Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (34 page)

John
raised the rifle to his shoulder and put the sights in the center of Jacob’s
chest.

He fired.

The
bullet put a single dark hole in the grayish skin and a spray of red splattered
the equipment behind him.

“Yes!”
Donna’s voice said.

Jacob
fell slowly off the gurney and crumpled onto the floor, one hand clinging to a
shiny cross-member.

“Is it
dead?” Donna asked. “Is it dead?”

John
moved up to get a closer look. Jacob was lying face up with his eyes open and
his mouth agape, looking not too different than he did when he was alive. A
little pool of dark blood had formed under him, staining the robe. John reached
down and felt for a pulse in the flaccid neck. The flesh was still and lifeless.
“I’d say he’s dead,” he said.

“Hallelujah,”
Donna said, then added, “Shoot it again, just to be sure.”

“He’s
dead,” John said. “I’ve made enough noise.”

He put
his hand on Rachel’s forehead and felt its smooth warmth. Then he shook her
shoulder gently.

“Rachel.
Rachel, wake up,” he said.

“Tell me
what’s happening,” Donna said.

“She’s
under some drug—some anesthetic or something. There’s a tube running into her
arm.”

“Read me
what’s on the bottle,” Donna said.

John read
the label. “Narcoline HCI,” he said.

“Well,
she’s not gonna wake up for a while, that’s for sure. You’ll have to carry
her.”

“Carry
her where?”

“Take one
of the tubes leading out of the lab. Just go. Go farther in and hide until we
can figure out how to get you out.”

“That
could take a while,” he said.

“Hey.
Don’t worry about it. I’ll think of something,” she said.

“Don’t
think too long,” he said. “Can you fly the shuttle down, Bill?”

“If it’s
machinery, I can work it,” Habershaw said.

“Just be
gentle on the stick. Don’t let it get away from you. Left stick for vertical
lift. Right for pitch, yaw and acceleration.”

“You’d
better get going and stop sweating the little things,” Habershaw said. Then
there was a burst of static and Habershaw’s voice was lost as static flooded
the channel.

“Hello?”
John said, tapping the transceiver. “Come in. He tapped the device and adjusted
the volume. “Damn it!” He knew what it was, Habershaw had turned the shuttle on
and the suspensor generators had warmed up and were now swamping the headset’s
lame little power band. They’d be out of touch until Habershaw shut the system
off.

John
pulled the needle out of Rachel’s arm. A trickle of blood ran out after it. He
plucked her clean clothes off a rack, picked up her boots then rolled them up
in her clothes and put the whole bundle on her. He gathered her up and with a
heave, lifted her off the gurney. He’d been carrying her unconscious form from
one place to another ever since they’d met, it seemed. She hadn’t gotten much
lighter.

He picked
a darkened tube in the wall fifty meters away and started for it. It was as
good as any.

* * *

In the
shuttle, Habershaw cut the wire and let it fall into the shaft, then closed the
hatch and locked it. He moved back to the pilot’s seat.

“Are you
sure you can fly this?” Donna inquired rather nervously.

“Oh, I
can fly it,” Habershaw said, fiddling with the controls. “Not good, you
understand—but I can definitely fly it.”

“Good
enough not to kill us?”

“I don’t
know yet.”

“That’s
encouraging.”

“I could
lie to you about it.”

“Don’t.”

“Then
buckle up,” he said. Then, “John? Was that the right stick for pitch and yaw,
you said?"

Nothing.

“John?”

“Come in,
John,” Donna said.

Silence.

“Well, so
much for support,” she said. “Screw it, we don’t need it. I think he said left
for pitch, yaw and whatever.”

“Yeah,
me, too,” Habershaw said, putting his hand on the right stick.

He pushed
it forward. There was a groan in the shuttle’s frame as it tried to dip down
into the monolith’s top with five thousand kilos of force. He pulled the stick
right, and it pivoted, grinding around in a tight circle, the skids cutting a
deep gash.

“Whoops,
wrong stick,” Habershaw said.

“Very
wrong stick,” Donna said, her eyes closed.

Habershaw
pushed the other stick gently forward and the shuttle lifted off the monolith
in a straight, vertical ascent. He watched the altimeter until it gained
another thousand meters and then pushed the other stick forward. The shuttle’s
nose dropped, and it raced off, gaining speed.

“Not bad,
Habershaw,” Donna said, more or less relaxing in her seat.

“Shit
these things are easy to fly. I’m surprised they pay these pilots down for this
kind of work.”

“Where
are we heading?”

He
checked the compass. “Northeast, according to this.”

“Don’t
change course,” she said. “Just find a place up ahead and duck into it. I need
some time to think.”
 

* * *

John
marched down the tunnel with Rachel’s limp form in his arms like so much meat.
One of her arms hung down and swung as if jointless as he walked.

The
tunnel turned to the left some distance ahead. By the time he got to the turn,
Rachel’s weight was taking its toll. He waited until he was well around the
bend and out of sight before he put her down to rest his arms. He was drenched
with sweat.

“Rachel,”
he tried with a gentle shake, “Baby—wake up.”
 
She remained in a deep stupor, her eyes closed and her mouth slack.

There was
another sharp left-angle turn a few meters up. He hefted her and trudged on again,
hoping he could find another place to stop very soon. The next length of tunnel
formed a “T” not twenty meters ahead. He took it right. He continued to turn
right at each turn without fail. That way, he figured he could find his way out
of the labyrinth of tunnels quite easily, when the time came, by turning left
each time until he came to the long straight one he’d taken first. He went
about twenty meters more and picked a small chamber. He went in, put Rachel
down, covered her neatly with the sheet and propped her head up on the clothes
bundle. It was fair cover, and a good enough place to hide until Rachel woke
up. If he moved up to the last bend, he had a view of at least thirty meters in
a straight line down the tube with no chambers on either side as cover for an
advancing offensive. He estimated he had traveled at least three hundred
meters. It would have to do.

* * *

Habershaw
was doing a good job of flying the shuttle and was quite proud of himself.
Donna figured it was because he was going in a straight line. There was a test
coming, however.

“Up
ahead,” she said. “Slow down and drop into that depression in the canopy.
They’ll never see us in there.”

Habershaw
slowed the vehicle to a crawl then stopped directly over the depression. Using
the other stick, he brought the shuttle down through the canopy. Branches broke
and scraped at the shuttle’s hard skin as it descended. A moment later the
craft stopped with a bump on the jungle floor.

“Not
bad,” Donna said.

“A rig’s
a rig,” Habershaw said knowingly. “This one just happens to fly is all.”
 
He shut the system off and the shuttle
interior was cast into darkness except for a splash of moonlight here and
there, just enough to see by. “Now what?” he asked.

Donna
closed her eyes and leaned her head against the side window for a moment. She
felt a thousand years old.

It was as
if the planet had been beating on her for the entire last year, giving her a
relentless pounding for something she didn’t do. It wasn’t fair—and the beating
wasn’t over yet. Her family, what there was left of it, was trapped in that
goddamned giant plant surrounded by mercenaries and far-beyond-insane religious
zealots, and the only positive thing that had happened in recent memory was
that the asshole Jacob was dead. That could slow the nest down a little, maybe
confuse them until they could find someone else to be their mad king.

She had
to find a way to get John and Rachel out of there. But there was only one way
in or out now—through the big front door. But once the others found Jacob’s
body, surely sometime in the next few hours, the whole complex would be on red
alert. That one door would be so heavily guarded it would be impossible to get
in or out.

They had
no weapons. They had no allies. They had no plan. They had no options.

“I don’t
know,” she said wearily. “I just don’t know.”

“We could
hide in containers and get carried in,” Habershaw said.

“Oh,
right,” she replied. “It’d just be our luck to get buried in a huge stack of
containers and smother or starve. Besides, what are we supposed to do when we
get inside anyway?”

“Just a
thought,” Habershaw said.

They sat,
not saying anything for some minutes. Insects bumped into the windscreen,
making tapping sounds or zipped past, lit up momentarily by a beam of
moonlight. An especially big one banged on the glass then hung there, drifting
up and down and back and forth, its wings making muffled buzzing sounds.

“Look at
the size of that bastard,” Habershaw said idly. “You could make a meal out of
the sonofabitch if you were real hungry.”

Donna
smiled her lopsided smile. Habershaw’s remark was kinda funny and kinda not.
They might actually have to learn how to cook fat beetles like that very soon.

Nurse to bug eater in one lifetime
,
she thought ruefully.

Once,
centuries ago, when her life was neatly planned and her course clear, the world
had so much promise. She had just graduated from Stanford after ten long years
of study and had been placed on her first contract in San Francisco.

It wasn’t
much, just an assistant’s deal, but her credit was good and her debt was coming
down. She sat one night and wrote it out, put down all the steps she would take
to move into a job that really paid down so she could use the credit deltas and
start accumulating some stuff of her own. The list was two or three screens
long; and when she was finished, her life seemed, if not perfect, at least
planned and under her own stewardship for the first time. She would do better
here, work harder there, and she would prosper. It had felt good to do that
little bit of planning in an atmosphere of hope. At that time, she remembered
clearly, the days seemed brighter and the crowds not so daunting. She’d
furnished her tiny apartment with just a few items: a used chair and table; a
small rug to go under it; a bed with legs and a dresser—just a few things to
celebrate. What she really wanted was a stuffed sofa, but such a luxury would
have to wait.

As the
weeks and months rolled by, her carefully crafted list of things to do began to
look shallow, naive, even sophomoric as the first in a long list of
card-carrying assholes began to tear it to pieces a little at a time.

In those
formative years, Donna Applegate wasn’t your perfect contractor—having a
penchant to speak her mind perhaps too readily—but she was willing and eager to
please, and she was prompt and conscientious.

It was
that willingness to please that allowed events to forge her particular world
view.

She
discovered early on that those above you, those holding the reins, at least the
ones in her profession, would exploit you in every way imaginable if you let
them. They would put you on jobs with no future or give you things to do no one
else would do. The wrong people would literally use your back as a stepping
stone to their own destination. Some of them, the worst of them, would fool you
and claim to make it all better by promising advancement in return for sexual
favors. Some were so rotten you could smell them in their offices, souls made
rancid by their own avarice.