Dominant Species Volume Two -- Edge Effects (Dominant Species Series) (34 page)

Donna
listened, then, arms propped mechanically on the bench and her head barely
moving, started in with the details of her adventure in the green, courtesy of
Smith and his boys. John could feel the hostility and resentment about what
they’d done to her coming from Donna like heat from an overworked motor. As she
spoke, John paced back and forth, hands on his hips, listening to her every
word. From time to time, Donna would stop and stare up into space or at the
bench top, grim-faced and angry, before starting up again. John swore that in
those pauses the bright blue half of her half-blue, half-brown eye glowed with
a light if its own as if fueled by her hatred from within.

When
Donna finished telling her story, Rachel was staring at her sympathetically,
not quite sure what to say, or how to console her. “They threw you right out of
the shuttle?” she finally said.

Donna
lowered her head, her eyes closed tight as if trying to shut the memory out.
“They did,” she replied flatly.

“So they think you’re
dead,” Rachel surmised.

“That’s a logical but
stupid fucking conclusion,” Donna said, head coming up and eye flaring defiantly.
“I’m not dead yet.”

Donna’s
anger had rubbed off on John. He rubbed his hands together carelessly as if the
anger was right there on his palms. “What now?” he asked. He’d heard enough and
was ready to move on to a strategy for survival.

“The
first thing,” Rachel said, “is to get a message to Health and Safety—tell them
what’s going on.”

“Fuck
that,” Donna said.” I say we go right to the police first, then the franchise
board. Richthaus has to know about this. The bastards tried to kill me. Ed
Smith should die and lose his franchise, too.”

“It
doesn’t matter who we send it to,” John said angrily. “You can bet he’s
filtering every goddamned message that's sent. I’d do the same. The orbiter is
the link to the Commonwealth. All communications, food, medicine, law
enforcement—what there is of it—comes through the orbiter. And Smith controls
the orbiter.”

“Right,”
Donna said. “So how do we do it?”

“Code a
text-only message,” Rachel said. “And send it to someone we trust.”

“In what?
Pig Latin?” John quipped.

“No, not
Pig Latin,” Rachel said impatiently. “But we can think of something, like an
embedded code—I don’t know— something.”

“We can
encrypt the message—scramble it,” Donna suggested.

“No we
can’t,” John said. “It’s illegal.”

“But I’ve
heard of those things that can do it.”

“Outlawed,”
he said. “It’s a serious offense to encrypt a message. Besides, they’d come
down on the sender like a hammer as soon as they detected it.”

“We can
send it anonymously,” Donna said.

“That’s
impossible,” John said.

They thought
it over in silence, each buried in their own thoughts. John had moved a dozen
feet away and studied the ceiling in thought, trying to pull all the pieces
together. Rachel fiddled with piece of scrap paper.

“I know
how,” Rachel said finally.

“How?”

“I’ll
send a bogus message to my friend Vic. I’ll talk about things we never did and
things we never said.”

“Why?”
John asked. “I don’t get it.”

“He’ll
just think you’re nuts, won’t he?” Donna asked.

“Maybe.
But it should make him maybe read the message closer, and we can—I don’t
know—spell out the problem in the first letter of each sentence or some shit
like that—it might work. If it’s bizarre enough, he might put two and two
together.”

“I don’t know
. . .” Donna said. “Sounds like magical thinking to me.”

“It’s
leaving a lot to chance,” John said. “He might never get it.”

“But he
might,” Rachel came back. “It’s a shot.”

“Any
message we send will take thirty Earth days to arrive,” John said. “And anything
coming back this way will take thirty more days. Even if he gets the message
and figures it out, we can’t expect help for at least sixty days.”

That sent
them back into thought, more frustrated than ever.

“Look,
this is bullshit,” John said. “We have to find another way.”

“What are
we supposed to do?” Rachel asked. “Take the orbiter by force?”

The look
on John’s face was unmistakable. Taking the orbiter by force was exactly what
he meant.

“No,”
Rachel said. “You’re not serious.”

“Why not?
If we stumble around without being decisive, he could very easily kill us all.
He’s got all the resources—all the power. It’s not like he’s some . . . some
dock worker gone off his head. He’s in control of a multi-trillion dollar
operation. He’s glued to the highest officials in the Commonwealth. He’s probably
got half of them in his pocket. From where he sits, he owns the planet and
everything on it. But he’s not God. He has limits. If we act as one, we could
take the orbiter, hold Smith and his crew and make our report without worrying
about it. It’s a better option.”

“Like a
mutiny?” Donna asked.

“Just
like a mutiny,” he said.

“I’m for
it—hell I'm with ‘im!” she said with the same resolute strength that helped her
survive the jungle. Her eye seemed to light the room.

“We don’t
have the people or the weapons to . . . to do a mutiny,” Rachel said. “It
would take more than the three of us to do it.”

“Then
we’ll have to find people to help us," John persisted, seeing no other way
to beat Ed Smith or to save their own lives.

The color
was draining from Rachel’s face. She hadn’t bargained for any of this. It was
one thing to tell on somebody. It was quite another to go to war with them.

“I don’t
know a thing about this kind of thing. This is just . . . just better left to
the police,” she said. “We have to . . . to find someone from the outside to
help us, that’s all.”

John saw
the fear in her eyes. He put his hand on her shoulder.

“There’s
no one to help us. We have to get access to the transmitters and send our own message
to the right people—a clear and unmistakable message with all the right
signatures. Look, the sonofabitch can kill us at any time. He can starve us,
poison us, cut us to ribbons with his defoliators or just shoot us outright. He
can make up any story he likes; accidents, murder, some . . . some set-up of
some kind . . . anything. If he thinks we’re standing in his way, he’ll do it.
If he finds out Donna is alive, he’ll do it. If he finds out that you and I
know Donna is alive, he’ll do it. He’ll kill the three of us. If we’re to
survive this, we have to do it ourselves. That means getting control of the
orbiter, at least until we can send our message.”

Rachel
couldn’t face up to the idea of violence; of having to engage in it, of
possibly shooting or hurting another person. “But how?” she asked.

“Force is
how,” Donna put in.

Rachel
snorted then rolled her eyes. “Sure. Just storm the orbiter and shoot
everybody. That works! We don’t have guns or a plan or anything like that.”

“We don’t
need a lot of weapons. All we have to do is be smart and have the will,” John
said.

Rachel
took a deep breath and put her head down on her arms, burying her face. She let
out a deep, low groan of pure angst, barely audible.

Sure. That’s all. Just those two things.

“I’m scared,”
she said into the table.

“We’re
all scared,” Donna said. “But we have to do it.”

“I don’t
have the will,” Rachel groaned.

It was
Donna’s turn to put her hand on Rachel’s back. She patted it gently. “I’ve got
enough will for all of us,” she said.

Rachel
believed her, but it didn’t make Rachel feel any better. She rose up finally as
if coming out of a nap, the print of her wrist red on her forehead. She
squinted against the light.

“Okay. So
what’s the plan?”

John
inhaled deeply through his nose. “The first thing is to hide Donna. She can
move in with me. I don’t have a roommate at the moment, and there’s no
connection at all between me and her, so it should be pretty safe. You’ll have
to hide. Hide good,” he said to Donna.

“You
bet,” she said.

“Next we
need to make some inquiries, Rachel and me.”

“What
kind of inquiries?” Rachel asked, growing more and more unnerved.

“We have
to get a layout of the orbiter for one thing . . .” Rachel had turned toward
the door that was out of sight for Donna and John. She wore a startled, worried
look. John leaned out and traced her line of sight. Standing in the doorway was
a young man. He was within easy earshot of the entire conversation.

“Hi,
Joe,” Rachel said stiffly.

“Hi,” he
said back.

John
clammed up visibly, his hands went to his hips, and he turned away.

“What’s
going on?” Rachel asked a little too loud.

“Not
much,” Joe said.

“Ummm . .
. how long have you been standing there?”

“Just got
here,” he said easily.

Rachel folded
her hands tight in front of her as if she were some kind of consultant. “How
can I help you?”

“Uh, I
was just wondering if you wanted me to continue to run the profiles on the soil
samples or stop. I’ve done about a hundred with no hazard matches so far.”

“Yeah,”
Rachel said.

“
Yeah, yes
; or
yeah,
no
?”

“
Yeah, yes
. Continue. We wanna do ‘em
all.”

“Okay,”
he said and started to leave.

“Hey,
hold on,” John said like a cop.

Devonshire
started toward them. John, brushed past him, then closed and locked the door.
Devonshire turned his head to follow John's movements.
 
His head appeared to be rotating on a pole.
John came back and escorted him by the elbow back to the bench. Devonshire
tried to get away.

“Hey . .
.”

“Just
relax. I’m not gonna hurt ya.”

“Yeah,
just cool it,” Donna said with an amused look, “or I’ll give you a sedative the
hard way.”

Rachel
swallowed. This was getting serious. Their lives were at stake it was true, but
until this very moment only in some distant, abstract sense. It wasn’t supposed
to get real now—not
this soon.
John was still holding Devonshire by the elbow. Donna was staring at
Devonshire’s face like some predatory bird ready to swoop and tear, and Rachel
felt an unsettling dread in the space around her. It was as if they’d suddenly
stepped into some dark and evil place whose walls were etched with the memories
of innocence lost and the damp floor steeped in blood and pain. This was a
clinic with cold steel tools and cutting machinery in every drawer; Donna knew
how to use all of them.
Damn!
Rachel
thought.
What are they going
to do?

“Hi,”
John said to Devonshire.

“Hi,” he
said back nervously.

“You
didn’t hear a thing did you?”

“Hear
what?”

“Just
now. You know, while we were talking.”

“I didn’t
hear anything.”

“You must
have heard something,” Donna said as if to a small child.

“Nope.”

“You’re
sure?” John asked.

“Yeah.
I’m sure.”

“You work
with Rachel?” John asked.

“Yeah.”

“Biologist?”

“Yeah.
Biologist.”

“Biologist
what?”

“Apprentice,
no grade. Why?”

“Just
curious,” John said.

“What is
this?” Joe asked with a frown.

“We just
want to know what you heard, that’s all,” Donna said. “We were having a very
secret conversation, you see.”

“Well, I
didn’t hear any of your damned secrets. I don’t even care about your damned
secrets.”

“Okay,
okay,” Rachel said. “This is nuts. Get back to work Joe, and forget whatever it
was you heard. It doesn’t concern you. Git.”

“I didn’t
hear anything,” he complained.

“Good.
Forget it,” Rachel repeated. “Go.”

“Fine,” he
said with a huff. “I can’t get out of here fast enough. You people are crazy.”

“Okay,
just go,” Donna said.

He
strutted out, closing the clinic door behind him. They sat immobile until the
door was closed. John walked over and locked it again.

“I guess we’re
just a little paranoid,” Rachel said.

“Do you
trust him?” John asked Rachel.

“Not
much. Enough, I suppose. He’s harmless.”

“Nothing
and nobody’s harmless on this planet,” John said knowingly.