Tainted Trail (34 page)

“Oh, you don't?” Sam seemed amused by the lack.

“Not with us,” Max explained. “You can't transport them on planes, and I didn't pick up a spare tank once we got here. I figured we would be working with the search-and-rescue team, which would have its own supplies.”

“It can't be too bad of a climb if my mother got out, provided there wasn't a major landslide or fall afterward,” Ukiah said. “Being that Jay and I got down into it and back suggests not.”

Max looked at him hard. “You and Jay?”

Ukiah blinked. The memory was there, without having him dig for it—as if it was his own memory. “Jay and Magic Boy.”

Max let it go, probably because there was nothing to be done for it now. Instead he flipped on the radio base. “Headset.”

Ukiah slipped on his headset. “Testing. Testing.”

“You're green across the board. Go ahead.”

With Max anchoring off to control the climbing ropes tied to Ukiah's waist, Ukiah crawled into the hole and slowly rappelled down the steep rock chimney.

 

Only three people had made the climb prior to him: his mother, Jay, and Magic Boy. He found bits and traces of them, faint ghosts of their passing. Ukiah treasured those of his mother. For a woman seemingly chosen at complete random, his splintered memories of her revealed a person of great intelligence, compassion and wisdom. Unique as he was, he had been overshadowed by her in their family until her death.

“Mother, I'm like no other.” He hid his face in her lap, her hands gentle on his hair.

“Ah, Magic Boy, let me tell you a story. Two coyotes met on a ridge looking down into a village. The first coyote grinned his sly grin and said, ‘I am Coyote.' ‘Well,' said the second coyote, ‘so am I.' ‘No, no, I'm
the
Coyote.' ‘How can this be? We're both coyotes. I could be Coyote just as well as you.' ‘Here,' said the first coyote, ‘I'll prove it to you.'

Down the first coyote trotted into the village, and the people working there looked up and cried. ‘Ah, it's Coyote!' And he trotted back to his brother and said, ‘See. Did you hear what they called me?' ‘That proves nothing,' said the second coyote. ‘Here, watch.' And he trotted down into the village, and the people looked up, and said ‘Ah, there's another!'

Magic Boy giggled.

“It is better, my little one, to be yourself, and not just another.”

Outside the memory, Ukiah felt a powerful love for her. More than before, he could not leave Zoey and Jared to their hard fates. His mother wouldn't have approved.

 

They say God works in mysterious ways.

The alien scout ship made a controlled but hard emergency landing in the Blue Mountains, tucked up against a granite cliff. Either one of Prime's sabotage efforts—prior to or after the landing—or the landing itself had sliced open the hull exactly opposite of the crack in the granite. Superheated by the reentry, the hull had fused rock to glass where it touched, heat venting up through the chimney, keeping the vent open while reinforcing it with its forge-hot heat.

A bubble of space remained between rock and hull. Ukiah dropped down to the ceramic-covered hull and peered through the slash in the metal below. The hole continued down through a twisted mass of wires and circuitry boards.

“Well I'll be damned,” Ukiah muttered over the headset.

“What is it, kid?” Max's voice whispered in his ear, barely reaching through the rock between them.

“This opens right into the ovipositor, nearly over the table Hex and Prime had my mother strapped to.”

“So she got loose and climbed right out, just like she said.”

“The room was intact when Prime last remembered it.” Ukiah eyed the twisted equipment. “Prime must have done a lot of damage that I don't remember.”

Max swore softly. “Are we going to be able to salvage anything useful?”

“Have faith,” Ukiah murmured, easing himself through the ragged metal. Ukiah snaked through the tangled wires and swung down onto the dirt-coated floor of the scout ship. “Okay. I'm in.”

He glanced at the table where his mother had been held captive. The restraining straps operated on magnetic locks. When the power failed in the room, they opened, freeing his mother. Since the ovipositor had its own independent, backup power system, only extensive damage like his father wreaked on the equipment itself would have caused it to fail.

He had thought during the trip from the Kicking Deers' to the Big Sink on what equipment they would need in order for this to work. He went first to the resequencer. The durable instrument front had been unscrewed and set aside. Stuffed into the heart of the circuitry was an unexploded detonator, looking as innocent as a can of soda.

“What is it, kid?” Max asked when Ukiah yelped in surprise.

“It's a bomb.”

“Shit, get out of there, then.”

“Wait. I think I can just disarm it.” Ukiah peered cautiously at the detonator. Prime had apparently set the delay counter and tripped the arming switch. The power cell, though, was long dead, leaving no clue to why the detonator
failed. Without an electronic pulse to trigger the explosion, the detonator should be inert.

Wincing, Ukiah picked it up. Nothing happened. Holding it at arm's length, he squinted and thumbed the arming switch to off. It clicked down. Gingerly he carried it to the waste disposal unit, unsealed the steel door and carefully placed the detonator inside. He sealed the disposal's door.

“Okay. I've gotten rid of it. I'm going to check to see if there's any others.”

Ukiah had memories from Prime of shutting down the scout ship's damage-control systems. Judging from the damage he saw, Hex must have gotten them back on line as the string of detonators tried to rip the ship apart from the inside. Inertia fields had contained the explosions as they were detected, localizing the damage to spheres roughly twice the size of the soda-can shaped detonators.

Prime, with his layered backup plans, had placed all the detonators inside the equipment. So while the damage was minimal, the bombs still utterly gutted the equipment.

“Ukiah?”

“Most of the systems are toast,” Ukiah reported. “One bomb failed to explode, and it was in the piece we need.”

“Oh, thank God.”

Ukiah knew that Max was just saying it out of habit. Still, he pressed his hands together like his moms taught him and said, “Thank you, Almighty God, for this blessing we have received. Amen.”

“Ukiah!” Max half-laughed, half-scolded far above. And then explained to Sam, “He's praying down there. No, I'm not an atheist. Kid, are you going to be able to get it up by yourself?”

Ukiah considered the resequencer. “I could use help.”

 

In some ways, Ukiah desperately wanted to know what had happened between Hex and Prime hundreds of years ago.

After leaving the mother ship, Prime had been wounded many times, reducing his last memories down to random snippets. Time and time again, the Pack had discovered the
dangers hidden by Prime's lost memories. They had not known that the mother ship crashed on Mars. They had not realized that Hex could free the crew trapped in cryogenic sleep. They had not guessed that Kicking Deer lived to give birth to the feared breeder.

What else did they not know?

As Ukiah searched the ruined scout ship, looking for tools and equipment, he found evidence of Prime's systematic sabotage. Many of the doors had been fused shut and then cut open. The armory, when Ukiah cranked the door open using the backup manual system, was stripped completely. He found a stack of damaged weapon power cells by the trash compactor. The compactor was filled with crushed stunners. Laser burns riddled the bridge control panels. The lift to the bridge had been blown with a disrupter cannon jury-rigged into the ship's power system, apparently set to go off when the lift signaled that it reached a certain level. A landslide filled the open sled-docking bay with dirt, boulders, and tree roots.

Prime left a trail of emptied and smashed weapons. When Prime could no longer use a weapon, he made sure Hex couldn't either—usually by using it to beat a ship's control to pieces. All major ship systems were damaged in one manner or another.

Unless Prime was a horrible shot compared to Hex, then Hex probably had been as wounded as Prime. Ukiah reconsidered his last memory of Prime, fleeing the scout ship with Hex in close pursuit. Prime had been so hurt that he couldn't remember what he had done to the ship, or even which direction it lay.

Had Hex also lost the memory of where the ship lay in this manner? Or had some later accident robbed him of the knowledge? Without the store of weapons, Hex would have found the world full of hostile elements and hosts that would usually die instead of converting into allied Gets.

Good work, Dad.

In the end, though, when Ukiah found Hex's five other bodies cooked in their cryo-chambers—dry-roasted mummies—he was glad he didn't have all Prime's memories.

Ukiah gathered what tools he could find that his father hadn't destroyed and returned to the ovipositor room.

 

Max stood watching Sam pick her way through the wires when Ukiah returned.

“You could make a fortune selling haunted-house tickets to this place,” Max said in greeting. “I think it's the creepiest place I've ever seen.”

Sam dropped down beside Max and her eyes went wide.

Max shined his light onto bright, hanging pieces of the analyzing station. “Do I want to know what that is for?”

“It's for vivisection.” Ukiah shuddered. His mother's tales were innocent of that horror. Had she been spared the knowledge of what Hex had done to her family members he had taken, or had she merely edited it from her story? “The machine would sample secretions and such from still-living—bodies.”

“Well, that would win my vote for first thing to blow up too,” Sam remarked on the fist-sized hole in the analyzing station's control panel. “Hopefully, we didn't need it.”

“No. It's used to identify the reproductive systems on native life-forms and what is needed to be done to produce a half-breed child.” Ukiah lead them to the resequencer. “This is what we need.”

“And this machine does that?”

“If the Ontongard just injected one of their cells into an egg, it would consume it, not fertilize it. If that egg was placed into the human mother, the mother would be a Get, and there would be no child.”

Ukiah pulled out the impregnation tip out of one of the wrecked stations. “They would use this extractor to take out a genetic sample. It would be put into stasis until needed. At that point, the sample cells are unable to act to save themselves.”

Sam shook her head. “What irony. They operate on the good of the many over the good of the few or the one. Usually that's considered a positive trait for people.”

“It's what makes the Ontongard nearly unstoppable,” Max said.

 

Ukiah showed Max how to undo the connecting bolts and set him to work dismantling the damaged stations in order to free the one they needed. Max swore under his breath as he worked. Finally Max eyed the thin, oddly curled dismantler. “I saw Hex. He was human enough to pass. How in God's name did a race that humanoid create something like this? I don't have fat fingers, but I can barely get my finger into the hole to hit the trigger, and I can only grip it with these two middle fingers. Don't they have any clue to ergonomics?”

Ukiah looked up from stripping out a computer. “Oh, that. The Gah'h created those. They had tentacles for hands.”

“Why didn't the Ontongard adapt the tools?” Sam asked.

“The Ontongard think of themselves in scales too small to see with your eyes,” Ukiah answered. “And the next host race might have tentacles again. Why bother?”

 

In the end the resequencer was too large to take up in one piece. Ukiah roamed the ship but found no other exit. The numerous cracks that led to fresh air all narrowed to openings too small for him to climb out, let alone be useful. Finally, they simply dismantled the resequencer down to three small pieces, wrapped them in bubble wrap that Max had brought down, and hauled them back up the granite chimney. Power connectors and portable hydrofusion power plants followed. On Max's suggestion that their loved ones might prove “prickly” at the idea of being saved, Ukiah found two undamaged stasis field generators, and salvaged parts from three sabotaged ones.

“Is that everything?” Max asked when Ukiah climbed up out of the hole on the last trip, having made a clean sweep for anything they missed.

“Everything except the Ontongard.” Ukiah moved the rocks back into place.

Sam came to help. “So how are we going to find Alicia, Kraynak, and Zoey? The FBI and the police are turning the state upside down trying to find the Brodys and Quinn.”

“The Ontongard like to keep to places known to the people they've taken over. They don't like moving out into the
unknown. They stand out more that way. If they keep to the habits of the host, then they can blend in.”