Reclamation (15 page)

“I also said there’s always somebody out there who knows more than you do,” Perivar reminded him.

Eric’s eyes shone coldly. “If that wasn’t true, there wouldn’t be contraband runners. Are we done quoting your words of wisdom now, Perivar?”

You started it,
thought Perivar childishly. He forced his voice into a semi-even tone. “Do you have any kind of plan for this insanity?”

“Not really.” He shrugged. “After this, I’m going to talk to Dorias. Between the two of us we should be able to string together something.”

“If anyone can,” Perivar added for him. Eric wasn’t looking at him anymore and Perivar couldn’t help wondering why not.

“As you say.” Eric shrugged. “What else can I do, Perivar? If I don’t put an end to this, then I’m a fugitive until I become a corpse or a slave.”

Perivar said nothing for a long moment.

“There’s nothing else I can tell you,” Eric said.

“What about something about your … friend?”

“She’s no friend of mine.” Eric’s eyes seemed to see something other than Perivar’s face at that moment. “Although, Notouch or not, I could maybe wish she was … she’s all right, Perivar. She’s stubborn and she’s got some secret she’s keeping to herself, but she learns fast and she seems as determined to stay out of the Realm as I am.”

“I’ll have to take your word on that.”
As well as on everything else.

“I’d give you more if I could.”

“I know.” Perivar pushed the door open. “And I appreciate it.”

In the workroom, Ri and Dene had Arla under close scrutiny. The pair of them had crammed themselves into the capsule that now hung from a post maybe six inches from Arla’s nose. The wariness was gone from her face. Instead, her expression shifted from bemused to bewildered as she tried to keep pace with the kids’ yes-and-no questions.

“Will you be staying …” Ri started.

“… with us?” finished Dene. Arla shook her head.

“You came from a long way …” Dene started.

“… away? How far?”

Arla nodded and spread her hands, unable to answer completely.

Perivar glanced through the membrane to Kiv. He was saying something soft to Ere where she lay on his shoulders. The remainder of his brood was draped across his back, whistling encouragement as their representatives tried to get information from the stranger. Kiv’s legs were retracted, but his arms and eyes were extended. He was relaxed and Perivar was willing to bet, a little amused.

“The lines on …” began Dene, but Ri saw Perivar step into the workroom. She squeezed her sister’s mouth shut with her secondary hands while she swung her eyes toward Perivar and Eric.

Arla also turned all her attention toward them.

“I’ve set things in motion.” Perivar felt his glance slide past Arla to Kiv, who did nothing more than swivel an extra eye toward his children in the capsule. Perivar faced Eric. “Are you going to stick around and watch?”

“No,” Eric said, and Arla’s head snapped around. “I’ve got to keep moving.”

The two of them exchanged a long, uninterpretable look.

“You leave me in your debt.” Under the translation, her voice sounded stilted to Perivar, as if this was a new phrase for her.

“Pay me by not giving Perivar any extra problems.” Eric turned away from her a little too quickly. “I’ve got to go. I only authorized a day’s worth of dock time for my ship.”

Perivar nodded. “I’d rather not ever see you again, Sar Born.”

“I know.” And he walked out. Arla did not turn around to watch him leave.

The door shut and left them all closed in together. Perivar looked at Arla, who looked back at him in silence.

What do you think I am?
asked Eric from memory again. It was his old voice, heavily accented and awkward. Nothing like the smoothly educated tone he’d used today.

Cargo,
thought Perivar.
Checked over, labeled as clean and delivered, or too dirty to fix and dumped.

Certainly not a person who would look at him like Arla was, vaguely expectant, waiting for him to do something.

“Want to sit down?” he gestured to a chair.

Her eyes tracked his hand and a puzzled expression wrinkled her brow. “Thank you … I don’t know how to call you.” The translation fell a long way out of synch with her real speech.

“Perivar,” he told her. “My partner is Kivererishakadene. Kiv’s the name you have to remember there. The rest of it belongs to the children.” Perivar nodded to the two in the capsule.

Taking that as some kind of cue, Ri raised the capsule back up to the ceiling cables and rattled back toward their own side.

Kiv stretched himself out toward the membrane. “Have you borne your children yet?”

Perivar shot Kiv a look, uncertain whether he was being really absentminded this time, or if he was trying to pay Arla back for her shocked stare by making her uncomfortable.

She sank onto the edge of the chair Perivar had offered her. “Four living,” she said quietly, and Perivar translated it for Kiv.

Kiv’s subtle ripples told Perivar he was trying to make the mental readjustment. The only thing more alien to Kiv than a male without children, was a parent who lived away from them. Even though the kids theoretically understood humans’ strange ways better, Ri and Sha piled on top of their sisters as soon as they got out of the capsule, as if the idea that a brood and parent could be separated would magically tear them away. Kiv automatically coiled himself around them, buzzing softly.

Perivar turned his back on his partner. “We need to get a blood sample,” he said to Arla, “so we can find out what we can do with you.”

“Eric told me.” She held out her arm without changing her expression.

Yeah.
Perivar shook himself.
Now where’d I put … No, I threw that all away. Let’s see
… He pulled open a corner drawer and found a utility knife and a piece of plastic wrapper. He tossed them both in the heater and set it on sterilize.

When he turned back around, she was still holding her arm out, waiting patiently for him to draw blood.

He laid the knife against her fingertip and pressed down. The skin broke and the blood welled scarlet around the blade. Arla didn’t even flinch.

Perivar, we just got the answer. The sample’s clean. Tell the client. Perivar, sample’s no good. We’re going to have to dump ’em. Perivar, sample says they’ll be able to take it for at least a year down there. Let the client know we’re bringing them in.

He wiped her cut off with the wrapping and dropped her hand.

Perivar, I don’t think you understand what you’re doing … You’ll do what you’re told you damned barbarian or you’re dead … Try me, Skyman, just try me.

Leave me alone!
he shouted to the memory voices.

Perivar taped the wrap closed around the bloody smear.

“Brain. Get a courier cart up here, on the double; I’ve got a package for Zur-Iyal at the Amaiar Gardens.” He and Iyal had never stopped sending each other things; souvenirs or jokes or small presents. One more package wasn’t going to generate any more attention, even from the watchful Vitae.

“Priority rating assigned. Request one will be completed in five minutes.” The voice from the ceiling startled Arla but not badly. Perivar slid the sample into a wrapper and dropped it into the hard mail bin. Reluctantly, he turned back to Arla.

“There’s not much for us to do until we get an answer on this. You can wait in here.” He led her into his living rooms.

Perivar picked a few old schedule printouts up off the sofa and said, “Make yourself comfortable,” before he walked out into the workroom again. He closed the door behind him.

“All right.” He strode back to the map table. “Where were we?”

“Perivar …”

Perivar touched two keys to clear a space in the corner of the display for schedule data. “I think I remember seeing that Haron Station will be supporting a six-layer open channel between …”

“Stop this.”

Startled, Perivar looked up. On the other side of the membrane, Kiv and all five of the kids stared at him, eyes and ears focused entirely in his direction. For the first time in years, that attention made his skin crawl.

Kiv glided up to the membrane. The kids slipped sideways to let their parent by.

“What are you doing, Perivar?”

He curled his hands into fists and leaned all his weight on his knuckles. “Trying to finish up the routing for packet 73-1511. What are you doing?”

Kiv closed and retracted all his eyes. “If I live a thousand lives, I will never understand your people.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“This time I mean it.” Only two of Kiv’s eyes opened and extended. “The packet can wait another few hours, Perivar. You have another responsibility that requires immediate attention.” All of his hands waved toward Perivar’s closed living rooms.

“She’s not my responsibility,” Perivar told the tabletop through clenched teeth. “I’m just moving her through.”

There was a long pause.

“So, how did you deal with … the contraband before this? When they were your responsibility?”

Perivar kept his eyes toward the map, but he saw nothing at all.

“We kept them in life-support capsules in the cargo hold. I actually spoke to maybe two others besides Eric. I told myself what we were doing didn’t matter. They’re not human, not like me, just gods-blasted-and-damned barbarians …” A red haze filled his eyes. “Better off where we take them, or better off dead. Too stupid to understand what really matters …”

“Per-efar!”

Perivar’s head jerked up. Kiv had shouted his name, the actual syllables, not the conglomeration of whistles and buzzes the translator straightened out.

“Perivar.” Kiv slapped his silicate mask over his face and glided through the membrane, leaving the kids huddled in a complex knot behind him. He filled the workroom and had to bend his body to fit between the counters and the map table. Despite that, he got close enough that Perivar could see the gel glisten on his skin. Perivar fought the urge to back away.

“What happened to you?”

Perivar felt his mouth move, but no sound was coming out. He forced his voice to speak.

“There was a revolution in Eshina. I was a communications hack and a spy on the losing side. Eshina law deports revolutionaries by selling them as indentured servants. Tasa Ad bought me up cheap. He and his sister Kessa headed up a runner team. I was … bought to work the communications transfers for them.”

Kiv’s body rippled, sending rainbows glistening down his back where the light hit the membrane gel. “And you made a bond of some sort with Eric.”

Perivar nodded. “We’d picked up Eric off his homeworld. Weird place. Crashing old world orbiting a binary star. Tasa Ad had seen him in action on the ground and decided this one we’d keep. Eric’s not his real name, I just called him that because I couldn’t get a handle on the real thing. It goes on even longer than yours does.

“He really is amazingly useful. He can … do things to machines … make them move. Make a computer run just by touching it. Tasa Ad used him as a kind of super-systems digger and we were able to expand our … activities from just contraband running.

“Eric and I got along. At least, I liked him better than I liked Tasa Ad and a lot better than I liked Kessa even though that didn’t take much. I taught him a real language, showed him how to take care of himself on the ship, told him about things outside. Played big brother a little, you understand? We became friends, almost without me noticing it’d happened. I’m not … I wasn’t used to having friends.

“Then we got a new job, a weird one. Aguy named D’Shane wanted us to steal an artificial intelligence called Dorias out of a planetary network. The money was … really good, so Tasa Ad took it on. We used Eric for most of the work, of course. He found the thing and got it loaded into the isolation box we’d built for it and we took off to hand it over to our client.

“We were two days in flight and Eric came into my cabin. He looked sick, shattered. He said ‘Perivar, is it true that the people we transport are being taken without permission?’

“I hadn’t stopped to think about it until then, but I realized Eric had no idea what was really going on. Tasa Ad kept him on a short tether when it came to network information, and I’d never spelled out anything to him. He was a volunteer and his people either have no concept of … involuntary servitude, or, it’s so different from what we did that it never occurred to him that we were kidnapping and selling unwilling bodies. I mean, yes, when Tasa Ad and Kessa got them to the ship, they were drugged out and in capsules, but that was exactly how we got him on board.

“And I’d never told him about me.

“So I said something particularly insightful, like ‘And?’ And he looked at me like he didn’t know whether to be sorry for me or kill me on the spot. After a long time he said ‘Perivar, I don’t think you understand what you’re doing. Dorias does not want to go to D’Shane.’

“‘Dorias is a machine,’ I said. ‘It does what it’s told.’

“He said ‘Dorias is a … I don’t know the word he used, but the translator turned it into ‘Well-Made Soul,’ and he said ‘I won’t hand him across to D’Shane without his consent.’ He walked out and I stayed stuck to the spot, cursing myself for an idiot.

“Then, I heard Tasa Ad yelling. I ran toward the sound.

He … they … Eric … I mean … Eric, Tasa Ad, and Dorias’s box were on the bridge. Eric was at the comm board. I read his fingers. He was opening up a channel to somewhere, probably to a station, or maybe back to where we’d come from. I saw the cable on Dorias’s box and I knew Eric was getting ready to hardwire the AI into the open channel so it could get itself free.

“Tasa Ad was, of course, yelling at him to stop, and when he paused for breath, Eric simply said ‘No.’ And Tasa Ad reared up and said ‘You’ll do what you’re told, you damned barbarian, or you’re dead!’

“That got him. Eric whirled around and yelled, ‘Try me, Skyman, just try me!’

“Kessa came in at that point. Shoved her way past me, just as Tasa Ad lunged for Eric. She was armed. A dart gun. The cartridge was red. Serious poison.

“Tasa Ad grabbed Eric’s arm … and … collapsed. Kessa screamed something and raised the gun. I screamed something else and shoved her sideways and she pointed the gun at me and fired. Caught me in the arm. And I collapsed. And Eric grabbed her and she collapsed and Eric collapsed with her and there we all were on the deck together. The thing was, Eric and I were alive. Tasa Ad and Kessa, weren’t.”