Achilles choice

Chapter 4

Even her aching bones couldn’t distract Jillian from the excellence of the Rocky Mountain Center’s training table. Dinner was plentiful fresh fruit and vegetables, pasta and rice and chicken.

But despite the unity of purpose (everybody needed calories), there wasn’t a real air of camaraderie. Even here, the awful risks of their shared venture dampened high spirits.

Holly sat next to her, picking at her meal with mantislike grace. Despite the delicacy of her movements, food vanished from her plate with astonishing rapidity.

“Still sore?”

“Globally.” Jillian glared at a roasted thigh, mentally labeled it Osa and sank her teeth into it. “I think I’ve got a few ideas for the Ice Queen, next time around.”

“She was first alternate on the Scandinavian Trials last Olympiad, when she was only sixteen.”

“Slightly advanced, isn’t she?”

“One word for it. Bet she suckered you into talking to her.”

Jillian glowered, and Holly laughed heartily. “Yeah, I knew it. I heard some rumors about how she switched from Scandinavia to North America Agricorp so easily.”

Jillian searched the room until she found Osa, sitting in the midst of a group of husky young men and women, laughing, attacking her food ravenously.

“Rumors? I thought the Council recognized no national boundaries, and all that.”

“Baksheesh never hurts.”

Osa looked up, locked gazes with Jillian, and smiled expansively.

Jillian broke eye contact.

Holly laughed. “She’s beaten you already, you know. Got you hexed, but good.”

A protest died on Jillian’s lips as a fanfare blared over the cafeteria’s speaker system. Dr. Kelly’s voice broke through the static. Normally acerbic, it fairly bubbled with excitement. “Your attention please. Donny Crawford’s shuttle has just requested permission to land. He will arrive in approximately one minute.”

Every head in the room swiveled toward the windows.

Crawford swept down in an electric-blue float car, the air beneath the car distorted by a haze of heat and turbulence. A ramp unfolded, touched the ground, and three men stepped out.

Donny Crawford, and the usual Council bodyguards.

A sigh ran through the room as he trotted to the mess hall, flanked by the bodyguards, who were themselves minilinked to his security system. Their constant visual inspection of the grounds would be augmented by the electronic and satellite scans of the entire area. They were 360-degree-alert. It was difficult to imagine anything getting through that screen.

The security was understandable. Donny was high-level Linked, a candidate for the Council now. If his area of expertise had been political science or economics rather than the pure sciences, he might already control serious power.

The external door opened, and he was there, haloed by fading sunlight, radiant.

Striding to the front of the room, he was beautiful, by carriage and visage more effortlessly charismatic than she could have dreamed. The room’s strained, competitive air dissolved.

She had never been so close to a Linked before. Jillian felt a sudden yearning that shocked and dismayed her with its intensity.

He smiled brilliantly. “I just showed up a little early. Thought I’d join you for dinner. Looks good from here.”

“Looks better than it tastes!” somebody yelled.

“We’ll see. Listen, everybody-after you’ve finished eating, I’d like to get to know as many of you as possible. We’re having an informal get-together, all workouts and coaching sessions canceled for the evening.”

Thank God.

With a healthy wave of applause, the trainees launched back into their dinners.

Jillian chewed thoughtfully. She watched Donny as he went to the head of the food line, piling his tray high.

“So what do you know about this guy?” Holly said conspiratorially.

“Well, I know he’s gorgeous.”

Holly’s nod of agreement was emphatic. “I wonder if he can be made. I don’t know how much time he’s got. Or I’ve got…”

“Whoa, girl. Back, back. Rein in those hormones.”

“You don’t believe any of that bull about sex being bad for your athletic performance?”

“Well,” Jillian mused, “I’m not saying having sex during training is a felony…”

“That’s nice to hear.”

“It’s more like a misdemeanor: the more I miss, demeanor I get.”

Holly laughed until Jillian had to slap her on the back. It felt like slapping a truck tire.

After dinner was over, they retired to the meeting hall next door. Tables and chairs were arranged in starbursts.

Crawford circulated through the room shaking hands, smiling, flirting, talking shop. Jillian saw nothing overtly peculiar about his hairline…

Beneath Donny’s hair a wire mesh had been implanted in the scalp. Metal strands only a few molecules thick extended into various areas of his brain. They controlled the firing of neurons and synapses, and regulated many of the biological functions that Boost had disrupted. That was Donny Crawford’s way out: as long as he remained Linked, the side effects of Boost wouldn’t damage him.

Finally, his circuitous palm-pressing route brought him to Jillian.

His smile was beneficent. “Jillian Shomer. I’ve wanted to meet you.”

“Yes,” she said clumsily, instantly embarrassed. The only other reply that flashed into her mind was, We’d make beautiful babies.

“Well, I think you’re going to show us something special.”

It was an act of physical control to keep her reply out of the realm of the suggestive. “I’m in fellrunning. Intervals, broken-ground, obstacles, and so on.”

His eyes crackled with secret amusement. “Yes, I know.”

Wasn’t there any place they could be alone? “I hear that you mix some free-climbing into your workouts.”

“I’m looking forward to the Rockies,” he said, breathing deeply. “The air is thin, and very clean-should be a good burn.”

She lunged into what she hoped was an opening. “Is there any chance that we could get together?”

“No, I’m afraid not. There’s really no time.”

She nodded. Gods cannot sport with mere mortals.

The Greek gods did!

And mortals suffered for it.

Donny moved on. As if an envelope of intimacy had ruptured, suddenly she heard other conversations around her, saw other faces. Her cheeks flushed red.

To heck with the rules. Come what may, she had to see more of him.

The sun hadn’t risen yet.

Jillian had been awake since three-thirty. She lay on a tarp, watching the guest dorms through a pair of infrared binoculars borrowed from Holly.

She knew from vidzine articles that Donny Crawford got in his first workout of the day before dawn.

The binoculars put a misty red haze over everything, but through that haze, outlines were amazingly sharp. She wore a thermal warm-up suit to protect her from the cold. Still, she stretched and wiggled continuously to keep the juices flowing.

A creaking sound, a brief glimmer of light against the back of the building, and he emerged.

Donny stretched each leg briefly, twice, as though he had one of those infuriating bodies that never needed warming up. She kept the binoculars on him, let him get almost out of sight, and then began to follow.

So smoothly did he run that his feet barely seemed to skim the ground. He was the best of the best. Even though this was a light maintenance run at an unaccustomed altitude, it was all Jillian could do to keep him in sight.

He headed up into the mountain, up a narrow trail until the path slanted so steeply that it was almost impossible for her to stay hidden.

He had all but disappeared into the vertical face of the mountain when the true miracle began. As he warmed up, he began to hop from one rock to another, with an uncanny, spring-steel leap reminiscent of a giant flea.

Back and forth, with absolute balance, limitless endurance, and explosiveness that would have broken long-jump records with contemptuous ease, Donny Crawford worked into the true heart of his morning routine.

She’d never seen movement like that before, wasn’t sure that anyone outside the Linked had ever seen it.

His true workout was not a fellrun at all. It was a devastating gymnastic display a thousand feet above the ground. He bounced from rock to rock in a dizzying succession of handstands and cartwheels. He spun and leapt, twisted and somersaulted like a circus aerialist gone berserk.

She caught her breath, and lowered the binoculars. And was blind. It was too dark! Was he mad…

How could he dare to do something like this?

This, then, this range of physical capacities that bordered on the superhuman, was an aspect of Linking that no one knew. Her head spun.

She put the binoculars back to her eyes, marveling again.

Why didn’t they tell people about this?

It all changed in an instant.

Donny’s hands seemed to give way. He slipped, scrambled to catch himself, twisted madly for balance. He hit the rock heavily and collapsed.

For a moment she thought that it was just another move, the horseplay of an insanely overconfident acrobatic clown. Then she focused in on him. Donny was curled into a fetal ball, gripping his head with both hands, inches from a sixty-foot drop. In the still of the morning she could hear him moan.

Or was it only the wind? But he was thrashing like an infant, in directionless panic. Something had gone terribly wrong. He couldn’t get down off the rock.

She moved up toward him, choosing her steps carefully. She couldn’t move as quickly as he had, but she still scrambled with panic speed, as if her own life were in danger, or as if she were running for gold.

He rocked back and forth, crooning to himself, his mindless, agonized writhing bringing him too close to the rim of the ledge.

When she reached him he was trembling, his body almost off as she pulled him back by his ankle and held him. He was cold and wet, his entire body quivering as with a terrible fever.

“McFairlaine’s goddamned two points,” he wailed. His eyes were wide and feverish; his voice was a wavering high-pitched song. “Bastards. Bastards. Kill me for McFairlaine’s two points…”

She slipped her arm around him, and he clung to her like a drowning man.

The sun was just cresting the horizon, but there was enough light for them to pick their way back down. Her shoulder and back burned with the strain. Twice she almost turned her ankle, and once they slid half a dozen feet before she caught her balance.

The tendons in his neck bulged and twitched. His face was a patchwork of strained muscle, a flowing horrific mask. He stared at her, still not knowing who she was or where they were. He sounded like an angry child. “Couldn’t be a war if he did something, old bastard. McFairlaine wouldn’t have pushed Energy if he’d come down from fucking Olympus and… just…”

His voice faded as he finally seemed to grasp his situation. His eyes cleared, his face straightened:

Donny was back.

He gripped her shoulders, and swung her around. There were no thanks in his look, only panic. Too much panic to remember niceties. “What did I say?”

She rested, panting. “I wasn’t really listening. I was too busy—”

“Listen to me now. Don’t tell anyone what happened. And forget anything that you heard.”

“Aren’t you sick?”

“No. Don’t tell anyone.” His grip tightened. His fingers clamped her arm like steel prods.

“Are you worried what people might think?”

“It’s not for me,” he said. “It’s for you. If they think you know…” Something terribly urgent gleamed in his eyes. “Just don’t. You shouldn’t have been there. This has nothing to do with you.”

“You mean, you were expecting it?”

“Just… forget what you saw. What you heard.” He breathed deeply. “I’ll go back to the dorm alone. Don’t let anyone see you, all right?”

He seemed to have recovered. He set off down the trail, even making a jaunty imitation of his former confident stride.

“Hey,” she called after him. “You’re welcome.”

There was no reply.

Shomer again. Saturn’s lips curled in a smile. Courage and foolhardiness have much in common. In fact, the difference may be nothing but perspective. Donny Crawford had great intelligence, great athletic gifts, and no courage at all. He’d only Boosted after coldblooded calculation revealed an eighty-seven percent chance of winning triple gold.

Her emotional attachment to Crawford implied vulnerability, lack of control, and unpredictability. Any of which, in the right situation, could be of use.

Besides, she amused him.

The old bastard?

If she only knew.

For .24 seconds he considered her, and Crawford, and the idiot McFairlaine and the implications of Energy’s actions. They had been predictable, and within context even reasonable, but McFairlaine needed perspective.

Could McFairlaine be Feral? Sometimes one of the Linked, drunken with power, might step across an invisible line. To be Linked meant not only power in the external world, but growing control over your every mental process and sensation. Easy to sink into catatonic indolence or solipsistic power fantasies. To go Feral.

Saturn had to consider possibilities: an embolism for McFairlaine, or perhaps a lethal power surge. The extreme irony of that approach appealed to Saturn.

Not yet. Monitor McFairlaine. Give him his chance for a while.