Blood Contact

by David Sherman

  Those were followed by several more at different places within the settlement. All of them were the same—a stream of greenish fluid obliterated the camera. Sometimes a bit of tubing was visible immediately before the stream came, other times not.

  "What was that?" Snodgrass shrilly demanded. "Who did that?" He'd been craning to see over and around Bass and Bynum.

  "Have you been able to do any filtering, get a picture of who used those weapons?" Bass asked Larishnamova, ignoring the lieutenant.

  Larishnamova shook her head. "I tried. The shooters always seem to be out of the line of sight from the cameras. Either that or in shadows too deep for the cameras to pick up."

  Bass looked unfocused into the distance. "That implies they knew the location of the cameras," he said slowly. He turned a puzzled expression to the doctor. "I read all the Waygone reports the Fairfax carried, and didn't see any mention of dismissed personnel. Did you?"

  Dr. Bynum shook her head. "No. What are you getting at?"

  "Someone disgruntled about being fired, someone with a grudge, would know where the cameras were."

  "That's not a grudge!" Snodgrass shrilled. "That's..." But nobody paid him any attention.

  "A scientist or technician joined a pirate band?" Bynum asked.

  "Pirates have to come from somewhere:"

  "Somehow I don't think that's the case here."

  "Neither do I." Bass abruptly changed the subject. "The weapons, that green fluid. Have you ever seen anything like that?"

  "As I said, my best guess is it's some sort of acid. Otherwise"—she shrugged—"you're the weapons expert here." Bass shook his head. "I've never heard of weapons that shoot streams of acid."

  The two looked at each other, neither willing to be the first to say what both were thinking: The unexplainable blips that approached Central, the improved Beamspace drive, the weapons they couldn't recognize. Something nonhuman did it. The navy and Marine personnel on the mission were prepared to do many things; making first contact with an alien intelligence wasn't one of them.

  "Unless you have objections, Doctor, I think we need to get the data from those crystals up to the Fairfax immediately. Maybe the shipboard equipment could decipher something we can't planetside."

  Bynum nodded. "I'll put it on our next shipment. Better yet, I'll send it immediately." Larishnamova popped the crystal and handed it to her.

  Bass looked back at the now blank display while Dr. Bynum headed to the waiting Essay. "A trajectory to Aquarius Station, huh?"

  The computers on board the Fairfax County were only able to come up with one bit of information the planetside techs hadn't. Spectrographic analysis which, given the quality of the vid on the crystal, was neither thorough nor reliable, tentatively identified the greenish fluid streamed at the cameras as an unknown compound with a dual base of hydrogen chloride and phosphoric acid.

  "So what do you want to do now, Lander Six?" Captain Tait asked from the communications visual display. At that point his job, his ship's job, was to support the ground forces. He could override any decision the ground forces commander made that, in his opinion, would put his ship in danger. Otherwise he would do everything he could to help the ground commander accomplish his mission.

  "I think we've found everything here we can without a more detailed investigation than we can make at the moment," Bass answered. "I think we need to visit Aquarius Station."

  Tait nodded. "That's what I'd want to do in your place. I'll send another Essay down with two more Dragons and a security team under the command of my bosun. They'll be under your command."

  "Thank you, Skyhawk." It didn't even cross Bass's mind that the bosun of the Fairfax County was a senior chief petty officer, the navy equivalent of a Marine sergeant major. It wouldn't have bothered him if it had. For ground operations he was the senior man on the mission and already had two navy officers under his command. He was in command of the ground forces, and, at least in theory, even an admiral would have to obey his orders. "How soon can I expect the Essay?"

  Tait chuckled. "My sailors would probably mutiny if I made them make planetfall the way you Marines do. It'll take an hour to get the security party ready, and then—" He looked away from the camera for a second. "—another three-quarters of an hour before we're back in the drop window. Say six hours."

  "That'll be after nightfall, Skyhawk."

  "My coxswains know how to make night landings, Lander Six. Tomorrow's early enough for you to get to Aquarius. Probably be better for you to get there in the morning, after a night's sleep."

  "Aye aye, sir." Bass, as anxious as he was to get to Aquarius, knew Tuit was overruling him. A night landing at Aquarius Station, where there was potential danger, could put ship's personnel, shuttles, and Dragons in unnecessary hazard, and the captain was fully within his rights in overriding the ground commander on this point.

  Bass, Hyakowa, Bynum, and Senior Chief Hayes had everyone up and aboard the Essays before dawn. As soon as the sun broke above the horizon, the Essays launched for the two-hour suborbital flight to Aquarius Station. At its end, the Essay carrying third platoon made a combat landing, coming down fast from four thousand meters, while the Essay carrying the navy personnel swung in a wide circle at five thousand meters, ready to come down when the all-clear was given, or to take off for orbital altitude if the landing zone was too hot.

  The Essay's coxswain brought the shuttle down fast and smooth to a hover, a meter above the water of the swamp, a kilometer and a half east of Aquarius Station. Its ramp lowered and the three Dragons roared out, splashed into the water, and raced toward the Aquarius Station compound, forming a line three abreast as they went. The Essay launched as soon as the Dragons were safely away.

  Bass on Dragon One, and Hyakowa on Dragon Three, were patched into their vehicles' opticals so they could see where they were going. At first all they saw was sluggish, almost stagnant water thickly studded with hummocks of mud bars and small, lushly vegetated islands. The Dragons' air cushions sprayed high screens and higher rooster tails of water that subsided only when they lurched over mud bars—they stayed off the islands, where they couldn't tell what hazards the vegetation hid. Some of the islands were too densely covered with vegetation to see more than a few meters across.

  After two and a half minutes of travel at thirty-five kph, the Dragons stopped in the lee of a small island. From there, the large island where Aquarius Station was located was visible across a hundred meters of water. No movement was visible in visual or infrared other than that of the ubiquitous insectoids and foliage that moved dankly in breezes nearly as sluggish as the water. Neither did the high-powered sounders mounted on the Dragons pick up any noises that didn't seem native to the swamp.

  "Dupont, launch the RPV," Bass quietly ordered.

  "Aye aye," the comm man replied. He already had the recon unit, disguised as one of the tube-bodied insectoids, ready for launch. He hit the button next to the ramp to lower it enough to release his bird, then reclosed the ramp. Bass stood over him, watching the display as Dupont worked the controls to maneuver the RPV in a quartering pattern over the station. Nothing appeared other than the native life.

  "Let's go ashore," Bass told Dragon One's commander after watching the display for ten minutes. "Land the navy," he said into his long-range communications unit.

  The second Essay landed on the island twenty minutes later.

  Aquarius Station was a second-class imitation of Central Station, with only a half-dozen buildings and large bungalows. The admin building was quite small and filled with claustrophobic offices. One building held what was evidently a combination meeting hall and mess hall—"dining room," as Dr. Bynum corrected them. "These people were civilians, they ate in dining rooms, not mess halls"—with an adjacent kitchen. Both the admin and the assembly buildings had apartments that had been used by the top people assigned to Aquarius. Three of the others were laboratory buildings. One of them had a freezer unit for storage of biological specimens. T
he Marines made a grisly discovery in the freezer—seven bodies. All seven had been killed by projectile or plasma weapons. Everywhere else they found skeletons, some partial, others complete, all with the same markings as those they'd found at Central Station.

  They saved the residential block for last.

  "Somebody's been here, and recently," Hyakowa reported over the platoon net from the scientists' living quarters.

  Bass, with Lieutenant Commander Bynum and Lieutenant Snodgrass in his wake, wasted no time getting over there.

  Hyakowa pointed to a dressing table set against one wall of what had been someone's bedroom. The table was covered with a thick coating of vegetable growth accumulated since the tragedy that had killed its occupant. Items of clothing lay scattered on the floor nearby. The surface of the tabletop gleamed dully where patches of the plant growth had been scraped away.

  The imprint of a human hand showed clearly in one of the cleared patches.

  "Damn!" Bynum exclaimed. "That had to have been made a long time after this place was attacked." She leaned closer to inspect the print. "I think one of them might be a woman." The others gathered around.

  "What makes you think that?" Bass asked.

  She looked at him, mildly surprised. "The size."

  Bass looked more closely at the print. Not much dust lay on it. "How long ago do you think it was made?" he asked.

  Bynum shrugged. "Days ago, maybe a couple of weeks?"

  "Then there are survivors," Snodgrass whispered. Maybe Morgan had survived. Maybe he could still...

  "And these clothes, Charlie," Bynum said, bending and picking up a pair of coveralls from the floor. "They're from that closet over there. Whoever was in here was looking for something to wear. And this is a woman's size."

  Bass reached over Bynum's shoulder and shook a slender bottle free from the lichens that had covered it.

  " ‘Persian Kitty,’ " he said, reading the label. He removed the glass stopper and smelled the contents. "Whew! Might take some of this back to Camp Ellis for Big Barb." Hyakowa guffawed behind him at the mention of Big Barb. That was the first laugh Bass could remember hearing since they left the Fairfax. Somehow it made him feel better.

  "Gunny." Sergeant Ratliff's voice broke in over the platoon net. "Better get over to the administration building right away. We've found a message!"

  They stared at the hand-painted message on a piece of metal propped up just inside the main entrance to the administration building.

  " ‘Grate danger’ "? Snodgrass read the words. "Interesting spelling."

  "Prob'ly written by an officer—sir," someone snickered. Commander Bynum laughed outright.

  Snodgrass whirled around but the several enlisted men standing behind him just looked innocently back at him. But Bass recognized the voice as belonging to MacIlargie. "At ease," the platoon commander said wearily to no one in particular. "I don't want any more of that talk out of you people."

  "Well," Snodgrass went on, "obviously written by a pirate."

  "How do you get that, Lieutenant?" Hyakowa asked.

  "No scientist could be that illiterate," Snodgrass answered in an almost contemptuous tone.

  "I don't know," Dr. Bynum said. "I've known some pretty inarticulate scientists. Just because a person has a genius IQ doesn't mean he knows how to spell."

  "It was pirates," Snodgrass said firmly. "And they killed these people."

  "I don't know, Lieutenant," Hyakowa said. "If it was pirates, what're they doing still hanging around here? And why'd they want us to know where they're at? Looks to me, sir, like some illiterate scientists might've survived."

  "Ambush," Snodgrass replied positively. "The pirates want us to go, uh," he glanced back at the message, "thirty kilometers southwest of here to where they're waiting to ambush us."

  Everyone looked to Bass for his opinion. He stroked his chin a few times. "Two things, people," he said at last, counting them off on his fingers. "One: there are, or were when this sign was written, survivors. And two: we're going to find them if they're still alive. Let's go climb some mountains." He signaled for Dupont to raise the ship so he could tell Captain Tait what they'd found and what they were doing next.

  Chapter 17

  "There it is again," Surface Radar Analyst Third Class, Hummfree muttered. His soft voice was lost in the pings of equipment and the susurration of carefully controlled air that wafted through the comm shack, the analysis center of the Fairfax County. None of the other analysts and techs working at other stations looked up at his words. They were as thoroughly immersed in their jobs as Hummfree was in the data that flowed from the string-of-pearls into the monitors he watched. He watched visuals that ranged from infrared to ultraviolet. His monitors showed X-ray and radar and could display gamma if he wanted. Graphs—bar, line, scatter, hi-lo, more—jiggled and jaggled before his eyes. But at the moment he was only interested in one thing that appeared in the array of monitors he watched and listened to. An intermittent dot that showed up in the infrared in one small space in the mountains.

  His fingers danced over his keyboard, caressed the balls and dials of his controls. His objective was to merge the visual and infrared signals in that space. If he succeeded, he might have a good idea what was generating the intermittent signal in the infrared. Theoretically, what he was attempting was possible. Few navy analysts were willing even to attempt it, though; it was simply too difficult.

  SRA3 Hummfree wasn't only willing, he was convinced he could do it. It didn't matter that he'd spent many hours of his own time on that problem over the three days the Fairfax County had been in orbit. And it didn't matter that he didn't seem any closer to a resolution. Hummfree had solved problems before in situations where nobody else thought there was a solution, so he was confident of his abilities. Now that Ensign Mulhoorn had ordered him to investigate the mountains full-time, he was spending nearly all of his waking hours on the problem, interrupting his work only when the communications chief made him stop for meals or to take a shower. If—no, make that when—he resolved the target, it just might get him that promotion to second class. Hummfree needed a meritorious promotion because he spent too much of his own time working on special projects and too little on studying for the promotion exam.

  The red dot showed up again in the infrared. Visual had just a small blur. Quickly, Hummfree zoomed the focus on it. Simultaneously he began to converge the visual and infrared signals on the same spot. For a second they didn't quite merge; theoretically, at geosynchronous orbit distance, the string-of-pearls' infrared sensors couldn't resolve anything much smaller than a one-meter radius, and the visual couldn't see details smaller than fifteen centimeters, even when seeing conditions were optimal. But Hummfree had reprogrammed the string-of-pearls software to allow him to use long baseline interferometry from four satellites. By having the computer average the best of the scans in the visual and infrared, then overlapping them, he gave form to what he tried to focus on. He transferred the data to storage, slapped the toggle labeled SFFT, and called out, "Chief, Mr. Mulhoorn, take a look at this."

  "What?" Chief Petty Officer Kranston asked through teeth clenched as though they gripped a cigar. He got up ponderously from the station where he oversaw the work of his men and took the one step that put him behind Hummfree's left shoulder. He plugged his headset into the console.

  "What do you have, Hummfree?" Ensign Mulhoorn asked when he reached Hummfree's right shoulder.

  Hummfree pointed at the wavering image, only a few pixels high, on his main screen. "That's a man."

  "Is it one of the Marines?" Mulhoorn asked, trying to understand what he was looking at. "Or one of our med-sci team?" It might have been a man. If he read the scale right, it was the about the size of a man, and it did appear to be vertical like a biped, rather than horizontal like most animals. But the young navy officer couldn't make out enough detail to tell who it might be, or even if it really was a man.

  "The Marines are wearing chameleons, we woul
dn't get one in the visual," Chief Kranston said. "And none of our med-sci people would be alone." He pressed the earpiece of his headset closer and listened as he studied the flickering, overlapping, different resolution images that didn't quite coalesce into something his eyes could be sure they saw. "Doesn't seem to be saying anything, but I hear sounds that might be from him. Sounds like he's taking a piss." Then to Hummfree, "Where is it?"

  Hummfree's fingers danced and the image changed to show an area large enough to include Aquarius Station. A red arrow pointed at the spot where the indistinct image was. Thirty kilometers to the northeast, an orange circle showed the location of Aquarius Station, where the Marines were awaiting Captain Tuit's approval for what they wanted to do next.

  "Bring him back," Kranston ordered. When Hummfree changed the screen back to the image that might have been a man, the figure was moving up the side of the mountain until it vanished.

  "I think they're staying in caves and only come out once in a while, maybe only one or two at a time," Hummfree said. "That's why the string-of-pearls has so much trouble picking them up."

  "You're really sure that was a man?" Mulhoorn asked.

  Hummfree hesitated before answering. "Sir, I'm not positive, but I'll bet on it and lay odds. It has the right kind of heat signature, and there's no record of this planet having indigenous surface-dwelling life-forms with that degree of body heat."

  The communications officer looked at the chief, who was still studying the display.

  Chief Kranston clapped Hummfree on the shoulder. "If you're willing to lay odds, I'm willing to back your bet."

  "I'll notify the Skipper," Mulhoorn said. He went to his station and reported to Captain Tait.

  "Get precise coordinates," Kranston growled, "Longe, lat, and altitude. Them mud-sloggers down there're gonna need them."

  "Roger, Skyhawk: Lander out." Bass returned the handset of the comm unit to Dupont and chewed on his lip for a few seconds while he digested what he'd just been told. Then he said, "Round everybody up. We're moving out."