Outpost

  DAW BOOKS PROUDLY PRESENTS THE SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS OF W. MICHAEL GEAR:

  The Donovan Series

  Outpost

  Abandoned*

  The Spider Trilogy

  The Warriors of Spider

  The Way of Spider

  The Web of Spider

  The Forbidden Borders Trilogy

  Requiem for the Conqueror

  Relic of Empire

  Countermeasures

  *

  Starstrike

  *

  The Artifact

  *Available November 2018 from DAW Books

  Copyright © 2018 by W. Michael Gear.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Jacket art by Steve Stone.

  Jacket design by G-Force Design.

  Book designed by Fine Design.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1779.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780756413392

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  Version_1

  TO DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, SHEILA GILBERT, AND BETSY WOLLHEIM.

  IN CELEBRATION OF THE THIRTY YEARS WE’VE BEEN PUBLISHING TOGETHER.

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ALSO BY W. MICHAEL GEAR

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  CHAPTER 80

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  All novels are team efforts. The proposal for the Donovan series lay in a drawer for two decades. I have to thank my New York Times-bestselling wife, Kathleen O’Neal Gear, for her insistence that I take it out, dust it off, and finally submit it to a publisher. The Donovan books might only have my name on the cover, but Kathleen’s influence is all over the series. As always, she is my heartbeat, my soul, and the center of my universe.

  My thanks, also, to Sheila Gilbert and Betsy Wollheim. As this is written we have just passed the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Warriors of Spider, my first DAW novel. And through all those long years we’ve enjoyed a lasting and wonderful friendship.

  Sheila, thanks for the perceptive comments on the Outpost manuscript. Here’s to the next thirty years. May they be as wonderful.

  And, finally, to all the fine folks at DAW who helped bring this book to life. Supper’s on me next time we’re in the city. Thanks, to you all.

  1

  A strange mythology has grown about morning; it has sent its roots to twine inextricable rhizomes through the human psyche. Like all mythology, it is mostly falsehood. According to the myth, with the rising of the sun hope is kindled in the human spirit. The body rises refreshed, vigorous. The brain is audacious. Keen again. The profound and dark despair of the predawn soul has been vanquished by those golden bars of light which bathe a reborn world . . . or so the myth would claim.

  Morning has another and more pragmatic reputation: the time of attack, of unexpected death intruding rudely and impudently into dawn’s domain. In contrast, that ancient reality is all the more gruesome. It is said among observers—at least among those of a sensitive nature—that the horrible irony and tragedy of dying at first light is reflected in the expressions of the newly dead. Only then has the mythology played its final deception.

  —SHIG MOSADEK, DONOVAN PORT AUTHORITY, 2153

  An exhausted Talina Perez watched the sunrise on Donovan. They still called it sunrise, even if the “sun” was officially named Capella and lay some thirty light-years from Earth. This particular morning began as a brilliant spear of light behind the craggy black silhouette of the Blood Mountains. Donovan rotated in the same direction as Earth, so sunrise was still in the east.

  Aching with fatigue and possessed of a pervading sense of futility, Talina would have preferred to be back at Port Authority. She would have awakened this morning, rested and energized from a full night’s sleep. Instead she stank of sweat, her feet and legs spotted with dried mud, her overalls filthy and smudged. Her skin stung from thorn punctures that she hadn’t been able to avoid in the darkness.

  As the first light spilled through the distant gap, she desperately wanted to believe the morning myth, to lower her guard and yawn. Maybe let her mind wander.

  Except that she’d seen too many sunrises play across the rictus on a freshly dead man’s face.

  Donovan did that, destroyed illusion with brutal regularity.

  As the dawn brightened, its light softened the angles and contours of the canyon—sifted shadow and form from the darkness.

  She crouched on a precarious trail, body tense, the heavy rifle tightly gripped in her slim and tanned fingers. Her
dark eyes shifted constantly, desperately searching the shadows. The charge was almost depleted in her thermal scope. Overhead, two of the drones scoured the canyon sides, the hiss of their fans barely audible.

  Capella’s first rays caressed her face, warming her high cheeks and straight nose as they gave a golden cast to her bronzed skin. They illuminated her ancestral features of Spanish hidalgo mixed with classic Maya. Descended from sun gods and conquistadors, their spirit flashed in her sable eyes as she stalked the wild and rocky trails of another world.

  Talina Perez hunted a killer.

  She pursed her full lips and brushed back a strand of black hair where it had come loose from her long braid. Hair that adopted a bluish raven tint in the full morning light.

  Warm air drifted down the canyon, carrying the odor of dry dirt and the cloying scent of musk bushes. The silence seemed to intensify as Capella’s light accented the parched surface of cracked and tumbled stone with pale lavender; high above, it bathed the shredded cirrus clouds in purple and orange streaks where they stretched across the northern sky.

  Invertebrates whizzed and chirred in the tangles of brush beneath the sandstone outcrops. To her right the canyon dropped away to a stone-and-sand-choked streambed some twenty meters below.

  She swallowed nervously and snugged the rifle butt into her shoulder. Her gaze searched the cap rock above for any irregularity. Then she turned her attention to the narrowing gap where the trail climbed the canyon wall and emptied out onto the flat tableland above. Dotted with aquajade trees and ferngrass, the plain extended to the distant Wind Mountains where they rose some twenty kilometers beyond.

  “Where the hell are you?” she whispered.

  She tried to still her pounding heart in order to hear even the faintest sound. Changing her focus, she gave careful scrutiny to the ground, looking for scuffed soil, a displaced rock, a broken thorn, or a bruised leaf on one of the plants.

  Because of a dead battery in a motion sensor, the quetzal had come undetected in the night, crossed the defensive ditch, unhooked the gate latch, and slipped into town. That was the thing about quetzals, they were intelligent. Learned from their mistakes. This one obviously had previous experience with humans and knew the defenses. After the creature made its kill, it had known how to escape, charging headlong for the uplands. That was another thing about quetzals: for short distances they could run faster than an aircar.

  The planet hosted an endless variety of different and deadly beasts. Bems, though solitary and slow, relied on extraordinary camouflage and deadly claws to capture prey. The creature they called the nightmare inhabited the tropical jungle stretches just south of Port Authority. Also a master of camouflage, it mimicked the surrounding vegetation and invoked a special kind of horror: it first impaled and then devoured victims from the inside out. Fortunately nightmares almost exclusively lurked in mundo trees down south. Smaller threats like the slugs, spikes, and semisentient stinging, poisonous, and predatory plants filled out most of the rest of the known dangerous flora and fauna.

  “Talina? You on the trail?” Allenovich’s voice came through her earpiece.

  She shifted her rifle, eyes still on the thornbushes as they rotated their branches to expose night-weary leaves to the rising sun. “I’m maybe three hundred meters from the head of the canyon.”

  “Still got tracks?”

  Talina filled her lungs, hating the way her heart was hammering at her breastbone. “No. They vanished about fifty meters back.”

  “Shit.” A pause. “You watch your ass.”

  “Yeah,” she whispered and wished for a drink of water.

  “Trish here. I’m on the rim just across the canyon from you, Tal. Iji says the drones are reporting that nothing broke out onto the flat up ahead. It’ll take a while to recall them. I’m scanning the canyon with the IR. With the morning sun, that slope you’re on is a patchwork of heat signatures. You sure it’s there?”

  “Yep.” She swallowed hard, the rifle up, her pulse racing. “I can almost . . .”

  A trickle of dirt broke loose to cascade from above.

  Talina dropped to one knee, the rifle lifted for a snap shot as she stared through the optic.

  What?

  Where?

  The buzzing of the invertebrates changed; the chime shifted as if a whole section of them had gone quiet. Odd, that.

  A pebble clicked and bounced down through the rocks and into the scrubby thorn brush above. Quetzal? Or just the morning sun expanding the eroded soil?

  Damn, I hate this!

  Her muscles remained bunched like knotted wire. Something about the invertebrates . . .

  “Trish?” she barely whispered. “See anything above me?”

  Why the hell couldn’t humans have eyes in the backs of their heads?

  The morning air had grown heavy, oppressive.

  “Can’t make out anything definitive, Tal. Be damned careful. We don’t want to bury you, too.”

  “Affirmative on that.”

  The quetzal had prowled the town, tracks indicating where it had avoided adults—aware of their weapons—and skirted the lighted areas. Sticking to the shadows and back ways, it had made its way to the personal quarters, stopping only long enough to peer into the domes and try the doors.

  At Allison Chomko’s it had found safe prey, had watched her leave her house on an errand. Then the creature had raised the unlocked latch before entering to make its kill. It had escaped, gone before anyone knew.

  A running quetzal made an incredible sight with its flared collar membranes spread for thermal regulation. Its mouth gaped wide to expose serrated jaws, which acted as a sort of ram-air intake. Pushed into three separate lungs, oxygen supercharged the blood. As air was channeled through the body core, it picked up heat and was exhaled, or vented, above the powerful legs and along the tail. All six meters of the animal would turn blaze-white for better radiation. A quetzal running in panic across flat terrain could hit one hundred and sixty kph for short periods of time.

  But it came at an incredible cost in energy; and here, in the canyon, it had gone to ground. By now it would have digested the infant girl it had taken from Allison Chomko’s cradle. Before it could run again, it had to eat, to replace those depleted resources.

  Talina could sense the quetzal’s hunger, sense the creature’s three shining black eyes as they studied her. As if the gaze were somehow radiant.

  The invertebrates began another chime—like a mutual wave of sound that passed from critter to critter. Talina was barely aware as it rolled slowly up from the canyon’s mouth.

  The fine hair on the nape of her neck rose.

  How can a creature that big turn invisible?

  But that was the way of so many of Donovan’s creatures: masters of camouflage, all of them.

  Arguments raged in Inga’s tavern. Were quetzals—in their way—as smart as humans? They hunted with uncanny ability, manipulated locks, doors, and tools—but made none of their own. Here, in the canyon, the predator’s cunning permeated the very air. A metaphysical odor borne on the currents of the soul.

  One small slip, Talina. That’s all it takes. Stay crisp—or you’ll die here.

  Talina took another step, senses at high pitch. People had stepped on quetzals before, oblivious to their presence until that shift of slippery flesh beneath a misplaced foot. For their part, the creatures had learned that a human could be efficiently eliminated by a strike to the head, chest, or neck. All it took was a pistonlike blow from one of their clawed, three-toed feet.

  Nerve sweat trickled down Talina’s cheek. Capella was a full hand-width above the horizon now, its heat beginning to radiate on the canyon wall. The chirring of the invertebrates swelled, covering any sound—as if the “bugs” were cheering the quetzal on.

  Let it go! Just back away!

  But she couldn’t. This one
was too cunning a killer. It would be back. Smarter. Faster. More deadly.

  The air pulsed with chime, beating a rhythm that was echoed by the land. Thorncactus reached out with a tentative branch, its spines scratching along her boot’s protective leather.

  Talina flinched, wheeled, rifle up as she stared at the trail behind her. Empty.

  If the thing would just move, the drones would detect it, give her that moment of warning. But for the drones they’d never have tracked the beast this far.

  Another swelling of sound rolled up the canyon as the invertebrates song-shared. The chime passed her, heading for the head of the canyon.

  Yes! There! A break in the wall of sound—a dead spot of uncharacteristic silence just off to the left—slightly above the trail and not more than ten paces away.

  She fixed on it, lowered her cheek to the stock and squinted through the optic. The soil began to flow. A plant seemed to thin, as if reality had turned sideways. A shadow formed in dislodged dirt. Three black eyes emerged from behind mottled, soil-toned lids.

  The moment their gazes fixed, they might have shared souls, touched each other’s deadly essences.

  Talina shot as the quetzal leaped. Explosive-tipped bullets ripped into the rock and brush that surrounded the three eyes that seemed to rise before her.

  She reeled back. Lost her footing and hit hard on the uneven stones. Somehow she kept her hold on the rifle, brought it up.

  The quetzal’s camouflaged colors darkened as the creature landed, bunched, and launched itself.

  Talina had a momentary image of its wide mouth, the wickedly serrated teeth. Then it blocked the sky as it hurtled toward her.

  She was screaming as she held the trigger back. The rifle thundered as she kicked sideways, flung herself downhill off the trail. The quetzal slammed hard feet into the spot where she’d been, one claw cutting her sleeve.

  The world spun as Talina tumbled down the slope, tore through the vegetation, bounced off rocks. She slammed onto a weather-rotten outcrop; sandstone crumbled under her weight. The side of her head hit a rock. Lightning and pain blasted through her skull. Her body bounced, landed on loose scree, slid, and broke through a young aquajade tree.