Unreconciled

by W. Michael Gear

  With Kylee hot on her heels, Talina dared not take the time to finish the job. Instead she crept around the side of the dome, found the door, and unlatched it.

  She slipped inside, closed it behind Kylee, and turned to cover the hallway with her rifle. Nothing. Just an empty corridor illuminated by a few flickering light panels.

  “Where are we?” Kylee wondered under her breath.

  “Science dome. Probably the last place Batuhan’s maniacs would inhabit,” Talina whispered. “Stay behind me.”

  She led the way down the hall, cleared the first two conference rooms, and then ducked into the lab. Looked to see that no one was hiding behind the counters. Even searched the hood and biocontainment room.

  “Check the cabinets. We need clean jars. Jugs. Anything that will hold water.” Talina ripped open the closest cabinets, finding empty shelves. In the next she found a couple bottles of alcohol, solvents, and a trio of one-gallon containers of nitric acid.

  “Got it!” Kylee called, popping up from behind the counter with collapsible sample jars.

  At the sink, Talina turned on the tap, cupped some and sniffed the water that trickled out. Kalico’s techs had gone through the systems while under Bogarten’s watchful eye. Smelled okay. She cupped it, sucking down handfuls. Waited while Kylee did the same. Now it would save the Supervisor’s life.

  “Come on. Come on,” Talina groused as the slow flow began to fill the first jug. “Kylee. Go keep watch. Be just like our luck to have somebody stumble over that dead guard’s body.”

  “What if they’ve overthrown Batuhan?”

  “Then I just murdered a woman for no reason.” Yeah, right. Deal with that later. “Now, go make sure the coast’s still clear. Scoot.”

  Kylee vanished from the room.

  What if they’ve overthrown Batuhan?

  Talina ground her teeth. Tried not to think about it.

  The jugs filled with maddening slowness.

  70

  The soft sound of a fan finally penetrated the pounding headache. Next was a delightful and cooling mist that settled on Kalico’s skin, followed immediately by a stirring of air that ran down her chest and belly, across the tops of her thighs, and all the way to her feet.

  She swallowed hard, the action doubling the pain in her skull. She hadn’t hurt this much since . . . since . . .

  Her muzzy thoughts couldn’t quite correlate the data.

  “Here,” a voice told her. “You need to drink again.”

  Kalico blinked as a hand lifted the back of her head. A glass was placed to her lips, and she sucked down the lukewarm water. Sighed as it hit her stomach. Then her head was lowered; a folded bundle of cloth served as a pillow. Overhead was a single light panel. Had to be daytime because Capella’s beams were spilling in the window to her left. She lay on a low fold-out cot.

  She gasped as the gentle mist settled on her skin again. Focusing, it was to see Kylee Simonov using a spray bottle to squirt Kalico’s naked body.

  Naked?

  “Hey?” She tried to sit up. The blast of pain in her head caused her to whimper and ease her head back to the folded cloth.

  “Stay put,” Kylee told her. The kid had her head cocked, tangles of blonde hair falling around her shoulders. “Tal says you’re going to feel like hammered shit for a while. But we’ve got to get you cooled down.”

  “Where’s my clothes? Why the hell am I naked? What’s going on?”

  “You’re in the science dome at Tyson Station. Stripping you down to the skin is the quickest way to lower your body temperature. No ice or cold water, so I get to squirt you and Dek down, then fan you to cool you off.”

  “Screw vacuum. What the hell happened to me?”

  “Dehydration and heat,” a weak voice told her from the side. She squinted against the headache, turned her head to the right to see Taglioni, his bone-thin and pale body as naked as hers where he lay on the adjoining bunk. The man looked positively miserable.

  Kylee—positioned between them—turned and used her spray bottle, shooting him down from head to toe. Then she used a flat piece of plastic attached to what looked like a length of broom handle to waft air over his body.

  “My head hasn’t felt like this since I tried to empty a cask of Inga’s whiskey all on my own,” Kalico murmured. Then: “How the hell did we get here? Last I remember was on the cliff. Feeling sick. Ready to kill for a glass of water.”

  “Talina carried you both to the dome while Flute and I kept watch. Muldare made it on her own. She’s asleep yonder.”

  Kalico followed Kylee’s point to see Muldare. The marine was stripped down to her underwear, supine on what looked like a lab bench, a fan blowing across her body. Some kind of grease had been slathered over her swollen arm; from the angry-red color it must have hurt like a bastard.

  “Drink.” Kylee offered Taglioni her glass. The man finished it off. Set his head back on a small duraplast box that served him for a pillow. Then Kylee stepped over to a sink, set the empty glass under the dribbling tap, and returned with a full one.

  Kalico was aware enough to suck it all down. Felt it seep through the empty hollow that was her stomach and into her aching limbs.

  She asked, “If we’re at Tyson, where are the Unreconciled?”

  “Down at the admin dome,” Kylee told her. “Tal and Flute are keeping an eye on them. Sooner or later they’re going to figure out that the woman Tal shot is missing. When they do, it’s really going to get complicated.”

  “What woman?” Taglioni asked.

  Kylee turned, spared him one of her glacial-blue gazes. “They had a guard posted between us and this dome. Tal took her out with your rifle. I wanted to. She wouldn’t let me.”

  “Took her out with my rifle?” Dek’s expression indicated his confusion. “You mean, Talina shot her?”

  Kylee tapped a finger to her forehead. “Pop! And down she went.”

  “Wasn’t there some other way?” Dek asked.

  “She was a cannibal. ’Cause of her, Mom and Mark are dead. What’s to cry over?”

  The cold tone in the girl’s voice sent a shiver down Kalico’s spine.

  Meanwhile, Kylee shrugged, walked over, and started spraying Dek’s body again. “Sure. We could have waited her out. Heat stroke being what it is, Tal, Flute, and I could have left your dead bodies down in that hollow. After dark we could have sneaked wherever we wanted. Stocked up on eats down at the garden, drank our fill from the cisterns. Slipped into the admin dome to get to the radio and sent an SOS to PA for a quick pickup down on the south end.”

  The girl switched her bottle for her fan, wafting it over Dek’s body as she added, “So the guard is dead, and you, Kalico, and Briah are alive. Are you wishing Tal had played it the other way around?”

  Dek’s face had scrunched into an uncomfortable pinch. “Don’t know. Hard to think rationally with this headache.”

  Kalico sighed as Kylee turned, sprayed her body again. She repeated, fitting the pieces together: “So, we’re all in the science dome, and they’re two domes away. Eventually someone’s going find the dead guard’s body. See that she’s shot through the head. Realize where we are. This place got a back door?”

  “Don’t worry about the guard’s body. It . . . went away. Let’s just say that in the end, Donovan got her. Meanwhile we lay low. And yeah, there’s a back door. But you’re not ready to run. So, my advice? Go back to sleep. Tal and Flute are out there, keeping guard. We figure we’re in the last place the cannibals would look for us.”

  “Flute is standing guard?” Kalico asked, delighted by the cool spray on her hot flesh. She felt beads of it running down the long lines of her scars. “What’s he get out of all this?”

  “Mostly he’s fascinated,” Kylee told her. “And a little worried.”

  “About Batuhan? This all goes sideways, Flute
can fade into the forest, and they’ll never find him.”

  “It’s the forest that worries him.” Kylee’s face turned grim. “First, he’d be stranded here. If we don’t take him, he’s got no safe way back to his lineage. Normally that would be bad enough, because he’d be a rogue. The local lineages would hunt him down. Try and kill him.”

  “He didn’t worry about that when he came here?”

  “Sure. But it was only to pick up Mom and Dad and fly out. He wouldn’t have been on the ground for more than a couple of hours at the most. When the airtruck was destroyed, Flute went on alert. Figured the local lineages would pick up his scent.”

  “Did they?”

  Kylee waved the fan—cool breeze caressing Kalico’s body. “That’s the thing that’s really got him worried. Not only did no local quetzals come after him, he didn’t pick up their scent. Nothing. Not even old sign.”

  “I guess that’s a relief.” Kalico laid the back of her hand against her forehead. Wished it would ease the damn skull-splitting ache. Wished she had aspirin. She’d have given a fortune to cut the throbbing misery.

  “Anything but,” Kylee told her. “Flute thinks Tyson has been quetzal-free for years. Maybe all the way back to when this base was occupied.”

  “Flute thinks the people killed the quetzals?” Dek asked.

  “In this mess of rocks and trees?” Kylee asked incredulously. “Humans wouldn’t have a chance at exterminating an entire lineage. Forest is too thick. Hell, Tal’s been hunting Whitey for three years in low bush, and he’s still ahead of her.”

  “Then what’s the explanation?” Kalico asked, head hurting too much to work out the intricacies.

  “Flute thinks it’s the thing that got Mom and Dad. Says he’s got a memory. Something ancient. From the far west. He says the memory is only an image. A sort of black swinging spear shooting down from the sky.”

  “Sounds about right,” Kalico whispered before Kylee put the glass to her lips. As she sucked down the water, her body seemed to give up.

  She closed her eyes, laid her head back.

  As she drifted into sleep, she heard Dek ask, “So, Flute thinks this thing’s hunted all the quetzals? What can you do about it?”

  “It took my parents,” Kylee told him in a voice hinting at rage. “All I have to do is figure out how to kill it dead.”

  71

  Vartan hurried down the hallway, burst through the doors into the cafeteria. He still felt weak, his muscles so sore that he limped. But his rising panic overwhelmed any physical discomforts.

  People glanced up from where they sat at the tables. In a plush recliner brought in for her use, Shimal Kastakourias sat at the head of a long table immediately to the Messiah’s right. On his left, Ctein Zhoa—the last of the First Chosen—served as a pitiful reminder of the Messiah’s dying prestige.

  For her part, Shimal shot Vartan a look fraught with worry. Her dark eyes were almost pleading, as if she were begging for anything but the honor of being the next Prophet. Vartan had always thought her a frail, mousy woman. Her training was as a solid-state board specialist capable of diagnosing and repairing sophisticated electronics, microscopes, computers, and the like.

  Ignoring the plea in her eyes, Vartan went straight to the Messiah; the man had set his bone scepter aside to drink a cup of tea from the garden.

  “Messiah, we’ve got trouble,” Vartan said.

  “Such as?”

  “You remember all those crates we found while searching for the Supervisor down in the basement? One had a laser microphone for listening at long distances. I was down there to get a specimen pole to drag Svetlana’s body away. Saw it. Thought it might be useful given our exposed location. Maybe give us a warning if the Supervisor’s party and whoever was in that airtruck might be sneaking close.”

  “And?”

  “And I charged it. Figured out where the best vantage point would be. Went up to the roof hatch. From up there I could see the whole compound. Figured I’d keep watch as the sun set. When I turned that mic on the science dome, it picked up conversations. There are people in the science dome.”

  “Perhaps some of our—”

  “None of our people are called Supervisor, Dek, Muldare, or Kylee.”

  The Messiah’s lips pursed, pulling down to elongate the hole that was his nose. “They are that close?”

  “They are. From the conversation I overheard, something’s wrong. The Supervisor, Dek, and Muldare are hurt, somehow disabled. Maybe wounded. But, more to the point, Talina Perez and someone called Flute are sneaking around the station, apparently keeping an eye on us. In the darkness out there, they could be anywhere.”

  The Messiah cocked his head slightly. “Perez and the others must have come on the airtruck. Where are Dya and Talbot?”

  “Apparently dead. But I’m not positive. Might be that some creature in the forest got them. Something big. Maybe, for all I know, the same thing that got Mars and Hap. I can tell you this: They are hostile and planning some kind of action against us at first light.”

  The Messiah gave him a sloe-eyed glance. “How do you want to handle this?”

  “They’ll try for the radio. Any kind of action we might attempt against them, armed as they are, we’ll have a lot of our people killed.”

  Ctein flinched. And well he might. He’d had to strip the flesh from the dead bodies of the First Chosen. His companions, friends, and fellows.

  The Messiah set his tea down. “We have the armed drone.”

  “We do. And they have as many as three rifles. No telling how many more if Talina Perez was in that airtruck. And if we try to rush the science dome, she and this Flute person could decimate us with flanking fire. Especially on full auto.”

  One of those cold trickles of fear ran down Vartan’s spine. “Messiah, if Perez has linked up with the Supervisor, she knows that we tried to kill Aguila. Given that she was in the airtruck, she’s been in radio contact with the rest of Donovan’s people. You know what that means, don’t you? They’re going to be coming for us.”

  The Messiah inhaled sharply, the air whistling in his gaping nose. The black eyes seemed to flicker fearfully for an instant, then sharpened into that familiar cunning glint.

  He turned to Shimal, who’d sat doe-eyed and uncertain through the entire conversation. “What do you think, Prophet?”

  Vartan started. Shimal? We are going to entrust our future to her?

  “These people?” Shimal asked. “They would attack us?”

  Vartan sought some cue from the Messiah, got only a blank stare in return. The unblinking blue eye painted on the Messiah’s forehead appeared fixed on eternity.

  With nothing else to go on, Vartan said, “If they know we tried to kill the Supervisor and her party, attack would seem their most likely course of action. Think of how we’d feel if they’d tried to kill the Prophets, or even the Messiah, here?”

  “And you say Supervisor Aguila is wounded?” the Messiah mused, his gaze going distant.

  “She’s being cared for. That’s all I know.”

  “The science dome? That’s just two domes away.” Ctein’s eyes shifted toward the north. “Not more than fifty meters from here. How did they get past Minette? She’s supposed to be on guard up there.”

  “Maybe she never got the chance to warn us. Like so many, she’s just gone. Vanished.” Vartan drew a worried breath. “I’m really starting to hate this place.”

  “What about the armed drone?” the Messiah asked. “Second Will, can we use it against them? Kill them before they can strike us?”

  “Not while they’re in the dome. And don’t forget, that Perez woman is out there somewhere. Probably waiting for reinforcements before she makes a try at us.”

  “How did this go so wrong?” Ctein asked under his breath. “Messiah, what do we do?”

  Vartan
caught a fleeting panic behind the Messiah’s eyes, saw the man battle with himself, win the fight for calm. Ctein must have seen it, too, for he paled. Swallowed hard.

  “Prophet?” the Messiah asked softly. “You have been touched by the universe, as were the others before you. What do you hear it say?”

  Shimal’s frantic gaze darted around the room, took in the people who sat at the cafeteria tables, riveted and listening. Had to see the fear reflected in their faces. The uncertainty.

  The woman’s voice broke as she said, “We need to be away from here. Gone. This place is death for us. Has been ever since that Supervisor brought us here.”

  Vartan would have laughed out loud. Be away? How? What did the woman expect? That they could just summon a shuttle? Fly off to . . . where? Ashanti wouldn’t take them back. The Donovanians certainly didn’t want them. And after they tried to kill and eat the Supervisor, she wasn’t going to be in any kind of a forgiving mood.

  The change, however, in the Messiah was immediate. The man smiled, a serenity in his expression. “The universe does not make mistakes. We shall leave.”

  He glanced Vartan’s way. “Go back to your post, Second Will. Monitor our enemies. Take your rifle. It has a night optic as I remember. You should be able to see everything. If they try to break out of the science dome, shoot as many as you can. Keep them bottled up inside.”

  “Messiah?”

  “In the meantime, we shall make our preparations.”

  “What preparations?” Vartan cried. “To go where? How?”

  The Messiah raised a calming hand. “The universe has brought us this far. Place your trust in it, Second Will. This is just another test. One we shall pass as we have all the others. You must have faith. The universe will not let us down.”

  “But, don’t you—”

  “Have faith, Second Will. Now, you have your orders. I shall call on you when we’re ready.”

  “Messiah, you can’t—”

  “Faith! Now go to your post.”