Vigiant (35 page)

No response.

"Come on," Festina shouted. "We have to go!"

"One more second."
Peacock,
I thought again,
Xé, Father, whoever you are, can you get us to the mine before Maya?

A swirl of light appeared outside the window. Festina leapt into it without asking questions.

"What is that?" my mother cried.

"Dads," I said. "Or whatever you were sleeping with the last few months of his life." I leaned in to give her a quick kiss on the cheek; I thought she might flinch, but she didn't. Maybe too shocked to react. "When this is all over," I told her, "I'll call and explain."

Then I sprinted forward, bounced off Maya's mattress, and sailed out through the window like a diver from a springboard. The Peacock caught me in its mouth long before I touched the ground.

The Peacock dumped me on a game trail deep in the rain forest. As usual, the tube disappeared instantly, back... back... well, I'd shot the chute often enough by now that I wasn't quite so queer-head dizzy as I'd been the first time I'd gone through. I had the presence of mind to look around fast, hoping I might catch sight of where the Peacock went. For just a second, I thought it was coming toward
me:
straight at my face, tangly-jambly lights plunging right at my eyes; but then the Peacock was gone, vanished, and I felt no different than I ever had.

I got to my feet. Dusted myself off. Thought about that phrase, "no different than I ever had" and wondered just how long the Peacock had been guarding my
botjolo
butt.

In the bad old days, sometimes I'd been Christly lucky to miss getting killed. And considering my habitually tin-sober state, would I have noticed a few more flickery lights?

Hmm.

Festina stood a few steps away, staring up at the trees with a gloomy expression.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"This place looks too much like my home."

"That's bad?"

"My home was a damned dangerous place." She glanced at me. "Do you know anything about jungles?"

"No."

"Never mind—you'll be all right if you remember one simple principle."

"Which is?"

"Everything here wants you dead."

It sounded like a joke.

"I mean it," Festina insisted. "Everything wants you dead. Even the things that won't directly kill you still want you dead. You're a waste of good nutrients; they want you recycled back into the ecosystem."

She reached to her belt holster and drew her stun-pistol... the first time I'd seen her do that in days. She hadn't bothered with her gun in the face of androids, reporters, or dipshits, but now she wanted a weapon handy.

Okay. Chalk me up as intimidated.

"Keep to the trail," she said. "Don't touch anything, don't step on anything, don't brush against anything. Understand?"

"Yes. Everything here wants me dead."

Which was too bad. To someone who'd grown up with Great St. Caspian's half-throttled flora and fauna, the rain forest was a heady gush of abundance. Take the insect life, for instance. In Bonaventure, bloodflies were puny things, traveling in fast-moving swarms that dodged and weaved like drunken dockworkers. Here in Mummichog, I was buzzed by a single fly near as big as my thumb—no need for safety in numbers, this guy could take care of himself. Slow and bullish, able to withstand a head-on swat: the supertanker of bloodflies, with a monstrous hemoglobin-carrying capacity. Thank God this beastie had one thing in common with his baby brothers up north; evolution had only taught him to suck on native Demoth lifeforms, not humans. Perhaps he gave me a sniff as he flew by... but I didn't smell like his natural prey, so he continued bumbling past.

One insect down, billions to go.

Ants the size of a baby's foot... moths bigger than my hand... beetles so huge you could use their carapaces as bread plates... not that these were genuine terrestrial insects, of course. Eight legs, no antennae, oddly hinged mandibles; but the names humans hung on most Demoth wildlife were Earth names because those were the names we had. These creatures scuttled like beetles; they had chitinous shells like beetles; they filled the same ecological niches as beetles; they might as well be called beetles, even if they were giant alien groundthumpers.

"Stop gawking," Festina ordered. "We have to find Cuttack."

"I asked the Peacock to take us to the mine," I told her. "It must be close by."

"Says you," she muttered. "Your pet Peacock might have dumped us a thousand klicks from Mummichog because the place was too damned dangerous."

"You're just jealous
you
don't have an invisible friend."

I looked at the ground again; the dirt held a string of clear bootprints, made when the soil was muddy and preserved when everything dried. The tracks couldn't be Voostor's—too deep for a lightweight Oolom. If my mother never came back here, this had to be Maya's trail. I asked, "Is this the sort of jungle where it rains every afternoon?"

"How should I know?" Festina said. "This is
your
planet."

"Yes, but you're the jungle queen."

She stuck out her tongue at me. I didn't know admirals did that.

"Let's go this way," I said, pointing back up the trail: the direction the boots had come from. If rain fell here every afternoon, the tracks must have been made late yesterday—Maya heading back to the house after knocking off work. Follow them backward and we'd find where Maya spent her day.

The bootprints kept to the game trail for a few dozen paces, then veered off on a narrower track. Still easy to follow—Maya hadn't tried to disguise her path. We wove our way over dirt leached light as sand, while bloodflies buzzed round our ears and wondered if they should bite us just for jollies. Past creeping vines and epiphytes floating on balloon sacs... crimson-strip fungi laid out like bacon on dead tree trunks... even a snake-belly or two... till we nearly walked past an overgrown hole in the forest floor.

If not for the bootprints, we would have missed the mine. Part of the entrance had been cleared with a machete, then covered again with prickly-leaved branches from nearby shrubs. Festina was still wearing her good-for-the-tundra gloves ("And I'll wear them till we get someplace that I call warm!") so she had no trouble pulling branches away from the hole, never mind the bristles and pricks.

Leaving a tunnel that led downward.

Just inside the tunnel sat a plastic box holding five torch-wands.

"Convenient," Festina said, picking one up.

"Easier to stash a box here," I replied, "than bringing them up from the house all the time. Besides, Maya was pretending to be a biologist. Mother or Voostor might have wondered why she needed torch-wands to poke about beamy bright jungle."

"Mmm." Festina looked into the hole. "Down now? Or wait for Maya and ambush her?"

I looked at the hole myself, then shook my head. "It'd be nice to know what's in there, but Maya's more important. Stop her before she does something we'll regret."

"Agreed." Festina checked the batteries on her pistol.

"Before you start shooting," I said, "remember she still might be innocent. Maya could have had her little dance with Chappalar, then headed down here the same night. Sounds like no one in Mummichog listens to the news, so she never heard tell of the murders. Doesn't know her sweetie's dead, doesn't know the cops want to question her..."

Festina just looked at me.

"Right," I said. "Stun the bitch's tits off and apologize later."

We made the ambush simple: Festina down the tunnel, waiting with pistol in hand. I borrowed her gloves and covered back the hole with branches, so Maya wouldn't know she'd had visitors. Then I moved off a ways, hunkering down behind a fallen log till our target arrived.

(Not touching the log. I'd heard about insects who made nests in such places, and got swarming mad if you gave their homes a knock.)

So we waited. For Maya to scuttle down the path, racing toward the mine and whatever she'd stashed below. Festina would stun her the second Maya started clearing branches from the hole, and that would be that. In due time, flocks of people would arrive from Pistolet: the med team for Oh-God, police for Maya, plus a rabble-pack of robot experts, archaeologists, forensics specialists and who-all else might get sent to investigate Maya's home away from home.

With luck, they'd let Tic and me look over their shoulders for a while... till more senior proctors arrived to shove us aside again.

In the distance, I heard shouting. Tic and Voostor yelling. At Maya? Why? If they'd caught up with her after she bolted from the house, they wouldn't holler; Tic would sweep silently out of the sky and deck her with a sock to the jaw. I'd never seen him fight, but he
was
a master proctor. Zenned-out too. That put him in the same league as those little old gents in tic-chips, the kind who look beatific as soap till they whonk you with a heelkick to the head. If Tic could reach Maya, he could take her down.

So why all the whooping and bellowing?

Suddenly, Tic's voice got joined by shrill animal howling: a noise I recognized from VR sims of jungle life. The danger call of siren-lizards. They were only the size of squirrels, teeny pseudo-reptiles who clambered through the canopy eating fruit and seedpods... but they had eyes keen as hawks', and a resonating collar around their throats that made their shrieks trumpet-loud. Naturalists called them "the Klaxons of the rain forest"—little noise-boxes that screamed blue murder if something scared them.

They were scared now: dozens of them, high and off to my right. Then another troop of lizards took up the cry, this one a fair bit closer. Were they just echoing the shrieks of the first bunch—an instinct to squeal when they heard other sirens howling? Or had they actually seen something, something coming my way?

More sirens took up the wail. Closer. I couldn't hear anything else over the racket. What was up there? What?

Something they could see from the treetops. Something flying. A skimmer?

Christ, of
course
Maya had a skimmer. We'd known from the start she didn't leave Bonaventure by transport sleeve. She had her own vehicle, and now she was bugging out in it.

World-soul,
I thought,
track it, track it!
But even before I finished the mental shout, my mind filled with the world-soul's response: ground radar couldn't get a fix.

Lord weeping Jesus, did everyone on this planet have stealth equipment?

Something ripped through the canopy of leaves straight overhead, I had a quick glimpse of a skimmer's underbelly, its bay doors open; then something big and black and blimp-shaped started to fall, crashing down through the trees.

"You're kidding," I said in disbelief. A bomb? She had a bomb in the skimmer? And she was dropping it on me. No, not me, she didn't know I was here; she was bombing the mine entrance, to close it off, seal it up.

Which would still blow me to smithereens.

"Festina!" I shouted. "Incoming bomb! Head down the mine, deep as you can go."

The blimp-shaped cylinder continued to fall—jerkily, slowly, catching on tree limbs, stopping for a moment before its weight broke the branch or it rolled off sideways, then falling a few more meters till it hit the next snag.

How much bouncing could it stand before it blew up?

I tore my gaze from the blundering bomb, and of course the Peacock was rippling in front of me, tail snaking far out of the jungle. "No," I snapped. "Down the mine! I want to go down the mine."

Festina was there. If I went in too, the Peacock and I could save her. If I let the Peacock chute me out of the forest, it might not volunteer to bring me back.

Festina would be trapped in the dark. Like my father.

I could feel reluctance spilling from the Peacock like a physical force; but its tail flicked, swept, and jammed itself through the shrubbery covering the tunnel entrance. Before it changed its mind, I threw myself into its mouth.

Vomited into blackness. I scraped my arm as I landed on the unseen stone floor, but it only did minor damage—this tunnel had a thicker carpet of dirt, fungus and animal crap than the one in Great St. Caspian. The jungle had more wildlife than the tundra... more dung and droppings for me to splash into.

Joy.

Then light flamed viciously far to my right, followed by a distant roar and rumble. That would be the bomb, blowing the bejeezus out of the mine entrance. Collapsing who knows how much dirt and stone to close the tunnel. Probably setting fire to the forest too, giving the siren-lizards something to
really
howl about.

The ground beneath me shook for ten seconds, trembling as more and more debris fell into the tunnel mouth. Not just dirt but trees toppled by the blast. I could imagine their leaves burning, while birds squawked and lizards shrieked and insects tore away from the flames...

But I couldn't hear any of it. Not with a massive plug of jungle floor sealing off the mine. I couldn't even hear the shaking; I could only feel it through the stone under my body.

After a few seconds, the quaking stopped. Then a heavy silence set in, as if I'd gone deaf. No—I could hear my own breathing. But no-one else's.

"Festina?" I called. She must have had time enough to run for safety. To bolt down the tunnel, out of the blast radius, beyond the cave-in.

Unless she hadn't heard my warning. Or she tried to run the other way, out into the open rather than be trapped underground.

Out into the explosion.

"Festina-girl!" I called again. "Are you there?"

A torch-wand sprang on in the darkness. "Okay," Festina growled, her uniform smeared with dirt, "when I said the jungle was dangerous, I meant snakes. I meant jaguars. I meant army ants, and piranha, and bushes with sharp spiky thorns. I did not mean goddamned motherfucking high-explosive bombs."

Pause.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"Yeah sure." She brushed mud off her shirtsleeve. "I'm an Explorer. I've lived through
real
explosions."

I could have called the Peacock to get us out. If it had managed to thread its way through the Rustico mine cave-in, it could do the same here. But I wasn't leaving yet. Not till I saw what Maya had found down here... something she wanted to keep secret so badly, she had a bomb ready in case she needed to obliterate it.