Adrift

by W. Michael Gear

  He seemed to struggle, as if having trouble understanding what she was saying.

  “Tadeki, that’s an order. Climb down now . . . and do it carefully.” When he still didn’t move, she snapped, “Now!”

  That finally penetrated his fog, and he carefully began to pick his way down the shifting scree of stone. At the same time, his expression had grown confused. He slowly shook his head, flicked it, as if at something buzzing by his ear. His worried brown gaze fixed on hers. “You need to call down everyone. We have to get her out.”

  Kalico watched his eyes; they kept shifting, as if a flurry of conflicting thoughts filled his head. “Call them,” he insisted. “Access com. We have to get her out. She’s in there. Just behind that rock. She’s pregnant. I told you that, right?”

  Kalico raised a soothing hand. “Easy, Tadeki. I’m stunned by this as well. Stana wasn’t as close to me as she was to you, and I’m so sorry. For you. For her. For the baby, too. I didn’t know she was pregnant.”

  “Our secret,” he whispered miserably. “Going to be a family. That’s why we’ve got to get her out.”

  “Tadeki, you’re not even supposed to be here. Does Stryski know you’re down here? Did he give you permission?”

  “I have to save Stana,” he continued to plead. “She’s all I’ve got. Do you understand? She’s my life. We’re going to have a baby.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “I have to get her out of there.”

  “Come on. Let’s get you outside. We’ll figure out what to do with Stana and Alia when we can determine why the shoring let go.”

  Tadeki’s cheek twitched, his gaze thinning. “You’re not going to save her, are you?”

  “Did you hear a word I said? She and Alia are dead, Tadeki. There’s nothing to save. They’re back there under tons of rock. Like you’re going to be if you go back to destabilizing that roof fall. Now, come on. Something tells me you’re absent without leave.”

  He turned, staring back at the slope of tumbled rock. “I have to save her.”

  “Yeah, I know. And I share your loss. Stana and Alia, both of them, were remarkable women. So, listen. Go back to work. I’ll tell Stryski to cut you a break. Hell, I might have done the same thing if it was someone I loved. Come on.”

  Tadeki was sniffing, a trembling in his hands, his shoulders bowed. Head down, he kept knotting and unknotting his fingers. The man looked completely undone. Kept repeating, “You’re not going to dig her out. Just leave her there to rot.”

  “Nothing we can do.” Kalico tried to keep her voice even. “Just had to come down and take one last look.”

  In the gleam of the lights, she could see his lips quivering, how his eyes were blinking.

  “Pick up your stuff. Come on.”

  She saw Tadeki reach for an iron bar, pick it up in his knotted hands; the weird gleam in his eyes seemed to intensify. Gripping the bar as if it were a bat he took a step toward her, saying, “If you won’t save her, I don’t have any other choice but to . . .”

  A voice called, “Supervisor?”

  “Here!” She turned, hearing the pattering and grating of footsteps as several people approached. Lights were bobbing, beams gleaming off the rails and water puddles.

  Kalico glanced back; tears streaked Tadeki’s smudged cheeks. Feet braced, he gripped the iron bar as if to crush it. Good thing he hadn’t taken it up with him to pry out that big trapezoidal stone. She might have arrived just in time to see him vanish under a cascade of rock that might have destabilized the whole mountain.

  Tadeki stood as if frozen, breath laboring in and out of his lungs. Head hanging. Then his body began to tremble.

  “Supervisor?” Sula Talovich called as he held up a hand against the shine of her light. He led the way, Ghosh and Ituri behind him.

  “Mr. Talovich,” she told him. “Where have you been?”

  “I know what happened,” he told her.

  “Tadeki?” Ituri asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be up top working on a hauler?”

  “Tadeki was just leaving,” Kalico told them. Turning to the man, she said, “Go on. Tell Stryski I said it was all right. Go back to work.”

  The man’s muscles tensed, the iron bar wavering in his knotted grip. Glancing up, he shot a half-glazed look at Ghosh and then Ituri. The iron bar clanged musically on the rock floor as it slipped from his suddenly nerveless fingers. Lips working soundlessly, he awkwardly stumbled past them, caught his stride, and broke into a run. Fleeing as if the furies of hell were behind him.

  “What’s that all about?” Ghosh asked.

  “He and Stana were expecting a child.” Kalico rubbed the back of her neck where it had suddenly gone tight. “She was three months pregnant. The damn fool thought he could dig her out. That she was still alive back there. Said he could hear her calling to him.” She paused. “Is there any possible way he could be right?”

  “There is not,” Talovich told her. “It’s not our fault. I mean, it is, but it isn’t.”

  “You want to be a bit more concise in your wording?”

  Talovich shot a look around him, pointing to the shoring. “That’s chabacho.”

  “Very good, Mr. Talovich.” She crossed her arms, making sure not to blind them with her light.

  “Back in the addit, we switched off. Chabacho and aquajade. It just depended on what we had cut as we built the haul road. We’ve used aquajade for years in the Number One and Number Two. It’s a good structural wood . . . right up until you put it in water.”

  “What do you mean, put it in water?”

  He pointed to the ricket where it ran a stream of yellow-brown water, then to the puddles where they dotted the tunnel floor. “We had places where the aquajade was constantly in standing water. You know about the veins in the wood, right? The ones you can tap? Drink from if you’re lost in the forest?”

  “Uh, yeah. But it’s not a healthy practice because of the heavy metals that accumulate in the tree.”

  Talovich ran a weary hand over his short-cut hair. “Those same veins suck up the water, ma’am. Act like suction tubes and saturate the wood. In that environment, it accelerates the bacterial action, which denatures the cells and weakens the polymer bonds in the cell walls. In short, it takes a seasoned timber and, over a couple of months, turns it into a sort of sponge.”

  Kalico experienced a sick feeling deep in her gut. “How did we miss this?”

  “We’re still learning, ma’am. But I swear on Alia and Stana’s graves, we’re never going to make this mistake again.”

  52

  Talina sat on a low basalt outcrop and studied the clear waters where the South River spilled over boulders in a set of Class III rapids. She had come here to make a decision about her “Dek problem.” It was a good place for soul-searching. Below the outcrop and crashing white water, the gradient flattened, the current still whirling and welling. To either side, the forest rose to varied heights, the trees moving slowly, their branches and leaves following Capella as the primary traced its way across the afternoon sky. The chime rose and fell, mocking in its predictable search for a nonexistent harmony.

  Talina cradled her rifle across her lap, her hair pulled back, butt half-asleep from sitting on the angular basalt. She’d opened the fastening on the front of her coveralls, allowing the breeze to cool her chest as she baked in the sun.

  She kept scanning the skies, looking for any sign of the mobbers. Her hope was that after she’d blasted the column, the survivors had been scared enough to flee the area. But then, no one had data on how the fearsome predators thought or behaved. Some dim part of her memory recalled that the more biologically efficient a predator was, the less intelligence it needed. That, back on Earth, that explained why ravens and crows were so much smarter than eagles or owls, or why wolves had to be smarter than cheetahs.

  But who knew if any of that held true on
Donovan?

  She needed only look at the surrounding forest. From the height of the trees, she could tell where the soil was deepest. There, the largest and most powerful of the forest giants stood; it was only as the soils shallowed that the smaller trees were jostling for space, wrestling, trying to topple each other.

  Maybe that was the legacy of organic-based life. It was bound to be in conflict with itself, a system built on predators and prey moving energy up the trophic levels, only to recycle it back to the lowest.

  “Then which level am I on when it comes to Dek?” she wondered.

  The guy had been out of his head for most of the morning, and nothing Talina had been able to do could reach him. She’d even tried a series of hard slaps to the face. Enough to raise a red welt on the guy’s already-scarred cheek. But his eyes had remained half-lidded. Whatever insane rush of memories and consciousness currently possessed him had him mumbling in poorly articulated syllables and periodically breaking out in bitter and derisive laughter—the kind that had nothing to do with delight.

  “Should I have really hurt him?”

  That’s when she’d had to leave.

  If it meant having to break his arm to bring him back to sanity, what would it take next time? Shocking him with electrodes?

  No, face it. Somewhere along the line, Dek was going to have to win this fight by himself. Or lose to Demon.

  She felt so damned helpless. It hurt too much to watch. And where had that come from?

  “Face it, Talina,” she told herself, “you don’t even know who Dek is anymore.”

  Was he the charming fellow who’d once helped Chaco Briggs fix a broken water pump? Or the wide-eyed and sunburned Dek who’d beamed over having picked a bucket of peppers in Reuben Miranda’s fields? Or was he the Dek she’d carried up the cliff at Tyson Station after he’d pushed himself to the limits of his endurance? That Dek would never be muttering about being a spider and destroying his father in the most painful way possible.

  Or would he?

  She rubbed her tired eyes, futility building inside. The old Dek—the one who was willing to risk it all to make it or break on Donovan—had charmed her. She’d found herself daydreaming about his smile, the dimple in his chin, and the animation in those yellow-green eyes of his. Something about the fact that he’d been so willing, desperate even, to meet Donovan’s challenges had appealed to something in her psyche.

  What had he said? “Hours, days, weeks, or months. I just needed to live. Free. On my own terms.” She pursed her lips. That was a man to respect.

  “He’s been a weight around your neck,” Demon chimed in from down inside. “Can’t take care of himself.”

  “He survived a mobber attack, climbed out of the canyon with a leg full of thorns, you piece of shit.”

  “And you condemned him. Should have let him die.”

  Talina ground her jaws, refusing to rise to the bait.

  “Be a mercy, you know.” Demon continued to twist the barb. “Put him down now. Save him the agony of living in despair and misery.”

  “Yeah? If I do, you win.”

  “I already have.”

  She squinted against the sun, letting the heat punish her. Problem was, the evil little shit might be right. What if it had figured out a way to shut off the part of Dek’s brain that controlled his post-Ashanti personality? What if it had excluded Rocket’s and Flute’s various lines of more beneficial TriNA? Somehow figured out a way to sequester itself in Dek’s head?

  “What do you do then, Talina?”

  She didn’t have to put a bullet in his brain. She could simply leave what was left of Dek here, at Two Falls. He’d have to live with what he’d become. Eventually, Donovan would kill him. Until then maybe Demon would keep him alive to torture and drive insane. Dek would have food, shelter, a fighting chance if Demon allowed.

  “But I wouldn’t have to watch it play out,” she told herself, eyes drawn to a couple of scarlet fliers that rose from the treetops to chase a rising column of invertebrates.

  “You owe him nothing.”

  “Sorry, but I’m the one who put you inside him. Hell, but for me, by now Dek might be working out a compromise with Flute’s TriNA. See, Flute’s line has Tip and Kylee and me in it. All your line has is hatred.”

  “We learned from you, human.”

  “Then you didn’t learn very well. But that’s history.” She wiped at the sweat beading on her brow. Time to be moving on, find some shade, cool off. “Face it, girl, the man you were falling in love with as good as died that day on the canyon rim.”

  The smart money was to cut her losses, save herself the pain. Dek was on his own.

  She rose to her feet, took one last look around. The river looked so cool and inviting, the sound of the water pulsing as it poured over the rocks, the rapids flexing and bulging like muscles to churn into whitewater. Where it slowed in the channel below, she could look down into the clear green depths, see the rocks that lined the bottom. Sleek shapes moved there, but she couldn’t make out the details, just that they were long and cylindrical.

  Movement at the corner of her vision caused her to turn.

  “What the hell? How did you get loose?”

  Dek was downstream from the rapids and below Talina’s outcrop, his path paralleling the river. The man wore his coveralls and boots, but this time, lucid or not, he’d remembered to arm himself, though only with his pistol. He carried it in his right hand; Capella’s light glinted off the fancy gold inlay and gleamed on the polished wood.

  “Dek!”

  He didn’t seem to hear, weaving his way around the boles of aquajade beside the river and ducking wide of the tooth flower and bluelinda that grew down next to the riverbank.

  How had he gotten down there? Somehow he’d found a path that led around the outcrop, circled wide, and made his way back to the water.

  “Shit on a shoe,” Talina muttered, fastening the open front of her coveralls. “Idiot’s going to get himself killed.”

  And, fact was, he clearly wasn’t in his right mind.

  “My fault,” she reminded herself as she slung her rifle and studied on how to find a way down the outcrop. There, but it was dicey. She’d have to use the cracks and crevices, hope that nothing lethal was hiding in them, and work her way down.

  Cursing and worried, she lowered herself over the edge, feeling the way with her feet, clinging with her fingers. Once upon a time, she’d never have had the strength or agility. TriNA might have ruined her life—and maybe Dek’s, too—but it did have its advantages.

  Halfway down, she almost reached into a slug’s hiding place, saw it at the last instant, and swung sideways to grasp a different handhold.

  Getting her heart to slow, she took a deep breath and, looking down, dared to drop the last two meters to a flat-topped boulder. But for a wild swing of her arms, she’d have fallen. As it was, she leaped, dropped, and hit the ground hard. At the impact, the rifle’s sling liked to have dislocated her shoulder. The roots underfoot went berserk, and she skipped quickly to a rock and jumped away from the questing tendrils. Looking back up the rock face, she shook her head and turned.

  It took longer than she thought it would to wind through the predatory vines, avoid a skewer, and figure a way past a shallow pool where the outlines of slugs could be seen under a thin layer of mud.

  What had it been? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? But she caught sight of Dek’s boot print in a small gravel bar beside the river.

  “What the hell are you up to this time?” she groused as she unslung her rifle and hurried in pursuit. She’d left the guy half-comatose, strapped to the bed. If he was coming to and had enough of his faculties to extricate himself, dress, and charge off into the wilderness with a pistol, her containment strategy was going to have to be rethought. Or was it?

  “Didn’t I just decide to leave?” Sh
e made a face.

  “Can’t,” she shot back before Rocket could get the satisfaction of playing angel-on-her-shoulder.

  But damn it, she couldn’t spend the rest of her life being nursemaid, chasing Demon Dek around the Two Falls Gap wilderness.

  “Not that it will be the rest of my life,” she muttered, skipping wide around one of the black meter-in-diameter pincushions with its hundreds of deadly spines.

  As good as Demon was at making Dek think he was a quetzal during these jaunts, just like the other day, mobbers, brown caps, a sidewinder, slugs, or one of the predatory vines was going to kill the guy. Hell, for all she knew, she’d round the next bend of the river and see him speared through by a bem and being engulfed. Not to mention that this was nightmare country. And though the mundo trees grew back from the river on better-drained soils, odds were that one or two of the local trees had to have a fricking nightmare living in it.

  The sound of the waterfall had grown louder; now it almost drowned out the chime.

  Talina clambered over a two-meter-tall knot of roots that followed a cleft in the underlying gabbro and broke out onto bare rock. Not more than ten meters beyond, the rock ended in a cliff. The river beside her flowed over the edge, curled, and the clear water vanished into the depths below to roar and thunder, mist rising from the thirty-meter drop.

  To her right, bare bedrock extended some fifteen or so meters before a low growth of something resembling ferngrass clung to the thin soils. Behind it, a kind of brush Talina had never seen slowly gave way to a tangle of vines with huge scarlet flowers sprouting long whip-like tendrils. The stuff just looked deadly, which, on Donovan, meant it was.

  More to the point, however, Dek was standing at the edge of the falls. His head tilted back, and Talina could see his face, sweaty, expression pained. The veins in the man’s neck were sticking out. His left hand knotted into a fist, the tendons hard under his skin.

  “Dek?” she called softly, stepping carefully onto the bare rock.

  He didn’t answer, but as she came closer, she could see tears streaking down his face.