Outpost

  Suddenly she was weightless, falling. The creek bottom stopped her cold, the impact smacked both breath and sense out of her.

  Stunned, vision blurred, she came to. Shocked nerves jangled in her limbs. Synapses overloaded and screamed. She tried to move—and gasped. Pain, like fire, burned through her body.

  What the hell? Where am I? What the fuck happened?

  Accident.

  Yes, I know this feeling.

  The distant bang of a rifle bored past the ringing in her ears.

  Who’s shooting?

  Panic caused her to reach out, slap a torn and bleeding hand on a large rock. She was in a canyon bottom.

  An image burst into her stumbling brain: quetzal. Baby killer.

  “Hunting me,” she whispered as she reached up to wipe at her eyes—and couldn’t, given the long thorns sticking out of her hand.

  Dirt and rocks came cascading from somewhere above. A bullet exploded on stone, followed by the crack of a rifle.

  Trish!

  Talina whimpered as she pulled herself upright and struggled to see through her swimming eyes. Branches snapped above. Pretty clumsy work on the quetzal’s part.

  Clumsy? Why?

  Another bullet popped as it exploded above the cut bank no more than three meters above her.

  Talina tried to stand. The numb burning in her leg changed to a white-hot and searing pain that speared through her fumbling brain. She managed to focus on her oddly twisted leg. Broken!

  The quetzal slipped sideways above her as another of Trish’s bullets exploded in the dirt where the creature had been but an instant before. Then it dropped over the edge, feet thudding into the streambed a couple of meters from Talina’s boots.

  The quetzal gleamed, skin shining, reflecting streaks of black and yellow with the legs mottling into blackened umber on those deadly three-toed feet. Behind the creature’s elongated head, the neck expanded; the flaring collar burst into crimson glory.

  Talina’s hand—heedless of the thorns—slapped for her holstered pistol. To her horror, the holster was empty, the pistol lost during the tumble down the slope.

  The quetzal fixed her with its three black and gleaming eyes. The beast wobbled as if hurt. Took a step, then another.

  The quetzal uttered an eerie moan as it raised itself sluggishly. Less than a meter separated her from the three vitreous eyes. The creature blasted out a trilling whistle mixed with a hiss of rage. Crystal drops of moisture caught the light in diamond sparkles where they beaded on the razor-ranks of teeth.

  “So, you’re taking as many with you as you can,” Talina told it, dazzled by the glow behind those angry eyes. And in that instant, she could sense the alien intelligence behind that stare.

  “Not that I blame you.”

  The quetzal replied with a clicking down in its iridescent throat, as if in agreement.

  Why the hell hadn’t Trish taken the final shot? What was keeping . . . Of course, this far down into the narrow-walled canyon, Trish didn’t have a shot. Couldn’t see the target.

  “Sorry, pal.” Talina granted the beast a weary smile. Blood was running down the side of her head.

  The beast kept wobbling on its feet, mortally wounded. Gaze still fixed on hers, it tilted its head, as though in an effort to understand. It gestured with one of the wickedly clawed forefeet, as if demanding something of her. She could almost feel the bottled emotion as the beast whipped its tongue out between the elongated jaws.

  She screamed as it made one final leap.

  2

  Dirt and rocks exploded under Trish Monagan’s heels as she sought to slow her frantic descent down the rocky slope. Each time she leaped she tried to land on the shadowed side of the thorncactus, knowing that the vicious spines would be pointed toward the morning sun. Moving fast like she was, the plants didn’t have time to swing their spines in her direction.

  Talina was down there with a quetzal, just out of sight over the lip of the drainage. And, damn it, Trish worshipped that woman. She would do anything for Talina.

  The moment the beast had leaped down out of sight, Trish had launched herself, calling, “Step! Talina’s down!”

  “Yeah, I saw. On the way!”

  Talina Perez was a living legend. A woman tougher than duraplast tempered with ceramic, a hard-fisted, undaunted, scrapping survivor.

  Please, God, tell me she’s all right.

  What if Trish crested that lip to find Talina halfway down a quetzal’s throat? What then?

  “Kill the fart-sucking quetzal!” she growled, using her rifle for balance as she skipped sideways and back-heeled down a loose fan of colluvium. She dared to slap the trunk of an aquajade tree to keep upright, then leaped from a crumbling sandstone outcrop. Knees bent to take the impact, she slowed, hopped from boulder to boulder, and, as the ground leveled, charged forward at a run. The tremolo of the invertebrates went silent as she passed. The thorncactus and claw shrubs began keening from broken branches in the wake of her passage.

  On trembling legs, Trish dashed up to the lip of the drainage, flipped her auburn hair out of the way, and looked over.

  For a couple of heartbeats it didn’t register. The quetzal lay curled in the narrow confines of the streambed, its hide glowing all the colors of the rainbow. More actually—but the human eye couldn’t see the infrared and ultraviolet.

  A broken Talina Perez lay tucked inside the quetzal’s protective curve, unmoving and cuddled as if she were a precious infant. Blood covered Tal’s face and matted in her hair. Her left leg stuck out at an incongruous angle. Worse, the quetzal’s wedge-like head lay against Talina’s, its blood mingling with hers, the creature’s tongue against Talina’s lips. The three eyes seemingly had fixed on Talina’s.

  “Ah, shit,” Trish whispered, her heart suddenly leaden in her breast.

  “What’s up?” Iji asked through her com system.

  “It’s Talina!” Trish dropped to her knee and raised her rifle, trying to stabilize it as she panted for breath. Through the optic she studied the quetzal’s head, wondering if the thing were still alive. As close as its massive head was to Talina’s, she didn’t dare use an explosive round.

  Pressing the magazine blocking lever, she cycled the bolt and ejected the explosive-tipped round. From her belt, she fished out an armor-piercing cartridge. Slipping it into the chamber, she slapped the bolt home before sighting through the optic.

  As the dot fixed on the beast’s neck just behind the head, Trish shot, saw the creature’s head jerk at the impact.

  Dead all right.

  “Oh, Tal,” she muttered as she stood, made her way to a break in the steep gully side, and slid her way down to the streambed.

  She approached, rifle up, her finger hovering over the trigger. A person just didn’t take chances with quetzals.

  Trish could see the quetzal’s torn flesh—the broken bone and shattered cerebral tissue. It still took all of her courage to step over the creature’s tail, straddle the thick body, and kick the tongue away from Talina’s mouth. Only then did she reach down for Talina’s torn hand.

  “Talina?”

  No response.

  Switching her grip to the woman’s wrist, a strong pulse beat there.

  “She’s alive! We need to medevac!”

  “We’ll have the aircar there in minutes,” Stepan replied.

  It took all of Trish’s strength to pull Talina free of the dead quetzal’s coils and ease her over the creature’s corpse—especially given Talina’s broken leg. Kicking some rocks out of the way, Trish laid her out on the sandy streambed and began checking her vitals. Respiration slow but steady. From her belt pack, Trish took a gauze pad and wiped away as much of the combined blood and gore as she could, then used a quick tie to put pressure on Tal’s bleeding head wound.

  The sound of rolling rock and cascading
sand above made her reach for her rifle. Then Iji appeared on the terrace lip.

  “How is she?”

  “Unconscious. Took a blow to the head. Broken leg.”

  “Be right down, Trish.”

  Iji began working his way down the drainage in search of an easier means of descent.

  Trish turned her attention to splinting Talina’s leg, finding two rather cumbersome pieces of jadewood and using the last of her quick ties.

  She was pulling thorns out of Talina’s hand when the woman gasped and blinked her eyes open. For a moment they stared—wide and disoriented. Struggled to focus, and finally fixed. “Trish?”

  “Glad to see that you’re back with the living. Stepan’s called for the aircar. It’s picking up the drones. We’ll get you out of here.”

  “But I was . . .” Talina clamped her eyes shut for a moment. “The quetzal and I . . .” She swallowed hard.

  “What?” Trish propped her elbows on her knees.

  Talina shook her head. “Man, that can’t be. It’s like I was inside its mind. Seeing myself. Weird. Like it admired me.”

  “Hey, you took a pretty good knock to the head.”

  Talina’s uneasy gaze fixed on the quetzal. “No. All this happened at the end. Like we were dying together. And then . . . and then I was in its head when it exploded.” Talina shivered. “That was really rude, let me tell you.”

  Trish lifted a skeptical eyebrow. Concussion. Had to be. Raya would know what to do. Probably meant that Talina wasn’t getting out of the clinic for a while.

  “How we doing?” Iji called as he came trotting up the rocky streambed, his rifle at the ready.

  “She’s conscious. Broken leg.”

  “Broken leg?” Talina asked, shifted, only to cry out and stare at her splinted leg. “Shit! There’s three weeks in Raya’s damn hospital while I chew up Cheng’s homemade aspirin like it was candy.”

  “Who knows? Maybe the supply ship will finally show up with a load of real med.”

  “Yeah, Trish. Dream on.”

  The whirr of the aircar descended, dust billowing out as it landed on the terrace flat above. Trish slitted her eyes, bending over Talina to shield her from the deluge of falling grit.

  “How we going to get her out of here?” Iji scanned the steep sides of the drainage.

  “Rig a pelvic sling,” Talina told him. “Clip it to my belt. Tie that off to a rope and attach the rope to the cargo hook on the aircar’s bottom. Step lifts me straight out of here. Flies out of the canyon, where he hopefully lowers me gently to the ground. I can crawl inside for the trip back.”

  “That’s going to hurt like . . . like . . .”

  “Yeah. Um . . . There’s probably no words to describe it, huh?” Talina gave him her old evil grin. “Beats spending the rest of my life down here with a rotting quetzal, don’t you think? And saves you and Trish the onerous job of packing me out of here on a litter.”

  “That’s my tough lady,” Trish said admiringly.

  Talina was staring thoughtfully at the quetzal. “Came pretty damn close, didn’t you?”

  The quetzal’s eyes had begun to gray where they peered out of the shattered skull.

  From above, Stepan called out, “Talina? You all right?”

  “Nothing thirty hours of sleep and a shot of Inga’s whiskey won’t cure.”

  A wry humor filled his voice. “Well, if you can survive that stomach rot, you can survive any old quetzal. What happened? Trish lost her touch? Thought she could shoot a fly off a wall at twenty klicks?”

  “She tagged it a couple of times. So did I. Just didn’t put it down.”

  Iji was inspecting the quetzal. “I can see eight hits. Might be the bullets going bad. Impact primers deteriorate with age. God knows how old that stuff was before The Corporation got their hands on it. And you know they bought it at bottom dollar. Figure another year in storage, then two years to get it here. And it’s been what? Six years since the last supply ship? Hell, yeah. The damn ammo’s going bad.”

  He pulled his long knife from its sheath and waggled the blade for emphasis. “What do you want to bet that if they ever do send another supply ship, there’s no ammunition on it?”

  “And if there is”—Trish laughed bitterly—“want to bet it won’t chamber in our guns?”

  Talina—eyes glazed with pain—used the falsetto voice that everyone on Donovan attributed to The Corporation: “Ammunition? What on Earth would you possibly need ammunition for? It’s not like you’re at war. We cannot process silly, frivolous, and spurious requests. We have shipping limitations. Profit margins. Every kilo of cargo must be absolutely necessary for the long-term success of the Donovan project.”

  “One more fucking thing we’ve got to figure out.” Trish muttered to herself as she caught the pelvic sling Allenovich tossed down from the aircar. “Now we’re going to have to see if we can’t suss out how to make our own ammo.”

  Talina made a pained face, breath catching as if something really hurt, and managed to say, “They can damn well come here and see how long they can last without ammunition.” A pause. “Of course there’s no guarantee that a quetzal would stoop to eating something as slimy as a Corporation Boardmember.” She shot a peculiarly thoughtful look at the dead quetzal. “Quetzals have pride, you know.”

  Trish studied her as she knotted the rope on the pelvic sling ring. What the hell are you talking about, Talina? They’re fucking beasts!

  “Wonder what the chemistry is for the explosive?” Iji asked himself as he dragged the quetzal’s tail straight and began slitting his way up the ventral hide. Rainbows of color spread out like a wake as the knife sliced through the skin.

  “Cheng will know.” Trish gave the rope a hard tug, ensuring that Stepan had tied it off securely. “The supply ship’s six years overdue. Sometimes I forget there’s any place in the universe besides Donovan. Like all the talk of Earth, Transluna, and Mars . . . well, they’re dreams, you know? Fantasies that never really were.”

  “Yeah.” Iji looked up from where he sliced open the belly, his round face thoughtful beneath his mop of black shaggy hair. “I’ve heard more than one person say that we’re all that’s left. That something happened back on Earth. Some disaster. No more ships. Ever. We’re it. The last of humankind.”

  Trish shaded her eyes. Capella’s harsh light beat down on the yellow-bedded cap rock above the sloping canyon walls. The scrubby aquajade trees gleamed like turquoise dewdrops, the thorncactus and varieties of what they called sucking scrub were now verdant green as their photosynthesis kicked into high gear. One thing a person couldn’t deny about Donovan: It was always colorful.

  This was Trish’s world. Her parents had arrived with the second ship. She’d been born here nineteen Donovanian years ago, making her first generation. Solar System? It was an abstract. A place she’d never seen.

  “You’re talking bullshit, Iji.” Talina gritted the words through pain-clamped jaws. “Travel’s risky. Maybe they finally found out what makes ships fail and disappear. Maybe, until they fix the symmetry inversion, no one will take the chance to space for someplace as far away as Donovan. Lose too many ships and those chickenshit assholes will write off the whole colony—and everyone here—as a bad investment.”

  Iji used his shoulder to prop up one of the powerful back legs as he slit the hide beneath. He might have been working with a blanket of liquid iridescent color as the tiny scales caught and refracted the light in laser-rich brilliance.

  He said, “We’re the settlement farthest out. I’ve read my history as well as my botany texts. The far frontier is the hardest place to hold. The easiest to forget.”

  “They’ll be back,” Trish promised. Not because she believed it, but for Talina’s sake. The woman’s head had dropped onto her chest, eyes clamped shut, breathing labored.

  Trish had been six
when her geologist father had vanished in the forests to the south. She’d been twelve when a gotcha vine killed her botanist mother. Talina had sort of taken Trish under her wing. Treated her more like a younger sister than an orphan. Saw her through all the shit a teenage girl could get into. Not that there was much to get into in Port Authority. And Trish came from a small circle of friends. A grand total of five who’d been in that initial first generation. Made her a sort of snob. Two boys, two other girls, they’d married, already had kids of their own on the way.

  I always was the odd one out.

  Iji peeled the hide back, running his knife through the connective tissue and nerve fibers to expose the curious arrangement of gray-blue guts that packed the chest cavity like swollen bladders. Swinging the heavy knife like a sword, Iji chopped through the quetzal’s equivalent of ribs—though they weren’t bones in the Earthly sense. These were a polymer compound instead of terrestrial calcium and collagen.

  The biology on Donovan was fundamentally different from that on Earth, but the colonists used the old terms for the analogous life-forms and structures. Cutting the slab of tissue free, Iji set it aside, exposing one of the three elongated lungs and the interlaced, kidney-red energy net—a weblike organ that stored oxygen then mixed it with hydrocarbons to provide the chemical energy that enabled a quetzal’s tremendous bursts of speed.

  “He was used up,” Iji noted, pointing his blade at the depleted organ. Whereas Trish had seen the strands so swollen and engorged they almost filled the gut, the strands here were more like fishnet.

  With a flourish, Iji sliced out the section, carefully cut out a bulge in the light brown digestive pouch, and lifted it out.

  Laying it on the sandy gravel, he hesitated, then slit the organ carefully down its length. Digestive juices dribbled out as he pulled the “stomach” open with the knife tip. A few bits of acid-eroded bone—no longer recognizable as human—were all that remained of Allison Chomko’s baby girl. Something, at least, for Allison to bury.

  Trish bent down, grunting as she lifted Talina’s weight in order to slide the pelvic sling under her hips. Then she drew the strap between the woman’s legs. She was buckling the belt when she glanced up. “Talina? You’re as white a Corporation lawyer’s ass. You look like you’re about to . . .”