Starfist: Blood Contact (36 page)

None gaped more than SRA3 Hummfree, who never expected to be addressed by the ship's captain without the Skipper first speaking to the watch commander, or at least the chief. "Y-Yes sir," Hummfree stammered.

"Don't be so fast to agree," Tuit said. His lips quirked in a half smile. "Or are you asking what the job is?" He shook his head and held up a hand to stop Hummfree from trying to answer. "This is a job that maybe even you can't do. If you can't, no one will think any the less of you. It might be impossible.

Understand?"

Hummfree didn't trust his voice, so he nodded.

"Those things the Marines are fighting down there, do you think you can track them?"

Abruptly, Hummfree's nervousness went away. "I believe so, sir," he said confidently, his eyes glowing above a wide grin.

Tuit cocked an eyebrow and Hummfree's grin wavered.

"Well, I can try, sir."

"All right, here's what we know about where they went. See if you can find them."

Tuit spent two minutes telling Hummfree and Kranston everything Bass had relayed to him about the skinks' movement. Before the captain was through talking, Hummfree was bent over his controls, diddling dials and tickling toggles. The ship's captain and the chief nodded at each other; if anyone could track the skinks, it was Hummfree. Tuit motioned the chief to accompany him out of the compartment into the passageway.

"That boy bothers me, Chief," Tuit said in a voice pitched low enough it couldn't be heard in the compartment. "I've never seen a third class so deserving of promotion to second class, even if he doesn't study for the test. But he's so good at what he does, I really won't want to put him in a supervisory position and lose him for what he does so well."

"I know what you mean, sir. Been thinking exactly the same myself."

"Maybe between us we can figure out how to promote him and keep him in the same job."

CHAPTER 26

"Try to take one alive," Dr, Bynum said as the sun rose.

Gunnery Sergeant Charlie Bass's gaze was fixed on the swamp he and his Marines were about to enter as though, if only he looked hard enough, he'd be able to see where the skinks had gone and what nasty surprises they might have left in their trail. "Sure," he replied absently. He was thinking of how he and his Marines would kill the skinks when they found them, how they could kill them without losing any Marines.

The doctor saw his expression and realized her words hadn't gotten through to him. She groped for his invisible sleeve and tugged on it to get his attention. He turned his gaze to her.

"I'm serious, Charlie," she said, her eyes boring into his. "This is important. This might be the first-ever human contact with an alien intelligence. We can't just meet them and kill them all, we have to try to establish communications of some sort with them."

" ‘Might be’? I've never heard of another contact."

She shrugged. "There have been rumors of alien contacts for centuries. And I'm only a navy doctor.

For all I know, the Confederation knows about alien species elsewhere, maybe even has established contact with some."

Bass cocked an almost disinterested eyebrow.

"One hears things. Rumors, innuendo." She shook her head. "I don't know. But I do know it's important that we at least make the attempt to talk to these aliens."

"Right," Bass said dryly. "Try to talk to them. Maybe we can keep them from shooting first." Yes, the Marines would do their best to keep the skinks from shooting first. The Marines would do their best to get in the first shots.

"Charlie, I mean it."

He nodded. "I know you do, Lidi. But you also have to understand that my primary responsibility isn't to make friendly contact with aliens. My responsibility is to keep us all alive, and deliver a report on what we found here. At this point, the fact that there is a hostile presence in this area is more important than bringing a live alien back." He held up a hand to stop her from the sharp reply she was about to make. "I know getting one of them alive is important. But preserving the lives of all of us is more important to me."

"Charlie, if all you want to do is bring us all back alive, we can leave the surface of this planet right now, as soon as a couple of Essays can get down here."

"Right. And leave a hostile group of aliens to attack the next human expedition that makes planetfall here."

"We don't know that the ones who attacked us are the only ones here."

"We don't know they aren't." He thought back to the stored data that showed the landing of the pirates and what appeared to be the aliens' landing as well, showed the destruction of the pirate ship and the departure of what he believed must have been the alien vessel. "There isn't evidence for more than one landing," he said. "I think we have to assume these are the only ones. We're going to wipe them out.

We'll try to get one to take back with us." He said the last sentence fast to keep her from arguing.

"Try, Charlie."

"All right, Lidi. We'll try" he said, knowing that the only trying they would do was to find and kill the skinks. Bass signaled to Hyakowa and the platoon moved out.

The comm shack on the
Fairfax
was quiet, save for the ever-present whispers of the climate control system and the muted beepings and tings of the surveillance monitors, phones, and other human/machine interface devices. None of the three surface radar analysts or the other technicians hunched over their equipment said anything aloud. They would speak only when they had something to report. Ensign Mulhoorn sat in his chair, barely visible in the comm shack's dim lumination, motionless except for the times he raised the mug of strong navy coffee to his lips for a sip. Chief of Communications Kranston blended into the shadows half a meter from the communications officer. Kranston didn't bother drinking coffee, but some of the sailors in the comm department claimed that he had an intravenous setup under his uniform and mainlined his caffeine. Kranston's attention was fixed on the back of SRA3 Hummfree, where the young sailor seemed to grow out of his task chair. Kranston suspected that Hummfree had somehow managed to grow an umbilical that connected him directly to the galley and the head. Kranston could think of no other way that would allow a man to spend as many uninterrupted hours at his station as Hummfree spent at his.

Hummfree caressed his keyboard, diddled his dials, tickled his toggles, brushed his buttons. He began with a small-scale, multispectral view of a many-kilometer-long area directly to the north of the island where the Marines had fought off the skinks. He'd watched the fight in visual. The image wasn't good, the light was poor, and their clothing—or body color, he hadn't been able to tell—was almost the same hue as the mud and dirt that spotted the ground. Still, what little he was able to make out, the appearance of the aliens struck him on some primordial level, raised an atavistic fear and revulsion in him. Intellectually, he knew they—the Marines on the surface, the medical team with them, the ship's officers—should be doing their best to make contact with the aliens, to talk to them, to make peace. Emotionally—the incomplete image he had of them made him want to kill the aliens, to fight and kill until not a single one was left alive anywhere in the universe. He didn't know it and wouldn't have cared if he did, but his reaction was similar to that of any other species in Earth's history when it came face-to-face with another species that occupied the same ecological niche. It didn't matter that the skinks had gills on their sides and were aquatic; their niche was the human niche. Besides, they had struck first, without warning or provocation, and before any of the humans they attacked were even aware of their presence.

Hummfree wanted to find those skinks for the Marines and do his part to help kill them.

The large area he examined at first held too many unidentifiable, transient signals for him to identify. He narrowed his viewing area to include only the kilometer north of the knob where the fighting took place.

A few moments' examination identified every trace he saw as one or another of the indigenous amphibians or insectoids. He shifted his focus north less than a kilometer to allow for overlap between the area he'd just searched and the next one. What was that, just disappearing off the north edge of the new area?

Swiftly he switched focus north again. He saw the bright red infrared signatures of Dragons near the bottom edge of the new display. Yes, to the sides and ahead of the Dragons were the Marines, stretching in a double line almost two hundred meters long from the back of the Dragons to the point. A couple of hundred meters ahead of the Marines, a tiny dot swept back and forth ahead of the axis of their advance.

That must be the UAV, scouting ahead. He wondered briefly how the Marines were controlling it, and decided the controller was set up inside one of the Dragons. Ingenious, those Marines. Even though they weren't a tool he normally used, Hummfree knew enough about the disguised aerial observers to know that they weren't designed to be guided from inside a moving vehicle. He decided not to tap into the UAV because his focus and its wouldn't be in the same area and the extra detail might only confuse him.

He shifted focus back to the area he'd just entered and left. Again, after a few moments' search there were no traces he could not identify as benign. He returned to the area with the Marines. They had advanced, but he could see he would finish searching that area before the lead Marine reached the northern edge, and he'd be leading them. Soon he'd have to extend his search to cover the areas to the sides of the Marines' route. How soon? He had no way of guessing how long the skinks would continue in a straight line before they turned east or west. Maybe he should already be extending his search to the sides. Maybe he should have extended it right from the edge of the knob. Maybe the skinks had gone only a couple of hundred meters before they changed direction. Maybe the skinks were moving in the areas he wasn't looking at. Maybe they were passing through the interstices between his observation areas. Maybe. Maybe and maybe and maybe. A man could go crazy thinking about the maybes.

Hummfree decided to quit worrying about the maybes and continue to search north for a few more kilometers before broadening his search track to the sides. Damn, too bad neither of the other analysts on the
Fairfax
was good enough to be reliable in his search. It didn't cross his mind that he was nearly the only Surface Radar Analyst rating in the entire Confederation Navy who was that good.

The susurration of sounds in the comm shack continued uninterrupted.

"Can you see anything, Hammer?" Bass murmured into his helmet radio.

"Enough," Schultz replied. A moment earlier the platoon's pointman had seen a footprint in the surface of a mud bar. It seemed to be pointing in the direction they were heading. The print was splayed, much wider across its front than a human footprint, and it was unshod. The leslies and some of the other amphibians had footprints as long as a human print and splayed wider at the front, but this one had a distinct heel, much like the mark left by a human foot. The amphibians that they didn't have to worry about didn't have heels. He had no doubt the print was left by a skink. Schultz shifted his pack and pressed on. Until he stopped seeing signs, he was going to assume the retreating skinks were still ahead of them.

The swampland had uncounted, uncountable channels. Mostly, the water moved so sluggishly a casual observer would think its motion was either simple eddies caused by wind or by animal movement, or tidal movement. In only a few places did the water slip and slide across its bed in the manner of a stream, and even then it never built up enough speed even to ripple. The contours of the swamp bed were smooth, and outside the faster moving streams they gently undulated, sometimes rising as much as a half meter above the water, never receding more than chest deep to an average man, not even where the water ran most true. Some of the areas above water were just transient bars of mud. Some were more permanent land colonized by vegetation that rooted and held the mud together.

The swamp was filled with a cacophony of sounds. Schultz cataloged them, fixed the sounds in his mind so he'd recognize them, then lost them to his consciousness so they wouldn't distract him. He'd heard the skinks yelling during the firefight and knew their guttural, barking voices weren't like the booming or hissing of the native amphibians. He heard the plopping of the bodies of the native amphibians in the water and on the mud when they jumped, the splashing when they scampered from a mud bar or islet into the water. The skinks were bigger than the native amphibians, and their sounds would be different. And the skinks were skilled, if fanatic, fighters—they'd generally move too quietly to plop and splash. Those sounds could also safely be ignored. Once those normal animal sounds were eliminated, the only sounds left to Schultz's ears were the whispering of the breeze, the small noises made by the Marines behind him, and the thrumming of the Dragons to the rear.

Schultz eyeballed everything. He switched back and forth between his infra and light amplifier, necessary in the gloom under the swamp's canopy. Every few minutes he stopped to use his light-gatherer and magnifier screens together.

Although he found the occasional mark of the skinks' passage, he never saw or heard anything that told him how far ahead they were or where they were going. That was all right; he was in no hurry.

Sooner or later the Marines would run them down. Then he, the Marines, would kill the skinks. No one attacks Marines and gets away with it, no one wipes out a human research station on an otherwise uninhabited world and lives to boast about it. Those were messages Schultz was determined to broadcast to the universe.

"What do you have, Hammer?" Bass asked when the double column stopped three and a half hours and several kilometers from where they'd begun.

"A bivouac," Schultz said. "Nobody's home."

"Wait one, I'm coming up." Then Bass added to Hyakowa, "Lander Five, establish a defensive perimeter." He toggled on his HUD to pinpoint the dot that showed Schultz's position and headed for him. He saw another dot also approaching the pointman.