Damocles (35 page)

“What’s happening?” Hark asked, or maybe it was The Searcher. Loul didn’t listen but ran ahead, trying to catch up with Meg, who was being held by the leader. He held her in his dark hands, gripping the edges of her arms, shaking her hard, snapping her head back.

“Did you have a good time, Meg?” Wagner grabbed her by the shoulders. She could feel the strength in his hands. “Did you get some shopping done? Maybe stop for lunch? Did you make some new friends?”

“Captain, what? I told Cho. I just went to see Didet before—”

He stopped shaking her, holding her still and very close to his face. “Before what? Before we left? You shouldn’t have hurried, Meg. Looks like you’re going to have plenty of time to see the sights. We all are. All the time in the world.”

They heard Jefferson grunt as the Dideto engineer tackled him. The wrench flew from his hands and landed near Cho’s feet. Cho didn’t move; he just stayed where he sat, legs crossed, elbows on his knees, eyes down. Jefferson used leverage and rage to dislodge himself from the heavy Dideto wrestling with him. When he saw Meg, he stopped.

“You.”

With one word, Meg felt her knees threaten to buckle. The look in his eyes, the sound of that one word slipping from his lips made her wish that he’d punched her in the face instead.

“Will somebody explain to me what’s going on?”

Jefferson spat on the ground, turning away from her. Wagner pulled in a deep breath and blew it out noisily. When he looked into Meg’s face, he had a tighter rein on his emotions.

“The crystal is dying.”

“But Aaronson said—”

“Aaronson said the crystal needs an injection of Class IV silicates, which we cannot find.”

Meg tried to let the message sink in, but the words jumbled up in her brain, dropping in broken, unconnected pieces. “Aaronson. She’s coming down?” Wagner shook his head. “But she has to. She’ll…if she stays…”

“Yeah.” Wagner’s shoulders drooped. “She won’t abandon the ship.”

Prader looked up from the toolbox she’d been staring into, pointedly not looking at Meg. “It’s a deep-space thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

“It’s a ship thing,” Jefferson said. “So we’re pretty much in the minority in understanding that little bit of knowledge.” His Galen drawl rolled the words out thick. He stalked away from her toward Prader, who handed him another heavy wrench.

Meg knew she should just walk away. She didn’t understand what was going on but couldn’t stop herself from asking. “Are you sure there aren’t any of those silicates? Anywhere? Did the computer find—”

“Class IV silicates, Meg.” Jefferson shouted, moving toward her with the wrench held like a club. “Officer Dupris.” He spit the words. “It might behoove you to learn the proper terminology if you’re going to be undertaking a mission of this scope. The Chelyan crystal needs an injection of Class IV silicates, a source of which I cannot locate on this godforsaken planet.”

He held up his hand to stop her from speaking. “Oh, there are traces of it. God knows I’ve found traces of it in the rain
runoff, in sediment. Dusty little sparkles of it all over the place, but at this point we need to find approximately enough Class IV to fill the cargo hold and the passenger deck to the walls. And if we found it and if Prader could get the sub to launch with the weight and if the crystal hasn’t decayed to the point of no return, maybe, just maybe we could hump ’n’ jump out of here. But there’s really no point in worrying about that, is there? Because your boys here think they know where the silicates are. They’re pretty sure they know where all these traces are coming from, but they can’t be totally sure. You know why?”

Meg shook her head.

“Because they’re in the ocean.” Jefferson’s voice dropped low as he leaned in close. “Yeah, they think the silicates are on the seafloor, but they’re really not sure. You know why?”

She wished he would stop asking her that. “Because they’ve never been to sea.”

Meg blinked, not understanding.

“You heard me. They have never been in the water. Never.” Jefferson gripped the wrench with both hands like he planned to bend it, to wrap it around her neck. “A billion people on a planet that is seventy percent water and they have never thrown a fucking piece of wood into the sea and thought, ‘Hey, we could float on that.’ Never.”

“Really?”

“Really. And since we have no submersible equipment on the shuttle and time isn’t exactly on our side—”

Meg wasn’t listening. Without her bidding, the sociologist within her tried to make sense of the bewildering revelation. “Didn’t you say the land mass of the planet is an unbroken ring at the equator? Maybe that’s why. Maybe they’ve never needed to cross it. Or maybe it’s sacred. Maybe their mythology—”

“Don’t you dare!” Prader sent her toolbox clattering to the ground with a sharp kick. She ignored the mess as she stormed over, jabbing her finger in Meg’s face. “Don’t you fucking dare give us that protocol shit. Not now. Not when Aaronson is gone. Not when these fucking monkeys could have saved her, saved all of us, if they’d gotten off their fat, lazy asses and looked around their own fucking planet.”

“What are you talking about?” Meg felt her own temper rise. “They’ve got a whole culture, a whole world. So they’re not like us, not exactly like us. What makes us so perfect? This is exactly the kind of xenophobic shit that’s been the cause of every major war and holocaust, the Evang-jihad for fuck’s sake, or have you already forgotten that?”

“Don’t you say that word.” Prader shoved her with both hands, but Meg caught her wrists, fighting the urge to twist them and drop the smaller woman to the ground. “Aaronson lost her husband in that attack. Aaronson lost everything in that, so you don’t get to talk about it.”

“Me?” She threw Prader’s wrists away from her, still tempted to start punching. “What does that mean? Why is everyone pissed at me? How exactly is this, any of this, my fault?”

“Like you don’t know,” Prader said.

Jefferson snorted an ugly laugh. “She doesn’t. She never could.”

Wary confusion overrode anger and Meg stiffened. “Don’t understand what?”

Cho spoke up. “Drop it, you two.”

“Drop what?”

Prader stepped in close enough for Meg to smell the motor oil in her hair. She looked up into Meg’s face with cold eyes. “You should never have been allowed on this mission. You have no idea how the crystal works.”

“Can it, Prader,” Wagner said, his voice tired. “Leave it alone.”

“No, tell me.”

“It knew.” The smaller woman nodded as she spoke. “It knew all along that you didn’t want to be there. It knew you hated space. We all knew. We all knew how much you hated the black and how much you hated being out deep. And if we knew it, you can bet your ass the crystal knew it too.”

Meg waited for any of this to make sense. When Prader said nothing more, she shook her head. “You have got to be kidding me. You think I caused the crystal to die? You think it read my mind and lost its will to live because I don’t jump up and down and stick my hand down my pants every time we leave orbit? It’s a propulsion crystal. It’s a chemical reaction, not a mood ring. And you call these people stupid?”

She didn’t think it was possible for Prader to get any closer but the smaller woman did, stepping so close to Meg that their shirts rubbed against each other. Meg couldn’t believe any of this, couldn’t believe she stood toe-to-toe with the engineer, seconds away from a fistfight over something so incredibly stupid. When Prader’s arm shot up, Meg drew back her own arm, ready to defend herself. Instead of hitting her, however, Prader snatched the chain around Meg’s neck, whipping her hand back and snapping the old clasp. She leaped back, taunting Meg with the locket dangling from her wrist.

“Give me that!” Meg’s mouth went dry.

“Tell me something. Tell me the truth.” Prader swung the locket, turning her body to keep it out of reach as Meg lurched for it. “In your heart of hearts, tell me you didn’t want to stay here. Tell me you haven’t been dreaming of spending the rest of your miserable life on this dry rock chitchatting with your little boyfriend, never having to step foot into the
Damocles
again. Tell me the truth, Meg.”

“Give me that locket or I swear to God, Prader, I’ll kill you.”

“Who’s in the locket, huh, Meg? A boyfriend? A girlfriend?”

“Knock it off, Prader,” Cho warned, rising to his feet. “Give her the locket.” But Prader ignored him, dancing backward, keeping her arm and the locket out of Meg’s desperate reach.

“Is it Mommy and Daddy? Is that what it is? Mommy and Daddy who didn’t love you enough, who weren’t proud of you and made you run away to try to be a big shot? What did they do, Meg? Huh? Did they fight all the time and make you be the little peacemaker?”

Meg could hardly see through the tears that rose up as she jumped and clawed for the other woman’s hand. “Shut your mouth, Prader.”

“Shut it? But that’s not what you want, is it? That’s not what you do. You talk. You talk and talk and get other people to talk so that everybody is talking and talking and everybody’s friends. Right? Because we’re all supposed to be friends. We’re all supposed to like each other and respect each other and be interested in each other because everyone has a story. Isn’t that what you said to me once? Everyone has a story.”

“Prader, please,” Meg sobbed, needing the locket like she needed her next breath.

Prader’s face was ugly with contempt. “Everyone has a story. Even short, stupid, hairy passive little monkeys like these freaks that we’re stuck with.” She hurled the locket over Meg’s head, aiming for and hitting a wide-eyed Loul in the forehead with it. “You got your wish. You can sit and talk yourself to death with them now. Hear all their stories and tell them all of yours. Oh, but don’t bother telling them the ‘Three Men in a Tub’ story or Jonah and the whale. They won’t get it.”

Prader turned away as Meg rushed toward Loul, sprawling on her knees in the dirt looking for the locket. Loul crouched
down in front of her. Tears made her blind and she clawed at the ground uselessly. Her breath caught when Loul opened his fist, the dented locket resting on the tender pink pad of his palm. It looked so small there, so old and battered, that she could only sob. Tears ran off her cheeks as she dropped her forehead against the locket, pressing her weight into Loul’s solid hand.

“Meg.”

Meg raised her head, blinking away the tears to see Loul’s worried eyes. His thrum was hushed and jagged, no longer in sync with his friends or anyone at the work site. Behind him, Dideto crews clustered, pressing against each other in anxiety.

“Meg.” He moved to brush his knuckles against her cheek and then changed his mind. Opening his fingers, he dragged the tender pads of his fingertips through the dampness of her skin. A lock of hair clung to her cheek, and he felt the fine strands tickle his sensitive pads. She put her head back down in his other palm, and he could feel the hard metal pressed between them. The littlest Urfer had ripped it off of Meg’s neck, making Meg chase and yell for it. It looked like a game, a child’s game, but even with the little he understood of Urfer body language, Loul knew this was no game. Something had changed.

Chaos surrounded him. The Effans, Kik and his crew, Olum, and all the work site crews crouched and muttered together, bewildered by the explosion of noise and motion from the otherwise placid aliens. Mil and two other engineers examined the fractured slab of the temple for damage from Cheffson’s blows. The generals shouted orders that nobody listened to, and from what he could hear Po was on the brink of exploding from
curiosity. Loul ignored them all, focusing instead on the delicate knobs of Meg’s spine that arced beneath her thin shirt as she hung her head in his palm.

Feet shuffled, voices rose and fell, and he ignored them all until something metallic crashed close to his feet. Meg’s head snapped up, the small ornament sticking to her forehead for just a moment before dropping back into his palm. To his right, Loul saw the broken frame of a box camera. Cho and The Searcher stood facing each other, the reporter’s hands out and apart as if he still held the camera. Despite his thin frame, the Urfer loomed over The Searcher, hand drawn back up, ready to whip out with that unreal precision to strike anything else the man decided to point at Meg.

The Searcher stayed very still, eyes locked on Cho’s wet stare. “They really don’t like cameras, do they?”

As The Searcher lowered his hands, Cho relaxed, keeping an eye on the man as he folded his long legs down to Meg’s level. Meg sat back on her heels, graceless. She took the round piece of metal from Loul’s hand, her fingernails tickling the sensitive skin, and wiped her face with back of her fist. The ornament’s chain bounced against her wrist as she smeared muddy streaks across her nose and cheeks.

“Meg.” Cho spoke, his voice so low Loul wouldn’t have heard it but for the earpiece he wore. Loul watched with a mix of worry and envy as Cho said words to her that made the water stop running from eyes. He heard the sound of Meg’s name the way it was supposed to be spoken, the way his Dideto mouth could never manage. Cho’s long brown hands feathered across her cheeks with a gracefulness only the Urfers knew, smoothing back her hair behind her ear, running a bony thumb over the fading imprint the ornament had left on her forehead.

Meg let Cho guide her to her feet. His long fingers tangled with hers, releasing the ornament. Slowly and with a precision Loul could only dream of, Cho maneuvered the ends of the chain, his fingernails catching on a release so small it was nearly invisible. Meg watched as he twisted and manipulated the fine chain until he achieved something that made Meg sigh. Cho held up both ends of the chain, the ornament hanging between them. Meg turned and Cho reached over her. When the ornament touched her chest, she pressed it to her, dropping her head, exposing the long line of her neck. Cho leaned in, staring intently as his fingers worked the chain until the two ends joined. When he finished, he put his hands on her shoulders and pressed his lips where his fingers had just been.

Meg looked at Loul, her eyes red, her pale skin blotchy and smudged. Her lips parted and she looked like she might speak, but she just drew in a shuddery breath. He wanted to step in closer to her. He wanted her to tell him what was happening, what that ornament was, and why, if it was so important to her that she would crawl around in the dirt for it, would she not have shown it to him before. He wanted to know why Cheffson and Agnar and Prader were vocalizing so loudly and harshly and why Cheffson had damaged the slab. He didn’t get a chance to ask any of those questions because Po charged in, fists waving, face red from exertion.