‘Why? Why so different from humans?’
‘Obviously we are the more primitive life form,’ said the mind.
‘Oh, you poor thing, you,’ said Janer.
‘Of course,’ said the mind. ‘I meant physically, not intellectually.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Janer. He slid his feet from under the cover and sat on the side of the bunk. He removed the dressing from his hand and looked at the ugly wound in which it seemed a blue ring had been tattooed. He was a Hooper now. He had the mark.
‘What do you want to do with… this lost sensory input?’ he asked, pressing the dressing back into place.
‘Return it,’ said the mind. ‘There is still much to learn about this virus and its effect on hymenoptera physiology.’
Janer reached under his bunk and pulled out his backpack. From this he removed a two-pack of brushed aluminium cylinders. Each cylinder was ten centimetres long and three in diameter. One end was rounded and the other end was a spike. He took one cylinder out of the plastic wrapping, pressed his fingernail into an indentation, and a small door flipped open. He used the plastic wrapping to pick up the dead hornet and drop it inside the cylinder. His years of being indentured, and the two decades thereafter, had enabled him to tolerate the presence of these insects but had not relieved him of his fear of actually touching them. He closed the lid and stood. Then he went out on to the deck.
The signal bell from the scooter comunit was chiming, but Keech ignored it as he waited for the last lights to change to green on the cleanser. Shortly after the chiming ceased, he got a message through the audio input from his aug.
‘Message for Sable Keech,’ it said.
‘What now?’ he asked.
‘Link requested from Hive transponder.’
Keech glanced back at the hexagonal box in the scooter’s luggage compartment. He’d almost forgotten about that.
‘Permission for link granted,’ he said.
First came the buzzing, and then the Hive mind came online.
‘Do you have the package?’
Keech replied, ‘I have the package, but I won’t be taking it to Janer just yet.’
The buzzing took on an angry tone. ‘We had an agreement,’ said the Hive mind.
Keech watched the last red light change to green, then detached the cleanser and carefully pushed the tubes back into place.
‘We had an agreement,’ the Hive mind repeated.
‘The agreement is off. I need to return to Coram and make use of the medical facilities there.’
‘You have a problem?’ the mind asked, injecting ersatz concern into its voice.
‘I have a problem,’ Keech said.
‘What kind of problem?’ asked the mind.
‘At a stretch, you could call it a medical one,’ replied Keech
‘Erlin Tazer Three Indomial is with Janer. Perhaps she could help you. I believe she travels nowhere without an extensive collection of medical and pathological research equipment.’
‘So nice of you to be thinking of me,’ said Keech, bracing his hand against the scooter and standing up.
‘Was that sarcasm or irony?’ asked the mind.
‘Probably both,’ said Keech, dropping the cleanser into the back of the scooter.
‘I’m never sure which is which,’ said the mind.
Keech stared at the scooter, trying to decide if he should risk flying to the Dome. His vision was still tunnelling and there were odd squares flicking up in the visual field fed from his aug. A hissing crack interrupted his decision-making process. Automatically he ducked down, only to stoop into a cloud of smoke that had gouted from his own kneecap.
‘You’re not going anywhere, reif!’ someone shouted.
For one long horrible moment Keech could not decide if this was reality or not. The two Batians who came striding out of the dingle at the head of the beach were like so many others he had seen and killed over the years. Then, to his horror he realized he had forgotten seeing these people earlier at the shuttle port. He tried to dispel anxieties about what this failing memory could mean, as he had more exigent concerns: two Batians here — with, no doubt, the other three not far behind.
‘You know, you’ve made our job so very easy,’ spat the man of this pair.
Keech said nothing. He gazed at the woman as she kept her laser carbine centred on him. The man holstered his weapon with a kind of casual contempt. It was the mistake they had always made. They were so very confident in their ability to kill. Weren’t they such good shots? But then it was like fire and ash: fire will not burn something that has already been burned.
‘Who sent you?’ Keech asked, as he had asked many times before.
The man smiled nastily and gave no answer — as before. Keech nodded and drew his pulse-gun from his belt holster.
‘Drop it!’ shouted the woman with the carbine.
Keech raised his weapon and carefully aimed it. Laser shots punched smoking holes through his chest and through his stomach, but did not spoil his aim. He fired once: a black hole appeared in the woman’s forehead, and the back of her skull turned into a blooming cloud behind her. As she staggered back and went over, Keech turned and mounted his scooter. The man just watched this in stunned horror, before thinking to reach again for his own weapon.
‘You forget, I’m already dead,’ said Keech, before slamming his scooter up into the sky.
A wind was blasting the ship along at a good rate of knots, and spray was coming up over the bow. Erlin watched Janer come up on to the deck and gaze about in surprise.
‘Got his sea legs, then,’ said Captain Ron.
Erlin turned and searched for a trace of irony in Ron’s expression, and found none. She returned her attention to Janer as he walked to the rail and tossed something silvery over the side. The silvery object fell in an arc but, before it hit the waves, it corrected and shot off under its own power. Captain Ron grunted in surprise and, when Erlin turned to him, he seemed embarrassed.
‘Message carrier,’ he said, nodding toward the receding object. ‘Used to send ‘em in the war.’
‘What war?’ Erlin asked.
‘Prador,’ explained Ron tersely.
‘Oh.’
Erlin looked away from him as she absorbed that. Ron was nearly as old as Ambel, and it was well to be reminded of this fact. It became too easy to view the likes of Ron and Ambel as relatively normal. Their apparent simplicity was deceptive, as the Old Captains had centuries of experience, and probably had forgotten more than she had learnt in her mere span of two hundred and forty years. She had actually forgotten that most Old Captains fell into an age range in the upper half of a thousand years. Senior seamen came in at the lower half. Herself?… she qualified as a senior, but only that. How easy it was to forget the way things were here. Those of the crew classified as juniors, and whom the likes of Ambel referred to as ‘lads’, were often over a century old. She wondered then how Ambel viewed her. Was she a child to him? Had the anger she had felt at his seeming complacency been seen by him as a childish fit of pique? What — when she found him — would be his reaction to her? Stupid child, she told herself as she watched Janer approach.
‘What message?’ asked Ron.
‘No message,’ said Janer as he climbed up on to the cabin-deck. ‘Just a dead hornet going home.’
‘Told you the fibres clog ‘em,’ said Ron.
‘Apparently so,’ admitted Janer. ‘Where are we going?’
Erlin replied, ‘Captain Drum sighted the Treader heading out for the feeding grounds. We’re going after it.’
‘What feeds there?’
‘Leeches — big ones.’