Borders of Infinity

upward. He clutched the white pipe, inched along it to a screw-joint. Her thick shoulders beneath his feet moved along under him. Her muscles trembled, it wasn't all his own shaking. The joint was tight—he needed tools—he turned with all his strength, in danger of snapping his fragile finger bones. Suddenly the joint squeaked and slid. It gave, the plastic collar was moving, water began to spray between his fingers. One more turn and it sheared apart, and water arced in a bright stream down onto the rock beneath.

She almost dropped him in her haste. She put her mouth under the stream, wide open, let the water splash straight in and all over her face, coughing and guzzling even more frantically than she'd gone at the rat. She drank, and drank, and drank. She let it run over her hands, her face and head, washing away the blood, and then drank some more. Miles began to think she'd never quit, but at last she backed away and pushed her wet hair out of her eyes, and stared down at him. She stared at him for what seemed like a full minute, then suddenly roared, 'Cold!'

Miles jumped. 'Ah . . . cold . . . right. Me too, my socks are wet. Heat, you want heat. Lessee. Uh, let's try back this way, where the ceiling's lower. No point here, the heat would all collect up there out of reach, no good . . .' She followed him with all the intensity of a cat tracking a … well . . . rat, as he skittered around pillars to where the crawl space's floor rose to genuine crawl-height, about four feet. There, that one, that was the lowest pipe he could find. 'If we could get this open,' he pointed to a plastic pipe about as big around as his waist, 'it's full of hot air being pumped along under pressure. No handy joints though, this time.' He stared at his puzzle, trying to think. This composite plastic was extremely strong.

She crouched and pulled, then lay on her back and kicked up at it, then looked at him quite woefully.

'Try this.' Nervously, he took her hand and guided it to the pipe, and traced long scratches around the circumference with her hard nails. She scratched and scratched, then looked at him again as if to say, This isn't working!

'Try kicking and pulling again now,' he suggested.

She must have weighed three hundred pounds, and she put it all behind the next effort, kicking then grabbing the pipe, planting her feet on the ceiling and arching with all her strength. The pipe split along the scratches. She fell with it to the floor, and hot air began to hiss out. She held her hands, her face to it, nearly wrapped herself around it, sat on her knees and let it blow across her. Miles crouched down and stripped off his socks and flopped them over the warm pipe to dry. Now would be a good opportunity to run, if only there were anywhere to run to. But he was reluctant to let his prey out of his sight. His prey? He considered the incalculable value of her left calf muscle, as she sat on the rock and buried her face in her knees.

They didn't tell me she wept.

He pulled out his regulation handkerchief, an archaic square of cloth. He'd never understood the rationale for the idiotic handkerchief, except, perhaps, that where soldiers went there would be weeping. He handed it to her. 'Here. Mop your eyes with this.'

She took it, and blew her big flat nose in it, and made to hand it back.

'Keep it,' Miles said. 'Uh . . . what do they call you, I wonder?'

'Nine,' she growled. Not hostile, it was just the way her strained voice came out of that big throat. '. . . What do they call you?'

Good God, a complete sentence. Miles blinked. 'Admiral Miles Naismith.' He arranged himself cross-legged.

She looked up, transfixed. 'A soldier? A real officer?' And then more doubtfully, as if seeing him in detail for the first time, 'You?'

Miles cleared his throat firmly. 'Quite real. A bit down on my luck just at the moment,' he admitted.

'Me too,' she said glumly, and sniffled. 'I don't know how long I've been in this basement, but that was my first drink.'

'Three days, I think,' said Miles. 'Have they not, ah, given you any food, either?'

'No.' She frowned; the effect, with the fangs, was quite overpowering. 'This is worse than anything they did to me in the lab, and I thought that was bad.'

It's not what you don't know that'll hurt you, the old saying went. It's what you do know that isn't so. Miles thought of his map cube; Miles looked at Nine. Miles pictured himself taking this entire mission's carefully-worked-out strategy plan delicately between thumb and forefinger and flushing it down a waste-disposal unit. The ductwork in the ceiling niggled at his imagination. Nine would never fit through it. …

She clawed her wild hair away from her face and stared at him with renewed fierceness. Her eyes were a strange light hazel, adding to the wolfish effect. 'What are you really doing here? Is this another test?'

'No, this is real life.' Miles's lips twitched. 'I, ah, made a mistake.'

'Guess I did too,' she said, lowering her head.

Miles pulled at his lip and studied her through narrowed eyes. 'What sort of life have you had, I wonder?' he mused, half to himself.

She answered literally. 'I lived with hired fosterers till I was eight. Like the clones do. Then I started to get big and clumsy and break things—they brought me to live at the lab after that. It was all right, I was warm and had plenty to eat.'

'They can't have simplified you too much if they seriously intended you to be a soldier. I wonder what your IQ is?' he speculated.

'A hundred and thirty-five.'

Miles fought off stunned paralysis. 'I … see. Did you ever get . . . any training?'

She shrugged. 'I took a lot of tests. They were . . . OK. Except for the aggression experiments. I don't like electric shocks.' She brooded a moment. 'I don't like experimental psychologists, either. They lie a lot.' Her shoulders slumped. 'Anyway, I failed. We all failed.'

'How can they know if you failed if you never had any proper training?' Miles said scornfully. 'Soldiering entails some of the most complex, cooperative learned behavior ever invented—I've been studying strategy and tactics for years, and I don't know half yet. It's all up here.' He pressed his hands urgently to his head.

She looked across at him sharply. 'If that's so,' she turned her huge clawed hands over, staring at them, 'then why did they do this to me?'

Miles stopped short. His throat was strangely dry. So, admirals lie too. Sometimes, even to themselves. After an unsettled pause he asked, 'Did you never think of breaking open a water pipe?'

'You're punished, for breaking things. Or I was. Maybe not you, you're human.'

'Did you ever think of escaping, breaking out? It's a soldier's duty, when captured by the enemy, to escape. Survive, escape, sabotage, in that order.'

'Enemy?' She looked upward at the whole weight of House Ryoval pressing overhead. 'Who are my friends?'

'Ah. Yes. There is that . . . point.' And where would an eight-foot-tall genetic cocktail with fangs run to? He took a deep breath. No question what his next move must be. Duty, expediency, survival, all compelled it. 'Your friends are closer than you think. Why do you think I came here?' Why, indeed?

She shot him a silent, puzzled frown.

'I came for you. I'd heard of you. I'm . . . recruiting. Or I was. Things went wrong, and now I'm escaping. But if you came with me, you could join the Dendarii Mercenaries. A top outfit—always looking for a few good men, or whatever. I have this master-sergeant who . . . who needs a recruit like you.' Too true. Sergeant Dyeb was infamous for his sour attitude about women soldiers, insisting that they were too soft. Any female recruit who survived his course came out with her aggression highly developed. Miles pictured Dyeb being dangled by his toes from a height of about eight feet. … He controlled his runaway imagination in favor of concentration on the present crisis. Nine was looking . . . unimpressed.