No. It’s the suit. My confidence caught on a jagged shard of doubt as I realized even the suit’s internal systems were scrambled. But Natasa claimed its ability to phase was intact, that only its link to the support system was down. I hoped he knew what he was talking about.
I put out my hand, watched it shimmer as I phased it through the surface of the rubble. Just touching the material of the reef sent an electric surge up my arm, straight into my brain.
I glanced back a final time. The space behind me had gotten unnaturally quiet. Every face I could see was looking at me, expectant, waiting.
I entered the land of broken dreams.
The flesh and bone of organic and inorganic materials closed around me. The silence here was genuine, not the silence of held breath; the pressure was real, not the weight of someone else’s hopes or fears. I moved deeper into the matrix, feeling my way slowly, because finding a path through this jumble of chaos and order was different from any reef work I’d done. I’d begun to take the wild unpredictability of the reef matrix for granted … begun to wear the field suit like a second skin. There was a kind of freedom to never knowing what you’d find next, as pure in its way as the rapture that took me sometimes when I encountered enigmas that spoke to me in a voice no one else would ever hear.
But this time the way to the unknown was roadblocked by barriers of shattered ceralloy and composite, barred with molysteel—inorganic materials so dense that they were beyond the phase range of my suit, impenetrable even for me. It was hard to believe they’d been fragmented by an explosion no bigger than this one; that the explosion hadn’t turned the whole complex into a smoking crater. Unless the construction materials used to build the installation hadn’t been up to specs, had been flawed to begin with … had been one more suicidal mistake that Tau had taken for a good idea.
I worked my way up to a fractured slab of ceiling, kicked off like a swimmer into the shimmering jelly of pulverized cloud-reef until I’d risen past it. I stopped moving again, drifting deeper into the matrix, letting its silence and strength surround me, shield me from the world I’d left behind. The reef’s presence had been rattling against my brain like pebbles against a windowpane since the moment I’d touched its face. Now, finally, I was secure enough to open all the windows into my mind. I let my body go slack—emptying my mind of every thought I’d carried with me into the matrix, until there was only sensation.…
The silence was filled with light. I smelled music with every breath; my eyes saw the transcendent radiance of unimaginable wavelengths as all my senses flowed out into the matrix of the reef.
It would have been easy to lose my self then, let even the itching sand-grain of someone else’s desperation that had driven me to this fade away. With an effort of will I stopped the bleeding of my consciousness and forced myself to remember who really counted on the outcome of what I did here:
Joby.… Joby would lose his mother if I lost my way. The investigators Isplanasky had sent to dig out the rot beneath Tau’s lies would never have the chance to tell anyone what they’d found. And I’d never sleep again, if I thought my own prejudice and bitterness had kept me from finding any survivors.
If there were any survivors. I cast the net of my psi out in a slow scan, feeling my sense of control grow as I searched the metaphorical darkened room for the faintest gleam of a Human thought. But this darkened room was in a madhouse, where nothing met anything else at the expected angle, where stairways of complex hydrocarbons led to impenetrable ceilings of ceralloy, doorways opened onto nothingness or walls: a death trap of illusions for any searcher who let his attention wander too far.
But as I worked my way deeper, old memories stirred, memories of the time when I’d been a real telepath—when I’d been good, one of the best— If anybody could find them, I could. If there were any survivors still alive, they had to be here somewhere … somewhere.… There.
I caught the quicksilver flash of a mind radiating pain. I lunged after it as the contact slipped away, followed it back through a storm wrack of alien sensation, not letting go because I couldn’t afford to lose it now, not when I was so close—
There. Contact charged my senses, sent my psi link arcing from the core of my mind to another … another … another: terror, pain, grief—
Three. Only three—? How many people had gone in here? A lot more than three. I didn’t know the feel of any of these minds, had never been inside them, couldn’t tell whether they belonged to anyone I’d ever met because there wasn’t a coherent thought in any of them. Raw emotion was screaming through my brain, and all it told me was that they were running out of time.
I didn’t try to contact them telepathically, knowing they’d only panic. I clung to the fragile thread of thought that linked me to their location, while my mind backtracked through the maze of jumbled reef strata to complete the circuit, contacting a mind on the outside that would anchor me and let me reel myself in.
I found Natasa, maybe because he was standing the closest, maybe because he was the only one who’d wanted me to find him. I felt him recoil as if the contact had been physical. Following the compass of his shock, I retraced my path through the techno-organic maze until I fell through into the open again.
Natasa caught me and steadied me as the suit deactivated. He was still in my head, not by choice, breaking the reef’s spell, demanding answers (—found them?) he was asking. “You found them—?”
(Found them, found them, found.…) I shook my head, trying to clear out the echoes; held up my hands, nodding frantically, as I saw the look on his face. I loosened my helmet and pulled it off. “Survivors. Only three.”
“Three?” he repeated. “Three? Dammit, twenty-seven people went in there!”
I looked down, grimacing.
“My … my wife—?”
“I don’t know,” I murmured. “I couldn’t—” I broke off, feeling frustration crush his grief into anger. I cut the contact between us, shutting him out of my mind. “Are you saying, if your wife is dead, then you don’t care if anybody trapped in there survives?”
He blinked, and the kind of anger on his face changed. “No,” he said. “No, of course not. How far in are they—”
“Just a minute,” someone said behind him. The officials who’d been talking to Protz when I went in gathered around us. Protz was still with them. “What about the FTA’s people? Are they all dead?”
I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what they were really asking. If the Feds had been killed in the explosion, it was going to look bad for Tau … but they might still be able to cover it up. If the Feds were alive, there was no hope of burying any of their mistakes, not the big ones, not the small ones. “I don’t know who survived,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “I only know there are people in there who are still alive.”
“How can you be certain?” one of the officials snapped.
“He knows,” Natasa said, his voice hardening with suspicion. “He’s a telepath.” A crowd was gathering around us, more guards and workers waiting for orders.
“He’s crippled, dammit!” Protz said. “He’s not a mind reader.”
“He can read the reefs,” Ixpa said. I turned, surprised to see her pushing through the crowd. “We never had anyone here who could do that before him. Why the hell did you pull him out of there just as he detected that anomaly?” There were murmurs from the workers gathering around us, but I couldn’t tell what their mood was. Ixpa looked away from Protz, like she didn’t really expect an answer. “How do you want us to proceed, sir?” She aimed the question at Sandusky, including me with a nod of her head.
“We’re doing everything we can.” Sandusky gestured like he was brushing aside smoke. “There’s no more we can do until the equipment is back on-line.” He glanced over his shoulder at the crews still trying to clear away debris with equipment that only did what they expected it to about a third of the time. “That will take hours.”
“I don’t think you have h
ours, Sandusky,” I said.
He looked at me with no recognition, only a kind of disbelief, like I’d forgotten what I was, to be speaking to him like that.
I turned back to Ixpa. “Can I take any equipment with me when I’m wearing a phase suit?”
“What kind?” she asked, looking dubious.
“Other phase suits—three of them.”
“Well … yeah,” she said. Understanding lit up her face. “Yeah, I don’t see why not. You think you could actually reach them? Lead them out—?”
I shrugged. “I want to try.”
Ixpa signaled to one of the workers standing behind her. “Get me some more phase suits.”
“Wait a minute—” Sandusky said, frowning. “You can’t do that.”
All around me surprised faces turned to stare at him. “Why not?” Ixpa said. “It could work.”
Sandusky pursed his lips. He looked like he was barefoot on a hot plate. “It’s too dangerous. I don’t want to risk losing another life in there—” He pointed at the rubble, trying to look like he really gave a shit if I lived or died.
“I volunteered,” I said. “I’m willing to risk it. I can reach them.”
“We don’t know if it’s our people who survived,” Protz protested. “We only have this half-breed’s word that anyone is alive in there at all.”
Sandusky glanced at Protz, his mouth working.
“Excuse me, sir,” Natasa said. “Is he saying that if the survivors are Feds we should let them die, for the good of the keiretsu? That just because we’re not sure who it is, we have to let them die—?”
The muttering around us got louder. “My wife is in there, sir,” Natasa said. “I don’t know if she’s dead or alive. But it’s not keiretsu to bury our own people just because they might be outsiders … and the outsiders might know too much. The keiretsu is family.”
Sandusky’s face reddened. He glanced at Protz again, looked away as workers arrived carrying the phase suits Ixpa had sent for. Ixpa handed me my helmet. I put it on. She passed me the other suits, one at a time.
“Carry them as close to your body as you can,” Ixpa said. “That should keep them in synch with your own phase field.” She bent her head at the waiting matrix.
I started forward, carrying the extra suits, watching Sandusky and Protz from the corner of my eye. Their stares got darker as I reached the broken reef-face. But without my noticing it, without Natasa’s saying a word, a phalanx of guards and workers had formed around me, protecting me from any interference: Keiretsu. I reached the barrier of broken dreams and stepped through.
I let the reef flow into my mind again. It was easier this time, because the anger I’d taken with me into the reef before was gone; easier because I knew that I could do what I had to.
As I let myself feel the reef, I realized that the shining trace of my contact with the survivors still existed, like a wormhole through space. Relieved and a little awed, I followed it to its end without stopping.
I burst through the matrix wall into the tiny vacuole where three survivors huddled under the accidental shelter of a panel of unbroken composite. I heard/felt the shock wave of their disbelief as they saw me emerge from the reef, impossibly, in front of them. They cringed and cowered like I was some manifestation of the disaster, come to finish what the explosion had started.
“I’ve come to get you out of here,” I said, trying to choose the words that would pull them back to sanity the fastest. I couldn’t tell how my voice sounded to them, whether the words were even intelligible. I held the suits up, letting them see what I had, while I searched their filthy, dazed faces for one I knew.
Ling Natasa wasn’t there. I didn’t recognize any of them … but one of them wore what had been an FTA uniform.
“Thank God.…” The Fed staggered to his feet, clutching an arm that was bent at an unnatural angle. His face was gray-white with pain under the dirt and blood. “How?” he mumbled. “Where—?”
I smiled. “Isplanasky sent me.”
He gaped. The other two still crouched, staring at us like they’d been put in stasis. “Come on,” I said softly. “I’ve got phase suits for you. I’ll lead you out.”
Isplanasky’s man took a suit and began to put it on, while I got the woman wearing a vacant stare and a guard’s datapatches into the second suit. Together we got the third survivor suited up—a bondie with a gouge in his face that had probably taken out one of his eyes. He wasn’t any older than I was. I tried not to look at his face; tried not to see what else they’d been looking at all the while they’d been trapped here: a foot, an arm, protruding from the avalanche of rubble. I was standing in a pool of blood that didn’t seem to have come from any of them. I swallowed down nausea, forcing myself to focus my psi for one last sweep, searching for any survivors I might have missed. There weren’t any.
“These suits are malfunctioning,” the Fed protested, as the oxygen processors began to clear out his lungs and his brain functions normalized. He was staring at the garbage readouts inside his helmet.
“It’s all right,” I said, trying to give my words the kind of assurance he needed to hear. “I’ll lead you out. You only have to follow me.”
“Your suit is on-line?” he demanded.
“Yeah,” I said, not looking at him. “It’s on-line. Let’s go.” I held out my hand again, and the Fed took it. He put out his hand in turn, taking hold of the bondie. The guard took the laborer’s other hand. They pulled him forward, carefully, as I led them to the wall of rubble. He came with us, as witless as a drone, but at least he came.
I waded into the reef-face again, leading them after me one by one. Relief filled me as I found the mind-lit wormhole of my passage still waiting to guide us back through the matrix. It was hard enough to keep track of the others as they floundered after me, slowed by their injuries, by shock, by inexperience. I almost lost someone more than once as we blundered through nightmarish pockets of random density in what was for them mostly pitch-black effluvia. I had to remind myself that they couldn’t sense what I sensed, each time I had to double back to keep one or another of them moving in the right direction.
I couldn’t communicate with them now to guide or reassure them; the suits’ commlinks turned everything into unintelligible static. I was glad I didn’t have to listen to what they were saying. I knew what they were feeling, and it was all I could do to keep myself moving through their nightmare toward the light. The journey in had been clear and easy; the journey out was by way of another universe, with a side trip through hell. My breath was coming in ragged gasps; I wasn’t sure if it was my strength giving out or the suit. I only knew that if I didn’t reach the other end of this mental rope soon, none of us was going to reach it.
And then, suddenly, we were through—I staggered out of the reef-face, dragging the Fed with me. The others came through behind him and dropped to the floor like stones. I fell on my knees, coughing convulsively, as workers and guards swarmed over us, stripping off our helmets and suits, leaving me defenseless against the mass of incoherent noise around us, the feedback inside my head—I covered my head with my arms, trying to shut it out.
Someone pulled me to my feet, pulled my hands away, asking, “Are you all right?”
I nodded blindly. He led me out of the crush of oversolicitous bodies. I opened my eyes again finally, to Natasa’s face. Realizing, as I did, why I hadn’t wanted to see it.
“You didn’t find her,” he whispered. It wasn’t an accusation—wasn’t even a question. His resignation pooled on the surface of a grief deeper than time. “She’s gone.”
I nodded, swallowing hard as I choked down his emotions. “The three I brought out … they were it.” I bent my head in the direction of the survivors. “They were all.”
“At least—” His voice broke. “At least she didn’t suffer.” He wiped his face with the palm of his hand, thinking, (It was the living, the ones left behind, who suffered. Joby. His wife was gone, Miya was gone … good
God, what was he going to do about Joby now?).
I didn’t know, and I didn’t know what to say.
The others were catching up to us now. Natasa wiped at his eyes.
I turned to see the Fed I’d just rescued supported by a couple of med techs. I saw him glance away long enough to notice Natasa’s red-rimmed eyes before he looked back at me. “I wanted to thank you—” he said, his voice hoarse with pain.
I nodded, only registering him with part of my attention, the rest still mired in Natasa’s grief. I felt my mind beginning to close up, inexorably, like a fist.
“And I want to talk to you. Now.”
“Sir,” one of the techs holding him up said, “now we take you to the infirmary and make sure none of your injuries are life-threatening.”
The Fed looked at her, exasperated, but he didn’t argue. He glanced at Natasa. “This bondie better not have any unfortunate accidents before I’m up and around. You understand me?”
Natasa’s dark eyes held his stare. “Perfectly,” he said.
The Fed let the med techs lead him away; he looked back once, like he wanted to be certain that he remembered my face or that I hadn’t already disappeared.
I stood beside Natasa, watching them go, through a silence that was as painful as it was long. Finally Natasa straightened his shoulders, as if he was trying to shrug off the weight of his grief. I couldn’t feel his mind anymore; couldn’t see in through his eyes. Nothing showed on his face now. I watched him take something off his equipment belt. He reached out and clamped it around my wrist.
I stiffened, starting to pull away, until I realized that it wasn’t binders. There was a flash of light; a shock ran up my arm. When he took the thing away, I wasn’t wearing a bond tag anymore. Instead there was only my own raw, flayed flesh in a band two fingers wide circling my wrist. “Your contract is canceled,” Natasa said.
I looked at him, not sure whether the pain or the surprise I felt was more intense. Neither one of those came up to the knees of my disbelief. “You can do that—?” I whispered.