Pariah

by W. Michael Gear

  “Benteen. Corporate assassin.” Shig’s voice sounded distant. “Came on the Vixen. She’s still blaming herself. Shouldn’t. Good as she is, he’d have killed her before she could have pulled her pistol.”

  “Promise me you’ll make Benteen pay.” Tish swallowed hard. “He’s evil, Tal. Don’t just shoot him. Make him suffer.”

  “Sure, kid. I promise.”

  “Always tried to make you proud.” Trish wished her mouth wasn’t so dry. “Hated myself for what I did. Couldn’t see you suffer.”

  “Hated yourself for not getting killed? That’s nuts.”

  “No. ’Cause of Cap.” Trish closed her eyes, remembering Cap as he lay in that hospital bed. “. . . See the little wheel? With your thumb, spin it open . . .”

  “Cap?”

  Trish struggled to organize her thoughts. “Sorry, Tal. So sorry. He asked me to. He knew. Loved you . . . We all did. Love’s such a funny thing, huh? Hurts so much when you might lose it.”

  “It’s the fever, Talina. She’s raving,” Shig’s voice came from somewhere above.

  “We’re going to take you out of here.” Tal’s voice sounded terse. A pause. Then, “Yeah, love’s a funny thing.”

  “Didn’t want you to suffer. Not after what you did for me.”

  Trish heard muffled voices. Tal’s sharp. Shig’s soothing, but she couldn’t make out the words.

  Then Tal was bent over her, the strength back in her voice. “Love you, too, kid. Gotta have you hang in there. Sounds like trouble back in PA.”

  “I got your back, Tal. Always.”

  Another pause.

  “Yeah, kid. I know you do. We’re going to put you under again. Next time you come to, it’s going to be in hospital. You hear? You be there for me, Trish.”

  “I wasn’t good enough.” A sob caught in her throat as the pain spiked. “Lost you to a little quetzal. How fucked is that?”

  “You didn’t lose me,” Tal’s voice came from a distance. “. . . right here . . . will be waiting to . . .”

  Then another of the searing, bone-blasting waves of pain rolled up her leg as it was jarred.

  “It’s raining.” Was that Yvette? “And it’s the middle of the . . .”

  Trish struggled to place the fragments of speech.

  “. . . Just got out of bed yourself. You don’t want to do this.” Some part of Trish’s mind thought it was Shig talking.

  “She’s gonna die. That’s infection. Hell, she may be dead by the time I get her . . .”

  “And God help us . . . crossing the Wind Mountains. Our luck, you’ll . . . a peak. They’ll never find . . .”

  “Gotta get back.” Yeah, that was Talina’s voice. “Too much shit’s coming down.”

  “. . . About that little girl?” This voice sounded shrill. That fucking idiot professor? Had to be.

  “. . . Need to be worried about, it’s that kid. She’s half . . .”

  For a moment, Trish’s mind and hearing seemed to clear.

  “Well, I’m not staying behind for her.” Definitely Weisbacher.

  “The hell you say. You made this mess. You keep a light on for her until I can get back. Now, move your shit and grab hold of the stretcher.”

  Trish yelped as she was moved. She tried to blink, saw blurry lights. Felt like she was floating. Another bash of pain left her scattered and panting. God, what she’d give for a drink of cold water.

  “Tal?” she cried.

  “Here.” Trish felt Tal take her hand.

  “Benteen . . . don’t take him head on. He’ll kill you. Make him . . . make him pay for what he did. Okay? Scared me. Shamed me.”

  “You just hang in there, Trish. You can take him down yourself.”

  “Love you. My best . . . I just . . .” Tried to find words in the haze. Couldn’t.

  Faintly she thought she felt rain on her face. Cool rain.

  Then blackness.

  The pain lashed her again. Fainter now.

  Trish let herself go. Felt her heart slow. Each beat ever more distant from the last.

  Let herself drop into the empty black.

  No need to fight anymore.

  Just . . . let go . . .

  75

  Talina pulled the throttle back, sending power to the fans. Rain pattered down on the aircar’s canopy; the wet topography flickered in blue-white flashes as lightning danced across the storm-torn sky. A blast of wind jolted the aircar, and Talina barely caught it in time to keep them on an even keel.

  Shig and Yvette were giving her that uncertain and frightened look, faces made even more pale by the frequent strobes of lightning.

  For Talina, the hits just kept coming. She’d awakened feeling weak, stiff, and vulnerable. Hungry as hell. Mostly naked and wearing a shit-sucking diaper, for God’s sake?

  She felt wobbly. A stim bar had given her a jolt of energy, and she’d scarfed down the dregs of the boiled vegetables.

  Another gust of wind tossed the car. She looked back. In the dim cabin lights, Trish looked ghastly.

  Trish? Damn. How could this happen to Trish?

  Talina sucked a deep breath, fighting images that kept trying to crawl up from her subconscious. Xibalba, quetzal memories, her mother’s kitchen, the expression on Cap’s dead face where he lay on the hospital bed.

  The aircar pitched again, hit sidelong by a blast of rain.

  Concentrate. You’re going to kill us all.

  “Shig?” she asked, struggling to keep her mind on the flight, needing a distraction from the chaos of horrible thoughts in her head. “What Trish said back at Rork Springs. About Cap? I’m still trying to make sense of it.”

  Shig rose from where he sat beside Trish’s litter, leaving Yvette to ensure that the wounded woman rode safely in the turbulence. Staggering, he made his way to the dash and clamped onto one of the grab rails.

  “You heard what she said. Cap told her to turn the little wheel. Come on, Tal. You knew the man better than any of us. You think he wanted to live like that?”

  She fought back tears, a spear of grief and frustrated anger surging through her. “Damn it, no.” A beat. “Why didn’t he ask me to do it?”

  “Because he loved you.”

  Talina shook her head, tried desperately to clear her vision of cobweb-like images that formed ghostlike behind her eyes.

  “You all right?” Shig asked nervously.

  “Seeing things.”

  He peered out into the blackness. “I can’t see anything except storm. How the hell are you keeping us in the air? You’re not even wearing night vision.”

  “Quetzal vision,” she told him. “It’s heavy in the infrared. We’re following the terrain. Rork River is off to our right. The compass heading’s correct.”

  Another frantic gust of storm hammered rain against the quivering aircar as it fought its way forward. Keeping on course took all of Talina’s concentration.

  In the next lull, she cried, “How could she do that to me?”

  “Because she loved you.”

  Again she caught the aircar just before the wind pitched it sideways and out of control. Flying in this shit? It was asking for a disaster. Even Demon, locked away down in her gut, was huddling in fear, somehow realizing just how foolish and dangerous this night flight was.

  Worse, Talina could feel her energy beginning to ebb. She struggled to peer through the windshield. The vibrasurface remained clear despite the downpour, but beyond that, visibility was limited to shrouds of falling rain. Just ahead lay Rork Pass, the high, torturous gap that led through this portion of the Winds.

  As woozy as Talina felt, as slow as her reactions, any rage she harbored toward Trish was moot. Figured that it was Trish, especially after eliminating all the other potential suspects.

  They’d no more than entered the na
rrow defile, jagged rock rising to either side, when the main force of the wind hit.

  Talina’s gut rose as the aircar was driven down. The effect was as if it had been hit with a hammer. She froze, terrified by the broken boulders that filled her vision.

  “Hang on!” she screamed, and pulled at the wheel with all of her flagging strength.

  76

  Port Authority’s worst nightmare: three quetzals, in the dark, in the middle of a storm, loose in the town. Were they still together? Hunting separately? Had they gone to ground in a building? Perhaps camouflaging themselves under or behind a piece of the parked mining equipment? Or worse, were they pursuing some more insidious plan?

  Kalico hunched over the map, hands propped on the scarred old conference table in the admin dome, her feet braced. The last time she’d been here for a hunt like this, she’d been a spectator, disbelieving, struggling to come to terms with the impossibility that an implacable predator was hunting human beings within the town’s walls.

  Shig and Yvette had been here. Standing where she was. Directing as she was now.

  More than anything, Kalico remembered there had been coffee. And she—smart-assed Corporate shit that she’d been—had let that cup go to waste.

  “I’d give a hundred-kilo bar of solid beryllium alloy for that same cup right now,” she told herself. “Cold, slimy, and black as it might be.”

  “What’s that?” Dya Simonov looked up from the “quetzal map,” a hand-drawn one-by-two meter rendering of Port Authority. It was stretched across the tabletop, each part colored differently, the town blocked into search zones.

  “Talking to myself.” Kalico accessed her military com. “Abu Sassi? What have you got?”

  “We’re lined out. Halfway through grid one, ma’am.”

  “Tompzen?”

  “Still on the second block of the warehouse grid, ma’am. This is the shits. All this equipment from Freelander. Each piece has to be cleared.”

  “Get it right, Kalen. No matter how long it takes.”

  “Roger that.”

  One by one, she checked in with her other marines. The last time they hunted a quetzal in PA, she’d had twenty, with full tech. And the thing had still eluded them. Now she was down to nine, not counting the four watching the gates, and they had only half the manpower available that PA had had on that previous search.

  This can go wrong in so many ways.

  Looking down at the map, she mentally marked off each small section of the town. Damn, it was going slowly. Miso’s team had barely gotten their search lined out and were only a quarter of the way through their half of the residential section. Every house had to be checked and cleared. Every potential hiding place probed. At the same time, drones were ensuring the roofs were clear.

  “Look out!” a voice on the radio cried, the broadcast followed by shots. A scream faded in the background.

  “Damn thing came out of nowhere!”

  “Wye? Where are you? Wye, damn it. Answer me!”

  “It was just there! Did you see it? Grabbed Wye, and . . . Oh fuck, no.”

  “Get it together, people.” That was Step Allenovich’s voice.

  More shots could be heard over the radio.

  “Report!” Kalico barked.

  “Fucker just got Wye Vanveer.” Allenovich’s voice came through the speaker. “My goddamned line’s too thin! Everybody! Hold up! Don’t go racing in after him. Don’t want to lose anybody because of stupidity. I said, stop. Stay in sight of each other!”

  Kalico took a deep breath. If only they had more bodies on the lines. Half of the people who made up the search teams were essentially trapped in their businesses and houses. The usual guards hadn’t been at their stations. People who normally would have been able to make the assembly points were hiding, praying, and most likely, dying.

  Kalico slammed a palm into the table making Dya jump. “You’re in charge, Dya. You’ve seen how I’ve been marking the cleared areas? Tell Two Spot to patch the military coms into the town net.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Kalico grabbed for the rifle she’d leaned against a chair. “You heard Step. He just lost a man. He’s short-handed. Last I looked there was still a night-vision headset in the locker. I’m going out there.”

  Dya gave her a measured, you’re-crazy look. Not that the two of them had ever really been on the best of terms.

  Kalico told her, “Keep the door locked. Something tells me this is about as far from under control as things get around here.”

  “Watch your ass.”

  “Watch yours.”

  Kalico swung her poncho around her shoulders, checked the load in the rifle’s magazine, and closed the door behind her. At the locker, she pulled out the night-vision set and fitted it to her head. The ancient battery read sixty-two percent, and that was coming off the charger.

  She strode out into the rainy night, flicked the headset on, and lifted her rifle to check the IR function in the optic. In the sight, blackness faded to a ghostly green.

  “Two Spot? You hear me?”

  “Roger that, Supervisor. What the hell are you doing?”

  “Headed out for Step’s line. Step? You hear me?”

  “You out of your mind, Supervisor?”

  “Where do you want me to rendezvous with your team?”

  “We’re held up. Block north of The Jewel. Got some nooks and crannies to peer at, and after losing Vanveer, don’t want anybody too long out of sight.”

  She trotted down the main avenue, streaks of rain falling silver in the glow of the night vision. Water puddles were stippled with raindrops; the buildings on either side seemed to glow in a ghostly fashion, especially where their lights were muted in the goggles.

  Have you lost any sense you ever had, Kalico? She now had time to take Allenovich’s question seriously.

  She was the most powerful woman on the planet, and here she was, headed into who knew what kind of disaster. Ready to step into a line and take the place of a man who had just been torn to pieces and eaten.

  She kept her gaze roving, trying to call up everything she’d heard since setting foot on Donovan. Rifle hot. Safety off. Finger resting on the receiver just above the trigger. Shoot fast. Don’t miss. And don’t—for fucking sake—shoot anything or anyone but a damn quetzal.

  Her adrenaline was up. Pulse pounding, she passed The Jewel, glanced up at the roof lines as she hurried below them. She could see the man in the street, one of Step’s team.

  “Coming up behind you,” she called. “Don’t shoot.”

  He turned and she recognized Mgumbe. “Roger that, Supervisor. Step’s halfway down the block.”

  She made the corner, trying to see everywhere at once. They had only seven people lined out on the street between the avenue and the distant fence. Privates Tanner and Michegan were spaced in the line where their tech could be the most effective.

  “Gotcha, Supervisor,” Step’s flat voice announced. “You’re taking Mgumbe’s position in the avenue. That’s got the best visibility. Your job is to keep in sight of Abu Sassi’s team across the way. They’re waiting on us. As we proceed you keep an eye on Mgumbe first, and the rest of us second. It’s your job to make sure no quetzal sneaks around our flank and cuts back down the avenue to get behind us.”

  “You got it.”

  “All right, people. Let’s go. For Vanveer’s sake, let’s not lose anyone else.”

  A chorus of rogers sounded in Kalico’s earpiece.

  Swallowing down a suddenly dry throat, she signaled to the closest man to her right on Abu Sassi’s team, saw his people move forward, disappearing between the buildings. Allenovich’s line of searchers did the same.

  And then the immensity of it came crashing down on her: It was the middle of the night, rain pounding out of the sky. A thousand hiding pla
ces were on all sides. She knew of two people already killed. Human beings who had been alive that morning and now were digesting in quetzal gut juice.

  And I’m out here in the dark. The only thing between me and them is this rifle, and whether or not I can make a kill shot on a charging quetzal.

  Muting her com, she whispered, “I’m a clap-trapping fool.”

  Step by step she made her way, checking the rooftops, searching along the building fronts. She saw one of Abu Sassi’s people climb the ladder behind Sheyela Smith’s shop to check the flat roof before calling, “Clear!”

  Three quetzals.

  There’d never been more than one.

  Which begged the question: What the hell had changed?

  Like a popping string of fireworks, shots came from the warehouse district. Maybe fifteen or twenty. Then silence.

  “Easy does it, people,” came Step’s calm voice. “Keep cool. Eyes open and think.”

  Damn. How did the man do it? Especially after just having a man killed?

  Knowing a quetzal was close, Kalico was ready to jump out of her skin. She made her way slowly past the big square building where Toby Montoya kept his machine shop. And there, at the alley, she stopped, heart thumping ever faster until Mgumbe stepped into view on the other side of the building. Above, the drones would be checking every inch of the roof. The man flashed his rifle each way as he searched the shadows.

  Only then did he give her a nod. She glanced to her right, seeing Abu Sassi’s man clearing his alley. One by one, people appeared, waiting until everyone was accounted for. Then came the knocking on doors to check for anyone in hiding. Any unlocked door meant the building had to be scoured.

  After what seemed an eternity they started forward again.

  The further they drove the quetzals, the more desperate the beasts would be. In the end, cornered, what were the quetzals going to do? A massed rush? Hit the lines in three places? Did the thin lines have enough firepower to bring the beasts down?

  Every nerve tingling, she whispered, “They’ll do their best to kill as many of us as they can.”

  As if the gods of violence had heard, the rain really began to pound down. It battered on the hood of her poncho, blunting her hearing. Slashed down from the sky, cutting visibility.