Free The D’neeran Factor by Terry A. Adams Page B

said with half-hearted curiosity.
    â€œAlien Relations. At sixteen hundred hours. Another session with The Man himself listening to every word and jumping on anything he doesn’t like. I’m not used to operating on that level, Hanna.”
    Hanna frowned at her. “What man?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWait a minute.” Hanna sorted it out. True-humans sometimes used a verbal shorthand that seemed to make up for the vivid images D’neerans exchanged to supplement language, and she was not good at it. “You said the man listens to every word. What man?”
    â€œThe commissioner.”
    â€œWhich commissioner?”
    â€œJameson,” Tamara said patiently.
    â€œOh. I see. Alien Relations. Erik won’t let me in on those meetings, you know.”
    â€œI know,” Tam said, but she left without saying anything else. There was nothing more to say. Hanna had told her all about it: the bitter argument, the truth coming out at last that even Erik thought her not quite human, a threat, a freak to be kept away from important
human
work.
    â€œYou’re lucky to be here at all,” he had said, and that had been the end of it. She had done as she was told. Erik was the captain and orders were orders; the implications would not be self-evident on D’neera, but there were no other D’neerans here. So she had stayed in her place in Navigation, downing stimulants and working endless hours like everyone else, with little room in her mind for anything else; the stimdope she and the rest of the crew were taking had given her no choice, because they concentrated your mind on whatever task was set it. Her head was filled with mathematical symbols that danced around each other in closed circles and ran together until they made no sense. She was stuffed with them and befogged by them, and her baffledcrewmates made another fog around her. Their search went round and round in circles too.
    She wouldn’t think about it any more. She couldn’t bear to. There was no way out of the fog, but at least she could sleep and forget about it for a little while.
    *   *   *
    She yawned and hovered a moment behind someone’s eyes in the command module with its bright displays and telltales and the human beings monitoring a sleek machine whose trillion nerve endings made it a nearly living thing. She drifted, soothed, through the ordinary detritus of humankind, a hundred separate universes of greater or lesser charm, self-contained though admirably bridged. Her tension eased. For after all, though D’neeran she was human, at home, at rest among the—
    Beasts,
said a whisper in her head. She whimpered but the whispering went on without words; she struggled to move limbs that had no strength; she was trapped in the smoke again, and the first flicker of apprehension swelled into fear. The whisper crept closer and called her. Wrong, wrong, no good at all; dark and ashes and an eye like the sun watching pitiless and the shadow looming without mercy, new, new, something new and terrible and that was all she knew, that was all she would ever know but it knew
her.
    I come. I come to you
—
    She heard herself with terror.
N.S. Havock
filled her eyes. Her hand moved toward a key and Roly, who did not want to die, cried, “You’re too good at this!” But still her hand crept on to the last thing she would ever touch. “You’re mad!” Dorista said and seized the dreaming hand but it seemed she had gone on: dust of
Clara
and, yes, her people dust—what waited past that end? The whisper said:
We wait.
    She shouted and the shout woke her up. She sat up shakily, sweating.
    (“But you were saved,” Peng said reasonably. “The Interworld Fleet, wasn’t it?”
    â€œ
Yes. Heavy cruisers. The
Willowmeade
under Tirel
—I
remember
Willowmeade—”
    â€œThese dreams, then. Do you want to die?”
    â€œMe?” she said