Trish Monagan had bootstrapped herself into a ring-tailed fit as she stomped down Port Authority’s main avenue. Capella hung more than a hand’s height above the eastern horizon and illuminated the weathered white domes interspersed among the stone and chabacho-wood structures.
As she went—cursing the entire way—her shoulder-length auburn hair swung with each step. The few who encountered her took one look at the fire in her green eyes, nodded, and ducked out of her way.
Damn it, she was newly turned twenty, second in command of security at Port Authority. Donovan born and raised, she’d never had the luxury of a carefree childhood. Young people got old fast. Or they got dead. Maybe when she hit old age, like twenty-five, she’d get her temper under control. Until then, if she wanted to vent over unadulterated stupidity, she’d damned well vent.
Trish picked up her pace until her scoped rifle bounced on her back, sending shimmers of color through the quetzal-hide jacket she wore. The same splash of color rippled up her boots with each heel strike on the hard gravel that paved the avenue.
“Coming through,” she snapped as she approached the high perimeter fence. One of the guards jumped to swing the smaller “man gate” open where it had been built into the main gate.
Trish stormed through. Out of second nature, she glanced around the aircar field, one hand going to her rifle. It would have been better to have had the aircar field enclosed by a nice, safe perimeter fence. The Corporation, however, had never bothered to send them enough fencing material.
Well, in fairness, they had, but failed to realize that fences on Donovan had to be fifty feet high to keep out the most lethal of Donovan’s predators. Meanwhile several containers of electric fencing that had been aboard Freelander suggested that, perhaps, when they finished sorting the piles of cargo, some augmentation of the town’s protection might be possible.
Assuming they could adapt the solar panels and regulate the voltage through the wire. Everything about Donovan was complicated given that they were mostly creating it ad hoc. The colony was a slapdash mixture of nineteenth and twenty-second-century technologies all cobbled together in the hopes of survival.
Having spotted no dangers—and seeing several people already working on the vehicles—Trish relaxed. Taking a stand in the center of the packed-clay lot, she pulled her binoculars around and raised them to her eyes. She fixed on the southern sky above the far tree line beyond the agricultural fields.
“Two Spot?” she accessed her com. “Is Tal on schedule?”
“Roger that. About fifteen klicks out.”
As Trish waited, she ground her teeth. Shit on a shoe, Talina knew better. It was originally her rule, after all.
There!
Trish picked up the black dot in the southern sky. Definitely an aircar. None of the larger flying species living in this part of Donovan flew that straight.
In the couple of minutes it took for Talina’s aircar to approach, circle, and drop to a landing, Trish rehearsed several verbal assaults.
When Talina finally shut down the thrusters, grabbed her pack and rifle, and stepped out to solid ground, Trish opened with: “Of all the stupid, irresponsible, and dumb-assed stunts to pull. I ought to smack you up alongside of the head. What the hell were you thinking?”
Talina shrugged one strap of her pack over the shoulder of her ragged and patched black security uniform. Her rifle, she let dangle from her right hand.
“Someone needed to test the night vision. Montoya’s people got it wired in yesterday. After bagging those two deserters, it seemed like a perfect opportunity.”
“Broke your own clap-trapping rule, Tal.” Trish lifted an angry finger. “Scared hell out of me when I heard you’d flown off in the middle of the night. Why didn’t you give me a heads up?”
Talina’s midnight eyes lit with no little amusement. “You were asleep. It was close to two.”
“And you think that makes it all right? What if you’d gone down?”
“I’d have climbed a tree.” She pointed at her pack. “Night vision goggles. New ones from Turalon. Not military quality, but good enough get around the forest at night. Even have a thermal detector should the spare quetzal or bem be lurking in the shadows. What’s got your tit in such a wringer?”
“Tal, I’m barely over the last time you were lost in the bush. People die out there.”
“Yeah, I broke my rule. What are you going to do, Trish?” The mocking smile was back. “Shoot me?”
“Talina, damn it, you—”
“I’m your boss. Back off!” Talina stepped past her, heading for the gate. “Besides, I was on the com to Two Spots the whole time. I was even sending telemetry, giving him readings from one of the remote sensors we found in Freelander’s cargo. If I’d gone down, he could have scrambled half the town to come get me.”
She glanced sidelong. “Maybe even you, if you weren’t in the middle of your beauty sleep. It’s doing wonders for you, by the way. Love that cherubic red in your cheeks. Or is that just ’cause you’re pissed off?”
Trish felt some of her mad leaking away as she matched Talina’s stride, heading for the gate. “Two o’clock in the morning, huh? You weren’t sleeping again, were you? The nightmares . . . That quetzal inside you.”
“Yeah, he’s a real jewel. Got an appointment with Cheng and Dr. Turnienko tomorrow. See if they’re closer to figuring out how to get the pus-sucking beast out of my bloodstream. It’s screwing with my dreams. I mean, vivid. I’ll be in the bush, camouflaged, waiting for chamois, and bam! I’m in a chase, running full-out.”
Talina shook her head. “Weird, I tell you. We never think about it, because we’re built the way we are. But the feeling of air streaming through a quetzal? Wow. Are they ever efficient compared to Earthly lungs: Suck. Stop. Exhale back through the same passage. Stop. Inhale. Do it all over again. All that time we’re exhaling, we’re losing peak oxygenation.”
Trish and Talina nodded to the guard, passed through the man gate, and back into Port Authority.
“Do you know how bizarre that sounds?”
“Oh, yeah. You ought to see from my side.”
As they proceeded past the warehouse district, Trish asked, “So, who’d you see at the mine? I’d guess Lieutenant Spiro wasn’t there, or there’d be blood spatters on your uniform.”
“Had breakfast with Aguila and Spiro. Aguila kept a leash on the lovely lieutenant. Probably because she didn’t want unnecessary violence disrupting her people’s breakfast.”
Trish raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, a lieutenant’s bleeding and dismembered corpse lying on the cafeteria floor can have a dyspeptic effect on the average Corporate employee’s digestion.”
“Funny how some people are, huh? Anyway, Aguila says they’re having a terrible time keeping farmland cleared. As soon as they cut it, the forest starts moving in. She says they’re picking out free gold from the Number One. Going to build a tram to get ore down the hill to the smelter.”
“And the two guys you took back?”
Talina arched an eyebrow. “One ended up as a corpse on the other side of the fence. Aguila shot him herself. Said she promoted the other one.”
“Right. Promoted. And how does that work?”
“Got me.”
They had made their way to the admin dome. The building, once a brilliant white, had taken on the tint of aged ivory, and Donovan’s version of microbial life shaded places on the outside with darker patches. These were now vying with terrestrial fungi the humans had imported from Solar System.
No one knew what long-term effects any of the terrestrial plants, microbes, or humans themselves would have on Donovan. Or vice versa, as Talina’s “infection by quetzal” had made abundantly clear.
The Corporation—despite cries, pleas, and barely inhibited outrage from environmental scientists—could have cared less. To The Corporation, Donovan represented an exploitable source of immense wealth and power. One which was far from the public eye and academic scrutiny, and access to which they controlled with an iron hand.
Talina led the way into the main hallway, leaned her head into Shig Mosadek’s office, and asked, “You and Yvette got a minute?”
Shig looked up from his desk, a faint smile on his broad lips. The man pushed back and stood. All five-foot-three of him. He ran a hand through his unruly mop of thick black hair.
“Have a nice flight?” he asked as he wiped at his pug nose; it seemed to have been squished onto his brown face as an afterthought.
“The night vision gear’s great,” Talina told him. “Looking at the way Sheyela wired it in is a little scary, but even in the dark of the moon, visibility is like daylight.”
“Had to be jury-rigged,” Shig told her, leading the way to the conference room. “The power packs had degraded to the point they wouldn’t take a charge. Nor did the connector plugs match. Like so much of Freelander’s cargo, we’re left making do as we can.”
At Yvette Dushane’s door, Shig called, “Talina’s back. Want a report on what the spider queen is up to?”
Trish grinned. The spider queen? Not a lot of love was lost between the Supervisor and Port Authority.
Trish stepped back as Yvette emerged from her office, a coffee cup in hand. Physically, she was Shig Mosadek’s opposite. Where he was short and brown, she was tall—six feet—pale and thin. Her narrow face and severe nose added to the wolfish effect animating her green eyes. Slightly silvered ash-blond hair topped her head.
They were just as different by nature. Shig’s personality reflected the tranquility and introspection you’d expect from his previous life as a professor of comparative religions. Yvette came across hard—almost cutting and acerbic in her take-no-prisoners approach to life.
Yvette fixed her green eyes on Trish, asking, “So did you tear Talina a new one when she landed?”
“Thought of it,” Trish told her back. “But she was armed. And after dealing with Kalico and Spiro, I figured she’d be desperate to shoot someone. Anyone. So I best not make myself a candidate.”
The junior member, Trish followed in the rear as they filed into the conference room. She took a chair off to the side and watched the others seat themselves.
Essentially, Shig, Talina, and Yvette were the leadership. Supervisor Aguila called them “the Triumvirate”: the established ruling power in Port Authority. Some years back they had declared independence from The Corporation. Executed the then-Supervisor, a man named Clemenceau. In the absence of The Corporation, they had started running Port Authority on their own. That had been in the dark days before Turalon’s abrupt arrival in orbit had changed the entire political equation.
New people—not the least of whom was Supervisor Aguila—had since dealt themselves into the fray. The most loathsome was the recent transportee Dan Wirth. If that was even his real name. Since his arrival on Turalon, the psychopath had taken over Port Authority’s only bordello and established a gambling house that offered additional prostitution, questionable loans, and violence for hire. Through acumen and unsavory deeds, Dan Wirth had become the largest single property owner in Port Authority. He even insisted on, and got, a seat on the town’s “council.”
Trish’s parents had been “second ship,” arriving just after the colony had been established. Trish had been born in Port Authority, part of the first generation of true Donovanians, though there had only been five of them in her age group who’d survived to adulthood. Her peers, two females and two males, had since married, moved out into the bush, and were having kids of their own.
Trish had been six when her father disappeared during a survey expedition in the southern hemisphere. Her mother had died when Trish was twelve. Not that she’d ever have suffered, but Talina had taken her in. Treated Trish like a little sister, and gave her a direction during those wild years when Trish was finishing her education. Fact was, Trish Monagan worshipped Talina. Would do anything for her. And had done so in the past, though God help her if Tal ever found out.
“How did things look?” Yvette asked, elbows propped as she cradled her coffee cup with both hands.
“They’re making progress.” Talina sat back in her seat. “They’ve got a hauler operational to remove ore from the Number One and Two mines. Aguila has built a stamp mill that is running on steam power, of all things. The ore is being piled just outside the main gate. Waste is being dumped down the side of the ridge and bladed flat to create additional level ground.
“As I flew out, I could see that she has a team logging chabacho and stonewood lumber. With that shuttle of hers, she’s setting up towers in the forest for her tram. Says she’s figured a way to make carbon-fiber cable in orbit.”
“How’s that coming along?” Shig asked, fingers laced before him on the table.
“It’s theoretical. If she succeeds, she wants to trade cable for things we make that she needs. The smelter itself has been assembled on a flat by the river down below the mine. Looked to me like crews are still building the power plant. Running pipes from the river to the reactor. Said she’d have it up and running in a week. Somebody on her crew must have figured out how the thing works.”
Shig was smiling, his expression placid. “A fascinating enterprise, don’t you think?”
“How’s that?” Yvette asked.
“After years of surviving, cut off from The Corporation, Turalon makes planetfall. We come within a whisker of going to war with the Supervisor and her marines, and end up as two mutually exclusive societies and settlements, both inextricably linked at the hip for our very survival. She and her people depend on us for food, medical care, maintenance, and technical expertise. We depend on her for a share of the largesse taken out of Freelander’s hold.”
He chuckled his amusement. “All this effort to accumulate wealth, and there’s no telling if we’re ever going to see another ship from Solar System again in our lifetimes.”
“Aguila has bet everything that they’re coming back.” Yvette sipped her coffee. “You ask me, Turalon was the last hope. And let’s face it: Chances are that she’s not going to make it back to Solar System. I’ve got better odds betting on black at Dan Wirth’s crooked roulette wheel than I have of ever seeing another ship from Earth.”
“I’m with Yvette,” Talina said wearily. “Our best long-term strategy is figuring out a way to stay self-sufficient. With Turalon and Freelander’s cargo, our chances are a hell of lot brighter than they were six months ago.”
Trish studied her friend’s face, seeing the fatigue lines, the sorrow. Not only was Talina grieving over burying a man she’d loved, but the quetzal inside her rarely left her any peace. That reality lay behind the dark circles under her eyes and the tense lines at the edges of her mouth.
Talina had always been a tough woman, resigned to deal in the most expedient way with whatever problem arose. On Donovan, as head of security, she literally had the power of life and death. As well as being a living legend, she was in some ways Donovan’s ultimate survivor: capable of coping with both the realities of Port Authority as well as the exigencies that arose out in the bush.
She and Cap, after all, miraculously walked out of the forest after two weeks of being lost without a trace. A feat that not even the Wild Ones—humans who’d moved out into the hinterlands—would attempt.
“So,” Shig mused, fingers stroking his chin. “She’s ready to plant her first crop. Very well. We’ll send her seedlings. Our best interests are served if her people can figure out how to make a farm thrive in the middle of the forest down there. That’s another source of food in case something disastrous happens to our farms here.”
“She really shot that deserter, Cabrianne?” Yvette mused.
“And said she promoted that guy Talovich. I saw Cabrianne’s body where they had tossed it on the other side of the fence.” Talina shrugged. “Sounds like a sort of mixed message, don’t you think?”
“Clever,” Shig countered. “Talovich must have been more useful to her. Structural engineer, wasn’t he? Want to bet but that he’s substantially more motivated to help her succeed from here on out?”
“Are we going to keep honoring this agreement to return her deserters? Especially if she’s going to start shooting them?” Talina asked.
Shig laced his fingers together. “We’ve built a society on contracts. Keeping agreements. If we start violating them, where does it end?”
Yvette said thoughtfully, “We got lucky the first time we crossed swords with Aguila. And then it was only because she didn’t understand Donovan or its people. Underestimating her would be a mistake. She will go to any lengths to save herself and her mine.”
Trish studied Talina from the corner of her eye. She wouldn’t underestimate Supervisor Aguila, for sure. But when it came to dangerous women? She’d put her money on Tal.
The problem was, her old friend and mentor had a quetzal inside her—and she’d been kicked too hard by life in the last months. All of which made Talina Perez a sort of ticking time bomb.
Just got to figure out how to keep you from going off.