Starfist: Blood Contact (30 page)

About an hour into his leg of the reconnaissance, Sergeant Ratliff reported a very strange discovery: hollowed-out mansized spots in the soft ground of a mud bar. Most interesting of all, the wallows—for that's what they reminded Ratliff of—were filled with some kind of organic material. "It looks like, uh, well, something's been laying eggs in there. Gunny, I think we've found a breeding ground."

But the most startling discovery was made by Sergeant Bladon. He was so excited he forgot to use proper radio procedure making his report. "Gunny! We found artifacts! We know what they look like!"

"Calm down, Tam," Bass said. "What do they look like?"

"Gunny, they look like—they look like—well, they look like, uh, skinks!"

CHAPTER 22

First squad's patrol made it back before the other patrol, and Sergeant Ratliff displayed the material they brought from the wallows—curved, leathery objects that could well have been eggshell fragments.

Dr. Bynum was the first to examine them. She peered, poked, prodded, and twisted the fragments.

"I'd need to run a full analysis," she said to Bass when her examination was finished, "spectrum, culture, molecular, the whole works. But, yes, they certainly resemble reptilian eggshells."

Bass looked around. A few of the Marines, some of the medical team, and Lieutenant Snodgrass were gathered around the doctor. But the pirates kept their distance and were casting apprehensive glances toward them.

"Mr. Baccacio," Bass called out, "would you come here please."

Almost reluctantly, Baccacio joined them.

"Ever see these things before?" Bass asked, and handed him an egg fragment.

Baccacio nodded. "Yeah. This looks like a slimy egg. The big ones that jump, they lay eggs like this.

You call them leslies. When we first discovered slimy eggs, we tried to eat some." Baccacio made a face.

"They're too runny to cook right, and they taste awful. The grown animals are edible, though even thoroughly cooked, their meat is slimy, like okra or the stuff in scotch broth." Baccacio began to hand the shell back, then looked at it again. "I don't know," he said after a moment in which he calculated the size of the whole egg.

"This seems a lot bigger than the eggs we tried to eat." Indeed, the curvature of the shell fragment suggested the whole egg might have been the length of a man's hand, maybe bigger.

"Could it be from a bigger animal?" Bass asked.

Baccacio shrugged. "Maybe. We only took eggs from a couple of nests. After we found out how awful they were to eat, we stopped bothering with them. Maybe different slimies lay different-sized eggs, maybe they grow after they're laid... No, the eggs wouldn't grow. Would they?"

"These animals don't lay their eggs in water?" Dr. Bynum asked, ignoring Baccacio's question about eggs growing.

He shook his head. "They may look like frogs, but they don't seem to have a tadpole stage. They make nests on mud bars where water can seep through the soil and keep them moist."

Bass and the other Marines were disappointed. They'd hoped the eggs were laid by the aliens that wiped out the scientific settlements. Knowing they were egg-layers and where one of their breeding grounds was could be an important step in finding them and possibly capturing one, but Baccacio had dashed that hope—unless the tool-users laid eggs too. Only theirs would probably be larger.

Just then second squad's patrol returned. Everyone was eager to see the "artifact" they brought back—everyone but the pirates. The Marines were sure, even before they saw it, that the artifact was something made by the intelligent aliens; the pirates were afraid it was.

Sergeant Bladon held out his hand, fingers spread, and let the artifact dangle. It was a locket hanging from a chain. He handed it to Bass.

Bass took it gingerly, almost reverently, and peered at the artifact in his cupped palms. Several of the Marines from first squad and the gun squad crowded close to look. They shifted to allow Dr. Bynum to squeeze in for a look. Lieutenant Snodgrass jostled his way through the knot of Marines and reached for the artifact.

"Pull that hand back or lose it," Bass said softly, without looking up.

Flushing, Snodgrass snatched his hand back.

It was a locket, no doubt of that. The casing looked to be some kind of bivalve shell, though none like Bass had ever seen. Its front was delicately carved into a shallow relief that could have been a stylized sun with a planet orbiting it. Bass made no guess about what a curved line that led from a dot far off to one side might mean. He turned the locket over to look at the back side. It wasn't carved; instead it held the lines and whorls that had grown on the shell when it held a live animal. The chain from which the locket hung was made up of tiny shells of a different type, and Bass couldn't see what held them together, though he knew there had to be some kind of strong thread running through them. The only metal he saw was the edge of a hinge along one side. Gently, he held the locket on the edge away from the hinge and pried. It made a light pop when it opened. Two images were engraved on the inner surfaces of the shell halfs, portrait heads.

The faces were distinctly, disturbingly, humanoid. They had two front-facing eyes that slanted downward from their outer corners so they formed shallow Vs above short noses. Lines that could have indicated very flat ears snuggled against the sides of the skulls. The features of one, oval, face were much finer than the other, which was more square and roughly featured. The finer face had a small, soft-looking mouth, where the other looked as though it would bare rending teeth if its lips peeled back. Bass couldn't tell skin texture, but the images gave the impression that the skin was slick, or moist. Neither head seemed to have hair; instead they had what looked like a scaly covering. The covering was caplike on one head, and hung to somewhere below the bottom of the engraving on the finer head. The most disturbing thing about the faces, though, could have been a mere trick of the lighting. As low as the relief was, the faces seemed to be sharply convex, snubby and reptilian.

"Mr. Baccacio," Bass called out. "What do you make of this?" He looked around for the pirate leader, his onetime commanding officer.

Reluctantly, Baccacio joined him, the Marines parting to let him through. He looked at the images and nodded. "Yeah, that's the things." He leaned in to examine the images more closely. "The one on the left is, anyway. I didn't see any that looked like the one on the right." The one on the right was the one with finer features.

"I can't tell for sure," Dr. Bynum said; "there's no way of telling relative size from these engravings, but the one on the left gives the impression of greater mass, that it's much larger than the one on the right."

She took a deep breath, then continued, "The one on the left is a male. The other's a female. Males are the fighters," she said to Baccacio. "You've only seen fighters, that's why the other doesn't look familiar."

"Just because, among us, men are fighters and women aren't doesn't mean that's true for an alien species," Bass said.

Bynum shrugged. "We've colonized more than two hundred planets," she said, "and explored a couple of thousand more. With almost all animal species we've encountered, on Earth or elsewhere, females might hunt, but males are the fighters. When you consider the fundamental biological reason for that, you have to conclude that it's likely a fairly universal rule."

Bass grunted. Bynum was probably right, but he wasn't going to say so. "Am I seeing this wrong, or do their faces actually protrude?" he asked Baccacio.

Baccacio nodded. "A bit. Their faces are pretty sharply convex. What did one of your men call them?

Skinks? Yeah, they stick out just like that, almost like their bodies should be horizontal rather than vertical. A lot like the crawling red amphibians around here."

"So you think they're indigenous?" Bass asked again. He kept hoping someone would tell him yes.

Baccacio merely shook his head. He had no idea.

"What about the strange track of the shuttle that landed at Central Station?" Hyakowa asked. He looked at Baccacio. "You didn't land at Central, isn't that right?"

Baccacio shook his head again. "We made one landing, at Aquarius Station."

"Offworld," Hyakowa said. That was the only answer that made sense, no matter how awful it was.

A hostile, space-faring, alien species wasn't something Bass wanted to think about, not in the situation he and his Marines were in. But they had to find these skinks and capture one of them to find out what they were. "Do we have security out?" he asked the platoon sergeant.

Hyakowa nodded.

The new watcher marveled. What she had been told was true, some of the Earth barbarians were invisible. Not that she would ever doubt the word of a leader. It was just... She'd never heard of an invisible person. Gods and spirits, yes, but not a person. She knew the invisible barbarians were not gods, and they were not spirits. The Master had sent the leaders and fighters to fight and kill the barbarians, and the barbarians died. Gods and spirits do not die when shot by the weapons of the People.

She listened more closely from her position hidden in the roots of a tree at the edge of the island. Yes, her ears agreed with the receptors on her sides, there were far more barbarians on the ridge than she could see—and not all of them were in hiding positions. Sometimes she could see a face or an arm hanging in midair where her other senses told her someone stood. Somehow, these Earth barbarians wrapped themselves in cloaks that concealed them from vision. That would not save them, though. The People had senses the barbarians from Earth did not have. Those senses would tell the leaders and the fighters where the barbarians were so they could find them and kill them even when they couldn't see them.

Without removing any of her senses from the ridge she was watching, she caressed the forever gun the Master gave her with his own hands. She wondered if she would have the honor of using it.

Two hundred meters from the command post, on a knob that poked up near the western end of the island, PFC Clarke idly gazed toward the swamp from where the gun team manned an observation post.

"What do you think the other squads brought back?" he asked.

"Dunno," PFC Kindrachuck, the gunner, replied. He was supposed to be keeping watch with Clarke while Corporal Stevenson slept, but was leaning back against a boulder that had managed to make it that far from the mountain during an old landslide. His chin rested on his chest and his eyes were closed. "First squad found eggshells, I heard that."

"Yeah, but what did second squad find?"

"Something." Kindrachuck was having trouble staying awake and almost wished Clarke would shut up and let him doze off. The only thing that kept him from telling his assistant gunner to shut up and let him sleep was the fact that he was supposed to be on watch.

Clarke didn't say anything for a few minutes. The sun was low on the horizon, not far above sunset, and casting long shadows. Some of the shadows were moving. Clarke slid down his helmet's magnifier and light-gathering shields for a better look. "Damn," he murmured, "some of those things sure get big."

"What?" Kindrachuck mumbled.

"The leslies. I see some of them that look almost as big as people. And a few that are a lot bigger."

"What, where?" Kindrachuck said, annoyed.

"Take a look." Clarke peered at the animals he saw emerging from the swamp. "Some of them seem to be carrying things," he said quizzically.

"No, the leslies can't carry things. No hands." Kindrachuck sat up and slid his infra screen into place.

The land and vegetation hadn't cooled enough for him to make out anything more than the faintest smudges of red against it. "How can you see anything?"

"Magnifier and light gatherer."

"Shit," Kindrachuck snorted. How come Clarke thought of that and he hadn't? He changed shields and looked at what Clarke saw. "Oh, hell, wake Stevenson." He moved into position behind the gun. "We've got company coming," he said as soon as he heard Stevenson was awake.

Stevenson automatically flipped down the right shields and saw about twenty upright bipedal forms moving in their direction. They seemed to be carrying short lengths of something flexible. He toggled on the command circuit of his radio. "Three-six, Oscar Papa Two. Company's coming," he murmured.

"Give me a description," Bass's voice came back.

This is very strange, the leader thought. He involuntarily flicked the nictitating membranes in, out across his eyes, to clear away any residual water that might be occluding his vision, but still couldn't see the Earth barbarians his other senses told him were on the slope ahead of his platoon. Maybe the watcher at Aquarius Station who said she couldn't see all of the Earth barbarians hadn't been lying after all.

Not being able to see the Earth barbarians meant he didn't know how many there were, but that didn't really matter. The barbarians from Earth were weak when his kind last saw them. The ease with which their small force had killed the thousand in the scientific stations proved that they had grown weaker during the intervening centuries. Even the ones that had stood and fought were easily defeated before their survivors fled high onto the mountain.

The leader flicked his nictitating membranes across his eyes again to moisten them, and glanced to his sides. His fighters were disciplined and ready. Even the large ones were keeping good order rather than rushing ahead. He saw that they were closing toward the middle of the formation. That meant there were very few of the Earth barbarians, just as he thought. Either few, or they were very tightly bunched up.

Either way they would be easy to kill. His fighters would close on them and pour death on them. It was good that the leader had ordered the platoon to go naked; by the time they were close enough for the Earth barbarians to see their weapons in this dim light, they would be well within range. Until then the stupid Earth barbarians would think they were simply larger amphibians. He and his fighters were amphibian, but they weren't amphibians. He doubted the Earth barbarians could appreciate the subtlety; they'd never been subtle.