“Your belief system, Inspector General.”

“Yeah? Well . . .” He swallowed hard again. “I can’t do a thing about hell, but Donovan? I can. I’m going to raze this shit-pit of a planet, and we can mine it in radiation suits if we have to.”

Shig knit his brow, doing his best to roll the cart as carefully as he could. Pushing the medical cart wasn’t his best skill. Nor did he have much body mass to do it well.

“Inspector General, in your voice I detect a surrender to tamas. Or is it just that you are drowning, lost in the illusions of maya.”

“What the hell kind of crap is that?”

“Oh, no ‘crap’ as you would call it. Rather it is the way in which we delude ourselves from seeing the truth. I suspect that you have never truly embraced your atman. Perhaps that is why you have come to Donovan. The reason you have suffered the misfortunes you have. This is your opportunity.”

“That’s insane!”

“No, on the contrary, that is Hindu.”

In reply, the Inspector General ground his teeth at the pain and clamped his eyes closed. “Just get me to medical care. I’ll deal with the rest as soon as they’ve given me something for the pain.” A pause. “And get me a line to Colonel Creamer.”

Chapter 69

  69  

The sensation dazzled Falise, an experience that transcended anything she’d known. Or even dreamed. She was riding a quetzal! Her perch was just ahead over the beast’s forelegs, Flute’s shoulders giving her legs support. A sense of total awareness and awe filled her. Call it frick-fracking magic, the reality of riding being totally surreal.

Such a thing would never have crossed her mind. She hadn’t conceived that such a relationship was possible—not just with a giant, deadly predator, but with a sentient alien being. Falise needed only to reach down and run her hand along that warm, slick hide—fingers tracing chevrons of color—to feel the creature. Solid. Muscles working. This wasn’t a dream; her body swayed with each stride, with each step. The world continued to pass by as she ducked occasional branches. Though periodically, that flaring collar expanded into a sheet of riotous color that blocked all forward vision.

“It’s how he fine-tunes his hearing,” Kylee had explained the first time Flute sent the membrane unfurling before Falise’s face. “Think of it like the tympanic membrane in your ear. The frill reacts to sound waves as they bounce on the surface.”