“Hey!” yelled Arron. “You can't—”
The door clanged shut. The bolt shot home. The daughter moaned, and Lynn finally identified her.
“Resaime.”
Dismissing her aches as best she could, Lynn crawled over to the child and raised her up onto her knees. Resaime blinked at her, obviously dazed. A vivid purple bruise with a black spot at its center spread across her arm. Lynn guessed she'd been given an intramuscular injection of some sort of tranquilizer, and it probably hadn't worn off all the way yet.
“It's good, it's good,” said Lynn in t'Therian as she wrapped her arms around Resaime. My God, what've they done with Senejess? There was no question in Lynn's mind that if they had Res, they had her aunt. Even Senejess would not leave a daughter alone in enemy territory.
Resaime didn't resist the embrace, but she didn't respond either.
“Who is she?” asked Arron in t'Therian.
“Resaime Shin t'Theria.” Lynn smoothed Resaime's ears. The daughter's eyes blinked heavily. “The last emerged of my friend Praeis Shin's first bearing.”
He didn't say any of the obvious; how could they throw her in here without any relatives? They can't leave her here. Our suits are rotting. We'll kill her just by sitting here.
“This could be a pressure tactic,” Lynn suggested, laying Resaime down on her side. “They'll leave her in with us just long enough for someone out there to get panicky. She was … traveling with one of her aunts…”
“No,” said Arron in English. The flat finality in his voice made Lynn turn to look at him.
“She's t'Therian. They've thrown her in here to die.” Arron hunched down like he was trying to guard himself from his own words. “They may bring her aunt in to watch when the anaphylaxis sets in, but she's already dead as far as they're concerned.” Lynn's expression must have been horrified because he drew back a little and spread his hands. “They've got a blood hate for the t'Therians.”
“It's thoroughly reciprocated.” Lynn collapsed backwards. She hurt, she hurt, she hurt. “They are not making this easy on themselves, are they?”
“No. But then they never have.” He flexed his hand and stared at it. Even from where she sat, Lynn could see the white threads covering his knuckles. “Your commander's got maybe twenty-four hours to find us before we become lethal to her.”
“I know.” Lynn rubbed Resaime's shoulder, wishing she'd wake up. “I know.”
Whatever you think about Humans—Lareet leaned her elbows on the terrace railing—you have to admit they're incredible architects.
The apartment buildings, municipal buildings, and small factories on the Ur had a strange, squared-off look, but they had been opened up from their Human isolation to provide plazas, terraces, great halls, and meeting chambers. Rivers and canals cut through lawns, arbors, and gardens. Boats and gondolas floated on the water. Members of the prep team thronged along the banks, arguing in a pleased fashion over who should get which vessel. All the water was deep enough to swim in. There were even fish in the rivers and birds in the trees. Everything was so clean it glistened.
Lareet took a deep breath of the fresh air. It felt a bit too dry, but the temperature was just right for early summer. The cloudless sky was disconcerting, but she felt she could get used to it. She loved it at night, when the blue-tinted dome cleared, and they saw all the stars there were.
It's almost a pity we don't have more time to enjoy it.
She opened the railing gate and climbed down the stairs to the flagstone walkway. She strolled past the gardens full of big fleshy flowers and thick vines. It was hard to imagine that a hundred yards below her feet, there was a mirror image of this city, and between them was not dirt, water, and rock, but conduits for maintenance, the hundreds of gravity generators, and all the climate machinery. The only sign of this underground complex was a sealed hatch set into the walkway. Its silver surface was labeled AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in four different languages.
Similar hatches were spaced about one every hundred yards in a tidy grid all across the city. Each one had a video camera hanging over it, mounted on the wall of a building or strapped to the branches of a tree. These were the only places you could see the cameras without searching for them. The Human soldiers … What was the word? The Marines, obviously wanted it known that access to the maintenance corridors was closely watched.
Which made Lareet uneasy. If this was what they could see, what couldn't they see? The Bioverse managers had assured them they would be perfectly free to do whatever they wanted. What surveillance there was existed to make sure vital systems weren't accidentally endangered, or to guide the maintenance jobbers to a site that needed fixing or cleaning.