The endless forest passed below as Talbot flew Kylee, Dya, and the terrified Rocket north. Below the speeding Beta aircar, the tops of the great trees created rounded and irregular mounds of various greens, turquoises, and teals. They had left the deep forest behind, and since they’d crossed the southern arc of the Wind Mountains, the country had turned more to a scrubby forest. What Dya called the bush. Occasional patches of brush and grasslike vegetation could be seen in the openings.
Talbot couldn’t help but flash back to the first time he’d flown over this same terrain. He, Garcia, and Shin, marveling at the endless carpet of green over which they passed, never having a clue about the world that lay beneath, or its dangers.
The Beta skimmed effortlessly northward, clipping along at two hundred kph. Talbot had had his doubts getting the machine prepped, charged, and airworthy. He’d prayed it would fly, that it wouldn’t drop them somewhere in the trackless forest.
From the chronometer, they had less than a half hour’s flight time to Port Authority. At this altitude he could just see the faint blue line of the Gulf off to the east. The Wind Mountains had faded into a hazy smudge in the distant west.
Dya crouched at the bench seat in the back and made her latest check on Kylee. Rising, she stepped around Rocket and up beside Talbot, her attention fixed on the northern horizon. “She’s still stable.”
Talbot glanced back where Kylee rested under blankets and atop the padded litter they’d fashioned. Rocket, ever faithful, had curled himself on the floor next to her seat. The little guy was nearly comatose. Flying terrified him; the entire trip, a dazzling display of color had played across his hide. Mostly he kept his head down, eyes clamped tightly closed.
It hadn’t crossed Talbot’s mind that they’d have to take Rocket. But then, without him, there was no telling what the impact of separation would be. On either the quetzal or Kylee.
And then there was Port Authority to think of. As Talbot recalled, they didn’t exactly like quetzals there.
Dya, gaze crystalline blue, mouth set, looked as if she were at the end of her endurance. “I hope this isn’t a mistake.”
“Makes two of us.” Talbot reached out an arm and laid it across her shoulders to give her a reassuring hug. “I’ve taken the serial number plate off the frame. There’s nothing to link the aircar back to Mundo Base. You and I, we’re just farmers from a holding out to the west. There’s nothing to link us to the south. Even if I’m recognized and arrested, I’ll tell them Garcia, Shin, and I went west. Just like Cap did. When Kylee’s well, you can fly back south. No one will be the wiser.”
She shot him a sidelong, worried look. “You know I can’t fly this, don’t you?”
“What?”
“None of us can. We never learned.”
“Now you tell me?”
No wonder they mothballed the aircars; but then, if they hadn’t, that last power pack would have been worn out years ago.
Lashed on the trunk were two cases, each filled with jars of Dya’s various salves, pastes, poisons, laxatives, painkillers and medicines. The results of her years of study as she distilled and experimented with the various forest plants.
The most valuable trade they had to offer in return for Kylee’s care.
“There,” he pointed, recognizing the scar from the clay pit, having seen it on the numerous times he’d ridden down on Turalon’s shuttle.
He turned the wheel, correcting course, and heading for the distant domes.
“I never thought I’d be back here.” Dya ran nervous hands over the backs of her arms. “Pak and Paolo must be weeping in their graves.”
She’d told him about Pak, her first husband. Kylee’s father. How he’d given Clemenceau an ultimatum. How he’d been shot down in the street when Paolo pulled a gun in a bid to keep them from being arrested for desertion. How it had broken her heart. Even considered suicide rather than live without him.
Her second husband, Torrey, had been a geologist. The most she’d say about him was that he was Tuska’s father, and a good man. He’d vanished in the forest, went prospecting along the rim where it sloped off to the south of Mundo Base and never returned. Damien had found his pack beneath a rock outcrop a couple of years later.
Talbot studied Dya from the corner of his eye. The wind was ruffling her yellow-blonde hair, the set of her firm jaw indicated a steely resolution. The way she gripped the hand rail, the tension in her broad shoulders and stiff back, spoke volumes about what this was costing her.
From behind, suffering sounds could be heard deep in Kylee’s throat.
Talbot ground his teeth and wondered how he’d come to love her so completely that he’d have traded places with her in an instant.
Dropping altitude, he circled, coming in from the west. They passed over the last of the bush, farmland now beneath them. Here and there, people working the crops and tending to the farmbots looked up and waved.
Ahead, Port Authority lay behind its ditch and high fence, the lines of domes ivory-colored in Capella’s hard light. The clutter of wood-and-stone buildings packed in among them like some medieval hodgepodge.
Talbot flew over the aircar field, then the fence, setting his sights on the hospital dome where it stood next to admin, the shuttle field fence behind it.
“You ready?” he asked. “This is it.”
Dya’s jaws were knotted. She gave him a short nod of the head.
Talbot set the Beta down in the street before the hospital’s double doors. His heart beat anxiously in his chest, muscles charged, adrenaline pumping. Felt like combat.
Out of second nature he grabbed up his rifle, slung it over his shoulder. If he was recognized, there was no telling which way this could go.
Talbot killed the power, then jumped over the seat, barely missed stepping on Rocket, and lifted the back of Kylee’s litter.
Dya had clambered over the side, helping to brace the litter on the aircar’s frame as Talbot climbed out and took the back. “Come on Rocket.”
The quetzal, on unsteady legs, leapt out onto the street, a rainbow of colors rippling along his sides. Rocket’s tongue flicked this way and that as it quested along the side of Kylee’s litter.
Talbot led the way, barely aware that people had stopped short to stare. Then he flung the doors open with one hand, charging into the hallway, calling, “We need a doctor! Now!”
A woman, dressed in a white apron, stepped out of an office a couple of doors down past the waiting area, a clipboard in her hands.
“We’ve got a nine-year-old girl,” Talbot thundered. “Broken hip and femur. We need a doctor. We have trade. We’ll pay.”
The woman started forward. “Bring her this way . . .”
She stopped short, eyes going wide. “Good God! That’s a quetzal!”
“His name is Rocket,” Dya called. “He’s Kylee’s pet. He won’t hurt you!”
The clipboard fell, hitting the floor with a clatter. The woman was backing away, face gone white. She seemed paralyzed.
“Where’s Dr. Turnienko?” Talbot asked. “Get her! Kylee’s hurt.”
The nurse’s gaze remained fixed on Rocket, as if mesmerized by his splashes of color.
“Where’s the surgery?” Dya almost screamed. “Now!”
“D-down the hall. Second right.” The nurse backed into the room from which she’d come, slamming her door behind her.
“Shit!” Talbot bellowed. “Come on.”
At the second door to the right, Talbot backed through, carried Kylee to the raised table beneath a thick cluster of overhead lights. Yep. It looked like an operating room: cabinets filled with medical supplies; surgical tools under glass in an ultraviolet sterile case; all the monitors, hoses, and electrical gizmos.
A siren began to wail, loud, offensive.
Rocket hissed, as if the noise frightened him.
“Let’s get her up on the table,” Dya told him, and together they shifted Kylee’s fragile and broken form onto the padded table.
“Stay with her,” Talbot said. “I’m going for the doctor.”
He stepped out into the hallway, found it vacant. The siren continued to wail.
Not knowing what else to do, he opened the door across from the surgery. A woman, partially swathed in bandages, and obviously a patient, was just getting out of bed. Talbot caught her in the act of pulling a coat around her shoulders.
“Where’s the doctor?” Talbot demanded. “Which room?”
“Should be in her office, but with the alert, she’ll be headed to the front.”
“What alert?”
The woman, her thick black hair pulled back, stopped short and studied Talbot with remarkably blue eyes. Even with the bandages on her cheeks, he was looking at a beautiful . . .
“You’re Supervisor Aguila,” Talbot said, realizing why she looked so familiar. “What happened to you?”
“Mobbers,” she snapped. “Who are you? And more to the point, what are you doing in my room?”
“I need the doctor.”
“Well, good luck. A quetzal in the compound outweighs whatever’s wrong with you.”
“A quetzal in the . . . Shit! That stupid woman.”
He wheeled around, blocking the Supervisor’s door, and looked down the hall. Here they came. At the entrance, armed men and women were forming up.
“Can this get any worse?” Talbot wondered.
Looking the other way down the corridor, he could see additional people looking in the rear entrance windows, rifle barrels silhouetted through the glass.
“Port Authority shuts down over a quetzal alert,” the Supervisor said from behind. “Nothing’s going to happen until the whole town is searched and either the quetzal’s destroyed or the town’s determined to be clean.”
Talbot clenched his fists, ground his jaws, and cursed himself for a fucking fool.
“The quetzal’s here, damn it,” he gritted. “He came with me. His name’s Rocket, and he’s not going to hurt anyone.”
“Are you out of your mind?” she demanded.
“Yeah, I probably am.” Talbot laughed, hearing the maniacal tones behind it.
At the front entrance, the doors opened; two women and a large man entered at a crouch, rifles shouldered. Competent, capable, they started forward, sweeping for a target. Stopping at the front lobby, they showed perfect form as they cleared the room.
Talbot eased out into the hallway, heart thudding at the base of his throat. “Hey! Down here!”
He watched as they stopped short, the woman out front calling, “Get to cover. There’s a quetzal in the building!”
“He’s with me. His name is Rocket. He’s in the surgery with my daughter Kylee. She has a broken hip and femur. All we want is a doctor. We have trade.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“We’re Wild Ones. From a farmstead out west. My daughter was injured in a fall. We have trade. Just fix my little girl, and charge our power pack, and we’re out of here.”
Some sixth sense made him glance behind. They were coming in from the rear, as well. Talbot slipped his rifle from his shoulder, calling, “That’s far enough! Not another step.”
“We kill quetzals here, mister,” one of the men behind him called.
“You’ll have to kill me first,” Talbot called.
“Not a problem,” the lead man called, raising his rifle.
Talbot stepped back into the protection of the Supervisor’s room, leveling his rifle. “Put the gun down! Bunched up like you are? A full-auto burst will leave your blood and guts all over the hall!”
Shifting, it was to see that the group coming from the front had split up, diving into rooms.
“Hey!” Talbot called. “Before you idiots start something you can’t handle, I’m standing in the Supervisor’s room. You go to shooting in here, we’re going to have a real mess.”
He shot a glance back over his shoulder, saying, “Can you believe this shit? All I want is to get medical aid for my daughter? Are these people nuts?”
“That seems to be a common theme around here. But then I didn’t bring a quetzal into a hospital, either.” Supervisor Aguila had backed up to her bed, adding, “You know they’re going to kill you, don’t you?”