Again, Kylee helped to thrust her up enough on the curvature that she could find purchase.

“Here I come,” Kylee stepped back on the wing, took a run, and made a leap, scrambling. Falise leaned low enough to catch the girl’s hand and pull her up. All of it made awkward because of the rifles they carried.

Together they walked forward to the hatch where it was open over the rear of the command deck.

“Hey!” Kylee called. “Anyone here? We’re your rescue.”

A woman, white hair, blue eyes, looking thirtyish, appeared. Falise recognized her as the IG’s Third. In a toneless voice, the Third said, “Help, please. The Inspector General is hurt.”

Kylee glanced at Falise, gave her a way-too familiar wink, saying, “That’s our new line of work.” She turned, whistled, and Flute seemed to magically appear on the wing before leaping up onto the fuselage with a graceful bound.

Kylee called down to the Third, “Any of you hurt this quetzal, and I’m leaving you behind to be eaten by the forest, you got that?”

The Third just blinked her blue eyes, seemed to be processing the information.

“Keep an eye out,” Kylee told Flute, and dropped into the command cabin.

Falise climbed down more slowly, making sure not to bang her rifle on anything. When she reached the deck, the first thing she saw was the blood, and only then recognized that it had to have come from the slumped figures seated in the pilot’s and co-pilot’s chairs. Next she caught the coppery smell. Oh, she knew that. Had—on occasion while practicing her assassin’s craft—smelled it before.

Ensign Makarov and his co-pilot were dead.

Chapter 56

  56  

Talina stood at the edge of Southern Diggings. What they called the pad—the scraped-off and leveled top of a geological dome. Behind her, the lab, stacks of shipping containers, bundles of fencing, portable lights, and a partially built perimeter fence were the center of human activity. The shuttle, resting on landing struts, gleamed in the slanting light as Capella dropped toward the horizon.

She could smell the forest: a rich saffron, ginger, and rose-like fragrance so different from what she knew in her own part of Donovan. Her quetzals, too, found it fascinating and new. She could feel their excitement.

For once, Demon, down behind her stomach, wasn’t making a pain in the ass out of himself.

Nor were the sounds here the same. The hoots, howls, screeches, and whistles from the forest beyond the berm hinted at creatures not even her quetzals could place. A completely new world, right down to the peculiar melody of the chime: a deeper, almost bass tremolo. That it sent unease through Rocket and Demon just added to her own sense of foreboding.