Outpost

  Again the boring gaze told her: I’m leaving in twelve hours unless you object.

  “Whatever you think is best.” Kalico waved her acceptance.

  The walk down to the shuttle bay might have been on legs filled with helium. “Freelander. My God, what could I have been thinking?”

  “Way too much on your plate, ma’am,” Abibi told her in that crisp voice of command. “And then there’s the matter of the Freelander cargo. It’s still technically yours to do with as you see fit.”

  Kalico nodded, having no idea what might have been in that gaping hold. Her concern had been getting it down-planet.

  “Just a thought, ma’am, but those transportees down there are still under contract. Backed by the marines, you could still dictate the conditions of their employment. No one on the planet could prohibit your enforcement of the terms.”

  In other words: You’ve got all the means for success at your disposal down there.

  “That’s true,” Kalico said, swallowing against the curious pounding in her chest. Twelve hours. She had twelve hours before Abibi spaced. All it would take was a call.

  As they walked into the shuttle bay, Lieutenant Spiro was standing at the hatch, dressed again in battle armor, her helmet hanging, a look of curious relief on her normally dour face.

  As Kalico approached, the lieutenant snapped off a salute, asking, “Did the captain speak correctly, ma’am? You wanted the mutineers, too? I mean, I’ve got them in bonds aboard the shuttle, but we packed in their armor and tech.”

  “That was correct, Lieutenant. You may board.”

  “Supervisor?” Abibi said at the last instant.

  Kalico turned, one foot on the threshold. “Yes?”

  “We’ve noticed some problem with the Port Authority radio. Some of their communications come through garbled. Just wanted that stated for the record, ma’am.”

  Again, the message was clear: That’s my alibi if you ever come back and accuse me of abandoning your ass down there.

  “Understood, Captain.”

  Abibi saluted, mouth working, as if she were biting off words. Her almost-tan eyes reflected a conspiratorial wariness as she said, “If there’s any change in your plans, I’ll hear from you within twelve hours. Good luck, ma’am. As to Turalon, we’re the best in space. Don’t worry about us.”

  And with that, Abibi spun on her heel and marched—back straight—for the companionway stairs that led up to officer country.

  Kalico bit her lip, turned, and stepped into the shuttle.

  Her stomach was no longer acid as she strapped in behind the pilot’s seat and closed her eyes.

  Margo Abibi, bless you for the savior that you are.

  65

  The tables in The Jewel were filled with Skulls—and that damn Shig had been right. The amounts they were betting was what, in the trade, was called “chickenshit.” Mostly chump change, hardly an SDR among them. And what they had left was quickly changing to drink instead of wagers.

  Angelina—as proof of the marks’ poverty—prowled without purpose among the tables, dropping a word here, patting a shoulder there, but finding no action.

  Talk was dark, angry, about the five bodies that had been carted out to the cemetery that morning and dropped into graves that a backhoe had summarily chopped out of the damp red dirt.

  And, of course, about the returnees who’d skipped justice and now floated safely above in the heavens.

  “My hope”—Paloduro sang out loudly enough for half the room to hear—“is that they space. Vanish. And die like those bastards on Freelander did. Slowly. Eating each other until the last one is a fucking half-rotted skeleton.”

  Fig had paraded himself around Turalon for two years, bragging about how he was going to set himself up with a hard-rock mine. His skill—or so he had claimed—was in his abilities to program mucking machines. That with his new programs, the machines could sort good ore from waste, identifying minerals and metal content through a sophisticated laser and sonic scan.

  He might still have a chance to prove himself. The mucking machines were supposedly somewhere in the clutter of Freelander’s cargo where it lay piled out beyond the fence.

  Assuming, that is, that he wanted to give up his newfound status as one of the protest leaders. Somehow, Dan just couldn’t see Paloduro surrendering a top spot in the fiery movement that earned him free drinks, accolades, and slaps on the back. What was that compared to the joy of sitting in a dark hole watching a clunking mechanical marvel sort rocks?

  Oman—Fig’s companion in mayhem—sat across the table, his eyes distant, cards forgotten in his hand. The man had that stunned look on his face. He’d been one of the loudest in calling for the raid on the returnees. That it had gone so badly, that men had died, seemed to have taken something out of him.

  “Yeah,” Dan whispered, dealing himself four out of the five cards needed for a club flush. How had he managed to screw up and get a diamond in there? “Tough call last night, Oman.”

  It could be tougher for the both of them if the triumvirate came through.

  As if on cue, Cap Taggart stepped through the door, paused, and took in his surroundings as his eyes adjusted from the sunset glare outside.

  “Well, well,” Dan whispered to himself and slipped the pistol from his belt and into the wire holder he’d rigged to the underside of the table. Smiling, he stood, spreading his hands.

  “Welcome to my humble world, Captain. I’m so glad you could wiggle a little time free from your busy schedule. You here for a game? Or by chance have you come bearing word on my proposition?”

  Taggart prowled his way across the room, looking side to side, seeming to see everything, one hand on the military-grade pistol at his hip. The quetzal-hide jacket he wore glimmered in rainbow patterns as it passed beneath the lights.

  “Have a seat,” Dan told him with a smile. “Allison, oh love of my life,” he boomed, “bring us a couple of glasses. Oh, and that brandy Inga’s so proud of.”

  Taggart hesitated, his cold, blue-eyed gaze still skipping around the room, as if wary of an ambush. Paloduro and Oman were frozen, expressions hard as they stared icily at Taggart.

  Heedless, Dan dropped back into his chair, hands still spread inoffensively wide. “Oh, come, Captain. Even if Shig and Yvette bowed to Security Officer Perez’s adamant objections and told you to come spit in my eye, you don’t think I’d be foolish enough to take it out on you.”

  Allison appeared, a saucy sway to her hips, glasses and bottle in her hand. Taggart eased himself down into the chair.

  “There,” Dan said easily as Allison set the glasses down and poured. “Not so hard, was it?”

  Taggart watched Allison’s retreat as she headed back to the cage, her walk accented to display the rounded curves of her ass. That was Allison, fully aware that every male eye in the place followed her.

  “Who would have thought an angel like that would be waiting on a rock like Donovan?” Dan said with a sigh. He took up his glass. “To opportunity.” He raised it in a toast.

  Taggart—his stare still glacial—studied him for a couple of heartbeats, then lifted his glass, saying, “Whatever that means.” And tossed it off.

  Dan drank, smacked the glass down, and sighed. “Not bad, don’t you think? Of all the things I was told to expect, fine drink wasn’t on the list for Donovan.”

  “Looks to me like you’ve found more than brandy on Donovan.”

  “Hard to believe they sent me here to take care of cows, huh?”

  “Yes, who’d have thought? If it hadn’t been for that little incident with Nandi, I wouldn’t even have known you were aboard. You camouflage better than a quetzal.”

  Dan’s heart skipped. Nandi? The lying slit. Oh, to have savored her throat crushing under his fingers. To have watched the terror in her eyes fade, her pupils widen as her heartbeat s
lowed.

  “You haven’t done so badly yourself, Captain. We both know Nandi’s charms, but what’s it like? Cycle down-planet, slip out of Nandi’s bed and into Talina Perez’s?”

  He raised his hands defenselessly. “Not that I’m complaining! I know firsthand how much of an improvement Allison made in my life. So I sure don’t hold it against you for doing the same.” He winked. “I like the wilder action myself.”

  Taggart’s jaw muscles bunched, jumped. His eyes narrowing into frigid slits. “After the things Nandi told me about you, I’m surprised you had the courage to try and get it up with another woman.”

  A chill wave ran through Dan’s bones and nerves. He felt the rage—hot and red—stir down in his gut. It burned, went white-hot along his spine. Then that part of him went blank, his heart slowing, a crystalline clarity sharpening his senses. As he twirled the brandy glass with a distracting left hand, his right slipped below the table to the pistol grip.

  “Did you have a purpose for coming here today? Or are you simply tired of life? You and I, we teeter on the balance right now.”

  “Clairvoyant, are you?”

  “Captain, I foresee a very short and bitter future for you. Don’t push it further. Now, do you have a message for me?”

  “You have a deal. That’s the message from the triumvirate. God help them. So there it is. You’ve been told.”

  Dan’s finger slipped along the trigger, tension building, his heartbeat slowed to a steady, emotionless beat.

  Not now, you fool! Not here.

  Dan smiled, removed his hand, and waved. “I want you out of my establishment.”

  Taggart stood, a thin smile on his lips, promise in his eyes. “Just so we’re clear. Your deal is with Shig, Yvette, and Talina. Me, I’m my own man. So I wouldn’t disappoint them, if I were you. Right now, they’re all you’ve got.”

  Dan had to give the fool credit. He was smart enough to back away from the table, one hand on his pistol. Nor did he take his eyes from Dan’s, using peripheral vision to make his way to the door and out into the dying light.

  “You’re a dead man, Captain Taggart. And more than that, I know where you live.” He winced as he imagined the lies that had spun out of Nandi’s lips.

  Well, Turalon hadn’t spaced yet. Perhaps there was a way to settle with her, too. After all, one of the first things he’d managed to do was to cultivate the talent necessary to handle the more distasteful projects.

  “Art?” he called. “If I could have a word back in the cage?”

  He slipped his pistol back through his belt, stood, and met Art Maniken at the cage door.

  “What have you got, boss?” Art’s normally emotionless eyes quickened as he followed Dan into the office’s privacy.

  “A job, Art. About as delicate a job as I could ask a man to do. It’ll take judgment, finesse. And when you’re done, nothing. And I repeat, nothing can be traced back to us. Do you understand?”

  Art grinned, exposing a cracked incisor.

  Oh, yes. The man lived for assignments like this.

  66

  The whine of heavy equipment, the hollow bangs of the grapples, and the straining of hydraulics came from the jumbled piles of crates and containers. Skid loaders labored to make sense out of the piled mess that had been haphazardly dropped on the landing field margins. Pamlico Jones and his crew of six had made some semblance of order out of the tangle of equipment, aircars, bundles of struts, beams, tarping, haulers, excavators, and odd-looking rigs whose purpose Talina couldn’t guess. In lockstep, she and Trish marched out past the man gate and onto the shuttle field.

  They were still days from getting it all sorted, let alone opened and inspected to make a determination of what was salvageable and what was junk. Some of the bigger pieces of equipment had been towed through town to the maintenance sheds. A couple of the excavators and loaders had actually taken a charge and ran on their own power. At least for a ways.

  The crates and containers, however, would each have to be opened to figure out what they held, laboriously inventoried, and routed to the proper storage.

  Assuming people didn’t all kill each other first.

  Port Authority might have been a pressure cooker. Bad enough that the Skulls were still stewing. Worse that Shig and Yvette had out-voted her when it came to that slug-in-the-mud Wirth. Now here she was, right at sunset, watching the silver delta of a shuttle winging in from over the Gulf, its shriek as threatening as a quetzal’s.

  What the hell does the Supervisor want now?

  Trouble, no doubt about it.

  Talina laced her fingers around her pistol grip. The contours formed to her hand, reassuring, firmly filling her palm.

  “Shit in a toilet, I want to shoot someone,” she growled. Worse, it had been Cap who’d volunteered to take the one-word answer to Wirth: Deal.

  As a result, it had fallen to Talina and Trish to meet Aguila’s shuttle as it came in.

  “Do you just want her stepping off alone?” Shig had asked when she met him in his office earlier. “Getting into who knows what kind of nonsense?”

  “No. But what does she want?”

  “Two Spots just said she needed to speak to the three of us. Better that Yvette and I prepare ourselves to look at least moderately professional and in control. Especially if this has anything to do with the attack on the returnees. Who knows what they might have told her about last night?”

  “We could have used the radio,” Trish had growled. “Sent her a message: ‘We’ve got it under control. Now space your ass out of here. And don’t come back.’”

  Shig’s smile had beamed as he said, “Trish, the fine art of diplomacy has never seen the like of your poise, grace, or wit.”

  “Thank God,” Yvette had murmured.

  The distant sound of thrusters could be heard as they ripped through the air.

  Talina stared out at the bush, wondering where the quetzal had gone—the one seen that first day when The Corporation had roared back into their lives.

  The beast in her belly seemed to settle smugly under her heart.

  “And I haven’t forgotten your game either,” she told the creature. “Molecules, huh?”

  “What was that?” Trish asked, arms crossed, her pistol grip sticking out suggestively. Wind teased her auburn hair.

  “Just talking to my quetzal,” Talina quipped.

  “You worry me sometimes.”

  “Here comes the dust.”

  The shuttle backed air, rotated into the wind, and touched onto the seared clay. As the thrusters spooled down, the struts compressed; the sleek craft rocked like a raptor settling into a nest.

  Pamlico’s crew had stopped their reshuffling of crates to watch, and now went back to grappling and reorganizing a series of haphazardly stacked containers.

  “You sure would have thought the vaunted Corporation would have done a better job unloading that stuff,” Trish noted. “It’s like they tossed shit wherever they could.”

  “Ghost ship, remember?” Talina asked. “They wanted it the hell off Freelander so they could either desert or scurry back to Turalon where the Lords of Xibalba wouldn’t get them.”

  “The Lords of who?”

  “Xibalba. The Mayan underworld where the Lords of the Dead and monsters live. It’s an old story among my mother’s people back in Chiapas.”

  “But this is Donovan.”

  “Where everything is different,” Talina agreed. “That’s why our underworld full of the haunted dead is now up in the sky. A cruel sort of inverted symmetry, don’t you think?”

  The ramp dropped as the shuttle thrusters’ whine thinned into silence.

  Talina started forward, hand on her pistol as the apparently requisite marines trotted down to take up position. They’d no more than hit dirt before Supervisor Aguila, dressed in a black, form-fitt
ing one-piece suit, followed.

  Apparently she’d learned. This time her thick wealth of black hair had been pulled back and clipped. Her shoes were also eminently more practical.

  Talina tried to read the woman’s expression as she approached; Aguila’s lips were pursed, hands behind her back. This time she was looking around, as if really seeing the planet. The way she walked, the slow swinging of her feet, communicated hesitation, perhaps relief.

  Her attention fixed on Pamlico’s crew, where they used a forklift to back a crate out of a mess of containers that reminded Talina of jumbled children’s blocks. Then the woman fixed on Talina, a smile that spoke of inevitability bending her lips.

  “Security Officer Perez,” she greeted. “And her loyal sidekick, Trish Monagan. Of course they’d send you.”

  “Shig thought a band and a parade would be a little over the top. How can we help you, Supervisor?”

  “A few last details need to be worked out. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of . . .”

  “Talina!”

  They turned at the frantic shout from across the field.

  Pamlico Jones was standing on the forklift seat, waving as he called, “You better come see this. We got trouble. And it ain’t good.”

  “Now what?” Trish grumbled.

  “Excuse us,” Talina said.

  “No, we’ll all go. See what sort of trouble you now have.” Aguila almost laughed. “I could use the amusement.”

  Side by side, Talina and Trish led the way, Aguila and her marines followed in formation. And to make the joke complete: Who would have guessed that the Supervisor and her security acted as their own little parade?

  Jones had climbed down from the humming forklift; he and his three helpers stood in a knot where they’d just pulled a room-sized sialon container back.

  “Whatcha got, Pam?” Talina asked, and stopped to study the recessed area surrounded by the crates.