Survival Page 4

  “Mackenzie Connor.” The creature’s low voice made her jump. From the way her skin shivered, it could well be uttering additional tones below her hearing range, possibly infrasound. “I deeply regret if my curiosity has interfered with your research. I had heard of the wonders of diving with the spawning run. It was never my intention to disrupt your fine work.”

  Reminded, Mac couldn’t help but scowl. “I hope you were bagged,” she said, eyes flicking to Tie.

  That worthy managed to look offended and embarrassed at the same time, protesting: “Hey, Mac. You think I’d let him in without? There was no chemical contamination. The repeller was on auto—to hold him for pickup. The water’s pristine.”

  “It had better be.” Mac shuddered to think of the confusion downstream if the dissolved odors of the Tannu River this year contained added Essence of Dhryn.

  “I repeat, Mackenzie Connor. I intended no disruption—”

  “Intended or not, Mr.—What do I call you?” The bureaucrat leaned forward, as if this was a question he’d like answered as well.

  A graceful, if ponderous, tilt of the head. “Having not yet served in grathnu, Mackenzie Connor, I regret I can offer only one name for your use. Please do not be offended.”

  The Dhryn’s face conveyed emotion that matched her human interpretation of his words, the edges of both eyes and mouth flexible enough to turn downward as if in regret. Mac felt chilled. How much was true similarity in thought processes—how much coincidence—and how much the mimicry of an accomplished diplomat?

  “One name’s fine,” she said warily.

  The Dhryn angled his body more upright, spreading six arms in what appeared a ritual gesture. The seventh was now out of sight under the silk bands. “Brymn is all my name.”

  The ensuing pause was silent except for the background roar of the Tannu, the intermittent patter of raindrops, and Mac’s own breathing. The Dhryn didn’t move. Finally, Mac slid her eyes to the bureaucrat and frowned meaningfully. This was his problem.

  The man seemed very careful not to smile. Instead, he took a step closer, to stand beside Mac, and said, spreading out his own arms: “I take the name of Brymn into my keeping. Nikolai Piotr Trojanowski is all my name.”

  The Dhryn clapped all six hands together and bowed in the bureaucrat’s direction. “I take the name Nikolai Piotr Trojanowski into my keeping. A very fine name, sir.” The lips parted, revealing a row of small, even, and brilliantly white teeth, each curved like a rose petal. “Most pleasing.”

  Emily, not one to miss a cue, spoke up. “Emily Mamani Sarmiento is all my name.”

  Tie pointedly leaned back against the skim. Mac presumed he planned to stay out of this. Wise man.

  “I have the name Emily Mamani Sarmiento in my keeping,” Brymn acknowledged with another hearty multiple clap. “Most impressive. You are very accomplished for one so young.”

  Emily smiled. Mac wrinkled her nose at her. The clouds were sinking into the treetops and a return to heavier rain was only moments away. They had no time for this—but Brymn had turned to her expectantly. She sighed. “Fine. You can call me—” The bureaucrat with the mouthful of names caught her eye and shook his head very slightly, as if he guessed she planned to say “Mac” and be done with it.

  Mac weighed her impatience against what was probably informed advice, given the bureaucrat had come with the alien and knew about this ceremonial exchange of names. “Mackenzie—” she hid a wince, “—Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor is all my name.” From the choked sounds coming from Emily, the “Winifred” would soon be all around Base.

  “Magnificent!” The Dhryn clapped, then reared almost vertically, its tiny mouth stretching in what looked like a human smile—or a reasonable facsimile. “I most proudly take the name Mackenzie Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor into my keeping. An honor, as I expected it would be. Please, accept my invitation to dine together this evening. We have much to share with one another.”

  Mac scrubbed her bare toes against wet granite, just to verify her surroundings. A line of four eagles flew by, barely visible among the clouds, and she wondered what they thought of this intrusion into their world. She was, she decided, quite sure what she thought.

  “Thank you, Mr. Brymn—”

  “Brymn.”

  “Brymn. A kind offer, but I can’t leave this field station. Dr. Mamani and I are in the midst of the most important phase of our work. By the end of the month, I should have time to—”

  The Dhryn let out a plaintive wail, not loud but certainly piercing. At the same time, he closed his eyes tightly and began rocking back and forth. There seemed little doubt of his suffering.

  “Excuse us,” Mac told the decidedly inattentive alien. She grabbed the bureaucrat by one arm and hauled him as far away from Brymn as the rock outcrop allowed.

  “What the hell is going on here, Mr. Trojanowski?”

  “To quote Brymn, I’m most impressed.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Most people have trouble with my name.”

  “I’ve heard all I want about names for one day,” Mac warned. “What I want is to hear how quickly you’re going to get this—this—intruder off my river! And you, too,” she added, just to be clear. “We’ll be damned fortunate if we can reinstall the Tracer before the rain hits.”

  “Isn’t it raining now?” He glanced upward with almost comic dismay.

  “This?” Mac snorted. “Not hardly.”

  He used a finger to wipe the drops from his glasses; they were immediately replaced. “I’ll take your word for it, Dr. Connor. As for leaving—believe me, I’d like nothing better. The IU’s going to rake me over the coals as it is. Our distinguished guest is supposed to be attending a state dinner in his honor at the Consulate, not snorkeling with fish in the middle of—” He broke off and looked around as if startled by a sudden thought. “Where are we, anyway?”

  Obviously not deep enough in the bush to save her from desk jockeys, Mac thought with disgust. “Where you shouldn’t be, Mr. Trojanowski. Just shut him up and take him away.” The Dhryn’s keening hadn’t abated. In fact, Mac thought it had climbed a notch or two in volume.

  The bureaucrat hugged his bag to his chest and leaned down to say very quietly, “He doesn’t exactly listen to me, Dr. Connor.”

  Mac narrowed her eyes. “Then he’ll listen to me, Mr. Trojanowski. I guarantee it.”

  His bleated “I wouldn’t—” was left behind as Mac walked back to confront the unhappy Dhryn, but the man caught up to her. “Please, Dr. Connor. We can’t have an interspecies incident. Brymn is the first of his kind to visit Earth—”

  “And I don’t care if he’s the last.” Mac pulled out her imp and used it to poke the Dhryn in the middle of his widest band of rose-colored silk.

  Brymn’s eyes shot open and his wailing ended in an exaggerated “whhooff” of air leaving his mouth. Before anything else came out, Mac put her hands on her hips and said firmly: “Leave. Now.” She put away her imp and hoped it still worked; she went through several a year as it was. “I have work to do and you are interfering.”

  Without another word, the Dhryn turned and clambered back into the skim. Tie jumped in after him, possibly afraid the creature would take off with the team’s vehicle.

  Not surprisingly, the bureaucrat was staring at Mac, his mouth working as though unsure what expression would be safe. He did take a cautious step out of range.

  As Mac feared, the rain chose the least convenient moment to turn from drizzle to blinding sheets that made it hard to breathe. She tugged her hood over her head and waved impatiently to the sodden figure still hesitating in front of her. Emily was already splashing toward her console. “Goodbye, Mr. Trojanowski.”

  The fool was digging into his office pouch. As Mac prepared to tell him where he could file his paperwork, she saw what he was pulling out.

  It was an envelope, in the unmistakable blue and green reserved for documents pertaining to the safety and security of humanity. Such an envelope
must be accepted by any person; refusing such an envelope was treason against the Human species. Its contents were both secret and vital.

  Mac had only seen them in movies featuring spies and intergalactic warfare. She’d half-believed they were nothing more than a handy plot device.

  Her hands lifted to accept the envelope, closing over what wasn’t rain-coated paper, but instead felt like thin metal, heat-stealing and sharp. Her name suddenly crawled over its surface in mauve-tinted acknowledgment.

  Did she imagine a flash of sympathy on Nikolai Trojanowski’s face before he turned to join Brymn in the skim?

  Mac watched the vehicle lift, then drop to the river’s surface, vanishing into the rain. Beneath, dorsal fins sliced the heaving darkness of the river and bodies twisted to leap through the foam. The Harlequins landed on the shore, walking in single file to plunge into the river. Left alone, life on the Tannu sought its own rhythm, heedless of Human affairs.

  Emily shook her cape as she approached, adding her spray to the deluge. “Well, that broke the boredom . . .” Her voice trailed away as she spotted the envelope. “Ai.”

  Mac’s hands wanted to drop the thing but couldn’t. “Lock us down, Dr. Mamani,” she ordered, wondering at the steadiness of her own voice. “I expect the other shoe to drop will be—Ah, yes. Base sending a pickup.”

  On cue, a shape formed itself from rain and mist: the transport lev from Norcoast, angling for a landing that wouldn’t crush either tent or console.

  “It seems someone thinks we’re finished here,” Mac said, giving the t-lev a short nod that had nothing to do with agreement.

  And everything to do with challenge.

  3

  ARRIVAL AND ANNOYANCE

  ON HER OFFICE wall, Mac had a satellite image of O Hecate Strait, its intense blue kept from the Pacific by the lush green arms of the Queen Charlotte Islands, the Haida Gwaii. To the east, the strait tried to sneak its waters into the snow-capped Rockies, wrapping around islands and through inlets like fingers grabbing for a hold, thwarted by the growing bones of a continent. Rivers, like tears of sympathy, leaked through the mountains to join the strait.

  From an eagle’s perspective, the midst of the strait might be the center of the Pacific, especially during storm winds. The submerged mountains forming the Queen Charlottes hid their tips below the horizon; the continent was nowhere to be seen. Mariners treated the area with respect. Whales sang here.

  But approach the coast and the landscape shot skyward again, as if the ocean waves constantly pushed the rock to heaven and forest anchored cliff to cloud. On clear days, the scale changed again, as the mountain ranges laughed down at forest, cliff, and ocean. Victor and goal in one.

  As the eagle flew, the coast was a labyrinth of deep cut channels that bent, fractured, and found one another again. There were hidden coves of water so still the bird’s reflection chased it. Along every shore, the bleached remains of giant trees competed with splintered bits of mountain, a rubble reshaped every spring.

  Every spring, the Norcoast Salmon Research Facility, or Base, as its staff of scientists, techs, and students preferred to call it, came back to life.

  Base floated within the southwest curl of Castle Inlet, a peaceful intrusion of humanity consisting of a half dozen pods, various docks, and landing pads linked by walkways. The pods were domes, their mottled grays, mauves, and browns matched to the exposed rock of the shoreline in the hope they’d resemble tiny islands themselves. It might have worked, if there had been forests of cedar and fir on the flattened roofs instead of aerials, solar collectors, skylights, and the occasional deck chair. Though the practice was discouraged, students tended to hang their laundry from the balconies surrounding each pod, further dispelling the illusion of blending with nature.

  The walkways were also employed to dry both wet towels and fish specimens. On those rare occasions when the sun encouraged such effort, they formed the favored spot for people to dry out as well, making it impossible to walk from pod to pod with any speed.

  Not that speed was the point. Norcoast’s researchers worked by nature’s timetable, not their own, and endurance mattered more than haste. As the Coho, Pink, Chinook, and King salmon arrived from the Pacific, feeding on the immense schools of pilchard converging in Hecate Strait, survey crews hovered overhead in aqualevs, sleeping over their monitors, if at all. Those studying the impacts of oceanic predation slept at Base, but only at the whim of orca pod, shark, and seal. Easy to know the predator researchers. Preds were the ones running along the walkways with still-lathered hair or wearing pajamas under their rain gear, a consequence of wearing wrist alarms activated by remotes listening at the entrances to the Sound as well as the various inlets.

  A few at Base lived by Human hours, in order to process data from their compatriots with the commercial harvesters. To compensate for that luxury, Harvs wound up cooking for the rest, being more likely to be awake and functional when supplies had to be ordered and received.

  They were doubtless all awake now, Mac thought grimly. She’d tucked the envelope from Trojanowski under her clothes, where it molded with unsettling comfort against her skin. There’d been no time or privacy to read its contents. She and Emily had sealed their equipment against weather, bear, and packrat. There’d been the required clarification for the t-lev’s crew—namely that Mac had no intention of letting them dismantle and remove Field Station Six, no matter what fool had ordered it. The crew, in turn, wisely professed themselves exceedingly content to remove only the two scientists and their personal gear.

  At the very last moment, Mac had remembered to pluck the bag with Lee’s book from its soggy crevice.

  Now, as the t-lev sank within the arms of the inlet and approached the north landing pad, Mac heard Emily click her tongue against her teeth. “We’ve company waiting.”

  “I see.” The rain hadn’t stopped, so the figures lining the walkway to the pad wore either rain gear or bathing suits. Only one carried an umbrella. “Trojanowski,” Mac concluded, pointing down. “Knew he was a tourist.”

  “Nice butt, though,” Emily countered. “Not that you noticed.”

  Mac snorted. “The day I check out someone like—” She shut her mouth and smiled despite herself. “You are impossible.”

  “Of course. Now that we have both formed our opinions of the meddlesome Nikolai, what’s next?”

  The t-lev took its time coming to rest, the pilot knowing exactly the reaction he’d get from onlookers if he so much as rocked the landing pad, let alone dumped anyone in the inlet. Mac leaned back on the bench, gazing at Emily.

  They were both filthy as well as barefoot, with streaks of gray mud running from toes to thighs. Em’s knees were only muddy; hers were scraped and bloody, like some kid coming in from street hockey. Their rain gear was clean enough; underneath, though, their clothing was, to put it kindly, ripe. Emily’s hair was so black as to have blue highlights; she wore it short and snug, a style that not only accentuated the fine lines of her neck and high cheekbones, but also forgave a few days of living in the bush. It really wasn’t fair. Mac tried to poke a finger through hers but couldn’t reach her scalp. Despite the braid, the stuff had reached the point of feeling like lichen. Tangles were doubtless the least of what rode her head.

  “What’s next?” Mac repeated, contemplating the disturbing message lying against her stomach and the expectant crowd below.

  “A shower.”

  Mac and Emily, backpacks on their shoulders and the rest of their gear to follow when the t-lev was unloaded, disembarked with every intention of simply walking past those waiting. The first person they encountered, the bureaucrat, seemed to grasp that point. He met Mac’s warning scowl with no more than a searching look, then stepped aside, holding his umbrella high so she and Emily could pass without having to duck under it. Annoyingly, he was impeccably clean and dry, wearing what had to be the twin of the suit and cravat he’d had on at the field station. His eyes, now visible through clear dry len
ses, were hazel; his hair was light brown, thick, and prone to curl. Doubtless, Mac thought, Emily would have something to say about both.

  For her part, she was grateful not to be delayed, more determined than ever to set her own pace regardless of the business at hand. She needed privacy to read the message. Not to mention the fact that she wasn’t going to conduct any business whatsoever without a shower. But as easily walk on water as evade the curiosity of grad students. As they pressed closer instead of giving way, Emily thoughtfully let her lead.

  As if she could simply push past them all. Mac sighed, taking in the intensity on those young faces, and slowed her pace. Jumping in the water and swimming to the next pod would only encourage them to do the same, probably turning it into a race pitting Preds against Harvs, with the rest cheering. She’d seen it happen more than once.

  Of course, the instant they knew they had her attention, questions began flying from every direction, interspersed with hugs of welcome and offers to carry her bag. Mac returned the hugs as quickly as was polite, held on to her bag, and kept up a running patter of answers. She reassured Cecily and Stanislaus that the other field stations were running as usual, then achieved two full steps before having to stop and tell Roman that no, this didn’t mean there would be weekend passes to Prince Rupert or any other shoreline destination with restaurants. A glower and five steps brought her face-to-face with Jeanine Duvois, who looked about to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” Mac asked involuntarily.

  The sudden hush wasn’t reassuring.

  “I didn’t have any choice, Dr. Connor. They made me do it.”

  “Do what?”

  Definitely close to tears. “You won’t hold it against me, please? I know my grades aren’t the best, but I’ve been trying—”

  “Hold what against you?” Mac demanded.

  A hiccup and a wild-eyed glance around for nonexistent help. “I—I helped move the Dhryn into your quarters this morning, Dr. Connor.”