Starfist: Blood Contact (16 page)

Painfully, he got to his feet and stretched. Suddenly it struck him: they were in the very room where the attack had happened. No wonder he dreamed about it. Yes, the door they came through a year ago was the same one they'd used last night to get into the building and—there—the skeleton of a man. Quietly, not to awaken the others, he stepped over to the body, by then just bones and rags. The bones were brittle and disintegrated at his touch. The man's skull had collapsed into dust and only his teeth remained intact. One glinted amid the whitish powder. It was solid gold. Johnny Lumberman! "Jolly Joking Johnny." It was he who'd come shrieking and stumbling through the door, his face dissolving like melting wax.

Now, as the light outside increased, Cameron could see the heaps and piles scattered about the room.

Each had been the body of a scientist or technician who'd been slaughtered. Most of the pirates had gotten out of the building—and run straight into more of those things. That any of them survived was a miracle, and due to the fact that they'd all been armed and ready for a fight, even if the fight was far different from any they could have imagined.

He walked across the room and opened the door. The sun was up and it would be another clear, cloudless, hot day. Yes, right there, at his feet, was Scanlon's body. Minerva came out behind him.

"Georgie...?"

"Yeah," Cameron answered. Maya and Labaya came out. "Well," Cameron said, "at least we made it through the night."

The others stared down at Scanlon's remains. They recognized his body by the elaborate buckle that lay among the rotting clothing. Cameron bent down and picked it up. He tore off the fragments of belt that still clung to the device. Someone let out a small gasp.

"Georgie, do you think...?" Labaya ventured.

"Think what, Labaya? Think we'll wind up like him? Think we'll make it?" He shrugged. "One thing for sure. There's no more Red 35 Crew, no more Finnegard Scanlon, but I'm still alive and I don't intend to give up while I got any fight left in me." He rubbed the buckle on his sleeve and stuck it in a pocket.

"Now let's get to work."

They discovered two facts about Aquarius Station right away: All the scientific equipment had been removed, and there were no weapons in the place. The former did not quite register on the others, although they were quite disappointed by the latter fact. Cameron kept his fear about the missing equipment to himself. They did find food, plenty of it, precooked and stored in highly transportable sealed packets, and clothing and soap and scissors and razors and mirrors and a reasonably potable water supply, a bit stale after a year in its huge tank, but welcome. They ate until they got sick, and then ate some more. They washed and washed and cut their hair and shaved and then washed all over again.

And they found boats, two of them, ultralight, durable sporting models with tiny but powerful energy packs that could propel them along at thirty kilometers per hour—if they could find a patch of clear water that ran straight long enough to reach that speed. Each could hold two persons with cargo.

"Well," Labaya said, "I'm not walking back through that swamp."

"You won't have to now," Cameron answered. Eagerly, they stowed food and clothing into the boats and then hefted them experimentally. When the loads reached the maximum weight two people, one man and one woman, could lift and carry comfortably, Cameron declared they were ready to head back.

"Shouldn't we leave a message, in case a rescue party comes here?" Maya asked.

"Good thinking," Cameron replied. They hunted about the station for a while until they found a suitable fragment of sheet metal and some paint in a repair shop.

"Georgie," Minerva asked, "if we're rescued and those—those things don't get us again, well, we're pirates, Georgie..."

She left the rest of her sentence unfinished. They all regarded her thoughtfully for a moment.

"I'll take a penal colony any day, to the way we've been living," Labaya muttered.

"That's right," Maya said. "Nothing could be worse than this goddamn place!"

"She's right," Cameron said. "Look at it this way: we didn't kill these people. We only came here to steal, and we never got a chance to do any of that. We must've broke some kind of law by landing here with larceny on our minds. But there's no evidence to link us to any of the real crimes we've pulled off.

So we get maybe two to five for trespassing? Come on, let's leave a note. We won't mention anything about what we were doing here."

Carefully, Cameron spray-painted big letters on the metal as the others looked on anxiously. Done, he stood back to check his work.

"Looks good, Georgie. Now let's get going," Labaya said.

"Wait," Maya said. "Shouldn't we put a date?"

Cameron thought about that. "What the hell is the date?" he asked. "Anybody know exactly how long we've been here and when we came here, standard?" He scratched his head. Nobody said anything.

"Okay," he said, and added something to the message. He looked at what he'd written and cursed. "How could I have misspelled that word?"

"That's good! That's good! It's been about a year," Maya said.

"Yeah, don't worry about your spelling, Georgie. They'll figure it out," Labaya said. "Let's get going."

They propped the sign up just inside the door to the main administration building, where it would be safe from the elements, and left.

The sign read: 14 SURVIVORS CAVE APPROX. 30 KM SW HERE GRATE DANGER, HURRY, HURRY, WRITTEN ONE YEAR AFTER ATTACK.

CHAPTER 13

"Nothing," Lieutenant Snodgrass said, thumping the display board with the flat of his hand. "The only transmissions from surface or orbit are automated signals."

Ensign Mulhoorn and Chief Petty Officer Kranston, the
Fairfax County
communications officer and chief of communications, exchanged a look. The special communications officer had found exactly what they had already reported to Captain Tuit. Neither of them understood Snodgrass's function on the mission, unless he was needed on the planetary surface, and they doubted that.

The
CNSS Fairfax County
had been in orbit around Society 437 for one standard day. It had deployed its string-of-pearls surveillance satellites on its first orbit and immediately put that necklace of geosynchronous satellites to work gathering all possible information of military interest: communications, weapons emissions, land traffic, air traffic, human congregations, weather. As far as the string-of-pearls could tell, there were no human beings on the surface of Society 437. No people, no land or air traffic, no large weapons in use or on standby, no kind of electromagnetic spectrum surveillance or tracking directed toward the ship. Most important, the only response to the transmissions from the
Fairfax
was an automated reply acknowledging communications received and recorded.

"I don't think anybody's there," Snodgrass said.

Gunnery Sergeant Charlie Bass stood in the center of the comm shack looking at all the displays, from time to time leaning forward to read a changing alphanumeric data display.

"What are those?" Bass asked, pointing over Snodgrass's shoulder at a concentration of dim splotches on a high-mag screen that showed the details of the land around the central station. The display was set to show heat signals that were congruent with life-forms. He winked at Mulhoorn and Kranston.

Snodgrass twitched one shoulder in a sort of shrug. "Those are too dim to be warm-blooded animals.

The planet has large amphibians. That's a swampy area; those are probably amphibians sunning themselves."

"Probably, but not positively."

Kranston grinned and winked back at Bass. Snodgrass had entirely too high an opinion of himself and his abilities; he needed to have someone point out that he didn't know as much as he thought.

Snodgrass's lips curled as he thought something unkind about the intelligence of Marine sergeants.

"There's nothing else they could be. That indicates a body temperature of about 29.5 degrees Celsius.

That's close enough to the ambient air temperature to indicate cold-blooded animal forms."

Bass grunted and kept studying the display. "How big are they, can you tell?" he asked after a moment.

"I'm a communications officer, not a biologist," Snodgrass said, "so don't ask me. But I don't think a bunch of oversized newts is going to give us any trouble when we go planetside."

Bass made a neutral noise. Even if Snodgrass couldn't interpret the symbols that ran along the side of the display, Bass could. They indicated the life-forms were a little more than one and a half meters long on average. A few of them were more than two meters long. But some of them seemed to be moving about in a vertical orientation as though they were bipedal. He'd never heard of a bipedal amphibian.

The
Fairfax County's
data banks had the reports the scientific mission had filed with BHHEI. Bass had read all of those reports, most of them several times. None of them mentioned bipedal amphibians—or any other bipedal life-forms.

Bipedal or not, amphibians as big as those the display showed could pose a threat to the Marines.

Bass turned to Captain Tuit, who stood quietly watching the proceedings. "When do we go ashore, sir?"

Captain Tuit sighed. He feared that everyone on Society 437 was dead. It would be up to him and his own medical staff to find out what killed them.

"If your Marines are ready by the next time we pass over Central Station, you can launch then," he said. "My technical and medical people can drop on the next orbit and join you within a few hours after you make planetfall. That should give you enough time to secure the station."

"How much time do we have?"

The captain looked at a data display. "It looks like forty-three minutes."

"We'll be ready, sir. Have your people prepare the Essay for launch."

"Sir," Snodgrass said and stood, "that would leave the Marines alone on the ground for five or six hours. I think I should accompany them." The captain looked at Snodgrass. "Sir, I think a navy officer should be present from the beginning."

"Why?"

Snodgrass thought fast. He realized it wouldn't do to say that Marines under command of a mere sergeant weren't properly led. "Sir, I believe there is a navy regulation that requires a navy communications officer to be present when Marines are detached from a ship's complement to the surface of a possibly hostile planet."

Tuit nodded. "I'm familiar with the regulation. It calls for a ‘communications officer or other appropriate communications specialist.’ Which can be a seaman—or a Marine." He turned to Bass.

"You do have a properly qualified communications man in your platoon, don't you?"

"Yessir, Lance Corporal DuPont is my comm man."

Snodgrass was grateful for the dim light in the comm shack; it hid the flush that spread across his face.

"Sir, I am the special communications officer assigned to this mission. I believe going planetside is my proper function. Especially since it involves Project Golem."

Tuit hid his amusement and turned to Bass. "What do you think, Gunny?"

"Have you ever made planetfall with Marines, Mr. Snodgrass?" Bass asked, hiding his amusement as well as the captain had.

"I've made many planetfalls," Snodgrass replied with a curled lip.

"Yessir, I'm sure you have. But have you made any with Marines?"

"I've made just about every kind of planetfall the navy conducts." Snodgrass made no attempt to conceal the annoyance he felt at Bass's questions.

Bass raised an eyebrow at Captain Tuit. "I have no objection to Mr. Snodgrass accompanying us if he wants to."

The captain gave Snodgrass a searching look, then said, "All right, you can make planetfall with the Marines. Just remember one thing. Until we know what's going on planetside, and unless we find that conditions warrant otherwise, this mission is classified as an amphibious operation. That means that the instant the Essay touches down, operational command of all ground forces goes over to the ground force commander. Gunnery Sergeant Bass is the ground force commander."

"Yes, sir, I understand that." Of course, he thought, the first time any real decision needs to be made, I'll make it. A mere sergeant can't order a naval officer around.

As Bass walked toward the Marine compartment, he gave orders into his comm unit. By the time he reached the compartment, Staff Sergeant Hyakowa had third platoon's Marines in their chameleon uniforms and everything they were taking packed for landing.

"Assemble the platoon," Bass said.

"Aye aye," Hyakowa replied. Then, loudly, "Third platoon, on me."

In seconds twenty-eight faces seemed to hover in midair in front of Bass and Hyakowa.

"Here's the situation," Bass told his men. "We make planetfall in about forty minutes. So far the ship has not been able to raise anyone on the planet. So far, string-of-pearls surveillance has not shown anything that looks like people. It appears that the scientific mission isn't there anymore. We have no way of knowing what happened to them until we reach the surface and make an on-site investigation. Until we know otherwise for sure, we have to assume that something killed the scientists and technicians and if it's still there it will attempt to kill us as well. We go in hot.

"Any questions?"

There weren't any.

"All right, one more detail. Lieutenant Snodgrass requested permission to make planetfall with us. The captain and I agreed to allow him to."

"Ow-w-w!" Claypoole hooted. "Put him on my Dragon, I want to see this!"

"Right, put him with Claypoole," Corporal Goudanis called out. "I don't want him emptying his guts all over my squad."

"As you were, people" Bass said. "The man's an officer, even if he is a squid. Show some respect."

Bass's comment was greeted by a chorus of hoots and laughs.

"He's going to ride with me so I can make sure he doesn't choke to death," Bass said.

"Would anyone miss him if he did?"

"His mother probably would. Most mothers love their sons. Anyway, I'd have to explain how I lost a navy officer on a routine landing, and that wouldn't look good on my next fitness report. Now, if there are no other questions, finish getting ready and Staff Sergeant Hyakowa will take you to the well deck." He turned to Hyakowa. "Are you ready?"