Pariah

by W. Michael Gear

  Benteen’s smile had thinned, his eyes sharpening.

  When he said nothing, Dan told him, “In summary, given the above, I’d suggest that after you finish that whiskey, you move on. Find a refuge in the cafeteria or Inga’s.”

  This time, Dan plastered a fake smile on his lips, all the while his heart and blood pumping in an expectation of action.

  Benteen took a sip of his whiskey, swished it around his mouth, and carefully returned the glass to the table. He hadn’t changed posture, still leaned back, looking relaxed. Finally, he said, “After due consideration, I think I’ll decline your kind suggestion.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t follow my drift, as the miners hereabouts would say. It wasn’t a suggestion, and this is not a negotiable topic. Finish your whiskey, and after you leave, don’t come back.”

  Benteen’s sudden smile went all the way to his eyes. “Good play, Wirth. I’ll bet it even works with these penny-ante miners, hunters, and assorted locals. As to what’s negotiable? That’s everything under the sun, my friend. Including where I go, who I spend my time with, and which chair I choose to sit in. For the time being, I like this one.”

  “Art?” Dan called, “Could you come over here for a second?”

  Maniken stepped out from behind the bar, a leather-wrapped stonewood bat held suggestively in his gnarled right hand. As he stepped up to the table, he asked, “Yeah, boss?”

  “Mr. Benteen here was just leaving. I was wondering if you would be so kind as to escort him out the back way. I’d hate to think what might happen if he were not incredibly polite and courteous during his rapid removal from the premises.”

  “On your feet,” Art ordered with all the sensitivity of a corrections officer.

  “This is the way it has to be?” Benteen asked Dan.

  “’Fraid so.”

  “Very well.” The man sighed, straightened, and rose. Art stepped up behind him, smacking the leather-wrapped bat into his meaty left palm with a hollow pop.

  Benteen seemed to blur, spin. Dan caught the faintest image of the man’s hand flashing under the coat, then out and up. Even as Benteen lunged, the meaty smack of metal on bone could be heard.

  Maniken’s head jerked to the side. The man’s eyes started wide. A spindle of saliva slung from his mouth at the impact.

  The big man was falling as Benteen danced to one side, caught Art’s weight, and supported his sagging bulk. A black pistol was pressed to the side of Maniken’s head, the bouncer’s expression slack, lips loose and eyes unfocused.

  “Tiresome,” Benteen said, mildly. “Three pounds of pressure on the trigger and I blow what few brains this lunkard has all over your nicely polished table. Shin Wong was so careful with his wiping this morning. Be a shame to muck it all up with gore.”

  Dan hadn’t had time to react. Now his heart, uncharacteristically, was hammering. “You really shouldn’t have done that.”

  Art tried to straighten, only to have his eyes roll back as he flopped limply.

  Benteen let him slip to the floor, reholstered the pistol, and resumed his seat across from Dan. Without so much as a tremor in the fingers, he picked up his whiskey and took another sip.

  Dan was aware that everyone in the room was frozen, watching. Shin, Vik, Angelina, and Dalia might have been rabbits in a spotlight.

  Benteen smiled. “You had to try. You wouldn’t have been worth spit if you hadn’t. To your credit, I thought it would take you another day. That it didn’t shows a well-developed sense for trouble and what to do about it. The ‘Art, come over here’ was a bit ham-handed, but maybe that’s how you have to communicate with these miners and the like.”

  “You know this isn’t going to end well.”

  “Your decision to make.” Benteen raised his voice. “Vik? If you can break yourself loose from imitating a tree trunk, could you bring Dan and me a refill, please? The good bottle this time.”

  Vik started forward, stopped short, looking back and forth from Dan to Benteen.

  “Hate to have to get up and show poor Vik his place, too.” Benteen glanced sidelong at Dan, an eyebrow arched. “Or is this the moment you decide to rear up on your hind legs and push the point? Granted, it will be heroic, but with a bullet through your heart, I don’t think Vik, Shin, and the rest will debate my authority afterward.”

  Dan considered Benteen’s hand, resting so innocently on the table. Considered his own pistol, back in the office. Not that it would have done him much good. Even if it were in the wire basket under the table, he doubted he could so much as get fingers on the grip before Benteen shot him.

  “Vik,” Dan barked. “Bring the bottle.”

  Fractured glass wasn’t as brittle as the atmosphere when Vik refilled both glasses and backed away to the bar.

  “Now, that’s better,” Benteen told him after inhaling over the whiskey. “Aquajade you say? It really is marvelous.”

  “Enjoy it while you can.”

  “Relax. I’m not interested in seeing you dead, let alone have any interest in taking over your operations. Hell, I don’t even want a cut of the action. Let’s just forget that this morning even happened.”

  Dan lifted his whiskey, every bit of him focused on Benteen. “Then what, pray tell, are you after?”

  “One thing at a time, Dan. First, I notice that Allison does what you tell her.”

  “For the most part. That what this play was about? Allison?”

  “Only tangentially. Here’re the new rules: I come and go. You run The Jewel and Betty Able’s and all of your other businesses. Your next move, of course, will be to bide your time. Shoot me in the back. Maybe a rifle shot from ambush. Don’t. It’s been tried by some of the smartest professionals in Solar System. They’re dead. I’m not. I’ve got a sense for these things. Anyone attempts it, you’ll be a corpse within the hour, and I get all this by default.”

  “Then, what’s your play?”

  Benteen chuckled. “I’m not your enemy, Dan. Just the opposite. Help me achieve my goals, and your life is going to be a whole lot easier.” Benteen paused. “What is libertarianism, anyway? Seems like a real waste.”

  “There might be resistance against what you’re planning. Remember that first night we talked?”

  “My take, Dan, is that you really hate fucking around building things like schools.”

  40

  The scream—by virtue of the sheer terror that filled it—sent shivers up Talina’s back. She crouched in the forest trail, pistol gripped before her. Eyes trying to see everything around her. Sweat was dripping from her skin in the damp equatorial heat. Her heart tried to hammer its way out of her chest. She’d warned him. Hoped for just this, actually. Call it the coward’s way out. But the horror of what she saw left her weak and trembling.

  Again, he screamed. And his eyes fixed on hers as he dangled three, maybe four meters off the ground. Another of the tentacles wrapped slowly around his upper thigh, the tip finding its way into the coverall’s front pocket, piercing the thin inner pocket material. Then the tip wormed its way into the tender skin beside the testicles.

  “For God’s sake, Talina!” he cried. “Shoot me!”

  Talina’s mouth had gone dry. She lifted the pistol, discovered that her hands were shaking.

  Up among the mundo leaves, Clemenceau drew another breath, filling his lungs for another plea. As he did, the tentacle that had grabbed his shoulder ate its way deeper into the hollow between the clavicle and pectoral. The scream grated across Talina’s nerves.

  She fought the urge to back away. Turn, wind her way to the trail she’d led Clemenceau down not an hour before.

  Wasn’t anything more than the bastard deserved after the things he’d done. The problem with petty tyrants was that they used their power for the most unsavory things. The latest—just the day before—he’d pointed to a tarp, ordering, “Take that o
ut over the Gulf. At least ten minutes offshore before you dump it.”

  Turned out that Clemenceau had finally had his way with Sheila Monagan. The man had been making a pest of himself, stalking the woman. Sheila had been terrified, a widow with a precocious daughter, and no one to stand up for her. Then Clemenceau had threatened to molest Sheila’s twelve-year-old daughter, Trish, and Sheila had given in, willing to endure the inevitable in an attempt to save her child. Not that it had turned out all that well for her.

  On that flight out to the gulf, Talina had checked. Unzipped the tarp to stare into Sheila’s dead eyes. Had cataloged the signs of sexual abuse. Nothing that the woman Talina had known would have consented to.

  Why the hell did I dump her? I could have taken her back, laid her body in the main street, and exposed Clemenceau for everything he was.

  She hadn’t because Clemenceau was the Supervisor. Heads of security followed orders.

  Just like the day Talina had shot down Pak and Paolo in the street.

  People raised in The Corporation didn’t question. It was unthinkable.

  “I will not countenance open rebellion!” Clemenceau’s voice thundered in her ear. “Security Officer, shoot them. Shoot them now!”

  Talina struggled to swallow as she stared into Clemenceau’s eyes. She raised the pistol. The same pistol she’d shot Pak and Paolo with. Stared into his face over the pistol sights.

  “Please?” he whimpered.

  She didn’t will it. The pistol just seemed to buck in her hand. The round caught Clemenceau in the left cheek next to the nose. The way his head was hanging, the bullet blew out the spinal cord and base of the skull. After the jerk at impact, he hung, limp in the tentacles, left eye bulged out of its socket, blood dribbling from his mouth and nostrils as the head drained.

  Talina was panting; it seemed impossible to draw a breath from the muggy and stifling air.

  “Talina? Hey!”

  Something poked her hard in the side.

  Talina blinked, the forest vanishing like a mirage.

  She was in a locker room. Showers. Toilet stalls and sinks. The place smelled wet and soapy. Her butt was astraddle a bench, a comb was grasped by one end in her hand.

  “For Sheila’s funeral, we buried a bunch of packing inside a rolled blanket so that Trish would never know,” she said absently. “I couldn’t have that kid knowing what that shit-fucker had done to her mother.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kylee asked.

  Talina’s quetzal was gnawing at the back of her spine. She imagined Rocket’s three eyes staring sympathetically out of her memory.

  Kylee was twisted around, inspecting her with worried blue eyes, her freshly washed hair wet and half combed. “You come back here. To this place. We’re at that fucking mine.”

  Talina’s scrambled thoughts tried to tumble into some kind of order. Potsherds rearranging into yet another pattern. “Corporate Mine?”

  “Duh?”

  “If your mother ever hears you cursing like that . . .”

  “Where were you just now? I know it was Clemenceau. And who’s Sheila?”

  “A woman he raped and murdered. That was a long time ago.”

  “You whimpered something about ‘not Trish.’ She her daughter?”

  “Yes.” Talina started. Shit. She wasn’t thinking. “Forget it. It was a long time ago. He was a bad man.”

  Kylee was watching her with those knowing eyes. “Did you kill him because of Sheila?”

  “Among other reasons.”

  “Like my father and Paolo?”

  “You know too much for your own good.”

  The girl took the comb from Talina’s hand and tried to work it through her tangles. Talina took it back. “Here, let me.”

  “We really going to Rork Springs?”

  “Probably. It’s a hideout that I’ve kept stocked for emergencies. Same with Two Falls Gap. There’s shelter, good water. Not much chance of poisoning. It’s bush country. Not as dangerous as deep forest.”

  “It’s scary when you go away like that.”

  “You ought to try it from my perspective. What if I’m flying? Or in the middle of a fight with a bunch of mobbers and my brain goes whacko?”

  “What’s whacko?”

  “Old term. Before your time. Means abnormal. Off track.”

  Kylee’s shoulders tensed. “You really believe that? What the scarred woman said? That Spiro disobeyed orders?”

  “I do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Kalico Aguila is many things, but never a liar. That’s one of the qualities I like about her. She tells you how it is straight out.”

  “She made Mark and Dya miserable in the hospital before we left. She would have taken Mundo.”

  “That’s right. But don’t be too hard on her. She was doing everything she could to keep her mine and her people alive. If you were in her place, you damn well might have done the same. Sometimes, like shooting Clemenceau, it all comes down to survival. Like you, standing there, watching Flash and Diamond eating Rebecca and Shantaya. I know for a fact you’d take that back in a second.”

  Kylee was silent for a long moment, then finally jerked her head in a miserable nod.

  “People back in Solar System wouldn’t understand, kid. If I could go back, I’d have shot Clemenceau the first time I realized what a sick and twisted piece of shit he was.” She gestured with the comb. “And believe me, I’ve had to ride herd on my impulse to shoot first and question later ever since.”

  “So you really should have shot Sian Hmong?”

  Talina made a face. “No. Well, not when I’m in my right mind. Sian’s a good mother and a great teacher. Her husband and her three kids love her, and she loves them. She didn’t understand Rocket. None of us did. Not at first. But because she didn’t understand, is that a reason to murder her? Leave her husband and those three little kids grieving, feeling like their guts are torn out?”

  Talina stood, heart beginning to hammer. “I’d be just like Deb Spiro.”

  “You’re not.”

  “You weren’t there that day in Port Authority. I mean, just like now with Clemenceau, I was locked away in the hallucination. It was so real. I just sort of woke up with my gun in my hand and a fresh bullet hole in a shipping crate. If Sian had been standing there . . . ?”

  Talina walked over to the folded clothing O’Hanley had brought while Kylee showered. “Try these on. I think they’re a little big, but they’re smaller than anyone here can wear.”

  She watched as Kylee dressed, looking baggy in the bright yellow overalls. With the cuffs rolled up, however, the kid no longer looked like a refugee out of one of those pictures in a twentieth-century history book.

  Talina led the way to the dormitory door, stepped out into the sun, and squinted as she started across the fired clay on the landing field. She could see her aircar, plugged in to the large solar panel array.

  She grabbed Kylee’s hand, stopping the girl as one of the big haulers went grinding and roaring past. The thing rocked and lurched on its oversized tires. A spear of pride warmed Talina’s breast. Those were Cheng’s tires. Molded out of vulcanized mundo-leaf rubber.

  She followed along in the monster’s dusty wake.

  “What are those?” Kylee asked, pointing with her other hand.

  “Cannons,” Talina told her. “For shooting down your death fliers. Could have used a couple of those when we were jumped down at Mundo. Kalico’s destroyed a whole flock with those guns.”

  “Wonder if Leaper and Diamond got away?”

  “I saw them dive into a hole torn in the side of the Mundo dome. Maybe. I couldn’t tell if the death fliers saw where they hid.” Talina glanced down. “Do you want them dead?”

  Kylee pursed her lips as she stared at the looming headstock over the
Number 1 mine shaft. The great wheel on top was turning as the cage was being winched up with another load of ore.

  “That a yes or no?” Talina prodded.

  Kylee glanced up, eyes fierce. “I want them dead, okay?”

  “Kid, you’re going to have to figure out that if everybody dies who hurts you, you’re going to depopulate half the planet.”

  Kylee didn’t seem to buy it. “Here’s the deal. Let’s go have our meal with the scarred lady. I’ll be good. Promise not to make a scene. Then just get me the hell out of here and back to the bush, okay?”

  “You’re really going to have to stop cussing.”

  “Why? It’s coming out of your mouth all the time.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Why? ’Cause you’re an adult? ’Cause you’ve earned the right? That’s what Rebecca always said. That she’d been hard-used by life, so it was okay. Well I’ve been hard-used, too. Harder than Rebecca ever was, so I’m cussing. And you can’t make me stop.”

  “Don’t bet on that.”

  “Oh yeah? What could you do to me that hasn’t already been done worse? Break my other hip? Kill someone I love?”

  Talina felt her resistance crumble. “You got a point there. So, I’ll take your deal. Be nice while we eat. Don’t antagonize Kalico, and I’ll have you back out in the bush before you know it.”

  “Good. Just so we’re long gone before Dya shows up.”

  “She’s your mother.”

  “I don’t have family. Makes it easier to hate people.”

  Talina glanced down, an uneasy feeling in her gut. How did a child get that broken? And was there any way to fix it?

  41

  The night was remarkably quiet. So much so that it brought Tamarland awake. As he’d been trained, he took the moment to listen, heard the soft breathing of the woman beside him. Aware of the round pressure of her naked hip against his.

  A board creaked somewhere beyond the door. The building settling? Or the weight of a stealthy foot?