Opposite the tube access, a set of stairs led up to the second-level labs, clinic, com center, and offices. From there, yet another set of stairs opened to the landing pad on the roof.
This was Michaela’s kingdom: six thousand three hundred square meters of living space, labs, equipment, and life-support systems. A solitary terrestrial outpost in the middle of Donovan’s trackless and unmapped oceans thirty light years from Solar System.
A burst of childish laughter intruded on her thoughts. Sheena, who was Kel Carruthers’s and Vik Lawrence’s seven-year-old daughter, had tomato sauce smeared on her cheeks as she wolfed down a whole lasagna noodle. The thirty-eight-year-old Lawrence held a PhD in marine microbiology, taxonomy, and genetics. For a couple of years after Sheena was born, Vik had taken up with one of the Ashanti crew, but ultimately had come back to Kel, who in the interim had moved into Kevina’s bed. As if by unspoken rule, the children had remained, more or less, community property; steps had always been taken to keep the adult drama from their already-fragile lives.
Funny thing how relationships had worked out on Ashanti. She’d once explained it to Miguel Galluzzi with one word: complicated.
The miracle was that during the turbulent years—and despite numerous promises to do so—no one had been murdered. Ultimately a live-and-let-live we’re-only-human-so-lets-make-the-best-of-it philosophy had developed. Michaela had been uncommonly lucky. By chance she’d been given the right mix of personalities that they’d finally coalesced into a close-knit and pragmatic bunch instead of exploding into violence and retribution.
Well, all except Dr. Anna Carrasco Gabarron. She was second only to Michaela in age. Along with having a smattering of medical training, Gabarron was the marine chemist and aquatic system’s specialist. Decidedly single, surly, and bitter, she’d avoided the squabbles, gossip, and tumultuous relationships during the years they’d been crammed into Ashanti. The woman was just plain antisocial, but brilliant in her field. Now she sat in the last seat by the door, eating thoughtfully and watching the rest feasting on their lasagna. Hard to tell what lay behind Gabarron’s dark-brown gaze. As always, the woman’s expression was fixed, slightly disdainful. For tonight she’d pulled her hair back into a severe ponytail that revealed the silver at her temples.
Iso Suzuki stepped out from the kitchen, the large lasagna pan in her hands. “Can you eat more, Michaela?” she asked. “Bill doesn’t want leftovers.”
“Sure.” Michaela offered her plate and Iso served up another of the kitchen-sized spoonfuls before marching on to dish more onto Shinwua’s plate. Of course Shin would have seconds. Anything to support Martin. Captain Galluzzi had married the two of them a couple of years back.
Nor would there be leftovers. After Ashanti no one took food for granted. They were all still thin, weak, lacking in stamina from the endless malnutrition and barely sufficient ration. And then there was taste. Like this marvelous lasagna. Rich with tomatoes, spinach, and spices.
Michaela launched into her second helping. After the endless monotony of ration, this was pure bliss—though she and the rest were still struggling to come to terms with Port Authority’s preoccupation with hot peppers and garlic. So, what the hell if it burned the skin off her tongue? Taste was everything!
“You’ll adjust,” Raya Turnienko—the MD at Port Authority—had informed them. “And the garlic is necessary as a chelation agent for the constant exposure to heavy metals. Believe me, you’ll stay healthier for it.”
Michaela had to admit, the profusion of garlic in the lasagna wasn’t nearly as overpowering as some of the dishes Bill Martin had been serving up. Since he’d finally been turned loose in a real kitchen, the man was a marvel. Maybe Shinwua was the smartest of them all when he married the man.
The lasagna was also a celebration. Today they’d actually started their research in earnest. Schwantz had taken the first of the buoys out. Jaim Elvridge had piloted the submarine for its rather limited shakedown dive while Casey Stoner had manned the recorders and cameras to take the photos of the fantastic creatures that called the reef home. To see the stunning array of life forms was overwhelming. They had no frame of reference for the creatures and plants. No terms to describe the colors, the incomprehensible shapes. Casey had been speechless—a wonder given that she’d specialized in kelp-forest ecology and trophic systems theory.
And then there was video of the polka dots, and Kevina’s report about the torpedoes and Big Mouth Thing—whatever kind of creature that might have been. Kevina hadn’t been quick enough to get video of the deepwater leviathan.
“Wish she had,” Michaela muttered under her breath. Anything as big as Kevina described it—not to mention as fast as she claimed it to be—would be well worth further investigation.
“Have to think about how we record these missions. We need some sort of three-sixty video record.” She made a mental note to discuss it with Shinwua.
Baby steps to be sure, but the first for their exploration of Donovan’s oceanography.
She was reveling in the feeling of euphoria when Bryan Atumbo wiped his mouth, pushed his plate back, and rose from his seat. The man walked over asking, “Got a minute, Director?”
“Hey, I’ve got all night, Bryan. But I’m going back to watch that holovid that Casey took of the reef. That purple thing with a thousand eyes just can’t be for real.”
He pulled out the chair next to her, sat, and laced his fingers together. “I did the after-action check on the motor launch. Pulled it out of the water and onto the dock according to protocol. I asked Kevina if she noticed anything weird about the boat while she was out dropping that buoy. Any funny noises. Felt anything through the hull. Asked if she’d hit anything floating. Or maybe a reef. She said no, but there’s gouges. You know, like someone has taken a chisel and scraped it down the hull a couple of times on either side of the keel.”
“There aren’t any shoals out there. Nothing she could have hit unless it was floating debris.”
Atumbo shrugged. “I’m just telling you that those gouges weren’t there when I lowered the launch into the water this morning. It’s my job to notice these things. The launch has a duraplast hull, so it’s not like sialon, but that’s still pretty tough stuff. Whatever peeled those slices had to be really sharp and really hard.”
“Okay, I’ll go over the charts again. They were generated a couple of decades ago, not to mention from space. Maybe they missed a shallow, something volcanic that bubbled up from the ocean floor after the impact. Anything else, Bryan?”
“Just some slimy stuff that was on the hull. Sort of like the tar we see stuck to hulls in the Gulf of Mexico or maybe the Persian Gulf. You know, where there’s oil seeping out. But it’s slimy and greenish blue. Didn’t feel like tar. It washed off with a power spray.”
“Bryan, make note of the gouges, put it in the service records.”
“Already done, Supervisor.”
Michaela glanced down the table where Kevina was in conversation with Lara Sanz. Beside her, Kim Yee had little Felix on his lap, holding the boy with one hand, using a slice of bread to sop up the last of the tomato sauce on his plate with the other.
Felix was telling Sheena something. Showing the little girl the tips of his fingers, letting her touch them. When she did, the little boy let out a giggle, and loud enough for Michaela to hear, cried, “That tickles!”
Gouges in the hull? Surely if Kevina had hit something, she’d have put it in her report.
7
The official name of the tavern was The Bloody Drink. Everyone on Donovan called it Inga’s for the owner proprietor, Inga Lock. Inga was a big-boned woman, blond, and buxom. Her personality matched her body; it came on strong. Across the alley, behind the tavern, Inga brewed, distilled, and fermented the finest beer, spirits, and wines on the planet. All of which she dispensed with a smile. At least she did as long as her patrons had coin to cover the
ir food and beverages. What made Inga’s unique was that it was Donovan’s one and only tavern.
Sure, you could get a drink at The Jewel casino, or Betty Abel’s brothel, but they didn’t have the amiable sit-down atmosphere where you could bring the family, let alone order a meal cooked to order. Not to mention that both of the aforementioned establishments catered to a rather unsavory clientele. On Donovan—when it came to the social center of the planet—Inga’s was urbs et orbis: City and world.
Kalico Aguila perched on her usual bar stool. She had flown in with the weekly rotation of workers from Corporate Mine, having worked out a deal with the triumvirate years back. Her people needed the skills, manufacturing, and amenities of Port Authority, such as they were. Port Authority needed the production of her smelter, access to Freelander’s free-fall manufacturing, and the additional income from Corporate Mine. One couldn’t survive without the other.
In the beginning, when Aguila had arrived on Donovan, she’d almost destroyed Port Authority’s independent-minded leadership. Had actually arrested Talina Perez, Shig Mosadek, and Yvette Dushane. Was going to convict them of treason and shoot them down in the street as a lesson meant to put the rest of the local hardheads in their place. The memory brought a smile to Kalico’s lips. She lifted her glass of whiskey in a salute to her scarred image where it reflected from the back bar. “To lessons well learned,” she toasted herself.
The scars were proof of that. She’d been a ravishing beauty before the mobbers sliced her into ribbons. They would have killed her but for a handy sialon crate. She had barely managed to dive into it. Even as they continued slashing her open and chewing on her flesh, she’d had to stomp, strangle, and crush the hideous beasts she’d trapped inside the box with her. Not all of her people had been as lucky.
Behind her, Inga’s was half-filled with patrons who sat at the long chabacho-wood tables. Outside, night was falling. For the most part, the families had retreated to their domes and houses, but the boisterous element was here. Sheyela Smith sat with Tyrell Lawson and Toby Montoya, mugs of beer in hand as they hovered over a tablet. Some sort of skull session to cobble together a jury-rigged kind of machine for Lee Halston’s sawmill.
As Kalico pondered that, Shig Mosadek climbed onto the bar stool beside hers. She gave the Indian a sidelong appraisal, taking in his brown face, mushroom-mashed nose, as well as the wild and unkempt hair that was graying at his temples. The comparative religions scholar barely stood five foot three. One of the triumvirate, he was the last person one would expect to be in a leadership position in hard-knuckled and rough-and-tumble Port Authority.
“How’s life?” Kalico asked.
“Very good. I sold two squash to finally pay what I owed Rude Marsdome for these new boots.” He pointed to the knee-high quetzal-hide footwear that shot rainbow patterns of light up and down their length. “The old ones were getting a little worn.”
“Understatement of the year, Shig. Your old ones looked like hell. How long you had them?”
“Let’s see. Ten? No, must have been twelve years at least. Wait. It was before the arrival of the Tableau. That was what? Fifteen years ago?”
“No wonder they looked like you’d stolen them off a corpse. But then, you’ve never really been a slave to sartorial perfection.” She took in his use-polished quetzal-hide cloak, the embroidered claw-shrub-fiber shirt and scuffed-and-stained chamois-leather pants.
He ignored the barb. Said, “You had an amused look on your face. Am I to interpret that to mean that things at Corporate Mine are running with unusual efficiency?”
She laughed, studied the light reflected in her glass of whiskey. “Hardly. The Number Three has us at wits end. It’s a nightmare of shoring, mucking, and driving rod. My people are half-spooked to work it, and I don’t blame them. But it’s paying, and if we can drive that bore under the Number One, it will make everyone’s life so much easier.” A pause. “And richer.”
Kalico lifted a finger when Inga glanced her way. The burly blond woman was pouring beer from a tap in one of her kegs. Kalico pointed to Shig. Inga jerked a short nod and went back to her pour.
“Actually,” Kalico told him, “I was thinking back to the time that I had you, Yvette, and Talina arrested for treason. I was sitting right there.” She pointed to the backside of the middle of the bar. “Holding court. Ready to sentence the three of you to death.”
Shig smiled wistfully. “We did teeter on the edge of disaster, didn’t we?”
“Talina stopped it. It would have ended in a bloodbath. Only the marines would have made it, and not all of them, I suppose.”
Shig smiled at Inga as she brought him his customary half glass of wine. Kalico had rarely seen the man even drink that much, and never had he had a second glass. He treated the drink more like a toy, something to amuse himself with.
Shig tossed out an SDR coin that Inga snapped up. She dropped it in a pocket, took a couple of swipes with the bar rag she had slung across her shoulder, and asked, “Anything else? Supervisor, you all right?”
At Kalico’s thumbs-up, the woman hurried back down the bar—an irresistible object in motion.
Shig lifted his wine, studied the light through the red liquid. “That was not just Talina, you know. She gave you an out, one that you were smart enough to take. A more obtuse personality might have failed to recognize and seize such a solution. Such a person might have made it a point of honor, no matter what the cost.”
Kalico sipped her whiskey, let it run over her tongue. Alcohol wasn’t allowed at Corporate Mine. Her rule. One she chafed over but wouldn’t change. It made her visits to PA more enjoyable. “You once said that if I could put my cultural baggage aside, I would be capable of great things. Seems that I also remember you saying that lunacy was catching.”
Through a placid smile, Shig told her: “That woman who arrived on Turalon knew nothing but the rage and anger of tamas. You now have a leavening of sattva gained through suffering, responsibility, and self-examination.”
“I don’t want to hear all that Buddhist crap.”
“Hindu. You’re as bad as Talina.”
“Speaking of which, where is she? I would have expected her to be here given the hour and all.” Kalico indicated the empty barstool next to hers. The one everyone in Port Authority reserved for the nominal head of security and local legend.
“She’s out in the bush. Apparently Dek Taglioni got himself in some sort of trouble. Tal took her aircar and headed out that way a little after noon.”
“What kind of trouble?” Kalico felt every nerve stand on end. Mention of Taglioni did that. She still wasn’t sure what to make of the guy. Back in Solar System, he’d been a foul-mouthed bit of walking human flotsam. Make that ultra-privileged walking human flotsam. A scion of the politically powerful Taglioni family, he’d been first cousin to Miko Taglioni, the Boardmember to whom Kalico Aguila had bound herself. Her encounters with Derek had been anything but pleasant.
Shig was watching her closely. “He called in on the radio, said he’d had a bit of a scare. That a pack of mobbers had flown over. Story is that he’d dived to the ground. Covered his head. Problem was that his left leg was within range of a gotcha vine. By the time the mobbers had passed over and he could take his knife to the gotcha vine, it had eaten through his boot and into his calf. Apparently the plant was pretty adamant about not letting him go. It kept grabbing hold of him as he cut his leg free.”
“Shit.” Kalico slapped the bar. “I’d better get to the shuttle, get out there. Cancel the trip to the Maritime Unit tomorrow, and—”
“It’s dark. The gate to the landing field is locked, and you’ll never get past the guard.” Shig indicated the dome overhead, Capella’s light having vanished from the sky. “And Talina’s out there. She’s had dealings with gotcha vine before. She’ll have him loaded up first thing in the morning. He’ll be in the hospital and under Raya
’s care by midday.”
Kalico rubbed her brow. It figured that Dek had finally gotten himself into a mess. One of her worst nightmares was that she’d be the one who would have to tell Miko how his cousin died, that she hadn’t been able to keep the prick alive.
Prick?
Well, that was the question, wasn’t it?
Images flickered through her memory. Dark forest. Fear and thirst. Dek Taglioni handing her an energy bar when she was on her last legs. His infectious smile, the dimple in his chin. How his green-ringed yellow eyes—genetically designed for effect—twinkled when he shared a joke with her.
“That’s a tortured expression,” Shig noted.
“Trying to figure out what to do with Dek. Wondering who he is. What he is.”
“I heard that you didn’t think much of him back in Solar System.” Shig fingered the stem of his wineglass. “Dek doesn’t think much of who he was, either.”
She took another small sip of whiskey to keep her tongue fresh. “Shig, do leopards change their spots? Do the evil ever truly become good? Can a onetime monster become a saint? He stays with you when he’s in town. What do you think?”
“Dek is a man in search of himself. What he endured in Ashanti should have broken him. Instead, he held on, grasping onto something he never knew he had.”
Shig lifted his wine to his lips, but Kalico wasn’t sure he actually drank any.
“And now?”
“Supervisor, he is no longer the man he was back in Solar System. Nor is he the man who scrubbed toilets and worked hydroponics aboard Ashanti. As to why he is risking his life out in the bush? I think it is to prove something to himself . . . and perhaps partially as an act of the penance he insists he doesn’t believe in.”
“I don’t know what to do with him.”
Shig dryly added, “In more ways than one, I think.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He is your only social equal on the planet. You enjoy his company. You share a common origin and can speak honestly about a way of life that only a select few can aspire to. But each time you find yourself drawn to him, the reminder of who he was back in Transluna rises to haunt that most-analytical-and-cautious brain of yours. That same world that you share, the one that brings you commonality, haunts you both.”
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