Nobody answers. The colonel takes the goggles and goes to see for himself, leaving everyone in the crew quarters taking turns to open their mouth, find nothing to say and close it again.
McQueen catches up quickly though, and he ends up in the same place Foss did. “If these are the guys who set up that barricade …”
“They can’t be,” Akimwe interjects. “We’ve covered forty miles on bad ground since we left the road. Even hungries would have hit the wall by now.”
Foss begs to differ, but she doesn’t bother to say it. They stopped to go up the mountain, after all. And you hear stories about squads driving for days on end in a jeep or a hummer on good tarmac with a hungry chasing their tail the whole way. It’s a moot point, though. She doesn’t think these are hungries. She has no idea what they are. She didn’t even mention the creepiest part, which is that they’re pint-sized. Human body plan, just way too small.
Man-eating hobbits? Feral ten-year-olds?
The colonel comes back from the mid-section and hands the goggles back to her. He is very quiet.
Foss has to ask. “Did you see them, sir?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing in sight.”
“But they’re out there,” Foss blurts. “I didn’t imagine this!”
“I don’t for a moment believe you did, Foss,” Carlisle says. “I’m assuming they’re still close by, and that they went to ground when we stopped.”
“Wouldn’t have had to stop if we’d stayed on the road,” Sixsmith says. Her voice has a raw edge to it. Everybody turns to stare at her and she shrugs, defensive but still angry. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. We could have outrun them on asphalt and we could have kept on going through the night if we had to. As it is, we’re stuck here until morning. Assuming they tried to trap us with that barricade, we finessed ourselves into the trap when we ran away from them.”
Fournier gets to his feet, all on his dignity but also really rattled. To Foss, he looks like he’s standing up to add to his physical size the way a scared cat does. “May I remind you,” he says frigidly, “that going off-road was a decision made by myself and Colonel Carlisle jointly, in response to a real threat.”
McQueen gives a mirthless chuckle. “Nobody saw a threat apart from you,” he says. “But I imagine that happens to you a lot.”
Carlisle moves in quickly to shut McQueen down. Ours not to reason why, evidently. “That’s enough, all of you. Foss, is there anything you can add to what you’ve already told us? Numbers? Appearance?”
“I saw eight of them,” Foss says. There’s no doubt about that: she took the time to count. “But there could easily be more, because like I said they were running in a pretty loose sort of formation. Maybe I was only seeing the ones who were closest to us. There could have been more of them hanging back, or flanking us. I wouldn’t have got much of a reading through the trees.”
“Were they armed?”
“I can’t be sure, sir.”
“Did you get a sense of what they look like?”
Foss could have done without that question but she answers it anyway, knowing that she’s going to sound like an idiot. “They were way below normal adult height. The tallest one I saw was only about four feet or so.” She hesitates for a moment, but there’s no point in holding back details that might be important. “Visible light was poor, obviously. That’s why I went to enhanced thermal. But it looked like some of them were holding things. Weapons, maybe.”
“Oh my God!” Dr. Penny bleats. She turns to look at Khan. “I told you, Rina. I saw children down by the loch right after the cull. You remember?”
“Children?” Dr. Fournier’s tone is one of bewilderment tinged with contempt. “We’re not being pursued by children.”
“I just said they were small,” Foss snaps, all out of patience. “Did you hear me mention children?”
“Pygmies, then?” Fournier inquires snidely. “It’s a shame you weren’t properly trained in observation.”
The colonel comes in again, saving Dr. Fournier from a short sharp meal of rifle butt. “Please. Let’s deal with the situation on the ground. Since we don’t know the first thing about what we’re facing, we have to assume that their intentions are hostile and prepare accordingly. I want a three-man watch throughout the night. The cockpit, the turret and the mid-section platform. Sixsmith, let’s have the intracom wide open at all points so we’ll all know instantly if there’s a sighting.”
As Sixsmith heads aft, Foss does the maths. “Sir, a three-man watch—”
“I know. With a man down, one of us will have to double up. That might as well be me, since I’ve had the least to do today. You and Sixsmith will take second watch. Mr. McQueen, Private Phillips, you’re with me. Dr. Fournier, you and your team had best get some sleep. We’ll move on as soon as there’s adequate light.”
“With respect, Colonel.” It’s Khan speaking up this time, which shouldn’t come as any surprise since she’s got the biggest mouth of anyone on the science team (Foss hasn’t forgotten that idiot jibe). But she hardly ever makes a peep when the colonel is talking. For some reason he gets a free ride while Khan talks to the rest of the escort like they’re shit on her shoe. Even now she is respectful, almost apologising for disagreeing with him. “I don’t think we should move on. Not right away. I think we need to find out what these things are.”
She looks around at Fournier, at the rest of the whitecoats. “Don’t we? I mean, look at the facts. If they’re that cold they’re not baseline human. The safe call would have to be hungries—especially if they’ve been keeping pace with us across all this distance. If you were human, trying to maintain that speed, your heart would burst. But hungries don’t use tools, so this doesn’t add up. We have to find out what it is we’ve got here.”
“I said I didn’t see what they were holding,” Foss points out. Although maybe she did, she just isn’t sure. Until she is, she is more than happy to be disagreeing with Khan.
Which is mutual, clearly. Khan rounds on her. “The barricade back there was a tool,” she says coldly. “It was meant to break our treads or trap us. That’s why I think we should stop and check this out. If they’re hungries, we need to know how they can make that kind of calculation. Or build structures, for that matter.”
“We’re not sure that they did,” Sealey objects. “Is there any evidence that these … entities we’re seeing now had anything to do with the ambush back there?”