Pariah

by W. Michael Gear

  The girl stood like a silhouette against the gray light, her blond hair hanging around her shoulders in tangles. She’d be turning eleven in a couple of months. Her frame remained rail-thin, the clothes she wore looking much the worse for wear and filthy. To Talina’s dismay, the girl was barefoot, which seemed to be begging for attack from the closest slug.

  “Kylee?” Talina asked, coughed to clear her throat, and swung her legs over the edge of the bed.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Neither should you. What happened to your shoes?”

  “Didn’t fit anymore.” A pause. “They want to know why you are here. The experiment is over.”

  Talina stretched, stood, and slung her rifle. “Sorry, kid. It’s anything but over.”

  “I’m not going back.”

  “I may not be either.” Talina walked over to look down into Kylee’s smudged face. “Had a visit from a quetzal the other day. We called him Whitey. Traded molecules, and I haven’t been right since. I keep having visions. No, clarify that. I should say I’m possessed by the visions. Made me think I was shooting someone.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman who once threatened Rocket.”

  “Deb Spiro?”

  “She’s dead.”

  Kylee cocked her head slightly. “When? Where?”

  “About a year ago. I shot her in the middle of the street in Port Authority.”

  “Good.”

  “How’s your hip and leg?”

  “Aches now and then. What do you want here, Ta Li Na?”

  “To find out what’s screwing with my thoughts. It’s like I’ve got five quetzals fighting inside me. All powered by a Maya spirit-possession glyph. Maybe you’ve got answers.” Talina paused, staring out at the morning. Mist was rising from the ground, the first of the morning chime announcing a new day. “You need shoes. Surprised a slug hasn’t gotten you.”

  “I try to stay on shallow soils and where it’s rocky. And Flash helps. He lets me ride most places. Especially where it’s boggy or dangerous. He thinks it’s funny, a human riding around on his back.”

  “Who’s Flash?”

  “He’s old. He gave birth to Diamond. Then Diamond gave birth to Leaper. Leaper gave birth to Rocket.”

  “Whole family, huh?”

  “It’s different with quetzals. No male copulating with a female to fertilize her. It takes three, exchanging molecules orally. The molecules are passed through tissues in the back of the mouth and into the reproductive tract. I’m not sure what happens next, but eventually a baby quetzal is popped out the anus.”

  Talina chuckled. “I forget that you’re ten.”

  “People always said that. But only the ones that didn’t know me.”

  “You really need shoes. I’m betting I can find something to cobble together a pair for you. Careful as you try to be, a slug’s gonna get you.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “What do you mean, doesn’t matter?”

  The girl averted her eyes, shrugged in a guilty sort of way. Then, almost angrily, she said, “You can’t stay here. I waited until Diamond and Leaper weren’t looking. I came to warn you before it’s too late.”

  Talina stepped out into the morning, stretching. “Yeah, well, that’s just it. I don’t have any place to go. In fact, I’m hoping that you can help me. You can talk to them, can’t you?”

  “Sort of. It’s not like it was with Dya and . . . Well, the others. Quetzals and humans, we’re different.”

  Talina carefully scented the morning breeze; the chime picked up volume. She could smell the farm, the scent of earthy vegetation mixed with the perfume of the forest. And yes, there was the taint of quetzal.

  “They’re close.”

  “They must have realized I got away. They’ll be coming now. Probably upset with me.”

  “Well, first I’m going to find a place to pee, and then you and I are going to walk down and have a little heart-to-heart with your friend Flash.”

  “He’s out hunting. It’s Diamond and Leaper who are here. Which is too bad. Flash was the one that let you and Dya go last time. He still thinks there’s a chance to learn something. Diamond and Leaper want you dead. Would have killed you yesterday when you were picking blueberries, but I asked them not to.”

  “Thought I felt quetzal yesterday. But tell me, was that really because you asked, or because I was picking blueberries with one hand and holding the rifle ready with the other?”

  “Okay, maybe it was the rifle, but I asked, too.”

  Talina chuckled. “Yeah, you’re all right, kid.”

  “You’re really not here to steal me?”

  “Nope. I’m here to figure this quetzal thing out. One way or another. And something tells me I’m going to need your help to do it.”

  “How?”

  “Well, that remains to be . . .” Talina paused, gaze turned toward the forest. “Looks like your friends are here.”

  Two adult quetzals, collars expanded and pulsing in crimson and black, emerged from the tree line. At a fast clip, they came, heads down, tails out, looking anything but friendly.

  Talina felt her quetzal squirming around behind her stomach. “Whoa, boys!” she cried, lifting her rifle. “That’s far enough.”

  The quetzals stopped short as she covered them with the muzzle. They fully understood a loaded rifle.

  The one on the right uttered a deep-throated chittering sound, its big triangular head lowered, a series of patterns running over the expanded ruff.

  “No,” Kylee told it, stepping forward. “She hasn’t tried to take me. She wants your help.”

  Another pattern—pinks, yellows, browns, and indigo—formed, all shifting and merging. The three eyes remained pinned on Talina while the beast uttered some incomprehensible gargling sound.

  Its mate, offspring, whatever, kept easing forward, gaze locked with Talina’s.

  “I said, far enough.” Talina settled the butt of her rifle into her shoulder. “Which one is this, Kylee?”

  “That’s Leaper.”

  “Leaper, I’m not here to fight. The experiment is not over. You understand that? Not over?”

  The quetzal froze, its patterns shifting to straight crimson.

  “Oh, shit,” Talina growled, her own quetzal hissing in preparation for an attack.

  “No!” Kylee cried, stepping out in front of Leaper. “She’ll kill you! She doesn’t want a fight! She’s a friend!”

  The second quetzal—who had to be Diamond—uttered a clicking, its hide flashing a new pattern of complex colors.

  Leaper seemed to relax, posture easing.

  “Well, thank fucking God,” Talina whispered, lowering her rifle to a less-threatening hip shot.

  Even so, her heart was beating a staccato against her breast bone. Damn, quetzals were absofragginlutely scary.

  “Thanks, kid. That was getting a bit hairy.”

  Kylee turned, looking back over Talina’s shoulder, and said, “It’s okay, Flash. She’s not here to cause trouble.”

  Talina whirled. Found herself face-to-face with a giant quetzal. Not a foot separated them. Frozen, muscles locked, she stood petrified as the beast used a claw to flip her rifle to the side and opened its scarred and serrated jaws.

  The words Oh, fuck seemed to catch in Talina’s mind as the creature lunged.

  22

  Acceleration pushed Kalico back into the commander’s seat as her shuttle arrowed through high cirrus and into the stratosphere. Below her, Donovan dropped away; its now-familiar geography grew distant as her shuttle lanced into the heavens.

  The first of the stars appeared in the darkening sky. She took a deep breath, her heart already starting to pound.

  “You all right?” Fenn Bogarten, her industrial design fabricator, asked fro
m the seat beside hers.

  “You know how much I hate Freelander?”

  “Yeah, me, too. I have nightmares for days afterward every time we set foot on that thing. Those glimpses from the corners of my eye?” He glanced away. “Saw myself once.”

  “You, too?”

  “You mean, I’m not the only one?”

  “Happened to me twice.” Kalico reached up and curled a length of her black hair around a nervous finger. “Saw myself stepping out of the bone temple. I was dressed like I am today. Complete with the scars. Heard myself say, ‘If you go back, you’ll die.’”

  “Freelander’s cursed, ma’am. But somehow, knowing that you’re creep-freaked, too? Makes it easier.”

  “Glad to be of service, Engineer.” A beat. “I think.”

  He studied her as the shuttle changed attitude. “You don’t have to be there, you know. Just me and my team.”

  “I know.” She chewed her lip for a moment. “Hard to ask my people to do what I won’t.”

  “Because of that, anything you ever need, we’re behind you, ma’am. Every Jack and Jill of us. Whether it’s down-hole or up in the sky. We ever make it back to Solar System? You want us to tear up the Board, we’ll do it.”

  She laughed at the notion. “One thing at a time, Fenn. I’ll be happy to get this last batch of carbon fiber spun. Having to do it on Freelander makes my teeth ache.”

  “To extrude cable with that tensile strength? Has to be done in freefall, ma’am. And in vacuum. Can’t have the odd atom or molecule inserting itself in the matrix. Got to be a pure carbon lattice. Freelander is the only choice for the time being.”

  He arched a suggestive eyebrow. “But with the tram up, the smelter working, I don’t see why we can’t manufacture the materials we need. Design a station for freefall manufacturing. We’ve got the shuttles for lift, the raw material, including clay for sialon.”

  “All in good time, Engineer.”

  That was the thing about building a world. So much needed to be done, and it was accomplished so slowly. They’d just finished the tram. Powered it. And the first buckets of ore were being carried down from the mine to the smelter on the river.

  Now she had to manufacture another batch of carbon fiber cable for Port Authority. She’d traded cable for the tram buckets and giant wheels and gears that had been sandcast in Mac Hanson’s foundry. Sandcast? Eighteenth-century technology juxtaposed with carbon fiber from the twenty-first.

  And traded? In the Corporate world, she could have just ordered the damn buckets and wheels. This business of free-market economy, of paying for everything, or trading for it, drove her half mad.

  At the same time, she and her people had a whole new spirit. When they manufactured wealth out of nothing, it was theirs. To have and hold. It didn’t just disappear, automatically surrendered to, and disseminated through, the Corporate system, bits allocated who knew where depending upon the algorithms.

  Sure, her people were under Corporate contract. Upon their return to Solar System—assuming they ever made it back—they’d get a lump sum. Living quarters would be provided for the rest of their lives, and they’d receive additional rations as determined by the algorithms.

  But here on Donovan—mostly because Port Authority ran on a market economy—she let her people keep the occasional nugget or gold bar. Paid them in PA-minted SDRs before sending them off to Port Authority for their R&R. The fact that they could accumulate “plunder” had had the unanticipated effect of doubling their productivity.

  Was it chaotic? Damn straight. Her old boss, Boardmember Miko Taglioni, would have been apoplectic.

  But then, Miko—arrogant and confident in his own godlike righteousness—would have ended in blood within his first hours on Donovan.

  She smiled at that.

  “Supervisor?”

  “Just thinking, Engineer. Trying to understand who that woman was who stepped off the shuttle that day at Port Authority, come to take the planet back from the rebels.”

  He laughed, the sound of it slightly strained by the knowledge that Freelander lay just minutes away. “Wasn’t like what we were expecting, was it, ma’am? Talk about a slap in the face.”

  No, she’d come a long way from the cold Corporate bitch who’d landed that day.

  “Coming up on Freelander, ma’am,” Ensign Juri Makarov, her pilot, called.

  “Thank you, Ensign.”

  “I really hate this,” Bogarten muttered between clenched teeth.

  “You told me it would take ten hours.”

  “Aye, ma’am. That’s after we get the raw carbon to feed and the machine starts extruding. Let’s just hope that we don’t run into any unforeseen problems.”

  Bogarten had his four helpers in the back. Still, Kalico said, “I don’t know that I’d be of any use, but if you need a spare set of hands . . . ?”

  He gave her a worried smile. “I appreciate that, Supervisor. Stryski’s back there. He’ll figure out any snag. You just relax, try and keep your sanity, and we’ll have that cable spun out in no time.”

  “Coming up on dock,” Makarov called. “Five, four, three, two, one.” The shuttled bumped and lurched. Thumps could be heard. “Hard dock.”

  It had to be her imagination, the spooky reality of where they were, but a wavering shiver, like an undulation of water, seemed to flow through her body. The light shifted, as if slightly smeared.

  “All right, people,” she called, willing courage she didn’t have into her voice. “Let’s double check the hatch and lock. No mistakes now. Stay frosty.”

  A chorus of “Yes, ma’am” came from the back.

  “Atmosphere checks green,” Igor Stryski called from where he stood at the airlock. “We’ve got twenty-seven Celsius on the other side. Fourteen psi. Lock is sealed, ma’am.”

  “All right, people, let’s go make cable.”

  She followed Stryski after he undogged the lock and stepped into the stuffy air. Freelander never smelled right. The dry air reeked of mold, of sweat, and the dust of long-dead human beings and their squalor. Sometimes she wondered if she was breathing the ghosts of the dead, sucking their wailing anguish into her lungs.

  A single light panel, strung up and left by Turalon crewmen before they spaced, cast a hollow and yellow light on the lines of chairs in the waiting room and onto the scuffed sialon floor. Little motes, stirred by their presence, glowed in their handheld lights.

  Kalico tugged her quetzal-hide jacket straight. She’d worn it instead of her suit because it was a tie to Donovan—a link to the sanity that existed on the other side of Freelander’s hull.

  She checked her com. “Juri? Can you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Loud and clear.”

  “Roger that. Keep the home fires burning in case we come running with the heebie-jeebies.”

  “’Firmative on that, ma’am. Watch yourself in there.” A pause. “Bateman has removed the crate with the carbon from the hold. He’s floating it down to the manufacturing bay as we speak.”

  Stryski and Bogarten led the way into the ship and down the corridor. No lights here but what they carried. The dingy walls seemed to close in as they moved inward toward the core. As angular acceleration decreased, they relied on handholds, and finally reached the freefall bay where Stryski and Bogarten had installed their precious carbon fiber extruding machine.

  In the room’s one dim light, Kalico anchored herself with a hand and watched through a grimy transparency as her people suited up in vacuum gear. One by one they cycled through the lock and floated out to help Bateman align the crate with the precious raw carbon. The container had to fit over the hopper just so. Then pins were removed and spring pressure squeezed the raw carbon into the machine’s guts where it was heated, compressed, and spun into fibers.

  Kalico gasped, swearing that something had just entered the room
. She whirled, shining her light. Nothing. But she could feel the wrongness, like a viscous quality in the air.

  Pus in a bucket, she hated Freelander.

  “Supervisor?” Makarov’s voice seemed to echo in her ear.

  “Yes, Ensign?”

  “You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve got a shuttle on an inbound vector.”

  “The PA bird? What would they be doing—”

  “Negative, ma’am. This one’s reading a Corporate pipper. Definitely NOT Port Authority’s bird. I’m sending a hail now. Haven’t a clue as to who this is, but company is definitely coming.”

  23

  Tamarland figured that he had a reasonable handle on the situation on Capella III from listening in on the planetary radio conversations over the last three days. Why they relied on old-fashioned radio when they could have been using photonics made no sense.

  Whoever the people on Cap III were, they hadn’t a clue that Vixen was in orbit. Impossible as it seemed, instead of a six-year exile, he’d stumbled upon a world ripe for the seizing. He could imagine Artollia smiling in anticipation. Maybe it wasn’t like the Chairmanship, but it was better than nothing, and after the complicated gamesmanship he and Artollia had orchestrated back in Solar System, this would be like taking rations from a baby.

  Tam had found his perfect opportunity to take the Supervisor by surprise when he heard the radio woman, O’Hanlan, announcing to Two Spot, “The Supervisor is shuttling up to Freelander tomorrow with Bogarten and four of his crew to manufacture cable.”

  Tam would be there, and the puzzle of Capella III’s occupants would be solved on his terms. Backed by him and his two armed security officers.

  Now he sat in the command chair as Vixen’s shuttle closed with the big mystery ship. He’d watched the Supervisor’s shuttle dock through his own shuttle’s telemetry.

  In the seat beside him, First Officer Seesil Vacquillas looked pale and nervous. But then, there’d been more than enough frightened gazes and whispered conversations passing among the command crew.

  When he’d asked Torgussen and Vacquillas point blank, they’d responded, “Nothing, sir.”