Adrift

by W. Michael Gear

  Casey lifted the underwear, shined the UV on it. In the room light, it could barely be made out. The black splotches where blood absorbed the spectrum. “Found the child,” Casey said woodenly.

  “Those are Felix’s!” Kevina cried, standing. “I made those for him.”

  “Yeah,” Casey told her. “And he’s got blood under his fingernails. I didn’t run the fingerprints yet, but you can bet they’re going to match the ones on the vibraknife. And none of the other children fluoresced. Only Felix.” A pause. “When I asked him about it, Felix said, ‘I wasn’t there till the end.’ When I pursued it, he told me, ‘The Voice said it was all right.’”

  The Voice?

  62

  Years ago, when Kalico’s father had finished a tough day, he had used the expression, “I feel like I’ve been beaten with supple sticks.” The saying seemed particularly apropos that evening when Kalico stepped into Inga’s, crossed the foyer, and paused at the head of the stairs that led down into the tavern. Damn. She had a lot of history in this place.

  At the long tables, her people—along with PA’s residents and a handful of Wild Ones—sat behind mugs and glasses or bent over plates as they chowed down on whatever Inga’s special was. The sight of all those wide-brimmed hats, the quetzal-hide cloaks, propped rifles, and tough-looking people, brought a smile her face.

  God, it was good to be back. Especially after her disastrous visit to the Maritime Unit and then the pain of the cave-in and all that came spiraling out of that. For the first time since the collapse in the Number Three, she’d reinstated the weekly rotations to PA. During the disaster, she’d wanted all hands available for rescue, support, or who knew what? Not that any of her people would have wanted to be anywhere but Corporate Mine.

  At the bottom of the steps, she strode down the central aisle, waving and answering greetings called by the locals as she passed.

  She could imagine the reaction back in Transluna. She was a fricking Board Supervisor, one of the most powerful women alive. The very notion that a woman of that stature would deign to share greetings, let alone riposte to ribald and insolently familiar salutations, would have left her old boss Miko Taglioni apoplectic.

  Calls of “Sorry to hear about the cave-in,” “Anything we can do to help, you call,” “Our prayers are with you, Supervisor,” and “You need anything, let me know” warmed her heart. Doubly because had she asked, each and every one of the crusty Donovanians would have sprung to. Not because she was a vacuum-sucking Board Supervisor, but because she was one of them.

  When did these become my people?

  Kalico found her way to her old stool beside Talina Perez’s where it stood on the far-right side of the bar. To her surprise, Shig Mosadek was seated at his accustomed place. He had a half-full glass of red wine, was staring thoughtfully at the back bar with its mirror and bottles, jars, and jugs. The man’s unruly thatch of hair reminded her of a stiff mop gone gray at the sides. Shig’s expression looked pinched around his blob of a nose. He’d taken his quetzal cape off and hung it from the back of his chair.

  “I hear you’ve had a rather tough time of it down at Corporate Mine.”

  “Lost the Number Three. When it went, it took two of us with it.” She caught Inga’s eye. The woman was stretched up to write a charge on the big board where she kept her accounts. Inga jerked her a nod as she scribbled with her chalk.

  “Anything Yvette or I can do?”

  “Turn back time?”

  “Been to Freelander recently?”

  The reminder of the ghost ship up in orbit sent a shiver down her back. “If I could figure a way to go up there and warn myself, I would. Problem is, you never know what you’re going to get. That creep-freaked wreck isn’t exactly reliable when it comes to messages from the future.”

  “I heard it was the aquajade.”

  “Yeah.” She propped her elbows on the bar. “Don’t let it get saturated.” A pause. “Talovich is going through the Number One right now. Checking every single piece of aquajade for potential failure. Soon as we landed, I ran down Lee Halston. Bought up every chabacho timber he had that might be used to replace a compromised aquajade. Until Talovich finishes his survey, Corporate Mine is officially on standby.”

  “Businesses here will welcome that. Gives your people time to come spend money.” He shot her a sidelong glance. “What about Maritime Unit? Two Spot tells me that your parting of the ways wasn’t amicable.”

  “My presence wasn’t welcome.”

  Inga came lumbering down the bar, two fingers of whiskey, neat, in a glass. Inga flipped the bar towel from her shoulder and took a couple of swipes before she set the glass on the battered chabacho-wood bar. “Heard it’s been a tough time down at Corporate Mine,” Inga told her. “That one’s on the house. From all of us. Anything else I can get you?”

  “On behalf of my people, the drink is deeply appreciated. Whatever’s on special, I’ll have it. Haven’t eaten since breakfast. Way I feel now? I could eat a bucket of slugs. Raw.”

  “No slugs on the menu.” Inga turned, headed back down toward her taps, bellowing, “One special for the Supervisor. Extra portion. The lady’s hungry!”

  Shig grinned. “Wouldn’t the Board love to have seen that?”

  She jerked a thumb toward the rest of the patrons. “Funny thing, Shig. After the last couple of weeks, I was feeling right at home walking down those stairs. Come a long way since we held that sham of a show trial here. I was just marveling that each and every one of these people have my back.”

  “They know you’ve got theirs. You’ve put your life on the line for them too many times. Pity the Corporation if they ever show up and try and bring you to heel.”

  “You saying I’m totally corrupted by you libertarian bastards?”

  “Totally.” Shig picked up his wine, looked at the color, and set it back down. “What happened with the Maritime Unit? Anything Yvette and I need to know about? Anything you need us to do?”

  Kalico lifted the whiskey. Tasted it. “What is this? Inga tapped all the right keys this time around.”

  “After her last disastrous attempt, she dug out the last barrel of the good stuff. It’s going fast. If you like it, get a bottle while you still can.”

  Kalico let the rye sit on her tongue in order to savor it, swallowed, and said, “Maritime Unit decided that they were better able to run their affairs without my advice. They didn’t trust me. Thought I was getting them killed. Asked me to leave.”

  “That’s Corporate property. You are a Supervisor. And, as I still like to remind you, you have marines. With armor. Not to mention tech. Essentially you are not only the law, but there’s nothing they could do to stop you.”

  “I’ve been here too long.” Kalico pointed a finger Shig’s way. “You’re right. There’s nothing they could do to stop me. But worse, I’ve sucked up so much of your libertarian insanity, I am unwilling to expend the effort to try and save them from themselves. Why the hell should I? Stupidity is just Darwin in action.”

  “They do have a nice Pod out there, I’m told.”

  “The survivors will be calling one of these days soon. They can choose Corporate Mine or PA. They’ll be broke.” Kalico gave Shig a poke with that same finger. “The Pod and the equipment are Corporate. I would take it badly if someone were to take any of it in trade.”

  “They have a sick kid.”

  “They do?”

  “You didn’t hear?”

  “They don’t talk to Corporate Mine. Must have been on the hospital frequency?”

  “They set up their own frequency. Maybe they didn’t want you to know? They’re talking to Raya about it. A little boy. I guess there’s some sort of infection. A bacterium or something. Two Spot says they’ve lost a submarine. You’ve heard none of this?”

  “Not a word.” Lost a submarine? Shit!

 
“Guess that parting really was acrimonious.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t hold it against them. Like my arrival here tonight reminded me, I was pretty arrogant, self-assured, brash, and righteous when I got here. They’re suffering from the same Corporate delusion that life is a fairy tale. I won’t put up with it. Which makes me ask: Why the hell did you put up with me?”

  “You were surrounded by twenty armored marines with tech that could have flattened PA and murdered every man, woman, and child in the compound.”

  “I suppose that does elicit a modicum of tolerance.”

  “A small modicum, I suppose. Ultimately, you know that Director Hailwood’s people are going to need relief of some kind or another.”

  “Yeah, Shig.” Kalico sighed as Inga approached with a heaping plate of enchiladas drowned in red chili sauce surrounded by stuffed poblanos. The smell was heavenly.

  “Two-fifty, Supervisor,” Inga told her. “You’re up ten on the board, so I’ll just subtract.” And she was gone, bellowing, “Yeah, yeah, Hofer, I hear you. Give me a second to scratch my achin’ ass, and then I’ll get you your damn whiskey.”

  “Transluna never had it so good,” Shig observed mildly. “Are you sure you want to call these your people?”

  “Damn straight.” Kalico picked up the fork and dove into the steaming delight. Chewing, she asked, “Where’s Tal?”

  “She’s still out at Two Falls Gap with Dek.” Shig shot her a mild look. “Dek, it seems, is dealing with the ramifications of being awash in quetzal TriNA. Given the creative and violent nature of his hallucinations, Talina rightly figured that he—not to mention the rest of us—was a great deal safer with him out in the bush.”

  Kalico stopped cold, a curious unease in her gut. “Tal and Dek? Alone at Two Falls Gap? For how long now?”

  “Long enough.” Shig arched a bushy eyebrow. “Talina radios in every couple of days to keep tabs on things. I do know that Tal is worried that Demon might be getting the upper hand.”

  “And what is Tal going to do if he does?”

  Shig gave her a fatherly smile. “She will do what she has to, even if it breaks her heart.”

  Yeah? Kalico thought, and what about mine?

  63

  Fire popped and snapped, sparks shooting up toward the night sky as the flames flickered yellow on the closest aquajade trunks and danced across the thick leaves the trees pointed in their direction. Camp was made on the canyon rim—on bedrock where no roots or slugs could wiggle their way close. Overhead, a column of invertebrates swarmed, chittered, hummed, and chimed, as well as occasionally roasted and fell into the fire to blacken and crackle, adding to the sandalwood scent from the burning aquajade, chabacho, and mundo stem.

  Talina studied Dek where he sat in the firelight and used her knife to sharpen the end of an aquajade sapling. The poor aquajade had been a youngster a little over three meters tall when it was uprooted by its neighbors and tossed out onto the bedrock. There it had withered, desiccated, and died. Dek had claimed it for a spear and was whittling the end into a lethal point that he occasionally fire-hardened in the flames.

  Maybe it wasn’t the perfect weapon for Donovan, but it beat nothing. After the trip up the cleft, anything was an improvement. The miracle was that they had made it.

  Talina sat cross-legged, studying her scabbed and raw hands. Some of the places she’d scaled defied description, let alone belief. Then she’d glance at Dek. All through that hard and dangerous climb, he’d been a perfect companion. Not quite as adept at spotting danger as she, he’d nevertheless saved her from disaster more than once. Asserted to by the fact that her pistol was now three rounds shy of a full mag. And that last shot had been made by a hair’s breadth. She had no clue what to call the snake-like creature that had shot out of a dark crack in the basalt canyon wall. It had been big, three-eyed, and had a lot of teeth in a triskelion-jointed jaw.

  Dek’s warning had barely been in time.

  The thing would have killed me, and I’d never have seen it coming.

  Nor would she have been able to make that climb without a second person to lend a hand, to lift her up, and to steady her as she eased her way across the treacherous gaps. A couple of times, she’d been scared to the core; he’d given her that reassuring smile, his odd Taglioni eyes looked even more odd as the quetzal TriNA continued to modify the receptors in his retina.

  “He’s never going back,” Rocket told her from his perch on her shoulder.

  She chewed on her lip, realizing that with Rocket’s declaration, she felt a curious sense of relief. Some part of her had expected him to eventually leave. The man was a Taglioni. One of the elite ruling class. And, from the perspective of a woman raised in Chiapas, almost an Olympian god. A sort of magical and mythical being who would ultimately be called back into the clouds.

  Or Transluna. Essentially just as unreachable.

  Fact was: Rocket was right. Donovan had taken Derek Taglioni for its own.

  She asked, “What do you want, Dek? Assuming that is that Demon doesn’t win, and you don’t kill yourself.”

  “Nothing like sugarcoating a question, is there?” He sliced off another long shaving of white wood with the gleaming blade.

  “I mean it. Oh, I know, there’s the claim out west, your rigged poker game at The Jewel on those rare nights when you can get there. But be real. The claim will make you rich, granted, but it’s small-time. Just gold, some silver, a little platinum. To really make it pay, you need equipment. Some way to transport the ore to Kalico’s smelter. That’s where the real money can be made. In the beginning, I thought the claim was a way to kill time. Get your feet under you. I figured that eventually you were going to hook up with Kalico. Broker some partnership with her that would get you an interest in Corporate Mine, but now, after being with you out here, I’m not sure.”

  A flicker of a smile crossed his lips. “Kalico? She and I will always be confidants. It’s a measure of the kind of woman she is that she could look beyond the man I was back in Solar System. And I’ll always owe her for that.”

  Dek frowned into the flames as some night creature screamed out in the trees. The night chime answered, and back in the forest a ululating call carried on the still air.

  “So, you didn’t plan to make a play for Corporate Mine?”

  “I might have. But it was a fleeting notion that died within days of leaving Port Authority that first time. Kalico Aguila is never, ever, under any circumstance, going to surrender so much as a share of Corporate Mine to anyone. Not ever her old sponsor, Miko. She’s bled too much, sacrificed too much. And if Miko should show up and try to claim it out from under her?” He gave Talina a conspiratorial wink. “God and the universe help the man. She’ll gut him.”

  “So, back to the question. What do you want?”

  “Right now? To keep a lid on these quetzals.”

  “Wish you’d never shared Flute’s TriNA?”

  He shook his head, looking perplexed. “You and me, we’re alive today because of this TriNA. Without it, you’d have died when you hit the bottom of the waterfall. Impact would have killed you. But for quetzal sense, I’d have died a horrible death four or five times climbing up out of that dark fissure. I’m soft meat, Talina. I could not have known about that nightmare, the three-eyed snake in the crack, those green-shelled invertebrates, or that creepy white-thorn vine. After ten years of atrophy in Ashanti there’s no way I could have clung to that cliff as we climbed around that patch of tentacle bushes.”

  “Hence my original question. What do you want, Dek?”

  He lifted his spear, tested its point with the ball of his thumb. Then he gave her an eerily intent stare. “I want to be with you. Do what we’re doing. I want to join my life to yours.”

  “Good man.” Rocket whispered into her ear as the intensity of his declaration warmed her.

  “It’s a lo
nely life, Dek. And years ago, when I shot Clemenceau, I made my choice. I have responsibilities to my people. To protect them, do what I can to keep them safe.” She rubbed her forehead, aware of the weight of it all. “These days, Whitey is using what he learned from me to threaten Port Authority. With all the advantages this TriNA gives me, keeping my people safe may be even more important than in the past.”

  “I understand.” His gaze narrowed as he considered her. “You like doing it alone? Being different? Never having anyone to confide in, to share the load?”

  “I . . .” Shit, what did she tell him?

  “I’ve been honest with you, Tal. How about reciprocity?”

  “All right, it’s like this. I have Shig, and Yvette, and Kalico, and Kylee. That’s it. Kylee’s been in my head. She’s got a lot of TriNA with my memories. We’re bonded that way. The others? Shig is more like a priest and father, but I love him anyway. Yvette and I have shared blood, history, and loss. Kalico? She’s an equal, but were we not thrown together on Donovan, I doubt we’d socialize much.”

  “What about you and Trish?”

  “She was the daughter I never had. I counted on her. Even though things had been strained, when she went, it tore a hole in me.”

  “And Cap Taggart?”

  “That tore me up, too. He and I never got a chance before he was . . . dead.” She gave him a half-lidded stare. Did she tell him? Could she trust him? “You heard that he was murdered?”

  “Uh-huh. Someone slipped in and overdosed him on pain meds. They never found the killer.”

  “Trish.”

  He started, frowned. “But everything I’ve ever heard about her . . . That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It does when you know Trish. Donovan is a tough place to grow up. Trish had a hard life filled with loss. When Cap was crippled and paralyzed, Trish knew I’d spend the rest of my life caring for him. She did it to free me, and maybe Cap, too. She called it an act of love.” She arched an eyebrow. “Shig, Yvette, and I know. And now there is you. Please don’t let me down.”