Redliners(74)

She lurched into a sitting position. Her muscles relaxed into patterns that didn't stress bruised and knotted tissue. The relative lack of pain was sudden pleasure.

Meyer smiled into the citizen's worried face. "It's just getting from one posture to the other that's a problem," she said, wiping her brow absently. "They couldn't give me the stuff they would've done in a base hospital because then somebody'd have to carry me, right?"

Lock swallowed and nodded. He looked like he'd lost ten pounds since she'd seen him in the ship. After that—all Meyer remembered was a flash of Lock's face as the native convulsed away. It'd been as much luck as Meyer's skill that she hadn't blown the cit's head off with the same burst, but there hadn't been a lot of time.

"Striker Meyer," Lock said formally. Fire lit half his face; the other side was sketched by the fainter, even glow of an electric lamp. "I've already withdrawn my complaint to the project manager about your conduct. I want to apologize to you personally as well."

He cleared his throat. "I told Manager al-Ibrahimi that I'd first acted like a fool in the ship, then compounded my error by complaining like a fool to him. He assures me that no disciplinary action had been contemplated in any case."

Lock gave her a wry smile. "So you don't have to worry about fools running the expedition, just fools among the civilians you guard."

"That's okay," Meyer said. She tried to shift her weight sideways. Staying in the same position gradually hurt worse than moving to a new one. The choice of when to move was a bitch, though. She grimaced. "I'm sorry it happened. I screwed up."

Meyer thought of saying it was the compartment that got to her rather than the woman and the screaming kid, but that didn't matter now. It hadn't much mattered before either. You either fuck up or you do your job. She'd fucked up.

"I didn't understand how quick you had to be to survive," Lock said softly. He turned his face from Meyer. His eyes were on the forest, but she wasn't sure they were focusing.

"When the savages came out of the trees I just looked at them," Lock said to the forest. "And one of them grabbed Alison. And I said, I said, `What are you doing?' and he cut her head off. Like that. And he grabbed me and you killed him."

The civilian stared at his hands, washed clean of his daughter's blood. He began to cry. "You were trying to keep us alive and I didn't understand," he said through the tears. "I'm a lawyer, Ms. Meyer. I don't belong here, and I didn't understand."

Meyer turned her head. "Nobody belongs here," she said. "Human beings don't. The jungle doesn't like us."

She cleared her throat. Lock wiped his eyes with his sleeve, angry at the weakness but not attempting to disguise it.

"Well, it'll be okay soon," Meyer said. "It's not as though we were planning to stay."

Esther Meyer tried to remember when was the last time she'd thought she belonged anywhere.

* * *

When the bonfires flickered, branches beyond the cleared margin looked as though they were moving, but Farrell's helmet knew better. Though—

The natives had fooled the helmets once. Fooled Tamara Lundie on the vibration sensors, and not enough infrared signature to give Tomaczek more than a heartbeat's warning.

Farrell smiled tightly toward the project manager and his aide. Neither of them reacted, but President Reitz paused in mid-breath.

"I was just thinking," Farrell said. "You can't live without trusting something. Even if you can't trust it."

"I consider the day's progress very satisfactory," al-Ibrahimi said, either because he didn't understand what Farrell meant or more probably because he did. "The humanoid attack was unexpected and costly, but C41's speed and skill limited the scope of the catastrophe. Tamara assures me that in the future we'll have at least some warning."

"Yes," said Lundie, a syllable edged with cold anger.

"I wonder if the Kalendru ship crashed and they've been looting it," Farrell said. "I've been thinking about those clubs. They're plastic, not stone or wood or something."

"According to analysis by Professors Gefayal and Bronski," al-Ibrahimi said, "the clubs are a complex folded protein, stiffened and hardened with silica. The professors don't believe the clubs could have been cast. They suggest that they must have been grown."

"But they were animals," Reitz objected. "They didn't have any technology. Only the weapons, and those so simple."

"A culture can have biological sophistication while remaining very simple in the mechanical realm, madam," Lundie said.

"Which is true but doesn't answer the question of how the bodies of three of the twelve humanoids were themselves modified to spray caustic," the manager said. "The sophistication is undeniable, but I remain doubtful that the humanoids themselves are more than agents. We'll have to wait to gather more data before we determine who is the principal."