Outpost

by W. Michael Gear

  Cap rolled onto his side, sucking air through his mouth, eyes half-lidded.

  Talina sat up, shifted where she’d landed on the rifles, and pulled them free.

  The path here was well used, showing wheel ruts where wood had been hauled. The ferngrass was beaten down in places. Lots of sign of human activity. Just over there was a curious wooden frame, weathered now, but built for some purpose.

  Capella might have been trying to bake them given the way it beat down.

  “Max?” she said through gasps. “I’m going to leave you for a bit. Help is just up ahead. I’ll be back with Chaco and some of the kids. You’ve got to stay here, understand? Wait for me. Don’t try to go anywhere.”

  He blinked.

  She slapped him to get his attention. “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Yeah. Gone for help.”

  “You stay right here. That’s an order. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he told her hollowly, eyes rubbery in his head.

  “Here’s your rifle. It’s on safety. We’ll call when we’re close, so don’t shoot us.”

  He chuckled softly.

  She stood, shouldering her rifle. “Gonna leave you with something, Max. Gonna leave you knowing that I’m not going to let you die. You gotta believe me.”

  “Gotcha, Tal.” He grinned up at her. “Damn, you’re a hell of a woman. Better’n I deserve.”

  “Goes both ways, Max. Now, you stay put. Be right back.”

  With his good hand, he flipped a salute. As he did, she could see the yellow caking of pus where it leaked from the bound wound and permeated the binding.

  Then she turned, took a deep breath, and started forward at a weary trot. The days of travel had taken their toll. While they’d eaten along the way, much of the food they scavenged hadn’t been nutritious, and the rations short. Not all of the proteins and fats in Donovan’s wildlife were digestible in the human gut. At least not without supplemental enzymes to break them down. Cheng was still working on that.

  She was tired. Stumbling.

  Mistakes happened when a person was in that condition.

  She’d proceeded for maybe ten minutes.

  The only warning was the quetzal inside her, hissing an alert.

  She barely managed to stop, clawing for her rifle as the rocks seemed to erupt, rising, spreading.

  Freeze!

  She stopped short, paralyzed as a quetzal arose from the trail before her and flared its collar in a brilliant scarlet and emerald blaze of color. The three eyes fixed on hers, the mouth wide as it shrilled a whistling challenge.

  Unthinking, Talina lowered herself, heart pounding. The beast inside took control, locking her muscles, hissing and swelling in her gut.

  Towering over her, the quetzal cocked its head, the three eyes fixed on hers. Rocking on its powerful back legs, it craned its head down to her level, the serrated jaws agape, inches from hers as it peered into her eyes.

  Talina struggled to draw breath. The beast inside her squirmed.

  And in that instant, she realized she couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. The only sensation was fear and her heart pounding panic and terror through her chest.

  She would have screamed, would have thrown herself back as the quetzal’s tongue whipped past her parted lips and darted around the inside of her mouth.

  She was beyond surprise, terror-locked. Saliva began flowing. The alien flickers of movement inside her cheeks and around her tongue triggered her gag response, turned her stomach.

  It seemed an eternity—then the quetzal’s whiplike tongue flashed back between the beast’s jaws.

  Talina’s lungs spasmed, drawing breath. Her muscles released and went lax. She barely caught herself before collapsing. Reflexively she spit, clearing her mouth. She made a face as the astringent taste, powerful—like concentrated peppermint extract—filled her mouth. Again she spit. All the while, she stared at the looming quetzal through fearful eyes.

  The beast shimmered in white and gray stripes as it exhaled in a purring sound filled with curiosity. The three eyes gleamed as the collar retracted and the beast turned away. She watched it step to the side. Toss its head in the direction she’d been going, as if gesturing her on her way.

  Talina, muscles shivering, struggled to keep her feet. She carefully hitched up her shoulder, shrugging the rifle sling back in place.

  The quetzal issued a hollow whistling as if in approval.

  “My man is back there,” she told the beast and pointed back the way she’d come. “He’s hurt. You understand? Armed. Leave him alone.”

  The quetzal tilted its head toward the trail again, as if trying to signal an idiot.

  Talina veered wide, then backed her way down the trail. When she started again for Briggs’, the quetzal padded along behind her for a ways, then angled off the trail headed west. One minute she could make it out as it passed between the trees. The next it had vanished.

  “What the fuck?” she asked herself again and again. “And what’s with the tongue in the mouth?”

  Knowing.

  “Yeah, sure. Knowing.”

  And then she smelled wood smoke. Periodically turning her head to the side to hawk and spit, she forced herself to a hard trot.

  Cap was dying behind her, and a fucking French-kissing quetzal was prowling on the loose. She didn’t know if she should be terrified or amazed.

  51

  The world kept shimmering in Cap’s fevered gaze. Capella burned down from a sere and scorching sky. The cracked stone he sat against tortured his back. And damn, did his arm ever ache and throb. He grinned wryly, amused with himself. It could have been worse. He could have been out in the direct sun instead of propped here in the shade of the aquajade tree.

  Cap’s water bottle was long empty. He shook Talina’s. Heard the slight splash of the liquid remaining. How much? A swallow or two?

  His mouth had already gone dry, his throat cramped and sticking.

  He blinked and squinted out at the too-blue vegetation with its weird leaves that moved in time to the hot breeze. The chime rose and fell, musical. What a curiously odd world this was that he’d come to die on.

  “Talina will be coming,” he whispered through cracked lips. “Hell of a woman, Talina.”

  He closed his eyes, floating in blackness. The sensation was so similar. He’d felt it before. In his vacuum suit. Back in Solar System. They left marines out there adrift and weightless in the black for a twenty-four hour stretch. One of the final tests before being certified for space duty. Lots of people couldn’t stand it. Went crazy, screaming, pissing themselves in panic at the loneliness, the lack of feeling.

  Cap had loved it. Thought it one of the most magical events of his life as he hung there marveling at the distant dot of the sun.

  Floating.

  He blinked, eyes gritty as he pried them open to stare out at the musk bush and thorncactus. How long had he been out?

  He tried to judge Capella’s movement, estimate how far the shadows had moved, but couldn’t remember their location when he saw them last.

  “Not doing well,” he whispered. With his good hand he raised Talina’s water bottle, glanced around as the chime rose and fell again. Did he dare drink?

  His thoughts were muzzy.

  How long would Talina be? How far to the Briggs’ place?

  He chuckled dryly.

  Did it even matter?

  He lifted the water bottle to his lips and drained the last of the tepid water. God, it felt wondrous as it rolled over his thick tongue.

  Cap shifted, trying to ease his back where the stone felt like it was chewing a hole in his hide.

  Then he glanced up. Froze.

  In the tree across from him, a boy sat in a fork of the lower branches. A brown boy. He wore a dirty brown shirt
and ragged pants—all tailored from chamois. Cap would have categorized the kid’s skin tones as dark tan, and a shock of thick hair the color of old oak rose from the kid’s head. A coiled rope made of what looked like braided leather was draped diagonally across his chest. An oversized knife hung from the boy’s belt.

  Cap started to smile. Hell, yes, he was fevered. Delusional. Figures that Donovan would kill him slowly and fill his head with hallucinations.

  “You real?” he asked, half expecting the apparition to disappear with a pop.

  “What happened to you?” the boy asked, his voice filled with accent.

  “Skewer.”

  “You alone?”

  “No. Talina. She’s going to Briggs’.”

  The boy cocked his head. Seemed to be thinking. “Quetzal out there.”

  “She’s dealt with quetzals before.” That made him smile. Had there ever been a woman like Talina?

  “You don’t look too good.”

  Cap chuckled to himself. “No. Probably not.”

  “Dying?”

  “Yeah. I feel like shit.”

  “I’ll see if they are coming.”

  The boy’s eyes seemed to expand, then his image shimmered. Cap’s heart had started to hammer in his chest. Nausea tickled at the base of his throat. He took a deep breath, trying to still the floating sensation. Sweat was trickling down his face, his body roasting inside his skin.

  He closed his eyes. Panted deep breaths to cool his lungs.

  When he got control, he blinked. Stared around.

  Yeah, he was still on Donovan. Back propped in the rocks.

  Then he remembered the boy. Looked across at the tree opposite him. No boy perched in the fork of the branches.

  “Must be losing my mind,” he whispered to himself.

  He would die here.

  It would be all right.

  52

  Freelander pulsed and hummed, powerful vibrations running through the deck beneath Kalico’s feet as she leaned over Zak Chan’s shoulder and stared at the holographic display. They were in Freelander’s engineering control room down near the spindle. Kalico hated the weightless feeling that made her clumsy.

  Hated being on Freelander even more.

  This ship scares the freaking hell out of me.

  Chan sat at the control console, his head covered in a translucent interface-helmet that interacted with his implants. It allowed him to virtually think and feel the ship’s systems.

  At that moment he was projecting a stream of data from Freelander’s sensors.

  “What am I supposed to be seeing?” Kalico asked. “And why did I have to drag myself over here from Turalon?”

  “That’s just the thing, Madam Supervisor. It won’t transmit past Freelander’s hull.” Chan turned his head, staring up at her through the transparency. “You have to be here.”

  “Why? What am I seeing?”

  “These mathematics.” He pointed to a column of numbers glowing light green in the projected data. Chan blocked them. Bolded the color. And then, to her amazement, pulled a recorder from his pocket and essentially took an old-time photograph of the data block.

  “What did you just do?”

  Chan took a deep breath, as if to reassure himself. “I’m hoping I can take the image with me. Physically. When I leave Freelander.”

  Kalico snapped, “I don’t understand, Zak. Tell me—in simple terms—why I’m back on this godforsaken wreck, and why you’re acting so weird.”

  Zak smiled uneasily as he waved at the streams of data that now scrolled. “Sorry, ma’am. But it’s a little complicated. Now watch. Here. See this sequence? Wait. In about forty-five seconds, you’re going to see it start all over again. It’s a loop, ma’am. Like the sensor array kept recording the same data over and over as Freelander was reversing symmetry.”

  He made a face, hands palm out to communicate the seriousness of his words. “I think that wherever Freelander went, it brought some of that universe back with it.”

  “With it, how?”

  “Like a bubble, ma’am. No, scratch that. Like a ghost of a bubble? A sort of shadow. Or a taint. A vestige of that universe, and it’s still clinging to the ship.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “So is Freelander vanishing for one hundred and twenty-nine years during a two-year period in our time-space.” He looked up. “And, ma’am. This ship gives people the creepy crawlies. They see things that aren’t there. Sometimes people. Phantom movements. I’m still not sure that Freelander is completely fixed in our universe.”

  He waved a hand at the scrolling projection of mathematics. “Like why I can’t send these data to Turalon. There’s no logical explanation, but try as I might, I can’t copy them and transmit them to Turalon. It’s like they don’t exist on the other side of this ship’s hull.”

  “There’s got to be another explanation.”

  Chan shrugged. “I’ll have a better idea if I can get that photograph to Turalon. But, ma’am, I’m not smart enough to solve this. It’s going to have to be the brains back in Solar System.”

  She glanced around at the small room. “Could we space her back?”

  Behind the helmet’s transparency, Chan’s face turned grim. “She might just go back to whatever universe she came from. Maybe she’d make it fine. Maybe she’d pop out in Solar System in another one hundred and twenty years. Maybe she’d go wherever . . . and stay there. Like in the old saying, we’re way off the map here. Meanwhile, I’m going to play with some of the energy levels in the reactors and see if I can get a reading.”

  “All right. Keep me informed.” God, she hated every second she was aboard this damned ship.

  She turned, palmed the hatch, and mindful of the reduced angular acceleration, left the claustrophobic little room with its consoles and projectors.

  Freelander carried a bubble from another universe?

  Kalico tried to get her head around it. Most physicists accepted that time—as a thing—didn’t exist. That the universe functioned in an eternal now, that what humans perceived of as time was nothing more than changing relationships between particles.

  She need only access her implant and the mathematical proofs would run in her head. But what did that mean in the real world? It wasn’t the first time that equational gymnastics proved that ultimate reality was different from human perception. It didn’t help her solve her dilemma about what to do with Freelander.

  The ship began to hum louder. Chan playing with the reactors, no doubt.

  A queasy sensation ran through her bones, tickled the pit of her stomach. She stopped short, gritted her teeth, and tensed. Either her eyes tricked her, or the light changed, smeared, and slipped sideways.

  In that instant, Kalico stepped reflexively to the side, making way for the person who suddenly appeared striding down the corridor. In that instant, the woman brushed through her left arm. A feeling—the same feeling Kalico had experienced the day they broke into astrogation—sent a shiver through her. Like a wind that blew through her body instead of against it.

  She caught but a glimpse as the light slipped back into place and solidified. The corridor seemed to dim, reestablishing itself. Kalico staggered sideways into the wall, frantic to feel it solid and cold to the touch beneath her fingers.

  She took a deep breath. Heart pounding.

  An empty corridor met her panicked gaze as she glanced back toward engineering. The phantom figure had vanished. Gone.

  Kalico’s heart continued to race. A cold shiver ran down across her skin, lifting her hair.

  In that glance, as she had brushed past, she’d recognized the person. Kalico had seen herself as she had been when she strode down this corridor on the way to keep her appointment with Zak Chan.

  53

  As far as places to live went, Talina had always thought
that Chaco and Madison Briggs had one of the most amazing dwellings. The living quarters were built into the canyon’s side where Chaco had walled off recesses in the old lava tubes. From the windows the spectacular view was of a four-hundred-foot waterfall cascading down a sheer cliff of uplifted metamorphic bedrock. The geologic layers glistened in pink, white, and black bands of once-plastic strata. Below the cliff house the river churned along its bed in the rocky gorge.

  From the main room a chiseled-stone stairway led fifty feet up to the flats above, where gardens of squash, cabbage, corn, beans, peppers, artichokes, peas, and the inevitable prickly pear cactus flourished in the rich volcanic soil. Chaco and the boys had built several storage buildings and equipment sheds, and it was to one of these that they had wheeled Cap.

  “Thought I saw a boy,” Cap kept repeating in his delirium. “Brown boy.”

  “Probably Tip,” Chaco told him as he and Talina eased Cap from the two-wheeled cart to a makeshift bed they’d set up in the toolshed. It would have been too much trouble to haul Cap down the staircase to the main house.

  Chaco had that sturdy back-country look to him: muscular, skin tanned to a hue mindful of age-stained walnut. His black beard glistened beneath a triangular nose and sharp, dark eyes. The man’s long hair was what would be called sandy.

  Standing back by the door, Madison cradled her newborn daughter in the crook of her arm, lips pinched with concern as she studied Cap’s wounded arm and took in his half-focused eyes. The baby had come in the confusion over pickup times, born without issue after a five-hour labor.

  Donovan had a sense of humor. Turned out Cap and Talina’s trip had all been for nothing.

  Talina laid a hand on Cap’s forehead. Damn. She didn’t like his color, either.

  “It will be a bit yet for the sedative to take effect,” Madison reminded Talina as she shifted the baby girl to her left breast. “It’s best now if he just gets some rest.”

  Madison stood a little more than six feet, muscular, with ebony skin, medium brown eyes, and long, silky-rich black hair. For someone who just had a baby, the woman moved with a sultry grace. The unusual angles of her face, the high cheeks and slanted eyes, gave her an exotic look. Talina had always thought Madison Briggs was one of the most beautiful women she’d ever seen.