Or so Kalico hoped as she stepped down from the seatruck and stared at her newly created way station. This would be the beginning, and, who knew, it might even grow into a settlement someday. For now, all the exposed bedrock gave them was a somewhat-safe spot to set up a solar charger, a clear field of view against predators, and a place for passengers to change vehicles for their flights back and forth from the Pod to Port Authority.
As she stared out at the trees, she wished she had either Iji or Cheng present. The vegetation here was unlike anything she knew farther inland. Some of the bluer trees might have been a species of aquajade, but nothing looked like any of the varieties of chabacho with which she was familiar. What she saw just past the splintered wreckage left by the explosives and Manfroid’s bulldozing were large trees, but instead of towering giants, these grew short and wide. Many—if her suspicion was correct—had multiple thick and low trunks. Sort of like the banyan trees of old Earth but taken to an extreme. Not the sort of thing that could be uprooted en masse by the neighboring trees.
Here—assuming Kalico could read the interlacing of branches and the periodically exposed roots correctly—the forest war appeared to be one of outflanking, engulfing, and lifting an outlying trunk from its purchase. Once loose from the soil, the upended trunk was flipped upside down, roots and all, on top of an older interior section. As the defeated tree scrambled to reorient under the weight of its overturned parts, the victor secured its position by sending its roots deep with the expectation of growing a new trunk.
Michaela Hailwood stepped down from the seatruck; Lara Sanz dropped to the ground behind her. Both women took position next to Kalico as they sniffed the salt-laden breeze and surveyed the bladed expanse. Really, it wasn’t much to see, just broken black, brown, and yellowish bedrock marred by the bulldozer’s steel-cleated tracks and blade polish where the machine had cut through stone.
Sanz, being a geologist, immediately knelt, picking up a fragment of the broken sandstone.
The breeze coming in off the Gulf flipped the women’s hair and ruffled their coveralls. From the height of the knoll, they had a good view of the beach, the dunes, and the narrow strip of forest that remained between the rise and the shore.
Kalico took a moment to once again sweep the sky, as always, searching for mobbers. Instead, all she saw was a distant flock of the four-winged fliers that she’d seen out on the reef the day Shinwua had died. And, like then, these seemed to be moving farther north and away.
“Don’t get more than a couple of steps from the seatruck,” Kalico ordered. “It’s only a hundred meters between us and the end of the clearing. A quetzal can clock out at one hundred and sixty kph, which means it can have you almost before you see it coming.”
“Think a quetzal would still be around?” Michaela asked. “I mean, this was blasted. And then the bulldozer pushed it all over yonder in a big pile. That’s a lot of disturbance. I’d think the wildlife would have been scared away.”
“Or attracted to see what all the commotion was,” Kalico countered. “And look where Manfroid piled all the broken timber and dirt. Perfect place for a camouflaged predator to hide. Trust me. Stay close to the seatruck. If I holler, you leap back inside and lock the doors.”
“And where will you be?” Lara asked.
“I’ll be inside before you are.” Kalico gave her a lazy smile. “There are old jokes back on Earth. Something about, if you and I are out for a walk in the forest, I don’t have to be able to outrun a bear. If we’re suddenly face to face with one, I only have to be able to outrun you.”
“Is this one of those ‘welcome to Donovan’ things?” Michaela asked.
“Very much so.” Kalico stared anxiously off to the west, seeing nothing but a riot of low treetops, and here and there in the distance, a forlorn root ball shoved up in the air.
Lara had pulled out a hand lens from her belt pouch and was studying the rock she’d picked up. “Wow. I’d love to get this under the scope. Bet I’d see shocked quartz. And there’s some really unique mineralization.” She stared around at the exposed stone, all mixed as it was with basalt and some kind of rock Kalico had never seen before.
Lara pointed. “That stuff? See how vitreous it is? Any takers that we’re seeing some of the asteroid? I’m going to get a sample of that.” The woman started forward.
“Not yet. Stay close. Wait until we’re better armed.” Kalico accessed her com. “Step? You there?”
“Roger that, Corporate. We’re about five minutes out and closing on your signal.”
“See you soon.”
Michaela was squinting in Capella’s hot light, fingers shoved into her back pockets, wind playing with her short hair. “So, how does this work? You’re paying these people to make this pad, to put up a solar charger, and buying guns. That’s a lot of SDRs. I get it that Port Authority is not part of The Corporation, but you’re the Board-appointed Supervisor.”
“The short version of a long story is that it was to my advantage to sign Port Authority over to the people who lived there. They’d been on their own for too long and were not going back under Corporate control. I took my people, who’d arrived on Turalon, and we went south to the outcrop where Corporate Mine was established. And yes, we had some trouble back in the beginning. Had to work out who was going to stay, who was going to go. But in the process, my people started to get rich. Really rich. And eventually—whenever that might be—they’re going to ship back to Solar System as incredibly wealthy individuals. Had seventeen who took a chance on Ashanti. If they arrive alive, believe me, they’re going to make one hell of a splash.”
Kalico cocked a provocative eyebrow, adding, “It would amuse the hell out of me to watch the Boardmembers trying to figure out what to do with these people showing up out of the blue with bullion and jewels worth a couple billion in SDRs. Just serving out contract on Donovan entitles a person to a pretty nice package when it comes to housing, food, and travel. The Board’s not going to have the first clue about what to do with a hard-rock miner showing up with all that plunder.”
“Will they just seize it? Declare it Corporate property?”
“On first glance, you’d think they might. But thinking a little deeper, it will cause them an unholy amount of trouble if they do. What’s to motivate anyone to go off world if The Corporation will just confiscate your earnings? And my people are going back with their plunder listed as ‘earnings.’” Kalico chuckled. “No doubt about it, it will cause a firestorm, especially with the value of the cargo.” A pause. “Assuming they make it back at all.”
“And all this wealth pays for the pad, charger, and guns?”
Kalico stepped out to get a better look around, let her gaze trace the edge of the pad. “Michaela, when you parse it down to the absolute fundamentals, essentially we’re all relying on each other. It’s a sort of bootstrap economy. We’re extracting wealth, true, but we’re also manufacturing it. Here’s your bit of economic reality for the day: Every sustainable economy, ever, has functioned based on the principle of the creation of wealth. The true economic powers on Donovan don’t reside at Corporate Mine. They’re farmers like Terry Mishka and Reuben Miranda, the fabricators like Mac Hanson at the foundry and Rude Marsdome, the bootmaker.” She pointed to her quetzal-hide boots.
“Hard to think of a bootmaker being more important than you.”
“Oh yeah?” Kalico asked. “Answer me this: What has greater value on Donovan? A metric ton of rhodium or a good pair of boots?”
Michaela gave her a wooden stare. “You’re kidding, right?”
Kalico squinted at the dot that appeared over the trees. Headed their direction. Had to be Stepan Allenovich. “Kidding? Not at all. You tell me, what can you do on Donovan with a metric ton of rhodium? But you walk over past the edge of the pad, and what’s the most vulnerable part of your body?”
“My feet?” Michaela glanced down
at her Corporate-issue plastic-flex shoes.
Kalico told her, “Not sure a slug can chew through the soles, even thin as they are. But your ankles are bare. Step in the mud past the tops of your shoes, and you’re gone. Not to mention scrambling across the roots. It’s way too easy for the roots to pull those nice comfortable slip-ons right off your feet.”
“This place is insane,” Lara commented as she studied her rock.
“Now you know how I felt when I first set foot here.” Kalico stepped out, waving as Step’s aircar approached. “Not to mention that the man coming to meet us? Stepan Allenovich? Once, in my early days, he was dead set on killing me. And now? Here we are, old, if not the best of friends.”
“Double insane,” Michaela agreed with Lara.
Kalico propped one hand on her pistol as Step slowed, hovered, and settled to the ground. The fans blew out bits of sand and angular gravel before the airtruck spooled down.
Step threw the cab door open, glanced warily around, then gave Kalico a smile as he climbed down. “How’s life on the ocean, Supervisor?”
“As the saying goes, ‘clap-trappin’ and nerve-wrackin’.’ What’s new at PA?”
“Inga’s latest batch of rye whiskey came out like acid. She dumped the whole barrel and took her last good one out of storage. Sczui saw quetzal tracks at the edge of the bush. Got a drone up but couldn’t find it. Rand Kope brought in a ruby that’s the size of a goose egg. Lost it to Allison at The Jewel in what had to be the poker game of the century. I didn’t know Allison had any gift when it came to poker, but I guess Dan must have taught her something.”
“Oh, he taught her plenty,” Kalico muttered. “She cheats.”
Step made a face. “How?”
“Kalen was somewhere behind Kope? Maybe watching?”
“Yeah, you know, leans up against the wall so he can keep an eye on the place while Allison’s busy at . . .” Step’s visage darkened. “You telling me that’s how Dan always did it?”
“Along with sleight of hand. And the guy has implants. Allison wouldn’t have, couldn’t have. But come on, Step. You’re not that fricking innocent or naive.”
He grunted, scratched the stubble on jaw. “Hey, you know me, Supervisor. But how did you know?”
“Would I be worth spit as a Supervisor if I didn’t know when I was up against a rigged system?”
“Naw, guess not.” Step walked around, threw open the big cargo door in the back. “Got most of the stuff you asked for. The solar charger is the best I could scrounge up on such short notice. But, hey, it’s old. Maybe forty percent efficiency. I’ll have Sheyela Smith cobble together something better and more permanent.”
“Let us give you a hand with that.”
Together, Kalico, Michaela, and Step slid the heavy unit out of the airtruck, rolled it across the irregular and broken surface, and raised the solar panel on its mounts. The needles immediately showed the available charge. Opening the battery case, Kalico found a homemade lead-acid battery in a hand-blown glass case.
“Looks like some of Tori Ashan’s early work,” Kalico noted.
“Who’s Tori Ashan?” Michaela asked.
“Glassblower. Makes our windows and glasses and things,” Step told her, giving the woman a sidelong appraisal.
“One of those important people I was telling you about,” Kalico added, slapping a hand on the cover as she closed it. “Looks like the water level’s good. I’ll have Anna Gabarron make us a couple of gallons of distilled water and detail someone to keep it serviced each time we come through.”
“Where did you learn so much about old batteries?” Michaela wondered.
“By keeping my mouth shut and listening when I’m in the presence of people who are smarter than I am.” Kalico followed Step back to the airtruck, helped him unload the rifles. These came in a blanket-wrapped bundle of four secured on the ends with straps.
“There you go,” Step told her. “Everything Frank Freund had in the shop. That’s three bolt guns and a single shot. Now, the fifty-caliber bolt gun only has five cartridges, and it was kind of experimental. You have to mix and match with the other ammunition for the other guns, but don’t get too wild when you start shooting. Not counting the big fifty, there’s only a total of forty-six cartridges.”
“Forty-six? That’s all?” Kalico asked as Step pulled out the ammo box. “Can Freund make more?”
“Yeah, well, that’s where it gets sketchy. Frank figured you were going to ask exactly that, so he was telling me as we were loading the stuff. Gunpowder is nitrocellulose. We can make nitric acid. The problem is cellulose. Most of that is made from either cotton or wood pulp back in Solar System. We’ve got cellulose in our terrestrial plant stems, but not like you’d need to easily make gunpowder. The best source we’ve got might be from wheat, oat, and rye straw. But Frank’s not sure. I could turn Cheng on it, but he’s already overwhelmed.”
“What does that mean?” Michaela asked hesitantly.
“It means you’d better not start any long, drawn-out gunfights,” Step told her. “And do most of your shooting with the bolt guns.”
“These guns shoot bolts?” Lara asked, straightening from where she was picking at some of the cracked basalt. “We’ve got plenty of bolts. I saw a bin full of them in the equipment storage.”
Step’s expression went quizzical, and then descended to disbelief.
“What do you expect? She’s a geologist,” Kalico said by way of explanation. “Not that I’d have known the difference back in the early days myself.” To Lara, Kalico said, “Bolt gun refers to the way the rifle loads ammunition. To shoot it you have to cycle a bolt to load and unload the chamber. A single shot only holds one cartridge at a time. It’s slower to operate.”
Lara gave her a blank look.
“Trust me. You’ll learn.”
Step gave Kalico a squinty and skeptical look. “So, Supervisor, you’re out in the ocean, already had one person eaten, and you’re going to trust yourselves with rifles for protection? Not even considering that bullets don’t go through water, your people are Corporate scientists. No offense, but in an emergency, they’re more likely to blow their foot off than some menacing sea beastie.”
Kalico stepped back for the box of spices she’d ordered, lifted them out. “Step, it’s all we’ve got until Kel, Ghosh, and Lawson come up with some way of protecting the subs and seatrucks. That, or I could hire Talina to come out and teach my people about shooting . . . if only I had enough bullets so that they could practice.”
“Yeah, well, that’s another thing.”
“What is?”
“Tal’s off in the forest with that Taglioni character. Seems he got himself in a mess out in the bush.”
“With the gotcha vine, right?”
“Right.”
Kalico set the box down, an unfamiliar quickening in her pulse. “You mean they never made it back to town from Dek’s claim?”
“Oh, yeah. But before she did, word is that Dek started to give up the ghost, crapped out completely, and Tal gave him CPR. Now, I just heard the story from Raya, but she says that Dek got a whole rafter of quetzal TriNA in the process. Made him more than a little cucking frazy. Back in PA, Tal ran him down just before he blew a hole in the new school. She figured to save the rest of us from having to shoot his chapped ass after he did something dumb, so she flew him out to Two Falls Gap in case the quetzals took him over.”
Kalico’s heart skipped. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me this before?”
Step arched a scarred eyebrow. “Didn’t know it was a matter of Corporate concern given sea monsters and all.” His gaze narrowed. “Besides, Tal’s the best person he could be with . . . unless you’ve got other concerns.”
Do I? Kalico asked herself.
Michaela was carrying the last of the boxes of vegetables to the seatruck, giving h
er an evaluative look. But then the woman had had an affair or two with Dek back on Ashanti.
Kalico kept her voice casual. “So, Step, what if, as you say, the quetzals take him over? What’s Talina’s plan?”
“Said she’d shoot him in the back of the head rather than let the quetzals kill him.”
“She wouldn’t.” But, damn it, this was Talina. If she said she would, she meant it.
“’Scuse me,” Step muttered knowingly. “Never seen a seatruck before. Think I’ll take me a look.” The man nodded, ambling off in the seatruck’s direction.
Kalico chewed her lip, seated herself on the back step of the airtruck’s cargo bay. Dek wasn’t just soft meat. He was a Taglioni. And if anything happened to him, there would be pus-bloody hell to pay.
And what will I do? Images of Dek’s smile, his roguish dimple and designer eyes, played through her memory. What does Derek Taglioni mean to me?
She was trying to sort through her complicated relationship with the man, their rather rocky history, and who he had become when Michaela asked, “Where’s Lara?”
Kalico leapt to her feet, started forward, staring around. The pad was empty.
“Where did you see her last?” Kalico asked.
Michaela pointed. “Right over there. Where that lighter streak of stone is.”
Shit. Not more than twenty meters from the tumbled rock and splintered trees at the edge of the pad.
“Step!” she bellowed. “Rifle hot, safety off. Lara’s missing!”
The man whirled from where he’d been inspecting the seatruck. For a big man—muscular as he was—he proved remarkably fast on his feet. He didn’t bother with his rifle in the airtruck but tore one of the bolt guns from the wrap of blankets.
Armed and ready, Kalico led the way to where Lara had been. The only trace was a smear of blood, and from the angles where drops of it hit and spattered, it was easy to see that something had grabbed her and left at a run. Whatever it had been, it had made a leap to the nearest fallen log and vanished into the forest on the other side.
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