Talina took a deep breath, made a face at the taste in her mouth. A feeling of triumphant satisfaction emanated from the quetzal inside her. Not that she took the beast’s feelings as anything but a ploy.
“It’s still headed away, Tal,” Step reported. “Straight line, and on a path that will keep it away from the claims. It’s like it’s going out of its way to avoid any contact.”
She glanced at Trish, rhetorically asking, “So, what the hell just happened here?”
Dya’s voice over the com said, “A wild quetzal came in, traded molecules, and is leaving. No one’s dead, and the quetzal’s still alive. That’s a first for Port Authority.”
“You didn’t get French kissed,” Talina groused.
“No,” Dya replied. “But Raya, Cheng, and I are just aching to get some of those new TriNA molecules you’ve got on your tongue.”
Talina shook her head, reading the dismay in Trish’s expression. “Okay, we’re headed back to the Haul Road. Assuming we don’t get eaten by a bem, slug, or skewer. Meanwhile, everybody stay frosty. Doesn’t mean this wasn’t a diversion and another quetzal or two haven’t tried to sneak in for lunch.”
“Roger that,” Step answered. “Got the rest of the drones deployed. Gates are closed. We’ve got eyeballs on the motion detectors, and the farms are on lockdown.”
Talina led the way, retracing their path, following where their boots had scuffed the damp clay. The image flashed behind her eyes: Mom’s kitchen back in Chiapas. Talina’s child-small fingers, reaching up for the beautiful pot with its fascinating figures. She barely touched it, the surface smooth, the colors so vivid. And then horror as the pot teetered, began to fall in slow motion . . .
Talina angrily jerked her head. What the hell? Why had her brain dug that up from the past?
Trish, eyes scanning to all sides, rifle at the ready, asked, “I mean, how did you know it wasn’t going to attack? Just from smelling it outside the gate? How does that work?”
“I haven’t a clue, Trish.”
“And talk about being creep-freaked, putting its tongue in your mouth?”
“It’s how they share information, though lord knows what my quetzal molecules are telling it. Besides, it could be worse.”
“How’s that?”
“Quetzals could share information through urine or feces.”
“Oh, yuck.”
“Yep. And as soon as Dya gets her swab, I’m off to Inga’s to sterilize my insides with her meanest whiskey.”
“Right. Not even quetzal spit could survive that.”
5
Tamarland closed the door to his personal quarters, walked to his small desk, and rotated the chair out. It swiveled on an adjustable pivoting arm that allowed it to be stored under the knee recess.
The room didn’t measure more than four by five paces, which included the bed, small bath, and toilet, as well as storage space for his clothing. Not that he had much, just his tactical weapons case and a few changes of apparel. His exit had been so precipitous that he’d only taken what he could carry.
Seating himself, Tam shielded the room, ensuring that he was in complete privacy and couldn’t be recorded. Then he leaned back and accessed the compressed message he’d received in the moments before Vixen inverted symmetry.
He wasn’t surprised when Artollia Shayne’s remarkable features formed in the image projected from his implant. Befitting her power and position, her physical appearance was that of an exotic beauty with high and almost triangular cheekbones, tan eyes that mesmerized, a delicately formed nose and full mouth. Now those lips were smiling in a way that betrayed no humor. One of her petite brows arched into a V.
“Hello, my lover,” she told him, her voice honeyed and sensuous. “I have but a few moments before they defeat the security and charge in to arrest me. I’ve thought of suicide, but rather than take that last victory from them, I’m planning on laying some traps of my own during the trial. Like landmines sown into Radcek’s path. I won’t live to see the effect they will have, but I’m hoping that you will, my scorpion.”
She tilted her head in an intimate gesture. “If you received this, it was because you’ve made your escape. My apologies for the manner in which I had to extricate you from the fray. But knowing you as I do, you’d have insisted on some final last act of defiance. Dramatic as your action might have been, it would have been pointless. You’d have ended up just as dead. And had they taken you alive, they would have employed advanced psychiatric interrogation and dissected your remarkable brain and personality in the process.
“I would spare you the pain, invasion, and the humiliation of having your living brain cut apart like that. Seeing bits of your personality being gawked at by the behavioral scientists, let alone broadcast by the media. What makes you so remarkably ruthless and cunning shouldn’t be served up as gaudy entertainment by a few specialists in abnormal psychiatry.”
Her seductive smile and twinkling eyes were for him alone as she added, “A woman in my position shouldn’t succumb to such failings, but I have a special place in my heart for you. Don’t call it love, but I need to know that you survived. We’re two of a kind. I would never have made it this far without your acute cunning. Sharing your thoughts and company was every bit as fulfilling and stimulating emotionally and intellectually as it was physically when our bodies were locked together in sexual ecstasy. In another age, we’d have made the perfect marriage.”
Her laughter filled with bitter irony. “That is to remain our secret. But then, I know you can keep a secret. Unless, of course, Radcek should capture you. Another reason for spiriting you away. I don’t want his technicians pulling those salacious bits from the deepest recesses of your mind. He’d use such maudlin sentiment as justification of my unworthiness.”
She narrowed a crafty tan eye. “No, my darling scorpion, I want you to live. You’re one of my landmines. I want you safely out of the way for the time being. Radcek will fall. It’s inevitable. My gamble is that you’ll be returning five, perhaps six years from now. My ruthless weapon from beyond the grave, slipping back into society, creeping through the cracks and hiding under the stones until you can sting each and every one of my enemies to death. And when you do, I want them to die knowing you act on my behalf.
“And your own, of course. I may be saving your life for the time being, and hence, deserve your consideration and at least a modicum of loyalty, but you know that had I not ordered you to Vixen, you’d be dead, too. Knowing that, they are even more your enemies than mine.”
He felt a flutter of sadness in his heart. Damn, what a remarkable woman.
Then she leaned forward, pupils glistening and black in a sea of tan, a devilish expression on her exotic face. Seeming to fix on his gaze, she formed her lips into a kiss, inhaling as she did so.
“Live for me, my scorpion. Upon your return, make them pay.”
And with that, the holo ended.
Tam Benteen sat back, his heart rate accelerated, the blood pounding in his veins.
A thousand memories flooded him, times they’d shared. The way she had looked at him over a candlelit supper. The occasion she’d been present when he executed one of her rivals, her eyes had almost glowed with excitement. Or the special way she’d convulsed in the throes of orgasm as her exertion-hot body had burned against his. The cunningly satisfied look as she’d listened to information he’d provided on a fellow Boardmember, each bit of data unlocking yet another secret.
Taking a deep breath, Tam stood, the chair automatically swinging back under the desk on its swivel.
She was betting that in the years he was away, Chairman Radcek would fall. That in that time, the warrant for Tam’s arrest would be dropped, or at least be considered a lower priority. That, at best, he might walk off the returned Vixen a free man, or at worst, he had five or six years to concoct a plan that would allow him to slip pas
t any security officers waiting to detain him.
Counting on the latter, he could already see ways to make his escape. Upon Vixen’s return, he could disable the communications, and as soon as symmetry was normal, he could drift away on one of the exploration shuttles. Once far enough from Vixen, he could slip sunward and eventually dock at a station. From there, it would be a simple matter to pick up one of his various IDs and ride back to Transluna in comfort.
“But that’s years in the future,” he told himself.
Did he dare trust Shayne? As a Boardmember she had certain protections that a man like Tamarland Benteen did not. Radcek’s psychiatric techs wouldn’t be allowed to use advanced interrogation. They were prohibited from cutting her skull open and picking around in her brain, stimulating memories, like they could in his. Who wanted to create the precedent that a Boardmember’s secrets might be exposed to the public? Certainly not Chairman Radcek, no matter how powerful. Nor would the other Boardmembers take kindly to the notion.
The power elite might play a deadly winner-take-all game, but they insisted on sticking to the rules.
Tam’s take? Shayne was telling the truth. She wanted him to stay alive, make his return, and pay the bastards back with mayhem. Correctly, she also figured that while his loyalty to her might not survive the years, the knowledge that her enemies would kill him remained as a motivator. And what the hell, he really was good at what he did. He had been her foil, the sharp wit against which she tested her plans.
“Damn, Tam,” he told himself. “Five years is a long time. Stretch it out to six, and it’s even longer. Get back, slip through the net, and who knows who you’ll find waiting on the other side? Maybe another Boardmember like Shayne. And maybe next time, you’ll ride his or her coattails all the way to the top.”
And that, he figured, was something to live for.
6
Talina sat with her butt braced against a counter, arms crossed as she watched the holo projection in Lee Cheng’s lab. Overhead, only one of the original lights remained working, while handmade bulbs blown at the glassworks, with filaments made from locally mined tungsten, supplied the rest of the room’s illumination.
Raya Turnienko, Dya Simonov, and Cheng clustered around the table, gazes rapt on the image projected before the lab’s back wall.
“Fascinating,” Dya whispered, one hand fingering the long locks of blond hair that hung over the shoulders of her canvas shirt. Anything having to do with quetzals obsessed Dya Simonov. She rarely let it show, but the woman tortured herself over the fact that her daughter Kylee chose quetzals over humans down at Mundo Base. That somehow she’d failed as a mother.
On the projection, Talina watched three molecules. Each reminded her of a short length of three-stranded S-twist rope. They began unwrapping into separate strands. As they did, the filaments—molecular strings—were wavering, looked to be searching around in the solution into which they’d been injected.
“The TriNA molecules that are unwinding are three of your quetzal molecules,” Cheng told her. “The one on the upper left is from the strain we recovered from your original infection. The second is from Rocket when he shared saliva with you at Mundo Base. The one at the bottom is one we recovered from this morning’s encounter.”
“Lucky me. I just love being a source for your entertainment pleasure.” As she said it, Talina felt her quetzal shifting inside her, apparently as rapt as the rest of them.
“Enjoy it, you piece of shit,” she growled. “Maybe the solution is finally here that will allow us to finally get rid of your pestilent ass.”
Dya couldn’t hide a smirk. Raya Turnienko, however, seemed to miss it. The physician’s tall and thin frame might have been spring steel, tense, and almost quivering. Her mouth puckered tightly in her flat Siberian face. Fully half of the blood samples Raya had taken from people living on Donovan now exhibited TriNA molecules that survived in their bodies.
No one had a clue about what it meant, let alone what the long term ramifications might be. Raya—as the only physician on the planet—ached to know. Back in Solar System it would have been as easy as submitting a sample to a biochem lab. Within seconds, the complete atomic composition, structure, and geometry of the molecules would have been mapped and cataloged.
The scanning microscopy equipment for such analysis now sat in a shed out back, tarped and waiting for replacement parts and a technician who might know how to both fix and operate the thing.
Lee Cheng fingered his round chin, small lips compressed; his eyes were half squinted, fixed on the image as the strands, like blind worms, slowly separated from their mates, dividing the molecules into three threadlike lengths.
“Must be some trigger,” Dya noted. “Some signal to cause them to initiate separation. We can leave a single molecule in solution for weeks, and it just sits there. Put two in from the same strain, they sit. Put in a second strain, Rocket’s for instance, and they separate and recombine.”
“What do you think is the trigger?” Talina asked.
“Might be a small molecule, something with a specific architecture and structure. Perhaps an analog to our microRNA. Could be something as simple as vibrations. Photons? Who knows?”
In the projection, the molecular filaments wiggled sinuously around, seemed to orient, and sorted themselves before beginning the intricate dance of weaving themselves together again. Within minutes, three new TriNA molecules had assembled themselves.
“Remarkable.” Cheng had a knowing smile on his lips. “None of the filaments reassembled with any of their original partners. Each joined one apiece from the other two.”
“Definitely non-random,” Dya said. “When two partners might have recombined, they shifted away from each other.”
“Much more organized than DNA,” Raya agreed. “It’s as if these molecules are smarter.”
Cheng nodded. “That’s what we’ve come to suspect. That TriNA is coding much more sophisticated information than DNA, and doing it on purpose . . . Wait a second, what’s this?”
Talina and her companions leaned forward as the three TriNA molecules in the image again began to unwind into separate strands.
“That was quick.”
“What are they doing?” Dya wondered.
The room was silent as the nine separated strands again wiggled, switched, and wove. Like tiny bits of animated cat hair, they again rearranged, once again twisting themselves together into three separate spiral molecules.
Cheng glanced at his companions. “They did it again, folks. Perfectly sorted into a completely new arrangement. Not a single repeated pairing.”
“Each strand has now been exposed to every other strand.” Raya frowned at the image. “Every potential combination has now been explored.”
“We suspect that sections of the TriNA are dedicated to the storage of certain kinds of information,” Dya reminded. “The three filaments are each in contact with the other two. Communicating.”
“That’s a huge information dump,” Talina noted uneasily. “You think that’s why that quetzal was so insistent on me going out there today?” The implications sent a shiver through her. “I mean, what we just saw here? Damn. These molecules are doing the same thing in that white quetzal, aren’t they? Comparing information?”
Dya arched a slim eyebrow. “Tough to think of, huh? That you might have just downloaded a year’s worth of intelligence on your body, thoughts, actions, and physiology to some strange quetzal. That as soon as Whitey gets back to the pack, they’re all going to be studying what it means to be Talina Perez.”
Talina accessed com. “Two Spot? Is our drone still following that quetzal?”
“’Firmative, Tal. He’s moving fast forty klicks out, still on a westerly course. Still white. Hasn’t made a move to give us the slip.”
“What are you thinking?” Raya Turnienko asked.
“About
grabbing my aircar, flying out, and dropping a seismic charge on his ass before he can report to his buddies on ways to kill me.”
Cheng chuckled. “That’s my Talina. Always ready to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“It’s too soon to be killing quetzals,” Dya said softly, her gaze on the TriNA as they began separating again. “Anyone want to make bets that they’re going back to their original configuration? Maybe to compare notes?”
“No takers,” Cheng answered. “Yep. See how they’re separating?”
The quetzal in Talina’s gut seemed remarkably satisfied, but then the molecules in her body would have been doing the same thing she’d just been watching on the screen. Sharing information, recombining with the new quetzal molecules. But getting what kind of instructions from them?
Talina knotted a fist, pressing it into her stomach.
“What’s wrong?” Dya asked, perceptive as usual.
“You know, I really hate having this thing inside me. It’s bad enough when it screws around with my dreams. Half the time it wants me to kill someone, and half the time I get the feeling it’s laughing at me.”
Turnienko turned. “But you still have control, right? No episodes like the night when it paralyzed you with pain?”
“For the most part I think I’ve got the little bastard on a choke chain. And, yeah, yeah, I know I’ve got better vision, hearing, strength, and all the rest. I still want this shit out of my body.”
Cheng sighed. “Tal, we’ve tried. I think, like it or not, you’re our test case.”
Talina gestured at the holo where the TriNA had reassembled into the original three molecules. “Okay, so we’ve just seen a huge data dump, right? Hey, people, come on. We don’t know what the hell they just ‘discussed.’ Could be a plan to take over my body and use me to blow up all of Port Authority, or to walk down the avenue shooting people like they were rats.”
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