Reckoning Read online

  “Well, that sucks toilet water,” Talina said softly, her heart dropping.

  She accessed her com, saying, “Two Spot? You copy?”

  “Roger that, Tal.” His voice came clear through her earpiece.

  “I’m at Liz’s camp. It looks abandoned. Worse, it looks like something got her. I’m going to set down and take a closer look.”

  “Roger that. Watch your ass, Tal. You need anything, holler.”

  “You’ve got it, old friend.”

  Talina gave the terrain a look, shook her head. There was no good place to land away from the more deadly plants or the questing roots that would trap an aircar. Instead, she turned toward the dry streambed fifty meters to the west. There, she could set down on the sand and gravel, knowing that the vegetation wouldn’t send roots or branches to tangle themselves in the aircar’s fans.

  As the fans spun down and the sand and dust settled, Talina reached over and pulled her rifle free of the rack on the dash. Habit made her do a chamber check as she carefully surveyed her surroundings. The chime rose in a familiar melody, a sort of off-tune symphony. A slight breeze blew down the canyon, carrying the scents of water and damp soil on the perfumed air. The odors of anise and cardamom came from the plants. She caught no vinegary hints that would indicate a bem or spike anywhere close. Nor did her quetzal-augmented senses detect so much as a trace of quetzal.

  “Well, boys, what do you think?” she asked.

  “Careful,” Rocket reminded.

  That Demon said nothing, just seemed to shift next to her spine, put her on alert. What was the little shit thinking?

  “Yeah,” she told him as she took in the bank on either side. “I’ll bet you’re wishing I’d finally get mine.”

  Slipping over the aircar’s side, she walked warily to where the bank had been broken down and climbed. At the top, she skirted wide of a sucking scrub and started into the trees. These were aquajade and stunted chabacho. None of them reaching more than three or four meters in height given the poor soil and shallow bedrock.

  The chime changed as she passed, the invertebrates reacting to her presence. The branches on the gotcha vine seemed to track her as she stepped wide around it.

  Winding her way up through the trees, she could see where wood had been collected, branches lopped off, and prospect holes had been dug here and there. Nothing looked recent.

  At the camp, she circumvented the trip wires and other early warning devices Liz had laid out to alert herself to the presence of a lurking quetzal. Stepping into the camp, Talina stopped, and yes, there, old and barely detectable, she caught it. That faint tang, almost a memory of scent.

  Demon shifted, flipping around inside her with excitement.

  Talina nodded to herself, asking, “You know that smell?”

  “Whitey,’” Rocket replied.

  No wonder Demon was bouncing with joy. Her first infection with quetzal TriNA had been from Whitey’s lineage. Nor had it been the last. She’d been dosed with strains from the same tainted TriNA several times over the years. They’d all tried to kill her in one way or another. The hatred went all the way back to Donovan himself. He’d been eaten by one of Whitey’s ancestors, and the lineage had been at war with humans ever since.

  Talina—catching no recent trace of Whitey’s presence—stepped over, took another look around, and then inspected the tattered clothing that lay on the ground. She could see the long-dried bloodstains where the invertebrates hadn’t eaten them. The rips had that characteristic look: quetzal claws shredded rather than cut through fabric. Left it looking frayed. Same with the boot, though it had been partially eaten and still swarmed with some variety of red-shelled invertebrates.

  “Two Spot?” she accessed her com.

  “Here, Tal. What have you got?”

  “Bloody and torn clothes. And the place still has Whitey’s scent. It’s old. Maybe a month.”

  “Roger that, Tal. Stay frosty out there. Anything goes wrong, I’ll have the cavalry sent your way ASAP.”

  “Roger that.”

  Talina made a careful circle of the camp, seeing that invertebrates had cleaned out the vegetables. A solar refrigerator had been opened, the contents spilled. She picked up most of the tools, the pick, shovel, chisel, and hammer. Then she boxed Liz’s radio, seeing that the battery still held a feeble charge. Batteries and radios were too damned precious.

  The rest of the gear, including the bed, would require an additional trip. The best way to handle it would be to list it as salvage. Some Wild One would be by to pick it up.

  On the last trip to the aircar, Tal took a different trail down through the trees. One that took her close to the base of the slope along what had obviously been Liz’s main route to the canyon. Tal walked with her rifle hung from her left hand, the pick and shovel handles over her right shoulder.

  Here and there she found evidence that the claim had been worked, the olivine in the kimberlite marred by metal tools. And at the side of the dry drainage, a large hole had been dug, the waste pile partially washed away by one of the periodic rains. In a quartzite boulder above the hole, an arrow scratched into the rock pointed up the canyon.

  Talina laid the tools down, hefted her rifle, and followed the faint trail worn into the alluvial soils at the base of the bedrock. A metal hook had been driven into a cleft in the quartzite; from it dangled a canvas sack. It hung maybe a meter and a half above what looked like a pile of . . .

  Talina chewed on her lip, glanced warily up and down the canyon, her nose sniffing for the faintest scent of quetzal. And caught Whitey’s distinct odor.

  Yeah, she knew what that off-colored pile was. Could recognize the splintered bone sticking out of the dried matrix. What made it particularly gruesome was the human skull perched atop the desiccated pile. Whitey had defecated here and placed Liz’s skull atop the pile in some sort of macabre quetzal statement.

  Down in her gut, Demon was chortling in delight.

  “Eat shit and die, you little maggot,” Talina growled as she stepped closer. Invertebrates had riddled the dried fecal material, their holes everywhere; Some were shuttling around as Talina inspected the pile.

  She carefully lifted the skull, shaking it to dislodge colorful shelled creatures that chittered and glistened in the shadowed light. They’d pretty much cleaned the skull of meat and brain. Looking closely, Talina could see the characteristic grooves left by quetzal teeth. Whitey had chewed off the face and scalp. Maybe he’d used his ropelike tongue to slurp out most of the woman’s brain, too. No way of telling that.

  And then he’d deposited the skull atop the pile.

  Who said quetzals didn’t have a twisted sense of humor?

  Talina sighed, studied the pile, and decided that digging out the splintered bones would be too much trouble. Just trying to pick the fragments from the hardened pile, she’d get the crap bit out of her by the angry invertebrates. The skull would be enough. Something to put in the cemetery beneath a marker. Liz deserved that, and as for what was left behind? Well, everyone on Donovan understood they could end up as quetzal shit.

  Reaching up, Talina unhooked the heavy canvas sack. Looking in, she could see a collection of rough-looking almost frosted stones. A small fortune of diamonds, most of them the size of walnuts. One as big as a peach.

  “Hell of a strike you had, Liz,” Talina thoughtfully told the skull. Then she placed it and the mandible in the sack with the diamonds.

  Retracing her way back to the aircar, she laid the bag on the seat in the back, loaded the last of the tools, and stepped into the vehicle. Taking one last look around, she spun up the fans and lifted off, blowing sand and gravel in all directions.

  “On my way back, Two Spot,” she called into com.

  “Roger that, Tal.”

  As she flew south toward Port Authority, she considered. For more than a year now, they’d had no sight nor trace of Whitey or his kin. Some had even started to think the fearsome quetzal was dead. Maybe killed by younger members of his lineage. Quetzals did that. That’s how they passed information from generation to generation. By ingesting their elders’ TriNA.

  “But the way you killed Liz?” she mused. “You made a show of this.”

  In her stomach, Demon snickered. Piece of shit that he was.

  “You wanted us to know that you’re back.”

  “Warning,” Rocket insisted from her shoulder.

  “Why warn us?” Talina wondered. “We’ll be ready. And this time, forewarned. Whitey’s going to end up as steaks and leather.”

  “You’ll see,” came Demon’s cryptic comment from down inside her.

  3

  The airplane curved off to the southeast as it banked tightly over the deep forest. Where she sat at the controls, sixteen-year-old Kylee Simonov kept an eye on the screen set in the dash. The readings kept climbing, dropping, and then climbing again; different signatures for organic compounds appeared and then vanished. The data came from the sensor they towed on a two-hundred-meter cable behind and below the VTOL aircraft.

  For the most part, her quetzal sense, that part of her personality that had grown up and merged with Rocket’s TriNA, was still. The human part of her had come to accept flying. Actually enjoyed it while the quetzal engrams in her brain went mostly silent.

  “Get anything?” Dek Taglioni asked from where he sat in the passenger seat.

  “Not sure,” Kylee told him. She pointed at the screen. “Got a weird spike on the organics. Something big, animal, but the signature is like nothing we’ve seen so far.”

  Dek tapped the screen, pulling up comparative data. “Doesn’t have the same signature for proteins or gases that the treetop terror did.”

  Returning her attention to the controls, she told him, “Keep in mind
, that one was wounded. It had been shot, a lot. Was bleeding. And it had snapped off the spike it used to spear people. Not to mention that it had eaten. We don’t know what kind of chemicals it would have given off after digesting otherworldly proteins.”

  She didn’t add, “. . . after eating my parents.” But then, Dek had been there. He’d seen Kylee’s grief and rage, knew how deeply personal this hunt was for her.

  She checked the instruments and heading. She enjoyed flying. The sense of freedom that Dek’s airplane gave her; that he’d taught her how to fly was one of the greatest miracles in her life. Not to mention that the quetzal part of her brain shut off and left her in peace for those golden hours when she was in the air. Flying terrified quetzals.

  She was in love with Dek Taglioni. He had long sandy-blond hair, wore a quetzal-hide coat, chamois pants, and a claw shrub-fiber shirt. His wide-brimmed hat hung from the seat behind. Dek’s skin was tanned into a lovely bronze by Capella’s hot rays. The guy had curiously enlarged yellow-green eyes. The color, Dek said, had been designed that way. The rest of the modifications had been compliments of the quetzal TriNA in his body. Same with the man’s face; TriNA had played with his handsome features, elongating the chin, squaring the cheekbones, and adding angular planes to his face. It hadn’t messed with Dek’s perfect white teeth. The glaring scar on his left cheek added to the image, gave him a threatening presence.

  Kylee thought he was really good to look at. Would have liked to have done more than look. But Dek was out of reach. Even for her mixed-up adolescent brain. Nor had he ever hinted that he was anything but lineage, and nothing more than her best friend. Besides, trained as she’d been by her mother, she fully understood the hormone rush her sixteen-year-old body was entertaining. And then there were the quetzal molecules. The memories she’d inherited from Talina Perez’s brain. Fact was, Kylee spent a lot of time wondering who and what she was.

  She adjusted the trim, checked the monitor again, and banked to send them back north on another transect a couple of kilometers to the west. “You’re probably getting sick of hearing it, but I really appreciate you taking the time. I know it’s been three years. A lot of people would have said, ‘Give it a break, kid. The thing’s gone.’”

  Dek made a dismissive gesture with his head. “I was there that day. Down in that black forest. Could have just as easily been me. Or any of us. And I figure that whatever that thing was, it deserves a payback. Your mother was one of the most outstanding women on the planet.”

  He paused, grunted. “And a Taglioni doesn’t forget his obligations. You could have treated me like shit on your shoe. Didn’t matter that I was soft meat, Kylee. You took the time to train me. Taught me things that have kept me alive.”

  “So did Tal. And your quetzals. And Flute.” She couldn’t stop the smile as she shifted her grip on the wheel. “And you were fun. It was all so important to you. Like every day was an adventure, and you were doing stuff for the first time. Reminded me of being a kid. One I could teach.”

  “So, maybe you’ll have your own one day.” Dek had his eyes fixed on the forest ahead of them. “You’re sixteen now. I keep wondering what happened to that cool girl I met at Briggs. Not that you ever acted your age.”

  “Too much of Talina in my head,” she said. “We shared too much TriNA. Every time the adolescent girl in my brain wants to do something stupid, there’s the Talina memory lurking right beside it. Wants me to respond like a mature woman would. What a fucked-up way to grow up.” She paused. “Not to mention that there’s a bunch of quetzals in my head. The part of me that’s Rocket views the world with a sense of inevitability. I don’t think like a human, Dek.”

  “But you’re still hunting the creature that killed your folks.” He lifted a cautionary finger. “That’s intimately human.”

  “It’s fundamentally quetzal, too.” She eased the wheel back as they approached a low hill. “Both species are alike that way. The human part of me wants to find and kill the terror like a sort of payback. It’s primate emotional rage: You hurt me. I’m hurting you back. The quetzal part of me? It’s like a drive. We’re enemies, and I will destroy you because I have to. It’s preordained. Not like the primate emotion, but a gnawing need.”

  “Yeah, I get it.” Dek frowned. “I’ve got too much of Whitey’s lineage in me. And too much of Talina, too.”

  “How’s that work?” Kylee asked. “You two seem to just click into place, like matching pieces of a puzzle. Me and Tip? It’s weird.”

  “You’re only . . .” Dek chuckled. “Sorry. You still fool me with that body of yours.” A beat. “So, what’s up with you and Tip?”

  She shook her head, felt the frown line her forehead as she watched the data scroll across the dash screen. “He’s not growing up, Dek. He’s becoming someone . . . um, something I don’t know anymore. Like the TriNA is making him into a new kind of organism that’s . . . well . . .”

  “Can’t put words to it?”

  Kylee took a deep breath. “No. And I was trained as a biologist. I haven’t even seen Tip. Like for three months. It was after we started having sex. Changed everything. He’s just . . . gone.”

  My fault, she thought. But then, it usually was.

  “Broke his parents’ hearts. Madison thinks that somehow she failed him. Chaco? He’s more philosophical about it. You know Tip best, Kylee. What do you think’s going to happen to him?”

  “Nothing good,” she told him. “Even Flute’s given up on him. In Flute’s own words, he says that Tip’s ‘spoiled meat.’”

  “Yeah, that’s quetzal for wasted and fit only for invertebrates.” Dek slapped his knee as if in disappointment.

  “Got to reel the probe in,” she told him, one eye on the charge level. “We’re at the safety limit to get back to the claim and recharge the powerpack.”

  Dek nodded, reached down and flipped the switch that would reel the probe in.

  Kylee made a one-hundred-and sixty-degree turn, taking a heading back toward Dek’s claim. Through the side window, she watched the forest pass below. From the sky, it looked almost like a soft carpet: bunched canopies, greens, blues, turquoise, teal, all thickly packed and soft-looking.

  Call that an illusion or what? That peaceful carpet of trees was anything but soft and peaceful. Looking closely, she could see the holes where forest giants had uprooted and toppled a rival. And here and there, a lollipop tree stood alone in a clearing it made by whacking and beating its neighbors. The very idea that a tree could be a mobile predator just wasn’t in a terrestrial human’s cognitive framework.

  “So, when are you and Talina having kids?” Kylee wondered.

  Dek shrugged. “Don’t know that we are. Hell, we don’t even know if we can. We’re both hybrids. Even if we conceived, there’s no telling if a fetus would be viable, or what it would come out to be if it was. Would the kid even look human? Or would it be some weird chimera that was a mish mash of human and quetzal? You don’t realize, but there are huge moral implications. We’re off the map, Kylee.”

  She nodded. The same thoughts had kicked off in her own head the first time she’d ovulated. At the time, the only eligible male had been Tip. Having “inherited” a lot of Talina Perez’s memories when they exchanged TriNA years back, Kylee had grown up with the memory of Talina’s relationships—good, bad, and worse—as if she’d lived them. It was like having access to an entire life’s experience. But none of Talina’s lovers had ever reacted as sullenly or defensively as Tip had.

  When she’d tried to tell him how a man should behave with a woman he was copulating with, he’d just gotten mad and stomped off. Gone.

  “What’s that look?” he asked.

  “Trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my life.” Kylee set her airspeed, relaxing in the seat. “Where do I fit in the world? If Rocket hadn’t been killed when I was a kid, it would have been him and me. Like a sort of symbiont, I guess. With Flute, I never bonded that completely. We’re sort of best friends who live in each other’s heads. Hard to put the intimacy of that link into words. But Dek, I was raised human, surrounded by people until Mundo Base was abandoned. And yes, I bear the guilt and shame for what I did to Rebecca and Shantaya.”

  “You were a wounded nine-year-old girl.” Dek squinted through the windshield. “Looks like a flight of mobbers.”