Harper, Tara K. - Cataract

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Tara K Harper - Cataract

Cataract

Tara K. Harper

Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the

publisher as "unsold or destroyed" and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

A Del Rey® Book Published by Ballantine Books

Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simul-taneously in Canada by Random House of

Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 95-92016

ISBN 0-345-38052-5

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition: September 1995

10 987654321

This book is for my sister

Colleen Annice Harper with the hope that she might someday call

Special thanks to Detective Bill Johnston, Portland Police Bureau; Mike Fleming and Special Agent John Colledge, U.S.

Customs Service; and Deputy Kevin Harper, Clark County Sheriff's Department. Also, a special thanks to Pam Ore,

Stephanie Hirsch, Dr. Jill Mellen, Ph.D., and Dr. Mitch Finnegan, D.V.M., of the Metro Washington Park Zoo; Dr. Darin

Collins, D.V.M., of the Woodland Park Zoo; Phillip Peck; and Dr. Ernest V. Curto, Ph.D., University of Bir-mingham.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!

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Tara K Harper - Cataract

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!

Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once

That make ingrateful man!

—Shakespeare, King Lear

Gray, whipping rain tore the skimmer out of the sky. The stabilizers jammed; the sail slats became

immobile; the ex-tended wing refused to respond. Savage winds shook the small craft, then batted it

aside. In seconds, the skimmer swung about, then down, steeply down—a pale, speeding spearhead in

the gloom of the gale.

Tsia forced her lungs to breathe against the acceleration, compelled her heart to pound in even rhythm.

Drove her mind to ignore the pressure of her lips against her teeth and register instead the silence of the

computer node that should have been sending its images to the tiny transceiver in her temple. As her

dark blue eyes flicked forward, they caught the last projected images in the navigation holotank. She

formed a mental com-mand and projected it by thought to the node. There was no re-sponse. And while

she watched, the holographic shapes in the navtank faded to emptiness as the flight commands abruptly

halted.

In the pilot's seat, Nitpicker felt the ship go on auto as her own temple link went dead. With a muffled

curse, the pilot watched the control screens fade and flash into manual pat-terns. The navtank had

completely cleared; not even a ghost of a cloud remained in the imaging area. The storm vectors that had

boiled through the tank were now nothing more than empty sky. The sea had become a nothingness. The

shape of her ship was gone. New data—manual data—flickered across the flat piloting screens in

patterns of light and color and text. And at the end of the sequence, the emergency-orbit com-mands

flashed twice. Then they began to take control.

Nitpicker caught the warning with a curse; instantly, her fingers wrenched at the overrides. She did not

look back at the other meres in the skimmer's cabin. Her lips tightened; she hoped five of them were

enough to control the sixth—the guide, Tsia, who sat among them.

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Tara K Harper - Cataract

Beside her, the copilot's voice sharpened as he reported the skimmer's status. "Safeties are coming on-

line—starting to override my screens."

"What's your control factor?'

"What I've got, I'm losing. We're looking at an orbital vec-tor within four minutes—"

"Stall them!" the woman snapped harshly. "If the safeties kick in completely, we'll be shot up and out

like a sneeze." She glared at the screens and punched the controls. Up and out, she thought, and into the

supposed safety of a preassigned orbit. She cursed under her breath and watched yet another screen rim

itself with the purple shades of automatic control. Her fingers flicked faster, as if she could keep the

violet hue from spreading like a virus to the next screen in line. "Zyas, but I hate that color."

"We're going to see a lot more of it," Estine retorted "Ei-ther the node is hit big-time, or there's a pretty

powerful some-one who doesn't want us to reach that freepick stake down landside—" His voice broke

off as the skimmer jerked, shud-dered, and slewed as if it spun on ice, not air.

Behind the pilots, pressed back in her seat, Tsia's fingers were spread against the arms of her malleable

chair. Her hands were not relaxed: tension kept her fingers so rigid she could not curl them into the

fabric. To her left, Wren's weathered skin whitened while his hammerlike hands dug into the flexan soft

as if it were mud, rather than the arm of a flexible chair.

Like Nitpicker, Wren did not look at Tsia—the acceleration toward orbit could hit any second, and he

had no desire to have his eyeballs flattened against the sides of their sockets. He could see Tsia, the

guide, out of the corners of his eyes.

Her face was tight and her hands clenched; her dark blue eyes were almost blank with suppressed fear.

Behind her, and out of Wren's peripheral sight, Tucker's pale blue eyes were steady, and that mere's skin,

naturally white, did not show tension any more than Doetzier's weathered tones. Both meres deliberately

relaxed in their seats. In the far back, Striker, her black eyes and brows set in a blank expression beneath

her auburn hair, murmured to Ames, the brown-haired man beside her, while Ames stared at the ceiling

and muttered to himself.

Six meres; three pairs of softs. The flexible seats took up the center of the skimmer's cabin, so that only

narrow aisles were left on either side. The inner walls of the ship were covered with drab webbing that

held gear and weapons. To Wren's right, the hatch, its edges glowing with pale green-blue light, hung on

the wall like an eye that dragged his gray gaze to it as insistently as a magnet.

Still diving, the skimmer pierced a storm front and slammed into the wind like a bug hitting a wall.

Violently, Tsia and Wren jerked forward before the backs of their softs caught up with them.

"Tight ride," Wren said.

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Tara K Harper - Cataract

His voice was flat, almost expressionless—as usual, Tsia thought—though his narrow jaw clenched like

hers against the pull of the dive. She hated his calm demeanor; hated the fear that grew in herself. And

she forced her lips to stretch in the semblance of a smile. The motion drew the claw marks on her tanned

cheek into white-taut, jagged scars; her short, brown hair swept back against her forehead. In her temple,

the node's metal socket remained cold and blank, as dead as the com, which should have been receiving

flight commands for the craft. The skimmer almost stalled midair, then fell faster.

Wren took in Tsia's whitened knuckles out of the corner of his eye. "Think they'll ever reseal the walls

of this thing with some design other than drab?" he asked deliberately.

Tsia turned her head to stare at him.

He touched her arm, forcing her to swallow her fear with the contact of his skin. "Think they'll ever

reseal?"

Unconsciously, she gazed around the small cabin. There were no decorations, no paint or design to

relieve the dull shades that met her eyes. The gear webbing was made of iri-descent cloth in the same

bland, earth-tone shades as her trou-sers. The flexan softs, each one shaped to the mere who sat in it,

were drab and dirt-toned, as if they had been used too long without cleaning. The flooring was mottled

with burn marks and patch-melts; the walls were pocked and old. The meta-plas—all metal tang and

plastic stuffiness—-flexed and bent with pressure and change, yet held its strength through impacts that

would have crushed a similar ship made of folded or braced alloys and blends. There were a dozen stains

from old crash foam, and the slit windows were dark with that faint opacity that comes from having their

crystal lattices hit too many times with a laze. Tsia's eyes darted from the thicker chunks of repaired

webbing to the two long, thin laser tracks on the ceiling above her head. The craft was not four years out

of the shipyards, but it looked as old as war.

The laser tracks led her eyes forward to the empty navtank, and then to the pilots' cubby. The skimmer's

angle was still steep, but the purple-edged screens had made streaked bands of color across the front of

the cabin. Fear, which grew as the color spread, became a solid chunk in her mouth. She could not stop

herself from building another thought-image to project to the node. But her temple link was still dead.

She glanced at Wren and forced her voice to steady. "Node's down," she said.

"Felt it," Wren replied shortly.

She shifted her weight, and just as the flexible soft caught up with the change, the skimmer hesitated,

tried to straighten, bottomed out, then shot up like a searchlight. Tsia's body hung forward for an instant,

then slammed back. Blackness swam in her eyes. Her slender fingers stretched out along the flight pad-

ding; she could not turn her head. In front, the mere pilot jerked at dead controls.

Estine reported almost under his breath, "Safeties are on. We're heading up."

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Tara K Harper - Cataract

"Time to orbit?" the pilot snapped.

"We'll be rounder in four minutes, fifteen seconds."

"Open the panels." Nitpicker's voice was low but sharp. "Get those safeties off-line."

Estine forced himself from his soft, bracing his feet against the seat while he groped inside the dash for

the navigation cubes, which stretched in thin lines beyond his reach. His fin-gers fumbled along the edge

of the honeycomb board in which the cubes were set

"Can you reach them?" Nitpicker's voice was still low.

"I'm trying for the nav cubes—"

"The safeties," she snapped. "Not the nav cubes."

"There's a gale on," he snarled back. "You need the nav cubes if we're going to head back down—"

Nitpicker's dark hand struck Estine's shoulder and jerked him back. "I could fly this ship blind through a

meteor shower. Now, get those goddam safeties out!"

Behind them, Wren glanced at Tsia's face. It was not the force of acceleration that stripped the color

from her tanned and weathered skin; it was not the loss of the node that pushed her heartbeat into her

temples. Her fear was growing into ter-ror, and he could smell it on the quickness of her breath. He

looked at her clawlike fingers, then back to her jawline. "All right?" he asked quietly.

She jerked a nod, but the edges of her face were white. Cab-in pressure dropped, and Wren worked his

jaw to pop his ears and sinuses. The skimmer was still on atmospheric settings, and full-seal

pressurization was not in force. As the pressure sucked on her cheekbones, her fingers clutched the

fabric of her soft like a lifeline. There was a crowd sound in the back of her mind that made Wren's

voice seem like the buzz of a gnat next to the roar of a tiger.

Cats. Her mind latched on to that feline image. Pumas and watercats, sandcats and tams… Cougar

voices growled in her head as their impressions leaked through the intangible mental biogate that opened

her mind to theirs. She could hear those snarling feline tones as clearly as if the cats surrounded her in

the ship, rather than huddled in the rain far below. She could sense their emotions in the mental yowls

they returned in re-sponse to the fear she instinctively projected. The biogate ex-panded with that terror

and her lack of control, and cat bodies seemed to leap inside her head. Cat nostrils flared; feline breath

huffed in her face; fanged mouths hissed till she choked on the sounds.

"Wren?" Her voice was tight and high. "I can't go sky-side—"

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TaraKHarper-CataractCataractTaraK.HarperSaleofthisbookwithoutafrontcovermaybeunauthorized.Ifthisbookiscoverless,itmayhavebeenreportedtothepublisheras"unsoldordestroyed"andneithertheauthornorthepublishermayhavereceivedpaymentforit.ADelRey®BookPublishedbyBallantineBooksCopyright©1995byTaraK.HarperAl...

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