Fuzzy Bones (v1.1)

by William Tuning (v1. 1) (html)

  After a few more expressions of astonishment and a flock of questions from Gerd, Sergeant Chin arrived, with Helton’s gear slung over one arm and his men in a neat file close behind him.

  “Now, what’s this bunch outfitted for?” Gerd asked.

  Holloway laughed. “You tell him, Phil. I’ve already figured it out.”

  Helton spoke as Chin helped him into the body armor. “There’s something or other inside the cavern, using vibrohammers. After O’Bannon gets the perimeter pulled in nice and tight, we’re going in.”

  “Then what’s with the crew-served weapons out here?” Gerd asked.

  Helton smiled. “Oh, those. Well, those are in case we don’t come back out first.”

  “Great Ghu’s calluses!” Gerd said. “Just like that! Aren’t you scared?”

  “Are you scared when you examine an alien organism for the first time and don’t know whether it may give you some unknown, some fatal disease?”

  “Well, of course I am,” Gerd said. “But we take precautions. Sterile procedures; that sort of thing.”

  Helton pulled the magazine from the assault rifle, inspected it, inspected the weapon, then slammed the magazine home and chambered a round. “We take precautions, too, hut they don’t have to be sterile. We wear ‘em, carry ‘em, and fly in ‘em.” He leaned close to Gerd and Jack. “Confidentially, I’m scared to death. In my trade—as, I imagine, in yours—it has a good effect on my ability to survive.”

  Chin and the other Marines had already lain down on the ground to rest, arranged in a circle, so that each man’s stomach made a pillow for the next man’s head.

  “Look at that,” Gerd said. “They’re getting ready to blow the headwall and go up against an unknown quantity and they’re taking a nap.”

  Helton sat back down on his rock and lighted another cigarette.

  Forty minutes later, he got up and went over to the other Marines. He lightly kicked the sole of Sergeant Chin’s boot. “Time to go,” he said simply.

  Helton walked back to Gerd and Jack and shook hands with them in turn. He stared off into the middle distance for a few seconds. “Reminds me of a verse,” he said.

  “The Milky Way is tracks in time where we have danced.

  Unwitting that the deadly tide of life on us advanced,

  To dissolve us into formal counterparts

  And make us slaves and patrons of the arts.”

  “Who wrote that?” Jack asked.

  “Can’t remember the name,” Helton said. “Have other things on my mind at the moment—such as my own mortality. But, he was a First Century novelist who was also given to writing sentimental poetry.”

  Helton turned back to the other Marines. “Okay, you guys; mask up. Let’s go.” With that he pulled on his own breathing gear, cleared it, and led the other men toward the mouth of the tunnel.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Christiana squinted at the man across the table from her. “Just who is your employer?” she asked.

  The man, who had never introduced himself, had a pale complexion. His eyes were colorless, hypnotic; he wore an old-fashioned hat.

  “That, dear lady,” he said, “I am not at liberty to reveal. As stated, though, he is willing to be quite generous with you in exchange for anything of interest regarding the plans of the CZC. Inside information, one might call it, if one cared to use a slangy phrase. This—ah—generosity will not take so much the form of financial reward, although that is a consideration, as the continued opportunity for you to pursue your quite promising future—unencumbered by a past that might prove less than palatable to Mr. Victor Grego.”

  They were sitting at a back table in La Rondo, a bistro and sandwich shop that was neither in Junktown or in the new city, but in the fringe area between them.

  Christiana’s mind was racing. How could they know of her affection for Grego? No, no. That didn’t have to be it. They just knew she had a good, honest job—one that was close to the pivots of power in the CZC. That’s what they were blackmailing her about. She didn’t dare let them know how she felt about Grego; then they’d have a real stranglehold on her.

  “I’ll have to think about this,” she said. It was all happening too fast. Only a few hours from the time she found a note shoved under her door until this—this, from this ever-so-polite gangster, bag-man—whatever he was.

  The man in the hat leaned back in his chair. “Take all the time you like, dear lady,” he said. “The entire balance of my day is at your disposal.”

  “I—I mean I need a few days to think it over,” she said.

  “Regrettably, time is a luxury we cannot afford in the matter,” he said. “You must make up your mind now.”

  Christiana chewed at her lower lip. She certainly didn’t want Grego to know about her short, disastrous career on Zarathustra as a prostitute, and she could tell by this man’s eyes that he would really spill it if she didn’t cooperate. The only thing to do was agree to the proposition and try to find a way out later. Possibly through the man in the hat she could get at who he was working for and find some way to shut him up for good. She was astonished to find herself thinking like that, but Victor Grego had become worth that much to her. He was beginning to become everything to her.

  She took a deep breath, put her elbow on the table, and hoped she had a convincingly tough look on her face. “Okay,” she said, “you got a deal. How do we pass the information?”

  “Right here,” the man in the hat said. “Tuesdays and Fridays at 1600. I will meet you at this table and we will have a pleasant chat about matters of interest to my employer.”

  “What if I get tied up, or something, “she said, “and can’t make it?”

  The man in the hat made a noncommital motion of his hand. “You have only to screen this establishment and explain matters to the proprietor, who is an acquaintance of mine. Your story will be checked by one of our—um—observers. If you have lied, our relationship will terminate and Mr. Grego will receive some distressing news.”

  Christiana got to her feet. “See you Friday,” she said.

  The man rose as she did, and doffed his hat. “It will be a pleasure to see one so lovely as yourself again at that time,” he said.

  She turned and left, anxious to get out on the esplanade, into the sunlight, and into the fresh air.

  Helton and Sergeant Chin had just placed the last of the shaped-charge Pattycake mines, neatly arranged at sixty-degree intervals around the periphery of the head wall.

  “Give ‘em thirty seconds,” Helton said, as he prepared to set fuse timers. “Two-second declension. We’ll start on the top two. Go.”

  They each quickly set the fuses—30—28—26—on three of the six mines, figuring two seconds to move to the next one and set it, so all six would go off at once. Then they jumped up and sprinted back down the tunnel. All seven of them flopped down on the tunnel floor and pressed the heels of their hands over their ears.

  With a deafening roar, the entire headwall of the tunnel blew inward. The Marines were already up and running toward it.

  Helton, in the lead, was thinking, I sure hope the inside mouth of the tunnel isn’t five feet off the deck of the cavern, or something. A guy could break his leg that way.

  Through the smoke and dust, Dave could see the ghostly figures charging at them just before the first one leaped into the cavern. “Stand and fight!” he shouted. “It’s our only chance.”

  Squint didn’t even listen. His pockets laden with sunstones, he was squeezing through the narrow opening of the fissure. “You stay!” he shouted as he waddled heavily down the passage.

  The three crouched and opened up with their pistols. One Marine went down. They might have a chance, after all. They began dodging around, to find a little cover and not be stationary targets. Jimmy drew down on the last Marine to jump into the cavern. The shot caught him and spun him around. He dropped his rifle, flopped on his belly, and lobbed a sleep-gas grenade with his good arm.

  A
ll the other Marines were spread out on the cavern floor, lying prone, propped on their elbows, and drenching the far corner of the cavern with automatic fire.

  Dave was the last one they got, because he was the smartest and the quickest. As he broke cover to get to a better position, a burst stitched him up the right side. The impact threw him against the cavern wall, with his arms spread wide. His pistol flew out of his hand and skittered across the floor as he sagged down into a sitting position. As he died, he smiled at the Marine who had come up close to look at him.

  Those outside heard the gunfire and shouts. It seemed like a year, but it was actually less than three minutes from the time the headwall blew until Helton came walking back out through the wisps of sleep-gas that were beginning to drift from the tunnel mouth. His men were close behind. One had his rifle at sling arms and with one hand was holding pressure on the wound in his other arm. Another had a knotted tourniquet on one leg and was hopping on the other, with his arms across the shoulders of the man on each side of him.

  Helton stripped off his breathing gear. “You guys get over to the battalion surgeon,” he said to the two wounded men and the two that were helping. “The other two; take an air-scrubber in there and start it up. Then you get over to the doc, too. Have him check you over.”

  “What happened?” Holloway put the inevitable question.

  Helton looked down at the front of his body armor. With his thumb and index finger, he extracted a bullet from the chest area, held it up to the sunlight, smiled, and put it in his pants pocket. “Three tried to put up a fight,” he said. “The other one made a run for it.”

  In the far distance there was the pop-pop-pop-pop-pop of automatic weapons fire, followed by a muffled explosion.

  “I see they found the transportation and someone there tried to get away,” Holloway said drily.

  Helton smiled and nodded. “Might be our lost sheep. Maybe he had someone waiting for him. We may still have to flush him out.”

  Helton posted two guards at the tunnel mouth. “Nobody, but nobody has access to this place except myself and Commissioner Holloway. That includes the Captain and the Colonel and the Corporal of the Guard. I’m in charge of the dig, and this is part of the dig.”

  “What about Colonel O’Bannon?” one of the guards asked timidly.

  “It includes Colonel O’Bannon, too. Nobody. Understand?”

  They both looked unhappy and nodded.

  Helton motioned to Holloway to follow him. “Come on, Jack. I want your opinion about something.”

  Gerd began to follow. Helton turned. “Nobody but Jack or myself, I said. Sorry, Gerd.”

  Gerd protested.

  “Put it in writing,” Helton said. “What I said stands until I say different.”

  Inside, the cavern was warm and large, with a high roof structure. It was also light inside—all the time. The roof and walls were studded with sunstones, excited to thermofluoresence by the geothermal heat of the mountain.

  Jack’s mouth fell open. “There must be millions of them,” he said as he slowly looked at the glowing lights. “I see it. but I can’t believe it. You did the right thing to clap the lid on this, Phil. If word of this gets out, it won’t just start a Sunstone Rush—it’ll start a Sunstone War.”

  “Well, Ingermann’s boys won’t be telling anyone. That’s probably who they were working for,” Helton said. “How would you go about explaining this place geologically?”

  “For one thing,” Holloway said, “it’s the answer to my speculations about ‘the dying-place of the jellyfish,’ and why the sunstone deposits get richer close to Fuzzy Divide.”

  Jack kicked his toe in the rock powder on the cavern floor. “This was the original dying-place of the jellyfish. If I were going to speculate, I’d say a bunch of the jellyfish died here, for whatever reason, and sank into what used to be a mud layer.” He pointed to the roof of the cavern. “Apparently North Beta and South Beta were once separate continents and this place was a shallow sea between them. As the tectonic plates drifted together, they pushed up this formation while the mud layer was still hardening into flint. Ground water slowly dissolved the limestone layer beneath the flint and made this cavern.” He reached down and picked up a handful of the rock dust. “That’s what this stuff looks like to me— decomposed limestone.”

  “You did the right thing to put the lid on this, Phil,” he repeated.

  “That’s not the real reason, though,” Helton said. “Come over here.”

  Against one wall of the cavern was a row of instrument racks, like computer consoles, perhaps, but totally alien-looking. There were pieces of furniture, desks and chairs— all about Fuzzy size. There were some Fuzzies there, as well, mummified by the warm, dry air of the cave and much better preserved than the remains that had been found in the wrecked starship. A recent earthquake had apparently opened the fissure through which Ingermann’s stooges had entered the cavern, and the outside air was making the mummies start to deteriorate.

  “Great Ghu,” Jack said softly as he looked over the scene. “More Fuzzy bones.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “This is incredible!” Holloway said. “They must have been here at a time close to the crashing of the ship—at least before the rockslide that buried it. Why would they drag all this stuff up here from the wreck? Just to have something to play with?”

  “Perhaps,” Helton said. “The ones in here were trapped by the rockslide that closed the cavern. We’ll have to date it out and see if both events were caused by the same rockslide.”

  “That might explain the Fuzzy bones in the ship. Gerd and Ruth will be able to date the remains. That will help tell you if there were two separate rockslides.”

  “Or,” Helton said, “the survivors of the wreck may have been long-since picked up when the Fuzzies found it, and all this gear was left behind. The Fuzzies who died inside the wreck could have wandered in there and been killed by radiation leakage.”

  “Too easy,” Jack said. “If there was all that much radiation leakage, it would have contaminated the whole area, and Fuzzies would have abandoned the place—not dragged all this electronic gear into the cave.”

  “Maybe they did,” Helton said, “then came back later—much later. It’s all too much for me. I’m going to have this stuff impounded and taken to Xerxes where it can be gone over properly.”

  Jack’s mustache twitched. “Just a minute!” he said gruffly. “This stuff is on a legally established Fuzzy Reservation! It’s their property, and, as Commissioner of Native Affairs, I intend to see they have some say-so about what’s done with it.”

  Helton smiled. “Eventually, I suppose you will. In the meantime, I’m impounding it under Priority One. All perfectly legal. You’ll get a copy of the inventory, and Governor Rainsford will co-sign the order for its removal from the planetary surface. There are records and scientific apparatus here, not built by Terrans, and obviously never intended for use by Terrans. Under Federation Law, the Navy has the first priority for the examination of—let’s see, the code states it… Oh, yes. ‘Artifacts of unknown or unestablished origin.’”

  Holloway was silent for a moment, trying to think of a loophole in Priority One. He couldn’t think of any. If anyone could, he should be the man. He’d been skating on the edge of the law on more planets than he could remember. “Dammit,” he said, “you are within the law.”

  “I guess Napier had a hunch about that when he put me in charge of the dig,” Helton said. “I will guarantee you one thing, though.”

  “Which is?” Holloway said.

  “Tight security,” Helton said. “I’ll have the battalion surgeon put those six guys in quarantine. They, and only they will pack this stuff up for transfer to Xerxes, and I’ll have the chief psychologist there put them on ice. I’ll also have Byers’ boys drive a hatchway in the tunnel, keyed to yours and my thumbprints only.”

  “And blast shut the tunnel that Ingermann’s stooges came through,” Holloway said.


  Helton nodded.

  “And what about the bodies?” Holloway asked.

  “I’ll have the same six that blasted in here with me pack those up according to Dr. van Riebeek’s specifications and cart them outside, where they will be turned over to him for further research and comparison.” Helton waited for Jack’s reply.

  “Sounds airtight to me,” Jack said.

  Helton grinned. “No such thing as totally airtight security, Jack, because it’s handled by people. All the works of man are flawed by human nature in some way.”

  “Well,” Holloway said with a chuckle, “I’ll settle for what you’ve outlined. You’re right—as usual. Xerxes is the only place around that has any chance of deciphering what’s here.”

  “Thank you,” Helton said.

  “Besides,” Holloway continued, “we’re going to have quite enough to do to keep the news of ‘something big’ out here from being all over the planet by sundown. I don’t relish the size of the task.”

  “Do you want to be in here when I make the inventory?” Helton asked.

  Holloway shrugged. “Not necessarily. I trust you.”

  “Well, you could help out,” Helton said. “It’ll go a lot faster if you measure and I write than if I do it all myself.”

  While Helton was expressing his displeasure to Chief Byers over the fact that a two-meter security hatchway could not be freighted from Xerxes and installed in the tunnel before morning, Colonial Governor Ben Rainsford and Attorney General Gus Brannhard were unraveling puzzles in Mallorysport.

  “Now, what in Nifflheim did Ingermann hope to accomplish by sending his tame lawyer into court with a case like that?” Rainsford demanded. “Surely he knew Pendarvis wouldn’t admit it on the issues framed in the complaint.”

  Gus Brannhard sloshed the whiskey in his glass. “Of course he did. He just wanted to tie things up for a while. If Pendarvis had scheduled the case for a preliminary hearing, that would have given the plaintiff certain ‘Rights of Discovery,’ the authority to subpoena records, take depositions, that sort of thing.”