One of the drones whirred softly through the air as it scouted ahead. Around them, the chime—as the locals called the musical song created by the invertebrates—rose in the morning air.
Talina sniffed, catching the faint fragrance of quetzal on the humid morning. “Asleep in bed, huh? Then why are you out here with me?”
“’Cause, like you, there’s times I don’t have the sense God gave a rock.”
Trish’s green eyes had that glitter of deep-seated worry; the breeze played with her hair where it lay on the shoulders of her quetzal-hide coat. Trish served as Talina’s able lieutenant. The young woman’s parents had been second ship, and Trish was one of the few survivors of the first generation of children to be born on Donovan. She’d been orphaned at the age of twelve, and Talina had more or less taken on the role of guardian and mentor.
Talina looked up at the high clouds, their edges rimed by Capella’s morning light. “My quetzal says not to kill it.”
“The last time one of your quetzal’s relatives came for a visit, it ambushed you in your house. Came within a neutron’s hair of killing you.”
The chime changed, its harmony subtle, but different in tone. Talina slowed, altered her grip on her rifle, and felt the quetzal in her gut shift. She carefully searched the aquajade, sucking shrub, and thorncactus. Though the latter wasn’t really a cactus, its thorns were just as dangerous. The damp, almost perfumed odor of Donovan’s vegetation filled her nostrils.
The thing about a quetzal—and from the tracks, this was a big one—was that it could perfectly camouflage itself. Blend in so seamlessly that people had unknowingly stepped on the things.
With care, Talina scented the breeze. The morning light cast shadows from the vegetation that mottled the ground in patterns perfect for hiding a quetzal.
As the thornbush turned its branches her way, Talina carefully eased forward. She could smell the licorice scent of the sucking scrub, and the milder peppery odor of biteya bush.
A fastbreak darted off into the maze. That brought a slight sense of relief. The creatures wouldn’t move if the quetzal were within attack range.
“Pus in a bucket,” Trish whispered. “I hate hunting quetzals. ’Specially in the bush like this.”
“Yeah.” Talina swallowed hard. “You could go back.”
“Hate to have you eaten, Tal. Means I’d be in charge of security, and I don’t want the job. Too much stress. I might find myself out in the bush hunting a damn quetzal.” A pause. “Why the hell are you so sure this one doesn’t want to kill you?”
Talina raised her rifle, slowing as she noticed a patch of deeper shadows behind an aquajade tree. Exactly the sort of place a quetzal would go to ground. She studied it through her rifle’s thermal scanner and found nothing.
“Something’s changing,” Talina replied when she got her heart rate back to normal. “We don’t understand quetzals any better than they understand us.”
“Well, damn, let me think here. Wait. Yeah, it’s coming to me. Large alien alpha predators, cunning, with tooth-filled jaws and really sharp claws. Capable of blending into the environment, can run a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour for short distances. And what was that last part? Oh, of course. Silly of me to forget. Been known to eat people. Frequently.”
“So? We put quetzal on the menu ourselves. Not to mention we kill them for their hides. Steaks and leather. Sounds kind of like a balanced equation.”
Talina tensed as a flock of scarlet fliers sailed overhead. Where in the hell had that drone gone? She accessed her com. “Step? You still got us on your scanner?”
“Yeah, Tal. We’re running a pattern ahead and to each side. Nothing yet.” Stepan Allenovich’s voice came through her ear bud.
“So, what’s changed?” Trish asked, stepping wide around a questing branch of thorncactus.
“Maybe nothing. Maybe something.” Talina raised her rifle, swept the thermal sight across the screen of vegetation into which the trail disappeared. “Life on Donovan communicates by molecules. The quetzal that infected me ate Allison Chomko’s baby girl. Not because it was hungry, but because it figured it was going to absorb everything the kid knew. Same thing happened when those quetzals ate Rebecca and little Shantaya down at Mundo Base. Kylee said the quetzals were trying to ‘learn’ their victims. That her whole relationship with Rocket was an experiment.”
“Some experiment,” Trish muttered, swung around, and snapped her rifle to her shoulder as something small dashed off to her left.
“Might have worked if we hadn’t driven Rocket out of Port Authority, if that two-legged piece of shit, Deb Spiro, hadn’t shot him just for the pleasure of killing something.”
Trish said nothing in response. The rift in their relationship, created by her part in Rocket and Kylee’s exile from Port Authority, remained a sore subject.
“What if it was all a mistake?” Talina asked. “Going all the way back to when Donovan was eaten by that first quetzal? The guy had stepped out from the survey ship to take a leak, right? What if that first quetzal just wondered what in hell that two-legged thing was? So it grabbed old Donovan around the midriff, chewed him up, and swallowed, thinking it was going to absorb Donovan’s molecules and thereby understand what this strange new being was.”
“Must have been a hell of a surprise when Donovan’s crew blew the damn thing in two.”
“It may not have even had a chance to realize that humans don’t have TriNA, that quetzals can’t absorb information from our tissues. They have a hard enough time digesting our proteins.”
“That goes two ways.”
The vast majority of Donovanian plant life, when ingested, either killed a person dead or passed through the human gut without providing any benefit. The Donovanian plant cell, with its silicone structure, was too resistant to acids or endogenous human flora and fauna. Dya Simonov was working on enzymes that would enable people to eat more of Donovan’s plants.
Animal proteins on Donovan—while still not as digestible—provided enough nutrients to justify the effort to procure and devour.
And then there were the heavy metals that made most life on Donovan toxic to consume. The planet had been likened to a ball of metal: mercury, zinc, cadmium, lead, lithium, scandium, and even more exotic metals permeated everything.
People ate a lot of garlic, and chelation therapy was considered a prophylactic.
And that was before Donovan’s various deadly creatures tried to devour any unwary soul who set foot outside Port Authority or Corporate Mine.
Because of the hostile environment, the planet bred a hardy, independent, and often violent breed of men and women who took the settlement of interpersonal spats to an extreme. Dying of old age on Donovan was as much a statistical rarity as Dan Wirth’s crooked roulette wheel paying off on red twenty-two.
As Talina liked to say, “Welcome to Donovan.”
She smiled as she considered the inherent risk of just getting out of bed in the morning.
So, here she was, hiking ever deeper into the bush in search of a clever man-eating predator that might or might not be on a peaceful mission. All she had to go on was a “gut” feeling provided by an alien, and the sense of guilt she’d felt ever since Rocket’s death. As if, somehow, she’d let the little quetzal down. Not to mention the girl it had been bonded to.
You failed, the quetzal in her gut whispered.
“Asshole,” she growled in reply.
She carefully scrutinized the thicket of aquajade through which they passed. Felt the thorncactus as it scraped along her boots. Not for the first time, she wondered what the quetzals thought about humans tanning and wearing their colorful hides. Back on earth, cows, horses, and goats had never minded, but quetzals—everyone assumed—were different.
Even as she thought it, the quetzal tensed inside her. Her hearing, so acute since she had been infected,
caught that faint altering of the tremolo as the chime reacted to something in the bush.
She stopped, raised her rifle to her shoulder. Vision sharp, she searched.
“Tal? Trish? Got a hot spot about fifty feet ahead of you. Be ready.”
Talina caught sight of the drone as it cut into view, slowed, and dropped to hover a couple of meters above the tops of the scrubby aquajade trees.
“Yep. Quetzal. Can you see the drone?”
“Roger that, Step. Keep an eyeball peeled in case I’m wrong about this.”
“If it were anybody but you, I’d label what you’re doing a quick way to suicide. My call is to use the drone to drop explosives on top of it and pick up the pieces later.”
“I’m for that,” Trish whispered, loud enough Talina could hear her from behind as well as through the com.
“Yeah, well,” Talina said with a sigh, “wouldn’t be the first time my judgment was in question.”
Her quetzal was so excited the thing felt like it was vibrating behind her stomach.
“Cut it out,” she growled. Fuck, it wasn’t like she wasn’t scared enough for the both of them.
“Don’t shoot.”
“Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you, you little creep? Let your molecules go home to roost in one of your kin. Is that how you achieve immortality?”
She started at the thought. What the hell? Was a quetzal just a TriNA molecule’s way of living forever?
The beast in her belly gave off that chittering response Talina equated with amusement.
She continued to scan the thornbush as she advanced step by step, rifle up and at the ready. Her heart was pounding out that old rapid cadence so familiar from a hundred hunts like this. Her finger hovered in the air over the trigger. She might have less than a second to aim, fire, recover, and fire again.
And if she went down, Trish was right behind her.
Nobody on Donovan she’d want backing her more than Trish. The woman had ice in her veins when it came to a situation like this. And she damn near never missed. Especially up close when the adrenaline was burning through a person’s veins like fire.
Talina sidestepped a questing sucking scrub that ran a branch out to feel her boot.
Took another step.
“Tal? Got it on visual,” Step said calmly in her ear bud. “It just dropped its camouflage. Turned bright white. Man, it’s standing out like a beacon in all that blue-green and brown. Like it wants to be seen.”
Talina saw. There, ahead. Maybe twenty meters. Patches of white in among the blue-and-teal-colored leaves and stems.
“See it?” Talina asked.
“Got it,” Trish said through a husky whisper.
The quetzal in Talina’s gut was shifting uncomfortably. By God’s ugly ass, she wished she could trust it.
“Hey, quetzal?” she called. “Here we come.”
“Don’t think they talk our language,” Trish growled. “But if it comes to shooting, you drop to a knee, Tal. I don’t want to take you out by accident if you leap into my line of fire.”
“If I gotta be shot, I’d rather it be by a friend,” she murmured, trying to find any shred of humor as her fear quotient rose.
The damn quetzal was just standing there. Talina took the last step past the brush to find the thing on the other side of a small clearing. As she did, the familiar rush of saliva flooded her mouth. The concentrated peppermint taste made her wince.
At her appearance faint patterns of yellow and black bled into the quetzal’s snowy white, a sign of fear. It stood on its powerful hind legs, the toes bunched, claws sank into the clay soil. The tail was raised, ready to lash out if the beast had to flee. The forearms were tucked close to the thing’s breast, the wicked claws curled inoffensively out of the way. Instead of spread wide, the neck’s expandable collar was down, signaling no threat. The saurian head was lowered, tilted, those terrible serrated jaws closed. Three hard black eyes were fixed on Talina, and a nervous clicking sounded from deep in the animal’s throat.
Talina’s quetzal continued to vibrate. A series of emotions tickled around the margins of her limbic system.
No more than five meters away, the big quetzal slowly took a breath and sent a harmonic exhale through the vents behind the back legs and at the top of the tail.
Trish sounded like she spoke through clenched teeth when she said, “Now what?”
“Yeah, good question, huh?” Talina kept staring at the creature through her rifle’s optics. It hadn’t moved.
She had to do something; the beast in her gut was whimpering and twisting around.
“Be ready, Trish.” Talina took a deep breath, and slowly lowered her rifle.
The quetzal remained motionless.
Fuck this. The tension was killing her. She took a step forward, saying softly, “We haven’t shot. Your move.”
At her words, the quetzal uttered a gargling sound. A thousand colors burst out in patterns across its hide. Fantastic crimson, royal blue, teal, and a fluorescent deep purple.
“Sorry. We don’t read quetzal.” Talina had to keep swallowing as her mouth watered.
“Trish?”
“Yeah?”
“If this is going to work, I’ve got to share spit with this thing.”
“That’s nuts!”
“You know how quetzals do it.”
“You’ll be halfway down its throat before I can kill it.”
“Only if it goes wrong.”
“Talina, don’t!”
But she was taking another step forward, letting the rifle hang inoffensively in her right hand.
If I survive this, Raya’s going to have me on psych meds for the rest of my life.
But the Wild Ones—the humans living out in the bush—had brokered peace with quetzals. Kylee had lived with one for years.
“What the hell do you want?” she asked the creature as she stopped less than a meter in front of it.
Talina fixed on the three eyes, tried to see the intelligence behind them. Her quetzal kept purring inside her. She wanted to spit, kept swallowing the rush of saliva. Then, unable to think of anything else, she expectorated a pool into her left hand and offered it to the quetzal.
In an instant, the creature’s tongue flicked out like a cured-leather rope. She’d bitten a quetzal tongue before, knew how hard and tough they were. It barely skimmed across her wet palm.
The tongue snapped back like a whip. The quetzal’s jaws worked, the head tilted in an almost human gesture of interest.
“Yeah, there’s a bunch of different quetzals’ molecules there,” she told it. “The two I killed. They think you’re kin. Then I shared spit with one out by Briggs’ place. Some is from Rocket. He was a friend of mine. The rest are his kin.”
The quetzal chattered in response, and the tail flipped lazily back and forth.
“Tal, you’re out of your mind,” Step’s voice said in her ear bud. She could hear the drone’s faint buzz overhead. Half of Port Authority was no doubt watching.
“Not dead yet,” she replied, wishing her heart would stop hammering and the cold sweat of fear would recede.
The quetzal made a croaking sound, extended its tongue nearly a meter beyond the jaws, and waited. Again it croaked, as if urging her to do something.
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Talina wiped her mouth. “You bastards don’t know this, but humans find this disgusting as all hell.”
She spit into her hand, offered it again. The blazing white quetzal ignored it. The beast’s three eyes peered at her, questioning, perhaps wondering if she were an idiot.
The tip of the extended tongue wiggled like an angry worm.
“What’s this all about?” Trish asked anxiously from where she’d taken a position to one side, rifle still shouldered and aimed at the quetzal.
�
�Wants to trade saliva.”
“The infamous French kiss?”
“Yep.”
“You gonna do it?”
“I hate that shit!”
“Talina?” a woman’s voice came over the com.
“Yeah? Dya, that you?”
“I don’t have to tell you what’s at stake here.”
Shit! If it were anyone but Dya, Tal could have told them to go suck a fart. Dya had been forced to abandon her eldest daughter Kylee to the quetzals—the woman almost broke down in tears at the mere mention of it.
“For the cause,” she said irritably, took another step forward, and opened her mouth. She squeezed her eyes closed, unable to watch. The quetzal’s tongue probed her mouth, flicked off her teeth, cheeks, and tongue. It seemed to suck up the saliva, and then a new peppermint flavor—overpowering and astringent—flooded her mouth.
As quickly it was over.
Talina made a face, turned her head, and spit. “Bloody sucking snot, that’s fucking rude!”
“I don’t believe you just did that,” Trish declared from behind her rifle.
“Yeah, I’m just a laugh a minute.”
The quetzal had gone quiet, peering at her with a new intensity. Again it inhaled, blew a harmonic out of its rear vents. Opening its mouth, collar extending slightly, it flashed a chevron pattern of taupe and burnt umber.
Whatever the hell that meant.
Talina stepped back, watching it warily. “So . . . what’s next? We all retreat to Inga’s, drink whiskey, and sing ‘Coming Together Under the Bower’?”
“Don’t know that quetzals are musical,” Trish growled, her eye still glued to the optical sight.
Chittering, the quetzal lowered its head until the jaw barely touched the ground. Maybe it was a bow. Or perhaps a gesture of submission. Then, carefully, it backed up a step. Then another. One eye looked up at the drone, the other two never leaving Talina.
With a final loud clapping of the jaws, it turned, slipped off through the brush, and disappeared.
“Step? You on it?”
“Yeah, Tal. It’s headed west at a quick walk. The thing knows we’re watching. It glances up at the drone every so often. It’s staying white. Like it wants us to know where it is.”
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