That’s when Dan noticed the crippled left front leg, the bullet scars along the beast’s muscular hide.
“Whitey,” he whispered.
48
The shape in the sucking shrub thirty meters away might have been a small boulder. The bulk of Dek’s body was hidden behind the bole of an aquajade tree. In the early morning light he squinted, shifted his focus slightly to one side. As if . . . yes.
“See it?” Kylee Simonov asked from where she hunched beside him. She was peering out from the other side of the tree. She’d been the one to spot the thing, having picked it out through a mere gap in the dense growth. That she’d seen it at all amazed him.
“Kind of that rounded shape,” Dek told her.
“That’s it. Now, on the left, you see that pointed part? Sort of blends into the branches? Notice how it’s not moving like the rest of the plant?”
“I do.”
“You want to put your bullet back where that pointed part merges into the rest of the body. That’s actually the back of the head and neck.”
Dek carefully eased his Holland & Holland hunting rifle up to his shoulder. Braced it against the trunk of the aquajade to steady his aim and sighted through the optic. Sure enough, the IR gave him a complete rendering of the fastbreak. Dek placed his point-of-impact dot on the thing’s . . . well, neck. As the dot settled, he caressed the trigger.
The pop of the bullet leaving the rails at fifteen hundred feet per second was surprisingly mild. But then he’d dialed down the velocity for such a close shot. The Holland & Holland could accelerate a bullet as fast as eighteen thousand feet per second. Assuming one really wanted to blow a hole in something. The down side was horrendous shoulder-pounding recoil, and the powerpack would have to be ejected and replaced after three such hyper shots.
At the impact, he watched the fastbreak explode from the bush, make a fantastic leap, and collapse on the ground. As it did, the shrub thrashed its branches, irritated by the disturbance.
“Good shot,” Kylee told him. “But you’ve got to hurry. See how it’s over by that claw shrub? The roots will have your fastbreak in another thirty seconds. And once they do, you don’t want to try and wrestle it back. You’ll end up being sliced clear to the bone.”
Dek cycled another bullet into battery, rose, and trotted out to the fastbreak. Yep, the roots were squirming in the thing’s direction. He picked it up, awed by the weight, by the warm limpness of the body.
My God. I just killed something.
The sense of elation faded into a feeling of unease. He stared thoughtfully at the beautiful creature. The soft hide was covered with a sort of feathery pelage that now took on a sheen of color—like oil made rainbow patterns on water. How did it do that? What passed for blood was leaking from the bullet wound, splattering red-brown on the soil. The three eyes in the triangular head were already sightless, growing dim.
This creature, this living thing, had been happily going about its business. Had thought itself hidden, without a care. And from out of nowhere its life was suddenly blown out of its body by a carnivorous monster from a planet thirty light-years away. Where was the justice in that?
Kylee propped callused hands on her young hips. She was giving him a thoughtful appraisal. The kid was supposedly thirteen, just entering that period of transition from a girl to a young woman. The changes in her body were evident. If she continued the way she was, she’d be stunning. Except for her alien-blue eyes, the almost triangular cheekbones. And her legs—maybe because of a growth spurt—appeared a bit too long for the rest of her body.
Not exactly an everyday blonde blue-eyed northern European kind of girl, she exuded a sense of danger, of otherness. From the moment he’d made her acquaintance the night before, he’d wondered if she wasn’t as likely to stick a knife in his guts as give him a smile.
“It’s called hunter’s remorse,” she told him. “Instead of torturing yourself for taking a life, blame it on the universe. It’s how being alive works. Something has to die for something else to eat. Same on Donovan as it is on Earth. Maybe more so here.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because on Donovan, it’s how information as well as sustenance is transmitted. TriNA is ingested, passes through the gut wall, and is incorporated into another organism. Pretty tidy actually. But that means if you want access to information, as well as nutrients, you have to eat it. Take quetzals. Among them cannibalism is an expected part of the life cycle. You want to know how to hunt chamois? Eat one of your elders who excels at hunting chamois.”
“That’s . . . um, unsettling.” And hewed too closely to the crap trap the Unreconciled claimed to believe. He studied the fastbreak, noticed how the stripes and shadows on its hide were fading to brown. So amazing that everything on Donovan changed colors.
“Come on,” she told him. “We need to get your kill back and cut it up. It will be lunch.” With that she turned her steps down the trail toward the farmstead.
Dek followed, careful—as he’d been instructed—to put his feet where she did, to pay attention.
“I really appreciate you taking me out hunting this morning. I’ve never done this before.”
She gave him the slightest twitch of the shoulders. “I wanted to see how stupid you were.”
“I . . . see.” Which, of course, he didn’t.
“Talina’s my friend.”
The way she said it, Talina was a lot more than that.
“I really appreciate her bringing me out here.”
“Yeah, I know you do.”
“Oh?”
She shot him a knowing look over her shoulder. “You’re way more interested in her than just as a friend.”
“I am?”
“You give her more eye contact, heartbeat changes, pupils dilate. Your smell goes more musky. Sexual interest. Male attraction. The hormones are working.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Yeah, you’re probably only partially aware. That over-civilized part of you has spent most of your life trying to keep the limbic system under control.”
“Listen, I don’t know where you get all this, but I—”
“Watch out for that blue nasty. Step wide.”
He did, realizing his attention had wandered. Amazed at the same time that she’d known he’d strayed from her path even though he was behind.
“What about me being stupid?” he asked. “I didn’t understand that.”
“The last time I got stuck with soft meat, it was Dortmund Short Mind. He was a professor and about the most stupid man alive. Letting him live was a mistake. He ended up killing Trish through gross incompetence, and that broke Talina’s heart. If I had let the quetzals eat him, the world would have been a lot better place.” A beat. “Though it might have been an act of malicious injustice to the Rork quetzals.”
The way she said it, so matter of fact, sent a shiver down Dek’s back. “Remind me not to be stupid.”
“You pay attention. That’s more than I expected. I can see what Talina likes about you.”
That caught his interest. “She likes me? She seems kind of standoffish.”
“She’s waiting to be disappointed.”
“She tell you that?”
“Didn’t need to.” Kylee pointed to her head. “Part of her is in here. I’ve got a lot of her memories. Her thoughts.”
“You’ve shared molecules,” Dek guessed, shifting the fastbreak to his other shoulder. The damn thing was heavy. His muscles were still adapting. He didn’t want to start panting. Not in front of Kylee. The need to make a good impression had become a great deal more important.
“Yeah.” She fixed her attention on one of the aquajades, slowed. “Changes the way you think.”
She held up a hand, head cocking as she stopped in the trail. Around them, the chime was rising and falling, the music slightl
y different than what he’d grown used to outside Port Authority.
“Something’s wrong,” she told him. “We need to make time. Hand me the fastbreak.”
He did, unsure of what might be wrong. All he could hear was the background of chime, the faint whisper of the morning breeze in the aquajade and chabacho leaves.
“Got to hurry now.” She flipped the fastbreak’s body over her shoulder like it was a sack of cloth. “Concentrate, Dek. Do as I do. Follow me. Footprint for footprint. If I veer wide, so do you.”
“Got it.”
“That will be an uncommon change from the usual soft meat.”
And then she was off, seeming to float as she trotted effortlessly along the winding path.
Concentrate. Don’t be stupid.
Within a hundred meters, he was panting and staggering. His Holland & Holland, not weighing more than four kilos, had started to feel more like a bar of lead.
Under his breath, he whispered, “Oh, Dek, what have you gotten yourself into?”
That’s when the sound of the approaching airtruck finally penetrated his thoughts.
49
The dark corridor reeked of something more than just a dead ship. A presence filled it. Something Galluzzi couldn’t quite manage to comprehend—a quality that seemed to slip off at a ninety-degree axis from reality. That it did so at the very instant Galluzzi began to grasp its essence made it even crazier.
“Where are the lights?” Galluzzi tried to keep the panic from his voice.
“The Turalon crewmen supposedly fixed them. Not up to their usual standards.”
When Shig shone his light down the corridor, Galluzzi would have sworn that something devoured the photons. As bright as the beam was, it should have penetrated more than just a mere ten or fifteen meters. Light didn’t disappear that way; that it did here was plain unnatural.
Shig added, “I don’t think their hearts were in any of the repairs. Hard to concentrate when you’re constantly looking over your shoulder. I suspect only fear of Supervisor Aguila’s wrath enabled them to patch up the few systems they did. Get the ship stabilized . . . and get the hell off. Workmanship wasn’t a priority when things were sneaking in at the edges of their vision.”
“I’m creep-freaked enough to understand where they were coming from,” Galluzzi said through an exhale. “Next time something touches me, I’m out of here.”
He kept wanting to ask the ship for light, for air, for an explanation as he would aboard Ashanti.
They chopped the ship’s AI out with cutting torches, he reminded himself.
Shig continued to plod forward, his light a truncated cone of reality in the dark insanity that was Freelander.
“I saw her,” Galluzzi whispered. “Freelander. In the yards outside Transluna. They were fitting her structural members. Just the rude skeleton that would become this ship. I remember how amazed we all were. Knowing that we were on the leading edge of ever bigger and better ships.”
And now she has come to this.
Shig stopped at a hatch. Then he turned, shining his light past Galluzzi and back the way they’d come. “Consider this: We’re looking at the transportees’ deck. All this black and empty space. They voided this deck. Five hundred people suffocated here, most of them in their bunks. Then they turned off the heat. Let them all freeze. Think of that. Five hundred corpses, frozen solid. An entire deck as a deep freeze.”
Given the difficulty with which Galluzzi managed to swallow, someone might have jammed a knotted cloth into the bottom of his throat. He stared back into the depths, tried to imagine the frozen corpses, eyes frosted white, lips pulled back from teeth that glinted with icy crystals.
The voice beside Galluzzi’s ear whispered, “. . . wasn’t but two days ago when Melanie . . .”
Galluzzi whirled, threw up his arm, crying out. “Get away!”
Shig flashed his light back. “Hear something?”
“A woman. Whispered something about two days ago. Melanie something.”
“If you want, you can look her up on the transportee manifest. That, or search long enough, you’ll find her name on the wall.”
“What wall?” Galluzzi put a hand to his heart, trying to still it as the shadows closed in around him. He could feel them. Kept turning his head, trying to see behind him, fearful of another touch like the one he’d felt outside the shuttle bay.
“You’ll see. This way.” Shig cycled the hatch manually, opened it to a corridor where the lights flickered on. The panels glowed in what Galluzzi would have called malaria yellow and cast a urine-colored tone on the corridor that led to the Crew Deck.
But the walls . . . Galluzzi tried to understand. Dark, as if poorly covered with...what? Scribbling? Scrawling?
“That’s writing.” He bent to peer at the looping script. Layers and layers of it. Sentences written over sentences. Thousands upon thousands, until the original meaning was hidden in a mass of looping black ink.
“We’ve never bothered to scry them all out, given the overwriting, but one of the most frequent is ‘The exhalation of death is the breath of life. Draw it fully into your lungs.’ My personal favorite is: ‘The fingers of the dead wind through our bodies, stroke our hearts, and caress our bowels.’ I’ve always wondered if it was metaphor or factually derived.”
Galluzzi stepped warily along the corridor, awed by meter after square meter, the countless layers of overwriting covering walls, ceiling, and floor. He finally saw a legible line that read: “I am vacuum. A cloud of emptiness. I am vacuum. A cloud of emptiness. I am vacuum . . .” and then it was submerged in a tangled chaos of overwritten lines.
“How many days . . . No, how many years did they dedicate to this?”
I am reading the ravings of the long dead.
His hair was on end again, a tremble in his muscles. Every fiber of his body wanted to turn, chase pell-mell back through the dark corridor and to the shuttle. To be rid of this . . .
He jerked to the side, sure that something had just passed him. A faint image of a human. It vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
“Did you see that?”
“No.” Shig told him. “But I don’t believe you’ve glimpsed the bits of movement I have, either. One seemed to appear out of your right side, only to evaporate. Your only response at that instant was a slight flinch.”
“They lived in here for one hundred and twenty-nine years?”
“Correct.” Shig ran his fingers over the black mass of scrawl, as though it were braille. “They are writing to the dead. This hallway was the only one they left unsealed. Through this door, they brought the bodies, one by one, over the years. Carried them right through here before dropping them into the hydroponics.”
Galluzzi endured a flashback. Saw again the stripped and broken human bones sent down the chute from Deck Three to find their ignominious end in Ashanti’s hydroponics.
“We are all monsters,” he whispered.
“Perhaps. Among other things. All of which makes the study of humanity so engrossing, if not particularly illuminating.”
Shig fought off a shiver, turning his steps forward. Took a companionway up, having to turn his flash on again.
Then they stepped out on the Command Deck where again the lights came on with that off-putting urine-yellow glow.
“It’s the light in this place,” Galluzzi growled. “Like it’s sick.”
“Captain Torgussen has a theory. When Vixen puts her sensors on Freelander, it’s as if the ship is still tied to wherever it went on the ‘other side.’ They think it’s leaking particles, photons, energy and what have you, back into that universe.”
“That’s . . .” But no, apparently it wasn’t impossible. “My God, Shig, what happened to these people?”
“Mass murder. What they believed was an eternity trapped aboard Freelander. And, well, I
want you to see this.”
“Crew’s mess, isn’t it?” He stepped through the hatch as Shig shone his light into the room’s center.
For a long moment, Galluzzi squinted, trying to make sense of the dome-like structure in the exact center. Some sort of yurt, or cupola. Rounded on the top, perhaps two meters across, two-and-a-half tall at the peak. But what was the lattice-like dome made of? He couldn’t place the rickety looking materials.
Shig slapped a palm to the wall, and dim lights flooded the two-story room with a faint glow that cast eerie shadows across the scraped and dirty floor.
“Holy shit.” Galluzzi fought for breath.
Bones. The whole damn thing is made of bones.
It put Batuhan’s carved throne to shame as a mere pipsqueak’s mockery.
Galluzzi felt himself pulled, almost staggered his way to the front of the thing. Stared in disbelief at the incredible artistry. Vertical femora held up the walls. Then came the lines of columnar shin and arm bones, the rows of staring skulls. Thousands and thousands of bones.
“Where did they get so many? My God, there must be hundreds of people here.”
“All of them.” Shig stopped beside him, rubbing the backs of his arms. “Even the last one.”
Galluzzi followed the nod of Shig’s head to where the wasted skeleton lay in the doorway. “How come they left that one lying there?”
“Because she was the last. There was no one to wire her bones into the temple.”
50
Talbot clutched Dya’s body close to his chest as she wrapped her arms around him. Whimpering and sobbing, she buried her head in his neck. The surrounding cavern was blotted with shadow where the weak light of the flash high above didn’t penetrate.
“Hey, it’s all right,” he crooned, petting her hair.
“Damn it! What’s happening down there?” Aguila’s voice thundered from above.
“We’re all right,” Talbot called back. “I caught her. Dya’s fine. But, hey, you guys might get down here. It’s pitch fucking black.”
Unreconciled Page 30