In Quaking Hills

1 After spending the last four days of her life hiding out from a deadly solar particle storm in an underground bunker, trapped inside with six treacherous women and a trio of girl assassins, it would be terribly ironic if Scout Shannon died now, plunging headlong into a ditch, because she had never learned to drive. But Scout wasn’t in a place to appreciate that irony. Not with the front end of the massive rover tipping dizzyingly down into the ravine despite her pushing, pulling, and stomping on every control she could find. She had nothing in her stomach except an excess of coffee, but even that was threatening to come back again, the bitterness washing up against her back teeth in spite of her best attempts to swallow it back down. Her hands were so slick with sweat they slipped over the control yoke. She hooked her forearms through it and pulled back as hard as she could, mentally begging for the rover to reverse away from the cliff already. She wasn’t even sure that was the right thing to do. The rover hung for a moment, teetering back and forth on the edge of the ravine. She could see loose rocks bounding down past her on either side, first a few bouncing and skittering randomly but then more, like a wave. Entire sheets of gravel were sliding off the hillside to plunge down into the ravine. It was a surreal sight, like the hill was melting, rock like hot wax pouring over jutting boulders and past scrubby trees whose tenacious roots clung stubbornly to the rock face. Years of sheering winds had twisted the trunks of those little trees into knobby, spiraling shapes that branched off at random. Now those branches shook like the bony arms of ghosts attempting to scare this new disaster away but never succumb to it. Scout wasn’t sure whether she found those defiant trees frightening or comforting. It would, she decided, largely depend on whether she, like the trees, stayed firm or if she was washed away in the tidal wave of loose topsoil. The two dogs in the rover’s cockpit with Scout were barking like mad. The movement of the rover wasn’t what was bothering them—they had started barking a moment before Scout had lurched over the unseen obstruction in the trail and lost control of the vehicle—although the rocking was tossing them about ruthlessly. Scout was belted into the driver’s seat, but the two dogs were trying desperately to hold themselves still even as they kept barking, heads tipped back as if they were addressing their warning to the sky at large. Gert, a dark-haired mix of unknown dog breeds, was more or less wedged between the passenger seat and the front console of the rover. Her large head repeatedly impacted against the hard edge of the console but she didn’t wince or even seem to notice. The rat terrier, named Shadow despite his mainly white coloring, was smaller and nearly went tumbling back into the main body of the rover. Scout had to take a hand off the yoke to catch him by the collar before he went flying down the steps. He yelped briefly in surprise but then resumed his anxious barking. What had set them off in the first place? Scout didn’t have a clue. She tucked the little dog close against her stomach and got her hand back on the yoke, not that there was anything she could do now with none of the rover’s treads actually on the ground. Besides make things worse. She could usually find a way to manage that. The rover was still rocking back and forth, the long drop to the bottom of the ravine dipping in and out of view in front of her. The landslide of rocks around her was unceasing. If the rover tipped either way, if its treads touched down on that moving surface, would she be carried away like driftwood on the tide? No, surely the rover, built to comfortably house a group of four researchers on a long-term expedition, was too heavy to be dislodged so easily. Still, there was more going on here than her lousy driving. They had hit something, or something had hit them. Had the dogs been barking even before then? Scout wasn’t sure. Her memory of the two events overlapped and refused to settle into a definable sequence. The teetering slowed, then the rover balanced for a moment at an untenable forty-five-degree angle before settling back on its rear treads. Scout made extra certain she had the engine in reverse before slowly easing her foot down on the pedal. The rover rolled back away from the edge. When the windscreen no longer showed even a hint of the plummet to her death that had been in store for her a moment before, she braked the rover and killed the engine. Scout slumped over the yoke, trembling all over. She wasn’t nearly recovered enough after the events of the last four days for such stresses. She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes, but despite the terror still making her heart pound, no tears came. She was too exhausted for more emotions, apparently. Once her heart had slowed, she pulled her hands from her face and looked to her dogs. Gert had stopped her frighteningly deep barks, those low rumbles that made her seem particularly hellhoundish. Shadow was still barking now and again, but with the air of a guardian unsure if the danger was really past. Scout put a comforting hand on his head and he gave one last halfhearted woof before settling down onto her lap. Poor fellow. As bad as those days underground had been for her, they had come far too close to killing Shadow. Scout picked him up in her arms and carried him down to the back of the rover where the stacks of bunks were. She laid him at the foot of the bottom bunk and he curled up on the faded quilt there, turning round and round before finally settling down and tucking his nose under his own paw. Gert, standing at Scout’s heels, made an inquiring sound. From the head of the bed the cat Tubbins made an equally inquisitive mew and Gert, her worry over Shadow now completely forgotten, tried to leap past Scout to get at the cat she had nearly killed days before. Scout stopped her with a well-placed knee. “Come on, Gert,” she said, catching the dog’s collar until she had her attention. Gert was twice Shadow’s size but really still a puppy. When she was growling that fearsome growl it was easy to forget how young and innocent she was, but when she looked up at Scout like she was doing now with those warm brown eyes it was hard to remember she was ever anything but cute and harmless. Scout pressed the button that caused the door to emerge from its recess, creating a little square of space between the dining nook and the bunks. It rolled out about half a meter, then the door swung open, letting in the full blaze of the midmorning sun. Scout started sweating at once, and she wasn’t even outside yet. But, hot as the air was, she stopped first to pull on the new long-sleeved sun-protective shirt she had found when scrounging for usable items back in Viola’s compound before she had blown the explosives that had blocked all the ways out, the closest she could get to giving those she had left behind a proper burial. The shirt fell midway down her thighs, barely past her cargo shorts, but she smeared sunscreen on her bare calves. She settled her father’s battered old bush hat on her head before leaping down to the ground. Gert jumped down after her, less than gracefully but unbothered by her hard landing. Scout looked up the slope of the hill behind the rover. What had been old, fractured rock covered with loose grit and sparse crabgrass was now just bare, somewhat more fractured rock. Like someone had swept the ground smooth. Everything remotely loose was all at the bottom of the ravine now. There was no way she had done all that damage with the rover. And after backtracking a ways along the trail she had been following and finding no obstruction, Scout was beginning to doubt she had hit anything either. Something had made her lurch, lurch hard and nearly tumble over the cliff. And it had shaken everything around them loose, hard enough to make it all fall away in a sheet. What could do such a thing? Scout had heard of earthquakes. The southeastern cities on the ocean sometimes reported them. She had never experienced one herself; no one had, not this far north and west. The land was flat here, nothing but prairie all the way to the horizon, split down the middle by the narrow spine of hills she had just been crossing. Had she just experienced an earthquake? Then a second thought hit her, sending a chill rippling over her skin despite the already stifling heat of the day. Was it going to happen again? Scout whistled for Gert and then climbed back into the rover. Just in case, she’d rather be back out on the flat prairie on the far side of the hills as soon as possible. If that was an earthquake, there might be others, and she’d rather be out in the flat grasslands when it struck. Besides, she had a destination to reach. More than that, she had a mission. And her clock was ticking. Liam McGillicuddy, the galactic marshal she had been trading messages with, was coming to meet her in three days. His partner, Gertrude Bauer, had died during the solar storm, but she had saved Scout’s life before losing her own. Scout was taking care of all of Gertrude’s things, her gun and badge but also other assorted equipment all attached to a belt Scout wore around her own hips now. She was sure Liam was coming to get it all back; it seemed too valuable not to recover. Some other galactic marshal would probably be carrying all of it soon. But perhaps Liam himself was coming not just to get the belt but also to meet the girl his partner had died for. And Scout would introduce him to the dog she had named in Gertrude’s honor. Scout didn’t know why he was coming in person, or what he intended to do, or what she should expect. She had written him a long message telling him everything that had happened since she had met his partner out on a hillside the moment before the solar storm had started. She had reported every poisoning, stabbing, and accidental death that had gone down over the last four days. His response had been terse: just a set of coordinates and the words MEET ME. Scout didn’t know what that meant or why he couldn’t say more. But his prior exchanges with Gertrude said he was not a terse man. There had to be a reason. Scout had spent the days after Gertrude’s death, the days she was still trapped underground by the ongoing coronal mass ejection event bathing the surface of her planet with deadly solar particles, researching Gertrude’s last mission, the one she had left uncompleted. It had not been an official mission. Technically, she had been on a long-overdue vacation. In reality, she had been chasing down a man that she had caught once before but who had later gone free on a technicality. Gertrude had known he was guilty; her own grandmother was among those he had conned and left destitute on a forgotten world even harsher than Scout’s home world of Amatheon. So Gertrude had taken a leave of absence to chase him. Scout got the sense that her boss had pretended not to know what she was really up to. She doubted he would be able to do the same for Liam if he tried to finish what Gertrude had started. Two galactic marshals using their vacation time to pursue the same personal vendetta was probably the sort of thing that would get a boss in trouble from the bigger boss, Scout guessed. Maybe that was why his reply had been so short. His boss might be reading his messages, to be sure he didn’t break any rules. But Scout could. She could find the con man in the next three days and drag him to where Liam was going to land his ship to meet her. Gertrude had accumulated more evidence; it was all on the tablet in a pouch on the belt. That evidence plus the recaptured culprit—Scout didn’t know anything about galactic law, but surely that would be enough. She knew all the steps to take to find this man and bring him to Liam. She was less sure what to do with the two data disks hidden deep in her front pocket. She couldn’t read them herself, but she knew they contained information that the Planet Dwellers wanted, the Space Farers had proved they would kill for, and the rebellion that lurked in the hills had attempted to secure for their own uses. Scout didn’t know which of the three she could trust. She was pretty sure it was none of the above. For now, she kept the secrets others had died for safe in her pocket where she could always feel them pressing into her thigh. Maybe she could ask Liam what she should do. If he turned out to be trustworthy. Scout couldn’t be sure until she met him. Scout looked down at the navigation screen, then got the rover rolling again in the direction of the flashing dot. Prairie Springs. Nothing more than an unremarkable little town in the middle of the grasslands. She had visited on a few occasions before, she seemed to remember, but she was only heading that way because it was the closest town to the hidden compound where she had waited out the storm. But she also knew Ruby, the woman who ran the public house in this town, and Ruby had access to the network run by all the public houses in all the towns. If anyone had seen her quarry, that network would know and could point her in the right direction. Scout sat back in her seat, starting to relax now that the trail was flattening out and the grass around her was changing from the stunted, scrubby tufts of the hill country to the tall, waving stalks of the prairie. She wanted justice for Gertrude, but that wasn’t the only reason she was going to find this guy. She also kind of hoped that if she showed up to the rendezvous with the fugitive in tow, Liam might be impressed with her skill and gumption, and he might be just a little more inclined to finish that other thing Gertrude had left undone. Gertrude had promised to take Scout off this world, to show her the galaxy. And now the thought that had never entered her mind before four days ago was her entire focus. She had to leave this place. And finding this man, this Farlane McFarlane, was her key.