The tavern in Port Authority was called The Bloody Drink; the moniker dated back to a more sanguine period in the colony’s early existence. Most folks just called it Inga’s after the proprietor. Inga Lock was a large-boned blonde woman in her forties with thick arms, a no-nonsense disposition, and a talent for brewing, distilling, and producing extraordinary wines from local grains and fruits.
Inga’s tavern had originally been housed in one of the midsized utility domes, but as it was the planet’s only public house, the crowds had necessitated expansion. Since the dome couldn’t be enlarged—and with Donovan being a mining planet—Inga had dug down to create the cavernous stone-floored room that now sported locally made chabacho-wood tables, benches, chairs, a restaurant, and on the west end, the curving bar from which Inga dispensed her liquid refreshments.
A ramp in the storeroom behind the bar led up to street level and the two-story stone building that housed her distillery, brewery, and winery. The upper floor she rented out to itinerant miners and hunters—called Wild Ones—who might be in town.
On the righthand side of the bar, Security Officer Talina Perez perched atop her usual stool. She wore mud-spattered and smudged quetzal hide: a rainbow-color-shifting leather made from one of the native predators. Next to her knee, her rifle was propped against the bar. Hung from a strap around her neck, a floppy leather hat flattened Tal’s raven-black hair against her back.
“Hard day?” Inga asked as she approached with her rolling gait, a bar towel over her shoulder. Talina’s glass mug—filled with a thick stout topped by an inch of creamy head—was in Inga’s right hand. This she deposited on the scarred wood with a thunk.
“Step Allenovich and I spent the last three days out in the bush, working the breaks leading into the Blood Mountains. Tracked Whitey that far. Storm hit. Winds were too strong for the drones. Had to wait it out. Once we could fly again, we’d lost the sign.”
“You look all in.”
“I’m eating whatever you got, sucking down a couple of glasses of stout, and then I’m off to sleep for a week.”
“You sure it was Whitey? One quetzal pretty much looks like another.”
“We managed to get a drone right on top of him. Crippled left front leg? Couple of bullet scars on his hide? Slight limp in his right leg? Gotta be him.”
Down in Talina’s gut, Demon—piece of shit that he was—hissed in approbation at the mention of Whitey’s escape. But then Whitey’s molecules where part of what made Demon such an insufferable beast.
Talina could feel Rocket shift on her shoulder—the little quetzal’s presence as illusory as Demon’s. In the words of Talina’s ancient Maya ancestors, she was Way. Pronounced “Wh-eye.” A spirit-possessed dreamer, transformed, one-out-of-many. Her quetzals were Wayob. Dream essences. Spirits who lived within.
“When it comes to Whitey, you’d know. You were the one who shot him up.” Inga wiped the bar down with her towel before slapping it over her shoulder. “Food’ll be up in a minute.”
Tal tossed out a five SDR coin.
“You’re still up two fifty on your account, Tal.”
“Put it toward my tab. Day might come, Inga, when I’m caught short.”
The big woman snatched up the coin. “Yeah, as if that would ever happen.”
“You forget, I have a habit of pissing people off in this town.” And, hero to them she might be, but Talina Perez was still a freak, infected as she was with quetzal TriNA.
“This far down the line, Tal, it would take some real doing for you to make it permanent.” Inga shot her a wink and retreated down the bar to note the amount on her big board where she kept her accounts.
Talina chuckled under her breath. Inside, she was what the Maya called pixom—of two conflicting souls. In her case, that of killer in opposition to that of protector.
Funny thing, to travel thirty light-years across space in order to discover that her ancient heritage was the only way to make psychological sense of who she had become after quetzal molecules began playing with her brain.
Down the bar, Stepan Allenovich, mud-spattered himself, was calling for whiskey. Three days in the bush hunting quetzal, and the lunatic was going to spend the rest of the night drinking and singing. Then he’d no doubt wander over to Betty Able’s brothel where he’d drink some more, pay to screw Solange Flossey, and finally make his way to The Jewel casino. The man was an animal.
Talina sipped her stout, let the rich beer run over her tongue. Damn, she’d missed beer. Three days of hardscrabble hunting on foot and by air, and that pus-sucking Whitey had put the slip on them again.
“Yes,” Demon hissed from behind her stomach.
It only felt like the quetzal lived in her gut. The Port Authority physician, Raya Turnienko, had repeatedly proven to Talina that there was no quetzal hiding out behind her liver. Rather—like the presence of Rocket on her shoulder—that was how the thing manifested. Used transferRNA to communicate with the nerve cells in her brain. Not that Demon was a single quetzal, but existed as a composite made up of the TriNA molecules from a quetzal lineage. Whitey’s lineage.
Nor was that the only quetzal TriNA that infested her. The one she called “Rocket,” the Wayob that perched on her shoulder, was made up of several different quetzals from the Mundo, Briggs, and Rork lineages. Her blood and tissues were thick with the stuff.
One and many at the same time.
Only a Maya shaman would understand.
Talina just wanted the shit out of her body.
“But I’ll get you in the end,” she promised both Whitey and Demon.
“Or we’ll get you.”
“Been trying that for the last four years, you piece of shit.” She sipped her stout.
Rocket’s spectral presence chittered quetzal laughter in her ear. She gave the little twerp a wry smile in reply.
Talina turned to take in the tavern. Inga’s was half full: miners, the local trades people, and the weekly rotation from down at Corporate Mine now came trickling in. The few local troublemakers, like Hofer, seemed to be in a convivial mood.
Good. She’d hate to have to go bust heads.
Talina saw Kalico Aguila descending the steps. Beside her, Shig Mosadek was saying something, his hands gesturing in emphasis. Kalico was dressed in her last fancy Supervisor’s uniform—the one she was saving for special occasions. That the woman would dress up like . . . Ah, yes. This must be the day she’d taken the shuttle up to Vixen to contact Ashanti.
Captain Torgussen had delayed Vixen’s departure to rendezvous with a particularly intriguing comet in order to allow Aguila to use Vixen’s photonic com. By now the survey ship was accelerating hard to catch the comet as it rounded Capella.
Shig, who had also attended, was wearing his locally milled fabric shirt with the squash-blossom flowers Yvette had embroidered on the front. To Talina’s knowledge, the comparative religions scholar didn’t have anything resembling formal attire in his wardrobe. Shig’s only concession to fashion was the quetzal-hide cape he reserved for rainy days.
Talina arched an eyebrow as Aguila turned her way, strode across the fitted stones in the floor, and hitched herself into the elevated chair beside Talina’s. Shig clambered onto the stool on Aguila’s right.
“What’s with the fancy dress? Trying to impress the new folks?” Talina asked.
“Just back from Vixen.” Aguila had a thoughtful look on her scarred face. “Ashanti’s finally close enough that we could have a conference on the photonic com. Talked to the captain, the Corporate Advisor/Observer, and the science director. Not that it’s a huge surprise, but the situation on Ashanti is a bit grimmer than we’d been led to believe on the text-only long-range com.”
“How grim?”
Aguila grinned humorlessly; it rearranged her scars. “Grim enough that I told Shig he’s buying the whiskey.”
“Couldn’t be worse than Freelander.” Memories of Talina’s last time aboard the ghost ship still sent fingers of ice slipping down her backbone. And to think she’d condemned Tamarland Benteen to that eerie and endless hell.
“Maybe not,” Shig agreed. “But trouble still. We finally got an explanation for some of the hesitation they’ve expressed through their messages. They’ve been ten years in that bucket. Out there in the black for almost seven now. Popped back in more than a half a light-year from Capella.”
“Shit. And let me guess. Didn’t have the fuel to pop back out?”
Aguila’s gaze thinned as she gestured down the bar to Inga. “Miracle and tragedy all in one. The miracle’s that they’re alive. The tragedy is what they had to do to stay that way for seven years in a ship that couldn’t feed them all.”
“They murder the transportees like the crew of Freelander did?”
“Might just as well have,” Kalico told her. “Captain Galluzzi sent his official log to Vixen, along with the Observer/Advisor’s reports. Shig and I gave them a quick scan. The transportees tried to take the ship. It got bloody. Failed. So Galluzzi had them sealed onto the transportee deck. And left them there.”
“Bet they’re ready to get the hell out.”
Shig glanced at her. “It’s just Galluzzi’s word, of course, but it may be a bit more complicated than that. If the good captain and the records are to be believed, things turned remarkably brutal among the transportees. Over the last six years they have apparently developed some sort of messianic cult based on the notion of controlled violence and eating one’s fellows as a reflection of the universe. At this stage we can only guess at the depth of the belief and its intricacies. If there’s good news, it is that there’s only about a hundred of them left.”
Aguila added, “Just talking about it, Galluzzi broke into a cold sweat. The guy’s almost a basket case, and he’s scared. Really scared.” She shot Shig an evaluative look. “So much so that he sent me a private com just before we stepped off Vixen. Asked me to consider blowing up Ashanti as soon as he could get his crew off.”
Shig’s round face puckered. “That’s a bit extreme, even for cannibals, don’t you think?”
“Excuse me? Cannibals?” Talina asked.
Kalico gave her a dead stare. “Think locked on Deck Three with insufficient food. It’s eat your neighbor or be eaten by him. One or the other.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Blowing up the ship would solve some of Galluzzi’s problems,” Shig mused.
“Hey?” Talina asked. “What about the cargo? Ashanti’s holds must be full of things we need. Equipment. Parts. Seeds, maybe cacao, or cotton, or who knows what? And unlike Freelander it wasn’t lost in space for a hundred and twenty-nine years.”
Aguila laid a 10-SDR coin out for Inga, saying, “My party tonight. Put whatever’s left on my tab.”
“Thought I was buying,” Shig said. “That was the deal.”
“How’s the vegetable market these days?” Aguila asked.
“I sold a couple of squash last week,” Shig told her proudly.
Shig made most of his income from his garden. One of the most influential men on Donovan, Shig Mosadek was also one of the poorest. He was a third of the triumvirate—the three-person government of Port Authority. Shig was the conscience, the public face, and liaison to the community. Yvette Dushane—a pragmatic woman in her fifties—did the nuts and bolts daily administration and record keeping. Talina Perez served as security chief, enforcer, and protector.
Inga set a whiskey down before Aguila and placed a half-full glass of wine before Shig, saying, “My latest red from those sirah grapes they transplanted from Mundo Base.” Then she scooped up the coin, heading back down the bar before reaching up to credit Kalico’s account on her big board.
Talina asked, “We’re not seriously blowing up a starship, are we?”
“Of course not.” Aguila raised her whiskey and swished it around, inhaled, and took a sip. “Oh, that’s her new barrel. Much better than last month’s.”
“So, remind me. That leaves us with how many traumatized maniac religious cannibal nuts?” Talina asked. “A hundred, you say? What are you thinking? Put ’em in the domes in the residential section? Let them rub elbows with us locals until they come back to their senses?”
Shig studied his half glass of wine. “I think that would be a bad idea. At least given what we currently know about them.”
“I can’t put them up at Corporate Mine,” Aguila said. “First, I don’t have the dormitory space. Second, we’re a pretty tight organization down there these days. If I drop a hundred soft meat into the mix, I’m going to have chaos. And who knows what kind of skills these people have?”
“Not to mention that they eat people. That will go over big in the cafeteria,” Shig noted.
“So that brings us back to some of the empty domes in the residential district.” Talina shrugged. “If they start to get out of line, it may take a couple of head whacks, but my guess is that between us, we can civilize them.”
Shig held up his hand for attention. “I don’t think that’s wise, let alone an operative plan of action.”
“Okay,” Talina told him. “Since when is having someone like me, Talbot, or Step coming down on a bit of misbehaving—”
“I took the opportunity to read some of the ravings the Irredenta sent to Captain Galluzzi.”
“The irrawho?”
“The Irredenta,” Shig told her. “That’s what they’re calling themselves. That, and they often refer to themselves as the Unreconciled. The words attributed to their Prophets reek of demented religious fanaticism. These people believe that they have passed through a brutal selection, that they have been given absolute truth. That they’ve been chosen to possess the one true understanding of God and the ultimate reality of the universe. Worse, they’ve been locked away, isolated, and survived a most terrible winnowing. Events stripped them of their humanity. They committed atrocities, acts that abnegated the kind of people they were before the trauma.”
“So what? Donovan is no one’s idea of a picnic,” Talina retorted.
Shig softly said, “In my view, turning them loose in PA or Corporate Mine would be to unleash a calamity.”
“Bit melodramatic, don’t you think?” Talina asked.
Shig arched a bushy eyebrow. “After the rise of The Corporation, religious fundamentalism was suppressed, monitored. But think back to your security training. You must have run across historical references to fringe beliefs, fanatical interpretations of scripture. Millenarians. Radical cults. Most were led by charismatic individuals thought of as messiahs by their followers.”
“Yeah,” Talina said, “but this is Donovan. That kind of silliness doesn’t last long here. You know how I’m always joking about the Buddha never existing on Donovan? ’Cause if he’d seated himself under a mundo tree, a nightmare would have eaten him. Same for a self-proclaimed prophet. They all digest the same in a quetzal’s gut.”
Aguila had been listening; from her expression she’d been accessing her implants, scanning data. Now she said, “I side with Shig. If these people are as indoctrinated to violence and their holy cause as Galluzzi says and their writings indicate, turning them loose in either PA or Corporate Mine would be a major mistake at worst, horrendously destabilizing at best.”
Shig dryly asked, “Do you really think that practicing cannibals preaching apocalypse can just move into the dome next door without repercussions?”
“So? Leave them up on the ship?”
Aguila’s wary smile rearranged her scars. “We want that ship. We need that ship. I’ve got a fortune in rare metals, clay, and gemstones in containers up in orbit. You’ve got shipping containers full of clay and plunder stacked seven-deep around the shuttle field. Maybe Turalon arrived on schedule back at Solar System last year. Maybe it didn’t. But Ashanti is coming in. If we can load her to the gills with wealth, ship her back to Solar System—even if we have to do it on AI—it’s another shot at long-term survival.”
“We could lock the cannibals up with crazy old Tam Benteen on Freelander,” Talina mused.
Aguila shook her head. “What? Compromise our only platform for freefall and vacuum manufacturing?”
“You’ll have Ashanti,” Shig pointed out.
“Not if we can convince someone to space her back to Solar System and make us all rich,” Aguila added. “Galluzzi really wants me to blow them up.”
“Morally unacceptable.” Shig declared as he fingered his wine glass. Talina grunted in agreement.
“Which leaves the planet. Maybe they’re crazy as the quanta. Maybe in the end, they can’t be reconciled with the rest of us. We won’t know until we can see for ourselves.” Aguila lifted her whiskey, studying the amber fluid in her glass. “Put them down at Mundo Base? Buy it from Mark Talbot’s family?”
“Not that they’d sell,” Talina said. “And the quetzal lineage down there’s really hostile.”
“Tyson Station,” Shig said. “Way out west. On that mesa top. Five domes. Just right for about a hundred people. Good garden space. Enough cisterns and capacity to handle a population that size.”
“Never been there,” Aguila said.
Talina sipped her stout. “Might work. Somebody needs to go out there. Check it out.”
Aguila shot Shig a sidelong look. “You all right with that? I mean, given your moral imperatives, all that talk about freedom? About government staying out of people’s lives? Isn’t this a form of playing god? Making these decisions for those people?”
Shig gave a half-hearted shrug. “One of the few tenants of government in a libertarian system is that the state should provide for the common defense. If these people arrived in our skies infected with some contagious disease, we would be within our moral rights to place them in quarantine for the protection of the general population.”
“But this is a cult.”
Shig’s eyebrows lifted. “And what makes you think that zealous adherence to a messianic religious cult isn’t just as dangerous as smallpox, rubella, or ebola?”