Sooner Dead Read online

  "I know you're not sleeping." Hella ducked under a low-hanging limb to get to Daisy. "You breathe differently when you're really sleeping."

  With obvious irritation, the lizard popped open one black eye and gazed at Hella.

  "Be mad if you want to, but I'll just take this feedbag back to the tent."

  Daisy stirred then, lifting her head and turning it toward Hella. The lizard chirped disconsolately. That was another trait that set her off from her lesser cousins: Daisy was vocal and she had a high intelligence that made her trainable to the sound of a human voice and hand signals. Her tongue slithered out to taste the aroma reeking from the feedbag. She chirped again, more excitedly.

  Daisy wasn't leashed to the tree, nor was she hobbled. She stayed with Stampede and Hella because she wanted to. She rose to her full height, and her head towered above Hella's, crashing through the lower tree limbs. Daisy trotted in place eagerly.

  "Happy dance." Despite how the night had gone, Hella's spirits lifted at the sight of the lizard acting so childlike.

  Lowering slightly, Daisy rubbed her rough head against Hella's shoulder. Hella staggered back for an instant then wrapped an arm around the lizards big head. As Daisy chirped excitedly, Hella secured the feedbag around the creature's head with Velcro straps.

  "How do you know that thing's not going to eat you?"

  Hella spun, both of her hands already morphing into weapons.

  CHAPTER 3

  The man standing three meters away from Hella raised both hands to show that he offered no harm. He wore a hardshell with a machine pistol slung around his neck. His face shield popped open with a liquid hiss and revealed a handsome face and a shock of blond hair so pale it was almost white.

  "Easy. Didn't mean to startle you."

  Hella flushed, irritated at herself for not knowing the man had walked over to her and equally bothered by the fact that she was pleased to see him.

  "Did Riley sneak up on you again, Red?" Stampede's mirth vibrated over the comm. The fact that he'd called her by his nickname for her served to underscore his enjoyment. "I saw him walking over in your direction."

  "You might have warned me."

  "I don't think he has anything sinister in mind."

  "Not used to guys walking up on me, Stampede."

  "Not guys that you'd like to have walk up on you, I agree. Riley, though, he's something else, isn't he?"

  "A little privacy here?"

  "Sure."

  Hella knew that Stampede would still monitor the comm, but he wouldn't say anything. When they were in-country, which was nearly all of the time, they never cut the comm link. Staying almost inside the other's head was hard, but it helped them watch over each other. On more than one occasion, the practice had saved their lives.

  "Friends?" Riley wore a confused look because she hadn't responded directly to him. "Or maybe I should head back to camp."

  Hella turned her hands back into hands again and relaxed. "Something you wanted, Captain Riley?"

  Riley put his hands on his equipment belt and smiled at her. "You're a hard person to get to know, Hella."

  "You know enough." Hella turned back to Daisy and scratched the lizard under the jaw.

  "Probably. But that doesn't make me any less curious. I haven't met many women like you."

  Women. The term startled Hella. She was twenty, so she was a woman by most standards. She just didn't think of herself as that. Captain Riley looked at least thirty, and was probably older. In her mind, she was just a scout, just Stampede's partner.

  "I'm sure you've met your share of them."

  Riley chuckled. "Is that a question?"

  "No." But Hella did wonder. Over the past few days, she'd grown more curious about the handsome captain than she was comfortable with. She'd learned early to stay away from men.

  "Sounded kind of like a question."

  Hella concentrated on her anger. At least that part of the emotions darting around inside her was something she understood. She wheeled on Riley. "If I have a question, I come right out and ask it."

  "Then maybe I should too."

  Hella didn't say anything. She stayed focused on the man and wished he'd go away. She wanted to be by herself.

  "Dr. Pardot hired you. I didn't get much of a chance to interview you. The last few days, we've both been busy with our respective responsibilities."

  The way he spoke sounded soothing to Hella.

  "Normally I like to do my own investigating when it comes to people I'm going to work with."

  "Do you work with a lot of people, Captain Riley?" Hella wanted the answers to questions of her own, and she knew how to barter.

  Surprise flashed in the man's eyes. "Sometimes. Depending on what I'm doing for Dr. Pardot."

  "Have you always worked for him?"

  "No. There have been other scientists at the lab that I've handled security for before."

  "But you haven't been to the Redblight before?"

  "No."

  Hella studied the man and regretted the fact that so little of Riley's face was visible through the face shield and that the hardshell masked his true body language. A person's body language gave away a lot. "Then why come now?"

  "Because I work with Dr. Pardot, and this is where he wanted to go."

  "Why?"

  Riley hesitated. "I seem to be giving more answers than I'm getting."

  Hella stroked Daisy's muzzle. The lizard chomped in noisy satisfaction. "Ask."

  "How long have you and Stampede been together?"

  "Nine years." Hella had barely been surviving on her own and been old enough to start pinging men's radar as female. She'd learned to cut and run, and she'd learned to hunt in the wilderness. Stampede had taught her the rest.

  "You don't look that old."

  "I was eleven."

  "Kind of young."

  "Not for the Redblight. A lot of kids grow up without their parents. Or they don't grow up at all. I got lucky. Stampede had just lost his partner."

  "Then why didn't he take on another partner?"

  Hella arched a challenging brow. "Not a kid?"

  Riley looked uncomfortable. "That's not what I meant."

  "I think it is. Anyway, to answer your question, you'd have to ask him."

  "I was trying to figure out the relationship."

  Stampede laughed in Hella's ear.

  Hella made her voice cold. Riley seemed to understand that from Dr. Pardot just fine. "We're partners."

  "All right. I just didn't want to be stepping on any toes."

  "How would you do that?" Hella put on an innocent face, as if she didn't have a clue what he was talking about.

  "In case your partner was... interested in you."

  "He is interested in me." Hella adjusted the feedbag so Daisy could get to the bottom. "If I'm alive, he's got a better chance of staying alive too. That's about as interested as you can get, Captain Riley."

  Riley rubbed the back of his neck. His armored glove clanked against his helmet. "I just haven't ever seen a bisonoid before."

  "And you didn't know if Stampede was interested in human women?"

  "You do get straight to the point, don't you?"

  "Saves time. You save time out in the Redblight, you're likely saving your own skin. Or someone whose skin you've been hired to protect." Hella shook the feedbag again. "As to Stampede's sexual preferences, you'll have to ask him. I do know for a fact that a lot of women like Stampede." The bisonoid had women in all the trade camps they visited, and he had no problem connecting with women on expeditions.

  "But not you?"

  "No. Not me. You're getting personal."

  Riley shrugged. "I like knowing how people work together. That's part of my job."

  "We won't be working together long." Hella unfastened the feedbag. "Hopefully Dr. Pardot will find whatever it is he's looking for soon. Then you won't have to learn one more thing about me." She paused. "I would like to know what this expedition is looking for."r />
  "Even if I could tell you, I wouldn't."

  "Then I suppose we're through exchanging pleasantries, Captain Riley. Good night." Hella tossed the feedbag over her shoulder and walked back to camp. Riley followed her, and she knew he watched her every step of the way.

  Hella stood outside the canopied area where Dr. Colleen Trammell performed an autopsy on the dead mutie-coyote. She'd even had some of Riley's men search the forest for the bits and pieces of the one Stampede had killed. Those pieces lay arranged on a silica skein, a piece of fabric so thin that stains couldn't take hold. Hella knew she could have bartered the fabric dearly at a trade camp. And Colleen treated it like a kitchen utensil.

  Colleen worked like a machine, slicing and removing organs and musculature with a surgeon's skill. Blood splattered her clothing, her mask, and her goggles. A robotic assistant spread thin arms around her, recording audible and visual input as Colleen worked.

  The mutie-coyote lay husked out on the collapsible table. One of the ATVs carried a generator that hummed quietly as it supplied power to Colleen's tools.

  After a moment, Colleen put one of the laser knives down and looked up at Hella. "Would you like to come closer?"

  "Not really."

  "You may never get a chance to see something like this again."

  Curiosity finally pulled Hella under the canopy. She gazed at the corpse and almost felt sorry for the creature. Killing it while fighting for her life was one thing, and field dressing it to eat was another, but what Colleen Trammell was doing was almost obscene.

  "You really do think this thing is from another time line?" Despite herself, Hella was interested.

  "Not from another time line." Colleen picked up an instrument that offered numerical readouts. "Another world. I've never seen genomes like this."

  "Another planet?"

  Colleen shook her head and absently pulled hair back from her face. As a result she tracked blood through her hair. "No. I think this animal came from another version of our world."

  Hella was familiar with the concept. Some of the people Stampede talked science stuff with brought up ideas such as "string theory."

  "You're familiar with the idea of multiple earths?"

  "Sure. String theory. Dozens of different worlds just one second or genetic breakthrough out of step with the world we know."

  "A layman's point of view, but it will suffice." Colleen removed a mass from the dead animal.

  "Why are you taking it apart?"

  That stopped the woman for a moment. "To study it, of course."

  "Why?"

  "Because that's what I do to learn things. You've learned to take animals apart too. I've watched you do it."

  Hella and Stampede tended to their own meals. They'd guided expeditions in the past that had charged them for food they'd thought was free. And once they'd even been poisoned by a client. They didn't trust anyone if they didn't have to. They also took half the payment up front and hid it before they left.

  "I take animals apart to eat them." Hella gazed disdainfully at the hollowed corpse. "There's not anything on that thing I would eat. Unless I was really hungry. And I haven't been that hungry in a long time."

  "Didn't you ever take an animal apart to see how it worked? How the legs functioned? Where the heart, liver, and lungs were?"

  "No." Hella shivered at the thought. Watching Colleen do an autopsy the first time a few days earlier had almost unnerved her and made her sick. She didn't get sick easily, especially not when fighting.

  "Do you know how your hands become weapons?"

  Thinking Colleen might have been interested in cutting up her hand since the day Hella had first revealed why she didn't carry pistols made her a bit anxious. She thrust her hands in her pockets. "Sure. I think them into guns. The nanobots do the rest."

  "Where did you get those nanobots?"

  "I don't know."

  Interest lifted one of Colleen's eyebrows. "What do you mean?"

  "I never knew my parents. Since the earliest I can remember, I was on my own. Till Stampede made me his partner."

  "Then how did you learn you possessed the ability to transform your hands and process materials through your body."

  "The first time was an accident." Hella still remembered the old man's wrinkled face as he'd pawed at her in the trade camp. He'd caught Hella raiding the trash bins out back of the tavern, and he'd put a knife to her throat, telling her he would kill her if she didn't stay quiet. Fear had filled her mind with screaming insanity, and she could remember wishing she had a pistol to defend herself. Then she had and she'd killed the man. She still remembered his hot blood raining down on her. But she'd retained enough composure to steal everything of value from him before fleeing. "After that, Stampede took me to a man he knew—a professor of science, like you—and he told me I had nanobots inside me."

  "Couldn't he identify them?"

  The uncomfortable feeling inside Hella multiplied. She'd made a mistake accepting Colleen's invitation. "No. When he tried to take a blood sample, the nanobots made me leave."

  "They can control you?"

  "Not really. But they can make me afraid enough that leaving isn't an option."

  "What about when you're asleep?"

  "They watch over me. If someone sneaks up on me, they'll shoot him—or her—at the first sign of trouble."

  Colleen frowned. "That's unpleasant."

  "I just think of it as a security system."

  "You could be drugged."

  "No, I can't. The nanobots process drugs and poisons and render them ineffective almost immediately."

  "Amazing."

  Hella shrugged. She was what she was. She didn't question the way her body worked any more than she questioned Stampede's ability to manipulate the earth with his power.

  "You've been wounded before?"

  "Sure"

  "What about that blood?"

  Hella shook her head. "The nanobots don't leave my body. Stampede had a friend examine bandages from when I'd been shot. When he looked, there weren't any nanobots in the blood"

  "They stayed in your body."

  "Maybe. Stampede thinks maybe they deconstruct themselves when they're outside of me. Don't leave anything behind."

  "Interesting." Colleen rubbed a knuckle against her chin as she thought about what she'd been told. Blood streaked her thin face. "What about the lizard?"

  "Daisy? I found her when she was a baby and kept her."

  Colleen smiled and she looked more human than Hella had ever imagined she would. "That sounds like something my daughter would do."

  "You have a daughter?"

  "Yes." Colleen stripped off her gloves and took a PDA from her pocket. She punched a couple of buttons then showed the summoned image to Hella. The PDA screen showed a little girl, maybe eight or nine, with mouse brown hair like her mother. The girl clutched a pink pig to her cheek and smiled happily.

  "Nice kid." Hella didn't know anything else to say. Most of the kids she met in the trade camps or on the roads were thieves and con artists in the making. None of them would have held a stuffed pig like that unless they were trying to make someone else think it was worth something.

  "She is a wonderful child." Colleen smiled tenderly at the image.

  "Why didn't you bring her with you?"

  The smile slipped and almost gave way to sadness. Then Colleen put away the PDA. "She's safer at home. I couldn't bring her to this place." She cleared her throat. "So you found Daisy. Did you know that she was going to grow so large?"

  "No."

  "But you're not afraid of her? She seems awfully fierce."

  "She is fierce. Daisy will defend me or Stampede to the death."

  "How do you know that?"

  Hella shrugged. "Because she told me."

  That seemed to surprise Colleen. "The lizard can speak to you?"

  "No. But she thinks things. Something like that, I know what she's thinking."

  "I see."

 
Though the professor said that, Hella didn't really think the woman did. Then she changed her mind. "You're psi sensitive, aren't you?"

  For a moment Colleen looked as if she wouldn't answer. Then she let out a long breath. "I am, though Dr. Pardot would think me remiss for giving out such information."

  "There wasn't much to give out. Stampede and I already had that figured."

  "You're very observant."

  "Keeps us alive. So what can you do?"

  "Every now and again, I can see glimpses of the future. Sometimes those glimpses just surround an event. Other times they focus on an individual." Colleen grimaced. "Unfortunately most of those glimpses are tainted with darkness and evil."

  "You can also track ripples."

  Colleen pressed her lips firmly together and looked even more stressed. "It might be a good idea not to let Dr. Pardot know you're in possession of such knowledge."

  "All right. But you can sense the ripples?" It was a lot for the woman to admit to. Such an ability would be highly prized by many people. Not for the first time, Hella wondered what the lab where the scientists came from was like.

  "Yes."

  "Is that why you're here in the Redblight? To track ripples?"

  "I'm afraid you're way past anything I feel comfortable answering at this point." Colleen glanced around at the security guards. "Dr. Pardot keeps a tight rein on things."

  Stampede whispered into Hella's mind. "Back off, Red. You're not going to get anything more from her, and you don't want her retreating to Pardot's side after she's been at least a little forthcoming with us."

  Hella knew that was true, but she wished she could learn more. Everything they didn't know threatened Stampede and her. "I understand. Thank you for telling me what you have."

  Colleen hesitated. "I want you to know, Hella, that the reason we're here is important. And not just to Dr. Pardot. Your efforts, and those of your partner, are deeply appreciated."

  Hella glanced meaningfully at the eastern sky. "Not much time left before dawn. The morning's going to come early. I'm going to try to get some sleep. You should probably do the same."