Rahel wondered how easy the pilot thought trusting its brain to three strangers must be. “What are you complaining about?” She clapped an arm across Keim’s sagging shoulders and turned her in a generally westward direction. “You and the Greens say you want to rescue this planet. Well, it’s time you got up close and personal with what it is you want to save.”
Seven hours, sixteen minutes, and one lost skinsuit shoe later, they mounted the steps of the Startide Hotel.
Rahel lifted her head to squint up the long stone stairs ahead of them, but could only summon enough energy to sigh. Beside her, Paval placed his foot on the first step and said wearily, “This is going to hurt.”
As if she had a pain threshold left to worry about.
Bugs, stench, and cool suck-mud had leached out every micron of vitality she had in the last seven hours. Now, the very business of lifting her feet from one step to the next took more concentration than she usually expended on cell titers, and sandy, mud-freckled footprints followed them up the stairs as they climbed. Rahel’s eyes hurt from the endless glare off the Odarkan’s surface, her throat hurt from coughing against the stink of rotten vegetation, and her legs hurt more than she could have imagined from high-stepping through the root-tangled mud. She’d been privately thrilled to have Keim struggling along with them—the reporter had given Rahel the excuse of occasionally calling a halt to let Keim catch up and get her breath. Rahel had done this at first because she really didn’t want Keim expiring of heat stroke a million kilometers from nowhere. After a while, though, she stopped whenever her aching thighs couldn’t stand pulling up against another step, and only said she was worried about the reporter. Neither of the others questioned her, but she had a feeling she wasn’t fooling anyone.
The last hour of so of their trek, at least, had been free of the slough. They’d made better time across the narrow strand of beach, but the unbroken sun and scorching sand did its own brand of damage. Paval’s face looked swollen and shiny where the sun had singed his skin, and Rahel’s shoeless foot didn’t feel a whole lot better. Keim, damn her, was miraculously unburned. It seemed somehow unfair that the reporter would be the only one to come out of this adventure unscathed, especially since it was more than just slightly her fault that they’d ended up stranded in the first place.
Wind, roaring faintly with the echoes of surf against sand, rolled over them without actually stirring a breeze. Struck suddenly with that incongruity, Rahel stopped and looked upward for the source of the blurry sound. She recognized it for distant cheering right about the time her brain identified the swarm of reporters and spybees pouring down the long staircase to meet them. She was surprised that she couldn’t feel anything but dull annoyance at the prospect of confronting them, even with such a clear view of the jeering Greens discoloring the steps above them.
Her apprentice, however, hadn’t yet reached such an impasse. Spitting some oath in a language Rahel couldn’t identify, Paval scrambled toward the crowd of Greens at what would probably have been a run on any other day. Rahel watched him pound his way upward, his hands grabbing the steps ahead of him as if resorting to all-fours could hurry him, and found herself faintly envious of his youthful vigor. Even if he was expending it on a stupid display of male ego. Reporters scattered to let him through without so much as interrupting their shouted question.
“You probably oughta stop him,” Keim commented drily when she finally trudged up alongside Rahel. The reporter sat with a weary groan, obviously not planning to go any farther.
Up top, Paval dove into the knot of Greens amidst a crescendo of media enthusiasm, disappearing beneath the resultant tumble. A burst of irate shouting marked his arrival.
“Yeah,” Rahel sighed, glancing back at Keim. “Probably.” Then she started upward at the same pace as before, keeping tabs on the fight by the number and color of epithets raining down around her as she climbed.
Not surprisingly, hotel security beat her to the brawl. By the time Rahel reached the long plaza, a fashionably tailored contingent of turquoise-and-salmon suits had pushed themselves through the confusion of Greens and buzzing cameras, surrounding the lone spot of Noah’s Ark yellow and pushing him grudgingly toward the entrance of the Startide while the Greens formed a protective clot around one of their own. Even without the shouting and turmoil, the conflict of colors—not to mention philosophies—was enough to make her head hurt.
“Rahel?”
Just the pleasure of walking on hard, level ground nearly buckled her knees. She pretended not to notice Nils squirming toward her through the press of bodies, and tried to keep her ears, if not her eyes, locked on her apprentice.
“Proctor Tovin! Do you have anything to say about your findings so far?”
“Rahel, what is going on?” Nils appeared at her elbow, grabbing for her arm and looking her wildly up and down as though searching for some sign of damage. “My God!” He recoiled with a grimace when his hand made contact with her suit, then had to trot a few steps to catch up with her again. “You smell like a sewer! What happened?”
“Anoxic organic decomposition. I’ll explain it to you someday.”
“Proctor Tovin, is it true that you’ve requested Noah’s Ark to remove you from this safari?”
Ignoring the reporters, Rahel reached past the shoulders of two of the security guards to seize her apprentice’s collar. “I’ve got him.”
“Wait a minute, lady—”
“I said I’ve got him!” Elbowing the guard aside, she dragged Paval to her with a single imperative tug. The young man stumbled, pulled off balance by her hold on his collar, but didn’t try to break her grip. Rahel couldn’t tell if the scarlet in his cheeks was emotion or sunburn.
“Can you tell us if charges can be brought against Mr. Sadena?”
You can’t sue somebody for pissing in his own bed, she thought but didn’t say, then pushed past that reporter just like she had already had all the others. “Hell of a job you’re doing here, Nils.” She spared the other proctor a sour scowl as she worked her way out of the knot of security guards. “Have you gotten past the wine and hors d’oeuvres stage yet?”
Nils blinked at her. “What?” He looked too sincere to even be worth yelling at.
“I wouldn’t belittle Proctor Oberjen’s work if I were you, Proctor Tovin.” Valhanryn Esz, the stringer from Tomorrow Today, snapped fingers to redirect her minicam and narrowed almond eyes at Rahel. “It’s only because of his cooperation that the media hasn’t characterized your behavior as a deliberate obstruction of free speech.”
Paval stiffened next to her, and Rahel didn’t even wait to see what brilliant rejoinder he might produce. Clapping her hand over his mouth, she matched stares with Esz over Nils’s shoulder. “Obstruction?” If she had the strength for humor, she might even find the idea laughable. “Guess what, boys and girls?” she called, loudly enough that Nils winced and reporters half a staircase down pricked their ears. “Noah’s Ark isn’t on Uriel just to supply fodder for your netlink uploads. We’ve actually got a job to do—a very serious job.” She scowled at the Greens cordoned behind hotel security. “These assholes aren’t helping.” When Paval reached up to grip her wrist in both hands, she tightened her fingers on his jaw as a silent warning not to piss her off any further. He let his hands drop back to his sides.
“The Greens?” Nils twisted a look over his shoulder at the activists, frowned at the reporters, then turned a hopeless shrug on Rahel. “What have they got to do with this?” he asked blankly. “Where did they come from?”