The Mystery of Ireta (2 page)

“As if something had been feeding on it—alive.”

“What?” Kai felt his gorge rise.

“Those predators look savage enough to have done it . . . but while the creature was still living?”

The appalling concept silenced them both for several strides. A civilized diet no longer included animal flesh.

“I wonder if Tanegli’s having any luck with those fruiting trees,” she said, quickly redirecting the conversation.

“D’you know if he did take the youngsters with him? I was setting up the interchange.”

“Yes,” said Varian, “Divisti went, too, so the kids are in good hands.”

“Just as well,” said Kai a little grimly, “someone can manage them. I wouldn’t relish explaining to the EV’s third officer if anything happened to her pride and joy.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Kai saw Varian bite her lip, her eyes sparkling with suppressed amusement. It was an embarrassingly well-known fact that young Bonnard had a case of hero worship for the team’s male co-leader.

“Bonnard’s a good kid, Kai, and means well . . .”

“I know. I know.”

“I wonder if food on this planet tastes the way most things smell,” said Varian, again changing the subject. “If fruit tastes of hydrotelluride . . .”

“Are we food-low?”

“No,” said Varian, who was charged by the expedition’s charter to procure any additional food suppliers needed. “But Divisti is a cautious soul. The less we use of the basic subsistence supplies, the better. And fresh fruit . . . you ship-bred types may not miss it . . .”

“Land-born primates have no dietary discipline.”

They were both grinning, Varian cocking her head to one side, her gray eyes sparkling. The first day they’d met, at a table in the humanoid dining area of the huge EEC ship, they’d teased each other about dietary idiosyncrasies.

Born and brought up on the ship, Kai was used to synthesized foods and to the limited textures provided. Even when he’d been grounded for brief periods, he had never quite adjusted to the infinite variety and consistencies of natural foods. Varian had boasted that she could eat anything vegetable or mineral and had found the ship’s diet, even when augmented from the life-support dome with freshly grown produce, rather monotonous.

“I’d call it educated tastes, man. And if the fruit tastes at all decent, you may be perverted to an appreciation of
real
food.”

Just as they reached the lab, the panel shushed open, and an excited man came charging toward them.

“Marvelous!” He halted mid-stride and, losing his balance, staggered against the panel wall. “Just the people I need to see. Varian, the cell formation on those marine specimens is a real innovation. There are filaments, four different kinds . . . just take a look . . .” Trizein began pulling her back into his laboratory and gesturing urgently for Kai to follow.

“I’ve something for you, too, my friend.” Varian extended the slide. “We caught one of those heavy-duty herbivores, wounded, bleeding red blood . . .”

“But don’t you understand, Varian,” Trizein continued, apparently deaf to her announcement, “this is a completely
different
life form. Never in all my expeditionary experience have I come across such a cellular formation . . .”

“Nor have I come across such an anomaly as this, contrasting to your new life form.” Varian closed her fingers about the slide. “Do be a love and run a spectro analysis on this?”

“Red blood, you said?” Trizein blinked, changing mental gears to deal with Varian’s request. He held the slide up to the light, frowning at it. “Red blood? Isn’t compatible with what I’ve just told you.”

At that moment, the alarm wailed unnervingly through the shuttle and the outside encampment and tingled jarringly at the wrist units that Kai and Varian wore as team leaders.

“Foraging party in trouble, Kai, Varian.” Paskutti’s voice, his thick slurred speech unhurried, came over the intercom. “Aerial attack.”

Kai depressed the two-way button on his wrist unit. “Assemble your group, Paskutti. Varian and I are coming.”

“Aerial attack?” asked Varian as both moved quickly to the iris lock of the shuttlecraft. “From what?”

“Is the party airborne, Paskutti?” Kai asked.

“No, sir. I have coordinates. Shall I call in your teams?”

“No, they’d be too far out to be useful.” To Varian he said, “What
can
they have got into?”

“On this crazy planet? Who knows?” Varian seemed to thrive on the various alarms Ireta produced, for which Kai was glad. On his second expedition, the co-leader had been such a confirmed pessimist that the morale of the entire party had deteriorated, causing needless disastrous incidents.

As usual, the first blast of Ireta’s odorous atmosphere took Kai’s breath away. He’d forgotten to replace the deodorizing plugs he’d removed while in the shuttle. The plugs helped but not when one was forced to breathe through his mouth, as he was while running to join Paskutti’s rapidly forming squad.

Though the heavy-worlders under Paskutti’s direction had had farther to come, they were the first to arrive at the assembly point as Kai and Varian belted down the slope from the shuttle to the force-screen veil lock. Paskutti shoved belts, masks and stunners at the two leaders, forgetting in the urgency of the moment that the casual thrust of his heavy hand rocked the light-framed people back on their heels.

Gaber, the cartographer who was emergency duty officer, came puffing down from his dome. As usual, he’d forgotten to wear his force-screen belt though there was a standing order for those belts to be worn at all times. Kai would tag Gaber for that when they got back.

“What’s the emergency? I’ll never get those maps drawn with all these interruptions.”

“Forage party’s in trouble. Don’t wander off!” said Kai.

“Oh, never, Kai, never will I do anything so simple-witted. I assure you. I shan’t move from the controls one centimeter, though how I’m ever to finish
my
work . . . Three days behind now and . . .”

“Gaber!”

“Yes, Kai. Yes, I understand. I really do.” The man seated himself at the veil controls, glancing so anxiously from Paskutti to Varian that Kai had to nod at him reassuringly. Paskutti’s heavy face remained expressionless, as did his dark eyes; but somehow the heavy-worlder’s very silence could indicate disapproval or disgust more acutely than anything he might have growled.

Paskutti, a man in his middle years, had been in ship security for most of his five-year tour with EEC. He had volunteered for this assignment when the call had gone through the mother ship for secondaries to assist a xenob team. Heavy-worlders often took semi-skilled tours on other worlds on the EEC ships as the pay was extremely good. Two or three tours would mean that a semi-skilled individual could earn enough credit to live the rest of his or her life in relative comfort on one of the developing worlds. Heavy-worlders were preferred as secondaries, whatever their basic specialty might be, because of their muscular strength. They were paid to be the muscles of humanoid FSP, generally a comment made respectfully, since the heavy-worlders were not just muscle men but numbered as many high-ranking specialists as any other humanoid subgroup.

There was, however, no question that their sheer physical presence—the powerful legs, the compact torso, massive shoulders, weather-darkened skin—provided a visual deterrent that prompted many sentient groups to hire them as security forces, whether merely for display or as actual aggressive units. Contributing to the false notion that heavy-worlders were ill-equipped with mental abilities was the unfortunate genetic problem that, though their muscle and bone structure had adjusted to bear the heavy gravities, their heads had not. Consequently, at first glance they did look stupid. Away from the harsh gravity and climactic conditions that bred them, heavy-worlders also had to spend a good deal of their time in heavy-grav gyms to maintain their muscular strength and to enable them to make a satisfactory adjustment when they returned to their home worlds. Perversely enough, the heavy-worlders were intensely attached to their natal worlds, and most of them, having made their credit balance high enough to retire in comfort, happily returned to the cruel conditions that had developed their subgrouping.

Paskutti and Tardma had joined the expedition out of sheer boredom with their shipboard security duties. Berru and Bakkun as geologists had been Kai’s own choices since it was always good to have a few heavy-worlders on any team for the advantage of their physical attributes. Both he and Varian had been pleased when Tanegli, as botanist, and Divisti, as biologist, had answered the request for such specialists. When they had made planetfall and Varian had seen the unexpectedly large type of animal life which populated Ireta, she had blessed the heavy-worlders on her team. Whatever emergency they were going to meet now would be approached with much more confidence in such company.

Paskutti nodded at Gaber as the cartographer’s hands twitched above the veil controls. Slowly the veil lifted while Varian, by Kai’s side, shuffled with impatience. One couldn’t fuss Gaber by reminding him that this was an emergency and speed was essential.

Paskutti ducked under the lifting veil, charging out, the squad at his heels, before Gaber had completed the opening. It was, as usual, raining a thin mist, which except for the heavier drops, had been deflected by the main screen as had the insects small enough to be fried by contact.

They could hear Gaber muttering anxiously under his breath about people never waiting for anything as Paskutti gave the closed-fist upward gesture that meant sky-trailing. The rescuers activated their lift-belts and assumed the formation assigned them at Paskutti’s original briefing on emergency procedures. Kai and Varian were in the protected positions of the flying
V
formation.

Aloft, Kai turned his combutton to home in on Tanegli’s signal. Paskutti gestures westward, toward the swampy lowlands, and indicated speed increase as his other hand adjusted his mask.

They flew at treetop level, Kai remembering to keep his eyes horizontal, on Paskutti’s back. Oddly enough his tinge of agoraphobia bothered him less in the air, as long as he didn’t look directly down at the fast-moving ground. He was cushioned by the air-stream of his passage, an almost tactile support at this speed. The monotonous floor of conifers and gymnosperms which dotted this part of the continent waved briefly at their passage. High, high above, Kai caught a glimpse of circling winged monsters. Varian hadn’t yet had a chance to identify or telltale any of the aerial life forms: the creatures warily made themselves scarce when the explorers were abroad in lift-belts or sleds.

They increased altitude to maneuver the first of the basaltic clines and then glided down the other side, skimming the endless primeval forest, its foliage in ever-varied patterns of blue-green, green and green-purple. They met the first of the thermal downdrafts and had to correct, buffeted by the air currents. Paskutti signaled descent as the best solution. For him, it was, with his bulk of heavy grav-trained muscles, flesh and bone, but Kai and Varian had to keep compensating with their lift-belts’ auxiliary thrust jets.

As the buzz of the homer intensified, Kai began to berate himself. He ought not to have allowed any exploratory groups beyond a reasonable lift-belt radius of the compound. On the other hand, Tanegli was perfectly capable of combating most of the life forms so far seen here while dealing with the exuberant nature of the youngsters in his charge. So what aerial trouble could they have fallen into? And so quickly. Tanegli had left in the sled just prior to Kai’s scheduled contact with the Theks. They could barely have made their destination before running afoul of whatever it was. Tanegli would surely have mentioned any casualty. Then Kai wondered if the sled had been damaged. They’d only the one big unit and the four two-man sleds for his seismic teams. The smaller sleds could, in a pinch, take four passengers, but no equipment.

The land dropped away again and they corrected their flight line. Far in the purple distance the first range of volcanoes could be seen on the edge of the inland sea—a lake that was doomed to be destroyed by the restless tectonic action of this very active world. That was the first area he’d had tested for its seismicity because he’d worried that perhaps their granite shelf might be too close to tectonic activity and would turn mobile. But the first print-out of the cores had been reassuring. The lake would subside, probably giving way to small hills pushed up from beneath, clad with sediment and eventually folded under, for this was the near edge of the stable continental shelf on which the encampment had been placed.

The steamy, noxiously scented heat of the swamp-lands began to rise to meet them; cloying humidity intensified the basic hydrotelluride stench. The homer’s buzz grew louder and became continuous.

Kai was not the only member of the party scanning ahead. Far-sighted Paskutti saw the sled first, in a grove of angiosperms, parked on a sizable hummock that jutted into the swamp, away from the firmer mass of the jungle. The great purple-barked, many-rooted branches of the immense trees, well-scarred by herbivorous assaults, were untenanted by avian life, and Kai was beginning to feel the anger of relief overcome concern.

Paskutti’s arm gesture caught his attention and he followed the line of the heavy-worlder’s sweep toward the swamp, where several tan objects were slowly being dragged under the water by the pointed snouts of the swamp-dwellers. A minor battle began as two long-necked denizens contended for the possession of one corpse. The victor claimed the spoils by the simple expedient of sitting on the body and sinking with it into the muddy waters.

Tardma, the heavy-worlder directly in front of Kai, pointed in the other direction, toward firmer land, where a winged creature, obviously recovering from a stun blast, was swaying upright.

Paskutti fired a warning triplet and then motioned the group to land on the inland side of the grove. They came to a running stop, the heavy-worlders automatically deploying toward the swamp since the likelihood of attack was from that quarter. Kai, Varian and Paskutti jogged toward the sled from behind which the foragers now emerged.