Daring (19 page)

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.

24

Back on board, Kris found that the very air of the
Wasp
seemed full of depression. The word of what the ground team found quickly spread to all hands. But helplessness and hopelessness quickly made way for grim determination as the boffins squeezed more information from their findings.

“We were able to extract DNA from the teeth of those skulls we found,” Professor mFumbo reported to Kris and her team after supper. They were meeting in a corner of the Forward Lounge. There, Ron could join them.

Jack, Abby, and the colonel were also there, availing themselves of what the bar had to offer.

Everyone turned toward the professor. When he didn't go on immediately, Kris said “And?”

“All three are female, and they appear to share the same complex DNA of those folks who tried to laser us when we disturbed their mining operation a few weeks back.”

“Women?” said Penny. “So dating can be dangerous anywhere in the galaxy.”

“They are the same species?” Jack said.

“Yes and yes,” said the professor, unusually direct with his answer. “They are all females. It's impossible to use a rape kit at this late date, but you are free to speculate as to how women ended up with their skulls bashed in, Lieutenant.

“As for you, Captain, I would add that there is significant genetic drift in this set of DNA. Those others were so alike they had to be a family; though some of the women showed sufficiently different DNA from the main family root, the others were quite close. The three women here are quite distant from that family grouping and show much diversity among themselves. I'd say they come from a much larger population.”

“How distant and how much larger?” Kris asked.

“Specifically, quite a bit. If you mean how long has it been since they shared an ancestor, I can't say for sure. Not enough information to develop a timescale for genetic drift. Sorry, Your Highness. Several of my people are very intrigued by these findings. I assure you much work is going into this, but there is little to base a conclusion on.”

Kris leaned back in her chair. “So, let's see what we have here. Nelly, open a small window on the forward screen and record this.”

“Yes, Kris.”

“What have we got?” Kris asked herself. “One, a homicidal maniac who charged out to kill us even though he had no idea who we were and what our strength was.”

“And he did it,” Abby added, “with a boatload of his kith and kin.”

“A very crammed boatload of kith and kin,” the colonel said.

Behind Kris, a first point appeared on the screen with additional points appearing below it as the team added their thoughts.

“Second,” Kris went on, “we've got a huge bunch of homicidal maniacs who slaughtered a planetwide civilization, then plundered that planet of its water, air, and anything else they could walk off with.”

“Including their own dead,” Abby said, “except for the three women that some homicidal maniacs actually committed homicide on.”

“Does anyone else find it interesting,” Penny said thoughtfully, “that they had no sanitation facilities for their camp on that planet?”

“Ew, to use Cara's word,” Abby said. “Disgusting but hardly interesting.”

“Professor, that boatload of people who attacked us,” Penny went on quickly, “did they have the normal sanitation facilities?”

“It would be impossible to run a spaceship otherwise,” the professor said. “Yes, we did find what looked like bathrooms. Not at all private. One of our engineers was very interested in finding their recycling and water-reclamation system, but we could not identify it in the wreckage.”

“I see what you're getting at,” the colonel said. “They have shipboard sanitation, if only by rote, but they so rarely go dirt-side that they've forgotten how to do it there.”

“Yes,” Penny said.

“Space raiders who only make landfall to pillage and don't do that often enough to remember the basics,” Ron the Iteeche said in conclusion.

“It's not like they gave the locals a fighting chance,” the colonel went on. “Flatten them with nukes or rocks, then gas those that are still raising objections. Viciously effective, though.”

“I think there's one more thing we need to highlight,” Kris said. Her team waited as she took a deep breath. “We've called them homicidal maniacs, because, from our perspective, that's what they look like. However, to them, I suspect their actions are quite logical. The question is, logical to what?”

“We'll only be guessing,” the professor said.

“But I think we need to have some guesses,” Ron said. “I certainly will need to put some in my report.”

“The individual doesn't seem to matter much,” Kris went on. “They cram themselves into ships far beyond what we would put up with. Even when they get a chance to go dirtside, their huts are small and they load six people into a tiny room.”

“That worries me,” the colonel said. “Quantity has a quality all its own, someone brilliant once observed.”

“Yes,” Kris said. “They attack without warning. Without reflection. They come in large numbers, and they can strip a planet and even a solar system.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Kris said, “I don't think humanity has much of a choice. We have met the enemy, and it's going to be a bitch.”

Kris tapped her commlink. “Captain, set course for where we left the battleships. I think we've got enough to make our report to the king.”

25

“So good to see you, Your Highness,” Admiral Krätz said, as soon as the
Wasp
jumped back into the system where the battleships waited. “A messenger packet has arrived from your king. You are ordered home immediately.”

The admiral made no effort to suppress his glee.

“Fine,” Kris said. “I'm ready to report to him.

The admiral's grin vanished. “You're not going to argue?”