She pulled his hands away, tugging on them. “Here. Look at me. That’s it. Now, pay attention. I have no plans to do anything detrimental to Kalico. Nothing. Like you, I respect the hell out of her. Further, I want, I need Corporate Mine to prosper.”
She could see the confusion in his eyes as he asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
She bit her lip, let him see her thinking it over. Said, “She won’t believe me. Like you just mentioned, there’s history between her and The Jewel. But I’m not Dan. I mean it when I say if something might compromise Kalico, you tell me. I’ll do what I can to help.”
“Why?”
“Think it through, Desch. Answer your own question. My only way out of this life that ‘you’d take me away from’, is by making a fortune and getting back to Solar System to spend it. To do that, and do it right, I need a powerful sponsor, understand? Like a Board Supervisor who will send a glowing recommendation and letter of support. Kalico’s imprimatur, if you will.”
He was chewing that over, nodding slightly. “Yeah, makes sense.”
She gave him a warm wink. “Never know, old friend. We might go back on the same ship. A fresh start for both of us. Might be the opportunity that we really could spend some time together. Like . . . real time. Not just business. You’ve lived there. You could show me around.”
“Yeah, I could see that.”
She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Me, too.” A pause. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. It just pissed me off. She can ask you, I can’t ask back. Not your fault.”
“It’s okay, Ali. I told her the truth. That you were better for PA than Dan. That you were smarter, and that our people would get a straight deal at The Jewel under your management. That’s still true isn’t it?”
“God, yes. Dan was a psychopath. He really didn’t give a damn who got skinned or hurt, so long as it didn’t affect business. Don’t tell Kalico straight out, but I’ll be keeping an extra eye out for her people. Last thing I want is to get crosswise. Any of them start to get in over their heads, I’ll have my people ensure that they don’t.”
“Figured it that way,” Desch said in relief.
“And Desch, remember, I need . . . No, we need Corporate Mine to run smoothly. Anything happens down there, and I mean anything, you tell me. I’ll do everything in my power to help Kalico Aguila keep that train on the rails.”
He was giving her that worshipful stare again, a glow of excitement behind his thoughtful brown eyes. “Deal.”
She slapped him on the shoulder, kissed his cheek again, and stood. “Now, I’ve got to go check on the floor. Make sure that Vik’s not overpouring from the whiskey bottle again. You’d think the man had no understanding of profit margins.”
She was at the door as he was pulling on his boots.
“Ali?”
She turned.
“Thanks,” Desch called. “And bless you for a saint.”
“See you next four-day, Desch. Maybe we’ll take an extra hour.”
She was smiling as she walked out onto the casino floor.
14
Capella’s light burned morning-gold as it bathed the bottoms of the clouds, tinged them with a blazing red and yellow, the edges rimed with an incandescent white. The chime rose, the first of the daytime invertebrates harmonizing with those of the night. A musical changing of the guard, even if it reminded Dek of no symphony he’d ever heard.
He lay on his bedroll, a thin emergency blanket thrown over him. The pain that had awakened him was back with a vengeance. The way it felt, he still expected to see shattered fragments of charred and splintered bone, ruined shreds of meat, tendrils of ligament, and tatters of hanging skin. He just couldn’t get used to the fact that his lower leg was only swollen to twice its normal size.
A fire spat and hissed beside him; the last of the aquajade had burned down to a heap of ash. Aquajade made a lot of ash, and usually the coals would last a day to a day and a half. Chabacho burned more thoroughly. Didn’t leave as much to clean up.
He had his wits back again—though if Talina had offered, he’d have taken another hit of Dya’s blue-nasty-based pain killer. Life as a Taglioni back in Transluna had given him a thorough introduction to mind-altering chemicals. And being a Taglioni, he’d been able to afford the best. Dya’s stuff had promise; it had kept him from suicide, dulled the worst of the agony. Let him cope.
That Dya Simonov had died just south of here, out in the deep forest, was heartbreaking. A tragedy for Donovan. He’d met the woman a couple of times in Port Authority. Never really gotten to know her. That she was Kylee’s mother made her even more of a legend in his eyes. His memory of her would be of an attractive blonde, competent in her movements, and with a ready smile. Though she’d been polite when she’d introduced herself, some preoccupation had given her a distant look, and immediately afterward, she’d shuttled off for the labs to test some hypothesis.
And she died for nothing.
A fact that really angered him. The woman had gone out to Tyson Station to explain to the Unreconciled that their prophets were being killed by a prion. And she’d ended up dead. Talk about divine injustice.
“Someday the wheel will turn,” Dek whispered to himself. “The Unreconciled will get theirs.”
Or maybe they already had. Batuhan, who led the perverse cult, had paid. The handful of cannibals who were left were pretty much exiled and on their own. Not a good place to be on Donovan.
Unless you were someone like Kylee Simonov, who could survive in the bush.
He smiled at the thought of Kylee. She might only be closing on fourteen, but he had come to dote on her. On her best friend, Kip Briggs, too, though he was a different kind of a fish. Quiet, ever watchful, and where Kylee was eternally wary of strangers, Kip avoided them like they were plague.
“You have a smile on your lips.” Talina’s voice surprised him.
Dek twisted, seeing where she lay off to his right, her back to a chabacho log. The brown blanket she had pulled up to her chin matched the log. Made her blend into the background. He could see the long outline of her military-grade rifle where it lay covered on her lap.
“Thinking of Kylee and Kip.” He shifted, gasped at the spike of pain that sent fire up his leg. “Shit on a shoe, I’m getting really tired of this.”
Talina stood, unwrapped the blanket from around her. “It’s light enough we can go. I changed out the power pack last night, so my aircar has a full charge. How about I get you back to hospital and let Raya get a good look at that leg?”
“What about my airplane? It will be faster.”
“You think I’m going to let you fly? You can’t even stand up.”
“How do you know? I haven’t tried. I can—”
“I only had a few gotcha spines in my arm, and I was almost out of my head. Another time I had ’em stuck deep in my hip and thigh. Hurt so bad I dug the spines out with my knife. Still got the scars to prove it. You remember what they did to Muldare? That was just a brush, barely penetrated her skin. We pulled them immediately. Yours, my friend, were driven deep. Maybe a hundred spines, all leaking poison into your muscles and blood.” She gestured for him to proceed. “But go ahead, macho. Get up and walk over to your airplane. Don’t let me stop you.”
Dek growled, threw the blanket off, and felt pain-sweat pop from his skin. Just that small shift had him biting off a whimper.
I can do this. It’s just pain. Pain can be endured. It’s only nerves. Shut it off. One, two, three . . .
He sat up, swallowed a scream, and actually got halfway to his feet before the blast of agony flattened him. On the ground, he lay gasping and sucking for breath. Tears leaked from his eyes. It hurt so much the world spun. His gut convulsed, and he threw up. Or tried to. All he got was concentrated bile that burned in the back of his throat.
“Shoot me,” he whispered.
In the pain-haze that washed over him, he felt something pushed into his mouth.
Heard, “Swallow that.”
He didn’t comply through any kind of coherence, just gulped against the pain. Was vaguely aware of a bitter taste mixing with the bile. Thought the combination was really shitty.
“Be about five minutes,” Talina’s voice cut through the heterodyne in his ears. “Then I’ll get you bundled aboard. That latest dose of painkiller should hold you for the four-hour flight to PA.”
Dek whimpered, wiped at the tears streaking down his face.
God fucking damn, if only he could just die.
He clamped his eyes. Tried to concentrate on breathing. Just in and out. Yes, inhale. Don’t think of how much it hurts. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. He made himself fall into the mantra.
And slowly the brain-numbing agony faded.
“Feeling better?” Talina asked, her voice close.
Dek blinked. “Yeah.” Swallowed. “More of Dya’s blue nasty?”
“Seems to really work. You ready?”
“Either cut my leg off or kill me.”
“Naw. Either way, Kalico would never forgive me. Since she’s one of the only real friends I’ve got, I can’t afford to piss her off. Guess you’ll just have to suffer.”
“You’re a hard woman.”
“Hey, you were in love with me last night. How quickly things change.”
“Still in love with you. It’s my leg that I hate.”
He felt her arms going around him. Instead of a lover’s embrace, she lifted. Drugs or not, the pain left him dry-heaving as she carried him across the clearing, lifted him over the railing of her aircar, and laid him on the seat.
As the agony eased, he managed to suck air, trying to keep himself from screaming.
He must have drifted off, didn’t know how long he was out. Coming to, he had an image of leaping onto a fast break, his jaws snapping shut on the back of the creature’s neck. And . . .
What? Leaping on a fast break? What crazy part of his brain had that come from?
Dek heard the rushing of air. He blinked. Lifted himself on his elbows to stare over the aircar’s railing at the deep forest passing below. He figured that they were about a hundred and fifty meters above the treetops, and they were making about seventy knots.
Overhead the morning sky was filled with Donovan’s deeper greenish blue, dotted with puffy white clouds. Capella looked to be about an hour above the eastern horizon. Good, he hadn’t been out for long.
Talina stood at the wheel, her attention on keeping the aircar’s course. Dek took a moment to enjoy the view. If only he could. . .
The thought flew away like thistle down on the wind. Had to be the drug. Made him really stupid. He remembered Talina’s lips on his, the way she’d been breathing life into him. Wished he’d been conscious, could have participated.
Damn, Dek. You’ve been celibate for far too long.
His last relationship had been with Michaela Hailwood. A couple of years back. On Ashanti before she’d turned her attentions to First Officer Turner. Ed and she were really more suited to each other, and in the end, even that hadn’t worked for Michaela. Maritime Unit had been that way. In the few instances when he’d been in a short relationship with one of the women, Kevina, Vik, Casey, or Michaela, they always went back to the “family.”
Dek reached up to rub his eyes. Wondered at the ache deep behind them. When he blinked, a rainbow-like shimmering made a haze at the edges of his vision. He tried to focus on the colors, how they seemed to pulse, only to have his vision splinter as if a thousand stars were falling around him and his body had become weightless. Had to be the drug messing with his senses.
He gritted his teeth, raised himself up to a sitting position on the aircar’s bench so that he could see past the white duraplast sides. Ahead the Wind Mountains blocked the horizon, their tall summits jagged against the sky. The highest peaks were spinning threads of cloud that trailed out with the wind. White patches of snow dotted the slopes up above the four-thousand-meter mark, and contrasted with the mixed grays, blacks, and reds of the up-thrust metamorphic and igneous rock.
Talina was headed straight for Best Pass, the lowest and most direct route to Port Authority.
Her lips on his? Wish it had been a lover’s kiss. She’d given him mouth-to-mouth. Hammered his heart back into beating, had breathed life into his lungs. Too bad he’d been dead at the time. As exotic and alluring as she was, he’d have loved to participate, savor her lips working on his, run his tongue . . . A sudden flood of saliva filled his mouth with a taste that he associated with astringent peppermint. What the hell was in Dya’s drug that it would screw with his sense of taste so?
“Oh, Dek, get real,” he whispered to himself.
But for Talina, at this very moment, his dead body would be swarming with invertebrates as they ate their way through his skin, devoured his muscles and organs. And nothing, no appeal to the heavens that he was a Taglioni, would have saved him. But Talina had come. Not because of his family, but because of him. Who he was as a man.
“That’s a considerable achievement,” he told himself.
“Yesss,” a voice hissed.
What the hell? He blinked, shook his head, trying to clear the sudden ringing in his ears. He caught fragments, as if disjointed voices were trying to form in his hearing.
“God,” he muttered, “I might be glad for the pain-dulling effects of this stuff, but the side effects are sure crazy.”
Talina turned, looked back. “You’re awake. How you feeling?”
“Weird. The backs of my eyes hurt. It’s screwing with my vision. Like rainbow shimmers. Uh, as if I was looking through an oil sheen on water. Lots of colors that break into stars. And I’m hearing things. Leg’s a hell of a lot better, though. Hurts about half as bad as it did yesterday, which I’m taking for a major win.”
Talina flipped on the autopilot, stepped back to crouch beside him. She pointed to the barely healed wound on his arm. “How long since you and Flute exchanged blood? A couple of weeks?”
“Yeah. About.”
“And why the hell did you do that?”
“To understand.”
“Understand what, Dek? We have no clap-trapping clue what TriNA’s long-term effects are on the human body. For all you know, you’ll end up a freak like Kylee and me.”
“And there’s that professor on Vixen.”
“Weisbacher. Last time I talked with anyone on Vixen, he was a mumbling, half-psychotic wreck. He hallucinates that TriNA is eating his brain. Never leaves his cabin. I think if Torgussen had his way, he’d ship the moron dirtside and be well rid of the albatross. But let’s get back to you. What the clap-trapping hell do you hope to get out of quetzal TriNA?”
He tried to think, wished to hell his brain was clear. That the blue nasty wasn’t messing with his mental clarity. “You, Kylee, Kip, maybe Chaco and Madison, you’re the future of humanity on Donovan. I don’t know if we’re going to win here, even whether or not we’ll survive. But meeting the planet halfway is the best hope.”
A hardness lay behind her dark and alien eyes. “It comes at a price, Dek. Kylee, Kip, and me? We’re no longer wholly human. You exchanging blood with Flute? I’d say you’d better hope it doesn’t take. If it does, you’re never going back to Solar System to enjoy all those perks of being a high mucky muck.”
“Thought you knew I wasn’t going back.” He gave her a wry wink, gestured toward the forest passing below. “My future’s here. Like Kalico, I’m betting everything on it.”
“Hope it doesn’t destroy you,” she told him as she rose and headed back to the wheel. Over her shoulder, she added, “More than once it’s come within a hair’s width of killing me.”
“But you made it.” He blinked against the growing ache behind his eyes. Wh
at was that about? Migraine coming on? On top of the pain-sucking leg? What kind of justice was that?
“Yeah,” Talina called over her shoulder. “First time you experience that peppermint taste, you’ll know you’re fucked.”
“How’s that?”
“Because it means the changes have started, and there’s no going back.”
15
The way the seatruck skimmed just above the cresting waves filled Kalico with a sense of magic. She had never seen water this color: true lapis lazuli. That blue so remarkable and enchanting. In order to get a better look, Kalico stood mere inches from the transparency that curved around the vehicle’s entire front. For the moment, she reveled in the illusion that she was flying over the water. Only if she looked down to see the deck beneath her feet, or sidelong where Shinwua stood at the controls, did the illusion shatter.
Behind her, Soichiro Yoshimura was seated in the cabin’s first row of benches, his head bent to his pad as he scrolled through one of the reports penned by Lee Cheng, the biochemist and miracle maker who worked in Port Authority’s hospital. Until their arrival at Donovan, most of the information the Maritime Unit had access to was dated, literally decades old. Since their arrival, Hailwood’s team had been in a mad scramble to review anything that Dya Simonov, Cheng, Turnienko, Allenovich, or Iji Hiro had written about biological pathways, organisms, and especially the miracle of TriNA.
Granted, the research documented land-based species, but the theory was that life on Donovan—as it had on Earth—developed originally in the seas. That ontogeny still recapitulated phylogeny, or that if you know how life worked on land, you’d have a foundation for your study of maritime organisms.
Kalico had spent the previous night in briefings with Michaela Hailwood’s people, refining her understanding of their goals and research designs. From her own experience she was able to help them narrow their focus. Even to the point of discarding entire Corporate mandates for research.
“Don’t bother with that gender study,” she’d told Michaela. “Life on Donovan doesn’t work the way any of the initial reports hypothesized. See Raya Turnienko’s research on TriNA. As far as we’ve observed, all reproduction on Donovan takes three donors, and there are no sexes. No dimorphism. Nothing close to an analog of a male or female. All three donors exchange TriNA. In the reproductive tracts, the molecules split into separate deoxyribonucleic strands that recombine with strands from each of the other two parental TriNA molecules. Each of the parents gestate one or more young after the exchange.”
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