Only four of the clans fought Hex, and they nearly lost. The modified Rover lowered the mother ship’s shields, and Hex used his remote key. Ukiah had replaced Hex’s program, however, with one that self-destructed the ship—snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat.
The Demon Curs were the only clan missing during that battle. Considering Rennie’s and Degas’s history, Ukiah wondered now if the Curs’ absence had been by chance or design.
“Chance,” Rennie answered him. “Too much was riding on that. If Hex managed to wake the sleeping crew, Earth would have never withstood the following invasion. Much as Degas hates me, I know he would have set it aside to stop Hex.”
Ukiah looked at Rennie skeptically.
“Remember, cub,” Rennie turned to stare at him with eyes cold as gunmetal, “under it all Degas and I are nearly the same creature.”
“If you’re one and the same, why did you kill Degas?”
“To teach him a lesson. Your father’s blood gave us the ability to be individuals if we’re given the room. What we grow into depends much on the human that we were. Degas was a cutthroat pirate, devious and ruthless, with willpower made of steel. As a Get, he’s extremely effective at fighting Ontongard—which is why I didn’t destroy him completely.”
“It just seems a little extreme to kill him. Did it help any?”
“Made me feel better.” Rennie gave a wolfish grin. “And it did drive a point through Degas’s thick head—stop trying to make massive numbers of Gets.”
“So it worked?”
“Not completely.” Rennie sobered. “There is necessary killing, and then there is wanton slaughter. Sometimes it’s a fine line between the two. Those of us who were trained military men or law officers can walk the line—we do what needs to be done and no more. Degas often walks the wrong side.”
Rennie jerked his chin in the direction of the Watering Hole. “Degas probably would have laid waste to that bar tonight and killed your gutsy woman friend on suspicion alone. You’re lucky I’m the one that found you in June, not him.”
Ukiah had Rennie’s memories from the day that the Pack hunted Ukiah down and closed for the kill. He knew how much he owed to Rennie’s compassion. “Degas would have killed me.”
“Degas would have killed everyone that ever met you.”
Ukiah staggered back, stunned. “Why?”
“Have you never questioned why the wolf dogs attacked Hex’s Get disguised as you? How they knew it wasn’t you and that Hex’s Get meant harm to your family?”
“No,” Ukiah whispered, suddenly afraid to hear the reason.
“Your blood has gotten into those dogs and changed them, cub. They nipped and bit and drew your blood, didn’t they?”
“They’re my Gets?”
“No.” Rennie shifted uneasily. “I’m not sure what they are. Your blood should have made them Gets; at least it would have, if you were a normal breeder. Your father might be the reason.”
“You think because Prime was a mutation, that I—I—I’m what?”
“You are a breeder. But your father’s mutation has put a few spins on things. Certainly there’s no memory in all of Ontongard history of blood crawling back out of a host before Hex tried to make Max into your Get.”
Ukiah shuddered with the perfect memory of finding the syringe that had contained his own blood—and its needle tainted with Max’s. He’d never known grief so great as that moment, when he was sure that his true Max was gone, replaced by an alien mockery.
Max’s salvation was that very love that Ukiah had for him. All of Ukiah, every single half-alien cell of him, refused to harm Max. Instead of propagating through Max’s body, Ukiah’s injected blood gathered into a long, thin worm and crawled back out of Max.
“Thank God it did!” Ukiah said. “Maybe I can’t make a Get! Maybe my blood will always—”
Rennie gripped his shoulder hard, to the point bones threatened to crack. “Don’t even think it, because then you’ll start believing it. The fact you heal up even from the dead and form blood mice says that you can create a Get.”
“Okay, okay.”
Rennie released the pressure and rubbed away the hurt. “The dogs can die, and they don’t form mice.”
“What did you do to my moms’ dogs?”
“We only killed one.”
“One! Mom Jo is going to freak!”
“If their blood were as dangerous as mine, wouldn’t you want your family to know?”
“Yes! But did you have to kill one?”
Rennie shrugged. “It was important to be thorough.”
“Oh, shit! I’m going to have to call her and tell her. Which one did you kill?”
Rennie gave him the dog’s name, thankfully not one of Mom Jo’s favorites of those that survived the June slaughter. This was still going to crush her; she thought of the half-breed dogs as unfortunate children, and had rescued them from shelters across the country. Ukiah imagined her pain and scrubbed the tears out of his eyes before Rennie saw them. Rennie, of course, noticed.
“That’s why we let you live.” Rennie rumpled his hair. “Because you have compassion. Yours is a human heart, and it’s filled with a great deal of goodness.”
“So, what did my alien blood do to the dogs?” He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice.
“It seems to have mutated them to something similar to what your children will be like—if you ever have any.”
Ukiah winced. He had Kittanning, but his son was identical to him in every way except memories. He had witnessed his sister growing inside his Mom Lara and the joyful mysteries that surrounded her. What sex would the child be? What color hair? Even after she was born, the questions continued. How tall would Cally grow to be? Would she be good at school? What would she want to be when she grew up?
If he married Indigo, the only way she would ever experience the same wondrous unknown of a child would be by allowing another man to father it.
Rennie tipped up Ukiah’s chin to meet his eyes. Maybe one day you can father a natural child. Hex is dead. If we ever eliminate the Ontongard completely . . . children aren’t a complete impossibility.
For a few moments, he was pleased, and then realization slipped in. “So, like my kids, wouldn’t the wolf dogs be perfect hosts for Gets?”
Rennie sighed and turned away. “Yes, they are.”
“You made it a Get?” He caught Rennie’s arm and pulled him back to face him. “That’s what you did, didn’t you? You made it a Get! But you said you killed it. As a perfect host, it should have easily survived the infection.”
Touching, skin to skin, he felt Rennie’s revulsion and caught a flash of memory: of having the dog before them, animal in intelligence, wolf in nature, Pack in every other regard.
“We couldn’t bear letting it live.” Rennie’s voice was husky with emotion. “It was like holding a mirror constantly in front of you so you can see the monster that you are.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Pendleton, Oregon
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Max glowered as Rennie made himself comfortable on the hotel room’s floor. In the morning, Max and Ukiah planned to drive out to Jubilee Lake. Sam had volunteered to play native guide, and Max gladly accepted. Rennie said nothing of the trip, but he joined them at breakfast at Shari’s, making the normally cheerful waitresses nervous with his dangerous looks.
“This case has nothing to with the Pack.” Max added milk to his coffee until it was tan. “If you come along, you’ll probably scare the locals.”
“I came out here to keep an eye on the cub. I can’t do that from thirty miles away.”
“I don’t suppose I’ll get any answers if I asked why he calls Ukiah ‘cub’?” Sam asked the table and received closed looks from all the men. “Okay. That’s what I thought. Why doesn’t Ukiah take tall, dark, and scary to the Big Sink while Max and I question people at the lake?”
Max glowered some more at Rennie, obviously not happy.
Finally, he sighed, “Fine! We’ll take both cars.”
But just as they were about to split up, Max pulled Ukiah aside and checked that he had the tracer on.
Whereas traveling south from Pendleton to the town of Ukiah had been a slow climb up into steep hills, going east up into the Blue Mountains was a stunning transition. At Weston, both cars turned off the almost-flat Route 11 and started to climb the first mountain on 204. Within five miles, they rounded a corner for a view that stretched for twenty miles out over the plateau. In another five miles, there was a scenic viewpoint, looking west into the heart of the mountains as if the plateau never existed. Pines leapt up, a hundred feet tall, crowding close to the road, and the wind-swept treeless plain was forgotten. Another ten miles, and they turned off onto a road of packed dirt, and civilization fell behind.
“This is the Oregon I remember,” Ukiah said.
“This part doesn’t look much different than when I first saw it,” Rennie said as he gazed out the passenger windows.
Ukiah sensed that Rennie was scanning the mountains for something as they drove along the forest road. “What are you looking for?”
“What I always look for in Oregon.” Rennie continued to gaze out the window. “The scout ship. There’s a hole in our memory, of how it came down and where exactly it landed.”
A hole would indicate that Prime had been injured and never recovered the memories. “Do you think it crashed?”
“Prime would have tried to destroy it before it reached Earth. It would make sense that he did something that made the landing rough. They certainly didn’t land on the plains.”
“You sure?”
Rennie barked a laugh. “No. We’re not sure of anything. It’s all mixed up and full of holes. Who knows what happened!”
Max had taught Ukiah problem-solving. Always make sure, he said, you knew what was supposed to happen before you try to determine where things went wrong.
“Well, we know how it should have gone,” Ukiah said. “Hexadecimal—all six of Hex—was to explore the landing site of the mother ship. Check it for geographical anomalies. Secure it against native life, yada, yada, yada.” To steal one of Max’s phrases—the memories he shared with Rennie had a complete command list for the mission. “Prime managed to add himself to the crew.” At that time, the Ontongard did not guard from attacks from within. They were, in essence, one sprawling creature. That part of itself would attack the whole had been unimaginable for the Ontongard. “We can recall the scout ship’s approach, and then something must have gone wrong, because after that, Prime only remembers one Hex.”
Rennie grunted an affirmation. “And Prime diverted that one Hex by sending him after the native life to start up a breeding program.”
Ukiah found himself blushing slightly. “Which is where I come in.”
Rennie scratched at his nose, thinking aloud. “Hex needed to get the Mars Rover within seven hundred feet of the mother ship in order to lower the shields. With human technology, the only way Hex could have positioned the Rover with that accuracy was via a transmission from the mother ship itself—sometime before the shields went up—giving its location.”
“Knowing that the mother ship was intact on Mars,” Ukiah followed the line of logic, “Hex probably would have taken the scout ship to Mars if it was capable of lifting off.”
“But instead, he started a breeding program.”
“So the damage was great enough that he committed himself for the duration,” Ukiah said.
“Which leaves the question, where is the scout ship?” Rennie waved at the soaring mountains. “We’ve never found trace of it. They were aiming for the plateau prairie between the Cascade Mountains and the Blue Mountains. We think they missed, but they might have hit hard, somewhere close to a river, which later eroded the crash site. Or they went down in mountains. Our first outdoor memory from Prime is in the mountains, but he’s already airborne and running at that point—and which mountains?”
“Coyote doesn’t know?”
Rennie laughed. “Doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Despite the centuries he’s been in human form, he’s more wolf than man. What matters to him is now. He can’t even tell us when Prime made him a Get. He spent countless days drifting as a Pack-blooded wolf, and then, once he started to change into a man, he lived years with the natives, mostly the Nez Percé. They’re the ones that named him Coyote. He remembers Lewis and Clark, who came through Oregon in 1805, which gives us at least one date.”
“Who?”
Rennie gave him a hard look. “Think on it a moment, cub.”
So he did, and in Rennie’s memories found a boyhood fascination with two explorers, the first white men to find passage to the West Coast.
“So, I was born before 1805.” Ukiah glanced at Rennie. Rennie’s boyhood had been in 1840s, shortly before the Civil War. When Coyote had found Rennie dying on a battlefield, Rennie had been in his early twenties. Rennie had “aged” less than a decade since then, but he was clearly a man, whereas Ukiah was arguably still a boy.
“Aye, cub, you’re older than I am.”
My life is so weird, Ukiah thought.
Rennie laughed.
Max and Sam in the first car turned off for Jubilee Lake. With Rennie navigating, Ukiah and Rennie continued until they found Forest Road 63, another narrow dirt track winding through the forest. Ukiah measured three miles via the trip meter and pulled off into a rough parking space.
It was the first time Ukiah worked with someone who could sense everything that he could. Rennie found where the women had parked Kraynak’s Volkswagen and like two bloodhounds, they followed the grad student’s trail. Where the girls separated, Rennie took Rose’s track, while Ukiah kept to Alicia’s trail.
Judging by the way the women had meandered over the valley, their directions had been not been very clear.
“What exactly were they looking for?”
“A hole in the ground, I think,” Ukiah said.
“Are we talking groundhog-sized? Or something bigger?”
Ukiah stopped on an outscropping of rock. “Something bigger.” He motioned down at the sunken earth before him. “Like that, I’m guessing.”
Rennie bounded easily up the rocks to his side and whistled in his surprise.
Ukiah crouched down, picked up a pebble and tossed it out into the massive rocky depression. He knew it was only because they talked about the scout ship that this seemed to be a likely crash site. Both the Ontongard and the Pack had scoured Oregon, Washington, and Idaho—surely they would have investigated such an obvious spot.
“First time I’ve seen this,” Rennie murmured, apparently reading Ukiah’s thoughts. “I was on horseback last time I was in these mountains—this spot hasn’t been this easily reached before.”
Considering the rough dirt road and hike, Ukiah wouldn’t consider it accessible. Surely, though, the ship’s landing site couldn’t be so well-known that two college students from Pennsylvania could so easily find it. And yet—
“Do you really think it’s the ship?” Ukiah picked up fist-sized rock and sent it after the pebble.
“Perhaps.”
“How can we find out if it is the ship?”
“I’d rather leave it lost and buried,” Rennie said, “rather than dig it up and try to keep it safe from the Ontongard and the humans.”
Ukiah looked up at him in surprise. “So why look for the ship, then?”
“To make sure that the Ontongard don’t have it.”
Ukiah chilled at the thought of the Ontongard having access to the scout ship, its weapons and technology. “Do you think that’s why the Ontongard keep coming back to Pendleton? They know where the scout ship is?”
“Actually, I don’t think they do. Hex would have focused all his energy into its repair instead of fiddling with the Mars Rover.”
Ukiah frowned at the weak logic. “Using the Rover means humans do all the work of getting to Mars. To repair the scout ship to the point of being
able to take off would mean exposing it to lots of curious noses, and not just the Pack’s.”
Rennie considered for a long time in silence, staring down at the massive depression that might be hiding the alien ship. Ukiah could sense Rennie’s mind sorting through centuries of action and reaction, plots and sabotage, starting with Prime leaving the mother ship. Prime’s nature of laying plan within plan was in fact an Ontongard habit, stemming from the fact they could think on multiple subjects at once. Luckily, Prime’s rebellion had instilled in Hex a self-paranoia; the creature mistrusted all its Earth-born Gets and limited his strategies to those conceived by the one wholly alien unit. Still, with hundreds of Gets to carry out his schemes, the sheer number of interwoven plots were staggering.
The Pack simply destroyed anything that smacked of Hex, without trying to step through the alien logic. Rennie now tried to see the greater design.
After a long time of thinking, Rennie said quietly, “Hex wanted you. If he had the scout ship, he could repair the ovipositor and make breeders based on his genetics. If he could hope to make a single breeder, he wouldn’t need you. I’ve dealt with his Gets long enough to know that Hex would rather cut off his arm and burn it than to allow something of Prime’s to live. Tainted as you are by your father’s blood, he would have wanted you only if he had no other choice.”
After searching the area thoroughly, Ukiah and Rennie rejoined Max and Sam, who were also calling it a day. All of the current campers claimed that they arrived after Alicia’s visit to the Big Sink. There was simply no indication that the graduate students had ever been to the lake.
On the way back to Pendleton, they stopped at the Tollgate Mini Market and Café. The women that owned the store hadn’t seen the girls, which, considering Alicia had filled the van on the morning of their trip, wasn’t surprising.
Sam used the restroom as the men eyed plaster-cast footprints of Bigfoot hanging on the walls. The older of the two women was telling Max about the Bigfoot sightings when Ukiah’s phone rang.