Dek had been hurt before. Thought he knew pain. He didn’t. Not even close. Fire and agony might have been mutilating his left calf. Tears squeezed past his lids as he clamped them shut. Looking down he should see his lower left leg in shreds of ruined meat and splintered bone. Nothing else could explain this kind of agony.
Dek blinked, remembered throwing himself flat, covering his head. How they’d come, fluttering around him. Wings beating, chittering, squeaking, whistling. The patting and batting of his clothing, the vulnerable back of his neck.
And all the while what felt like acidic fire had started to eat into his left leg. Like burning needles that seared the flesh.
But I didn’t dare move. Not with the flying death hovering, trying to decide if he was prey.
And then they’d flown on, a last few pausing to flutter above him, uttering a high-pitched harmonic of curiosity before following the flock on their way toward mayhem.
Only then had he been able to look down, horrified to see the gotcha vine shooting spines into his leg and foot. He barely remembered the fight to free his leg as he slashed and hacked with his long knife. Or the crawl that followed as he whimpered, cried out in agony, and screamed each time he jarred his leg.
Somehow he’d made it to the caprock. Here, to this bit of bare basalt. And consuming pain.
His leg had to be tattered ruins. But when he dared a glance, his leg was whole. Horrendously swollen, skin pulled tight and shiny as if it would pop open, but whole.
Dek leaned his head back and screamed.
Out of instinct, he reached for his knife. Tried to crush the handle in his grip.
The knife. That was the solution.
God! Yes! He could reach down. Cut right at the knee. Sever the whole calf. Slice it clear off. A body couldn’t take it.
Fucking gods, get it over with!
“Dek?” Talina’s voice cut through the haze.
“I want it off. You do it. Cut it off!”
“Hey! Look at me!”
An iron grip tightened on his wrist. He felt the knife wrenched away as it was peeled out of his trembling hand.
He blinked through the tears, managed to fix on her face where it was lit by the dying light as Capella sank below the canyon wall to the west.
Talina? Here? Yes. It had to be Talina. A whimper broke from his throat as a wave of pain sent him into a spasm.
How did Talina get here?
Through glazed eyes he glanced around. Chabacho trees and aquajade. Sunset. He could barely hear the chime, rising, mocking. He couldn’t feel the rock he lay on. Pain. Only the blasting damn pain.
Rock? Basalt? How did he get to the cap rock? He now lay at the edge of the canyon. Could see it drop off into a wilderness of trees no more than a meter from where he lay. Last he recalled he’d been under the canyon rim. Below the capping strata of basalt. On the steep slope. Surrounded by plants. Picking his way along the vein. Found a chunk of quartz that gleamed with nodules of gold. And then. . . . And then . . .
“I climbed,” he whispered, remembering. If only his thoughts weren’t wheeling and reeling.
Focus. It’s Talina.
Talina Perez filled him with awe; the most exotic woman he’d ever known. Quetzal genetics made her that way, TriNA, or trioxynucleaic acid. The Donovanian analog to terrestrial DNA. The stuff had turned Talina into a hybrid. One mostly human, but her angular cheekbones, the large dark eyes, and the intensity with which she watched him most assuredly had an alien quality.
“I’m not cutting your leg off.”
He fixed on her voice, an anchor in a burning sea of misery. Somehow he got a swallow down his throat. Yes, look at her. Concentrate.
She had the richest black hair. Thick. Pinned behind her neck, it still spilled down her back.
“This is going to hurt,” she told him. Capella’s sunset light had turned her skin into gold, shot fire along the edges of her black coveralls.
Hurt? Too late for that. He’d have laughed if the mind-killing agony had left him any wits.
He screamed as she lifted him. Tossed him over her shoulder. Screamed some more as Talina pounded down the trail. She dodged the sucking shrub, veered wide around the tooth flower, ducked the blood vines with their crimson tentacles, and hammered her way heedlessly across the writhing roots. With each step, his leg exploded anew. Kept bursting, the meat blasting away from the bone. Nerves splintered into an infinity of fire. Time after time.
The world started spinning, his vision a blur of aquajade, squirming roots, reaching branches of green and turquoise leaves blurring as they whipped sideways.
At a particularly hard jolt, pain stunned him. Couldn’t help it. His stomach pumped. Acid bile filled his mouth, clogged the back of his nose. He coughed and coughed, each wracking of his body beyond endurance.
“Stop! In the name of God, just kill me,” he heard some dissociated part of him plead. “I can’t stand this.”
“Hey, Dek,” her voice came from somewhere beyond the pain. “You’ll make it. It’s the gotcha vine. The thorns shoot poison into you. Paralyzes the local critters, just burns like liquid fire in humans. Let me get you back to camp. I’ve got something that will make you better.”
Each breath broke into a whimper.
Falling.
Falling into pain.
The blur around him darkened, softened. Until . . .
5
A faint sensation of impacts hammered through Dek’s sternum.
Air was being blown into his lungs, inflating his chest.
Something on his mouth. Movement on his lips. More air.
A taste of overpowering and bitter peppermint.
Dek gasped, jerked.
He blinked his eyes open. Stared into Talina’s anxious gaze, her face hovering close over his as her lips left his mouth.
Starved for air, he gasped a lungful, almost gagging at the overwhelming peppermint that filled his mouth, his lungs.
“You back with us?” Talina asked. “That was quite a scare you gave me.”
“I . . . ?” He blinked some more; mouth filling with saliva, he swallowed the bitter taste.
“You stopped breathing. Couldn’t find any heartbeat. Thought I’d lost you.” Talina shone a penlight into Dek’s eyes, watching him critically for a few moments, and straightened.
How long had he been gone?
Dek felt like he rose in the gray haze. Floated.
His left leg throbbed. Distant. Dull.
A crackling. He knew that sound.
Yes, fire.
The flicker of it teased the backs of his eyelids, and he blinked. Fixed glassily on the fire. He was back in his camp, and lay supine atop his bedroll. Behind him, his airplane glowed whitely in the firelight. The night sky above was frosted with a million stars; opaque blots of dark matter and alternating swirls of nebulae interspersed with patterns of cloud.
He gasped, glanced down. Talina was bent over his left leg. Her hair pulled back over her shoulder.
He remembered her hair. How soft it was. Her lips on his, blowing life into his empty lungs.
She’d carried him. Tossed him up over her shoulder like a sack of flour. That, too, was the quetzal in her. The woman was as strong as two men.
The slight breeze chilled his bare legs. What had happened to his pants? His boots were missing.
If he could just think.
Why the hell did his left leg ache so? What was Talina doing? Why was she here?
“Tal?” Damn. Why couldn’t he find words? His whole fricking body was floating.
Couldn’t think.
“You’re going to be all right,” Talina told him, looking up from his hugely swollen left calf. The thing looked as if it were overinflated, the skin so tight it would burst at any moment.
“Wha . . . ? What?” He
blinked, tried to focus. Seemed to drift sideways as the ground went rubbery.
“Relax,” she told him. “Don’t try to think. You can’t. You’re doped up past your gills. It’s a painkiller. One of Dya Simonov’s concoctions made out of blue nasty.”
“But I . . . ?”
“I said, don’t try to think.” She shifted enough to take his hand, the side of her face golden in the firelight. “Just listen.” She squeezed his hand as if in emphasis. “You did fine, Dek. You were prospecting. When the mobbers flew over, you played dead. Even though a gotcha vine grabbed hold of your leg. That took some real guts. Don’t know how you endured it. Then, when the mobbers flew off, you fought your way free of the gotcha vine. But its spines were embedded in your calf and foot.”
He blinked, struggling to remember. Wondered if the kaleidoscopic images cartwheeling through his memory were real. Had to be. Those four-winged creatures, alternately glowing in laser-bright patterns of blue, red, yellow, green, and orange? He’d never seen a live flock of the feared predators. This had to be a memory.
“I threw myself flat on the ground. Remember that. Roots were wiggling under me. But the mobbers were fluttering around, making that odd chitter. Checking the trees, looking under branches, trying to scare up anything that would move. Saw one get a tree clinger. Sliced the poor guy into ribbons as the things flew off with it. Left the bones to fall back to the ground.”
“Sounds about right.” Talina gave his hand a squeeze again.
“Pain started in my leg,” Dek told her. “I couldn’t let myself move. Not until those flying bastards had moved on.”
“If you had, that tree clinger’s bones wouldn’t be the only ones out here.” Talina gave him a ghostly smile. “The first time I got into gotcha vine, it was just a couple of spines. I thought someone had poured boiling acid into my arm. Second time left scars on my hip and upper thigh. It’s your whole lower leg, Dek.”
“Did I really try to cut my leg off?”
“I stopped you.”
“How’d you get here?”
“Sheer dumb luck. You were down in the canyon. Vixen just happened to be overhead when you called out a mayday. They relayed your signal to Two Spot. You were still lucid enough to give your location. Said you were going to try and make it to a basalt outcrop at the top of the canyon. Closest aid would have been Chaco and Madison, but they were on the way to Port Authority and didn’t have enough charge to turn back.”
She gave him a half-hearted shrug. “Step Allenovich and I argued over which one of us was going to have to fly way out here and save your scrawny ass. After a couple shots of whiskey, finally we drew straws. I got the short one, and Step wouldn’t go two out of three.”
“The fulfillment of dreams,” he whispered.
“How’s that?”
“I’ve fantasized about spending a night alone in the bush with you.” Oh, had he ever!
“Okay.” She arched a thin eyebrow. “So, like, a lot of men fantasize about spending a night with me. Most know it wouldn’t end well. None of them, however, are dumb enough to let a gotcha vine chew on them just to get the chance.”
“Then they’re fools.”
Her oversized dark eyes fixed on his with a curious intensity. “All right, tough guy, now that you’ve got me here, what are you going to do about it?”
He tried to fix his thoughts on the question, but they just seemed to drift aimlessly until an image of her popped into his head: Under a star-filled sky she lay on her back as he made love to her; her hair was spread on the ground in a midnight wave. Her legs were locked around his hips, her arms crushing him to her. He was staring into her eyes, drinking her soul. Lost in the image, he said, “You are beautiful, you know. Unlike any woman I’ve ever known. You’re so . . . fantastic.”
She laughed, flashing white teeth, which brought him back to the night, the camp, and the fact that she was fully clothed beside him. “Raya warned me. Said that you’d be drugged past any good sense, and anything might come out of your mouth.”
“I mean it. You are. I’d be honored to take you anywhere in Transluna. Can’t think of a single one of the courtesans who would merit more envy than if I walked into the Three Spires with you on my arm.”
Talina leaned back on her haunches, releasing his hand. “Now, that’s an aspiration I’ve never striven to attain. Wonder how it’s slipped my attention over all these years?”
“You mock me.” God, why couldn’t he find his wits? The drug? Really? If he could only think.
“Besides,” she told him, “I thought you were interested in Kalico. She’s the Supervisor. And you had a thing for her back in Transluna, even if you were a spectacularly crass boor about it.”
“I understand now.”
“Understand what?”
“Why she went to Miko’s bed. She’s remarkably competent to have played Miko the way she did. Of course, he knew she was using him for her own advancement, just as he was using her to sate his rather perverse sexual appetites. I suspect he’d have had her murdered eventually. If he hadn’t, she would have ruined him. Left him trailing in her wake like broken flotsam.”
Talina considered him. “Tough world you folks have back in The Corporation. And I thought quetzals played rough.”
The breeze cooled his naked legs. “Where are my pants?”
“Folded yonder. I had to be able to pull the gotcha spines out. Can’t do that through coveralls. I think I got them all. Just for good measure, I shot you up with an antibiotic along with Dya’s anesthetic to keep the pain at bay. Still, if I’d known the stuff would shut off any good sense you might have had, I’d have considered letting you scream.”
“You don’t like me, do you?”
Again she gave him that intense inspection, the firelight playing on her face. “Yeah, Dek. I like you.” She patted him on the thigh before rising. “And that’s probably not a healthy situation for either one of us.”
“Why not?”
She paused where she’d headed for her aircar, turned, looking back in the firelight. He thought she looked marvelous in the flickering yellow glow. Her raven hair, the slim body in its form-fitting black fabric, the muscular poise and almost feral balance. And those eyes, those marvelous eyes that stared right down to his soul.
He was adrift in his mind now, feeling a euphoria as he asked, “I wonder what it would be like to hold you, love you?”
She retrieved something from the aircar, walked back and knelt beside him. As she slipped the needle under the skin of his arm and injected the fluid she said, “Think it through, Dek. I’m a sort of hybrid freak. And you? You’re a Taglioni.”
“That doesn’t . . .” He was falling into gray clouds, eyes closing . . .
“Good night, sweet prince,” he heard her say from some incredible distance.
6
In a very real way, the children were the heart and soul of the Maritime Unit. Michaela had understood it from the very beginning. That Kevina Schwantz had been pregnant had figured into Michaela’s calculus clear back when she’d ordered her people not to participate in the Unreconciled’s attempt to seize Ashanti. Thinking of her people as family, she’d ordered them off Deck Three the moment the insurrection failed. She had directed them to throw their lot in with Captain Galluzzi and the crew.
Michaela had stifled any protest when Galluzzi locked the rest of the transportees behind the hatch down on Deck Three. In Michaela’s mind, if Kevina was pregnant, it meant the ship’s birth control was breaking down. Something was wrong with the dietary progesterone supplement. Kevina would only be the first, given the realities of men and women in close confinement.
After Felix came Sheena and Felicity. A year later, Tomaya was born. Almost one baby a year followed, including Breez, now five; Toni, who was three; little Kayle had just had his second birthday; and then a spate of infants. New life
born among them in spite of the poor nutrition and the numerous miscarriages. The children had given her people a separate identity, one that the surgically sterilized crew would never mimic. And now, eight years and nine kids later, she could see the fruits of her wisdom. A certain enjoyment came from watching the parents treating their young to lasagna. Of watching the children’s faces screw up, or the smacking of their lips.
For her part, Michaela wasn’t sure if the lasagna was as good as she remembered. With no dairy, cheese was only a memory. These weren’t egg noodles after all. There were no chickens on Donovan to lay eggs, but the rich red tomato sauce was so good she didn’t care.
In a very real sense, the children belonged to all of them. A living legacy to their survival of Ashanti’s near-disastrous passage. A counterbalance to the horrors of the Unreconciled, of the starving times, and an affirmation that they had made it across thirty light years of space to continue as a species.
The first-level room where they ate was located on the Pod’s north end, and served as mess hall, auditorium, commons, and—when the tables and benches were folded flush into the floor—as the gym/playroom. The kitchen where Bill Martin held court opened off to one side. Through the central doorway was the landing. A hatch behind the stairs opened out onto the dock where the seatrucks and launch were stowed and could be lowered to sea level.
The second set of stairs—opposite and through the pressure hatch—went down the tube and through a second pressure hatch to the Underwater Bay five meters below sea level. Continuing down the length of the Pod, beyond the stairways, was gear storage on either side of the hallway. Past storage, on each side, were the personal quarters. Finally, the hallway ended at an observation blister with its clear dome looking out over the water.
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