Outpost

  “Thought this was funny looking,” Pamlico said, gesturing. “They’d left a container on top, sort of like a cap, you know? Then we pull this one out of the way, and here’s this space all left behind it. And, well, see?”

  See she did.

  The quetzal inside her hissed its excitement.

  Stepping forward, hand on her pistol, Talina took it all in. The containers had been placed to create a sheltered enclosure, bounded on all sides, with narrow gaps that allowed ingress and egress. A tarp had been tied up as a rain fly to shelter bedding where four people had slept. Plates, pans, ration kits, and personal items were strewn around, proof that they’d been there for a while.

  She caught the smell at the same time she recognized the mounded excrement; the quetzal shrilled victoriously inside her. What looked like soiled rags told the rest of the story. Scattered about, torn, they were the remnants of coveralls. And there was a boot, another there, and another, and another.

  “Trish?” she warned.

  “Yeah!” Trish had already pulled her pistol, backing against Talina, eyes scanning the container tops.

  “What’s going on here?” Aguila asked. “What is all this?”

  “Spiro?” Talina shouted. “Weapons at the ready and hot! We got a quetzal.”

  “Fuck and shit!” Pamlico and his crew scrambled for the rather insubstantial safety of the forklift’s cab. “Tal? We’re out of here.”

  “Go, Pam.”

  Into her com, Talina snapped, “Two Spots? We’ve got a quetzal kill on the shuttle field.” She stepped warily over, flipped a piece of the torn coveralls with a toe, and counted. “Looks like four people.”

  “Four?” Two Spots’ voice answered.

  “Roger that.”

  “Damn.”

  “Tell me what’s going on,” Aguila ordered, but her voice had taken on a different tone. She was now staring over Lieutenant Spiro’s shoulder, an uneasy frown marring her forehead.

  Talina carefully stepped into the enclosure, pistol ready, and bent down. She turned over a crumpled wad of coveralls to expose a sleeve and breast patch. “Load specialist. See the Turalon patch? You know the uniform as well as I do, Supervisor. Four of them. My guess? They didn’t want to take a chance on spacing back on Turalon. Instead they figured they could make a nice little shelter here, wait it out until you were all gone. Then they could walk out and make new lives.”

  “Deserters,” Spiro growled from behind her shining helmet. “What happened to them? What is all this?”

  “Quetzal,” Trish growled. “The damn fools even left a doorway for it.” She pointed to the gap in the back, facing away as it did from the landing field.

  “Been here for days.” Talina noted as she studied the claw-scuffed dirt, the piles of excrement. “It would have killed all four immediately. Then it ripped the clothing from the bodies and laid them out, eating them bit by bit, piece by piece.”

  Inside her the quetzal hissed in agreement, the thing irritatingly joyous.

  Trish pointed at the heaping mounds of dung. “And there’s what’s left of your crewmembers, Supervisor.” To Talina, she asked, “What next?”

  The marines were staring through their visors, faces grim as they fingered their weapons. Aguila’s back had stiffened, distaste on her fine features.

  She asked, “Is it still around?”

  “No,” Talina, guessed, feeling the quetzal’s agreement. “My guess is that it only stayed long enough to feed. But, my God, four people? Eating them would have taken days. So, why take the chance it might be discovered?”

  “One thing’s sure,” Trish noted warily, “it’s energized. Call it supercharged.”

  Talina backed out of the shelter, turning, running her eyes over the stacks of crates, the parked equipment. “A thousand places to hide.”

  And then Talina fixed on the Port Authority gate, swung wide. Open. Inviting.

  “Oh fuck.”

  The quetzal under her heart hissed in victory. Talina accessed her com. “Two Spots? We’ve got a quetzal inside the compound. Sound the alarm. We need lockdown, now!”

  “Inside the compound?” Trish cried, spinning around to stare at the gate in horror.

  At that moment, the warning siren began to wail, its ugly bellow carrying through the early evening air.

  “Let’s go, people,” Talina called. “Spiro, you tell that shuttle to button up, and no one steps out until this is over. Get Aguila into the admin dome and secure. After that, I need you and your team to help in the hunt.”

  To Talina’s surprise, Kalico Aguila could actually run, and run well.

  “What’s this thing doing?” Aguila asked as she panted along in the midst of her marines. “It’s eaten. Why enter Port Authority? It’s got to know we’re going to find it. Kill it.”

  “Got me, Supervisor. But whatever it’s planning, it ain’t gonna be good.”

  Talina thought her quetzal was laughing as it slithered around inside.

  67

  The way Cap felt, he could have used a shower. Something about Dan Wirth just left him feeling unclean. That old sixth sense made him glance back over his shoulder at Wirth’s warehouse turned casino.

  Not a single soul was in sight; no party of thugs was emerging to follow along in his wake. Still, Cap couldn’t shake the feeling that he and Wirth had crossed some unseen line that would destroy one or both of them.

  “What is it about that guy?”

  He glanced at the sunset as he heard the distant roar of a shuttle approaching. The slanting light illuminated the underside of high clouds: a bank of them that glowed pinkish orange in the light. Their texture and color, given the ripples and lines, reminded him of a thinly sliced fillet of salmon.

  Around him, Port Authority was still quiet in the aftermath of the night’s violence. People were wary, giving him a nod of the head at best, but none of the usual called greetings as he passed the domes and stone buildings with heavy chabacho-wood doors.

  Uncharacteristically, the streets were cluttered with occasional crates and containers. The odd vehicle dragged in from the treasure trove of Freelander’s holds lay awaiting attention.

  “I tell you, Cap. The guy’s a psycho. That night? He didn’t have any more feeling in him than a block of ice. I wasn’t any more important to him than a fly on the wall.” Nandi’s voice echoed in his memory.

  A psycho? Impossible. Cap had pulled Dan Wirth’s profile from the ship’s records. The guy had worked for one of the big Corporate farms in the North American Midwest. His entire life history was there. Never a speck of trouble. Not so much as a complaint. Psychopaths always had something in the records. Allegations, charges, some sort of incident report, even if they’d never been convicted.

  Besides, Dan Wirth, like all the transportees, had to have passed the psychiatric evaluations and assessment of functioning. Granted, he’d been late, almost missed the last shuttle up to Turalon, but nothing else was outstanding.

  How could they have missed him?

  It wasn’t impossible that a clever psychopath could trick the General Assessment of Function test, but it was rare enough that people considered the system solid.

  The Dan Wirth he’d just dealt with wasn’t any easygoing cattle technician from a Midwest feedlot. This was a stone-cold killer. Nandi had called it right.

  “Good thing you had that pistol under your pillow, girl.”

  So, what did Shig and Yvette have under theirs? Talina wouldn’t hesitate. She’d shoot the son of a bitch if he threatened her.

  “And don’t tell me that Wirth doesn’t know that.” He stopped, watching as the shuttle swooped in and dropped on the other side of town. When the roar died, he added, “So when it comes to Talina, he’ll come at her from the shadows. Never give her a chance.”

  What are you going to do about it, Cap?


  “Kill him before he can kill Tal.”

  Odd, wasn’t it? How easily he could commit himself to taking a man’s life? Donovan had gotten into Cap’s blood: Dan Wirth was a dead man.

  Cap hesitated at Inga’s, glanced behind him again to ensure that he wasn’t being followed, and then opened the door and stepped inside.

  As he looked down into the great room, it was to see Donovanians pretty much on one side, transportees on the other. For the most part, they were ignoring each other. Only the occasional cast glance was spared for either side. Nor was the room particularly loud, but more somber.

  He trotted down the steps, nodded as the occasional set of eyes turned his way, and stopped at the bar.

  “What’ll it be, Cap?” Inga asked as she headed his way.

  He leaned on the wood. “How’s it been? Any trouble?”

  She shrugged. “Not yet. The locals, they’re thinking, ‘Damn fools. What kind of idiots, carrying clubs, would charge headlong down a narrow alley into a fight with folks totin’ guns?’ The Skulls, they’re thinking, ‘What kind of heartless bastards would open fire on people armed only with sticks and stones?’”

  “Should Tal and I drop by later?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt for our people to see her, Cap. Especially later on tonight. I’m pouring light drinks. Cut off a few like Hofer who were getting a bit deep in their cups. And I’ll keep cutting. Especially with the troublemakers.”

  “That sounds like a smart . . .”

  The siren—the one he’d only heard in that first day’s drill—blared out. The clear tones had an electric effect on the Donovanians. In an instant they were on their feet, cups abandoned, chairs and benches askew, as they pounded up the steps and surged for the door.

  Inga slapped a hard hand on the counter, bellowing, “You Skulls! Get the hell home! Lock your damn doors and wait for the all clear! Now, move it!”

  Cap, slow to full understanding, was caught in the rush.

  It seemed forever before he spilled out into the street as part of the stream of humanity.

  He had his pistol, but if this was quetzal trouble, he wanted more. His time in the bush had taught him that. Sure there were rifles in the admin dome armory, but Tal would want her personal weapon. Turning toward the residential domes, he broke into a run. The soft meat stood out, milling, calling questions, a half-dazed look on their faces.

  The Donovanians could have been a crack military team as they dropped their bundles and ran. Children, holding hands, called to their fellows, frightened but focused as they hurried toward safety.

  Cap charged into Tal’s block, surprised to find a big front-end loader blocking most of the street in front of her dome. Atop the engine unit, a man was frantically pitching tools into his toolbox.

  “What the hell is this?” Cap bellowed.

  “A piece of crap off Freelander,” the man bellowed. “Took a charge. Thought we could get it at least as far as the shops. This is where it stopped.”

  He leaped down, landing with a thud. “Got a solar charger on it! It’ll move tomorrow.”

  “But it’s sunset!”

  “I know,” the man called back over his shoulder. “Get it tomorrow!”

  And then he was gone, vanishing into the thinning crowds as people found their domes and bolted inside.

  “Toilet-sucking moron,” Cap muttered to himself as he made his way around the thing. The tires, despite looking new, showed cracks. If they’d really aged one hundred and some years, it was no wonder.

  Cheng was said to be working on a rubberlike compound that could be cooked from mundo tree leaves. Maybe they could make tires from that. Assuming they could figure out how to replace the flat batteries with ones that would allow the big machines to run for long enough to need the tires in the first place.

  He stepped around the bucket—a big flat-bottomed scoop that slanted down at an angle from the monstrosity’s front like a sharp bulldog jaw.

  He pounded up Talina’s steps, smiling thinly as he remembered the night she’d found him there in the rain. How she’d looked at him, head tilted. The way they’d made love when she’d taken him in to her bed.

  “The perfect woman,” he soliloquized. “I just had to cross half the galaxy to find her.”

  Talk about an ultimate irony.

  He threw the door back and grabbed Talina’s rifle off the rack. Popping the magazine, he checked it: topped off with explosive rounds. As if Tal would have had it any other way. And yes, it was chambered.

  He set the safety and grounded it butt first. Talina had acquired the second rifle—a handmade bolt-action piece made on Donovan. Not military, but for hunting. It would get the job done if he had time to aim. The box magazine held five rounds. He slipped the bolt back to expose the sixth.

  Got to count shots.

  He slung Talina’s rifle over his shoulder, lifted the bolt gun to the crook of his arm.

  A soft scuffle of sound behind him was all the warning he got. The blow caught him behind the ear, slamming him forward into the rifle rack.

  You piece of shit . . . was the last thought in his head.

  68

  Kalico Aguila wondered if another person could be squeezed into the conference room. This was what they called the big room, in what they more amusingly called the “ops center.” Ask her, and Kalico would have said it was one poor attempt at a CIC. A table—upon which a map had been spread—filled the center of the ten-by-twenty room. The chairs had been shoved back and stacked against the wall to make room for warm bodies.

  I’ve traded terror for horror.

  She rubbed the back of her arms as she remembered the deserter’s camp, the scattered supplies, the torn shreds of clothing. Had the bits of bloody coveralls been the worst part? Or had it been the mounded excrement that had once been human beings?

  And that thing is here? In Port Authority?

  “While we can’t be one hundred percent sure,” Talina had told her, “what we can’t be is so much as one percent wrong.”

  Kalico tried to huddle out of the way, partially protected by Lieutenant Spiro and three of her marines. Decked out as they were in their armor, it was like having an impervious barrier between her and the world. The rest of Spiro’s command were lined up out in the hall, waiting for orders.

  The suspicious stares she got from the shabbily dressed Donovanians left her oddly off balance and added to the feeling of insecurity.

  Shig Mosadek leaned over the map. Talina Perez, Trish Monagan, the big man they called Step, and four others peered down at the way his finger divided Port Authority into districts.

  “Trish, you and your team take the residential section. That’s our first concern. Especially the children’s areas. That’s where it’s most likely to have headed. Tal, you take the warehouse district. If it rode in on a piece of cargo, that’s where it would have gone to ground.”

  “How long’s it been in?” Step asked, his face pinched into crags and lines.

  “No idea,” Perez told him. “From the scat, not longer than a couple of hours.”

  “How the hell could it have gotten in?” one of the other men—a round-faced young Asian with a mop of black hair—asked.

  “Iji, have you seen how much material we’ve hauled in?” Pamlico Jones asked. “I’ve been running loads through the gate all day. It could have flattened itself on top of a container, turned itself gray, and we could have hauled it into the admin dome and never known.”

  “And the big gates have been wide open,” Monagan reminded. “Sure, we’ve had the usual sentries, but with all the coming and going? Quetzals don’t like crowds. And, damn it, it’s the middle of the day! They just don’t act this way. It’s not right.”

  “Or maybe they do,” Yvette said crisply. “Quetzals adapt. And now we’re going to have to as well.”

  “As
suming it’s actually in the compound,” Shig reminded. “We have to believe it is. Any other course could get more people killed.”

  “Any questions on areas of responsibility?” Perez asked. “No? All right, people. We know how to do this.”

  Around the table, heads nodded.

  “Unlike the drills,” Shig reminded, “you take the safety off before you shoot. You may not get a second chance.”

  Perez turned, “Madam Supervisor, can you detail us your marines? Their tech, especially their thermal detection gear, could make all the difference. And a quetzal can’t slash its way through armor.”

  Kalico hesitated, staring into the woman’s hot eyes. This wasn’t her problem. Nothing The Corporation had to . . .

  She heard another part of herself saying, “Yes.”

  I’ve lost my mind. She slapped a hand to Lieutenant Spiro’s armored shoulder. “Detail the squads, Lieutenant. One for each of the search areas.”

  “Ma’am?” Spiro turned, her face quizzical. Her helmet hung from her web gear, her rifle slung. “Your security at this time is my first and only—”

  “Go on, Lieutenant. That’s an order. My security will be better served with this thing dead, and you and your people have the best chance of finding it. Now, go.”

  Spiro—still frowning—snapped a salute, ordering into her com, “Finnegan, Miso, Abu Sassi, form squads for search and destroy. Optics and thermal on, people. Weapons hot upon deployment. Let’s find this thing and fry it.”

  A series of “roger thats” could be heard through Spiro’s battle com.

  Kalico stood mutely as her people trooped out behind the Donovanians. Feeling oddly alone and adrift, she continued to rub the backs of her arms, as if chilled.

  Into her com, Yvette said, “Millicent? Can someone bring us a pot of coffee from the cafeteria?” Then she nodded at some response in her earbud.

  “I suspect it’s going to be a long night,” Yvette told Kalico as she dragged a couple of the chairs out. “Have a seat, Supervisor.”

  “This happens often?” Kalico asked.