Outpost

  Kalico’s heart skipped. What she’d thought at first glance to be wadded and discarded rags on the floor was a uniform. She swallowed hard as she realized that the clutter inside was bones; what resembled a smashed pot was a skull. And there, behind the first skeletonized remains, lay a second. It took a moment for her to synthesize what she was seeing. The skulls. Both were damaged, the backs shattered, shards of bone spread as if burst from the inside out. A thick film of what had to be long human hair covered the floor.

  “Fuck me,” Private Garcia whispered.

  Spiro stepped forward, shining her light down. She knelt, picking up a pistol from where it lay beside the closest skeleton. “Firetron. It’s a personal sidearm. Not military or security issue. Expensive. Shoots a twelve-millimeter explosive bullet.” She checked the magazine. “Still loaded, but two rounds missing.”

  “This was a fight?” Kalico asked. “Murder?”

  The broken skulls, their jaws slightly agape in what could have been silent laughter, mocked her.

  Spiro glanced around, peering at the room’s contents. “Welder’s right there by the door. Sealed it from the inside. Whoever welded the hatch shut is still in here.” She waved at the bodies. “My guess, ma’am? This first one’s the shooter. Popped that second one in the head . . . and then shot himself.”

  Kalico felt herself sway as though something invisible was passing through her. The sensation sent a tickle through her bones and nerves.

  Concentrate, damn it.

  She forced herself to fix on the bones, discolored as they were and dark with age. Stains could be seen where the bodies had leaked juices onto the sialon floor as they had decomposed.

  At that moment, Dr. Tyler stepped in, stopped short, and gaped at the scene.

  “Willa?” Kalico almost gagged given the images playing through her imagination. “What can you tell me about these, uh, bones?”

  Dr. Tyler pushed through the surrounding knot of marines and bent down. Using her light, she peered at the shattered skulls, then picked up the facial piece. The jaw fell free. She turned the shattered skull over to study the hard palate and teeth.

  Replacing it, she moved on to the next, again studying the skull.

  To Kalico’s eyes, the second pile of bones was smaller in stature, the bones lighter and thinner.

  Dr. Tyler sighed. “The male skeleton at your feet is probably Jem Ortner. Not only is he in a captain’s uniform, but the age and stature are right. The second body is probably his first officer, Tyne Sakihara. I’ll know when I run the DNA.”

  “Murder?”

  Tyler stood, staring down at the bodies. “My first call is suicide, ma’am. From the damage to the teeth and bones, the pistol barrel was in each victim’s mouth when the gun went off.”

  “How long since this happened?” Kalico asked.

  Tyler knelt again, using a probe to lift the worn-looking uniform jacket over the rib area. “See the white stuff inside around the bones? How the ribs have all sort of folded down so neatly? The white stuff is what we call corpse wax, body fat that can’t be completely digested by bacteria. The hair spread behind the skulls is still black. Without any sign of gray. My guess—and again, I’ll need to test the remains to be sure—is that they’ve been dead for decades.”

  “They were only six months ahead of us,” Kalico whispered.

  The marines were looking stunned, staring anxiously at each other, shifting nervously.

  “That might be,” Tyler said, standing again. “But I’ve spent my life in ships, Supervisor. This thing’s almost a derelict. Those bodies have laid there a long, long time.”

  Tyler turned, pointed at the tube-and-filter apparatus with a gloved finger. “My take? That distillation unit? It’s to process water from urine. The jury-rigged hydroponics? That was for food. This was their last stand. They sealed themselves in, hoping to outlast whatever had gone wrong. When it became clear that they’d reached the end, pop and pop, they checked out.”

  Kalico tried to imagine. Shook her head. Couldn’t.

  On the floor, the shadowed eye sockets in Jem Ortner’s exploded skull stared at her with an intensity that unnerved her. As if the grisly thing could see the empty hollow that had grown inside her.

  She knotted a fist. My God, what sort of insanity is this?

  “Supervisor? Lieutenant?” a half-panicked voice called through the com. “You better get down here. Crew mess. I mean . . . Well, you just aren’t going to believe this.”

  44

  Kalico led the way into the crew’s mess hall. Unlike the Spartan utility in the transportees’ section—they were just cargo after all—attention had been paid to the crew’s mess. The hall was large, the only two-story room in the ship, elegantly designed, with pleasing lines that carried the gaze upward to the second story with its balcony seating above. The center of the high ceiling was dominated by a crystalline dome that contained the holo projectors for the entertainment system.

  Now the tables and chairs were missing, the room dark, sepulchral and alien. And in the center?

  Kalico stopped short, trying to make sense of the free-standing structure in the middle of the room: an isolated dome-like thing rising to a point. Maybe two meters across and two and a half tall at the pinnacle. Call it knobby in construction, sticklike with thin gaps everywhere, as though cobbled together with irregular pieces, all fitted in an artistically unsettling design. Kind of a poorly woven knitting. The supporting level was made of sticklike supports—all slightly bowed—that resembled a warped picket fence. Then irregular triangular pieces had been placed in a ring, or decorative outer band. Above them rose another level of columns—thin supports topped with more of the triangular pieces. What looked like slender curving laths had been tastefully interwoven in chevron patterns over the vertical, thin pieces. Then came a higher band of bean-shaped elements ending in small triangular perforations. Globular shapes dominated the next level, and so on.

  The entire exterior had been decorated, a brocade of patterns affixed to the surface. Flower motifs had been created from small, round pieces with petals sprouting three protrusions. And then, looking closer, she could see the patterns of starburst, chevrons, curlicues, zigzags, and other designs where tiny pieces had been affixed to the outside, the effect reminiscent of rococo.

  “What the hell?” she whispered.

  “It’s like some kind of shrine,” Lieutenant Spiro muttered.

  “And look,” Shintzu, one of the marines who’d found the room, pointed. “In the doorway. There’s a body.”

  Kalico nerved herself and walked across the dark floor. No, not dark. Just covered with more of the eerie writing. At the front of the structure, she bent down, staring at the desiccated corpse. Mostly skeletonized, the jaw sagged; straggly white hair still clung to shards of dried scalp that had peeled up from the skull. In other places yellowed bone could be seen.

  The hideous thing wore a threadbare and patched set of coveralls that had once been yellow. It slumped against a box set just inside the structure door, but seemingly had become disjointed along the vertebrae and collapsed into a heap, the skull lolling to one side.

  “What the hell is this, ma’am?” Spiro asked. “I mean, you ever heard of anything like this? Seen it before? Maybe some weird religion from one of the stations or something?”

  Kalico shook her head, backing away, feeling oddly unclean—as if even her soul had taken on a smutty taint. The room seemed to pulse around her, evil, menacing. Down in her gut, the nerve that triggered her to throw up was tingling.

  There’s no such thing as ghosts.

  Close as she was, she fixed her gaze on the side of the entryway. Really got a close look at the vertical supporting pieces that held up the wall’s lower tier.

  She blinked, knowing that shape, the two knuckles at the bottom, the slightly bent shaft, and the canted neck that ended i
n a ball.

  “God in heaven,” she whispered.

  Powered by adrenaline, she scuttled back, almost bowling over the marine behind her. In horror, she stared at the building. Shrine. Whatever it was. The corpse in the doorway, broken as it was, leered crookedly at the shadowed room.

  “It’s bones,” she whispered. “The whole fucking thing. The building, the decorations. It’s built of human bones.”

  And at that moment, she saw movement inside the shadowed depths. Realized it was a person. The image seemed to waver, fade into translucence, and then solidify again.

  Dressed in colorful quetzal hide, and wearing a Donovanian hat, the figure ducked through the low doorway. For the barest heartbeat, they were face-to-face. The rugged clothing faded into translucence again, and Kalico could see the scars crisscrossing the woman’s whip-thin body. Even as she stared, crystalline blue eyes met hers, a familiar smile bent the woman’s lips, and she said, “If you go back, you’ll die.”

  Kalico gasped, raised a hand, and staggered back.

  Blinked.

  “Did you see that?” she asked.

  “See what?” Lieutenant Spiro asked.

  “That woman?”

  “The dead one? The skeleton? That’s a woman?”

  “No.” Kalico struggled to fill her lungs. In that instant, something inside her snapped. Like a keening scream in her mind. “Nothing. It was nothing.”

  But it hadn’t been. Imfuckingpossible. That ghostly image that had emerged from the tomb of bones? The familiar eyes and smile? She knew that woman. All but the inexplicable scars.

  That was me.

  45

  The body hung awkwardly, head cocked to the side at an unnatural angle; the rope wire cut deeply into the neck tissue. The woman’s eyes were wide, blank, and popped out of the face. Her tongue—a dark shade of purple—protruded from her mouth as if to fling a final insult at the universe that had betrayed her. Her shoulders, in contrast, sagged wearily. She barely swung in the breeze that blew through the open door; it fingered her thin fabric dress. A puddle of urine was drying on the floor beneath her feet.

  “Ah, shit,” Trish whispered as she took in the sight.

  “I couldn’t do anything,” one of the women said, her voice strained with emotion, pleading. “I climbed up on the chair. But I couldn’t undo the wire. I couldn’t save her.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Gopi Dava. One of her roommates.”

  “Nothing you could have done,” Trish told her, glancing back at the other women who clustered at the door behind her, unwilling to set foot in the room. “See how the head’s hanging? Neck’s broke. And that thin-gauge wire? It’s cut clear through to the ligaments. That’s all that’s holding her together.”

  Behind her, she heard someone gag, then run. A faint sound of vomiting followed.

  The room was sparsely furnished with a couple of utilitarian chairs, a table with a holo box, some pictures of a family on the wall: smiling people dressed in fine, shining clothes of a style Trish had never seen. A door led to the bunks in the back room.

  “What’s her name?” Trish asked.

  “Indu Gautamanandas. She’s a hydraulics specialist sent to service the Semex 81-B roto mill.”

  “What’s a Semex 81-B roto mill? Never heard of it.” Trish winced as another drop of urine spattered onto the floor.

  “It’s a machine to crush ore. As far as Indu could determine, that model of roto mill was on Ashanti. Turalon is carrying spare parts that Indu was supposed to install and service.” Dava swallowed hard, ran a nervous hand over her short black hair.

  “Did she give any clue that she was despondent? Any hint that she might do this?”

  Dava glanced nervously at the door where her other two roommates waited in terrified silence. “We’re all . . . I mean, no. Not any more than the rest of us. We’re specialists. They promised us jobs. Things we’re trained for. We were told we would have quarters, a clean dormitory. But here we are. Living in a dome with a plastic floor. She was assigned to the cafeteria! Scrubbing tables. Sterilizing plates and eating utensils. Me, I’m a university-trained polymer chemist. I’m supposed to have a lab here. Instead I am tending plants for a farmer beyond the fence.”

  Dava’s voice broke, tears streaming down her face. “Maybe Indu’s the lucky one. She’s out of this hell.”

  “Then leave,” Trish cried. “You know the contract. If The Corporation can’t fulfill its obligations, you’ve got a free ride home.”

  “You tell us that?” one of the women at the door said harshly. “Space on Turalon? Take a chance on vanishing in space? To what fate? Wind up dead, like the rumors say happened to the people on Freelander? You call that a choice?”

  Trish bit her lip, attention on the gruesome corpse. “Beats ending up like this.”

  “Does it?” Another of the women—Trish vaguely remembered her name was Sian Whay—almost spat the words. “Locked up in that rats’ warren of a ship? Living with the constant fear that you’re going to just vanish? Maybe suffocate slowly like they say happened on Freelander? And the worst part is that your family never knows.” She gestured to the photos on the wall.

  Trish bit off a retort. What did they expect? That life was without its risks? She gritted her teeth, reached into her utility belt for her multitool, and climbed up on the chair.

  As she opened her cutters and fastened the jaws on the wire, she said, “Some of you come catch her when I cut her loose.”

  The women stood frozen, eyes wide, faces pale.

  “Did you hear?” Trish asked. “Catch her when I cut her loose.”

  “Not me,” Dava said, backing away from the door.

  “Me either,” Whay said. “That’s not my responsibility. I’m not medical.”

  “Catch her?” the other woman at the door said weakly. “As in, you mean, touch her? Dead like she is?”

  Trish hesitated, cutters on the wire. “It’s just a dead person. Meat and bone. What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen a dead person before?”

  They were all shaking their heads, eyes wide.

  “Oh, for the love of pus.” Trish clipped the wire, Gautamanandas’ body dropped to the floor in a loose-limbed series of thumps.

  The women screamed, hands to faces, mouths open.

  Trish reholstered her multitool. “Trust me, she didn’t feel a thing.”

  Another of the women turned, bent double, and threw up.

  Trish stared up at the loop of wire left on the dome strut. Considered untying it; then decided to leave it in place as a reminder to the others.

  She jumped down, grabbed Gautamanandas’ arms, and pulled her out straight; the woman’s head came flopping along, held on only by the ligaments.

  “God, you people are heartless and cold,” Dava whispered through tears. “She was my friend.”

  “This is Donovan. Chances are that you’ll bury a lot of friends. Or that they’re going to bury you. Assuming you’re lucky enough to be a corpse instead of a pile of quetzal shit.”

  Something had changed in Gopi Dava’s eyes—a half-panicked resolve forming there. “We’re not going to live like this.”

  “How are you going to live?” Trish asked absently as she hauled the corpse around and pointed it at the door.

  “Take matters into our own hands, that’s what.”

  “Uh huh, thinking of taking over Port Authority? Some folks here might object to that. And that snotty Supervisor Aguila has her marines. Which—as that maggot Dan Wirth would say—is the ultimate trump card in the deck.” She looked up from where she gripped the dead woman’s clothing. “Any of you going to help me with her?”

  She met stares laced with hatred and disgust.

  “All right then, move please.” She gave the corpse a tug, sliding it across the floor, smearing u
rine in the process.

  Gautamanandas bumped and flopped her way across the threshold and out onto the dirt, the women scattering from her path.

  Trish straightened and thumbed her mic. “Two Spots? Got a body. Dome sixty-four. Female. Name of Indu Gautamanandas. Send the hearse if you will.”

  “Roger that. I’ll send word to old man Han Chow. Um, I was just about to give you a call. Inga’s. Two Skulls got into it. Some sort of dispute. Someone pulled a knife. One guy’s on the floor. You want to check into it?”

  “Sure. On my way.” She straightened. “Wagon’s on the way to pick her up. As her friends, you want to follow along? Help with the burial? Maybe say a few words?”

  The women, wordless, just stared at her as if she were some sort of loathsome monster.

  “All right, fine. Look, I’ve got to go break up a fight between Skulls.” She turned, trotting toward Inga’s.

  God, what was wrong with the soft meat? They were killing themselves faster than Donovan could.

  And it’s going to be trouble in the end.

  She remembered Dava’s words: “Take matters into our own hands.”

  46

  Talina and Cap gave up on the canoe at the first rapids. It had been hard enough paddling upriver along the Briggs River’s eddies and currents; they’d had to struggle to keep out of the river’s main thread.

  Talina squinted against the mist as pounding plumes of water hammered down onto the rocks. Something about the streaming water reminded her of muscles that flexed and strained, only to surrender to a white froth of sound and spray.

  “Quite a sight, wouldn’t you say?” Cap shouted into her ear. “But looking at these cliffs, it’ll be hell to portage.”