfounded by the concept of teams of non-Base personnel romping at will through the Wilderness Trust. “The Oversight Committee—” she began.

Trojanowski’s face had a way of becoming still that sent a small shiver down her spine. “The Committee has no objections to any investigation we choose to conduct,” he finished in a voice that left no doubt at all in Mac’s mind about objections made and summarily squashed. She felt mildly envious. “In fact, this entire inlet—land, sea, air, and orbit—is now under the direct jurisdiction of the Ministry of Extra-Sol Human Affairs, although we’d prefer not to share that with the media. You can understand.”

His statement should have been reassuring. Mac wasn’t sure why she abruptly didn’t feel reassured at all. She narrowed her eyes. “What—who was in my office, Mr. Trojanowski? Who took Emily?” Despite her effort to remain calm, her voice failed her after: “Why—?”

It was the right question. The one she’d been asking herself over and over again since learning Emily was gone. Mac loosened her clenched hands and made her fingers toy with the purple lace crossing her thighs. “If you’re asking me an opinion,” she answered slowly, “I have none. I threw a sandal at it.”

“It worked,” she pointed out the obvious. “The thing ran out the door. It ran from me all the way to its ship.”

Shivering at the memory, Mac drew one leg up under the other and pulled the blanket around her shoulders. “I prefer Mac.”

“Mac.” Trojanowski didn’t smile. He took off his glasses—which Mac doubted served any useful function beyond camouflage—and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I don’t know what you’ve been told about the condition of her quarters, but Dr. Mamani—Emily—must have put up a significant struggle. We found her blood—” Mac had no idea what suddenly showed on her face, but Trojanowski shifted in mid-sentence. “Trust me. If they’d been after you, you’d be missing, too.”

Mac stared at her feet. Red and sore, but no real blisters. There were the inevitable pine bits between her toes. Socks seemed irrelevant. With her luck, whoever had undressed her would forget to pull both socks and liners from her boots. They’d take days to dry.

She raised her eyes to his. “No need. I’m worried about my friend and I’m angry. Neither affect my ability to participate in whatever will help find her—and those who took her. Please continue, Mr. Trojanowski.”

“As you wish.” He straightened, replaced his glasses on his nose, and took out a disappointingly ordinary imp which he made a point of consulting.

He peered at her over his glasses, a curl of brown hair sliding down over one eyebrow. An artfully harmless look Mac didn’t believe for an instant. “What do you know of Emily’s life outside her work?”

Emily’s life outside of work? Mac opened the bottle and took a long drink, then another. “If you mean her life on Base,” she answered warily, “the usual. During the research season, we’re either at a field camp or here. Emily—” Might as well be honest, she told herself bitterly, he probably has it all in some damned dossier . . . Emily’s wealth of lovers, her own solitary years. “Emily tends to be more social than I—” Her blush made the burn along her cheek throb and Mac ended with a lame: “You’d have to ask around.”

He didn’t seem to notice her embarrassment. That didn’t mean he hadn’t, Mac thought. “What about off-season, when she’s not here with you?”

“She makes time for her—family.” Mac knew if she said “sister,” she’d hear Maria’s voice again, those horrid flat tones reciting a number for the office, another for her friend, a litany of ways Mac could reach her at any time with news. Would call her, as if the numbers were like magic, drawing answers from the air. Mac coughed to clear her throat. “Em heads out to the Sargasso Sea for a month or two to work on her Tracer. It’s a remote biosensor—do you want details?”

His eyes were hooded. “Just keep going, please, Mac. What else does Emily do? Does she take vacations? Travel?”

Mac didn’t bother arguing that hopping between the north Pacific to the south Atlantic twice a year was traveling, since he apparently didn’t think so. “She mentioned shopping in Paris. A visit to Pietermaritzberg. That’s near the southern tip of—”

“I know where it is. Did Emily tell you about going anywhere else? Even a hint? Think, Mac. This could be important.”

“Nowhere else.” Mac’s left foot was asleep under her right thigh, and she was feeling a somewhat inconvenient desire to visit the washroom. Nonetheless, she narrowed her eyes at her questioner. “You were asking her about traveling. You know something,” she accused. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Thank you for your time, Dr. Connor.” Trojanowski stood, a fluid motion that belied the weariness on his face. He doesn’t move like that in public, Mac thought, wondering what else the man was trained to hide. “I’m expecting the audio reconstructionist shortly after lunch. We’ll resume our conversation then.” As if they were finished, he headed for the door.

Not again, Mac vowed to herself. “This isn’t the top of a mountain,” she snapped. “I’ll decide when we’re done, Mr. Trojanowski—if that’s even your real name.” Mac jumped off the bed with every intention of following him out that door if he dared open it, obnoxious orange nightie or not.

Well, that’s what she’d planned to do, but to Mac’s chagrin, her legs crumpled beneath her. As if he had eyes in the back of his head, Trojanowski spun around with disturbing grace, reaching out to steady her before she could fall.

For a moment, they stood face-to-face, his fingers wrapped securely around her elbows, his forearms like warm, sturdy rails under hers, supporting a considerable amount of her weight. His breath stung the burn on her cheek as his eyes searched hers. For what? Mac wondered, suddenly more perplexed than angry.

Then, as if impelled by something he saw, the man she’d once thought nothing more than a messenger said in a low and urgent voice: “Mac, listen to me. Listen carefully. The best thing you can do right now is be yourself. Be the reclusive scientist. Be the private, careful person who doesn’t let anyone close. Anyone.” His fingers tightened with the word. “The only reason you’re here and you’re safe is because you weren’t in your quarters last night. Do you understand me? They found poor Brymn-—but I believe they came for you.”

“For me? Why?” Involuntarily, Mac’s hands closed on his arms, not for comfort, but to hold him there, to demand more answers. “What about the intruder in my office?”

“I wish I knew.” Trojanowski hesitated, then went on: “My guess is that one of them was to search your office and he, she, it was to run if discovered. You were lucky.”

“He’s being monitored. Meanwhile, you,” the spy said sternly, “will stay here.” Before Mac could protest, he used his grip on her arms to heft her up on the bed and sit her there. “Get some rest. I don’t want that rugby player you call a nurse chasing me down the hall.”

As the room was elongating on two axes, Mac didn’t even attempt to nod. “You’ll call me when your audio expert arrives, Mr. Trojanowski,” she told him firmly.

He looked back at her, his hand on the doorplate. “It is my real name,” he said, without smiling. “But I prefer Nik.”

Mac lay back, legs dangling over the side of the bed, her head spinning far too much for safe passage anywhere but horizontal. He’d been briefed on more than Emily’s Tracer. She’d rarely heard a more precise summary of her life.

Her fingertips followed the lingering heat from his skin along the underside of her arms. Nik, was it? Did “Nik” think she’d missed his implications? Of course not. Mac doubted a single word came out of that man he didn’t fully intend to say. So there was something she didn’t know and he did about where Emily had been, something connected to invisible aliens and Brymn’s being here, something that meant she, Mac, wasn’t to become close to anyone. She was to keep up her guard.

Good advice, regardless of its source. “Against you, too, Mr. Nik,” she muttered, sitting up more cautiously this time. The local representative of the Ministry of Extra-Sol Human Affairs might have access to a dossier of her work, life, and likely even a psych profile. He didn’t know her.

Mac achieved vertical with no more than a momentary wobble. “Must thank our Mandy for whatever he pumped into me,” she told the room. Not that there’d been anything wrong with her body a few calories and some sleep hadn’t cured.

As for her mind and heart, well, her dossier should have warned Trojanowski that Dr. Mackenzie Connor was a person of action, not mood. Worrying about Emily meant finding Emily. Finding Emily meant getting to her feet and back into the game.