“You want me to poke around about it?”
“That’s the idea. And you’ll let me know if there’s any unusual reactions. I also want a list of all the existing Hague research facilities, who’s running them, what they’re doing at them.”
“That’s all public record stuff. Should be easy. Is that it?”
“Just one more thing. I want Board agenda memos.”
Rachel lifted her head from the notes she was making. “You mean - minutes of meetings?”
“I mean memos. The kind they shoot back and forth to each other over their private lines.”
“I don’t have access to that,” Rachel said. “Not officially.”
“But you can get it.”
She cleared her throat. “Technically, that’s a violation. In the code books.”
Alex swiveled in his chair and said nothing.
She sighed. “How far back?”
“Six months’ll be fine.”
She nodded. “What in particular am I looking for?”
“Any mention at all about the moon. Any discussion of the Hague repeal of moon mining. Like that.”
“Um – am I allowed to ask why?”
“You are, but you won’t get much answer yet. Except I’m hearing rumors about Planetoid interest in repealing the moratorium and I want to check it out.”
Rachel frowned. “Does Jaguar know about that?” she asked.
“Not yet. I don’t want to get her motor running until I have more than local gossip to fuel it with. If you come up with anything, I’ll let her know right away.”
Her frown deepened and Alex laughed. “We’ve avoided killing each other so far. I think you can relax.”
“I’ll work on it,” she said, still not quite convinced. “When do you want this?”
“No rush. Tomorrow is fine.”
Rachel groaned and rolled her eyes. But Alex knew her. First thing in the morning, most of what he wanted would be downloaded into his computer.
Chapter 2
The deep green coating of the night surrounded them, a liquid blanket of breathing leaves and moss, the scent of rotting and growing and growing and rotting smooth in their nostrils.
Jaguar surveyed the women crouched at her feet. Their eyes were big and their naked skin shone in the softly filtered moonlight. They stared up at her, not moving, not speaking, the rate of their breathing the only indication of their fear. They were her prisoners, and she’d brought them to the old forest eco-site between day and dusk to begin what looked like a challenging program.
“You’re murderers,” she said. “All of you. What punishment do you deserve?”
Terez lowered her head, silky blonde hair covering her face. Karena poked a finger into the dirt, her painted nail carving small holes through dead leaves. Fiore bared her teeth in a grin. Nobody spoke, but she could hear the hiss and spark of their answer.
Death, they did not say.
Jaguar chuckled. “Death would be too easy.”
Terez and Karena swayed and moaned, rolled back on their haunches and covered their heads with their hands.
Jaguar’s hand shot out and slapped Karena in the face. The moaning ceased.
She cast her gaze around the eco-site, with its high pines, birch saplings that stretched toward light, and floor padded with soft, wet leaves. “We’re going to make a sweat lodge,” she said. “Start gathering wood.”
The women stared at her blankly, and Jaguar shook her head. They were suburban women, all some flavor of Christian, used to the polite smiles and good clothes of Sunday church services. Spiritual ceremonies conducted naked on the damp earth were totally foreign to them. They had no idea what a sweat lodge was.
“Just do what I tell you,” Jaguar said, and set them to their tasks.
She took on the job of cutting saplings and bending them to the curves that would be the dome frame of a sweat lodge, which they would cover in the skins they’d carried into the woods from her vehicle. Fiore chopped wood into kindling for the fire they’d build. Terez gathered stones that would be heated in the fire. Karena dug a pit for the center of the lodge, where the heated stones would go once the ceremony began.
Their three bodies moved like patches of moonlight through the trees. They worked without speaking to her or each other, only occasionally asking for her attention nonverbally, to make sure they were doing their jobs correctly. Jaguar worked and listened to the language of their gestures as they performed their various tasks.
Terez, young and blonde and lovely, carried stones tentatively, one at a time, stumbling frequently over tree roots. She would place a stone near the circle where the fire was to be built, then stop and stare at Jaguar. When Jaguar smiled at her, she jerked her head away and went back to work.
Until a few weeks ago, she’d been a mathematics professor at a University, studying infinity, enjoying a perfect life with a perfect house and marriage. Then she killed her husband with a meat cleaver while preparing a vegetable stir-fry. Her crime was discovered when a colleague of her husband showed up at the house to see why he hadn’t come to work, and found a blood-spattered Terez sitting at the table, staring at a plate full of cold human parts mixed in artful arrangement with miniature corn and straw mushrooms. All she would say at the trial was that she was tired of being a vegetarian.
Since her sentencing to Planetoid Prison Three, she’d said nothing else, and it was Jaguar’s job to find out what lay under her continued silence.
Karena worked awkwardly, shoveling dirt slowly, stopping to brush the dirt off her rings, clean out a nail. She would pat at her head, as if to keep her close-cropped, carefully groomed curly dark hair in its place. She didn’t seem aware of Jaguar’s watchful eye. All her concern focused on somehow staying clean as she worked the earth.
In contrast, Fiore’s muscled back bent to her task with ease, and she didn’t stop to wipe the sweat off her face as she worked. Periodically, though, she would straighten her spine, press her hand against her lower back and lift her eyes to the moon, breathing deeply as if light and air were equally necessary for her lungs.
Jaguar watched, and listened to the spark and hiss of their unspoken fears. They wanted her to kill them, she knew. It would be easier than facing the tangle of power, desire and fear they were caught in.
The women worked together to pile the stones and cover them with wood and brush. The air, heavy and humid, defied the fire at first, and the three women struggled with matches as kindling caught and spit and refused to burn. Fiore stood over Karena and Terez impatiently, her dark skin shiny with sweat, and the silver streak in her black hair accenting the high color of her face and eyes.
She was 44 when she discovered she was pregnant for the first time, after being told she’d never bear children. The pregnancy proceeded without trouble until she began having labor pains in her sixth month. She was home by herself at the time, but she didn’t call a midwife. Instead she gave birth alone and easily, and her husband came home to find her licking at the remains of the tiny head.
Fiore pushed the other two women aside and grabbed the matches from them. She knelt in front of the fire and struck three against the box. She walked the circle of piled wood, directing the fire to the four quarters as Jaguar showed her. In her hand the blaze caught, her breath spreading the flames around the circle and toward the wood at the center, casting sharp points of shadow and light across the faces of the women.
Jaguar watched, letting the moon pour light into her, chanting