Drowning World (16 page)

Swallowing hard, her throat dry, Matthias strove to project an air of calm above the pandemonium that had enveloped the office. “I'd say that explains it pretty plainly.” Under the direction of a trio of armed officers who had arrived in response to an emergency call from a member of the staff, the surviving assassin was secured and hauled away, facedown, long arms bound behind him.

Matthias restrained one officer briefly. “If you can, find out if they are acting alone or, if not, who sent them. They could be acting on behalf of a clan, a family, a single fanatical Yuiqueru, or someone else. Or they might have decided to do this on their own.” Her expression contorted as she watched the bound assassin being removed from the room. “The extremists' extremist.”

“Don't worry, Administrator.” The officer's face was flushed with anger. “We'll get the answer out of him. If we have to, we'll just turn him over to some of the local Deyzara who've lost loved ones in the uprising.”

“No,” she replied firmly. “This doesn't involve the Deyzara. Do what you can, but do it properly, following prescribed procedure.”

The officer was visibly disappointed. “As you wish, ma'am.” Turning, he hurried off in pursuit of his colleagues.

Walking back to Harriman's desk, she resumed her seat. “We were going over arrival projections for the next week, I believe.”

Lips parted, Harriman slowly sat down in her own chair. “Are you sure you want to continue with this, Lauren? We can pick it up anytime. Don't you want to go home, or at least back to your own office, and get some rest?”

“No, I'm fine,” she insisted, straightening the upper half of her jumpsuit beneath the rain cape. “I played a lot of competition contact sports when I was younger.”

“You took that Sakuntala right down.” Harriman did not try to disguise the admiration she felt for her superior.

“Once I saw the gun starting to come out, I didn't have any choice except to get right in the middle of him. He was ready for me to run or try to dodge, not attack.” Smiling, she patted her right hip. “Nice to know a low center of gravity is good for something.” With a hand, she gestured at the projection that still hovered, undisturbed, above the center of the desk. “Let's get on with it.” Harriman did not see the administrator's other hand. Lying out of sight in her lap, it was shaking badly.

It didn't occur to Matthias, more rattled than she would have admitted, to try to suppress the news of the attempted assassination. As a result, it was all over the port and then the rest of Taulau within a couple of hours. The Hata High Chief Naneci-tok came as soon as she heard the news. She arrived alone, Matthias noted, without an escort, braving the derogatory and abusive hooting of the Deyzara refugees massed outside the Port Administration center.

“I heard what happened.” As Naneci-tok spoke, Matthias was ashamed of herself for reflexively noting the position of the Sakuntala's ears. Both faced outward, to the sides. “This a terrible thing, terrible!”

“It was that,” Matthias agreed as she took leave of Harriman and Port Administration. “But it's over, and no one was hurt. Except the one attacker who was shot, of course.”

Together they exited the double door that was designed to keep out rain as well as excessive heat and humidity, not potential killers. In light of the attempt on her life, the procedure for native access, Matthias knew, was one of the things that was going to have to be changed, perhaps permanently. That was not how interspecies relations were advanced, she knew, but under the circumstances she saw no alternative.

Outside, with her hood up and the rain coming down steadily around them, they headed for the small personal skimmer that would convey them back to her office. “If the radicals now feel confident enough to target humans as well as Deyzara, it shows that this uprising has moved into a new and far more dangerous stage.”

“May only be a few crazies.” Naneci-tok spoke thoughtfully as droplets coursed down her slender form, hanging momentarily from the tips of her body strappings and fur before falling to the tarmac. “May have decided to do this dreadful thing without Hata or clan approval.” Piercing eyes met her own. “I ask, as Hata for Taulau territory, that you only warn your people about what has happened. Ordering payback will only make situation worse.”

Matthias could not conceal her surprise. “I had no intention of ordering a reprisal.” Even as she replied, it struck her that Naneci-tok was speaking, albeit in terranglo, as if to a fellow Sakuntala. Among her people, given what had just taken place inside the port building, instant reprisal would have been the order of the day.

“That's not how the Commonwealth works,” she explained. “We have advanced beyond such things.” At least, government policy had, she knew. The actions of individuals were something else again.

“That good to know. I will see to it that all Hatas are so enlightened. It will help.”

Matthias's skimmer was parked on the other side of a single covered walkway beneath the open overhang that fronted the nearest maintenance-and-storage hangar. As they approached, a quartet of thick-beaked kolari spread perforated leathery wings and glided down toward the water. The holes in their wings allowed them to sieve away rain that would otherwise have weighed them down and rendered flight a more arduous proposition.

Every creature on Fluva, Matthias reflected, had evolved its own method of dealing with the constant rain, some of them unique and found nowhere else. She was particularly taken with the blind jilp, to whom Jack had introduced her soon after their arrival. Standing motionless out in the heaviest downpours, the jilp thrived in and relied on steady rain for its survival. Clusters of the harmless, attractive, knee-high russet- and pink-colored browsers could be seen standing with the flowerlike orifices that crowned their bodies spread open to the rain. They fed by straining a constant flow of rainwater through their bodies, in the top, out the bottom, filtering out and living upon whatever tiny creatures were washed down out of the trees and macromycetes by the rain. A boring life, that of a jilp. But it seemed to suit them.

Pondering the static jilp, Matthias did not notice the heated shouts of recognition and resentment that had begun to rise above the general din. It was impressed upon her that something out of the ordinary was happening only when they suddenly found their way blocked, not by knots of imploring refugees but by Deyzara faces distinguished by red-rimmed bulbous eyes and angrily darting trunks.

“Look, brethren—a high Sakuntala walks alone among us!”

“The She-Hata shows nothing but contempt, I have to say.”

“She thinks that because she can see easily over us, we do not exist in her eyes.”

“Bring those eyes down to ours, so that she may see the pain in them that her people have caused.”

“Bring her down; bring her down; bring her down!”

Initiated by the most militant among the crowd, the cry was taken up with an enthusiasm and a speed that startled Matthias. Confronted by a single Sakuntala Hata, those who had been forced out of their homes, had their livelihoods destroyed, or seen friends and relatives ill-treated found in the isolated Naneci-tok a target for their accumulated hatred. No rocks were thrown (there were no rocks in the Viisiiviisii), but someone found a branch and hurled it. It struck the now wary Naneci-tok on one shoulder and bounced off. Other objects started to come flying through the air: pieces of wood, empty containers, battered sandals. There wasn't a lot the irate Deyzara could throw. Every emergency food container was soft and either edible or biodegradable. Only the satiated would hurl uneaten food, and there were not many of those in the crowd.

Feeling something hard strike at the back of her knees, where she was most vulnerable to being brought down, Naneci-tok started to reach for her side arm. Matthias was quick to restrain her.

“No shooting! We'll get out of this.” She nodded forward. They were almost to the walkway. Once on the strilk-suspended accessway, the crowd would be able to follow only two abreast and would find itself slowed accordingly.

That was all she needed now, she reflected worriedly: a shooting incident. Self-defense or not, if the Hata accompanying her shot down one or two Deyzara, the huge mob might well get completely out of control.

Then something struck her in the face, and she was forced to place survival above procedure.

Staggered by the blow, she reached up. Several fingers came down covered in blood that the rain of Fluva rapidly washed away. Something opaque and sticky had begun to obscure the vision in her left eye. The Deyzara were all around them now, pressing close, hooting and chanting wrathfully. For the first time, she felt the weight and presence of the mob, and was frightened. Would Harriman or anyone else step out of their dry, comfortable dens long enough to see what was happening? And even if they did, could they arrive in time to do anything about it? She and Naneci-tok were trapped. Because of the press of bodies, they couldn't move forward, back, or to the side.

There was, however, still one avenue of escape open to them. Being Sakuntala, Naneci-tok didn't hesitate. It took all her strength to take the stocky human with her, but she was not about to leave her friend the administrator to the mercy of a mob that was rapidly spinning out of control.

Followed by a flurry of thrown objects, the two females went up into the trees. Matthias felt the Hata's lean but powerful arm around her waist as the cries of the infuriated Deyzara receded beneath them.

“You must to help self now,” Naneci-tok told her as they settled on a branch that was much too thin. “I can't carry you anymore.”

Are you implying that I'm overweight? Matthias found herself thinking reflexively. But of course she was. Practically any human would be. Grown Sakuntala could fling themselves through the trees with apparent ease, but they could not carry much of a load while doing so. To them, humans and Deyzara were solid as well as short. Naneci-tok might be nearly two meters tall, but Matthias doubted the Hata who had saved them both from the mob weighed more than fifty or sixty kilos.

Looking down through the rain, Matthias saw the frustrated Deyzara still gesticulating furiously below. She and Naneci-tok couldn't go back the way they had come. Nor could they make use of the walkway. It had been taken over by other Deyzara who expected the human, at least, to descend and try to cross on it. For the moment, their rage and resentment had overcome the fact that she was not their traditional enemy. It was enough to make her a target of their ire that she was accompanying one of the hated Sakuntala.

“This way.” Naneci-tok gestured encouragingly. “We go around.”

Around? Wiping blood from her face, an uncertain Matthias eyed the route the Hata was proposing. It consisted of a winding path through vines and loopers, utilizing branches and broad-shouldered shelf fungi made slippery with rain. The other alternative was to sit and wait, hoping the mob would grow bored and trickle back to their shelters and emergency rations before she stumbled and fell.

If I'm going to slip and fall, she told herself firmly, I might as well do it while trying to get out of here.

“Okay,” she muttered uneasily, clinging tightly to a chartreuse looper with one hand, “but take it slow. I've never done anything like this before.”

As at home in the trees as on a solid surface, Naneci-tok eyed the administrator in surprise. “You on Fluva for years and never make road through the forest?”

Matthias offered up a wan smile. “Canopied skimmers are more my speed.”

Naneci-tok grinned. “You smart incubator. I bet you learn quick.”

I will damn well have to, Matthias told herself as she eyed the water some thirty meters below. If she fell and survived the splashdown, there was no one around to fish her out before several of the Viisiiviisii's water-loving predators found her first.

“There is one other thing,” she told her long-limbed companion. “I'm in pretty good shape, but . . . I'm afraid of heights.”

“Watch me and stay close. I will go slow and grab you if you fall. Follow my back end.”

Matthias did as she was told. It worked even better when in her mind's eye she substituted Sethwyn Case's backside for that of the slender, furry Hata. She discovered she could follow it easily as it appeared from behind the moving strappings, the muscles twitching as . . . Though she was able to justify the imported mental picture as a matter of survival, she felt guilty nonetheless.

Moving safely but guiltily through the trees, human and Sakuntala followed a roundabout course toward the skimmer maintenance block. They arrived safely fifteen minutes after Naneci-tok had first snatched the administrator up into the branches. Matthias was soaked to the skin despite her rain cape, having been forced to twist into extreme positions in order to complete the journey. Despite her saturated self she was unnaturally ebullient. Other than a slightly sprained right ankle, her grazing head injury, and a flurry of scratches, all of them minor, she was unhurt.

Wait till I tell Jack about
my
morning, she mused excitedly. A glance backward showed that a few of the enraged Deyzara had advanced almost all the way across the linking walkway. Now seeing that their quarry had already reached and was about to enter a vehicle, they gave up, turning back in disappointment, their fury unrequited.

“I didn't think I could do that.” As she spoke, she was unsealing the skimmer portal. The same remote that she used to open it simultaneously activated the interior instrumentation.

“It not hard to travel through the forest in place like this.” Naneci-tok gestured at the surrounding foliage as she followed the human into the skimmer. She had to bend nearly double in order to enter.

In less than a minute they were airborne, racing through the rain back toward the administrative and operational center of Taulau Town. The port, with its skilled but overworked staff and surging throngs of despondent, fuming Deyzara refugees, was left behind. Only physically, Matthias knew. She could not blot the sight of hundreds of despairing moon-eyed faces from her mind.