“Tal,” Muldare called softly.
Talina turned, stared back down the steep escarpment. Muldare had her good hand on Taglioni, seemed to be pressing him into the rock to keep him from pitching off the slender ledge where the man was propped. Above him, Kalico was glancing down, looking none too steady herself. Bits of detritus were stuck in the Supervisor’s already filthy hair. Something Talina had never seen.
Using cracks, Talina scaled her way back down and wide around Kalico. She got her fingers into a fissure and took a good look at Taglioni. The guy’s eyes were unfocused, wavering. His muscles had that loose shiver that indicated a man on the edge.
“He’s spent,” Muldare said. “What the hell do we do now?”
“You’re not looking any too good yourself. How’s the arm?”
“Like a fucking fountain of fire. The only good news is that it keeps me from knowing how gagging thirsty, hot, and tired I am.”
“Dizzy spells?”
“Not yet.” Muldare gave her a suffering grin. “Marines don’t quit. I’ll make it.”
But even marines had a point of no return.
Talina glanced up. Where was the top? Maybe another thirty or forty meters? Hard to tell from this angle.
“Kylee?” she called, hoping no one was at the summit to overhear. The girl turned, stared down, wild blonde hair framing her thin face. “You and Muldare, help Kalico.”
Kylee immediately began to scramble down the rocks.
“What are you going to do?” Muldare asked, voice partly slurred by thirst. The marine winced as she hitched her swollen arm around.
“You and Kylee make sure Kalico gets to the top,” Talina told her. “I’ve got Taglioni.”
“Tal, he’s about to pass out.”
“Yeah. I know. So’s Kalico. Too long without water and now heat stroke. So, hump your butt, Marine. Get the Supervisor up and out of here. Whatever it takes.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Muldare mumbled hoarsely, and taking a grip with her good hand, climbed past the sagging Taglioni.
Talina took hold of the guy, could feel his heart pounding like a triphammer. “How you doing, Dek?”
“Headache’s fit to kill a horse. Everything just started spinning. Anything . . . Just want . . .” He wavered, and she pushed him back against the rock.
Talina filled her lungs. Looked up to where the others were slowly and clumsily working their way up the steep ascent. Kalico was going to fail next, and then pain-wracked Muldare. It’d be a miracle if the marine made it.
So, what to do about Taglioni?
Talina shifted her feet for the best purchase possible and swung the man onto her shoulders. Damn, his limp body jammed her rifle right into the middle of her back, bruising the spine.
“C’mon,” she growled to herself as she took the weight. “All that quetzal strength better be worth something.”
Demon hissed from down next to her liver.
She began to climb.
Handhold by handhold she made her way up. Felt the fingers of fatigue, her own lack of water. Quetzal visions kept spinning through her head: Bits of forest. A hot plain. Heat waves rising above the bush.
Talina imagined she had claws. Visualized how they’d look fixing themselves into the rock. Recognized the reality that she had hardly slept the night before. Had spent her time aching and grieving with Kylee over Dya and Talbot. About the “thing” out in the forest that had killed them.
And now?
Here she was, climbing with two rifles and seventy kilos of dead weight in an attempt to reach the summit where an unknown number of cannibals would love nothing better than to chop them all up and turn them into a sacred lunch.
“If that doesn’t suck toilet water?” she asked between gasping breaths.
Sweat beaded, ran down into her eyes as she glanced up; Kylee tugged on Kalico’s arm in an attempt to get the failing Supervisor over a vertical column of stone. Muldare had her feet braced and was pushing up on Kalico’s butt with her good hand.
Kalico’s butt? Really? And not a single protestation of outrage?
How was that for a measure of Aguila’s failing state?
Talina grinned, hoisted herself up another half body length, and felt the burn in her muscles.
“Come on,” she growled down at her stomach. “What’s the point of having a piece of shit like you living inside me if you can’t make me superwoman?”
“Weak!” Demon’s voice taunted from her gut.
“Fuck you,” Talina gritted through her teeth—and stared up at the near-vertical crack that led to the top of the next boulder. The basalt was in the signature columnar fractures; the only good news being that they’d been snapped into short segments. Sort of like climbing a stack of building blocks.
She puffed for breath, charged her muscles, and told Dek, “Hang on!”
Then she tackled the climb, shutting her mind off, simply willing herself to power up the slim fissure. Sucking air, heart hammering, she flopped herself and Taglioni across the flat surface atop one of the stones.
“That’s it,” she told herself. “Get your wind.”
Where his head hung beside hers, Taglioni slurred, “She loathes me. Despicable walking shit that I am.”
“I don’t loathe you,” Talina told him. “You’ve spent the last ten years in a ship is all. So far you’ve impressed the hell out of me, having made it this far.”
“Kalico,” he whispered muzzily. “Don’t blame her. I was a real maggot.”
She felt him fading, his hold growing limp. “Hey! Pay attention. Wake up. Concentrate. I need you to hang on to me. Just one more climb, okay?”
He worked his dry mouth. She felt him start, as if from impending sleep. “Yeah. Awake. God, I’m thirsty. Fucking head’s about to burst.”
“Okay. Here we go.”
She felt him tighten his grip, and with a cry she tackled the next vertical crack. Muscles burned, fingers ached as they sought a purchase; she gutted her way to the next ledge.
And the next.
Each time, it was supposed to be the last. Somehow, sag as he did, Taglioni held on. The man’s weight on her rifle was like a knife-blade bearing into her back.
And then hands reached down. Got hold of Taglioni’s shirt and rifle, pulled the man off Tal’s back as she fought her way up and over a final ledge. Here ferngrass grew, a hollow marking the edge of the basalt flow.
With her quetzal vision she could discern Flute where he was flattened under the lip of stone, his camouflage melding with the rocks and vegetation.
Talina slipped her rifle off, flopped onto her back, and heaved for air as she stared up at the endless vault of sky. Capella’s harsh light burned down, half blinding. Baking hot. Had to be forty if it was a degree.
“Screw vacuum,” she gasped. “I don’t want to do that again.”
“We there yet?” Kalico rasped. “They can eat me. Anything to stop this headache.”
“She hates me,” Taglioni’s voice was mumbling, and then he seemed to drift off.
“Who hates him?” Kylee asked where she lay on her belly at the top of the hollow, eyes on the approaches.
“Kalico.” Talina tried to muster enough spit to swallow. Couldn’t.
“Fucker . . . called me Miko’s favorite slippery cunt,” Kalico said through a dry whisper. “How far to water?”
“Doesn’t matter”—Muldare’s voice cracked—“I’ll shoot any bastard tries to get in the way.”
Kalico bent, tried to throw up, but only suffered from dry heaves. “Sucking snot,” she whimpered. “That hurts.”
Talina’s heart had slowed to the point it was no longer trying to batter its way through her ribs. She smacked her dry lips, forced herself to sit up. Her fingers were torn and bloody from the climb when she picked up her rifle and crawled up next to Kylee and Flute.
People died of heat stroke. They were running out of time.
“What have we got, kid?”
Raising her head, it was to see the flat mesa top. Maybe fifty meters to the south, the first of the domes shimmered in the hot white light. A woman, wearing only a wrap around her hips, was standing in the shade of an old ramada this side of the dome.
Eat her, Demon hissed. Moisture in her meat.
“Go screw yourself,” Talina muttered in return.
Demon chittered happily.
“There’s just that one woman on guard.” Kylee made a face. “What’s with the scars these people have?”
Muldare, looking haggard, hitched her way up one-handed to take a look. “Marks a path for the souls of the people they eat. Or some such shit like that.” The marine awkwardly unslung her rifle, laid it across the rock and tried to sight it. Hard to do one-handed on her weak side. “I could pot her from here. The way I feel? It’d be a pleasure.”
“Yeah?” Talina asked, noticing how the marine’s rifle wavered like a branch in the wind. Muldare’d be lucky if she could hit the dome on fully automatic, dehydrated and exhausted as she was. “And have the whole compound hear. Bet they’d come at a run. How many of them are there?”
“Maybe fifty adults? Maybe less. No telling.” Muldare sucked at her dry lips, desperate eyes on the lone sentry. “If Batuhan sent all those people . . . down into the forest . . . to search for us? May only have a handful left. Look at us. Four of us got away . . . and Talbot and his wife . . . dead. That’s half.”
“I can handle it.” Kylee reached down and pulled her long knife from its sheath. Sunlight glinted on the wicked blade’s polished steel.
“Going to kill her?”
“Well, duh?” Kylee shot her a frost-blue look of disbelief. “My parents are dead because of these people. Mom and Mark came here to help them, and these fuckers drove them out into the forest.”
Talina got a grip on Kylee’s wrist. Squeezed. “No.”
For a moment their gazes locked in a battle of wills. In the end, Kylee rolled her eyes, jerked her knife hand free, and asked, “So . . . what? We sing “Coming Together Under the Bower” and make like best friends? I don’t think so.”
Talina glanced up at Capella. Figured the time at somewhere around eleven. The temperature, mixed with the humidity, was compounded now that they were in direct sun. Taglioni was already raving, Kalico at the stage of complete heat exhaustion. Dehydrated as they were, hyperthermia would kill them within the hour.
If that guard called out, brought twenty or thirty screaming Unreconciled soldiers charging down on top of them? What were any of their chances? Flute would unleash havoc among them. Tal’d open fire on full auto, mow them down to the last man, woman, or child.
So, what’s a human life worth?
Talina slithered back down, picked up Taglioni’s fancy hunting rifle with its waxed walnut, gleaming gold, and fancy inlay. She studied the thing, found the dial that controlled velocity in the pistol-grip’s pommel. She set it to eleven hundred feet per second. Just subsonic.
Crawling up to her place again, she laid out prone, braced the rifle’s forearm on a tuft of ferngrass.
As she got a sight picture, Muldare asked, “What are you doing?”
“Making the best of a shit-load of totally bad choices.”
Talina settled the self-regulating sight on the woman’s head, pressed the button on the sight that compensated for distance and trajectory, and took a breath. Letting it half out, she timed her heartbeat, and in midbeat, caressed the trigger.
The rifle barely uttered a phfft.
In the optic, the woman’s head snapped back, her eyes gone wide. She dropped like a sack of potatoes. Kicked a couple of times and began to twitch.
“Why was that better than me knifing her?” Kylee demanded, her face in a pout.
“Because it’s on my soul, not yours,” Talina told her. “Muldare, you stay on guard. Flute, you make sure nothing happens to them. Kylee, you’re with me.”
Talina laid Taglioni’s gleaming Holland & Holland to one side, took her service rifle, and not waiting to see if Kylee obeyed, sprinted for the curved side of the nearest dome.
She didn’t bother to look at the woman she’d shot. Her peripheral vision was more than good enough to tell her the woman hadn’t been killed outright.
With Kylee hot on her heels, Talina dared not take the time to finish the job. Instead she crept around the side of the dome, found the door, and unlatched it.
She slipped inside, closed it behind Kylee, and turned to cover the hallway with her rifle. Nothing. Just an empty corridor illuminated by a few flickering light panels.
“Where are we?” Kylee wondered under her breath.
“Science dome. Probably the last place Batuhan’s maniacs would inhabit,” Talina whispered. “Stay behind me.”
She led the way down the hall, cleared the first two conference rooms, and then ducked into the lab. Looked to see that no one was hiding behind the counters. Even searched the hood and biocontainment room.
“Check the cabinets. We need clean jars. Jugs. Anything that will hold water.” Talina ripped open the closest cabinets, finding empty shelves. In the next she found a couple bottles of alcohol, solvents, and a trio of one-gallon containers of nitric acid.
“Got it!” Kylee called, popping up from behind the counter with collapsible sample jars.
At the sink, Talina turned on the tap, cupped some and sniffed the water that trickled out. Kalico’s techs had gone through the systems while under Bogarten’s watchful eye. Smelled okay. She cupped it, sucking down handfuls. Waited while Kylee did the same. Now it would save the Supervisor’s life.
“Come on. Come on,” Talina groused as the slow flow began to fill the first jug. “Kylee. Go keep watch. Be just like our luck to have somebody stumble over that dead guard’s body.”
“What if they’ve overthrown Batuhan?”
“Then I just murdered a woman for no reason.” Yeah, right. Deal with that later. “Now, go make sure the coast’s still clear. Scoot.”
Kylee vanished from the room.
What if they’ve overthrown Batuhan?
Talina ground her teeth. Tried not to think about it.
The jugs filled with maddening slowness.