What the hell? Dek was smarter than this.
“Or is he?” she asked, slinging her utility belt and pistol around her hips before grabbing up her own hat and cloak. Pulling her rifle from the rack, she stepped out, locking the door behind her. The morning was beautiful, crystal clear in Capella’s slanting light. Dew glistened on her aircar and beaded in drops on the large-leafed plants. Mist was rising in a gray haze from the garden, and the morning chime kept rising and falling in half-symphonic regularity.
“Dek!” Talina slowly scoured the area. And in the golden light, she noticed where the dew had been knocked off the leaves by Dek’s passage.
“Dek! Damn it, where are you?”
Nothing came in answer but the mocking sound of the chime.
Slinging her rifle, Talina started off in Dek’s footsteps. As soon as Capella’s implacable rays had a chance to do their thing, any semblance of a dew trail would be gone.
She crossed the garden at a trot, slowing at the edge of the trees. Behind the outlying aquajade and chabacho, the forest rose in an impenetrable mass of vines, branches, and leaves. But Dek’s trail headed straight into the shadowed depths.
“Well, shit, you stupid fool.” Talina unslung her rifle. She’d find him all right. Probably hanging half-devoured from a tooth flower, or maybe wrapped up in a sidewinder’s embrace. Worst would be if a nightmare had caught him and hauled him up into a mundo tree’s dim recesses to digest for a couple of months.
“Please, Dek, if it’s a nightmare, be dead already.” The last time she’d shot anyone in a nightmare’s embrace it had been Clemenceau. She’d hated Clemenceau, and it had still been one of the hardest things she’d ever done. Pulling the trigger on Dek? That would break her heart.
“Good,” Demon whispered.
“Oh, go fuck yourself.”
“Can’t. Takes three.”
“Piece of shit.”
Irritated, Talina started forward, her vision adjusting to the darkness as she slipped into the forest’s shadowed depths. Here, beneath the thick overstory, the visibility was little better than in starlight; Capella’s angle remained too low to shoot even refracted rays through the higher branches. Thick root mat squirmed slowly under Talina’s weight as she scented the air, her wary gaze taking in the surrounding vines, looking for the lethal predators.
Dek’s track had been in a straight line from the dome. West. Toward the mountain wall. But once he was in the trees? Picking and holding a direction was nigh on impossible without a compass or global positioning aid, not that Donovan had anything like the latter.
She searched for any sign of Dek’s passage, any difference in the movement of the roots. And saw nothing but the constant slow writhing normal to a forest floor.
How much lead did he have? And more to the point, why in hell had he wandered off into the forest? Soft meat he might be, but it just didn’t make sense. He was smarter than this. Nothing would have been tempting enough to lure him into the bush without his rifle or his . . .
“He’s not in his right mind,” Rocket told her from her shoulder.
“Demon’s got him locked in a hallucination,” she agreed, her hopes dropping.
Had to be.
“So, Demon, you piece of shit, what’s your game? If you wanted him dead, you could have just hallucinated him into shooting himself.” A pause. “Or could you?”
No answer came from down behind her stomach where her hated quetzal seemed to crouch in anticipation.
“This is a game, isn’t it? There’s no fun or payback in killing Dek fast. That’s too easy. I’d just grieve for a bit, load up, and head back to my life. No, you’re going to try and make the two of us suffer. To do that, you need to keep him alive. Make it a challenge.”
She could feel the quetzal shift in her gut, as if delighted that she’d caught on so quickly.
“West.”
How in the hell would her Demon know what Dek’s Demon was planning? But then, it was the same intelligence. And who knew how that worked?
Toward the mountains? Where the forest was thicker, the land more rugged and broken as it rose toward the sheer cliffs?
Talina checked her wrist compass, and—focusing on her surroundings—started forward into the hidden depths. It came to her in a curious revelation that she did so with an uncanny ease. Almost a feeling of being at home, moving with a surefooted speed. She sidestepped the biteya bush and thorncactus, gave wide berth to the pincushion thing, and instinctively leapt from root to root, secure in her understanding of which roots would support her weight with the least amount of disturbance.
This was a far cry from that hesitant, start and falter, forever-on-the-edge-of-disaster trip she’d made with Cap Taggart all those years ago. Not that anything about her passage was cavalier. Death lurked on all sides. Not just in the predatory plants, but in the ever-questing roots, in the hidden hunters that prowled the shadows.
“So how did Dek get past all this without being turned into a skeleton?”
“Made him quetzal?” Rocket suggested.
That scared, more than reassured, her. If Demon’s TriNA had that much control over Dek’s brain, was it even worth finding him?
Worst case, Demon would use the guy to toss her into a nightmare’s tentacles or shove her down in slug-filled mud so that she’d die horribly and in agony.
Best case? She’d find him a blithering idiot, or zombie-like under Demon’s control. And it would be her responsibility to put a bullet in his head.
“Either way sucks toilet water,” she growled as she slipped around a black hole in the roots that reeked of slightly different vinegar smell than she was used to. Something down there that she was unfamiliar with, not a skewer or bem. Her quetzal sense formed an image of a two-sword-clawed, blue, three-eyed thing in a hard shell. Weird how the image came clear with just the smell.
Skipping across a series of roots, she startled a collection of invertebrates on a fallen chabacho trunk. They scattered in an explosion of multicolored shells and buzzing wings.
By the numbers on her wrist unit, she’d been traveling west for twenty minutes when she picked up the first trace of Dek’s passage: a slight agitation in the roots off to her left. No telling if it was Demon’s influence or Dek’s previous experience, but he’d made a wide circuit around the stand of brown caps.
Then which way?
She frowned, couldn’t pick out any unusual activity in the roots beyond the brown caps, but a fallen aquajade trunk served as a ramp that led up to a bench on her left. Talina took it, racing to the stony outcrop’s top. Here she could see the thin root mat’s agitation where Dek’s booted feet had bruised them. Talina raced along in pursuit, and into the dense forest beyond where deeper soil allowed the trees to grow into towering specimens. Some of the boles were a good five meters in diameter, the roots snaking out beneath them like supple pillars.
Dek’s trail through the jumble let her make good time, proceeding almost at a run. Breath came easily to her lungs, the familiar weight of her rifle acting as a balance as she leapt from root to root, heedless of the disturbance she left by her rapid passage.
“Come on, Dek. Where the hell are you?”
For the first time, a spear of hope began to build. The guy was still alive. Protected either by incredible luck—or more likely, Demon’s guiding hand—Dek had crossed almost a kilometer of virgin forest. Unarmed.
“So, seriously, Tal,” she mused as she climbed up a three-meter-high knot of interlaced roots, “you like the guy. If he’s a blank-gazed automaton possessed by a demented quetzal, can you really make yourself walk up and shoot him in the head?”
Damn it, why the hell did these things always happen to her? Why was it she who had to make the choice? Chock it up to some cosmic injustice? Bad karma on her part? Or was Shig right, and her young soul had to pay a weird penance for sins c
ommitted in one of her earlier and even younger existences?
“Screw the Hindus. Or Buddhists. Or who the hell ever,” she muttered.
In her memory she could hear her half-Maya mother telling her, “The universe wouldn’t pick you if you weren’t strong enough to do what you had to.”
The way was steeper now, and she had to dig in with her toes to find purchase on the already irritated roots. She was gaining. Just minutes behind her prey if she were any judge of the roots’ activity. The light was brighter, indicating a break in the trees, probably a rock outcrop or one of the jumbled ridges abutting the mountain wall. She could hear the faint roar of whitewater tumbling down a defile somewhere beyond the steep incline just ahead.
Talina fought for footing in the roiling roots as she scrambled up the abuttal. She was on the verge of crashing through the screen of leaves and into the open when she heard the chittering, the tweeting whistles and harmonics. She didn’t need the panicked quetzals inside to bring her to a hard stop. Her own heart might have leapt from her chest.
Mobbers!
Talina immediately dropped to a knee, every muscle frozen.
The sound grew, ever louder.
And Dek had to be just on the other side of those leaves, out in the open.
“Think, Tal,” she managed through gritted teeth.
Dropping onto her stomach, she wiggled across the roots to peer through a gap in the leaves.
A wheeling, fluttering chaos of laser-flashing colors met her gaze. Mostly crimsons, stunning oranges, vermillion yellows, blinding greens, and pulsing blues, a riot of color in a whirlwind column that descended from above. For the briefest of instants, Tal fixed on the image of Dek Taglioni, lying flat, face-down and motionless on the bare stone.
Within seconds, Talina was going to bear witness as the beasts stripped Dek’s body down to bloody bones.
The scream of the quetzals inside her, the momentary paralysis they imposed, froze every muscle.
Dek is going to die!
She choked off the stone-cold fear. A scream tore from her lips, causing the mobbers to hesitate just as the four-winged terrors descended on Dek. Talina had a momentary vision of the triangular heads turning her way amid the flapping of a thousand rainbow-patterned wings. Of the three-eyed gazes fixing on hers. The curved claws, like thin razors, flashed in the light.
She didn’t consciously flip the safety to automatic as she rose. The rifle in her hands might have pointed itself, erupted on its own. Automatic fire spewed into the center of the twisting vortex of flying bodies. Muzzle blast shredded the leaves around her, blowing bits and fragments into the air.
She would remember it like a vision: the multicolored bodies exploding as the rounds tore through them at three thousand feet per second. Bits of cad-yellow, aqua, violet, and turquoise pelage, the spraying haze of blood and body parts. Fragments of bone, strings of guts, furry tails, heads, and severed wings cartwheeled in the air. As tightly packed as they were for the kill, each bullet tore three or four of the flying horrors into pieces.
Talina screamed as she charged out, raising the rifle, stitching her way up through the dense column of flying bodies. She could follow the path of her bullets by the exploding bodies, the haze of blood and fluids and burst, tumbling, wheeling body parts. It might have been a perverted and hellish vision. Shreds of tissue, heads, guts, ripped apart, half obscured by a red and watery mist. The flying bits and pieces blotted the sky with chaos.
And then silence. Only the ringing in her ears.
Talina stood, trembling, rifle lifted, bolt open after the last round, a curl of smoke rising from the elevated barrel.
From out of the whirling, contorting, vortex above came a rain of blood, tissue, bones and wings. She crouched, covered her head as the gore came cascading down. Bits and pieces were falling like a mad bombardment, to batter, splat, and thump on the stone around her and Dek. Mingled in the body parts were wounded and dying mobbers, shrieking as they fell and slammed into the hard rock. Most died when they smacked into the stone; some flapped broken wings, crying piteously.
And in the midst of it came an eerie shriek that grew into a deafening squeal born of a hundred lungs as what remained of the column broke into a panicked confusion, colors flashing to black and orange throughout what was left of the shattered flock.
Maybe a hundred of the wheeling, milling beasts remained, and there Talina was, crouched over Dek’s body, out in the open, with an empty rifle.
The deafening squeal grew louder, painful enough to make her wince.
Dropping her rifle, Talina clawed for her pistol, prepared to take as many of the little bastards with her as she could before they cut her to ribbons. As she lifted it, the lowest mobbers jinked sideways in flight, their squeal like an icepick through her ears.
With incomprehensible agility—the deafening squeal spreading up the column—the horde broke, jinked a couple meters to the left, and within seconds, fled into the trees.
As the chime began to rise again, Talina and Dek—spattered and dripping with blood and bits—were left alone beneath an open sky; offal, fluids, and pieces of dead and dying mobbers colored the patterned gneiss.
When Talina finally caught her breath, got her heart rate back to normal, and stopped the shaking in her arms and fingers, she dropped to a knee in the gore.
Placing a hand on Dek’s shoulder, she rolled him over, asking, “Hey, Dek. You all right?”
When she stared into his eyes, it was to meet a terror-locked stare. The man might have been catatonic.
“Dek? Dek! You okay?”
He blinked. Seemed to focus. As his eyes widened in terror, a bloodcurdling scream tore from his throat.
38
Kalico stared out the side window as her A-7 dropped from the sky toward Corporate Mine. As it lost altitude, she had a perfect view of her empire. Corporate Mine perched on a metal-rich ridge jutting out on the southeast side of the Corporate Range. Part of the crater’s rim, Corporate Range composed the southern arc of the Wind Mountains where they curved eastward toward the Gulf. On a resistant outcrop below the high peaks, Kalico had blasted a flat pad, built a fenced compound around a large dome and equipment yard, and erected two headstocks over the Number One and Number Two mines.
A tramline carried ore down the mountain and across the forested lowlands to the smelter where it had been built on the floodplain beside a bend in the river. Contiguous to it lay the small plot of farmland and the lower shuttle landing field. Landing field might have been a stretch; the thing consisted of nothing more than a thruster-baked red-dirt field. The faint scar of the slowly proceeding haul road could be seen where the trees had been held at bay by the struggling line of immature pines.
When she’d stepped out of the seatruck back on the beach pad and climbed into the A-7, Makarov had told her that her missing miners were Alia Fey and Stana Viola. The two had just driven the mucking machine into place and began removing ore when the roof goafed less than a hundred meters behind them. Meanwhile, Jin and Masters were servicing the drill back at the portal. The framing crew had been in the adit, preparing to haul timbers up to the working face. The miracle was that the cave-in hadn’t killed the entire crew.
Be that as it may, two of her people remained trapped by—or dead under—tons of rock.
Everything on Donovan is a fight, Kalico thought, her chin propped on her knotted fist as she contemplated her small settlement. Didn’t matter if it was the mine, the forest, the geology, the climate, the ancient and forever-breaking equipment . . . or the fucking Maritime Unit.
Now she faced her first cave-in. Worse, this time it wasn’t just statistics, but names, women she knew: Alia and Stana. In her hurried communications with Aurobindo Ghosh, she’d learned that any chance that they might be alive was either little, slim, or most likely, none.
“Supervisor, we’re still at th
e beginning of this. We’re just getting an idea of the extent of the roof fall. Since we talked to you last, we’ve had more rock come down one hundred and fifty meters back from the face. The shoring just keeps giving way.”
One hundred and fifty meters.
She could see it in her mind’s eye: The rotten and cracked rock, the water dripping through the elaborate wood shoring, the timbers giving way. See—as if in slow motion—the cascade of splintered wood, the falling tons of broken and cracked rock . . . crushing the very light out of existence.
The notion was mind-and-soul-numbing.
What if Alia and Stana were still trapped in there? Clinging desperately to a small pocket of air? Crouched in the darkest of black and soundless eternity? Knowing that with each breath, they were exhausting the last of the air?
Kalico ground her teeth, wondering if she was a monster to hope that they’d been crushed instantly.
“Coming in,” Makarov called as he banked hard, g-force pressing Kalico down into her conforming seat. She watched the forest rise to meet her as Makarov eased up on the thrusters at exactly the right moment to settle them with a feather-lightness onto the red soil of the smelter landing pad.
“Give me a moment to spool down, Supervisor,” Makarov called as Kalico unbuckled from her seat, grabbed her small bag, and made her way to the hatch.
As the ramp dropped, she called, “Thanks, Juri. Superb job, as usual.”
“Hope it turns out well, ma’am.” Makarov called back. “I’m going to sit tight with the shuttle until, one way or another, this thing is over. You need me and the bird for anything, we’ll be ready to lift within five minutes.”
“Appreciate that. It won’t be forgotten.” And she was out the door, smelling the stink of exhaust mixed with dust.
Overhead, Capella burned down with glaring white intensity. She could see the heat waves rising over the packed crowns of the trees where they towered on all sides. A constant reminder that her little settlement with its fragile perimeter of pines, walnuts, and other terrestrial trees held but the most precarious of toeholds.
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