Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (30 page)

“John
here, and Rachel are a pair,” Donna said for John.

“I see,”
Habershaw said, letting the memory of Joan pass to the living. He breathed in
long through his nose. “Well, you two can’t go looking for her. Lavachek and
me’ll have to do it.”
 

“Hey,
speak for yourself,” Lavachek said.

Donna got
that terrier look again, eye blazing. Habershaw opened the door all the way to
let her outside. “Would you two mind stepping out on the catwalk for a minute,
I’d like to have a word with my Oiler. You can move up and duck in the cab.
They won’t be able to see you from the ground.”

Donna and
John moved outside and went into the cab. Habershaw slid the door closed and
turned to Lavachek. Lavachek just stared at him. It was hard to know where to
begin, so Habershaw just started. “We’ve known each other a long time, haven’t
we?” he said.

“Ten
years in Jultosep,” Lavachek said. “The worst ten years of my damned life,” he
added with a smile.

“I need
you to do something,” Habershaw said.

“You
always need my help.”

“I’m
serious.”

“Me, too.
You always need my help.”

“I need
you to stand behind me on this.”

“On
what?” Lavachek snorted. “What are you gonna do? I thought you’d have learned
your lesson by now. Joan’s dead because of talk like this.”

Habershaw
felt the urge to leap on Lavachek and strangle him. Lavachek sensed the anger
but continued heedlessly. He’d just about had it this morning and didn’t care
who knew it. But he leaned forward and whispered, just to be safe.

“What?”
he said. “You gonna be the revolutionary now? Hell, Verde’ll end up just like
Cunningham or Fuji—people wandering around starved, eatin’ each other, dying of
diseases and shit, no organization. I’m telling you, Bill, them two people are
gonna get us both killed. If you’d just wait until things settle down here,
everything will be all right.”

Habershaw
said, “There ain’t gonna be no goddamned settling down. This right here is
about as settled down as it’s gonna get. We’re slaves.”

“So? That
ain’t no different than it’s ever been.”

“They
never had to enforce it with guns before—that’s the difference. Before, we did
it because we thought we were getting something in return. Now they don’t have
to give us shit. They get what they want and, we can eat dirt.”

“That’ll
all change, you’ll see,” Lavachek went on. “They ain’t as bad as all that.
Hell, they moved us over from the settlement, didn’t they? They haven’t
slaughtered us yet, have they?”

That last
part made Habershaw see red. He forced down the impulse to grab him by the neck
and choke the life out of him. Until that moment, it wouldn’t have occurred to
him that Lavachek was a coward. But it was one thing to poke fun at authority,
but quite another to actually challenge it. Lavachek’s fear had drawn a line in
his mind he just couldn’t step over. Wasn’t that the definition? Didn’t
cowardice equate with overpowering fear? What did it take to get someone to
swallow their dread and fight? He should know—he’d been in Lavachek’s shoes his
whole life. It was a curious turnaround, Habershaw thought, that Lavachek, who
until recently had been the pissed-off malcontent, and he, Habershaw, the
cautious one, should now have switched roles. Fear was a more powerful
motivation than he had realized. When you have it in great abundance, you just
don’t know it, you only experience the paralysis of it. But being on the other
side of the fence allowed Habershaw to see quite clearly. And any residual fear
that might have been lurking in his mind prior to Joan’s death had been burned
alive when they killed her. His hatred was so deep for the Sacred Bond and
their enforcers that the mere thought of them was enough to set his blood
boiling. He’d done a good job so far of keeping his anger under control, but it
didn’t matter much now. So what to do about Lavachek? The answer was you did
nothing. You just parted ways—with a friendly little ol' handshake.

“I can’t
tell you what to do,” Habershaw said. “But if you’re not with us, there’s a
good chance you’re against us.”
 

Lavachek
snorted. “What’s that ‘sposed to mean?”

“It means
you’d better not say a word to anybody about anything, or I’ll kill you with my
own goddamned hands.”

“Who the
hell am I gonna say anything to? Patel?” Lavachek snorted again.
   

“Just
keep your mouth shut.”

“I ain’t
been off the rig in days,” Lavachek droned. “I ain’t gonna say a word.”

“When the
shelters are ready, you move off the goddamned rig.”

"Fine.”

“I mean
it.”

“Me, too.
Now, look—I said I wouldn’t say a word.”

“You’d
better not . . .”

“. . .
you three . . . you three . . . can plot your plots and skulk around all you
want for all I care. I got more important things to do.”

“It
better stay that way,” Habershaw said. He gave the metal wall separating the
cab from the living quarters several firm knocks with his hand. John and Donna
came back in a moment later. John, Habershaw noticed, was visibly nervous; far
more so than when he first came onto the rig.

“Did you
two kiss and make up?” Donna asked, ending with a terrier look at Lavachek.

“Yeah. I
guess you could say that,” Habershaw said.

“I been
kissin’ his ass for years,” Lavachek added. He lowered his head and slowly
rubbed his close-cropped hair. “One more smooch won’t make any difference.”

14

T
hey would go in, find
Rachel and bring her out. It was a simple plan, but the devil was in the
details. Habershaw agreed to make surveillance excursions into the monolith’s
interior to start. They had to find out where she was and under what conditions
she was being detained before they could figure out how to free her.

Habershaw
found a good hiding place for Donna and John in the meantime. Between the
motors in each track was a locker half as large as a utility truck. It was used
for storage, and there were racks and shelves inside it. Habershaw stripped
those out and tossed them overboard. Then, using a pair of grips, he bent the
heavy latch on the back of the door so it could only be opened from the inside.
In the event anyone came looking for them, they’d find a steel door that
wouldn’t open without a lot of effort. The mercenaries, the lazy bastards,
would skip the locker once they discovered the door would have to be pried
open. Several air vents with angled slats and covered with fine screens made
the space was fairly well-ventilated and somewhat bug-proof. In the middle of
the ceiling was a small light that would provide sufficient illumination.

It was
cramped and close, but it would beat the hell out of sleeping in the jungle. As
a last touch, Habershaw went upstairs, came back with some wadded-up bed clothes
and a pillow and tossed them into a corner. Donna made a face and decided she’d
sleep on the bare floor rather than come in contact with those particular
items, thank you.

“I wish
we had phones,” John said.

“The
bulletins say they won’t be operational for another week,” Habershaw said and
shrugged. “We’ll have to work without them. Will you two be all right in
there?”

“Sure,”
John said. “Looks real cozy.”

“Stay out
of sight until I get back,” Habershaw said. “My guess is they’ll be looking for
you before midday.”

“Be
careful, Bill,” John said. “They’re killers.”

“Hey,
they won’t know shit. See you later.”

By the
time Habershaw started across the field toward the monolith, the sun was higher
and hotter still. He wondered if some new, life-threatening bug would start to
hatch out as a result of the change in weather.

He went
down the ramp and felt himself vanish in the bustling activity of lifts and
moving pedestrians and the mountains of containers and equipment. The stacks of
stuff immediately reminded him of Joan. This was her work. These were her
workers. These containers and crates had her stamp on them—her touch. Without
thinking, he reached out and rested his hand on one for a second.

The
interior walls were lined with openings that led off into tunnels in all
directions. He did an estimate and came up with the number twenty. He held his
hand up to a passing lift to stop it. The driver was Peter Ho, and Habershaw
brightened at his good fortune.

“Hey,
Peter.”

“Hello,
Mr. Habershaw.”

“I’m
looking for Rachel Sanders. She’s been hurt, and they probably took her to a
clinic. Where is it?”

“Well,
there’re two clinics, Mr. Habershaw. I can take you to one, but the other one
is in the guts.”

“What’d
you mean, in the guts?”

“That’s
what we call the areas deep inside. They won’t let us go there. They keep it
guarded at all times. If we have a delivery to make we have to hand it off to
one of the soldiers who lifts it in. See that hole way over there?” He pointed
at an open doorway on the far side of the chamber. Habershaw wished he wouldn’t
do that. “That’s hole E. That’s the one that leads into the guts. Any container
or item marked E goes down that hole. There’s a sub-chamber a few hundred
meters in where we dump our loads.
 
A
soldier carries it the rest of the way.

“How do
you know there’s another clinic in the guts?” Habershaw wanted to know.

“We’ve
been taking medical equipment and stuff back in there all week. What else could
it be?”

“Where’s
the other clinic? The one we can see?”

“Climb
up. I’ll take you over there.”

Habershaw
climbed up and held onto the lift’s cage. Peter raised his load and headed off.
Staying in the tire-darkened roads drawn in the floor and dodging other lifts
in the intersections, he drove as fast as the lift would go. Habershaw was
impressed. The skillful operation of any moving equipment impressed him. “You
handle this thing pretty good there, Peter.”

“I’ve
been doing it a few years, Mr. Habershaw.”

The
clinic had been set up in a small chamber off a tunnel marked M in black paint.
Peter stopped the lift at the metal door and Habershaw hopped down.

“That’s
it, Mr. Habershaw,” Peter said.

“Thanks.
Do me another favor. If you see Rachel, come to the rig and tell me. Don’t tell
anybody else.”

“Okay.”

“See you
around,” Habershaw said.

Peter
swung the lift into the lane and hummed off. Habershaw had to think of some
excuse to go inside. There was no mark of the Bondsmen above the door, which
meant he could use the facility, but he couldn’t just walk in without a good
medical reason and the holes in his back, not yet healed, filled the bill
perfectly. He opened the door and walked down the tunnel. A single black power
cable ran along the wall, fastened with brackets hammered into the wall’s
smooth surface.

The
clinic was even smaller than he thought it would be, scarcely ten meters
across. A jumble of tables and racks of equipment were strewn all over with
little sense of order. There were three examination tables separated by white
plastic curtains hanging from frames. The frames looked bent and crooked. Carts
on rollers were everywhere, loaded up with pans and an assortment of medical
paraphernalia. Metal shelves against one wall held hundreds of bottles and
boxes of drugs in uneven stacks. An irregular row of five or six chairs served
as a waiting area. A young contractor, a woman of about twenty, clearly
pregnant, sat in one of them, bouncing one foot, waiting for her turn.

“Hi,” she
said nicely.

“Hi,”
Habershaw replied.

The
layout was so ill-designed that there was virtually no privacy from the eyes in
the waiting area. Two patients, one sitting, the other lying down, occupied the
tables... A single doctor, dressed in a dingy gown, was examining the one
sitting. He looked up long enough to acknowledge Habershaw, then went right
back to work. “Have a seat,” he said. “I’ll be with you when I can.”