The search party began its search just before noon. It was a hundred and fifty volunteers strong; Henri Arlien may not have been popular but both Therese and Loong had a number of friends. Therese came to join the party but I sent her home with two of her friends. I didn’t want to run the risk of her coming across Joe’s body. Jane blocked off search areas for small groups and required each group to stay in voice contact with one another. Savitri and Beata, who had become friends despite their interesting failure of a date, searched with me, Savitri keeping a tight grip on an old-style compass she had traded for with a Mennonite sometime before. Jane, some measure down the woods, was accompanied by Zo? and Hickory and Dickory. I wasn’t entirely thrilled with Zo? being part of the search squad, but between Jane and the Obin she was probably safer in the woods than back home in Croatoan.
Three hours into the search, Hickory bounded up, shadowy in his nanomesh suit. “Lieutenant Sagan wishes to see you,” it said.
“All right,” I said, and motioned for Savitri and Beata to come along.
“No,” Hickory said. “You only.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I cannot say,” Hickory said. “Please, Major. You must come now.”
“We’re stuck in the creepy woods, then,” Savitri said, to me.
“You can head in if you want,” I said. “But tell the parties on either side so they can tighten up.” And with that I jogged after Hickory, who kept an aggressive pace.
Several minutes later we arrived where Jane was. She was standing with Marta Piro and two other colonists, all three of whom had blank, numb expressions on their faces. Behind them was the massive carcass of a fantie, wild with tiny flying bugs, and a rather smaller carcass farther beyond that. Jane spied me and said something to Piro and the other two; they glanced over to me, nodded at whatever it was Jane was saying and then headed back toward the colony.
“Where’s Zo??” I asked.
“I had Dickory take her back,” Jane said. “I didn’t want her to see this. Marta and her team found something.”
I motioned to the smaller carcass. “Joseph Loong, it looks like,” I said.
“Not just that,” Jane said. “Come here.”
We walked over to Loong’s corpse. It was a bloody mess. “Tell me what you see,” Jane said.
I leaned down and got a good look, willing myself into a neutral frame of mind. “He’s been eaten at,” I said.
“That’s what I told Marta and the others,” Jane said. “And that’s what I want them to believe for right now. You need to look closer.”
I frowned and looked at the corpse again, trying to see what it was I was clearly missing. Suddenly it snapped into place.
I went cold. “Holy God,” I said, and backed away from Loong.
Jane looked at me intently. “You see it, too,” she said. “He wasn’t eaten. He was butchered.”
The Council crowded uncomfortably into the medical bay, along with Dr. Tsao. “This isn’t going to be pleasant,” I warned them, and pulled the sheet back on what was left of Joe Loong. Only Lee Chen and Marta Piro looked like they were likely to vomit, which was a better percentage than I expected.
“Christ. Something ate him,” Paulo Gutierrez said.
“No,” Hiram Yoder said. He moved closer to Loong. “Look,” he said, pointing. “The tissues are cut, not torn. Here, here and here.” He glanced over at Jane. “This is why you needed to show us this,” he said. Jane nodded.
“Why?” Guiterrez said. “I don’t understand. What are you showing us?”
“This man’s been butchered,” Yoder said. “Whoever did this to him used some sort of cutting tool to take off his flesh. A knife or an ax, possibly.”
“How can you tell this?” Gutierrez said to Yoder.
“I’ve butchered enough animals to know what it looks like,” Yoder said, and glanced up at Jane and I. “And I believe our administrators have seen enough of the violence of war to know what sort of violence this was.”
“But you can’t be sure,” Marie Black said.
Jane glanced over to Dr. Tsao and nodded. “There are striations on the bone that are consistent with a cutting implement,” Dr. Tsao said. “They’re precisely positioned. They don’t look like what you’d see if a bone was gnawed on by an animal. Someone did this, not something.”
“So you’re saying there’s a murderer in the colony,” Manfred Trujillo said.
“Murderer?” Gutierrez said. “The hell with that. We’ve got a goddamn cannibal walking around.”
“No,” Jane said.
“Excuse me?” Gutierrez said. “You said it yourself, this man’s been sliced up like he was livestock. One of us had to have done it.”
Jane glanced over at me. “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to have to do this formally. As the Colonial Union administrator of the colony of Roanoke, I hereby declare that everyone in this room is bound by the State Secrecy Act.”