Dark Space - Marianne de Pierres [68]
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MIRA
No one on the viuzzas stopped to speak, though some shouted words of warning about packs of cane. Mira strapped Vito into a sling around the korm’s neck. The alien’s night vision was keener than hers and she was exhausted already. She could have asked Trin but she didn’t trust him.
They walked, aided by Tiesha’s light, until Mira begged for a rest. Semantic would rise earlier tonight and for those few minutes when both moons were present in the sky it would seem like daylight.
‘Here.’ Trin herded them behind the wreckage of an overturned TerV. Its axle had broken and the canopy had ripped open.
Mira took Vito from the korm and sank to the ground. She searched Loris’s pack for latte and slipped a proper cleated teat into his mouth.
‘Where did you get that?’ Trin demanded.
‘From the ‘esque, Loris. She believes that her husband is somehow involved in this.’
‘Why did you not tell me before?’
‘You might have acted . . . rashly,’ Mira said.
‘I would have found out more.’
‘How so, Don? Beat it out of him. And his cane?’
Trin took some food from her without answering.
They ate in silence. Mira gave the korm some piol nuts and offered the water bladder to Djeserit. The ragazza had not complained but her epidermis looked pinched and dry in the moonlight. Her tightly pored skin was less efficient at cooling than that of the others.
She nodded gratefully and took the water.
Mira stared into the night. She recognised the Duca’s chamber from the bank of solar arrays along its flat top. The Carabinere office must be close. ‘How far now?’
‘Another hour. Perhaps less.’
She pinched oily cheese from a wedge and sucked it slowly. A pungent sweetness permeated her breather. It was not the cheese, she thought, for the scent had lingered on the edge of her consciousness since leaving Loris’s casa. Now, suddenly, it had intensified and she sensed its danger. Perhaps she should share her fear with Trinder?
What fear? What would she say to him? That she had hidden in a biozoon carrying ginko artefacts? That she had bargained for her freedom with a smuggler?
‘That smell? What is it?’ Trin asked.
‘Trinder, I—’ Mira began with a rush. But the korm screeched, silencing her.
Something moved behind them under the TerV’s damaged canopy. Trin shone his light onto it. A large, rough-surfaced globe lay nestled between two damaged crates, fluid dripping onto it from a ruptured water tank. The water formed no puddle around it—the moisture was evaporating in moments.
Figures came from the shadows to stare at the object, attracted by the korm’s screech.
Mira wanted to speak to them, ask them what they knew. But the globe began to judder and distort. Its movement jolted Mira’s memory into a shocked realisation. ‘Crux,’ she whispered. ‘No!’
‘Che, Mira? Che?’ Trin said, urgently.
‘I know. I remember,’ she cried. ‘Cryptobiosis. I only touched on it at the Studium. Even before when I saw the globe in—’
‘Before? Cryptobiosis? What in Crux’s name . . .’
‘It’s a dormant state in which living things hibernate.’
‘What is hibernating, Baronessa?’ Fear lent Trin’s voice an imperious edge.
‘Saqr.’ As she spoke the name, the globe warped and split. A feeler of dark tubular flesh crowned by a bulbous maw uncurled. The maw trembled as if tasting the air and another rush of sickly-sweetness flowed from it. The globe split even wider, and a glistening, carapaced creature, as large as the korm, with six foreclaws and two hind claws unfolded from within it. Though it had no discernible head, mouth lobes protruded from the tube at one end of its body. Tiny eye-spots glittered in the light, in a semicircle behind the lobes.
‘Saqr? But they are water creatures,’ protested Trin.
‘Then these have adapted. Or have been adapted.’
‘Mira?’ He sounded far less imperious now, far less sure. ‘How can you be sure?’
Her only response was an intensification of the hollow fear in her stomach. Instinctively she began to back away but before she could urge the others to do the same the Saqr lunged at Trin.