With that, Kalico tossed her bag into the seatruck, grabbed the handrail, and hauled herself up into the cab. Without a look back, she dropped into the seat, telling Atumbo, “Now, get me to the beach. Fast as this thing can go . . . and remember that I’m in one hell of a bad mood.”
“Yes, Supervisor.” Atumbo powered up the fans, lifted them off, and eased out over the water. As he circled, and the tail wind sent them flying across the waves, Kalico got one last look back at the Pod.
Michaela Hailwood stood there, braced against the wind, looking small and defeated.
35
Since she had watched the seatruck vanish over the horizon, Michaela Hailwood had passed the morning in stunned relief. She had fully anticipated Kalico Aguila to give the order that would shut down the Maritime Unit. A Board Supervisor with marines to back her up, Aguila could enforce any decision she made. And she’d do it without remorse.
“She personally shot a couple of deserters,” Michaela reminded herself as she crossed the landing in level one and worked the upper hatch that let her descend the tube to the Undersea Bay. The story had been recounted several times during the Maritime Unit’s short stay in Port Authority. According to the Donovanians, Kalico Aguila was a woman that no one with sense messed with. And that included beasts like mobbers and quetzals.
A woman like that? Last night Michaela’s own people had figuratively given the Supervisor a slap across the face.
Michaela entered the pressure lock, cycled it, and stepped through into the brightly lit Underwater Bay with its gleaming submarines, equipment, workbenches, and cabinets. The open pool of water was perfectly still, reflecting the lights and walls above its translucence. She crossed the deck, aware of the small spots of teal-colored stuff on the floor. Yoshimura was crouched at the edge of the water, staring down at the coating of what looked like green-blue slime that clung to every surface at the waterline.
“What have you got, Yosh?”
Yoshimura used a glass rod to scoop some of the slime up, stood and studied it in the light. “Well, I wanted a word alone with you. I thought you did a pretty good job with that speech at breakfast. You got everyone charged up and gave us all a boost. Okay, so the Supervisor’s off to deal with a disaster at Corporate Mine, but Michaela, ultimately we’re going to pay for what we did.”
“Yosh, what could I do? I keep thinking that maybe, if Shin was just here, we could have sidestepped this whole calamity.”
“You were trapped. Had to side with the vote.” He chuckled as he studied the goo on the glass rod. “A vote, can you imagine? When did we start doing that?”
“On Ashanti. Once it was apparent what kind of trouble we were in, we had to have community consensus. It was that or we’d have started murdering each other when things got tense. Survival hinged on group harmony being more important than interpersonal differences, grudges, and jealousies.” She gestured her futility. “What I didn’t get was how frightened and anxious our people are. That they could rally around surly old Anna, of all people, shows how deep the problem lies. But how could they blame Aguila?”
“Because Aguila’s an outsider. And she’s the face of The Corporation that sent us here, had us locked in Ashanti, and landed us in this little Pod out in the middle of an ocean full of nasty creatures that can kill us. If you’ve got to have a scapegoat, she’s made for it. She comes across as hard and uncaring. Not one drop of empathy for an individual’s suffering or feelings. She’s as tough as the scars on her face, hands, and arms.”
“Our fate hangs by a thread, Yosh. This disaster at Corporate Mine might have been the only thing that saved us. Bottom line, up front? Whatever happens out here, we are on our own. Get it?”
“Yeah, you stressed that at breakfast. But saying it and understanding it might be two different things.”
“Help me get it through people’s heads. Back home, The Corporation was always there. Rescue was always just a call away. On Ashanti, it was the crew. For a while, here, it was Aguila, and what little she had to offer. But that just flew east with the seatruck.”
Michaela paced back and forth, knotting and unknotting her fists. “If we call on Aguila to bail us out. For any reason. She’s coming back with her marines and shuttles. She’s loading us all up and packing us off to Corporate Mine to scrub floors and carry rocks. The Pod will be picked up in its constituent pieces and hauled off to the mainland to be recycled into things Corporate Mine can use. Or maybe it will be sold to Port Authority in this insane market economy they’ve created.”
Yosh walked over, carefully tilted his glass rod so the teal-colored goo ran into a sample jar; then he capped it. The rod he washed in one of the sinks, then inserted it into a sterilizer. Bearing his prize, he turned to face her.
“Michaela, here’s the thing: I was out there with Aguila when Shin was taken. If the Supervisor hadn’t been with us, we would have lost both UUVs. We would have gone together to collect the samples, as a team. Not individually, let alone in a hurry like Aguila had us do. We’d have both been standing there, side by side in the surf when that scimitar burst out of the water. It wouldn’t have just been Shin. Both of us would have been dead.”
He pointed a finger. “And from the reports, Lara was told to stay next to the seatruck. She wandered off, right? To the edge of the pad. And she did it after Aguila told her not to.”
“That’s right.”
“Michaela, it’s our fault. If Shin had run out, taken his sample, and hurried back like he was told, he’d be alive. Instead he just stood there, staring out at the surf. Same with Lara, she disobeyed. We just turned on a woman who did everything she could to help us. From here on out, we can’t fail. We can’t give her reason to shut us down.”
“I’m way ahead of you. I’ve ordered Dik to cut all communications with Corporate Mine. Aguila says we’re going to lose more people. If we do, and if we have other failures, I don’t want it getting back to Aguila. If she calls us, I’ll tell her that everything is fine, and research is progressing.”
“And the trips to Port Authority? Anything that happens, she’ll hear it through PA and be doubly pissed off that we didn’t tell her.”
“Let’s postpone those rotations until things settle down. After losing Lara, we can make a case for putting them on hold.” She indicated the sample jar. “What is that?”
“Don’t know. But it’s all over the pilings and the bottom of the Pod. I thought I’d get Vik to take a look at it under the scope. See if she can figure out what this stuff is. Probably some sort of Donovanian algae or the like.”
“Good thinking.” She started for the hatch, lost in thought. Stopped as she opened the pressure door. “Yosh, you and I are thinking along the same lines. Aguila won’t forget this. We really are on our own. If you think of anything, and I mean anything, that I might need to know to keep us alive out here, you will tell me, won’t you?”
He gave her a smile, nodded. “I can’t be Shin. He was a one of a kind. But yeah. We’ve been though too much to lose it all now.”
36
The tooth flower, in all of its glorious colors, hung low over the trail as Dek slowed, cocked his head, and studied the predator. In the twilight, he backed a step, feeling the roots under his foot squirm. Better to go around. With a bunching of his legs, he leapt the two meters to the top of a thick tangle of chabacho roots, ran the five meters along the top root, and dropped with a thump onto the trail beyond the tooth flower. Not that it was a trail in the Earthly sense, just an opening in the forest floor that allowed passage between the massed snarls of intertwined roots.
As he lowered his body parallel to the ground, mouth open, and sprinted down the winding way, he was aware of the sidewinder that jetted back out of sight. The bem he passed didn’t so much as shift its camouflage, despite the intensifying of its odor. A sure indication of fear.
Better yet, Dek’s vision gave him
added confidence as he shot through the mazework of vines, root bundles, and occasional dips and rises. Nothing had prepared him to see the world with such clarity. Human stereoscopic vision was so limited. With three widely spaced eyes, his depth perception was perfect, even at the speed he ran. Never had he been so surefooted, able to run so fast without a bobble or a misstep. His body might have been one with the terrain, each step perfectly placed.
Dek paused at the base of a vertical tumble of black rock, the stone cloaked in a fine tracery of roots. A leap took him to the top of a fallen boulder, and dodging vines, he scampered his way up to the flat meadow above. There, on the black bedrock, he stopped short, scenting for danger, and used the air funneling into his lungs to expel excess body heat from the vents beside his tail. The sensation of air sucking through his mouth, compressing for oxygen, and jetting out behind him, filled him with exultation.
He thrived on the intensity. A totality of existence. Experienced the sense of “Eternal Now” with such clarity. Color, depth, the complexity of sound, the movement of air on his expanded collar, the scents of plants and prey, immersed him in a celebration of what it meant to be alive.
I am free.
Filling his lungs, he expelled a harmonic blast of sound from his vents, chittering at the same time in an exploration of quetzal expression.
Around him, the chime changed, its pitch rising.
Through the gap in the trees, he could see the sheer mountain wall rising to the clouds, its colorful and patterned rock broken and craggy along the fault lines, the stone radiating in different shades of infrared where Capella’s rays warmed the cliffs. Lines of waterfalls, shadowed cracks and crevices gave off a duller shade, almost blue.
Dek reveled at the vista, taken by the grandeur of the place. He had seen Earth’s most spectacular scenery, and nothing compared. As the human inside him marveled, the quetzal became confused and then amazed. How could the creatures not have a sense of aesthetic beauty? But here it was, as if in illumination.
“That’s Demon. It never accessed that part of Talina’s brain.” Rocket whispered from his shoulder. “He was too intent on just killing her.”
“But Kylee knew. You shared with her.”
“Grew up with it. So much to explore now. Like the miracle you experience seeing through quetzal eyes, we feel seeing through yours. A remarkable—”
A blast of pain exploded in Dek’s gut. Bent him double. The agony of it left him wheezing for breath and clutching his middle.
“What that . . . ?”
“Not to be heard.” The voice had a hissing quality now, coming from inside.
“Demon,” Dek gritted, made himself straighten and breathe. “So, you can just blast Rocket out of my head with a jolt of pain. Talina warned me.”
“Yesss. Stronger.”
Dek blinked, the world coming back in focus. The mountain wall remained before him, more stunning than he remembered as it rose in sheer cliffs to the cloud-wrapped peaks so high above, but the image wasn’t quite the same. Flatter now, and the IR shading had lost its vibrancy. His breath was labored, sucking and expelling out of his lungs. The sounds not as rich to his ears as the chime rose, seemed to catch a melody, and then disintegrated into atonality.
He looked down, surprised to find his body, not quetzal, but human. He wore only a set of coveralls, belted at the waist, and his boots. But looking around, he was on that block of stone, only to gaze up at the same mountain he’d seen as a quetzal.
“What the hell?” he demanded, turning. Capella hung over the treetops above the eastern horizon.
“Brought you out here to die, human.” Demon’s voice seemed to chortle down inside Dek’s gut.
“Where’s my rifle? My pistol?”
“Just you. Time to die.”
Dek rubbed hard at his face. Blinked. This was no dream. He was here—atop a block of toppled gneiss—surrounded by forest at the very foot of the titanic up-thrust of the mountain wall. Worse, he had no clue how he had come to this place.
“So, which way is Two Falls Gap?” he wondered, staring wistfully off to the east. Had to be that way. But which trail did he take? How could he keep his orientation once he was back in the trees?
Instead of an answer, all he got in return was the rising and falling of the chime.
“Think, Dek. Think.”
Try as he might, cudgel his brain all he could, the only image was of a mazework of trees and a torturous path that he’d run at high speed. The forest floor had been a jumble of giant roots, all knotted and intertwined, of ups and downs, twists and turns.
No clue remained as to where he’d been, how he had managed to get here.
“Talina!” he bellowed.
The only answer was the monotonous shifting of the chime. And, damn it, as loud as the invertebrates were, if Tal wasn’t within a hundred meters or so, she’d never hear his call. Not even with her quetzal-augmented senses.
Dek knotted a fist, turned as several buzzing flying things whisked past his ear like slow bullets. Creatures like he’d never seen before. They paid him no heed.
“How the hell did I get here?”
“I brought you.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You brought me here to die, you piece of shit. Why?”
“Talina. What she calls ‘payback.’”
“The problem with learning about humans? You’re starting to think like one.”
“Talina is a blunt tool. Your way is much more cruel.”
“My way? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“As you did to Kalay.”
“Go fuck yourself, Demon.”
Demon didn’t reply, just uttered that infuriating chittering.
Dek kept turning, searching desperately to discover some sign, some clue that would lead him back to Two Falls Gap. All he could see was trees, their leaves and branches slowly moving as they shifted and jockeyed for a better exposure to the morning light.
“Think, Dek.” He swallowed hard, realized that his mouth was dry. Where the hell was he going to find a drink? He didn’t even have a knife to cut a hole in an aquajade to tap one of the veins for water, toxic though it might be.
Glancing to the west, he studied the closest of the waterfalls tumbling down the mountain. That was maybe a hundred meters to the south across impossibly piled chunks of colluvial rock intertwined with trees and vines. Not even a quetzal could cross that.
But water? Wherever it collected at the base of the slope, there lay his drink. As to the knot in his stomach? It came as the first pang of hunger. The thing about having survived starvation was that he knew how far he could go on empty.
Walking to the edge of the tumbled block, he looked back down the drop. He had climbed up that, could see the last of the fine roots he’d scrambled across as they relaxed into their usual slow, sinuous motion. By now, any trail he’d left had faded back into the normal rhythms of forest life.
“Pus in a bucket, I don’t even know how long I’ve been gone, let alone how far.”
The miracle was that he’d made it. That some chokeya vine, biteya bush, you’re screwed vine, sidewinder, spike, or skewer hadn’t grabbed him and killed him.
“So, if being a quetzal got me this far . . . ?” Dek cocked an eyebrow, tried to imagine himself back into a quetzal’s body. Tried harder. Still didn’t happen. So, how had Demon done that? Taken over all of his consciousness, essentially stolen his body and turned off his mind?
He was staring up at the mountain wall again, the futility of his circumstances beginning to take hold, when he saw movement. A lot of movement, like a thousand sparkles of color against the craggy rock wall no more than a couple hundred meters to the south.
The jinking flight—fluttering and uniform patterns of movement—was familiar. Like a nightmare come to life.
He knew that shape as t
he closest of the flying beasts rose up above the trees. The four wings, the keel-shaped breast, the furry tail and gleaming knife-like claws on the beast’s wrists.
Mobbers.
And they were headed his way.
37
Talina hadn’t slept well. She awakened late, blinked the rheum out of her eyes, and sat up in her makeshift bed. Light spilled in through the film-covered window. Not that window washing was one of her preferred occupations, but she’d have to attend to some cleaning today. Maybe get Dek to help her. The man liked to brag about how he’d scrubbed toilets, so she’d let him take a whack at the scum on the . . .
She glanced across, saw that his bedding was thrown back. Empty.
Didn’t make sense. Normally, she’d have awakened at the crackling of the plastic emergency bedding the guy was sleeping in. And she should have heard him dress. Dek’s boots were gone, too. Surely she should have heard him clumping across the duraplast floor. What had he done? Tiptoed out in his sock feet to put his boots on in the front room?
Whatever. Maybe he had breakfast ready. She’d found mint plants in the wet areas the day before. Be nice if Dek had a cup steaming for her.
She dressed, rolled her shoulders to loosen the muscles, pulled on her boots, and made her way into the bathroom. No way she’d walk barefoot on that kind of filth. As she inspected the floor, she figured that here was a better way for Dek to demonstrate his prowess when it came to cleaning. The place needed to be sprayed with disinfectant followed by a thorough scrubbing, and then to be hosed down.
When she’d finished her morning constitutional, she walked out into the main room. Only to find it empty.
On the rack beside the door, her rifle rested next to Dek’s fancy Holland & Holland. His cloak and hat were hanging on the back of the couch. The door gaped open a crack, allowing easy access for any passing sidewinder, bem, or quetzal.
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