An Oath of Dogs

by Wendy N. Wagner

  “You OK?” Niketa leaned in, her bright eyes concerned.

  Standish wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “Just getting choked up from all this welcome wagon excitement.” She could see Niketa trying to work out whether or not Standish was being a bitch and reminded herself HR was in charge of benefits and staff housing. “I’m just really looking forward to starting work. Especially since the position has changed since I applied.”

  “Good.” Niketa gave her another measuring look. “Good. Well, Joe and Brett will get you settled in. I’ll have paperwork for you later.”

  Then people were saying goodbye and refilling her coffee cup. A second pastry appeared in her hand just as Joe Holder and Brett, the security guard, waved her toward the staircase. Her knees felt wobbly, probably because of too much coffee and too much friendliness. She held the pastry in her teeth and gripped the handrail tight.

  The hallway below had the homely smell of cleaning supplies and burned popcorn, and every surface looked worn, as if scrubbed within an inch of its life for the course of fifteen or twenty years. There was nothing shiny to be seen. Clerestory windows let in some light, suggesting that in the time she’d met the office, Wodin had taken its big shadow and gone to bed for the day.

  “Gonna clear off this afternoon,” Joe announced. “Won’t be long until the dry season, and then you’ll see why we stick around the rest of the year.”

  “Dry season?” In the endless damp of the previous day, she had almost forgotten there was one.

  “It’s only about five weeks, but it’s the best five weeks of the year,” Brett agreed. “Sunshine all day, every day.”

  “Dry clothes, blue skies, and the sun twinkling on the lake? This place is paradise.” Joe chuckled.

  “Sounds… wonderful.” She hadn’t counted on open skies so soon. This was going to be harder than she’d expected, even with Hattie’s comforting presence.

  “Here we are,” Brett announced. He stepped forward to unlock the door. The little placard on it read “Kate Standish, Communications Engineer.” A clean spot above it suggested a similar placard had only recently been removed.

  Joe frowned at it. “Should read ‘Communications Manager,’ of course. We’ll get that fixed right away. There was just so much to do after Duncan… well, you understand.”

  The door swung open. Brett passed Standish not a key card, but an old-fashioned metal key. She tried to remember if she had ever used such a thing.

  “Power outages,” he explained. “Hardly anyone wants to get locked out of their office.”

  “Or in it,” Joe added. The comment had the rehearsed quality of a joke, but he didn’t laugh. He had stopped just inside the doorway, staring at the set of wooden pegs set into the wall. A battered hat hung from one, a set of binoculars from another, and beside them the kind of heavy rain jacket oldtimers called a “tin coat.” “God, I should have cleaned out this place.”

  He looked pale and unhappy. Standish felt a surprising surge of feeling for the man. It was an unenviable position, dealing with the dead.

  “I’ll do it,” she said. “It’ll help me get to know the place. Is there anyone I should send his personal items to?”

  Joe shook his head. “No family. Peter Bajowski took care of most of Dunc’s things. They went way back. Friends on Earth, even.”

  Peter Bajowksi had been friends with Chambers. She filed that away for later. She turned a slow circle, looking around the office. A tiny desk sat in the corner, utterly bare and still showing the dull gloss of freshly printed plastic. A couple of uncomfortable plastic and wire chairs had been dragged in front of a much larger wooden desk, which hulked in the middle of the room with every surface covered in papers and tools and snippets of wire. She had her work cut out for her, she could see.

  Joe cleared his throat. “All your sign-ins should have been sent to your hand unit by now. A fella came from Space City last week to catch up on some of the work orders, but I imagine there are plenty of service requests backed up already. The door to the motor pool is just down the hall, if you want to drive out to any maintenance requests. But we told folks not to expect you for a day or two. Give you chance to find everything.”

  “Thank you.” Standish couldn’t look away from the desk. It was daunting, completely daunting. And if the desk was like this, what would the tool shed look like?

  “Anything you need, you just ask.” Brett shot her a wink. The men left her to the disaster of her office.

  Standish sank into the padded desk chair. Hattie sat down at her feet. A dust bunny clung to the black tip of her nose, giving her a disheveled air.

  “I’ve got to get you a dog bed in here. This afternoon, all right?” She dug in her pack for the food and water dishes she’d stowed away.

  The door opened.

  “I’ve got all your paperwork, Kate.”

  “Standish. Please.”

  Niketa Shawl gave a charming shake of the head. “I’ll catch on in no time.” She folded herself into the chair beside the desk and began setting out stacks of paper. “We keep hard copies of everything, just in case. Here’s your tax info, housing details and repair line info, motor pool instructions — sign here, please — security details, oh, and a map of Space City, if you ever head out there. Which of course you will, because Canaan Lake only has a clinic, and all your regular health care will be handled in the city. I threw in a list of psychiatrists, too, so you can get your meds set up right away. You’ve got a good supply right now, don’t you?”

  Standish thought of the past-dated box she’d tossed out before she landed at the spaceport. “Sure.”

  “Good. We will need a note from your new psychiatrist within sixty days. You remember that from your hiring session back on Earth.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then that’s all set. You can drop the paperwork into my mailbox by the kitchenette.” Niketa sprang to her feet. “I just know we’re going to love having you on board, Ka… Standish.”

  “Good catch.”

  Niketa smiled. “See you soon, then!” She hurried out the door, as if she had a thousand other employees to badger about their tax or health insurance situation. Maybe she did. Songheuser was a big company.

  Standish waited for Niketa’s footsteps to fade away before kicking the toe of her boot into the side of the desk, knocking over a stack of junk and bursting open a drawer. “Corporate b.s. is the same across the galaxy.” She eyed the top of the desk. “How am I supposed to work like this, Hattie?”

  She finished opening the drawer she’d kicked. It looked as if technology had gone to die in there. Who still used pens or a stapler or fricking paper clips? She shook her head and opened the next drawer. White plastic boxes filled it. She pulled out one, which proved to be full of smaller boxes, each containing scraps of wire separated by grade. She opened another bin and found neatly sorted boxes of plastic connectors, frowning. The kitchen cupboards in her house had been just the same, the different snacks sorted and labeled, everything in its own careful place. The disaster of the top of the desk seemed strangely out of character for Duncan Chambers.

  But what did she know? Maybe he’d had some kind of personality disorder, compulsively neat at one moment and messy the next. Or maybe his substitute had messed up the desk as they tried to figure out Chambers’ filing situation. Her first order of business was to get all the junk out of her way before it drove her insane.

  Given her assignment to find a new shrink, the thought felt like a stab of dark humor. She grabbed a handful of papers and carried it over to the smaller desk. Scraps of paper dropped like snow from the heap.

  Hattie curled up in the corner and watched Standish with unhappy eyes. She didn’t like disorder any more than Standish did.

  Standish stooped to rub the dog’s ears. “Don’t worry, Hattie. All of this is going to get sorted out in a couple of days.” She picked up a paper scrap that had landed by Hattie’s paw. The bold handwriting caught her eye.

&nbs
p; To do: conduit, sector 13. Enough for school project? Che

  Part of the “e” and the rest of the word were gone.

  She turned slowly, still holding the note. “Sector 13.” Behind the desk, a large, simplified survey map showed the area, the town and farms strung out along the side of the lake and the creek that fed it like beads on a winding string. Sector 13 was just about the ass-end of nowhere, an undeveloped tract tucked behind a stretch of Believers’ farms. There ought not be any kind of conduit out there; from the general map, there weren’t any houses or farms or even cell towers out there. The company hadn’t even put in any access roads. She checked the bookshelf and found a binder full of more detailed maps, but Sector 13’s was missing.

  “Jesus Christ, Hattie.” She put the binder away and sank into the desk chair. “It’s a good thing Duncan Chambers got himself killed before I arrived, because otherwise I would have had to do it. What a disaster.”

  Hattie stretched and wagged her tail and laid back down. Standish watched her a moment, envious. Then she picked up a stack of papers and began flipping through them, doing her job.

  PETER SLAMMED the hood of the UTV down over the fresh battery pack. He had six hours of charge in there, and if he wanted to make it home tonight, he’d need to keep an eye on the levels. The forest canopy in Sector 12 was dense enough to defeat solar panels.

  “Bajowski!”

  He didn’t recognize the voice, but the anger in the man’s tone was palpable. With an inner wince, Peter turned to face the speaker. The face was vaguely familiar, his Mesoamerican heritage stamped as strongly as Peter’s own. Songheuser had offices throughout Earth’s solar system, but its presence was strongest in the North American Trade Federation.

  As familiar as he looked, the man was a stranger to Peter. Peter squared his shoulders. “Can I help you?”

  The man slapped his palm down on the hood of the cruiser. His arm cut off Peter’s path to the left, pushed him up against the driver’s side mirror. “Yeah. You give my kid’s bones to me, you stupid son of a bitch.”

  “Whoa.” Peter flung up his hands. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You turned in a bone to the sheriff yesterday. Now it’s in an evidence locker, instead of the ground. Why the fuck would you do that?”

  “What else would I do with human remains? I don’t know who they belong—” Peter broke off. He did know who that bone belonged to now that he was staring up at this man’s face. “You’re Luca Alvarez’s father. Oh, shit.”

  The man turned his face away. His shoulders sagged. “Yeah. My little boy.”

  It had been an ugly thing, that accident. The little boy tried to follow his father to work. Hanging off the back of the logging crew’s crummy in the dark before dawn, nobody saw him. Nobody knew he wasn’t safely at home until Matthias Williams brought the tiny crushed body into town on the back of his wagon. “I’m so sorry.”

  Alvarez blinked, hard. “Songheuser paid for four days of night guards in the cemetery. I couldn’t afford anything more. Would have stayed up there myself, but I gotta go to work. You know what that’s like, knowing I let my little boy get dug up by dogs?”

  Peter didn’t want to think about it, but he couldn’t keep the image out of his head: the tiny body wrapped in its shroud, the dogs ripping at the fabric. The boy had only been dead a week — long enough for rigor to subside, but not long enough for his face or body to have lost its shape and humanity. Deputy Wu had told Peter the bone he’d found was probably a human femur, its surface stripped clean. Peter could all too easily imagine how it got that way.

  “I’m sorry,” Peter repeated. “I didn’t know that had happened to Luca’s grave. I just wanted to do the right thing.”

  Alvarez looked at him, his eyes fever-bright. “You know, Frank’s gotten back about half of him. Do you think he only has half of his body up there in Heaven?”

  Peter reached out to the man, but Alvarez stumbled away. “I don’t think it works like that,” Peter said, although Alvarez showed no sign he heard.

  Peter opened the door and stared inside the truck, his heart heavy. He had no words of comfort for the grieving man.

  “Dogs eating dead kids. This place just gets more and more fucked up,” he muttered to himself. Shaking his head, he tossed his bag onto the passenger seat. A sandwich, his hand unit, and a stack of notes tumbled out.

  He gave the notes a hard look and then tapped the starter code into the UTV’s ignition. The spidery handwriting on the battered papers evoked the image of the man who had written them. Peter steered out onto the main road, only half-aware of his actions. Most of his mind was focused on the past, on the man who had disappeared a month and a half ago.

  “What were you doing out in Sectors 13 and 14, Duncan? And why is the company so interested in those sites right now?”

  He shook his head. He shouldn’t talk to himself, even if no one was around to catch him. The utility vehicle gave a little jolt as it left the smooth pavement of Canaan Lake proper and rolled onto the little-maintained access road headed into the far end of the valley. The first and oldest road built on Huginn, it looked its age. On a larger or older vehicle, the road’s jolting could throw Peter’s back out of alignment.

  Peter couldn’t help but wonder if the Alvarez kid’s accident could have been prevented by more regular road maintenance. He knew plenty of adults who could have barely held onto the back grill of a crew cab or UTV moving down this road. That someone had died didn’t surprise Peter.

  The thought felt disrespectful, and he immediately regretted it. But he still found himself scowling at the pole fence running beside the road. It was hard to get maintenance done on the roads out here when the Believers didn’t want heavy machinery going past their farms. The religious nuts didn’t believe in voting, but they had enough clout to discourage most voters from passing new property taxes.

  He realized he was clenching the steering wheel and forced himself to relax. He had known it wouldn’t be easy, living on Huginn. The wormhole connecting the two solar systems had made interstellar travel possible, but it hadn’t made it cheap, and the cost alone guaranteed a world dominated by groups with deep pockets. He’d been ready to deal with Songheuser and their half-dozen competitors, all scrabbling to find a way to turn the forest moon into a cash cow. He should have expected organized religion to follow suit. Hell, he had. But he’d grown up in Mexico, where the Catholic Church still held onto some of its ancient power. He couldn’t have been prepared for the presence of the Believers.

  One part reformed Anabaptist and two parts New Age mystic, the Believers in the Word Made Flesh lay outside his Earthly experience. It wasn’t until Peter landed on Huginn that he learned anything about the farming cult, and he wished he’d known what he was getting into before he arrived. Their quiet intractability was just as frustrating as the constant orders from Songheuser HQ. Both were more interested in their own plans than in studying the new world.

  A figure stepped out onto the road, and Peter had to slam his foot down on the brake. “Jesus Christ!”

  The dark-haired man in the road turned to stare at Peter. The Believer rubbed his bearded cheek absently, blinking like someone who had just come out of a dream. It took Peter a moment to recognize him without his flat straw hat.

  Peter rolled down the window. “Matthias? Are you all right?”

  “Pardon?”

  Duncan had always said Matthias Williams was the best of the Believers, but right now he seemed even weirder than the rest of the cultists, and that was saying a lot.

  “I’m sorry. I was just thinking about something on my way to check on the sheep.” Williams said. “Phenomenology,” he added, as if Pete had asked.

  “You lost your hat.” Peter frowned. The man, although close to Peter’s age, reminded him a little too closely of his grandmother when she’d first developed Alzheimer’s — the distracted expression, the weird comments. He hesitated. “Do you want me to drive you some
place? Maybe you should see a doctor.”

  “No, no, I’m fine.” Williams smiled. “I’ll just head home and write down this thought. Sorry to bother you.”

  He waved and stepped away from the UTV. Peter thought about pressing the man, but instead rolled up the window with a sense of relief. He didn’t want to spend the next hour in Williams’s company, sitting with him in the clinic while the usual throng of sick kids and injured loggers made their fuss. The Believer would certainly mouth some kind of pithy platitude about the mysterious ways of God, and Peter would want to strangle him, and at the end of the day, Peter would almost certainly come away with a cold.

  He glanced in his rearview mirror as he pulled away. The Believer was still standing on the shoulder of the road, the lost expression back on his face. Peter squelched a feeling of unease and kept driving.

  When the Believers arrived on Huginn, they brought an array of remarkably sophisticated biological tools with them, understanding as perhaps no other group before or since that humanity could not flourish on a world devoid of terrestrial fungal and bacterial allies. Humans are as dependent upon invertebrates, fungi, and bacteria as they are upon air and water.

  — from “Huginn: A Fungal Future,” Peter Bajowski, PhD, in NATURE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  STANDISH DROPPED to her knees and squinted into the darkness under her bed. “You just had to roll your ball under here, didn’t you.” She finally caught a glimpse of the yellow thing, which had managed to find the farthest, dustiest corner. “Stay back, Hattie.” She grabbed the bottom corners of the bed. It was surprisingly easy to move, probably all lightweight plastic and cellulose fiber. Every centimeter of the planet was covered in wood, but the stuff was too damned valuable to justify using in mere employee housing.