by Sharon Lee
And so he went himself, down the center of the main corridor, through the blown hatch, into the inner sanctum, and nothing worse befell him than his boots got wet; their shiny blackness marred by streaks of pale mud.
The control cavern . . . the floor on which he and Theonna yos’Phelium had madly embraced, so very long ago, was sticky with blood. Bodies, likewise sticky, lay in stiff, graceless poses. He checked them all for vital signs, starting with the one nearest the door.
Dead.
Dead.
Decapitated.
The fourth body, left arm nearly severed, blood sheeting the sharp, ironic face. As unlikely as it seemed, given the surrounding carnage, and the wounds which must surely have pained him, he was smiling.
Uncle sighed, remembering the murdered ship scattered on the drifted snow and across the wind-swept rocky plain outside, and wondered if, indeed, the pilot would have chosen this, had he known.
He wondered, but recalled that the pilot had not come here to smile, as much as he may have expected to die, but that he’d come to—
No manual control reacted to his demands, none to the remote he’d built so many years before.
Yes, of course. The lighting and other such housekeeping protocols were powered by the planet’s seasons, and they would go on, but the weapons and devices of Pod 78, those were in fact not merely disabled by automatics—the controls were severed from their aims. The brain of it was gone, the very links from controls to devices had been physically eliminated.
Pod 78 was useless.
He considered that, realized it might not quite be the case. Perhaps some of the pod’s devices might be salvaged; certainly in the long run of time they should not be permitted to be discovered for what they might tell an ardent investigator. A project to be added to his years ahead.
But there, this man of Korval had done what he had come to do, and perhaps that was what the smile meant—he had succeeded at his last task.
Well.
In the interest of thoroughness, he bent once more, placed his fingers against the pulse point in the throat—and straightened, snatching the comm from his belt, finger on the call button.
“Dulsey,” he said in answer to her inquiry. “I need a field ’doc. Immediately.”
