The best course, Talina figured, was to leave the Mundo women alone. Not impose herself or be a reminder of the bitter past. Just being at Mundo had already pulled the scab off a long-festering wound.
Damien, the twelve-year-old boy, had helped her disconnect a couple of nonessential pieces of electrical equipment. Then they’d wheeled a series of solar panels and a charging unit from the scavenged equipment over to her aircar. It was a fricking make-do contraption of wires, voltaics, and regulators, but charge was slowly flowing into her aircar’s power pack.
“Thanks,” she told the boy. “Listen, there’s no sense for me to tie up your whole day. Go on back to whatever you need to do. Me, I’m just going to lay low and keep from pissing anybody off.”
The kid just eyed her with those dark orbs that looked so much like his mother’s. The entire time the boy had barely spoken a word. He’d treated her as if she were a deadly, venomous beast who might lash out at any moment.
Now he swallowed hard, finally asking, “Is Port Authority as bad as they say it is?”
“Bad? No, Damien. It’s just people trying to get along and survive. It’s a whole lot better than it was in the days when your people left. That was partly my fault. I served a very bad man. But he’s long gone. We’ve tried to make things better.”
“There are people my age? Males and females?”
Odd that he’d use those terms to describe other kids. But then, what should she expect, being raised as he was by a bunch of scientists? “Sure. A couple of dozen.”
“What are they like?”
“A lot like you. Smart. Tough. Learning what they need to know to survive Donovan.”
“Maybe someday I could go there. I’d like to know those people. Find out what they are like.” He glanced sidelong at her. “But I wouldn’t want to be shot, either.”
“You won’t be shot.” Talina chuckled in ironic amusement. “Hell, boy, I was the shooter back then. You want to come to Port Authority, you’ll come under my protection. I’ll give you a guided tour of the place. Introduce you to all the young people your age, and see that you get home without issue to boot.”
His expression pinched as if he were wondering if he could trust her.
“I may have my faults, Damien, but no one doubts my word. Not even your mother, Dya, or Su.”
She made another check on the charge trickling ever so slowly into the aircar. “Now, go on with you. I’m going to take a walk down through the fields. Keep out of everyone’s way.”
“Don’t go past the tree line,” Damien told her as he picked up his tools.
“I’ve been in deep forest before. I’m not the kind to tempt fate.” She shot him a wink and watched as he walked away.
Taking a deep breath, she looked up at the dome, thought she saw someone peering down at her from the curving transparency of the main window, though it could have been a reflection.
She slung her rifle, laid a palm on the butt of her pistol, and strolled leisurely past the sheds, shops, and stacked equipment to the closest of the fields.
Taking it in, she saw cabbages, lettuce, corn, beans, varieties of squash, huge cactuses growing under an awning, an herb garden, pepper plants, giant sunflowers, peas, and a host of plants she couldn’t name. Things they most definitely didn’t grow at Port Authority.
Dang, if we could just talk them into trading.
As she walked down the elevated causeway, the tended part of the field gave way to a riotous chaos of intergrown plants. An agricultural profusion gone completely wild once past the last of the corn stalks.
The chaos of green just kept going until it stopped at the line of brush: mostly terrestrial fruit, berry, and nut bushes. A line of fruit trees followed, and finally the pine belt just this side of the forest.
“My God,” she whispered. “We could feed every man, woman, and child on Donovan from this one field and still have food left over.”
As she said it, the chime rose and fell in its incomprehensible musical patterns. She could see the occasional hopper, and sometimes a roo as it wiggled through the profusion in search of invertebrates to munch.
She caught movement from the corner of her eye and turned to see Rebecca, expression stern, eating the distance between them with long strides.
Talina kept a hand on her pistol, waiting. At least Rebecca wasn’t carrying one of those tube guns.
“What are you doing, Perez?” Rebecca asked as she stopped a couple of paces away.
“Figured I’d go for a walk.” She waved at the fields. “This is amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, in pictures of farms back on Earth, the crops are laid out in rows. Here everything’s growing on top of everything else. Like a humping jungle.”
“It’s Capella’s energy, the rains, and most of all the nutrients in the soil,” Rebecca told her. “And none of the deleterious fungi, viruses, or microbiota that have evolved to parasitically effect plants back on Earth. When the first seeds were brought here, they were accompanied only by beneficial microbes. Think of it as a perfect world for a terrestrial plant. No diseases. The only predation comes from what we harvest.”
“Rebecca, you’re sitting on a clap-trapping fortune here.”
“Are we?” The woman’s mouth tightened. “We’re a bit conflicted, Perez. You got Dya, Mark, Kylee, and Rocket out. Kept this new Supervisor from taking our husband. But that doesn’t make us friends. And now what? Do we let you fly off and tell all of Port Authority what you’ve seen here? Or is that just inviting disaster?”
“Disaster’s coming either way, I fear.” Tal stared up at the thickly needled pine trees. “What species are those?”
“A mixture of loblolly and Southern pitch pine. Both species that literally drip sap. Works pretty well to keep our species in and Donovan’s out. As part of our long-term research on our impact to the planet we closely monitor what’s growing out in the forest. We’ve only recorded a couple of volunteer terrestrial plants whose seeds somehow made it out past our containment. So far the boundaries are remarkably efficient.”
“So you can keep our stuff in and Donovan out?”
“Pretty much. But why don’t you tell me about this coming disaster?”
“Rebecca, we need each other. Our people would love to trade for some of the foods you grow here. For Dya’s medicines. In return, we have supplies. Like cable. And the kind of people who could fix your lift. Maybe get some of your equipment working again.”
“Sounds like the kind of beginning that could end in dependency.” Rebecca’s expression went flinty.
“Not just no, but hell no! We don’t want dependents. Means they have to be taken care of. Subsidies. Wasted time. Take it up with Shig. He’ll talk your ear off when he’s not spouting all that Taoist Buddha Hindu crap.” Talina pointed. “What kind of berry bushes are those?”
“Blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and some wild plum mixed in.”
“Holy shit,” Talina whispered. “Didn’t know such things had ever been tried on Donovan. Let alone were growing.”
“Our original mandate was as an agricultural research station.”
“Cherries?”
“Along the western tree belt.”
“Dear God.” Talina shook her head. “If we fix your lift, put in a new cable, repair your dome floor and pump, how many loads of fruits and vegetables would you trade?”
“Maybe you didn’t understand when I said we’re not interested.”
Talina arched an eyebrow. “Oh, I picked up on that without any problem at all. But Port Authority isn’t the disaster you’re facing. It’s Kalico Aguila, her shuttle, her marines, and the fact that she will find you. I figure you’ve got a week before she’s setting down in your front yard. I can promise you, the good Supervisor doesn’t ascribe to a single libertarian value. She’s made a bit of progress, but she’s still fundamentally Corporate in her mindset.”
“Dya told me that she told Aguila that we were somewhere off to the west.”
“So I heard. Like I said: end of the week at the latest. Less if she figured out how far Dya and Talbot actually flew to get to Port Authority.”
“We disabled the locator beacons in the aircars years ago.”
“Your problem is the shuttle. If it even passes anywhere close, you’re going to be the big electrical blip detected by the lateral sensor array.”
As Talina spoke, Rebecca’s face went ashen. “Hadn’t thought of that. We can’t shut the place down. The refrigeration, the lights, the pumps, the lab equipment, the coms.”
“So, you figured out how . . . ?” Talina stopped short and cocked her head. It came from the south, the distant roar just discernable to her quetzal-augmented hearing. “Screw me with a skewer. How wrong could I be?”
“What?” Rebecca, too, had cocked her head, listening hard. An instant later, as the sound grew, the woman shifted her gaze to the southern sky above the treetops.
It came in high, a slim silver delta that left a thin white contrail through the humid air and patchy bits of cloud.
Talina and Rebecca watched as it made a slow, leisurely circle of Mundo Base, banking wide, then dropping down for a closer look.
“Game’s up,” Talina noted dryly.
Rebecca might have turned to stone.
Then, to Talina’s surprise, the shuttle didn’t land, but headed directly in the direction of the Corporate Mine.
“Why didn’t they set down?” Rebecca asked.
“My guess? Aguila’s not on board. She wouldn’t waste her time riding around while they searched. I’d say you’ve got a reprieve. Maybe hours, maybe a day or two, before they’re back.”
“Oh, God. I just want to be sick.”
“So, how about we go back, sit down with the others, and figure out just what we can do?”
Rebecca’s eyes betrayed panic; her hands were trembling. “It’s over, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. I guess it is.”