“Kalico?” came Ghosh’s call. “You all right?”
In the darkness of her protective crate, Kalico Aguila shivered, blinked, and slowly lowered her hands from her ears. It took three tries before she could manage a feeble, “Yeah, I’m all right.”
Her heart continued to pound, and she was trying to nerve herself to open the door when the lid was pulled back. Capella’s harsh light blinded her, and she threw an arm up. From its protective shadow, she squinted up at the two shadowed silhouettes looming above.
An arm was extended, and she somehow summoned the energy to reach up. Let them pull her up from her would-be coffin. Curious, wasn’t it, that she could consider the crate in such terms?
She took a deep breath of the fresh air, found it mingled with an odd scent—a fatty, coppery, and sour smell.
Unwilling to trust her legs to support her, she compromised by sitting on the edge of the crate where it lay flush with the ground. As her eyes adjusted, they had to absorb the sight: hundreds of torn, bleeding, and ruptured bodies lay in all directions. Spots of fierce color—blues, yellows, and greens intermingled with the iridescent and striking scarlet that made mobbers so visually stunning.
This time, when she met the beasts’ three-eyed stare, it was to look into death’s dull gaze. Mouths that had once snapped with vicious intent now gaped; tongues lolled onto the clay. The laser-bright wings with their curious nonfeathers flopped out, extended or broken. The claws, which had once terrorized Donovan’s skies, glinted impotently. Even as she stared, the blood and fluids that had once powered the creatures leaked from their torn bodies, pooled atop the impermeable clays of the landing field.
“Kalico?” Ghosh asked again. “You sure you’re all right?”
“Ma’am,” Private Finnegan said, “you’re bleeding? Did they cut you?”
She looked down, seeing the spots of crimson spreading on her clothing. “No. Just tore some of the stitches when I landed hard in the crate.”
Private Michegan, shotgun at port arms, bent down on one knee. She raised her visor to expose concerned features. “You cut that damn close. I thought for a second they had you.”
“Did we . . .” Kalico swallowed against the urge to throw up. “Did we get them? All of them?”
“Think so, ma’am. We’ll have to run the video to be sure. But damn, I mean was that an incredible sight or what? You should have seen it. I mean, you will. On the video. But watching those cannon shots blasting through that flock. You’ll see. Blew the damn mobbers into pieces in midair. Chunks and bodies falling everywhere.
“And between cannon rounds, we were trying to pick up concentrations, blasting any bunch that clustered. The fool things kept attacking us. As if they could so much as scratch our armor. They just wouldn’t give up. It was crazy. They just kept at us until we shot the last of them out of the sky.”
Kalico stared at the splotches of goo on Michegan’s armor, realized it was mobber guts that literally dripped from the smooth surface.
“Wouldn’t have worked without you, ma’am.” Private Finnegan had secured his shotgun and came forward, kicking the corpses of dead mobbers out of the way. “They were splitting apart. Would have been two flocks in another couple of seconds. I thought you’d lost your mind when you went running out there, screaming. But, by damn, Supervisor, you sure knew your shit. You brought ’em right to the killing ground. You saved what was about to be a disaster, turned it into a success.”
“Damn straight,” Michegan added. “Ma’am, you can be on my fire team anytime.”
Kalico took a deep breath, heavy as it was with the stench of new death. She thought her wits had recovered, so she stood, discovered her legs would hold her. That the shakes had gone.
She climbed the rest of the way out of her box, stepped around a pile of broken and torn mobber bodies. “We’re going to have to get this cleaned up. I say toss them into one of the skips, fly them out over the forest and pull the drop cord.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Finnegan gave her a crisp salute.
Ghosh and Ituri followed as she started picking her way through the mess of blasted bodies, then realized the hopelessness. Screw it, she wasn’t going to reach the admin dome without fouling her shoes, so she took the straightest path treading on the corpses.
“You played that way too close for my taste,” Ituri muttered. “I know you wanted them all, but what if they’d caught you?”
She was able to jump one last pile of corpses. The few outliers could now be easily avoided. From the dome, the mine, and various pieces of equipment, people were now flooding out, exclaiming as they tried to absorb the scene.
“I didn’t realize how close that was,” she told them. “I was going to yell at you for not awaiting my order.”
“By the time I reached out and slammed my lid shut, I didn’t have it latched before they were clawing at the duraplast,” Ituri confessed. “I have no idea how you got yours closed without trapping a bunch of those things inside with you.”
“I didn’t. Had to be one of the Marines.” But which one? She needed to find out.
She exhaled with weary relief as she stepped into the safety and cleaner air of the admin dome. Her muscles felt like rubber, barely managing the simple task of walking.
All she wanted to do was pour herself a stiff drink of Inga’s whiskey before throwing herself on her bed to vegetate for a couple of hours. Wanted to tend her reopened wounds. For the most part, they’d ceased to bleed. But no. Damn it, her people needed to see her now.
Coffee. Today’s success justified a cup of their dwindling supply of coffee.
Thus heartened, she actually smiled at Igor Stryski where he waited just outside her office door. “We got ’em.”
Stryski’s expression, however, didn’t brighten. “Ma’am. I was in charge of checking stations before the mobber attack. I, uh, found something. You’d better come see.”
“Where?”
“Barracks, ma’am. Male showers.”
“Do you need us?” Ghosh asked, indicating Ituri and himself.
“Might be best if you came along,” Stryski told them.
The mechanic led the way back out the front, along the path that led to the barracks where they backed against the perimeter fence. Inside, the building was quiet. Normal shifts had been dispensed with in anticipation of the mobber attack. She passed the ranks of cubicles with their four-tiered bunks.
The men’s bathroom was in the rear right, the women’s on the left. Strysky pushed the door open, leading Kalico into the room. The place was a prefab, like everything at Corporate Mine. Standard layout with six toilets, four urinals, seven sinks, and in the rear an open shower with four heads and a central drain.
The woman, naked, hung from a thick wire that had been pulled through a truss in the ceiling and tied off on the post that supported the closest toilet stall.
Kalico caught her breath, disturbed by the odd angle of the woman’s neck, by the way her bruise-black tongue protruded between her lips, and how the wire had cut so deeply into her neck behind the angle of the jaw.
Lividity had purpled her feet and lower legs. The woman’s gut sagged where the muscles now stretched, and a pool of urine had mostly dried around a single feces where her sphincter had relaxed. Letters that Kalico couldn’t quite make out from this angle were scrawled over her chest and breasts.
“Know her?” Stryski asked.
“Red hair.” Kalico rubbed the back of her neck. “Yeah, I know her. Rita Valerie. What’s the writing?”
She stepped around, reading aloud, “I ratted out.” She frowned. “What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Stryski said. “I didn’t touch anything. Thought you’d want this taken care of carefully. I mean, I don’t know what effect this will have on everybody.”
“Why’d she kill herself?” Ghosh asked. “Last I heard she and the rest were relieved to be out of that man Wirth’s hands.”
“She didn’t kill herself,” Stryski replied. “There’s no chair, nothing to stand on. She was hoisted.” He pointed to where the wire was knotted on the post. “Whoever did it was strong enough to lift her weight and hold it while he tied her off.”
“Or there was more than one,” Kalico countered.
Stryski fingered his jaw. “No cameras in here. Couldn’t pick a better place for a murder.”
Kalico said, “Aurobindo, check with Petre Howe and Ashanti Kung’s supervisors. Find out when they went on shift today, what their duties were, and if they were ever out of sight.”
“Yes, ma’am. What do you want us to do with Valerie’s body?”
Kalico considered. “Everyone’s out front dealing with the mobbers. We’ve got a small window of opportunity here. I want her taken down. Tarp the body to disguise it, then fly it down to the farm field and bury her. Can you do that without being seen, Igor?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He was giving her an uncertain look.
“Let’s see who asks about her first. If her supervisors are the first, or if it’s her friends. And how they ask could be important. Her disappearance might be more unsettling to the murderer than if we made a major investigation of it. Meanwhile, I want round-the-clock surveillance on Kung and Howe. Microdrones, long-range microphones, night vision. Whatever it takes. If they killed her, they’ll discuss it. Probably sooner rather than later, and we’ll have them.”
“What if it wasn’t them?” Ituri asked.
“In that case, we’re playing under a whole new set of rules.”
I ratted out. What the hell does that mean?
But the hanging woman with her swollen tongue and bugged-out, dead eyes offered no answer.