The giddy excitement had found its expression, and they all leaped, shouted, and danced around—if somewhat awkwardly in the new gravity. Dan whirled to the next person in line, hugging her to his breast, grabbing a hand and hop-dancing with Gopi Dava, heedless of the fact that he hated her guts.
“My blessed God!” Pete Morgan bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Look at all the wondrously empty space. Empty, I tell you. God, I love that word.” He bent down and scratched the powdery soil. Cupped it up and held it to his breast as tears streaked down his cheeks.
“How I dreamed of this day,” Dava told him as she leaned her face back to the sun, actually looking beautiful for the first time in her life. “I hated that ship . . . and prayed to see the sun again.”
“It’s not the sun.”
“Who the fuck cares?” She giggled like a school girl.
He happened to look up as Nandi walked past in an oddly mincing walk—what he termed spacer’s step—as she struggled with the gravity. She didn’t look nearly as appealing in the pure light of Donovan’s sun. He could see the age in her face, and way the planet’s pull tugged at her full breasts.
I’m seeing her out of her element.
Had he been like that on the ship? Was that why the trip was so damned hard? He was a groundhog after all. What the spacers called “a dirtie.”
He met Nandi’s eyes and nodded, remembering how she’d stood before a monitor and told him, “That’s the reason. Out there, Cowboy. Look at it! Forty billion stars . . . and I’m free to fly around them until hell freezes over.”
And then she was past him, headed back up the ramp into the shuttle: a space creature returning to her environment.
“All right, Skulls, give me your attention!” a contralto female voice called.
He turned back to the front where a woman stood in the tall fence’s pedestrian gate. Wouldn’t that be a bastard to have to climb if you were in a hurry?
Then he really fixed on the woman. Maybe five-foot-six, with a really good body barely disguised by a black, form-fitting uniform. Okay, so it looked ten years out of date and was patched like a tramp’s. So what? Especially when she had nice, high, and just right jugs, a flat belly, and despite the cast, the sort of thighs a man could dream about having wrapped tightly around his ass.
Who cared that she was on crutches with a cast on her leg?
“I think I’m in love!” Stryski moaned aloud.
“Think again, soft meat,” the auburn-haired young woman shot back. “And if you want to get through that gate anytime today, you’re gonna shut your yap hole and pay attention, or you can spend the night on this side of the fence!”
Dan smiled at Stryski’s discomfort. The mechanic wasn’t used to be slapped down like a child—and especially not by some green-eyed young slit who was dressed like a homeless derelict.
“I’m Talina Perez,” the Latin beauty up front called. “I’m in charge of security here. My word is law. So pay attention. This isn’t the Garden of Eden that The Corporation advertises it to be. Once you are processed and in the system, you’ll be taken to the cafeteria for an orientation. There you’ll be assigned quarters in a dome, and you’ll meet your instructor. Your instructor will teach you how keep from ending your short and unhappy days as quetzal shit. Or worse. So, come on, Skulls, let’s get a move on.”
“Who’s she think she is? Some kind of tough bitch?” O’Leary asked.
“Somebody whacked her hard enough to put that leg in a cast.” Stryski gave them an evil grin. “Maybe she’s into strenuous nighttime activity.”
“Hey! Soft meat!” The auburn slit was back, face like thinly veiled thunder. “A quetzal broke her leg. Up close and personal. Before I shot it in the head and killed it. You mouth off again”—her hand was white-knuckled on the grip of her pistol—“I’ll shoot you myself.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Stryski said wearily. “My ’pologies to the lady.”
“Uh, she doesn’t seem to like us,” Morgan noted as the auburn-haired young woman stalked away. “What do you think ‘Skull’ means?”
“Bones, man.” Stryski ran a palm over his shaved head to emphasize the rather knobby contours beneath his shining scalp. “So, come on, you heard the lady. Get the line moving!”
“Hey, if all the women look like that Perez and that green-eyed one, I could get to like it here.” O’Leary had a dreamy look on his face.
Indu Gautamanandas—hands on her hips—looked back long enough to say, “Keep dreaming, limp dick. You didn’t cut such a swath through the women’s quarters back on Turalon, and you had two years and a captive population.”
“Yeah.” O’Leary adopted a thoughtful look. “Guess we got a lesson in how The Corporation’s policy of preferential lesbian recruitment is working out for them. Would have been nice if they’d added at least a handful of heteros to the manifest this time.”
Indu bent her lips in a smile. “A little surgery, O’Leary, a hormone implant to supply a bit more estrogen and progesterone, and you can overcome the mistake of your birth and come into your true flowering. Then you’ll know firsthand. And it’s not like you’ve been using your balls and dick for anything but manual dexterity training these last years.”
“Fuck you!” O’Leary’s complexion had turned a serious shade of red.
“If you’ll recall, my refusal is what started us down this path of conversation.”
The auburn slit, having overheard, was grinning as she started one of the lines forward.
Behind him, skid loaders rolled up to the shuttle bay, thick pinchers bearing heavy sialon crates.
Dan turned his attention to the surroundings, looking across the slightly-too-blue grass to the distant trees and then off to the north. Atop a low rise was a stone cairn, like a monument. He didn’t remember it from the tapes they’d studied, but Port Authority had changed, much of it hidden behind the four-high stack of crates waiting for shipment off world.
“Hey?” he called. “Ma’am? You with the green eyes.”
She turned, walking up. “Name’s Trish.”
“Trish. I’m Dan Wirth.” He pointed. “What’s that up there? That pile of rocks. Some sort of shrine?”
The humorless smile on her lips twitched slightly. Seeing her up close, she was cute, with a faint sprinkling of freckles on the bridge of her nose—though a deep-set hardness lay behind her green eyes.
“That’s the first grave, Skull. The first man to set foot on this planet was named Donovan. Two hours later he was dead. The quetzal only managed to eat half of him before Donovan’s crewmates killed it. They dug the rest of him out of the beast’s stomach. Didn’t want to take the chance of infecting the hydroponics tank with alien pathogens, so they buried him up there. We consider Donovan a sort of historical figure. To date, he’s the only person killed on this ball of rock to have a planet named after him.”
“But he was killed back in the hills, right?” Dan couldn’t help but stare at the lonely monument.
“Sorry, Skull. Donovan stepped out of the survey shuttle to take a leak.” She pointed to the top of the supply dome just visible over the line of crates. “Would have been right over there.”
Gopi Dava asked, “But quetzals don’t come around Port Authority anymore, right? Corporate says they’re controlled around the compound.”
“Glad to hear it,” Trish told her, her gaze shifting reflexively to the distant line of trees. “Maybe the quetzals will get the memo. Either that or the one that took Allison Chomko’s baby girl out of its crib last month couldn’t read.”
Pete Morgan said, “They told us Donovan was perfectly safe. That if a person followed the rules, there was nothing to fear. That there was an electric fence that kept the wildlife out.”
“Oh, that fence!” Trish chuckled as if to herself. “The one we cut up for wire. See, it took special regulators to keep it hot
. And the smart guys back in Tokyo, or wherever, only included one with the fence, figuring no doubt that we could just pick up a spare from supply, right? Maybe write a requisition?”
She paused, a distant look behind her eyes. “I’d love to see their faces when Turalon gets back and they read Shig’s report.” Her expression hardened. “Keep the line moving. We don’t have all day.”
He watched her as she walked off, thinking, Nice ass.
Then he turned his attention to the so-called grass. The pseudo-succulent that cattle could eat—until the arsenic toxicity built up and killed the gut microbes in the rumen. Which begged the question, where were the cattle?
And, fact was, he was going to have to fuck around with the damn cattle for a little while. He’d need the cover until he found the kind of woman he could run, could get established and start his game.
Grazing cattle on Donovan was a tricky business. Mostly they were supposed to eat alfalfa and timothy grass grown special for them. They could supplement with local plants, but had to be monitored, their grazing managed so that they didn’t consume too much of any one thing lest it lead to rumen shock. And while most of Donovan’s microbiology couldn’t stand up to a cow’s hostile rumen, a few species could. Those had to be treated before they could take over.
Behind them, lightning flickered in a black cloud that had rolled in from the Gulf. He could feel the coming storm, waiting, saving itself to be whipped into fury.
“Hey, Skull!” Trish cried. “You coming?”
Dan hurried to the gate, offering his papers to Talina Perez where she sat behind a sialon crate and tapped information into a portable solar-powered computer.
“Says you’re a cattle production specialist, livestock technician level two?” Perez’s voice rose with incredulity. “No shit?”
“I worked in a Corporate farm for a while.” She didn’t need to know that it was a prison farm—and that he’d hated every minute of it. “It was the only opening for Donovan that hadn’t been filled, and I qualified. So, yeah, I’m contracted to take care of the cattle herd.”
Perez glanced at Trish, a distasteful amusement in her gleaming dark eyes. “A cowboy?”
Trish broke out in laughter. “Bet he can ride a horse. Assuming we could find one on Donovan.”
Perez asked, “What else can you do? Mining? Construction?”
He thought he could drown in Talina Perez’s large, dark eyes. She had to be the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. And at the same time, something in the way she looked at him sent alarm bells ringing down in his guts. That there was a whole lot more to her than just being head of security.
You are warned, Daniel. She could kill you just as easily as looking at you.
“Never done any of those things.”
“What have you done?”
“Stayed alive.”
Talina grunted. “Yeah, well, the last of the cattle died eight years ago, Cowboy.” Her fingers were tapping at the keys. “If you had to make your living any other way, how would you do it?”
“I was a pretty good gambler.”
“Looks like the odds weren’t in your favor when you opted to herd The Corporation’s cattle. I’m putting you down for mining. Doesn’t take much to dig clay.”
“What if I refuse? My contract is for beef production.”
“Oh, you can refuse, Cowboy. That’s a contract issue. But if you stay it means you’re off the payroll. Port Authority is like every other place. Market economy. If you’re not on the rolls, you don’t eat. Not unless you can pay for it.”
“Fuck me,” he growled. “What if I don’t want to mine?”
“Take that up with the Supervisor. That’s her area of responsibility.” Perez seemed to be staring into his very soul, seeing him, naked, judging his character. It irritated him.
And the last thing he wanted was to spend another two years stuck down in the rat-warren of Turalon’s belly. Let alone end up back at Transluna where questions would be asked about Dan Wirth. All things considered, God was smiling down on him with the same intensity as Capella’s warm and slanting sunset rays.
“I’ll figure out how to make my own way.”
Perez seemed to be hesitating, dissecting him with her eyes, disdainful of the kind of man he was.
And I thought she was beautiful?
“Don’t cross me, Cowboy,” she said as she handed him his papers. “And don’t try anything with the folks here. They don’t have a sense of humor when it comes to soft meat.”
Lightning flashed followed by a crash of thunder. Storms on Donovan, he thought, could be just as threatening as its women.
The first hard, cold drops were splattering around him as he made his way into the dome for the next stage of his “orientation.”
When he glanced back, it was to see Talina Perez’s hard eyes watching his every move.
11
“What is it?” Trish asked as the first drops of rain slashed down out of the bruised and storm-tortured sky. Actinic veins of lightning, like great writhing snakes of light, strobed a glowing halo through the twisting clouds. As if knotted by pain, they flickered, contorted, and died, only to be followed by blasts of thunder that shook the ground, each explosive detonation sending its quivering impact through muscle, bone, and blood.
“Something about him.” Talina clamped her computer closed against the onslaught. “The cowboy.”
Trish ducked her head as the rain hammered down. Running, she led the way to Shig’s office door and held it while Talina hobbled in on her crutches. Slamming it shut, Trish shook the water from her now-plastered hair and used her hands to sponge her face. “Damn! That hit with a fury.”
Talina was still looking thoughtful as she laid the computer in its place.
“You still worried about the cowboy? Livestock technician, level two? And, I mean, the papers were correct, right? The Corporation actually sent him here to take care of cows?”
“You think back in Tokyo they know the herd’s been dead for eight years?”
“Nope. It’s been so long since I’ve seen a cow, I can’t even remember what a one looks like in the flesh.” Trish wrung the water from her sleeves, watched it splatter in starburst patterns on Shig’s floor. “That’s not what’s bothering you.”
Talina pulled a rag from her back pocket and wiped her face. “It was something about him. The way he looked at me.”
“Hey! Talina! Hello! Every man out there was looking at you—and half of them were peeling your uniform off and fantasizing which position from the Kama Sutra they were going to bend you into as they did the ultimate belly bump.”
“Then they’re using the wrong reference. The Kama Sutra is kind of short on variations of the belly bump. Most of the positions are lot more . . . well, anatomically divergent.” She shook her head. “No. The guy’s a . . .”
“Sneak? Cheat? Reptile? What?” Trish shrugged. “I talked to him. Really cute guy with that soft, brown fuzz of hair and dimple in his chin. He just seemed like another Skull. Maybe a little smarter, but not all that different.”
“He’s a quetzal,” Talina said softly. “Very good with camouflage. You don’t realize. Don’t see the real him until he drops the illusion. By then, it’s too late.”
“So? Donovan has a way of revealing who people are in a big hurry.”
“So does being locked in the belly of a starship for two years. No, he’s good. Me, I’m going to check. See if there was an incident with Wirth on the way here. Something. And I’m betting it was with a woman.”
“How’s that?”
“Because I’d guess his camouflage works better with women. You saw him, what did you think?”
“Like I said, handsome guy, soft brown eyes, sort of a vulnerable look. Nice hands and ass. Can’t tell how he moves until he gets used to being planetside, but he wasn’t nearly as
wobbly as most of the others. Kind of a cute smile, and just the right amount of muscle. Wasn’t a wiseass like so many of the others. Thoughtful, you know? Like when he was asking about Donovan’s monument up at the cemetery.”
“You picked up on all that? Out of all those men? He’s the one who made an impression?”
Trish defensively said, “Well . . . yeah? I mean the rest of them were just soft meat. And yeah, I treated him like he was. That’s what you do with Skulls. But, it was sort of . . . well, like he wasn’t, you know?”
“Quetzal,” Talina said softly. Then she glanced up. “No. Worse. Quetzals don’t prey on their own kind. Trish, you gotta promise me. Don’t get close to him. I mean it. This is your warning.”
“What warning?”
“I don’t want to bury you.”
“What in God’s name are you talking about?”
“Not really sure . . . but something tells me I’d save everyone a lot of trouble if I just moseyed on over to orientation and shot him.”
12
Cap stood at the supervisor’s office window, hot coffee in his zero-g cup as he stared out at the fence that separated the admin building from the shuttle field. He’d insisted that coffee be on the second shuttle after learning the beverage hadn’t been available on Donovan for years. And, indeed, there had been a rush on it as soon as the first pots were brewed in the cafeteria. And they did mean pots, having no idea what had become of the coffee machine.
Someone said it might have been cannibalized for parts.
“Fucking barbarians,” he muttered as he stared out at the flashing lightning and bands of rain that continued to pound the compound. Sheets of water sluiced down the window and—he noticed—leaked in around the edge of the sill to follow a green smear of what looked like fungus down the stained wall.
Like most of Port Authority, the admin dome appeared to be on the verge of falling apart.
Cocking his head, he heard voices raised in the hall outside. It brought a faint smile to his lips. He’d put Lieutenant Spiro in charge of the flood of people who’d mobbed the hallway seeking access to the Supervisor. Most were there to bitch about contract violations, demand redress for some sort of injury, press for word about loved ones back home, request overtime pay, book passage aboard Turalon, plead for some special privilege, or what have you; and Deb Spiro was the perfect subordinate to act as interface. The woman had all the imagination and flexibility of a block of granite, was in fact rather brittle when it came to personality. And God help any poor bastards who might serve under her if she were ever promoted.
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