Outpost

by W. Michael Gear

  Talina’s eyes flickered as they lost focus; her head lolled loosely forward, and she slumped on the sand.

  “Shit!”

  “What’s wrong?” Stepan called from above.

  “Talina’s out. Cold. Maybe she’s hurt worse than we think.” As she spoke, she was tying a loop in the rope. “Step! We’re going! Now!”

  “What about Iji?”

  Looking up from the quetzal, Iji gestured with the knife. “Get her out of here. I’ve got my weapons along with Talina’s rifle and pistol. Just you damn well be back to get me and this hide before dark. Big hide like this? It’s worth a fortune.”

  “But leaving you—”

  “Go!” Iji bellowed. “Hell, if luck smiles, I’ll have two quetzals skinned by the time you get back!”

  Trish keyed her throat mic. “Step, I mean it. Talina’s not doing well. I’ve got a loop for my foot, and I can keep a grip on the rope and make sure Tal doesn’t fall out of the harness. Now fly our asses out of here! She’s not dying on my watch. That’s an order.”

  “Yeah, yeah. But I don’t like it.” Step called down before he vanished back toward the aircar.

  “Iji! You stay damned frosty, you hear me? I’ll have Step on his way back for you the moment we’re offloaded at hospital.”

  Iji was grinning, hiding what was obviously worry. No one liked being left alone on Donovan. Especially with a freshly dead quetzal corpse to draw every predator in the countryside down on top of him.

  As the aircar spun up, dirt, grit, sand, and small gravel blew out over the gully’s edge in a blinding shower.

  It took all of Trish’s might to get an arm around Talina’s shoulder. The slack went out of the rope, almost jerking her loose. Holding on for dear life, she felt herself lift. The loop tightened painfully around her foot as it took her full weight.

  “Careful, Step!” she bellowed in the downdraft as she and Talina swung against the rock-filled side of the drainage.

  Then they were up, rising, the narrow drainage bottom dropping away as Step sought altitude.

  Panting, scared half out of her wits, Trish kept a death grip on the rope—why the hell hadn’t she taken time to put on gloves? Her other arm hugged Talina’s limp body to her.

  The Corporation left us here. Soft-coddled bastards never know what it means to fight. To bury the few bits of bone that remain from your only child. Or your lover.

  Heart hammering with fear, she kept her eyes closed, ignoring the pain where the loop cut into her foot and where the rope was eating the skin off the palm of her hand.

  3

  Images drifted through Talina’s imagination. Ill-formed and misty.

  Dirt, gritty and clinging, coated her hands as she stood in the open grave. She had insisted that she be the one—along with Stepan—who reached over and got a grip on Mitch’s shroud. Stiff and resisting, the canvas fought her as she tried to wrap her fingers around it and get a grip. The way Talina lived it was as fresh as yesterday.

  Her gut tightened as she strained, half dragged Mitch’s corpse from where it rested at the lip of the grave. He was so cold. Limp. His body sagged as she took his weight and lowered it to the red soil on the bottom of the grave. For a moment she just stood there, his shrouded head between her feet.

  Is that all there is? The end of love? The end of life?

  Dully, she’d become aware of the voices asking if she were all right.

  Hell no.

  But some inner strength had caused her to bite off her grief, to reach up and take the offered hand. To help them as they pulled her from the grave. Then she had glanced up at Donovan’s memorial at the top of the cemetery. After a second spent staring at the stone monument, Talina stepped over and laid hands on the shovel; she’d driven the blade into the loose dirt. Shoulders working, breath coming in gasps, she’d tossed the rocky soil onto Mitch’s corpse.

  “I buried my lover. Not like a nice sanitized funeral back home. Here we have to shovel the dirt ourselves.” Her voice seemed to echo in the curious stillness, and then fade slowly into nothing.

  She blinked, coming awake. It took a moment for her vision to clear. Her throat was dry, her body aching. As her focus returned, she stared up at a ceiling. To either side the medical equipment blinked at her in an old and familiar way.

  She filled her lungs. Started to exhale a hiss. And caught herself.

  Hiss?

  What kind of insanity was that?

  Talina forced her brain to concentrate. “Hospital. I’m in hospital. What the hell happened this time?”

  She ordered her thoughts, remembering the quetzal. How it had attacked, her tumble down the steep slope. Staring into the beast’s eyes as if sharing its soul . . .

  Did the damn things even have souls?

  “God, I’m messed up,” she whispered to herself, images of burying Mitch once again spinning up from her memory. Was that cold corpse really the same warm man she’d cherished? The lover whose eyes she’d stared into? Laughed with? Who’d held her as she cried? Shared her longings and dreams? That she’d wrapped herself around as he shuddered in orgasm? The man she had tried to press into her very soul?

  The man I couldn’t save.

  It would have been so simple back in Solar System.

  She imagined a Boardmember, resplendent in his silk suit. The genuine article, not a synthetic. A smiling man, clean-shaven, with white and perfect teeth. His hands were pale, soft, perfectly manicured, the skin thin and translucent. Without scars or calluses. Perfect health—monitored by the finest physicians—could be seen in his stride, in his perfectly proportioned body with its interactive genetic and metabolic feedback in constant balance. She could see his dissociated smile as Corporate data rolled through his implants, scrolling the abstract mathematics of profit and loss through his brain.

  That suit that would have been worth five rifles and eight thousand rounds of ammunition. A day’s salary enough to have paid for an electric fence and enough parts to keep it from failing. A week’s earnings enough to have supplied the entire perimeter of Port Authority with motion detectors.

  In her imagination he gave her a helpless look—eyes impotent and tender—and shrugged slightly. With a wistful smile he lifted his delicate, almost translucent hands, spreading them in apology.

  And we have to depend upon the likes of him?

  “People are dying here. Dying to make money for you assholes.”

  Her voice rasped, as if from disuse.

  It took no effort to remember Mitch’s face as they sewed canvas around it. How his slack features disappeared with each stitch.

  If I’d only had an ampoule of megacillin I could have saved him.

  Dead. For lack of an inexpensive mass-produced antibiotic that no one had deemed worthy of sending to far-off Donovan, despite its continued requisition.

  When she looked up through unfocused eyes, the ceiling shimmered in rainbow patterns. A slight ache tightened in the back of her eyeballs. A quetzal ceiling. As if the creature . . . The shimmering faded, and it seemed as though a thousand stars rained from the sky. As though her body were falling through space, weightless and eternal.

  What the . . . ?

  It hit her that she remembered the stories. The ones her mother had told when she gave lectures on the ancient Maya. About how the shamans of her people could change into spirit beasts. How the souls of animals could possess them. One of her great aunts—who some called a bruja—had claimed she could turn herself into a giant snake.

  It wasn’t coincidence that the first explorers had named the quetzals after the Mayan rainbow-skinned feathered serpent that flew through the night sky and breathed out the spiritual essence of Creation.

  Something seemed to move deep inside her, down under her heart and diaphragm. An alien presence that left her frightened and slightly nauseous.

&nb
sp; Talina, get a grip on yourself.

  A tingle of fear ran through her.

  She wondered which of them had actually died that day in the canyon. Talina chuckled dryly. No doubt there were worse forms of madness.

  Didn’t matter. If a supply ship from Earth didn’t arrive, quetzals would wander unhindered through the ruins of Port Authority, perhaps wondering if humans had ever been real, or were just a dream.

  4

  According to Trish Monagan’s bedside clock it was just after three in the morning when Shig’s call had roused her from a deep sleep. She had been dreaming of whipped cream, having had a taste of the delicacy when she was a girl. That had been before the last of the cattle had died.

  What an odd thing to dream, but the taste had been so clear: thick, sweet, and remarkably rich on the tongue.

  She groaned, climbed out of her bed, and pulled on her jumpsuit. Didn’t even bother with the light as she belted on her pistol and equipment belt. She stumbled out of her dome and into the night, limping slightly. Her foot still hurt from where the sling had bruised it.

  In an effort to clear the cobwebs from her sleep-addled brain, she rolled her shoulders and pressed her palms together with all of her might, stimulating her arm muscles and pectorals.

  God, her eyes felt like someone had packed sand into them. She rubbed them with a hard knuckle and yawned as she arrived at the administration dome.

  Passing through a section where the light panels were out in the main corridor, she opened the Control Room door and stepped inside.

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  Shig Mosadek and Yvette Dushane sat with their asses propped on the cluttered work table in the center of the room. “Two Spots” Smith sat in the improvised chair behind the radio. The holo monitors in the work stations to his left were dark.

  Only one worked as it was, and that was the one that communicated with the mine office three klicks to the north. Mellie Nagargina—who monitored the mine—wouldn’t be in to turn it on until eight in the morning. Unlike Trish and the rest, she was home in bed with her husband and four kids.

  Shig turned as she strode in. He stood five foot three, a small man who had a shock of inky hair that sprouted from his round head. The burnt tones of his skin had blackened under the influence of Capella’s rays. When he looked at a person the ebony pools of his eyes seemed detached, pensive. His pug nose might have been mashed onto his face as an afterthought. The broad set of his mouth suggested a mild disposition that refused to ruffle. She’d rarely seen his expression change. Not even the time he’d executed Tambuko for rape.

  “Ship’s coming in.” Shig said it so casually, as if it were just another routine matter.

  “No shit?” Trish asked, wondering if it could be true.

  “Trish, there are times your eloquence leaves me in awe. And yes, a ship’s out there at last.”

  A curious wave of relief washed through her: Joy mixed with apprehension. “’Bout clap-trapping time,” Trish said with a sigh. “Where the hell have they been?”

  Yvette Dushane sat with the right cheek of her rump planted on the table, her long leg swinging. Though her arms were crossed, she held a cup of steaming tea in her right hand. Given the disheveled look of her thick mane of graying ash-blonde hair, she, too, had just been hauled out of the sack.

  She fixed Trish with her hard green eyes. “It’s called the Turalon. We are waiting out the communications lag. It’s still a little more than twenty-five minutes.”

  “So they’re a long way out.” Trish fought a yawn. Early in the Donovan colony’s thirty-year history, the decision was made to rely on simple, old-fashioned radio for communications. All it took to make one was a coil of copper wire, a speaker, a mic, and a power source. No quantum photon entanglement, computers, lasers, or microwaves. Just figure out the frequency.

  That was the thing about survival on Donovan, it was a mishmash of eighteenth and twenty-second century technology.

  Shig said, “Thought we’d give you a heads-up. With Talina still in hospital, you’re the top cop. Everybody’s going to want to celebrate. The tendency is going to be to let things slide. Maybe not pay close attention to their jobs. Especially security. And with Allison’s baby, we just had an example of what happens when even the littlest thing like a locked door is overlooked.”

  Allison was twenty-three, a few years older than Trish. They’d gone to school together. Something about her had always been fragile—as if Allison were just a blonde beauty. The sort to be admired like a fine sculpture rather than depended upon.

  “Gotcha,” Trish told Shig. And yes, people were going to get a little nutty. She was suddenly feeling her own growing excitement. Sort of like inexplicably getting a new chance at life. Realizing there was a glowing future where dreams might actually come true.

  “Where the hell have they been since Mekong left?”

  “I guess we’ll find out when they get here.”

  Trish ordered her thoughts. “We need to be ready to handle the influx of new people. Figure out where to put them, how to feed them.”

  “It’s not like we don’t have the room,” Shig noted. “Given the attrition, we have lots of vacant domes in the residential section. But we’re going to have to ramp up our food, water, and recycling to be sure we can handle the volume.”

  “Do the cargo skids even work anymore?” Yvette asked as she fingered her chin, green eyes fixed on the map that covered the wall behind the holo monitors. “We’ve let so many things fall by the wayside.”

  “Concentrating on survival does that to you,” Trish pointed out with a shake of the index finger. “Let’s not forget that while it hasn’t really been said, a lot of the people here had more or less come to the conclusion that we were on our own.”

  Yvette took a deep breath, slitted her eyes, and sipped at her tea.

  It was Shig who said, “There’s another reason we called you first, Trish. Since Supervisor Clemenceau’s death, we’ve been running things ourselves. Doing it our way. It’s pretty much been me, Yvette, and Talina calling the shots. This isn’t the same colony The Corporation is expecting to find: fat, ordered, and dutifully following directives in lockstep.”

  Trish smiled grimly. Donovan wasn’t the authoritarian Corporate community it had been when Mekong departed six and half years ago. “Do we even have a Corporate Operations Manual around here anymore?”

  “Wouldn’t matter if we did,” Yvette told her coldly. “Trish, your orders are to get Port Authority ready. One way or another, we’re going to have an influx of people and cargo. We’re granting you whatever authority you need to get the job done while ensuring that no one makes a mistake when it comes to keeping the compound secure.”

  Yvette’s eyes narrowed. “At the same time, we don’t know who’s on that ship, or what their orders are. It’s been over six years. A lot could have changed back home. Perhaps some political or social upheaval. They may not be the people we remember them to be.”

  “To that point, sure as hell, we are not the same obedient rank-and-file Corporate servants they left here.” Shig smiled thinly. “Listen, I know that you’re young. This is the first time you’ve been in charge, but trust yourself. Just use your head. Get with Talina, quietly, and consider options in the event that whoever gets off that ship decides they are going to try and force us to be good little employees again.”

  “What about the awkward little matter of deeds and titles?” Trish arched an eyebrow. “You think maybe The Corporation’s going to look slightly askance at that bit of liberty we’ve taken with their property?”

  “I, for one”—Yvette tossed off the last of her tea—“will never be a Corporate slave again.” A pause. “How about you, Trish?”

  “Hey, I’d just turned thirteen when you guys took Supervisor Clemenceau down. But I remember how Mom and Dad used to scurry around like invertebrates
.” A cold sensation made her tighten her stomach muscles. “So, Shig? Yvette? If they come down with a show of force, how far are you willing to push this thing?”

  She felt a tingle of unease in her guts. Damn! Did they think she was ready to lead a war against The Corporation? She couldn’t even get a date!

  Shig’s enigmatic expression never changed. “As far as we have to.”

  The tingle in Trish’s gut turned to ice. You have got to be kidding!

  “Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that,” Yvette said as she crushed her cup between her long fingers.

  As if on cue, grim-faced Two Spots—who had been listening—bent back to his radio as the speaker crackled and announced, “Turalon actual to Port Authority. Please advise the current Supervisor that, subject to Corporate regulation 17-8-2, he is required to immediately submit a detailed report of all colonial activities, production figures, resource utilization, personnel, equipment status, and special needs since the departure of Freelander to Supervisor Aguila with your next transmission.”

  Which, of course, was impossible since the last Supervisor was five years dead.

  “Wonder what ‘since the departure of Freelander’ means? You think it was a ship?” Two Spots asked.

  “I suppose we’ll find out when they get closer,” Shig replied thoughtfully.

  “Shit in a toilet,” Trish muttered as Yvette’s expression pinched. “How long do we have before they’re in orbit?”

  “Eight, nine days.” Shig arched an eyebrow. “I’d like to keep Talina in hospital for at least another week if possible. We’re going to need her as healed as she can be when this all blows up.”

  “Yeah.” Trish wiped at her suddenly sweaty brow. “Meantime, see how much you can learn about who’s aboard that air bucket, and what their intentions are.”