“So any edits that were made would still be in the document,” I said.
“They might be,” Bennett said. “It’s a CU rule that final documents are supposed to have this sort of metadata stripped out. But it’s one thing to mandate it, and another thing to get people to remember to do it.”
“Do it, then,” I said. “I want everything looked at. Sorry about becoming a pain in your ass.”
“Nah,” Bennett said. “Batch commands make life easy. After that it’s a matter of the right search parameters. This is what I do.”
“I owe you one, Jerry,” I said.
“Yeah?” Bennett said. “If you mean it you’ll get me an assistant. Being the tech guy for an entire colony is a lot of work. And I spend my entire day in a box. It’d be nice to have some company.”
“I’ll get on it,” I said. “You get on this.”
“On it,” Bennett said, and waved me out of the Box.
Jane and Hiram Yoder were walking up as I came outside. “We have a problem,” Jane said. “A big one.”
“What?” I said.
Jane nodded to Hiram. “Paulo Gutierrez and four other men came past my farm today,” Hiram said. “Carrying rifles and heading toward the woods. I asked him what he was doing and he said that he and his friends were going on a hunting trip. I asked them what he was hunting for and he said that I should know full well what they were planning to hunt. He asked me if I wanted to come along. I told him that my religion forbade the taking of intelligent life, and I asked him to reconsider what he was doing, because he was going against your wishes, and planning to murder another creature. He laughed and walked off toward the tree line. They’re out in the woods now, Administrator Perry. I think they mean to kill as many of the creatures as they can find.”
Yoder walked us to where he saw the men enter the woods and told us he’d wait for us there. Jane and I went in and started looking for the trail of men.
“Here,” Jane said, pointing to boot marks on the forest floor. Paulo and his boys were making no attempt to keep themselves hidden, or if they were, they were very bad at it. “Idiots,” Jane said, and took off after them, unthinkingly moving at her new and improved high speed. I ran off after her, neither as fast nor as quietly.
I caught up with her about a klick later. “Don’t do that again,” I said. “I’m about to heave my lungs out.”
“Quiet,” Jane said. I shut up. Jane’s hearing had no doubt improved with her speed. I tried to suck oxygen into my lungs as quietly as I could. She began walking west when we heard a shot, followed by three more. Jane began running again, in the direction of the shots. I followed as quickly as I could.
Another klick later I entered a clearing. Jane was kneeling over a body that had blood pooling underneath it; another man sat nearby, propped up by the woody stump of a bush. I ran over to Jane and the body, whose front was spattered with blood. She barely glanced up. “Dead already,” she said. “Shot between the rib and the sternum. Right through the heart, straight out the back. Probably dead before he hit the ground.”
I looked up at the man’s face. It took me a minute to recognize him: Marco Flores, one of Gutierrez’s colonists from Khartoum. I left Flores to Jane and went over to the other man, who was staring blankly ahead. It was another Khartoum colonist, Galen DeLeon.
“Galen,” I said, crouching down to get at his eye level. The salutation didn’t register. I snapped my fingers a couple of times to get his attention. “Galen,” I said again. “Tell me what happened.”
“I shot Marco,” DeLeon said, in a bland, conversational voice. He was looking past me, at nothing in particular. “I didn’t mean to. They just came out of nowhere, and I shot one, and Marco got in the way. I shot him. He went down.” DeLeon put his hands on his forehead and started grasping at his hair. “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “All of a sudden they were just there.”
“Galen,” I said. “You came out here with Paulo Gutierrez and a couple other men. Where did they go?”
DeLeon waved indistinctly in a westerly direction. “They ran off. Paulo and Juan and Deit went after them. I stayed. To see if I could help Marco. To see . . .” he trailed off again. I stood up.
“I didn’t mean to shoot him,” DeLeon said, still in that bland tone. “They were just there. And they moved so fast. You should have seen them. If you saw them, you know why I had to shoot. If you saw what they looked like.”
“What do they look like?” I asked.
DeLeon smiled tragically and for the first time looked at me. “Like werewolves.” He closed his eyes and put his head back in his hands.
I went back over to Jane. “DeLeon’s in shock,” I said. “One of us should take him back.”
“What did he say happened?” Jane asked.