Regeneration (Czerneda) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Mac observed. “We do it.”
    “For three thousand years?”
    “There’s that.” As hypotheses went, Mac had heard flimsier ones. Not much flimsier.
    Meanwhile, she discovered she could tuck a remarkable amount of herself inside her sweater. Human Becomes Sheep—had to be in some brochure. “I take it your buddies at Sencor checked it out?”
    “Mac, were you not listening to a—”
    “Using a scan from their ship in the Chasm,” Mac interrupted. “What did you think I meant?” she asked innocently. “That they’d closed their eyes and clicked their heels? ‘Poof’ go the light-years?”
    “Nothing,” Emily said with exasperation, “from you would surprise me.”
    The familiar complaint was oddly comforting. Mac grinned to herself. “I presume your next step is to ask Anchen for a transect-initiating probe.”
    “ Aie! Mackenzie Connor. Okay, that surprised me. When did you start caring about transect technology?”
    The night you disappeared from Base, Mac almost said. She settled for: “When I started using it.”
    “You’re right. We need to send a probe. Assuming there’s a civilization there, and it’s still space-capable, they can use the probe’s instructions to build a transect gate on their end. When they do, we’ll be connected. They’ll know what happened. Just think of the possibilities.” The satisfied warmth in Emily’s voice only made what Mac had to say harder.
    “I know how I’d react to a transect opening in my system,” she began cautiously. “Not well.”
    “Bah. The Sinzi have made successful first contact with thousands of species. They’ll be able to reassure the Survivors.”
    So much for caution. Mac bristled. “Reassure them about what? It’s not as if we can stop the Dhryn from using the transects.”
    “It’s worth the risk. If there’s a chance the Survivors can help us—”
    “Then the Ro will destroy their new home, too. Do you want to find more victims for them to slaughter?” Mac regretted the words the moment they left her lips, but didn’t apologize. The truth didn’t come in an easier format. “The Ro don’t need gates. If your Survivors exist and have been left in peace until now, it’s only because the Ro haven’t considered them a threat.”
    Unless they were discovered—by someone or something else first. “That’s why the Ro noticed you in the first place, isn’t it, Emily?” Mac breathed. “You were looking for what they didn’t want found.”
    Instead of answering, Emily said, very quietly, “It began with fear. It became obsession.”
    The rain chose that moment to go from teasing random drops to a steady, if light downpour. “Emily—” Mac’s fingers tightened their hold on her sweater, “—you said that already.”
    “I know. It’s the truth, Mac. You see, the day came when I received data from a new, unnamed source. Out of the blue. Wonderful, fresh information. Different from anything I’d seen before—than anyone had seen—about the technologies of that world in Chasm 232, about the planet itself. And because of my obsession, I kept it to myself.”
    The trap the Ro had set for her. “Why, Em?” Mac asked, frustrated. “You must have realized something was wrong.”
    “It didn’t matter. What mattered—” a swift, indrawn breath before Emily rushed on: “Mac, it wasn’t enough to find the answer. I had to find it first. Do you understand? I’d worked on this all my adult life. To see the end—a discovery of such magnitude, just waiting? Oh, Mac, I could taste it. It was mine. My work, my life, my family—my friends? Nothing compared to being the one to do it—to solve the greatest riddle of our time.”
    Mac stood, stretched, and walked to the river’s edge, cautious of the footing in her tied-together sandals, leaving Emily behind.
    “Mac? Don’t you understand?”
    That word again.
    She didn’t turn, instead stooped to feel for a pebble to throw at the dark water, adding its sound to the