Dominant Species Volume Two -- Edge Effects (Dominant Species Series) (38 page)

“Something
like that,” he said with a sneer.

In her
mind’s eye she saw the carriers by the hundreds adrift above Earth’s ports. She
saw the shuttles running back and forth to them in thin lines and the crowds of
wealthy and rabid religious pilgrims clamoring for passage on one of the new
and shiny carriers.

This
project had nothing at all to do with mining; at least not now. Mining would come
later—after the slaves arrived.

No. It
was about the migration of Homo sapiens to a new and pristine place; to a
planet rich and fertile and beautiful—with plenty of resources for the holy.
Unlike tacky Fuji, an out-world
project
made of three parts machinery and one part human flotsam, this would be the
grand and fertile field where the seeds of Homo sapiens most shining examples
would be planted. This would be the new place, the fresh place, where humankind
would procreate and grow and flourish and devour once more. Here the most
gluttonous of the species would bring to bear its formidable technology and
with its virulent will to survive and breed, aim that fearsome weapon at the
planet’s heart.

She’d
seen them, even spoken with a few over the years and listened politely to their
psycho-babble. The Sacred Bond of the Fervent Alliance, with their horrible
iron-willed devotions and rules of proper conduct. Their hideous rituals of
blood and adoration promised to wash away all sin, then filled the void left
behind with a concrete mix of dogma, rules and scripture; the foundation for a
mind stripped of its former framework. They were the blamers, the
pointer-of-fingers, humanity’s accusers, and the embracers of a love,
self-serving and false. They were vain seekers of a messiah who would certify
them and their rabid convictions with a stamp holier than thine own. They were
the procreators, the ones gone forth to multiply—the makers of lives in great
number, dull and eternal.

These
devoted ones would leave a vanquished Earth behind and with the zeal only the
religious righteous can muster, would carry forward humankind’s flag. Stitched
with fifteen thousand years of war, plague, greed and religion-spawned avarice,
they would carry it to Verde’s Revenge and plant that tattered standard deep
in its heart.

This rich
green planet would become the new center of the human universe with the
superstitious and deceptive as its stewards. Here the gatherers of excessive
wealth and the gleaners of souls would feed. The cycle would repeat as it had
in the past.

“That’s
some news, Joe. You just risked a lot,” she said.

He
knotted his brow as if he were really thinking about it.

“See, I
don’t think you’ll kill me. You might run away and hide, but you won’t kill me.
I’ll go back to Uncle Ed and make up some story to cover my butt, but you’ll be
back in the green and probably dead in a week. I’m not worried. It doesn’t
matter what I tell you. The important thing is that the planet doesn’t get
closed down and all those delivery channels stay open. With you two out of the
way, that’s guaranteed.”

“You got
awfully lucid, there Joe, for a man who’s dying.”

“I’m
fine,” he smiled “It’s just a scratch.”

“Is that
right?” she said with a crooked grin of her own.

The concussion
of the huge pistol tore through the little room like a bomb blast. The area
behind what was left of Devonshire’s head was a red, star-shaped splatter. His
arms and legs hung down and twitched spastic and weak.

“Donna,
you killed him . . .” Rachel said, her ears
ringing. “That’s right. He’s dead. Now we have a chance—and there’s one less
zealot in the world.”

“We’ve
got to get rid of the bodies,” John said, scowling at them as if they were
trash to be thrown out.

“Why?”
Donna said. “If they don’t report to Smith, he’ll know they’re dead anyway.
What’s the point? What we have to do is get the hell out of here.”

“Where?”
Rachel asked. “Where are we supposed to go?”

“Anywhere,
Rachel! Got any ideas! Maybe you’d like to wait for some more of Smith’s bad
boys to come and get you and fuck you dead like this bastard here wanted to.
Well, if that’s what you want, you stay—I’m getting the hell out of here as far
as I can go. Fuck this, I’ve lived a week in the green, and I can live there at
least a week longer—that’s a lot longer than I’ll last here in the compound.”

“She’s
right, Rachel,” John said. “We have to go.”

“But
where?’
Rachel almost
cried.

“We’ll
take a shuttle, stock it with food and fly it into the green. They’ll never
find us.”

“Now,
there’s an idea,” Donna said.

“We can
live in the shuttle as long as the food holds out,” he went on.

“Then
what?” Rachel wanted to know. “What happens when we run out of food?”

“We’ll buy some more or steal it!”
Donna
screamed, nearly knocking Rachel over with it.

“Stop
yelling at me . . .” Rachel said evenly.

John saw
a look of dark anger cross Rachel’s face and wondered with dread what would
happen if all those muscles suddenly exploded out of the corner, gun or no
gun.

“Let’s
not fight,” he said. “We’ve got enough to worry about. Why don’t you . . . uh .
. . give me that gun.”

“Sorry,”
Donna said handing it over. “I’m a little tense.” That brought wry grins all
around and a snort of black laughter from Donna.

“We’d
better get started,” John said. “The clock’s ticking.” They picked the shelter
clean of everything edible and carried it out and put it in the truck. Clothes
and net suits were next, and extra boots, gloves and tools. The next stop was
the clinic where Donna gathered every last medical item she could find that
might be of use, including two or three armfuls of emergency kits. Moving now
under cover of darkness, they stopped at the bio-lab last where they collected
all the food from shelves, cabinets and cooler. When they’d gotten it all,
Rachel started carrying out awkward armloads of her treasured equipment.

“Do you
think you’ll need that stuff?” John asked.

“You
never can tell—get that scope for me.”

With
everything they could get their hands on for free loaded up, John and Rachel
surveyed the load, taking inventory. It wasn’t enough.

“Who’s
got credit left?” John asked.

“We
should have gotten credit today,” Rachel said. “You and me, I mean. Donna may
have had hers terminated already.”

“It
wouldn’t matter,” Donna said. “I’m even as it is. We’ll have to use your
credit.”

“Administration
might have cut ours off too by now for all we know,” Rachel said.

“There’s
one way to find out,” he said, getting in the truck.

“We’ll go
buy something.”

“I’ll
wait in the truck, if you don’t mind,” Donna said. “Right . . .” John replied.

John
walked into the store and picked up two hand baskets. Rachel followed right
behind him and did the same. They went right to the food racks and started to
fill them up with complete meals at random until the baskets wouldn’t hold anymore.
“Stocking up, huh?” the fat clerk said.

“Yeah,”
John said stiffly.

“We like
to be prepared,” Rachel said. “You know . . .

“Right.”
The clerk tallied the items and activated the hand pad. “Who pays?” he asked.

“I’ll pay
first, then her.”

“Okay with
me,” the clerk said.

John put
his thumb down on the reader. The device read his print that followed with an
audible beep. The clerk brightened.

“Looks
like you just got paid. You’re lucky. I don’t get mine till the end of the
period. Shitty contract.”

“Oh,
yeah. I guess we did,” John said. “You wouldn’t mind if we stocked up with some
more, would you?”

The clerk
looked puzzled. “I don’t care. Help yourself. It’s your debt.”

They
dumped the contents of the basket into the truck’s bed. As they were going back
in, Rachel saw two figures in net suits approaching from the direction of the
dock. Her heart went into her throat.

“Don’t
panic,” John said. “It’s a store. Stores have customers.

They
walked back over to the food racks and started filling up.

“Hey, hi!”
Mike Kominski said to Rachel. The sound made her jump.

“Hi!” she
said. “How are you, Mike?”

“Good.
You got enough food to feed an army there I’d say.”

“Yeah,
well. You know . . .”

“Okay.”

“Yeah . .
.”

“Well,
see ya’ later, then.”

"Sure."

“And thanks
again for saving me.”

Rachel
looked at Mike and smiled. He’d been so sincere with that little
thank you
that it plucked at her
heartstrings. She touched his arm.

“My
pleasure,” she said.

“See ya.”

“See ya.”

John and
Rachel exchanged looks; both glad the conversation lost its momentum so
quickly. They paid again, hauled the baskets out and dumped the contents in
the truck. John looked at the truck’s load and was dissatisfied. “One more
time,” he said.

 
“Let’s go.”

“He’ll
think it’s weird,” Rachel said.

“Who
gives a shit what he thinks. C’mon.”

They went
back and filled up again, ignoring the looks from the two boys. The clerk must
have thought it was unusual too, but if he did, he didn’t say anything.

“Can you
think of anything else,” he said to Donna as he put the last of it in the
truck. “We’ve got some credit left.”

“No.”

“Then
let’s get outta here.”

They
drove to the shuttle landing and, as they approached, John wished the area were
less well lit. But circumstances were in their favor. The shuttle landing was
some distance from the docks and its guards. Chances were slim they’d be seen
in spite of the light.

The
company operated three Creighton-class shuttles for low atmospheric transportation.
His thumb print would start all three, so he had his pick. His favorite was the
older Model SU, but he considered stealing the new Model SY then changed his
mind. He knew his SU inside and out. He planned on stripping out the
transponders, and he knew just where they were on the older model.

Double-timing
it, they carried the provisions into the shuttle and stowed as much as they
could in the storage compartments. It was a twelve-seater and the seats took up
useless space. But there was no time to remove them then. They stuffed the rest
of the supplies into and under the seats, securing it any way they could.

While
Rachel and Donna stowed the last, John removed several panels from the ceiling
of the passenger compartment, and one from the cockpit. Using a Gripsall, he
clamped onto the transponders one at a time and wrenched them out like stubborn
teeth, leaving hanging strands of wires like torn veins.

“Won’t we
need those to navigate?” Rachel asked.

“No. All
these little bastards do is broadcast our location to the orbiter. I left the
receiver array—that’s what the navigation system uses.”

He
pitched the transponders out onto the ground next to the truck and shut the
shuttle door. A moment later the shuttle was airborne with lights out, humming
westward over the green.

“Where
are we going?” Rachel asked.

“Does it
matter?” Donna answered.

“It
might,” Rachel replied.

“Anywhere
Smith can’t find us suits me just fine,” Donna said.

“Is there
such a place?” Rachel asked.

“We’re
flying over it now,” John said.

* * *

They
continued westward until they reached the sea, a broad calm pool that lay under
them like a swath of tarnished silver. Nothing disturbed that solemn surface,
and the rising moonlight illuminated it like something solid. He turned south
along the coast and dropped down a few hundred feet. They’d been airborne for
over an hour and traveled well over two-hundred kilometers. It was far enough,
and he thought with a wry grin that just a hundred meters would probably have
been far enough in with the jungle as cover.

“There’s
a likely looking spot,” he said, pointing out the window. “That little inlet
there has a patch of beach.”

“I’ve
always wanted to live at the beach,” Donna said.” I like to smell the ocean.”

“Then
you’ll get your wish,” John said.

He
circled around the spot to get a better look. The inlet formed a backwater
perhaps fifty meters wide that penetrated the jungle for some distance, finally
narrowing to a point a few hundred meters to the east. Where the inlet merged
with the sea, two small patches of beach had formed.