Dirge

by Alan Dean Foster

  He glanced sideways at the starship’s silent, flickering instrumentation, his expression set. “Like hell,” he growled softly.

  They settled into orbit without incident. As expected, they were the only vessel present. Treetrunk was an outpost, a comparatively new settlement far from Earth and the other colonies. KK-drive ships called infrequently, and only on official business. In the ellipsoidal cargo compartment that comprised the bulk of the vessel’s superstructure was a consignment of goods from New Riviera. Subsequent to delivery, the space-plus transport would move on to Proycon. Everything about the run, from its payload to its course, was conventional.

  On the chill world below, however, something was not.

  Meeker had been at it for another six hours straight when Trohanov finally lost patience. By now all three shifts were awake, with rumor and controversy rampant among the crew. It was time to resolve ignorance.

  “Run the check on shuttle number two. I’m going down. Hollis, as per procedure you’re in charge until I get back.” He turned to leave.

  “What about the cargo, sir? We have three full loads. The company will scream if we have to make an extra drop.”

  “Let ’em howl. There’s some kind of trouble down below, and until we know the nature, extent, and degree of the local emergency it’s more prudent to hold onto the shipment than to start delivering it. As soon as we know what’s going on we’ll start shifting containers. Until then, ship is to remain on alert and everyone is to stand by. I’ll field complaints from those who are supposed to be on downtime later. Right now the first thing we need to do is find out why this place is electronically comatose.”

  Nothing untoward materialized to interfere with the shuttle’s descent. The view out the small, thick ports was uneventful, the surface a watercolor wash of white, brown, and green. Trohanov and the half dozen crew he’d chosen to accompany him spoke little as the shuttle struck atmosphere and began to vibrate. At such times each man and woman had thoughts enough to occupy their minds. At the captain’s direction, all wore sidearms. Procedure, he thought. In the absence of knowledge it was always reassuring to be able to fall back on procedure.

  Nothing in the literature, or the regulations, or his experience prepared him for what they found, however.

  As the shuttle dropped beneath the thick clouds and into calm air the pilot reported the absence of any signal from the capital’s port. There was heavy overcast but no rain or snow, the atmosphere being as eerily silent as the surface. In the absence of the usual datastream to take control of the shuttle’s instruments and guide it in, the pilots were forced to locate the landing strip themselves. “On final approach,” one of the pilots said, and Trohanov and his people scrunched a little deeper back into their seats. Down, down…

  The shuttle accelerated violently and without warning. He found himself wrenched sideways, then pressed back into the seat. Several of the crew gasped, but no one screamed and there was no panic. They were still airborne, and the shuttle’s engines throbbed with restored power. Moments later the voice of the pilot echoed through the passenger compartment.

  “Sorry about that, everyone. Obviously, we made a last-second pull-up. We’re going to have to try and find a field or something to set down in. We can’t use either of the two landing strips at Weald shuttleport.” There was a short pause while the atmospheric craft began to bend around in a tight curve, though the arc it executed was no more constricted than the pilot’s voice. “They’ve been destroyed.”

  It took some time for the pilots to locate a suitable site. Relying on the shuttle’s landing skids, they made a bumpy, jolting, but successful touchdown. Before the craft had slid to a stop Trohanov was out of his seat and harness and racing forward.

  The view out the cockpit’s wide double port was maddeningly uninformative: tall evergreens, distant tree-swathed hills, a nearby pond whose inhabitants were only now starting to return following the shuttle’s noisy landing. Everything appeared peaceful and serene.

  “Where are we?”

  Solnhofen, the copilot, pointed to a readout. “About two kilometers southwest of the southern runway. This appears to be a natural meadow.”

  Bending over to peer out the port, Trohanov nodded once. “I don’t see any signs of catastrophe. You said the landing strips were destroyed?”

  “Yes, sir.” The pilot’s face was ashen. “We didn’t get a good look at the city itself—too busy with the descent. Neither Lillie nor I have had to do a manual landing since flight school.”

  “Forget it. You both did great. Could you tell what caused the damage?”

  The two pilots exchanged a glance. “No, Captain,” a regretful Solnhofen told him. “It was as Dik said. We were too busy just trying to get down in one piece.”

  “Right.” Turning, a couple of steps brought Trohanov back into the passenger compartment. Everyone was out of harness, fidgety and anticipative. “We’re going for a walk. Check your sidearms and make sure they’re not just decorative. I want everyone’s weapon and communications gear fully powered up.” They stared at him expectantly, and he realized they were waiting for an explanation. In the absence of one, he improvised as best he could.

  “Something bad has happened here. We don’t know what yet, but we’re going to find out.”

  “That’s not our job, Captain,” someone pointed out. “We’re a class three KK-drive deep-space cargo carrier, and that’s all we are.”

  “You can file a formal complaint about being forced to function outside your job classification with the company later. Right now everybody here comes with me. I’ve been in Weald twice before, once as recently as last year, so I’m at least sort of familiar with the municipal layout. Stick close and don’t wander off. No matter what we find, we’ll be back here before dark.” He looked over his shoulder, toward the cockpit.

  “You two stay on board. I don’t want you going outside, not even to smell the tree sap. If anything real disturbing should start to show itself, you lift off and return to ship.”

  “Disturbing?” The pilot looked uncertain. “Like what, Captain?”

  “Like I don’t know—yet. Use your own judgment.” He tapped the communicator on his duty belt. “We’ll keep in touch.”

  Stepping out of the shuttle, it was difficult to believe that anything was amiss. Indigenous wildlife filled the nearby forest and the open meadow with intermittent alien song. Arboreal life-forms flitted among the trees and skittered through the waist-high blue-bladed ground cover. Plotting a simple straight line, Trohanov led his people away from the shuttle and into the woods.

  The gently rolling ground did not slow them, and the absence of dense underbrush except in isolated copses allowed rapid progress. With the shuttleport lying to their northeast, Trohanov calculated, if they maintained their current pace they ought to reach the southernmost outskirts of the city by midafternoon. That would not allow much time for exploring, but they ought to be able to secure transport into the city center. Someone at Administration would be able to clear things up and to explain the nature of whatever emergency had befallen the colony.

  But there was no transport readily available in the southern suburbs of Weald. There was very little left of the suburb they entered, or for that matter of the rest of the city.

  Its inhabitants, it was revealed, were as dead as their communications.

  Whatever smoke and flame had risen from the ruins had long since burned itself out. Except for the occasional darting shape of a native scavenger working the dead, the city was devoid of movement. Finding and righting a small skimmer that still retained half its power charge, they succeeded in covering considerably more ground than they would have been able to do on foot.

  The destruction was selective as opposed to total. Many of the city’s buildings were still intact, from individual or group habitations to municipal facilities such as the central water-treatment plant. But the center of the city, where Administration had been located, was a spacious, silent c
rater. Ramparts of fused glass sloped down to a pile of vitreous slag in the center. On the northern outskirts of the city, a similar pit marked the spot where the colony’s intersystem space-minus communications shaft and facility had been located.

  All that afternoon they scoured the capital in search of survivors, and found none. Those bodies that had not been incinerated by shot or subsequent fire displayed indisputable evidence of having been shattered by violence. Come early evening Trohanov found himself kneeling alongside an entire family. Trapped inside a small shop, they had evidently attempted to make a stand against whatever had ravaged their community. Signs that a blockaded doorway had been smashed inward lay scattered everywhere.

  Whatever weapon had been used to kill them was thorough and messy. Though no forensic pathologist, Trohanov could see as clearly as anyone that something had struck each of the bodies and blown them apart. The remains of the father lay in the middle of the floor, where he had apparently attempted to intercept the intruders. Back in a corner they found the corpse of the mother splattered over those of two preadolescent boys. In a warmer climate the stench in the room, as elsewhere in the city, would have been overpowering. The cold, clear air of Treetrunk had helped to slow decomposition and decay. Otherwise, it would have been impossible for the crew to have continued their investigation.

  As it was, several of the small group became sick at different times that afternoon. The slaughter gave every indication of having been carried out in a relentless and methodical fashion. Returning to the shuttle, Trohanov informed Hollis and the rest of his crew of what he and the others had found and took care to relay the visual information they had managed to collect. Returning to the ship, they compressed and sent it on its way to Earth, entangling it with the first quantum receiver that acknowledged their transmission.

  In the silence of the bulbous ship no one slept. As soon as Trohanov felt able, he took a larger team back down to the surface. This time they set down near the colony’s first community and second city, the municipality that had been named Chagos Downs after the ship that had originally explored the Argus system. There was no shuttleport at the Downs, but there were landing facilities for suborbital aircraft. Unfortunately, those facilities had suffered the same fate as their much larger counterpart at Weald, and the crew once again had to set down in the nearest available field.

  Chagos Downs was a mirror image of disaster, albeit on a smaller scale. The same conditions applied as they had encountered in the capital: Many structures had been left standing and intact, some with no sign of damage at all, while others had been completely reduced. As before, there were no survivors. Like the inhabitants of Weald, the citizens of the Downs had been slaughtered where they had been found; attempting to surrender to unknown assailants, lying in bed, slumped over instruments and other devices while busy at work, caught preparing meals, on the streets, and in hallways. From the eldest patient in the hospital to the youngest infant, no one had been spared.

  Whoever, whatever had committed the atrocity had been relentlessly thorough in seeing to it that not one survivor was left breathing to comment on the cataclysm. Trohanov knew it was not his responsibility to try and find out who was responsible. The crew member who had spoken out earlier doubtless had being doing no more than voicing the concerns and opinion of many of his colleagues. They were crew on a deep-space transport: not soldiers, not mass-homicide investigators, not government operatives. Whatever had happened on Treetrunk was terrible, but it was not their business to try and fix responsibility. Nor could Trohanov leave his ship under Hollis’s command to resume its voyage while he remained behind to await the first official response from Earth. Pragmatically, he and his companions could do nothing with the anger and helpless fury that boiled within them except bottle it.

  Reluctantly, they returned to the ship and resumed their itinerary. Until the day and hour of their deaths, the memory of what they had seen never left them, remaining as clear and sharp as the air of the devastated world itself.

  Little had changed when the three warships emerged from space-plus dangerously close to the planetary mass. Settling into equidistant orbit, their instrumentation between them covering and monitoring every meter of the cloud-swathed globe beneath, they dropped nine shuttle craft into the clouds and clear air below. Each was far larger than that of the cargo ship that had preceded them. On board were soldiers as coldly efficient and highly trained as Earth and its colonies could produce, armed with the most advanced weaponry their military research institutes could manufacture.

  Setting down simultaneously at predetermined locations in the planet’s habitable equatorial zone, the independently functional squads immediately established defensible perimeters around their respective shuttles. Once these landing sites were secured, ground transports were unloaded from the craft and boarded by half of each squadron’s personnel. Leaving the entrenched perimeters that now surrounded the heavily defended shuttle craft, these armed skimmers and their smaller escorts moved out in carefully designated search-and-rescue patterns.

  They found little changed and nothing significantly different from the halting, barely adequate pair of reports that had been filed by the crew of the cargo transport that had first made the grisly discovery. Fanning out from their landing sites, they checked the towns first, then moved on to isolated hamlets, individual farms, mines, and tiny frontier outposts. The degree of physical destruction varied, but nowhere did they find anyone alive, nor any record in any of the surviving instrumentalities of what had happened.

  As soon as the military commander of the expedition was satisfied that no threat remained on the surface, at least insofar as his troops could determine, the members of the scientific team were allowed to descend. Forced to remain on their assigned ship while the soldiers secured the ground, they were in a quiet frenzy of fervor to begin their work. Over their protests each was assigned an armed guard. Until some answers were forthcoming the military was taking no chances. Pathologists and recorders, biologists and scanners were forced to operate under the watchful eyes of edgy soldiers.

  The scientists’ escorts were not uneasy because they feared attack. Indeed, they would have welcomed it. To the last man and woman they had seen too much death on what had previously been considered a mellow, pastoral, even boring world. Women clutching infants, old men slain in the doorways of their homes, children shot down in the street: It was too much for some of them. Those who gutted their way through the last of the patrols wanted something to shoot at, something to kill. No plague had wiped out the inhabitants of Argus V, no secretive native uprising had surprised the colonists in their beds. The evidence was indisputable that advanced killing technology had been at work in the peaceful forests and meadows.

  The question that was on everyone’s mind—soldier, scientist, and starship crew alike—was, Whose?

  Derwent was tired of trideeing bodies. After the first sickening couple of days his stomach settled down and he was able to go about his job more or less normally and at a faster pace. The labor was necessary, he knew. Not only so that relatives on other worlds could identify slain relations but so that the research team being put together back on Earth would have as much information to work with as possible. Hudson, his partner, was reciting into her recorder in her familiar monotone. It was her job to render a preliminary judgment on cause of death.

  Dozens of additional personnel were active in other districts. Since landing, no one had enjoyed a day off. Given the condition of many of the bodies there was no time to spare. Not with hundreds of thousands of corpses to evaluate. For teams such as Derwent and Hudson, long hours in unpleasant conditions had become the norm. Every body, or remnant thereof, had to be dutifully recorded and evaluated.

  Outside the ruins of the small country inn a corporal and two privates stood guard, stood being perhaps too strong a word. Derwent didn’t mind when the three sat down and set their weapons aside, conversing quietly among themselves. The small skimmer that had tr
ansported the team and its supplies rested nearby, powered down and open to intrusion. The recording specialist was not worried. From the time the first squad of marines had touched down they had encountered no opposition. Nor had any trouble manifested itself since. Nothing interfered with the work of the pathologists or coroners.

  Whatever had exterminated the population of Argus V was nowhere in evidence. If the relentless and thorough attackers had suffered casualties they had been careful to take their dead and wounded away with them, as well as erase any evidence of their existence. Only human bloodstains and fragments of human bodies were found. The use of generic and not especially sophisticated weapons of destruction precluded the rapid identification of the killers. Nothing remained of their handiwork except the corpses of their victims.

  To the psychologists, that suggested that the assailants feared retribution. As well they should. There wasn’t a soldier among the relieving force who did not go to bed night after night dreaming of imaginary alien necks to wring.

  Derwent was more of a realist. Knowing nothing of those who had destroyed the colony, it was premature to assign blame even to imaginary enemies. For all they knew the invading force might have been renegade humans from one of the other colony worlds.

  “What motivation could another colony possibly have for carrying out a massacre like this?” Hudson had challenged him. Light glinted off her implanted lenses. She was a pert, spirited lady whom the adjective vivacious fit in more ways than one, and she was not slow to defend an opinion.

  Phlegmatic and blunt, Derwent argued for the sake of dissention. They were not a particularly well-matched team, but their personal disagreements did not hamper their work.

  “How should I know? Not having the mind-set of a mass murderer myself, I can’t begin to imagine a reason.” He stepped over the body of an eight-year-old boy whose head and legs had gone missing.

  “Then shut up,” she told him curtly. “If you can’t give reasons, you don’t have a hypothesis.”