Fuzzy Nation (3 page)

“And I want a one percent finder’s fee,” Holloway said.

Bourne swore. Holloway was asking for four times the standard finder’s fee. “No way,” Bourne said. “No
way
. They’ll fire me for even
thinking
about approving that.”

“It’s one lousy percent,” Holloway said.

“You want ten million credits for blowing up a cliff side,” Holloway said.

“Well, it might be more than that,” Holloway said. “I can see six more sunstones in the seam from where I’m sitting.”

“No,” Bourne said. “Don’t even think about it. The most I’m allowed to authorize myself is point four percent. Take it and we’re done. Leave it and we’re going to court. And I
swear
to you, Jack, if I get fired for all of this, I’m going to hunt you down and kill you myself. And steal your dog.”

“That’s just low, stealing someone’s dog,” Holloway said.

“Point four percent,” Bourne said. “Final offer.”

“Done,” Holloway said. “Write this up as a rider to the contract neither you nor I contend was ever stupidly deleted by you. If it’s a rider, I don’t have to fly into Aubreytown to approve it.”

“Already done,” Bourne said. “Transmitting now.” The
MAIL
icon on Holloway’s infopanel came to life. He picked up the infopanel, scanned the rider, and approved it with his security hash.

“Pleasure doing business with you, Chad,” Holloway said, setting down the infopanel.

“Please die in a fire, Jack,” Bourne said.

“Does this mean you’re not taking me for a steak at Ruby’s?” Holloway asked, but Bourne had already cut the connection.

Holloway smiled to himself and held up the sunstone in his hand, turning it in the sun. Even in its uncut, dirty state it was beautiful, and Holloway had held it long enough that his own ambient heat had worked into the heart of the stone, making its filaments glow like lightning trapped in amber.

“You’re coming with me,” Holloway said to the stone. ZaraCorp could have the rest of them, and would. But this was the stone that had just made him a very rich man. It was a lucky stone, indeed. And he had someone in mind to give it to. By way of apology.

Holloway stood up and slipped the sunstone into his pocket. He looked over at Carl, who was still lying on the ledge. Carl crooked an eyebrow at him.

“Well,” Holloway said. “We’ve done all the damage we’re going to do around here for today. Let’s go home.”

Chapter Three        

Holloway’s skimmer was roughly halfway back to his home when his infopanel alerted him that his house was being broken into; the emergency alert system’s movement alarm had been tripped.

“Crap,” Holloway said. He jabbed the
AUTOPILOT
function on the skimmer; the skimmer skewed momentarily as it acquired signal and pathing from Holloway’s home base. There was no traffic here—Holloway’s survey territory was deep inside a continent-wide jungle, far away from any population centers, or indeed any other humans—so the course was more or less a straight line to home over the hills and treetops. Autopilot engaged, Holloway picked up his infopanel and clicked through to the security camera.

Which showed nothing; Holloway had the camera on his work desk and generally used it as a hat stand. His view of his house—and whoever was currently inside it—was being blocked by a stained porkpie hat he’d worn for amusement’s sake during his second year of law school at Duke.

“Stupid
hat,
” Holloway said. He kicked up the gain on the security camera’s microphone and held the infopanel speaker against his ear, on the chance the interloper might talk.

No luck. There were no voices, and what little else he could hear was being washed out by the sound of the skimmer engines and wind rushing through the open cockpit.

Holloway clicked his infopanel back into its cradle and looked down at his skimmer instrument panel. The skimmer was moving along at a leisurely eighty kilometers an hour, a safe speed in the jungle, in which birds were liable to burst out of the trees and smash themselves into the vehicle. Home was another twenty klicks out; Holloway knew that without checking the GPS data because he could see Mount Isabel off to his right. The hill’s eastern face was chewed away and the four square klicks in front of it fenced off and stripped bare of vegetation where ZaraCorp was doing what it euphemistically called “Smart Mining”—strip-mining but with an ostensible commitment to minimizing toxic impact and to restoring the area to its pristine state when the mining operations ceased.

At the time ZaraCorp started mining Mount Isabel, Holloway had idly wondered how an area could be restored to a pristine state once ZaraCorp had mined everything of value out of it, but this was not the same thing as him exhibiting actual concern. He’d been the one who did the original survey of Mount Isabel; the small sunstone patch that first drew his attention was exhausted in a matter of weeks, but the mount was a good source of anthracite coal, and the relatively rare rockwood tree grew on the mount and down its sides toward the river. He’d gotten his quarter of a percent out of the find—a decent-enough sum—and had moved on.

Holloway’s critical eye guessed that Mount Isabel had another year or two left in her before she was mined down to a molehill, at which time ZaraCorp would airlift out its equipment and drop in a clutch of terrified summer interns, who would hurriedly strew bags of rockwood seeds on the ground—this counted as “restoring the area to a pristine state”—and who would also pray that the fence winding around the perimeter of the mining area held up while they did it.

The fences usually held. It was rare these days to lose an intern to a zararaptor. But fear was a fine motivator.

A loud crash came out of the infopanel. Whoever was in Holloway’s house just dropped something breakable. Holloway swore and pressed the button that would enclose the skimmer cockpit, and then opened the throttle. They’d be home in five minutes; the birds in the treetops would just have to take their chances.

*   *   *

As the skimmer approached his home, Holloway dropped it into
CONSERVE
mode, which dropped its speed significantly but also made the skimmer almost silent. He stop-hovered the craft a klick out and reached for his binoculars.

Holloway’s house was a tree house—or more accurately, a platform anchored across several very tall spikewoods, on the edges of which stood the modest prefabricated cabin that was his living quarters, and the two sheds in which Holloway kept his surveying and prospecting supplies. Power was supplied by solar panels held aloft by a turbine kite, connected to the compound’s power plant, on which was also attached Holloway’s moisture collector and waste incinerator. In the center of the platform was a parking space, with enough room for Holloway’s skimmer and one other craft, provided it was small.

It was that space Holloway was looking at. It was empty.

Holloway relaxed a little. The only easy way into Holloway’s compound was by skimmer. It was possible that someone could have approached by foot and then climbed up, but that person would’ve had to be either very lucky or very confident. The jungle floor belonged to zararaptors and the local versions of pythons and alligators, any of which looked at the soft and slow human animal as an easy-to-catch, easy-to-eat snack. Holloway lived in the trees because all the big predators were on the ground, save the pythons, and they didn’t like spikewoods for reasons the name of the tree made obvious. The spikewoods also made climbing them a challenge if one were taller than half a meter, which any human would be.

Regardless, Holloway scanned the platform and through the foliage to look for climbing cables and the like. Nothing. The other option would be that someone dropped in from above, from a hovering skimmer, which then took off. But Holloway would have been pinged about any traffic within a hundred-klick radius when he set the autopilot. He hadn’t been.

So: Either there was a super-awesome ninja assassin lurking in his cabin, knocking over pottery, or it was just some dumb animal. While Holloway wouldn’t put it past Bourne to put a hit out on him, especially after today, he also doubted that Bourne could shake out a competent assassin on short notice. The best he would be able to do was some of the less intelligent ZaraCorp security types, such as the aforementioned Joe DeLise. They (and particularly DeLise) wouldn’t have bothered with sneaking up on him.

Chances were excellent, then, that this was a dumb animal; probably one of the local lizards, in fact. They were the size of iguanas—just small enough to avoid impalement on the spikewoods—vegetarians, and dumber than rocks. They would get into absolutely everything if you gave them a chance. When Holloway first came to Zara XXIII and had his treetop compound built, the place was infested with them. He’d put up an electric fence at first, but discovered that waking up every morning to the sight and smell of barbecued lizard depressed the crap out of him. Then another prospector told him that the lizards were utterly terrified of dogs. Carl arrived shortly thereafter.

“Hey, Carl,” Holloway said to his dog. “I think we got ourselves a lizard problem.”

Carl perked up at this. He very much enjoyed his role as solver of lizard problems. Holloway smiled, took the skimmer off
STOP-HOVER
mode, and went in for a landing.

Carl was out of the skimmer as soon as Holloway turned off the engines and opened the cockpit. He sniffed happily and headed off in the direction of one of the storage sheds.

“Hey, dummy,” Holloway said to Carl’s tail, which was whipping back and forth. He walked over to his dog and whacked him gently on the flank. “You’re going the wrong direction. The lizard’s in the house.” Holloway pointed in the direction of the cabin. He looked at the cabin at the same time, catching the image of the cat staring at him through the window over his work desk. Holloway stared back at the cat. It took him a second to remember that he didn’t own a cat.

It took him a second after that to remember that cats didn’t usually stand on two legs.

“What the hell
is
that?” Holloway said, out loud.

Carl turned at the sound of his master’s voice and saw the cat thing in the window.

The cat thing opened its mouth.

Carl barked like a mad dog and bolted toward the cabin door. His lack of opposable thumbs would have brought him up short had Holloway not installed a dog door after he’d gotten tired of being woken up in the middle of the night to let Carl out to pee. The dog door’s locking mechanism picked up the proximity signal from the chip in Carl’s shoulder and unlocked the door roughly a quarter of a second before Carl jammed his head and body through it, bolting effortlessly into the cabin.

From his viewpoint, Holloway saw the cat thing fling itself away from the window. Less than a second after that, Holloway could hear the sounds of many things breaking.

“Oh, shit,” Holloway said, and ran for the cabin door.

Unlike Carl, Holloway did not a have proximity chip implanted in his shoulder; he fumbled for the key to open the dead lock on the door, barking and crashing continuing nonstop as he did so. Holloway undid the bolt and cracked open the door just in time to see the cat thing running toward it.

The cat thing looked up, saw Holloway, and skidded, desperately trying to change its vector of direction. Carl, directly behind the cat thing, leapt up to avoid the braking creature and twisted midflight, connecting his flank with the cabin door, slamming it shut on Holloway’s forehead and nose. Holloway cursed and dropped to his knees by the closed door, clutching his nose. There were more crashing noises inside.

After a few minutes, Holloway became aware of two things. The first was that his nose, while swollen, was not going to bleed out on him. The second was that all the crashing noises had stopped, replaced by the sound of Carl’s constant bark. Holloway stood up, touched his nose one more time to make sure it wasn’t going to spontaneously gush, and then very carefully opened the door to his cabin.

The cabin looked like one of Holloway’s college dorm rooms at the end of a semester: an explosion of papers and objects on the floor, which should have been on a desk or shelf. Dishes previously in the cabin’s tiny sink were shattered on the ground. Holloway’s spare infopanel was likewise facedown on the floor. He couldn’t bring himself to see whether it was still functional or not.

Carl was propped up against the cabin’s sole bookcase, barking madly. A quick glance up established that he had treed the cat thing on top of the bookcase. Books and binders had been flung off the shelves as either the thing climbed up the shelf or Carl tried to get at it. The bookshelf was nowhere close to anything the cat thing could jump to; it seemed like it was too tall for the creature to jump down from, even if Carl weren’t there. It was safe from Carl for the moment, but it was also well and truly stuck. It stared down at Carl and then over at Holloway, alternating between them, cat’s eyes wide and terrified.

“Quiet, Carl!” Holloway said, but the dog was too out of his mind with the thrill of the chase to hear his master.

Holloway glanced around the room. Amid the mess he saw the creature’s place of entrance: the small, tilting window in Holloway’s sleeping alcove. He must have left it unlocked, and the creature must have been able to pry it open and get into the cabin. Once the cat thing got in, it wouldn’t have been able to get back out; the window was easily accessible from the outside roof, but it looked like it would have been too high for the creature to get to from the cot or the floor.

He looked back at the cat thing, which was staring right at him. It stared at the window, and then back at him. It was as if the critter knew he’d figured out how it got in.

Holloway went to the tilting window in the alcove, closed it, and locked it. Then he walked over to his dog and grabbed him by the scruff of his neck. Carl stopped barking with a surprised
urk
and skidded his back paws ineffectually against the floor. Holloway maneuvered the dog to the cabin door, opened the door, and tossed the animal out. He pressed his leg against the dog door until he could secure its manual lock, and then stepped back. There were two thumps as Carl batted his head against the dog door. A few seconds later, his paws and head showed up in the window above Holloway’s desk, alternately barking with indignity and whining to be let back in.