The D’neeran Factor (127 page)

It would do no harm to get closer.

When the five were all turned away from him, he hauled himself up so that he sat with his back to the wall. The cost was blinding pain. They must have turned to look, but he was half-unconscious again, gasping like a dying fish and too weak to move. When the mist cleared, they were looking away.

He started to inch along the wall, using legs and his one good arm, pushing the useless left one ahead. He had looked down once at the black crater the laser had left and
absorbed what it meant. If he were trapped on Gadrah he would lose the arm, at the least; without sophisticated medical attention, he would most likely die.

The hand at the end of it, dangling, got in his way. It was turning blue.

The world contracted, all his life contracted, to a simple sequence he would repeat and repeat forever. Hitch and move and brace against the pain and the fog it brought along. Wait for it to ease. He felt no diminution when it did, but his vision would clear, and he would know it must have gotten better.

Watch for another chance. Do it all again.

When he had been doing this for a long time he had moved a meter. The locker was still twice that far away. What was left of his strength was ebbing.

In one of the pauses he thought he heard Hanna's voice. He had imagined it once before, and he thought he must be losing consciousness again. But this time she was not talking to him, and he realized, slowly, that he heard a real voice, and real words, and what they meant.

“You will board, one of you, and we will give you our arms. I understand. If we make any resistance, Michael will be killed. Yes, we all understand.”

After all his costly silence, after choking back a scream at every furtive move, he cried out then: “No! No!” He meant it to be a command and a plea for Hanna to hear, but it was a whisper. B heard it, though, and looked at him. He looked at the place Michael had started from, at the locker with the weapon in plain view, and he went to it and picked it up: another laser pistol. He swung it toward Michael and smiled with the faintest amusement, as he had smiled sometimes years ago when he did some unspeakable thing and watched the contorted, tear-stained face like a scientist observing the outcome of an experiment. “You won't need that any more,” he said, and aimed for Michael's groin. Michael twisted away and the light burned another crater in his thigh. He made one wretched sound and sank on his face without tears or hope, and the
Avalon
and everything else went away.

*   *   *

The
Golden Girl
skimmed over seaboard, moving quickly but doing nothing like top speed. Shen looked ready to
fight; she was the only one who did. A bleak feeling that death was near had come to Hanna. She tried to look back at the path that had led her to it, but she could not see one.
Courses.
Silver necklace of Earth, golden alien treasure, a piece of plain utilitarian metal: exactly what had B found all those years ago? A sheaf of paper? A microchip? She looked for some meaning in the objects, and found none. They had fallen into her life and she had had to make choices about them and that was that.
You choose what you can and the rest is just there.
He had said that to her once. She could not remember when.

Without warning her left leg gave way and she fell on the floor. There was an instant of nothing—she knew that because Theo had been at the other side of Control, and now he was bending over her. Her leg did not hurt; instead she held both hands over her heart. Theo took her pulse, examined her skin; he thought her heart was failing. It was not, but it was breaking. He wanted to know what was wrong with her and she would not tell him. Why hurt him by telling him Michael had been hurt again? But he must know by the tears that ran out of her eyes and down her cheeks. Her will was paralyzed; she could not stop them.

*   *   *

When
GeeGee
got back to Croft's valley, the
Avalon
had moved. It was not hidden but brooding in the open upriver from Croft. Shen brought
GeeGee
in slowly and landed a few meters away from the
Avalon.
She had been told to make the distance between as small as she could. She opened
GeeGee
up and they waited in Control, and Shen looked at Hanna and saw no help. Hanna was broken.

The thing that was supposed to be a man, looked like a man, was biologically a man, crossed the space between the ships. He came quickly. He would not make himself a target any longer that he had to; he thought he might be attacked; he thought they might hurt him though it meant Michael's death. That was how little he knew about them. It was how he thought.

They did nothing. They let him come. He walked into the golden light of Control like a bloated white spider and they only stood there, except Hanna who could not move and did not look up. Close to the door where he stood was a pile of weapons. There were three stunners, all they had left, and
Carmina's well-made, old-fashioned gun. He looked at them as if he did not believe they had gone where they had gone, done what they had done, with a handful of stunners.

He squatted and picked up the stunners one by one and snapped out the power pack from the butt of each. He put the packs and his laser pistol in a pocket, got up holding Carmina's gun, and cocked a finger at Lise. No one had uttered a word. Lise stood still. She was very pale.

“I want to look around,” the soft voice said. “You show me.”

Theo said to her quietly, “He won't hurt you yet. He wants another hostage.”

“That's right,” B said, “Listen to your daddy.”

Lise took a step forward, shaking. The next step was stronger; she made it the rest of the way a step at a time, haltingly. B put his free hand on her shoulder and pushed her to the door. He said to the others, but mostly to Theo, “You know what happens if you do anything.”

Theo said, “You don't need her for that. Unless Mike's already dead.”

“Not quite,” B said.

Lise looked up, the first time she had dared lift her eyes to his face. “You can kill me,” she said. “I don't care. But don't hurt Mike!”

The transparent eyes were impersonal. He watched a performing animal.

“Why do you hate him?” Lise said. Her voice shook. “He never hurt you. He never hurt anybody.”

B was not interested. He pushed her again. But Hanna said from the floor, “Earthquake.” They looked at her again, even B, but her eyes were empty. She spoke again, with great effort. It was evident that she hardly knew she was speaking, and that she was talking to Lise—for her education. For some reason B listened, too. She said: “Wind. Volcano. Flood.” Her eyes met Lise's. They were still empty, but after a moment Lise nodded as if she understood something new. Her face was sad. She was calmer, and she did not look like a little girl.

“People can be like that, too,” she said. “Sometimes you don't live through it.”

B shoved her then and she went out ahead of him, the gun at her back.

She did just as she was told, though she was slow about it. She had almost stopped thinking.
I used to be afraid like this sometimes before,
she thought, when she did think. But for a year she had forgotten this kind of fear.

B followed her through the galley and the lounges.
Cooking and luscious food, games and conversation.
She wanted those familiar places to mean what they had meant before—she wanted it so badly that she was disoriented, which was why she was slow.

The medlab. “Ever use it?” he said. Theo was a physician, she said with difficulty. The old staff quarters with their alphanumeric locks; they had modified one to lock from outside for the I&S operative, and B looked at it carefully. The cargo hold, and down to the engine rooms, living quarters, Mike's room, Lise's own.
Theo patiently repeating a lesson.
And back to Control.

She wanted to run to Theo, but B held her by the arm. He held her in front of him and poked Carmina's gun into her back. He talked into the air, his voice traveling to the
Avalon.
Who would be killed, who would not be?—it remained an open question, that was the meaning of what he said. There was Polity medical technology here and a Polity-trained doctor. Maybe Theo would be spared. And Lise, as hostage for his good behavior. She got that much out of what B said. But that meant—she shuddered, and the hand was harder on her arm—that Mike wouldn't make it, or Hanna or Shen. There was no use for them.

*   *   *

Hanna's body had forgotten who it belonged to. When she got up it was weak, and twitched. It rose in obedience to some command from outside and let itself be herded out of Control and through
GeeGee
toward the craft's rear, into the room they had made into a cell. The door closed and they were locked in. Lise could finally cling to Theo. Shen stood by the narrow bunk, her face dark with thought, but Hanna sank to the floor again. Her body was numb, especially on the left side, shoulder and thigh. She had never felt anything like it before, she had not know this was possible, this connection of flesh through the spirit. Her efforts at thought did not get anywhere; they spiraled into the pit of Michael's unconsciousness.

Shen came and squatted in front of her. When Hanna did
not look up, Shen took her shoulders and shook her. “Wake up! Pay attention!”

It was too much effort to speak aloud.
I can't,
Hanna said in thought.

Shen shook her again. “What are they all doing?”

I don't know.

“Find out!”

She tried halfheartedly. When she reached out there was only one place she wanted to go, one mind she wanted to see. If she tried hard enough, she could wake him. But only to pain and despair—so she would not do it; but the struggle not to do it, to let go and give him up so his end would be easier, took all the little she had left. She put no name to what she felt, the vast misery. She only knew that Michael's coming death was the most important, the worst thing that had ever happened, and she could not spare thought for her own fate, or Shen's.

Shen felt enough of it to know what was happening in Hanna. Real pain, sharp and stinging, forced its way through Hanna's fog; Shen slapped her methodically, cursing. “Gonna lay down and die? Say where they are. Say it now! Now!”

B's in Control. Doing something.

“Doing what?”

I
don't know. The navigational systems. Crippling
GeeGee.
So we can't go back—

“What about the rest? They coming over here?”

No. Later. Not yet.
She saw through someone's eyes for half a second. The man was on the
Avalon.
There was tension and some kind of suspicion there: dissent inside the wolf pack, directed at B. She couldn't concentrate on it, she couldn't concentrate on the import of what B was doing, exiling them here; she was drawn too hard to the dark shape on the floor at the edge of someone's vision.

Shen got up and roamed the tiny room, furious, thinking.

“How bad's Mike hurt?” she said, got no answer, turned to see tears streaming from Hanna's eyes again; went back to her, and went back to slapping her. The wet cheeks were starting to bruise. “Can he walk?
Can he walk!
”

“I don't know, I don't know! I don't think so.”

“Gonna have to try. Soon's they leave.”

Hanna got a glimpse of what Shen was thinking.

“He can't, it would kill him—”

“You remember before? Broken ribs, fever, you remember what you did?”

“I remember. But—”

“So?”

They stared at each other. Shen shook Hanna again, gently this time. “Gonna die anyway, him, you, everybody. All we got left's one surprise. You're it. You and Mike.”

*   *   *

He was conscious of being cold. His body was shutting down. The pain had removed to some distance, was with him and would be there until the end, but hung back for a time like a live thing, a scavenger waiting for an opening. In the half-world of relative peace, images played at random in his head, the mind shutting down, too. He saw the house on Valentine, much too big, ridiculously big, but it had given him the seclusion he wanted. A dark blue-eyed woman lived there, completing his peace. He was not capable of questioning the image. It seemed as if it had been so. It was what he had wanted, and here at nightfall he believed he had had it.

Hanna sat beside him on the beach below the house, dressed in white. The wind gusted hard from the sea and she put up a hand to her frivolous floppy hat, to hold it on. Wisps of hair escaped and stirred softly in the wind. She was smiling, and her eyes were as blue as the sunlit water.

“It won't hurt to get up now,” she said. “I'll keep it from hurting.”

“Can you?” He did not really doubt her. It was Hanna, he realized now, who kept the pain at bay, so that it made a circle around him but did not quite touch him.

“It's your useful trance,” he said, pleased. “All right, then.”

The bright white sand dazzled his eyes. If he squinted, he could see other things through the sand. He was somewhere else as well as on the beach, simultaneously. It was too dark to see much of the other place, but he was alone there. There had been other men; they were gone. He had to learn to stand. “Try locking the knee,” Hanna said, and it worked. He would never walk normally again, too much muscle was damaged or gone, but if he kept the leg straight and balanced carefully, he could use it as a prop to heave himself along.

The beach was gone, but Hanna walked ahead of him, still in white. One side of the skirt was slit nearly to the hip, and when the wind blew it away, he thought he had never seen anything more lovely than her shapely brown leg. There had been other women, and he remembered them with love and gratitude. They had helped educate him for loving Hanna.

“I didn't tell you often enough how beautiful you are,” he said.