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  “Okay, so we inverted, it failed, and we popped back into Solar System,” Torgussen insisted. “What went wrong?”

  “You tell me.” Ho growled. “Maybe Neptune control telemetry can give us a clue. They would have been watching right up to the last second.”

  Torgussen tried again to raise Neptune control on the photonic com, heard only silence in return. “They’re still not answering. Seesil, get an astral fix. Maybe we popped a couple thousand klicks from our original position.”

  Finally. This would solve his mystery.

  Vacquillas did, flicking her fingers to bring up the star charts for Solar System. Then she ordered: “Superimpose Vixen’s position and locate.”

  The stars wavered, seemed to expand and then shrink as the ship’s external sensors projected their observations against that of Solar System.

  “No match,” Vixen’s voice informed. “Checking star charts now.” A pause. “Location established. Capella system. Six point one five light-hours from the primary. Twenty-one degrees, seven minutes, thirty-two seconds inclination.”

  “Impossible!” Torgussen cried, standing from his chair to stare as Vixen superimposed the star charts with the masters recorded during Tempest’s initial survey of the Capella system more than a decade ago.

  “This has got to be wrong,” Ho snapped. “We barely inverted symmetry.”

  “Running additional analytics now,” the ship told them.

  “I gotta go check this.” Vacquillas stood, taking her holo with her. “I’m headed to the observation dome. I want to see with my own eyes.”

  “Yeah, go,” Torgussen told her, gaze fixed on the rolling screens of data.

  “I don’t get it. What’s the problem?” Tam asked. “So, we’re there. So what?”

  “So, Advisor, it doesn’t work that way,” Torgussen insisted. “After years of hypothesis testing, we’re barely beginning to grasp the theoretical roots of navigation in inverted symmetry. Put in the simplest of terms, once a ship has inverted symmetry, its location is a matter of statistical probability. The longer the ship is outside, the more time it has to appear in any given place, or nowhere at all. But we know that if you run a series of mathematical equations and statistics, they somehow set the initial conditions for where the ship will or will not appear. Sort of like the way quantum mechanics function in our universe. Vixen is programmed to run the same mathematic probabilities that Tempest ran when she discovered the Capella system. Assuming those initial conditions, and running those same descriptive statistics, we should come out at the same place after the same amount of relative time: two years ship’s time, in whatever dimension, universe, or wherever the hell Tempest went.”

  “But we’re missing the two years. What we call transit time,” Ho said. “Which is a problem.”

  Torgussen added, “And if anything goes wrong during the transit time, the ship is supposed to default back to Solar System by immediately running the math backward.”

  “Which Vixen never had time to do,” Ho added.

  “But I still don’t get how running a series of statistics can get us from point A to point B across space.”

  “Yeah, well, we really don’t have a handle on that. No one does. Maybe, eventually, the brainiacs will work it out. In the meantime, you’re just going to have to accept that it works, and when we initiate the program, we usually get where we want to go. As to the mathematics necessary to get from Solar System to Capella, it takes a 1023 power quantum qubit computer to compute, which means it’s an insoluble problem to figure it out by hand.”

  “It still doesn’t make sense,” Tam muttered under his breath.

  “Neither does photonic entanglement and a plethora of other observed phenomena in the universe,” Ho replied.

  Valencia Seguro’s face formed on the holo. “Cap? I’m in observation with Seesil. Got the fricking star chart. It’s impossible, but we’re in Capella system. Everything matches, right down to the primary’s stellar emissions and spectra. Background constellations, everything right where it oughta be. Just like Tempest reported them.”

  Torgussen shook his head violently back and forth. “Damn it, Val, I take your word for it, but it’s just freaking impossible.”

  “Yeah,” she told him. “We’re supposed to believe we jumped thirty light-years from Solar System, and we did it in a fraction of a second.”

  “Which means something’s really wrong,” Ho added darkly from the side. “Where’d our two years and eighty-eight percent of fuel go?”

  “You’re right.” Torgussen rubbed his jaw. “That energy had to go somewhere.”

  “Okay, that’s just about what it would take to invert long enough to get us to Capella. But the transit time . . .” Ho gave up and blinked in confusion at his screen.

  “What do you want to do, Captain?” Vacquillas asked from her holo. “Spin up and try and invert back home? See if we can run it again backward? If we’ve cracked instantaneous travel, it’ll be worth a vacuum-sucking fortune to The Corporation slicks and their profit margins.”

  “Cap, we don’t have the fuel,” Ho added.

  Torgussen shot a wary look Tam’s way, as if to judge his reaction.

  That brought a spear of amusement to Tam Benteen’s heart. Artollia had placed him here under false pretenses. He was no more a Corporate bureaucrat than he was a fish. Wouldn’t Torgussen and his crew love it if they knew he was facing a death sentence back in Solar System?

  He said, “Captain, if we’re really here, in Capella’s orbit, my advice is that we look around, proceed with our mission, and collect our survey data. As I understand it, the exact math that brought us here will run backward, which means whatever happened to get us here instantaneously will be just as likely to happen again on the way back, right?”

  “Hypothetically that is correct,” Torgussen answered warily.

  Not that Torgussen would buck his decision. Tamarland Benteen’s title was Advisor/Observer. Once past the semantics, he was in charge. Chances were that if Vixen inverted again and reappeared immediately outside Neptune orbit, Corporate Security would be waiting for him.

  And it wouldn’t be pleasant.

  2

  Her night vision acutely sensitive, Talina Perez ghosted down the dark street. With care she skirted the few cones of light cast onto the graveled avenue. In the thrill of the chase, her charged muscles allowed her to almost flow, each movement liquid and powerful. Her clawed feet barely made a whisper of sound as she searched the houses that lined either side of the road. She slowed to listen and inspected each of the doors.

  Doors were fascinating. Such clever things. And latches even more so. They existed as puzzles. And here, in this next pale white dome, she found just what she sought.

  She melted into the shadows as a young woman stepped out of the dome-shaped dwelling. Closing the door behind her, the woman skipped down the stairs and hurried off down the street, then took a right and vanished between two of the stone buildings.

  Easing forward, Talina tested each step lest it collapse under her weight. With a tentative try, she managed to undo the latch, watched the door swing inward in silence.

  Warm air drifted out, filled with the scents of alien foods, hints of chemicals she couldn’t identify, and the moist odor of human.

  She paused, taking one last careful look up and down the street. Nothing moved. She extended her collar, the membrane picking up the finest of auditory vibrations. The only sound came from the faint whisper of voices from nearby dwellings.

  Talina entered, vision adjusting to the bright light within. The scent led her through the main room with its curious furnishings, past the kitchen with its interesting smells. She had to maneuver just so to pass her bulky body through the narrow doorway, and there, in a cage-like bed, lay the newborn. It was on its back, legs bowed, arms out and bent at the elbows. A wrapping partia
lly covered the tender skin. Fine hair—pale and almost golden—crowned the round head. As if it sensed her, the infant shifted, opened blue eyes to stare up in curious wonder.

  Talina felt a flare of color roll through her, white and fluorescent pink. A statement of satisfaction.

  She could sense the infant’s life, the beating of its heart, the warm blood in its veins. Such a marvel this soft and tiny creature was. Its harmless little hands opened and closed. The feet kicked up and down on the mattress.

  As more color flared, the infant’s face bent into a smile, and the little mouth began to leak saliva as it uttered a happy “Gooo. Daaaa.” It reached up as if to touch, fingers fluttering. Delight filled those oddly focused blue eyes.

  Had the creature no clue?

  In that moment, Talina experienced a jolt of disgust.

  No! This is wrong.

  Even as she recoiled, her mouth opened and she reached down. Could taste the infant in the crib. Experienced the rapture as her jaws closed on the fragile little life. Heard the wail of terror as her teeth clamped down. The cry cut off as bones snapped, and that small body crushed in her jaws.

  And then she was outside, in the dark street, running. Around her, the town remained quiet. She was reveling in the taste of the infant—so different from anything she’d ever devoured. Curiously sweet and barely more than a morsel, its fluids were running down her throat, into her digestive . . .

  “Fuck me! No!” Talina shrieked as she bolted upright in her bed. At her cry and movement, the lights flashed on in her bedroom.

  Talina gasped for breath. Her heart hammered hard at her chest as if to explode her ribs. She reached up, running a hand over her face and clawing her long hair back.

  Worst of all, she could still taste the infant. The memory of it thick on the back of her throat.

  Dream. It was all a dream.

  No, it couldn’t have been.

  The imagery, the smells, the sensations. They’d been lived.

  She felt the quetzal in her gut resettle itself.

  “You piece of stinking shit,” she told it, awake enough now to know the dream’s origins.

  Which did little to lessen the horror.

  For whatever reason, the demon quetzal had made her relive the night it had sneaked into Port Authority and eaten Allison Chomko’s baby girl. Talina had tracked down and killed that same quetzal. In the bloody final confrontation, Talina had been contaminated by the killer’s fluids. Shared its blood.

  She could feel the beast inside her. Though Raya Turnienko—the town’s only physician—assured her that no malignant quetzal was growing in her gut. As eerie as that would be, it wasn’t much better that she was infested with the quetzal’s molecules: Donovan’s analog of DNA. Turnienko and the chemist, Lee Cheng, were still trying to understand how those alien molecules managed to interface with Talina’s brain.

  “You really are disgusting,” she told the creature.

  Mistake. The word formed in her mind.

  “Yeah, you and your kind seem to be prone to that, huh?”

  In retaliation, her quetzal’s mate had come seeking revenge. That had been a tough fight. Left her dome in ruins. The man in her life, Cap Taggart, had been crippled. And days later, someone had murdered him in his hospital bed.

  “Guess neither one of us came out on top,” she muttered to the beast. Checking her implant, she discovered the time was two thirty-three in the morning.

  Lightning flashed through her dome’s bedroom window, and the first spatters of rain hit the roof.

  An image flashed in her mind: A pot, Mayan in origin, colorfully painted and decorated with images of Maya gods. One, a feathered and bedecked human figure with a large nose, was shown in profile flanked by hideous beings, looking maimed and infected.

  She knew that pot. Remembered it from when she was a girl. She had reached for it, only to watch it fall from the high table . . .

  “No!”

  Talina blinked, trying to clear away the memory. The falling pot left her with a sense of terror. Started her heart pounding. That had been one of the worst days of her life. The pot had been priceless. Freshly excavated from a newly discovered Mayan tomb in Chiapas.

  Worse, she still had the aftertaste of eating that little girl. “There are times when I really hate you,” she told the beast inside her.

  The quetzal squirmed in her gut, whispering, Good.

  Cheng, Turnienko, and the microbiologist, Dya Simonov, had no clue about how to purge her of the alien molecules.

  “Meanwhile, I’m a freak,” Talina whispered as she dressed. She shut off the light. Could see fine without it thanks to the infrared and ultraviolet receptive cells that had grown in her retina. Proof that having a quetzal inside wasn’t all bad.

  Thunder boomed, and the rain increased. Which was why the quetzal had been so active in her dreams. Quetzals liked to hunt during storms.

  She paused in her kitchen for a glass of mint tea, then took down her rifle, checked to ensure a round was in the chamber, and slipped her rain poncho over her head. Outside, she locked her door and glanced up and down the wet, dark street. Images from the dream flashed behind her eyes.

  Allison Chomko’s old dome was there, two doors down. Talina’s quetzal would have prowled right here, checked this very door, though the dome was empty back then.

  Yes, the beast whispered.

  “All that, and it was a bust. Thought you were going to learn something about us by eating that baby. And all you got was shot.”

  We didn’t know.

  “Ignorance is a bitch, isn’t it?” She slung her rifle and padded down the street; rain tattooed an irregular rhythm on the poncho hood.

  Talina cut across town to the aircar field gate, her night vision finding the guard awake at his post. Smit Hazen had just survived his eighteenth birthday. He was fifth ship, arrived on Donovan as a gawky, tow-headed boy. His father had died that first year, and Smit had grown up without any illusions about the world on which he lived. Even as she approached, he was using night-vision goggles to scan the aircar field just behind the tall fence with its locked gate.

  “Hey, Smit?” Talina called as she approached the guard post and stepped under the roofed enclosure.

  “Hey, Tal. Middle of the night. What are you doing up?” The young man lowered his goggles.

  “My quetzal wouldn’t let me sleep.”

  “Yeah?” He glanced sidelong at her. “It’s the kind of night they like. So far the only thing moving is a herd of chamois. About fifteen. They were hugging the bush out past the farmland.”

  “Seem nervous?”

  “Naw. Still, that doesn’t mean squat.” He lifted his goggles again, looking out past the security light that illuminated the grounded aircars glistening in the rain.

  “Okay, stay frosty.”

  “You got it, Tal.”

  Something in the wind and rain turned her steps toward the Mine Gate on Port Authority’s north end. There, the main avenue ended in a large gate through which the heavy haulers could pass. Beyond it, the haul road vanished into the darkness.

  Wejee Tolland, a dark-skinned man with Australian aboriginal ancestry, could have stepped right out of the outback. His curly red-blond hair was squashed down under his rain hat; the man’s flat nose and strong jaw were balanced by the prominent brow that made a shelf over his eyes. “Hey, Tal,” he called as she splashed into the illuminated area around the gate.

  “How’s the night?”

  “Wet.” He stepped out from the shelter of his little shack and gestured beyond the fence. “Something’s got my back up. Hard to say. I smell it every so often when the wind’s right.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Quetzal,” he told her. “People tell me I’m nuts, but I’m only three generations out of the red center.”

&nb
sp; She sniffed the night wind, her own sense of smell acute. Another of her quetzal changes. And, yes, when the wind eddied there it was, that familiar musk. She’d smelled it often enough after she’d killed the beasts.

  Stepping up to the high gate, she peered through the falling rain that slanted silver in the floodlights. At the edge of the pool of light, the bush—made up of scrubby aquajade, sucking scrub, and muskbush—had a washed-out look. Water shone in the graveled surface of the haul road. She sniffed the air again, caught that faint whiff, and almost immediately her mouth started to water. She winced at the bitter, almost overpowering taste of peppermint, like concentrated extract dripped on her tongue.

  “Yeah, quetzal,” she agreed. “Just out beyond the lights.”

  “Been a while,” Wejee noted, shifting his rifle. “What? Almost a year since we’ve had one prowling around?”

  “’Bout that.” She accessed her com. “We’ve got a quetzal out in the bush north of the mine gate. Be frosty, people.”

  “Roger that,” repeated in her ear bud as the other guards checked in.

  Inside, her quetzal tensed, expectant. She’d felt that same nervous excitement just before her quetzal’s mate had tried to kill her.

  “So,” she mused. “Another of your relatives?”

  “What’s that?” Wejee asked, wary eyes on the bush, his rifle raised under the protection of his raincoat.

  “Talking to my quetzal,” she told him. Half the town thought she was nuts, the other half considered her infected and quasi dangerous, but everyone knew about her quetzal.

  “What’s it say about this one?”

  “Relative.”

  “Ah.” Wejee gave her a knowing grin as he stepped back under the shelter of his guard shack. “You know, back on Earth my people put a lot of stock in family and kinship. On how we were related to each other and what obligations we had. Gave us a clue as to how we were supposed to act toward each other.”

  “Yeah, well, this is Donovan. Last time one of my quetzal’s kin showed up, it crippled Cap, came within a whisker of killing me, and I dropped the bucket from a front-end loader on its head.”