An Oath of Dogs

by Wendy N. Wagner

  Standish realized she was still sitting and scrambled to her feet. “Ms Wallace. It’s an honor to have you here.”

  The woman stepped around Holder. She was older than she’d looked at a distance; the blond tones in her hair artfully subdued the strands of silver. Every last inch of her was coiffed and polished, but she’d made no effort to erase the lines around her eyes and mouth. In her blue pantsuit, she looked more military than society, and Standish knew that was just the impression Victoria Wallace wished to cast.

  “You’ve been in communications a long time, haven’t you, Standish? I’ve heard good things from the folks at Goddard and Pescano stations.”

  Standish had almost forgotten she’d worked on Pescano. Most of the things that had happened to her after Goddard and before Earth had passed in a haze of tequila.

  Standish found herself shaking Wallace’s hand. If Holder was Standish’s boss and this woman was his, then ultimately Wallace was the one signing Standish’s paycheck. She hoped like hell her hand didn’t have kibble crumbs all over it.

  “Let me show you the motor pool,” Holder said, and the herd squeezed back out the door, their voices rumbling in the low-ceilinged hallway.

  Niketa cleared her throat. “Standish, I’d like to talk to you about something.”

  They were alone.

  “Sure, shoot.”

  Niketa eased the door shut. “I’m sure you understand that the safety of COO Wallace is our number one concern right now.”

  Standish nodded.

  “I know you spend a lot of time off campus. The whole community sends you work orders.”

  “Well, we are the only communications provider out here.”

  Tension came off Niketa in waves. Standish cleared her throat and tried to look attentive.

  “I like your sense of humor, Standish. I also like you. I know you’ve been through a lot in the past five years, and that the company has really stepped up to help you through it.”

  Standish thought of Dewey’s warning and felt her own tension level shoot up. “I’ve been lucky like that.”

  “I’m just asking you to keep an eye on things out there. If you hear anything — if you see anything out of the ordinary—”

  “I got it. If I see something, say something. The whole planet’s worried about ecoterrorists.”

  “Moon,” Niketa corrected. “Huginn’s not a planet.”

  The pedantry stiffened Standish’s back. “Right.”

  Niketa reached for the door knob and paused, turning back to meet Standish’s eyes. “And Standish, if you could pay special attention to Peter Bajowski, that would be a great help.”

  She closed the door behind her.

  Standish stood in place for a moment. Her ribs felt tight. It was hard to breathe. It was one thing when the town gossip started talking about Peter, but when the company wanted her to play the spy? And they had an axe to grind for Peter? For a second she thought about sticking her head out the door and telling Niketa to go to hell, but she’d have to breathe to do that.

  Hattie nudged her in the leg, and Standish dropped to her knees. Hattie pushed her face close to Standish’s, sniffing at her nose and mouth, her big dark eyes concerned. “Shit, shit, shit,” Standish whispered.

  There was right and there was wrong and there was self-preservation, and she didn’t know how to make them all come together. It was like one of those build-it-yourself kits, the little ones that had first taught her about electronics and wiring — they had all the parts, but sometimes, no matter how closely she read the directions, she couldn’t figure out how to put them together. She could stand up to Songheuser and lose everything, or she could just let them keep steamrolling over good people like the fuckers they were.

  She drew in deep breaths of doggish air until she could stand up again. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know who to trust. But she did know that there was a box in her house that Duncan Chambers had tried to hide, and it was full of secrets Songheuser didn’t want told.

  No species evolves in a vacuum. All living organisms develop in relationship with the beings around them, and those relationships are often complex. Rarely do two species have merely symbiotic or parasitic interactions, or serve simply as predator or prey.

  — ECOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTORY TEXT, Dr Peter Bajowski

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PETER GOT an early start on Saturday, heading out to Sector 12 with his breakfast in his pocket and mug of coffee wedged between the window and the dash. It went without saying that security and ops had all the good UTVs. He hoped like hell he didn’t spill coffee all over his lap and cook his nuts off. This week had been bad enough without personal injury.

  Once he passed the last of the houses, he unwrapped a granola bar and bit off half. This whole week, he’d felt as if every eye in town had been fixed on him, waiting for him to make some kind of mistake or just crack under the pressure. His only comfort was the fact that Sheriff Vargas hadn’t sent for him yet. Local gossip might have him pegged as a terrorist and a murderer, but there didn’t seem to be any kind of proof connecting him to the crimes.

  He should have never dated Niketa Shawl. He’d fit in just fine here before he’d taken up with that woman; he was just another company guy, the sort of unmemorable figure that was welcomed on the softball team but forgotten for Happy Hour invites. Stuffy, stodgy, uninteresting Peter Bajowski. He couldn’t imagine why a classy chick like Niketa had ever gotten interested in him in the first place, let alone freaked out about commitment and forced him to dump her in the ugliest manner possible.

  The road came to an end and he parked the UTV. He finished the coffee. Of course he had a hunch what Niketa had seen in him: his degree from Oxford. Once people learned about it, they made plenty of assumptions about the size of his bank account and the gilt on his family tree. Nobody looked at an Oxford diploma and thought of a working class family with Guatemalan coffee farmers and Polish immigrants as their roots, even though Peter’s last name ought to give away half of that. Niketa had wanted those old-Earth connections, all the polish and class she’d never gotten bouncing from Luna to Ganymede to Huginn.

  His boots shushed over fallen horsetail fronds, and his thoughts about Earth and gossip began to fade into the back of his mind, then vanish altogether. None of it mattered when he was out here. He wasn’t in the field to test Songheuser’s compound — he’d gotten that taken care of yesterday afternoon, applying the stuff to two test sites.

  No, this was his own project, because he realized that nothing else really mattered besides his research. Learning how this forest worked. Nailing down what connected all these wild and weird species. Back on Earth, even as a child he’d had a solid grasp of the water and nitrogen cycles, but in a hundred years no one had studied what made the nutrients go round here on Huginn. The leather birds ate the tree scooters. The tree scooters ate the lichens and horsetail fronds. Or at least that’s what everyone assumed. Peter had never seen a tree scooter nibbling on a horsetail. In fact, he’d never seen one eat. He ought to start more terrariums and study the creatures more closely. But which species to select and what to put in their tank were difficult details.

  The ground began to slope upward, the bedrock showing through the thin soil in some places. The tendril of a stream followed the folds of the stone, although in places the Christ’s fingers and rain palms obscured the waterway entirely. Even here, where it rained for over forty-three of the year’s forty-eight weeks, water drew life to itself.

  Up ahead a huge candelabra tree had toppled over, and Peter hurried forward, excited.

  He scrambled over a limb the thickness of his waist, noting the healthy canopy, the still-green pseudo ferns clinging to its branches and the smaller orchid-like plants clinging to the seams where branches met with the trunk. The life forms hidden in this tree hadn’t had a chance to wither from their fall from the clouds; they couldn’t have landed on the relatively dry ground more than a day ago. There was still a chance he
’d find tree scooter nests in the root bole.

  Where the tree had once spread itself into the thin clay soil, it was as if a great hand had scooped out the earth. He hopped down into the hollow, aware of the pungent smell of broken roots and crushed vegetation.

  Fuzzy pink tree scooters scurried up the walls of the pit, pausing occasionally to grab hunks of the white strands of mycelium in the exposed soil. He picked up one of the little creatures. This was a medium-sized scooter, about the size of a mouse, with a pair of glossy black eyes and a many-segmented body covered with spiky fur. Its stomach was only lightly fuzzed. It twitched one of its slender, delicate antennae.

  At least one entomologist had theorized that the tree scooters lived in a hive-like society with the kind of rigid caste system seen in ants and bees. The same species showed morphological differences that supported such a notion — the kinds of scooters seen away from their nest usually had short, thick antennae and densely furred bodies. This one must perform some sort of duty inside the nest.

  It wriggled in his grip and he set it carefully on a rock. It rubbed its forelegs over its head and flanks as if to wash away the feeling of his fingers and then hurried on its way.

  Excited, he followed the line of scooters to a fist-sized opening in the wall. Several of the delicate-feelered scooters zipped out the opening. They paused when they felt the carbon dioxide of his breath upon their bodies and then moved quickly away.

  A larger scooter emerged, moving more slowly as it used its foreleg to hold something green on its back. Peter leaned in closer and realized there was a small, motionless caterpillar tucked into the tufts of the scooter’s fur. He was almost certain it was the same variety as the one in his office. The pattern of spots on its side was familiar; the soft, moist body identical. For a moment, Peter thought the caterpillar might be dead, a meal to be moved to the new nest. But then he saw the legs twitch a little, digging their little hooked feet deeper into the tree scooter’s fur.

  It wasn’t being carried. It was riding the tree scooter with the scooter’s help.

  Another scooter came out of the hole, similarly burdened with a caterpillar, and then another. Another burdened scooter emerged more slowly, trudging along until it came to a broken bit of root. Then the scooter stopped and held still. To Peter, who could rarely resist anthropomorphizing animals despite his training, it looked totally wiped out.

  He held his breath as the smaller tree scooter approached the tired-looking one. Here was his chance to observe tree scooter societal behavior. He trained his hand unit’s camera on the pair.

  The new arrival pressed its first two pairs of legs against the body of the green caterpillar, its legs flickering up and down the insect’s sides. Peter zoomed in with his camera.

  A green bubble, tiny, no larger than a pin head, began to extrude from the caterpillar’s back end. The little scooter whisked the bubble away and carried it to the tired scooter’s mouth. For a second, nothing happened. Then a black threadlike tongue shot out of the larger scooter’s mouth. The bubble vanished into its mouth. Then both tree scooters hurried on their way, the larger moving with noticeably more energy.

  Peter sat back on his heels, awed. This kind of behavior happened all the time on Earth. Ants kept aphids for just this purpose, and if he remembered right, there were even some species of butterfly that kept a similar arrangement with ants. But these weren’t ants.

  And more importantly, this wasn’t Earth.

  Somehow, a symbiotic relationship had developed between two species from entirely different solar systems, creatures that until now he had assumed didn’t share enough biological similarities to serve even as prey and predator. He was seeing something entirely new, something that no human had witnessed in the whole galaxy. He was seeing the possibility of Earth creatures and Huginn creatures finding a way to live together in something like harmony.

  He reached in his field bag for a plastic specimen box. He had to find out what these caterpillars turned into. If he was lucky — really lucky — he might have found Olive’s butterflies.

  STANDISH RAPPED on the Whitleys’ door, noticing more of the details than the last time she’d stopped by. A little wreath hung on the battered plastic door, a bunch of twisted grasses with dried lichens and flowers woven into it. She wondered if it was Olive’s work. The door swung open.

  “Kate.” Melissa Whitley looked relieved. “So glad you made it out so quickly. Today’s the day I send videos to my parents. They’re so hungry for news about Olive.”

  “That’s grandparents for you.”

  “They love her, but they don’t really understand her. I think the videos help.” Melissa hesitated. “Olive isn’t like other kids they know.”

  “She’s awfully mature for her age.”

  “Yes, that’s part of it. The other part is… I don’t know. Sometimes I think Olive is more connected to the trees and the ferns out there than she is to people. Sometimes I catch her talking to them.”

  Standish shifted uncomfortably. “I think it’s normal for kids her age to identify with plants and animals.”

  She didn’t want Melissa Whitley to think of Olive as a weirdo. The kid was strange enough, she needed her mom to have her back, to see her as a kid, even if the rest of the world told her she was some kind of nature spirit. Hell, Standish herself sometimes thought Olive seemed more like an elf than a normal kid. But that didn’t mean her mom should.

  “Maybe that’s it. I just can’t help thinking I shouldn’t have read her all those fairy stories when she was little. When we first moved here, she missed her grandparents, she was afraid of all the trees and the rain. I had this book of Swedish fairy tales, and I’d just read them to her over and over, because they made her happy.” Melissa paused. “But after a few months, it was like she started turning into something from the stories. She got so pale and so focused on plants and animals. She wanted to be outside all the time, wandering wherever she wants.

  “Sometimes I look at her and I think being here on Huginn has made her more like a little vätte than a little girl.”

  “A vätte?”

  “A forest spirit.”

  “Look, moving is hard for kids. She liked the stories, that’s all. And she got excited about living here. It’s not some magical transformation. She’s a kid.”

  “You don’t get it. When I say Olive changed, I don’t just mean that her behavior changed. She physically changed to look like the illustrations in her books. Olive had blonde hair and blue eyes before we moved here. She had freckles. Now look at her.”

  Standish opened her mouth and closed it. Olive did look… odd. Her white hair and near-black eyes were strange for anyone. But what Melissa was talking about was impossible. Standish had a rational thought. “Hair color can change in response to minerals in the water and eyes are sometimes affected by the quality of light. And cryo — well, that’s got to have some kind of effect on a kid’s body.”

  Melissa gave a weak laugh. “That’s true. Maybe I’m reading more into this than I ought to. Maybe she would have turned out like this even if we’d stayed home.”

  It was past time to change the subject. “Where’s home?”

  “Ganymede. My folks went out there for the mines, but wound up in the greenhouses. You want a coffee?”

  Standish couldn’t imagine thinking of Ganymede’s domes as home. There was no atmosphere there to block out the stars. And given the misty look in Melissa’s eye she got from talking about the place, Standish had a feeling she wanted to continue that line of the conversation. “No thanks — I want to wrap this up so I can take the rest of the day off.”

  “Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry. I would have waited to report it until—”

  Standish cut her off. “It’s no problem, Melissa. I was looking for some overtime, and I’d rather help out your family than catch up on my filing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Olive’s mother looked so concerned Standish had to laugh. “Yes, really. How
long has the cable been out?”

  “Since late evening, I guess. When I came back from work, Judd had left me a note. He already checked the box and the line running along the side of the house and didn’t see anything.”

  “Well, I’ll check it again, just to be sure. But it’s probably something farther down the line.” On Earth or even one of the stations, rats were the biggest culprits in cable outages. But most of the problems she’d seen on Huginn came from lines eroded by lichen or from plain human stupidity, like the time the mill’s groundskeeper cut the south office block’s cable bundle with his weed eater. The idiot was lucky he hadn’t electrocuted himself.

  Melissa led Standish and Hattie around the side of the house. This was the last property on the cable line running down this street; since no one else had called in for service, the problem had to be located fairly close by. Standish slid on her thick work gloves and smiled at her guide. “It’ll probably take me a few minutes to check the line. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Standish followed the cable from its entrance point in the house and then down to the ground, where it ran into a sturdy black plastic pipe. On Earth, most home lines ran to the roof and then out to a utility pole. Here on Huginn, half-assery prevailed. If she had a dollar for every wire conduit some construction worker had just dropped on the dirt, she’d have given herself a hefty raise already. If she didn’t find the problem at the juncture with the street’s main cable line, then she’d have to pull the wires out of the conduit and deep clean the whole thing. Not her favorite activity, but at least she wouldn’t be doing it in some dirty alley or air duct. Even in the rain, Canaan Lake was the prettiest place she’d ever worked.

  “Stay put, Hattie.” The conduit ran down a slope of fist-sized rocks, most covered in rock-eater lichen and shrouded in button ferns, before dropping into the ditch beside the road.

  An engine growled, and Standish waited for a log truck to roar past, its bed loaded with slender horsetail trees from Sector 11. It was second-growth timber, the land heavily managed by Songheuser, and according to the gossip she’d heard at Heinrich’s, some of the most productive land on Huginn. She jumped into the ditch, where a knee-high metal column announced the underground cable line junction. It stood cockeyed, one side bashed in. The wires lay on the ground, their ends ripped through.