Of course he did. The piece of shit knew how much it would hurt her if she had to kill Dek.

29

The coast consisted of a line of exposed dark-brown dunes, partially vegetated, that ran down to the flat expanse of tidal zone. On the beach, breakers rolled in curling lines of white that streamed off to the north. Beyond the surf, the immensity of the Gulf stretched away to the horizon. Past that, pillars of white cumulus formed against the too-blue sky.

Back from the dunes and behind a belt of vegetation, Kalico had ordered a small knoll to be flattened, the trees blown away with a series of strategically placed barrels of magtex. Then she’d flown in a bulldozer from the clay mine at Port Authority and had the cat skinner, old Artie Manfroid—with all of his years of experience—blade the knoll top all the way down to its crumbly bedrock.

Kalico ended up with a three-acre pad of exposed basalt interbedded with a highly friable quartzite-like sandstone. The stuff didn’t offer much in the way of a foundation, cracked and shattered as it was. But the pad sat in the geologically turbulent interior of the crater. By blading down to virgin stone, it gave roots nothing to cling to; the trees couldn’t encroach. Some of the smaller plants would probably try to creep their way across the clearing, but the big stuff would be stopped cold at the margins of the site where topsoil was piled.

Or so Kalico hoped as she stepped down from the seatruck and stared at her newly created way station. This would be the beginning, and, who knew, it might even grow into a settlement someday. For now, all the exposed bedrock gave them was a somewhat-safe spot to set up a solar charger, a clear field of view against predators, and a place for passengers to change vehicles for their flights back and forth from the Pod to Port Authority.

As she stared out at the trees, she wished she had either Iji or Cheng present. The vegetation here was unlike anything she knew farther inland. Some of the bluer trees might have been a species of aquajade, but nothing looked like any of the varieties of chabacho with which she was familiar. What she saw just past the splintered wreckage left by the explosives and Manfroid’s bulldozing were large trees, but instead of towering giants, these grew short and wide. Many—if her suspicion was correct—had multiple thick and low trunks. Sort of like the banyan trees of old Earth but taken to an extreme. Not the sort of thing that could be uprooted en masse by the neighboring trees.