23
The loaded launch flew across what had once been a sea. That fact was emphasized when Kris spotted something and got permission from the boson flying to use the third backup camera.
Nelly pointed it back to what had caught Kris’s eye. There, in the middle of what was now a desert, were over a hundred calcified exoskeletons.
“Any guess what those are?” Kris asked.
“They look huge,” Jack said. “If this was ocean, then they must have filled the econiche held by the whale on old Earth.”
“That lobster would take quite a bit of melted butter,” the colonel said, smacking his lips.
“They look like a pod of beached whales,” Penny said, thoughtfully. “The receding water must have caught them there and left them high and dry.”
“That would be horrible,” Cara said, from where she sat beside Abby.
“I suspect we’re going to be hearing that a lot,” Kris said, and had Nelly switch off the screen.
They were coming up on what some guessed to be the coastline. Kris had Nelly use the spare camera again to capture their landfall. There had been a city there, once. It hadn’t been nuked but had been flattened by several rocks. The actual shore area was on the periphery of the zone of destruction.
The camera caught a long pier jutting out from the shore. Kris had gone fishing from just such a pier several times in different resorts around Wardhaven. What Kris would have taken for an amusement park, complete with roller coaster and Ferris wheel, passed quickly under them.
The Ferris wheel was over on its side, and the upper reaches of the roller coaster had been knocked loose. The cars from the coaster now spread along the ground beneath that break. They and the Ferris wheel still showed evidence of smashed and scattered exoskeletons.
“That’s horrible,” escaped Cara in a whisper.
Nelly changed the picture. One of the vanished forests came into view. The scrub brush that had tried to rise in its place showed dead itself.
“Regrowth never had a chance,” Penny said.
“No,” Kris agreed.
Cara just stared at the pictures, her mouth open in a silent Oh. Apparently, there was a limit to how much horror one thirteen-year-old girl could respond to.
The 1/c bosun’s mate piloting the launch was aiming for one of the cutoff mountains. Jack had seen to it that the first launch that got away from the Wasp was combat-loaded with Marines. They had come down there the orbit before.
Jack held Kris’s launch on the Wasp until the skipper of first platoon reported, “Nothing hostile here bigger than an ant, Skipper. And even the bugs are skittering away from the noise the launch made.”
Still, the two launches with boffins were ahead of Kris’s lander. Jack took Kris’s security seriously, even when there was nothing much alive on a raped planet.
The landing was an experience; wind and what little rain there had been had done what it could to smooth the plain of the scraped-off mountain. Still, those who had done this did not have a shuttle landing field in mind as they did it.
Ron the Iteeche had wanted to join Kris on this drop, but his advisors had looked the landing zone over and talked him out of risking himself in the harness the humans would use to strap him into one of their landers. As knocked around as the landing was for Kris, she found herself glad that Ron had agreed to follow them on net and read the reports later.
The aft hatch of the launch opened slowly. With a whoosh, the residual air inside fled into the lower pressure outside.
“This planet has about one-quarter the air pressure of Earth,” Professor mFumbo reported. “The atmosphere’s content is about what Mother Earth gave us, seventy-seven percent nitrogen and twenty-two percent oxygen, with minor contributions from other gases. What we have here is Earth atmosphere at thirty thousand feet. Please don’t open your suit masks,” he added.
Kris led her team out of the lander, right behind Jack. At least he didn’t have his automatic out.
The scene that met Kris’s eyes brought her to a halt. Her mouth went tight, and her stomach flipped. “Desolation” was the only word that came to mind.
Death and desolation. As far as the eye could see was a dusty emptiness. Off to her right, a boffin from one of the other landers kicked over a stone and reached down. Protected from the blistering wind and sun, some sort of life clung to its underside.
“We’re finding some lichens, a few mosses, and two kinds of fungi,” Professor mFumbo reported. “There are also some bugs that eke out a bare survival on them. Not much alive here, though.”
“Where are the bodies?” Kris asked.
“The Marines have the killing field staked out,” Jack said. “No one has entered it, yet. However, I think we have an answer to the colonel’s question as to how they died.”
“What have they found?” the colonel asked.
“Residue of Sarin gas,” Jack said.
“Ugh,” was all the colonel said.
“What’s Sarin gas?” Cara asked.
“Nasty stuff,” the colonel said.
“Illegal stuff,” Penny added.
“It’s illegal for humans to use it on humans,” Kris explained. “ Against the laws of war and reason.”
“Think of it as a jacked-up insecticide,” the colonel said. “Especially if they mixed it with a bit of oil, it sticks to the skin, gets inside, and destroys your nervous system in as little as one minute. It makes it so you can’t breathe.”
Through her bubble helmet, the girl’s face again showed pain at what she heard, but words failed her.
“Want to go back to the lander?” Abby asked.
“No. No. I can take this,” Cara insisted.
“Do you have any idea how they delivered the gas?” the colonel asked Jack.
“No. The Marine guard has cordoned off the killing field. All they’ve done is a preliminary chemical check of the soil. That turned up the Sarin residue. The actual gas, thank God, broke down a long time ago.”
“Broke down?” Kris asked.
“Sarin is not very persistent,” Nelly said. “It degrades in the sun and rain.”
“Did we have enough rain here?” Kris asked.
From the looks of it, Jack tried to shrug. That’s hard to do in a fully armored space suit. He finally said, “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“I’ve checked with the Marines doing the chemical check,” Nelly reported in a moment. “They are finding Sarin residue. No Sarin. I’d suggest that we wash down our suits after this, but I don’t think you humans have anything to worry about.”
“Thank you, Nelly,” Kris said.
While they talked, they’d been walking toward two Marine guards standing at the edge of the flattened mountain. If the look of the scraped mountain was shocking, the sight along the rising ground below was beyond words.
Kris’s experience with bugs had been limited. Loddy, the cook at Nuu House, kept a spotless kitchen. There had been one infestation of cockroaches when Kris was about Cara’s age. Kris had helped the cook spread out the roach hotels and emptied them a few days later.
She remembered one other time when she’d helped the gardener with a particularly bad summer crop of some kind of bugs. She’d been three at the time and didn’t want him to hurt the bugs. She’d spent as much time as her small attention span allowed picking bugs off the flowers and toddling over to the gate to send them flying free.
If she remembered right, she hadn’t been allowed to play in the garden for several days after that. Once she’d scampered off to other interests, no doubt the gardener had done his job.
Someone had certainly done a job here.
The escarpment was covered with portions of shells or complete exoskeletons. Thousand and thousands of them. You could see where others had crawled off to die at the foot of the hill.
These weren’t garden nuisances, sanitary challenges to a spick-and-span kitchen. These were intelligent creatures who built towns and roads that had lasted long beyond them.
One of the boffins, his suit said Dr. Lynch, made his way carefully down the hill. He stopped at the first complete body he found and stooped to examine it.
“There’s no soft tissue left,” he reported. He lifted up the skull to examine it. “No teeth, just a ridge of chitin. I doubt there’s anything left from which we could get DNA. Still, I’ll collect a number of these more intact bodies and see if there isn’t something they can tell us.”
“You do that,” Kris said. “Chief, can you direct us to that other skeleton you found?”
“It’s off to your right, where the ground is steeper.”
Kris and her group moved that way. A number of Marines came and hammered in spikes with ropes attached. Dr. Lynch joined them, along with three Marines with CSI stenciled on their packs. The four of them roped up and began a careful descent.
Kris turned on the outside mic on her suit. The wind, weak but constant, made a whispering noise as it slipped over bones and through empty eye sockets. The thin dust moved constantly, eroding what it could. Even in so much death, the planet lived its own quiet life.
Careful as the Marines and scientist were, they added their own sound as carapaces cracked and broke. Dirt and bones broke loose and slid down the ridge. A place that had changed very little in two hundred years took this chance to slide away.
Kris waited silently while the descent team made its way down half the embankment.
“I’ve got something that looks like foot tracks,” a Marine announced, and started snapping pictures.
“Yeah, I think someone came down this hill before us and went back up,” he added as he finished his recording.
“We’ve got a real live skull, here,” Dr. Lynch announced as he reached their goal. “Several of the locals on top of him. As a guess, I’d say that before nature did its dust-to-dust thing here, the bodies hid this other body.”
“Any idea of cause of death?” Kris asked.
“I think it’s pretty clear,” the doctor said, reaching down and raising the skull for all to see. “This skull shows evidence of our old friend, blunt force trauma. Somebody bashed his brains out.”
“Murder,” Kris said.
“That the murderer tried to hide,” Jack added.
“Quite successfully,” Penny said, and went on like the cop’s daughter she was. “Look around. Whoever slaughtered this planet left none of their own behind. Normal morbidity says that some people would keel over from a heart attack, old age, occupational accidents. Yet we have no sign of any bodies. Somebody busted this poor soul’s skull, hid him among the ‘trash,’ and so we have a body to examine.”
“Sounds plausible to me,” the colonel said.
The doctor examined the skull. “I think we may be able to get some DNA out of those teeth, assuming this alien had teeth like us and DNA in them.”
He and the Marines began filling the body bag they’d brought down with the bones of the murdered alien. They had several bags and looked ready to fill the others with some of the local bodies.
“You might want to come over where I am,” Professor mFumbo called on net. “I’m in what we think is the invaders’ village.”
That involved a long hike across the scraped mountain. The village was nestled in a hollow between the hill they were on and the next hill over, which had also been leveled. As they made their way down into the protection of the valley, they took in what the planet had to show of its flora and fauna.
Lots of trees, bushes, and other brush had lived on this land once.
They were dead now.
It was easy to tell the attackers’ constructions from the locals’. They were made of mud bricks with wooden roofs. All were squat, one-story buildings that sprawled across the hill with no sense of urban planning. If there had been any kind of rainfall, the mud bricks would have flowed back to the ground the mud was dug from; but since someone had taken the water, the buildings survived.
Professor mFumbo waved them toward a hut he and several other boffins were coming out of. The other scientists headed for another hut to examine. The professor stayed to give Kris and her team the fruits of their initial examination.
“The rooms were tiny,” he said. “There is not much furniture, and what there is is hacked out of local wood.” He pointed at several rough-hewn bunk beds, stacked three high.
“They crammed them in, didn’t they?” Kris said.
“It was tight quarters,” the professor agreed. “And one thing more. There were no amenities. I mean that. None. Not running water. Not indoor plumbing.”
“They had to have something,” Kris said.
The professor pointed down the hill. “The water was apparently drawn from the nearby river even though an entire mountaintop was being shoved into it.”
“That’s rude,” Cara said.
“The pollution must have been horrible, but that’s what they apparently did,” the professor said.
Cara ducked into the hut, looked around for a moment, then came back with a question. “Where did they go to the bathroom?”
“That puzzled us for a while,” the professor admitted. “We’d examined several of the sites, looking for means of sewage disposal. We didn’t find any. No slit trench. No pit latrine. Once we started searching this place, a couple of the folks spotted lumps of scat scattered indiscriminately around the site.”
“Ew,” Cara said.
“They couldn’t have done that,” Penny said. “That would have left them open to all kinds of epidemics.”
“Apparently, they did it, anyway. Right out in the middle of everything,” the professor insisted. “My guess is they didn’t intend to stay long, and it’s possible that the folks who got assigned to dirtside duty weren’t the highest in their caste system or social structure. Here, your guess is as good as mine.”
Kris had to hunt for a word. “This boggles the mind?”
“Yes, it does,” Professor mFumbo agreed. “But then, so does working in an environment loaded with residual radioactivity from when you nuked them from orbit.”
“Somebody doesn’t care much for occupational safety,” Kris said.
“More likely they never heard of occupational safety,” Abby said. “Something tells me that these little hellions didn’t spend a lot of time on the ground. And when they did, it was years and years apart. They might regularly build new ships, but building huts on a mud ball? Not something Great-greatgrandpa liked to talk about.”
“You may have it right,” the professor said.
“Is there anything we can learn from their scat?” Penny asked.
“No,” the professor said. “I’m afraid it is a bit too old for us to get any DNA or other useful stuff from it. We have analyzed it. No surprise, their digestive system is very effective, and their food was very well processed. We couldn’t identify any specific foods from the resultant dung. We do know they ate pretty much the same minerals that we need and excreted very much what we do ourselves.”
Jack shook his head. “If their concept of personal hygiene was nothing better than what you think, we ought to find a lot of dead bodies.”
“Sorry, Captain, that doesn’t seem to be true. They slaughtered the local folks and left their bodies to rot in the air. But of their own, nothing.”
“Nothing but what appears to be a murdered and hidden one,” Kris said. “I very much want to see what information that body yields.”
“One body that we think might be one of the attackers. Not much to go on,” Jack pointed out.
“Too true,” Kris agreed, looking slowly around the wreckage. “All too true.”
“I may be able to change that,” came from Chief Beni on net.
“Please do,” Kris said.
“Since I spotted that one body, I’ve had every drone I could get loose doing low passes around alien villages. I think I’ve spotted two more endoskeletons. I’ll need permission to send Marines to pick them up, and we’ll need time on the longboats.”
“That you will have,” Kris said; she turned to Cara. “Have you seen enough?”
The girl merely nodded within her bubble helmet.
“Let’s go topside, folks. Professor, you and your boffins can study this place until you run out of air. I’ll be waiting for your report. Me, I’ve seen enough. Somebody committed a crime here of biblical proportions. I don’t know if we can do anything about it, but I think the human race needs to know what we’ve seen.”
The ride up was silent. Everyone was lost in their own thoughts.