“You think I have a crush on him?”
“Crush is an unseemly and unsuitable word. I do think you are attracted to him for all the above-mentioned reasons. And as the Corporate Supervisor, you remain separate—apart from your people despite the camaraderie you have managed to cultivate. Just because you rely on your strength of will, your determination and faith in yourself, doesn’t mean you don’t wish that you had someone to share the burden.”
She laughed at that. “I share my burden with you, Yvette, and Talina. Which makes the irony that once upon a time I was going to shoot you even richer.”
Nevertheless, it bothered her. Irritated her that Shig could see her confusion so clearly. Damn it, she did enjoy her time with Dek. They did have a lot in common to talk about. And she did, on occasion, have those fantasies about what it would be like to have a man again. One trained in the arts of sex, who spoke her language, and understood her history and needs. A man she could be intimate with on all levels.
She’d also spent way too much time worrying that the fool was going to come to grief out in the bush, and now she learned that Dek was hurt? Badly? While she was sitting here in the safety of Inga’s, he was in excruciating pain.
“We’re sure that Talina made it out to Dek’s?” she asked.
“She called in. Had a conversation with Raya about Dek’s leg. My understanding is that Dek died on her, and Tal brought him back. Last I heard, Tal had him stabilized. By now she’s got him in, under cover, and will be battening down for the night.”
“Died?”
“Like I said, Tal got to him in time. He’s stabilized. Could have been worse, mobbers and all.”
Kalico fought the urge to finger the line of scar on her cheek. “At least he had enough sense to play dead for the mobbers.” A man had to be tough to hold still and not even quiver while a gotcha vine was eating into his leg. That was the thing about Dek. He listened. Learned.
Her fingers tapped on the side of her glass. Part of her really wanted to stay in PA, to be there tomorrow when Tal brought Dek in. You know, just to be sure that he was all right. He was, after all, a Taglioni. Her loyalty lay with the Taglionis. Miko was her patron. He’d ensured that she got the assignment to Turalon. Dek was her responsibility.
Fleeting fantasies of her meeting him at the hospital, overseeing Raya’s care. Ensuring that Dek got the best of everything. That she could ease his recovery, care for his . . .
What the hell am I doing?
Kalico shook her head to rid herself of the sappy images of her playing nurse.
Shig watched her with amusement, his wide lips pinching off a smile.
“I’m going to the Maritime Unit tomorrow,” she declared. “Michaela Hailwood has been after me since she got the Pod placed. Would have been out there a week ago, but for the mess down in the Number Three.”
When she glared at Shig, he avoided her eyes, lifted his wine to his lips in an effort to hide the smile.
Yes, that’s what she’d do. Dek had gotten himself into this mess, he’d just have to live with it.
Nevertheless, it rankled that Talina would get to play hero. And Dek had always had a thing for Talina.
Kalico could just wait long enough in the morning to ensure that Dek was made comfortable in the hospital. Get Raya’s take on the wounds and . . .
“I said,” she told herself, “that I’m going out the Maritime Unit in the morning.”
“Yes, you did.” Shig gave her that infuriatingly beneficent smile.
8
Throwing another chunk of broken aquajade onto the fire, Talina waited for the flames to catch and rise. Not that she needed the light. She could see just fine in the infrared and ultraviolet ranges. Another benefit—and curse—of her quetzal TriNA. The way the molecules had remodeled her ocular physiology gave her that alien look that spooked even her closest friends.
Rolling the syringe between her fingers, she studied it in the firelight. Should have put him to sleep in the beginning, but she’d had no clue how unsettling his utterances would be. Talina had always taken for granted that Kalico had the inside track when it came to Dek. Kalico was his kind of people. Came from Dek’s world. And they’d been spending a lot of time together when Dek was in PA.
Talina replaced the syringe in its case, returning it to her aircar. As she did, she took in the camp. Dek—no doubt with Chaco Briggs’s help—had picked a sound location. Surrounded by low chabacho, aquajade, and dwarf stonewood trees, the camp sat on eroded basalt bedrock, free of roots. But, taking nothing for granted, Dek had parked his airplane on a tarp to keep any questing roots from wrapping around the landing gear. Smart trick, that.
This was deep bush, maybe forty kilometers northwest of the Briggs homestead and mine. The canyon where Dek had staked his claim—and above which she had found his pain-wracked body—was a good two hundred meters to the west. Port Authority lay just over three hundred klicks to the east. About a four-hour flight by aircar in good weather. Hardly an hour in Dek’s airplane.
By rights, Derek Taglioni should have died.
In Donovanian terms, the guy was “soft meat.” A newcomer who’d spent but a few months dirtside. Nevertheless, he’d listened, learned. Immediately recognized the mobbers for what they were: flying death. That he’d dived to the ground and froze was smart. That he’d been on rocky colluvium, without a thick root mat had been chance good fortune. That he’d stuck it out as the mobbers flocked over him and the gotcha vine began chewing on his leg took extraordinary resolve. That he’d fought off the carnivorous vine with his knife was sheer pluck. As to Vixen having been overhead to receive his signal? Again, just dumb luck. And, finally, he’d been ballsy and courageous enough to climb out of the canyon and onto bedrock where she could spot him from the air. In brain-numbing pain, he’d kept his wits. Been smart. Smart had kept him alive.
On Donovan, anything else was a death sentence.
Talina crossed her arms, stepped over, and stared down at the comatose man. Derek Taglioni had sandy-tan hair, a perfect patrician face, and a dimple in his chin. The pinking scar on his cheek—left by shrapnel from an exploding drone—gave him a dashing and exotic look. With his yellow-green eyes, the guy was drop-dead handsome, muscular, and graceful. Everything that an elite program of monitored breeding and advanced genetics could bestow on a pampered and entitled Corporate male.
She could see the healing wound on his arm where he and Flute had exchanged blood. The guy had willingly infected himself with TriNA. Here she was, wishing she could be rid of the shit, and he was letting a quetzal pump it into him.
She should have hated him for who he was. But the guy charmed her, not to mention that Dek was willing to take on Donovan’s challenges with the full knowledge that the planet would try to kill him at every turn. That the odds were, it would kill him. Today—but for the thinnest sliver of luck—it almost had.
“He wants to mate with you.” Demon whispered from his lair down behind her stomach.
“Go suck on a toilet, you piece of shit,” she told it.
It only felt like the quetzal lurked beneath her liver. Demon—and its antithesis, Rocket—existed inside her as TriNA molecules. The stuff communicated with other TriNA through recombination, transferRNAs, microRNAs, and proteins. Raya Turnienko and her team were still struggling to understand the intricacies, but the notion that intelligent molecules could live within a human being was sobering.
For Talina, it wasn’t academic. She was full of the stuff. Some of it—from what they called Whitey’s lineage—wanted her dead. That was the Demon identity who lived in her gut. The TriNA Rocket had infected her with actually had a soft spot for humans. The Rork quetzal lineage was mostly just curious, and she had her own infection of Flute’s Briggs lineage.
Factions among intelligent molecules? Who would have thought?
Using transferRNA, the various �
�identities” of TriNA had learned to communicate with the language centers of her brain, talked to her, and often times interacted with her limbic system. In the years since her first infection, she had developed defenses that allowed her to maintain her sanity and personality while she waited for Raya—or someone—to figure out a way to scrub her blood and body of the alien genetic material.
“And you want to fall in love with me?” she asked the somnolent Dek. “Typical male. All you see is the packaging. Not what a fucked-up mess I am on the inside.”
Talina chuckled at herself. Told Dek, “While you may not have a clue about who I am, you’re an open book, and I can read you page by page.”
Especially with her augmented sense of smell. She couldn’t have missed the sexual musk that poured out of him when he told her she was fantastic. Not that a sexually excited man without pants was a tough call in the first place.
Looking back at the history of the species, maybe it was adaptive for humans to have methylated most of their genes for olfaction. People gave off too many pheromones. It would have led to murders in closely packed cities. She could always smell when a man or woman was interested in or had had sex. Some were worse than others. She had seriously considered nose plugs when she was working with Step Allenovich; the guy was in a constant state of rut.
Raya had warned her when she gave Talina the drug. “This stuff numbs the inhibition centers of the brain. Don’t be offended by anything he says.”
But the last thing Tal had expected to come out of his mouth was a protestation of love.
“Hard to think I’m more desirable than a courtesan.” She was cosmopolitan enough to realize that in Transluna’s rarified corridors of power, the courtesans were a special caste. Each belonged to a specific guild, was highly educated, trained in the arts of music, poetry, sex, history, geography, culture, and etiquette. Training began in childhood, and but a handful of the men and women managed to qualify for the registry by the time they reached their late teens. Of them, only a few would survive the cutthroat world of Board politics to make it to the top of their profession. The kind who would appeal to a Taglioni like Dek.
Talina took a deep breath, tossed a triangular chabacho limb onto the fire, and seriously contemplated the sleeping man. The night chime was rising and falling, the stars partially obscured as the clouds drifted in from the east. Out in the forest, something screamed. On Donovan, the hunters never slept. She could hear the soft rustle of the leaves as they shifted out in the deeper forest. There the trees wrestled with each other, repositioning their roots. Far off, she thought she heard a distant crash, the kind made when a group of the forest giants toppled one of their foes.
“And you chose this world?” she asked Dek. “Knowing it’s going to kill you?”
She reached down, ran her fingers through his hair, felt the tingle inside her.
“Yes!” Demon hissed down in her gut. But the thing had always been intrigued by human sex.
Reproduction was a lot less complicated among quetzals; three of them shared TriNA through an interchange of saliva. The TriNA was sucked into the reproductive tract where it recombined with strands from each of the donors. The new TriNA was incorporated into a prokaryotic germ cell that began dividing, developing, and a couple of months later a juvenile quetzal was popped out the reproductive orifice atop the tail. The whole process held no emotion, no agonizing choice of mate, none of the drama characteristic of human sexual relations.
At times, Tal envied the beasts.
Talina could feel Rocket’s presence shift on her shoulder. Like Demon, Rocket was no more real than a feeling. Was it something in the human psyche that insisted on giving her infection a physical presence, a manufactured identity? But then, Shig would say that all identity was maya, a form of trickery or illusion.
“And what do you think?” she asked Rocket.
“You are tired of being alone.”
“I’m never alone. Half the time I’m sharing your dreams. Same with that piece of shit in my gut.”
“You know what I mean.”
That was the thing about having an intelligence inside her. Dek’s pheromones might give away his sexual interest, but the damn quetzals knew her innermost thoughts.
“Yes!” Demon insisted.
Before being infected by quetzals, she could tell herself any damn thing she wanted. Pretend she believed it. Having intelligent molecules that knew better running around in her blood really sucked toilet water.
Yes, admit it already. She was lonely. The quetzal molecules in her blood, the physical changes in her body, her almost superhuman strength, reflexes, and senses, made her suspect. And there had been some pretty rocky incidents while Whitey’s molecules were trying to manipulate her body into becoming a weapon. Like the time she thought she was shooting Sian Hmong. Thank god it was only a hallucination. But she’d still blasted a damn hole in a shipping container.
She missed human companionship. Ached for the old camaraderie. Wished that she could walk down the steps in Inga’s, slap people on the back, be invited to their tables to lift a cold glass of beer. She’d fought for them. Been one of them.
“Now you are outcast!” Demon chortled.
“Oh, go fuck yourself.”
“Poor . . . sad . . . pathetic.”
“Eat vomit and die, you piece of shit.”
Demon chittered in quetzal laughter where he slipped around down behind her gallbladder.
She could sense Rocket giving her that three-eyed look of commiseration. He often did these days. And the look was new. Almost human. Another piece of her personal weirdity, she imagined that she really did see Rocket on her shoulder, could feel his weight. But only when she was looking for him.
“How screwed up is that?” she asked Dek, thankful the drug had knocked him out.
She laughed, answered herself. “As screwed up as having an intimate conversation with a man who’s so out of it, he isn’t hearing a word I’m saying.”
If there was ever a symbolic moment of how alone Talina felt, this was it.
Well, there was Kylee. As far that went. She and Kylee shared quetzal molecules, even shared memories—some of them damned uncomfortable for Talina’s part. But Kylee was just coming on fourteen. She was more quetzal than even Talina, and her youth at Mundo Base had been limited to immediate family. While Rocket’s death might have torn her in two, Kylee had never buried a husband or a lover, never shared that ultimate intimacy that came of an adult relationship. She’d never been one of a team, a valued member of a community.
For all the things they had in common, Talina and Kylee had even more differences that left them in separate hells.
Just thinking about it, she remembered the morning sunlight on Cap’s face as it poured through the window. He was lying in her bed, still lost in dreams. With that came the memory of how they’d made small talk after sex, his reassuring hand on her breast. For those few days she’d had a partner, a man she could treat as an equal and a soul mate.
She didn’t dare allow herself to recall her days with Mitch. That had been young, heady love. The stuff of fairy tales and head-over-heels passion. Talina had lost herself in Mitch, her heart had beat within his, her soul had wound around his until the two were one. And his death had almost killed her.
The firelight played in yellow and shadows as it toyed with Dek Taglioni’s features. What was it about him? Some innate quality that Talina hadn’t been able to finger. Not even that first night when she and Stepan Allenovich had half carried the blind and stumbling Dek back to her dome.
That had been Kalico’s work. The wily Supervisor purposely got the guy so intoxicated he couldn’t see straight. She’d figured it was the best way to ferret out Dek’s furtive goals, given that Board politics might have sent their dirty tendrils some thirty light-years across space. Turned out that Dek was just running away from home. N
o power play.
“He’s a Taglioni. Can’t let anything happen to him,” Kalico had said. “Can you keep an eye on him?”
Which meant Talina had taken him home. Put the guy in her bed and prayed he wouldn’t puke on her sheets.
The next morning she’d found the hungover wreck soaking in her shower. Having not had a man in her house since Cap, something had felt complete in her as she fed him breakfast, watched him devouring her tamales. Sure, he’d been soft meat, but something about the guy had been game. For days afterward, she’d caught his scent in the bedding, on the kitchen stool where he’d sat.
“Oh, Talina,” she told herself. “Even if he isn’t interested in Kalico, he’s still a Taglioni.”
9
The way Felix Schwantz saw it, the Pod was a miracle. He’d been born on Crew Deck in Ashanti. All he’d ever known was the crowded warren of rooms he had grown up in. He missed the old Maritime Unit ship’s quarters where people slept in beds that were built—one on top of another—into hollows in the walls. He and his mom and Yee had lived in a lower bunk, just up from the floor. All the families with kids had low bunks. It was that way so none of the little babies could accidentally fall and hurt themselves or be killed and have to go to hydroponics.
On Ashanti, Yee had taken Felix down to see what hydroponics was. He knew it was bad, that it was on Deck Four, which was beneath Deck Three where the cannibals lived. Cannibals ate people. Killed them, cut them into pieces, and cooked them. So, being even further down, those yuck-suck green tanks of goo were pretty horrifying.
A lot of babies had been born dead and had been dropped into the hydroponics chute. Some were called miscarriages and were really small and bloody. Others were what they called “closer to term,” and some, because of the mother’s health were something called “aborted.” When any of those things happened, it had been a sad time, with a lot of crying and people hugging each other. The old saying, “The child is in hydroponics now, it will be part of us all soon” was said over and over afterward.
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