Outpost

  “I learned that the measure of human life on Donovan is relatively simple: Are you purposefully going out of your way to get other people killed? Are you working toward the detriment of society? If the answer is yes, that puts you in a pretty shady area on the plus or minus category.”

  “The greatest good for the greatest number. Talina, you could be a Corporate algorithm.”

  “It’s a little more nuanced out here.” She glanced his way. “What about you? Still looking forward to that fat-padded life as a Corporate bodyguard?”

  Was he? He stared out at the night, smelled the perfumed breeze. The chime was waxing and waning, the hooting down in the trees almost a symphony. The unfamiliar constellations, the swirls of stars, and the black patches of dark in their midst smacked of the exotic. Terror and beauty, what an odd reconciliation of opposites.

  “I don’t know what I want.” It stunned him that he’d just told himself the truth. “One thing’s for sure: I don’t want to set foot in that ship and space back for Earth. The idea of inverting space and just vanishing? That scares the ever-loving hell out of me.” He met her eyes. “Does that make me less of a man?”

  She was thoughtful as she shook her head. “In my book, it makes you more of one.”

  “Well, if fear is your measure of masculinity”—he waved a hand toward the forest—“I had my heart in my throat for that entire run. So, consider me twice the man you thought I was.”

  “You’ll do, Cap. Yes, I think you will.” She nodded to herself. “You’ve just taken the first step toward becoming a fully realized human being.”

  “Why, thank you, Security Officer, I appreciate that.” He tried to keep the venom out of his voice.

  “It’s because it’s unfamiliar,” she seemed almost to be talking to herself. “You can learn it, Cap. Not everyone has the knack for it, but you do. That’s assuming . . .”

  “Yes? Assuming?”

  When she looked at him again, her eyes had gone black, alien, and cold. Even her voice seemed to change as she said, “Assuming you can stay alive long enough.”

  35

  Trish had buried herself in the investigation over Thumbs Exman’s death. Enough of the corpse remained that Raya determined that Thumbs had been thumped on the back of the head and then strangled. Manually.

  That kind of murder didn’t happen in Port Authority. Killings came in the form of gunshots and stab wounds when interpersonal violence broke out. The creed of “fair fight” had developed over the years. Even Clemenceau had endorsed it as a means of “disposing” of potential troublemakers. The notion of dishonorably sneaking up behind someone and smacking them in the head just had a noxious loathsomeness about it.

  Which meant it had to be a recently arrived transportee. One without apparent scruples.

  Dan Wirth. Had to be.

  Trish had thrown herself, full-tilt, into trying to prove it. And failed. She’d gone to question the bastard after hearing Raya’s report; he’d given her a mystified look, offered his hands for her inspection, and even suggested that she take scrapings from under the fingernails.

  “Hey, Officer,” he’d told her, “I’m just as anxious as you are to find who did this. After all, I was the last guy seen with him. I don’t want that shadow cast on my door. All I want is to run an honest business.”

  She’d even gone to the extent of secreting sensors beneath her uniform to monitor the guy.

  Now she stood in Raya’s examining room, watching the instruments as Raya reviewed her interview with Wirth.

  “I’m seeing nothing in the recordings, Trish. No sweats, no dilation of the pupils. Not even a trace of galvanic skin response, increased respiration, or accelerated heartbeat.” Raya stood back, a frown on her face. “What about his expressions? I mean, you were there. Surely you must have had a sense for when he was lying.”

  “I didn’t get a single tell,” Trish told her. “Talina taught me what to look for. Usually it’s the eyes and eyebrows, a wrinkling of the forehead. Subconsciously a liar wants to emphasize the lie. The subtlest of communication. Make a statement of ‘I really didn’t do it.’ But I got nothing. If anything, the guy was too calm.”

  “From the readings I’m seeing here, he might have been discussing the color of mud while drinking a cup of morning coffee.”

  “That’s just it, Raya. When you’re interrogating a person about something as incriminating as murder, essentially attacking them, you should get some kind of reaction. Hey, if I came in here and started questioning you, you’d be surprised, then alarmed, and finally defensive. Especially if you knew you hadn’t done it.”

  “Well, the instruments didn’t record so much as a skip of his heart.”

  Trish fingered her chin as she stared thoughtfully at the monitor.

  “So what kind of human being doesn’t even show a change of brain waves when he’s lying about killing someone?”

  “One kind,” Turnienko told her. “A stone-cold psychopath.”

  “But why did he do it?” Trish parked her butt on a counter, arms crossed. “The guy won the title in a card game. It was all fair. Thumbs was in the game of his own free will.”

  “All fair?” Turnienko arched an eyebrow. “You sure?”

  “Two of the Skulls, Stryski and O’Leary, were in the game. They said it was just luck of the draw. They said that Wirth even gave about thirty thousand back. That he went out of his way to make sure Thumbs had enough left to make him a rich man back in Solar System. Talked to Step. He says the guy plays a straight game.”

  “And of course, the thirty thousand wasn’t found on the body, right?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  Raya Turnienko smiled. “Admirably orchestrated. Perfectly performed. I’m glad that Dan Wirth is your problem, Trish. But be careful. Very, very, careful. He’s not just a psychopath, but a damned brilliant one. Especially if he managed to get past the Corporate psych screening. I don’t want to come in some morning and find you on the table where Thumbs is lying.”

  Trish glanced at the wall separating Turnienko’s exam room from the morgue. Thumbs was just waiting for one of Pamlico Jones’ overwhelmed crew on the shuttle landing field to get time enough to run the backhoe up to the cemetery and dig a hole. Then Thumbs would be hauled out on the cart and buried.

  As Trish considered this, boots came thudding down the hallway, and Step Allenovich leaned in, his face grim. “Trish?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Two Spots just ran me down. Tal’s overdue.”

  “Overdue from what?”

  Raya Turnienko said, “She went out to pick up Madison Briggs. She’s got a baby coming in the next couple of weeks. Given the complications she had last time, I wanted her here for observation. Tal was supposed to pick her up a couple of days ago.”

  Trish felt a cold rush in her spine. “A couple of days?”

  Step took a deep breath, jaw muscles tensing in his craggy face. “Two Spots didn’t get any distress call. First he knew that something was wrong was when Chaco called just now asking when Tal was supposed to pick Madison up. He thought it was today.”

  “Tal would have called if something had gone wrong.”

  “Yeah. You’d think.” Step gestured. “She’s not the kind to go off lollygagging. Oh, and Two Spots says she took that marine, Taggart, with her.”

  The cold chill of premonition grew. “Cap Taggart? The bastard that arrested her? That was going to put her against a wall and shoot her?”

  “The very same.”

  “Get your rifle and a survival pack, Step. We’ve got to find her. One of the aircars charged?”

  “Yeah, the blue one should be.”

  But Trish was already pushing past him, headed for the weapons locker.

  36

  “See it?” Talina asked. She stood frozen on the dim forest floor, her rifle at the rea
dy. Overhead the maze of branches rose into an interlaced roof that blocked most of the light. She’d been ready to step over one of the waxy green roots when the quetzal hissed inside her.

  Cap, similarly frozen, stood just behind her left shoulder. She could smell him, his odor sour with sweat. As was her own. Too many days in the same clothes.

  Overhead the forest symphony had dropped to a low musical hum; invertebrates kept fluttering through the still and muggy air. Her nose caught the subtle odors of decay; perspiration beaded on her skin. The twilight shadows and dim light just added to the creepy sensations of danger.

  Cap swallowed hard. “Yeah,” he whispered. “Cutthroat flower. Right?”

  “Yep. And to its right. There, in the darkness under that root?”

  “Sidewinder?”

  “Very good.”

  “Guess we’re going back the other way?”

  “Guess we are.”

  She sensed him as he backed slowly away, retracing his steps around the thick tangle of roots clustered at the base of a huge chabacho tree. The massive trunk had to be five meters in diameter.

  Step by step, she backed beyond of any possible reach from the sidewinder.

  As he let her pass, Cap asked, “I suppose cutthroat flower isn’t named for its colors, since I didn’t see any.”

  “Oh, it’s colorful enough. It’s just not blooming right now. It won’t, in fact. Not until it grabs something with its tendrils to slice open and drink. And even then, the word ‘flower’ doesn’t really describe the reproductive process. It’s just a visual signal that the plant has enough food to reproduce. Cheng and Iji aren’t really sure how that happens yet.”

  “You don’t seem to know a whole lot.”

  “Cap, it’s a huge planet. Humans have only been here for a little over thirty years, and most of that was spent building and mining. There’s so much we don’t know. Haven’t had time to study.”

  She led the way around the roots, felt the quetzal’s hesitation inside her. Peering into the shadowy depths, she just knew: Trouble that way.

  Looking back through the gloom, she could see where a young chabacho had toppled sideways, the ground around it buckled and slanting.

  “We’re headed up, Cap. Time to take to the branches for a while.”

  As she started up the loose incline where the roots fought to hold the soil, Cap asked, “What causes a tree to fall like this?”

  “Mind you, we don’t know for sure, but Iji thinks the trees gang up on other trees in some form of alliance.”

  Cap gave a dismissive shake of the head. “Do you know how weird that sounds?”

  “Do you remember what world you’re on?”

  He grinned in macabre amusement.

  She slung her rifle and scrambled on all fours up a webbing of roots, feeling them squirm as she did so. Not a place to either slip or linger. Beneath her gaped a dark emptiness where the root ball had been pulled out of the ground. The fact that none of the smaller roots sought to loosen themselves suggested the tree was holding for dear life onto what dirt it still could.

  Talina clambered up onto a knotted twist and reached back to give Cap a hand. “Look how the tree’s holding on. And here, on the other side, the roots are wrapped around the next tree’s.”

  “Yeah, like they’re fighting.” Cap paused, considering the spectacle. “Alliances between trees, huh? How do they communicate?”

  “No idea, Cap.”

  She glanced up the slanting trunk, seeing where the branches had interwoven with those of its neighbors. “Danged if it doesn’t look like the tree doesn’t have a choke hold on older ones. It’s like it grabbed hold as it started to fall, and it’s not letting go.”

  “Wonder what it did to piss off its neighbors.”

  “Something. Think about it while we climb.” She felt her way up the inclined trunk. Thank God that somewhere deep in her ancestral past her ancestors had been arboreal apes.

  As she made her way into the branches, it was to find them wound into the thick lower branches of the surrounding trees. Instead of the round branches common to terrestrial species, life on Donovan had taken a different structural approach, with a triangular cross section and interior bracing.

  “Why’s that?” Cap had asked the first night when they’d climbed into the trees.

  “Triangle’s the strongest geometric shape,” she’d told him as they constructed their platform in the fork of a branch. “That’s why they’re used in bridges and load-bearing construction.”

  They’d been learning a lot about the forest. For one thing, it seemed that as long as no one crashed a burning aircar into them, the roots seemed a lot less aggressive, really only reacting if they provoked them through hard stomping or rapid travel. But moving slowly, watching where a person put his or her feet, caused a minimum of reaction.

  No threat, her quetzal sense insisted.

  The creature’s presence no longer disturbed her as it once had. Maybe there was too much of her bruja aunt in her genes. Talina understood that her quetzal was smelling through her nose—that its instincts were melding into hers. The how and why of it still eluded her.

  Nor did she fully trust the creature. It had, after all, sneaked into Port Authority and eaten Allison Chomko’s baby.

  A sense of disappointment coupled with frustration rose inside her. Call it a feeling that hinted that eating the baby hadn’t been worth it.

  Whatever that meant.

  No mind.

  “Yeah, right. Whatever,” Talina almost growled as she led the way across a mat of interwoven branches. Hands out for balance, she crossed onto a thicker branch jutting out from one of the older trees. Glancing at her wrist, she checked her compass. Still on course.

  “You talking to yourself, or did I do something to piss you off?” Cap asked from behind her.

  “Talking to the quetzal.” She took a moment to study the way ahead where an interlacing of thick branches offered several paths forward. The important thing was to look first, really study how they wove their way across other branches. Many were twisted, making them impassible as the flat tops bent away until they presented a sharp angle no one could cross.

  “You and your quetzal.”

  “Yeah. Sure, I can see better. Even into the IR and UV. And I can smell, almost sense trouble. I get thoughts. Like it’s communicating. At the same time, I know it’s not friendly. Like it’s waiting for something.”

  “So will you tell me when I should start being concerned?”

  “How about when my skin starts turning colors?” She figured the grin she gave him was more like a rictus.

  He chuckled, taking time to unscrew his water bottle and take a swig. It wasn’t safe by any means, but they had an unlimited supply. She had shown him how to drill into the aquajade tree’s veins to tap one of the water-bearing arteries. She’d worry about the amount and kind of heavy metals it contained when, and if, they ever got back to Port Authority.

  Off to the left a tree clinger chattered and leaped away on long back legs. Since taking to the trees they had seen a host of new and unknown creatures. In addition to the tree clingers, were several different species of what Cap had called “squirrels,” though they had no similarity to the earthly rodents. Scarlet fliers were in evidence but tended toward the higher branches. Then came something they had tagged as live vines, which only looked plantlike; the things were definitely animals. Other creatures had only been glimpsed for a second before fleeing, defying any kind of name at this early stage.

  Talina checked her compass, picked a route, and started forward. So much for “follow the yellow brick road.” This was more like a turquoise ribbon in midair. The thick branches like this one were nearly a meter wide across the flat and didn’t so much as jiggle as she and Cap trotted along. Not that she didn’t have an eerie sense of the heights—of wha
t a fall meant if she should misstep. It was a long way down, bouncing from branch to branch the entire way.

  “How you doing, Cap?”

  “Heart in my throat, Tal. I’d rather be working in vacuum in freefall. Gravity’s a scary thing.”

  She grinned to herself, wondering just when Cap Taggart had managed to work his way into her very narrow and highly select circle of acceptable companions. The guy was solid, no bullshit, and smart enough to know his limitations.

  She carefully climbed over a cross branch and picked another branch leading the direction she wanted to go. Invertebrates skittered this way and that, fleeing at her approach. As they did, the chime changed, deepening in tone.

  The first thick stalk of vine lay just ahead, proof that they were nearing a break in the forest. She passed it, noting that it was lumpy enough, with protrusions in the bark, that climbing up or down wasn’t out of the question.

  She hadn’t made fifty meters before the number of vines began to increase. “River’s close,” she told him, scanning the shaded surroundings for an appropriate chabacho pod.

  Just as she saw one where it sprouted from a smooth-barked trunk, the chime changed, a subtle alto harmony growing in background.

  Fear. Like a fist to the gut, it stunned her with its intensity. She froze, heart battering in her chest. That quetzal sense inside locked her muscles. Surrendering to impulse, she dropped onto the branch.

  “Cap? Lie down. Don’t move.” She struggled for breath, smelling the forest’s slight tang. A bizarre shimmering of color crossed her vision; then it clarified with an intensity she’d never experienced before.

  “What’s up?” Cap asked as he dropped to his belly behind her.

  “Don’t know.” Chin propped, she scanned as widely as she could.