The Cause of Death

by Roger MacBride Allen

  It didn't take more than a few seconds more for his sides to start aching and his suit to start overheating. He would have cranked the cooling up to maximum if he had had a free hand to reach the controls. The suit's visor started to fog up. One of the escape packs was banging into his right leg with every step, throwing him off-balance. And he must have twisted his left ankle somehow in the drop from the Lotus, because it was sending a jolt of pain up his leg with every step.

  Jamie gritted his teeth and kept moving. A few more moments of pain and exhaustion would be a fair trade for staying alive. He leaned forward, determined to keep on going--

  And fell off the edge of the landing pad, tumbling into a drainage ditch that ran along its edge. He landed hard on his left side in a tangle of arms and legs and equipment bags and straps, banging up his ankle again. Before he had a chance to unsnarl himself from his possessions, Hannah came crashing on top of him, and seemed to land with her entire weight directly on the spot on his right leg that had been slammed around already.

  They thrashed around in the darkness for a moment, struggling to organize themselves and catch their breath. It was plain that it would make no sense to try going much farther in the dark over what seemed like rough ground ahead without making some sort of plan first--and it didn't seem likely they'd find anyplace that would afford better cover against a blast if it did come.

  At any rate, they seemed to have gotten clear of the smoke. Jamie decided it was just about time to open his visor. They were going to have to start breathing local air sooner or later, anyway. He rolled over on his back to get both arms clear, then reached up and undid the visor's safety releases, then the inner latches. There was a soft sort of chuff as the pressure equalized with the outside air, and Jamie pushed the visor up.

  The first thing that struck him was the smell--no, the multiple smells--that seemed to rush in at him from all directions. Something like fresh grass, cool night air, and a nasty cocktail of unpleasant burning-chemical smells. A patch of smoke slipped out of the way, revealing the cold and clear light of stars, strange stars, spangling the darkness overhead in a sky never seen from Earth, or Center, or any human world.

  This world wasn't just new to him. It was all but unknown to humans. The gigabytes of data they had waded through boiled down to less actually useful information than would fill a modest datapad--and none of it was going to do them much good in a muddy ditch deep in hostile territory. They were in trouble--big trouble.

  So it's time to start thinking about how to get out of it, Jamie thought. He rolled over on his stomach and looked toward Hannah as she opened her visor. Jamie left her to it, and belly-crawled up to the edge of the drainage ditch to look back at the Lotus--or, rather, the remains of the Lotus.

  It would have been a lovely and dramatic sight if it had had nothing to do with him. The long, tapered black-and-white cone that was the Lotus, toppled over on its side, was framed by the gathering darkness of night and the light of all manner of fire. There was a dim glow visible from the crew cabin, and tendrils of smoke eddying up through the evac hatches. A jet of flame spurted up now and then from somewhere on the back side of the ship, silhouetting it against the red-orange bloom of light. A smaller, steadier fire was alight in the cracked-open stern, burning with a deeper red, almost the color of dying embers.

  A gouge through the hull revealed an angry, white-hot flame burning amidships. Smoke spewed forth from a dozen wounds, and the wind blew it about, obscuring and revealing the ship as a whole, and each of the separate fires, from one moment to the next. The smoke caught and blocked the light, changing its color from moment to moment as it reflected and then obscured the various patches of fire.

  Hannah belly-crawled up beside him. As they watched, some pressurized tank in the aft end blew up with a loud BANG and a flash of light. The next time the smoke parted, the Lotus was still more or less intact, but with a new hole torn in the stern. The whole ship had been rocked sideways by the blast.

  "I wouldn't want to bet on it, but I don't think the whole ship is going to explode," Hannah said in a whisper. "It looks like all the volatiles are cooking off and burning instead, with maybe a few more storage tanks popping off from the heat."

  "Good, I guess," Jamie whispered back. "Though I wouldn't want to be any closer when the next tank blows."

  "Oh, I'm right with you," Hannah said. "I'm not going back toward it. But I think we're pretty much safe where we are."

  Jamie pulled his head back down and rolled over onto his back, signaling for Hannah to follow. Hannah moved back down into the ditch and turned on her side to face him. "We won't get killed if the ship blows up," he said, "but we're not safe from whoever was shooting at us. We need to get out of here before someone comes poking around. Got any ideas?"

  "Nothing that isn't obvious," said Hannah. "Try to repack the gear we saved so we can move more easily. Be glad we landed at sunset, take advantage of the darkness, and hope they don't use good night-vision gear to look for us. Take advantage of this ditch to move--that way, I guess, away from the main terminals. Get out into the forest, find someplace to hide, try to figure out who on this planet--if anyone--won't shoot at us. Make contact with them--"

  "And then try to find out what, exactly, we were supposed to do here, and why stopping us from doing it means they need to kill us."

  "Right. Then all we have to do is the whatever-it-is and figure out some safe way to get home."

  Jamie let out a weary sigh. "Sounds real simple," he said. "Might as well get started." He slid down farther into the ditch and started gathering the padded gear bags together. He reached for the weapons bag first. "Can you keep watch while I'm working here?" he asked, in as loud a whisper as he dared.

  "Quiet!" she hissed back, in a voice that made it clear she meant it. He looked up. He could barely see her silhouette against the darkening sky, but it was obvious, just by the angle of her head, and the way her arms had tensed up, that she was watching something. Something dangerous.

  Almost before he knew it, Jamie had the weapons pack open, and was pulling out hardware. He was careful to close up the pack properly when he was done. If they had to make a sudden run for it, he didn't want to do it with half their weaponry spilling out of the pack as they moved.

  He headed back up the slope of the drainage ditch on his belly, cradling a multigun rifle on his forearms and moving on his elbows and knees. Hannah pointed to what she had spotted, but there was no need. A headlight, or what looked like a headlight, was moving toward them. He caught just a glimpse of the new arrival as it moved in front of some lit-up structure on the horizon. One vehicle, a big car or a small truck, was headed straight for the crash site from the far side of the spaceport. Jamie powered up the night scope on the multigun and looked through it.

  "Good-sized open-frame vehicle," he whispered. "No armor or weapons visible. Nothing that looks like rescue or fire gear. One occupant visible. Probable Pavlat female, but not certain. Wearing what looks like conventional civilian dress for a young adult female Pavlat, but not working clothes. Semiformal, say. Nothing that looks military. No official-looking markings or placards or anything like that on the car. No attempt at evasive driving. She'll be at the Lotus in about thirty seconds."

  "Okay," Hannah whispered back. "We crashed ten minutes ago, and they probably don't think we survived the crash--I don't quite believe it myself. So probably they didn't have any prearranged deception plan to fool crash survivors. Therefore, she's almost certainly what she looks like she is, and not some plan to fool us for whatever bizarre reason. So what is it that she looks like?"

  Jamie, still watching through the night scope, gave a minuscule shrug. "A tourist?"

  "A witness," Hannah suggested. "A verifier. Sent to make sure it was a nice, violent crash and we didn't make it out alive."

  Jamie wasn't convinced. According to all the sources on Reqwar culture he had studied, young females were regarded as worthy of protection and young males were far more
expendable, close to cannon fodder. It would be unlikely in the extreme for the Reqwar Pavlat to send a high-caste female in to do something as low-status and high-danger as checking to see if there were any survivors aboard a crashed spacecraft.

  That seemed an awful lot of explanation to get across to Hannah in whispers while lying flat in a drainage ditch, and Jamie didn't try. But there didn't seem to be any other obvious explanations. "Maybe," Jamie conceded.

  "Let's hope that she finds that brightly burning spacecraft very convincing. It'd be nice for us if she decides we didn't get out, and we're both safely dead."

  "Then we'd better hope something else--that she doesn't notice that the evac hatches are all blown."

  But that hope didn't last long. The vehicle roared up at high speed, and came to a halt between the Lotus and their hiding place in the ditch.

  The driver of the vehicle reached down and picked up something that proved to be a very powerful handlight. It stabbed a shaft of light through the smoke and lit up the side of the ruined ship in dazzling brightness. The light beam searched up and down the wreck until it came to rest on the evac hatchways, then worked slowly over the hull toward the nose. The handlight was far too bright for the multigun's night scope, and Jamie flipped over to daylight mode. He studied what their visitor was looking at--and cursed. "Footprints," he said. "We left footprints and handprints and all kinds of smears and marks as we got out of the ship."

  He looked over at Hannah's suit, then down at his. Both their suits were filthy, stained and spotted with all the dirt and dust and smoke and soot that had filled the cabin. He looked at the glove of his suit and was shocked to see how much crud was still on it--and that was after it had left big smeary marks all over the nose of the Lotus.

  He went back to watching through his scope. The stranger was still working the light down the length of the hull. The light paused at the spot near the hull where Jamie had slid to the landing pad, then it played over the ground. It was impossible to see what the light was pointing at--and impossible not to guess what their visitor was seeing. If they had left footprints and handprints on the lander, they must have left them on the ground.

  He swung the scope back to watch their visitor. He could see that she was still pointing the light at the ground. She got out of the vehicle and moved a trifle closer to the fire. She knelt, pointing the light at the ground between her feet, then walked a bit closer to the wreck. A subdued whump, a jet of fire that stabbed up from the upper evac hatch startled her, and she backed off a bit but kept at what she was doing. Very plainly, what she was doing was tracking their footprints away from the spacecraft.

  Hannah could see it as well as Jamie without the aid of a night scope. "Our tracks can't go on too long," she whispered. "We'd have walked off whatever dirt and soot was going to come off before we went fifty meters."

  "She won't need more than ten meters," Jamie replied. "Even if she's never seen a human footprint before, she'll see them moving in a straight line, directly away from the fire. Straight toward here. And even if she can't tell a running print from a walking print, there's a burning spaceship right there. She'll be able to guess we were moving fast, and that we probably wore ourselves out, and that we can't have gotten far, and that--"

  "We've got to get moving," Hannah said, cutting him off. "Now." She slid down into the ditch and set to work pulling on gear bags. But there was something that kept Jamie watching. Something wasn't quite right. Their visitor had no arms or armor, and had come alone. There was no sign that she was in communication with anyone, though of course she could be wearing a headset, chatting a mile a minute with her controllers. Maybe she had hidden weapons. But he didn't believe it.

  There was something in the way she stood, the way she moved, that showed she was new to tracking and searching. And it went further than that. He felt quite certain that she was not hunting them. Not exactly. She was seeking them. But he wasn't going to bet his life on a vague impression.

  He was just about to move back down into the ditch when he saw her start walking, moving along, plainly following their footsteps. She stopped dead and looked up from the ground, straight in Jamie's direction but without pointing the light. He fought against the impulse to duck. Pavlat eyes weren't that much more sensitive than human eyes, he was far away in the dark, and her night vision must be all but useless at the moment, because she had been using the dazzlingly bright handlight. But he still felt like a jacklighted deer, caught in a car's headlights. He studied her through the scope. There was something in her expression that told him she was not so much looking in his direction, as thinking about what might be in that direction.

  She seemed to reach some sort of decision. She shut off the handlight, went back to her vehicle, climbed in, and drove forward, almost silently, with no other sound than the hum of the wheels on the roadway. Even that sound died as she paused at about the line of their footprints and looked out along their line of travel, as sighting along a landmark.

  Then she started up again, and drove off, moving, not toward them, but parallel to the edge of the landing field and the drainage ditch. Jamie watched her go in the night scope, feeling relieved and a little bit bewildered.

  "She left?" Hannah asked, from close up enough that Jamie almost jumped out of his pressure suit and his skin, all at once. He had been watching their visitor so closely he hadn't even heard Hannah coming back up beside him.

  "Ah, well, ah, yeah," Jamie said, trying to settle himself down. He kept watching the vehicle's driving light move smoothly off down the landing field, turning to the left a bit as it followed the edge of the field.

  But then the headlight went out. Through the night scope he saw the vehicle take a hard right turn, right off the edge of the landing field. Then the vehicle dropped out of sight as suddenly and completely as if it had fallen down a rabbit hole.

  Or a drainage ditch.

  Then Jamie understood. Too late, perhaps, but he understood. She was cutting off their line of escape. She would drive into the ditch, then drive back down its length, forcing them to climb out one side or the other, out into the open, where they would be easy to catch, or kill.

  But why turn her headlight out? he wondered, even as he scrambled down to join Hannah. If she was trying to flush them out, she'd want them to see her--and she'd want to be able to see them. Never mind. "Grab it all, and get out of the ditch, now!" he cried. "Up the side away from the landing pad. Her car's coming, and we need to be out of the ditch and flat to the ground before she gets here!" And just pray that she drives right past all the chewed-up dirt and mud and grass we've made by thrashing around down here. It seemed a pretty forlorn hope, but it was all they had.

  The two of them, overburdened and thrown off-balance by the gear packs, dropped into the soggy bottom of the ditch. They had been on the landing-side slope of the deep ditch until then. It was only as they tried to move to the other side that they discovered the bottom of the ditch was filled with malodorous squelching mud. It turned to glue the moment it touched the boots of their pressure suits, but when they tried to scramble up the opposite side, it served as a first-class lubricant that sent them sliding back down into the muck.

  Dumping their gear and scrambling up the opposite slope more or less unimpeded was not an option. They needed that equipment. Besides, a heap of abandoned supply packs would be a signpost impossible for her to miss. They were going to have to move slowly, methodically, carefully, if they were going to get out of there--but there was no time for that before their visitor came barreling down on them.

  They were just barely starting to make progress, stabbing their gloved hands into the soft earth to make their own handholds when they heard the sound of the vehicle's wheels squelching and splashing along through the mud, moving slowly, coming carefully.

  Moving slowly, lights off, Jamie noted. Why, when she's trying to flush us out?

  Without any conscious thought on his part, he stopped climbing and had the multigun rifle bac
k in his hands and the night scope to his eyes. There she was, just coming into view around a corner of the ditch, driving slowly and carefully through the muddy bottom of the ditch. Coming slowly, but coming straight for them. They were trapped. Utterly and absolutely. She would drive up to them, and they would have the choice of surrendering at once or making some pointless run for it.

  Except--

  Shoot!

  It was a blindingly obvious thing to do. There she was, literally right in his sights. All he had to do was dial in the sort of ammo he wanted to use, and then--

  Except--why is she alone why isn't she using some sort of comm to coordinate with another team why isn't she using night-vision equipment why--

  Never mind. She's coming straight for us. Her friends chased us halfway around the planet trying to kill us. Shoot.

  She was getting closer. His finger was on the trigger. He had his target point, right on her throat, had the shot sighted, locked, and tracked. He dialed in GUIDED JET ROUND on the ammo selector. All he had to do was pull the--

  "BINDULAN SENDED ME!" she called out. She stopped her vehicle, and through the night scope he could see her peering into the darkness, straining to see. "I mean, Bindulan sent me." A pause. "Hello? Is you--are you--dere--there? My English rusted--rusty. Understanding me? Bindulan sent me!"

  Jamie froze, and held his trigger still, absolutely rigid. The slightest wrong move, and the weapon would fire. It would do no good at all to point it somewhere else with the tracking system live, and with a guided round in the chamber.

  "What's she talking about?" Hannah hissed at him. "Who is that? Bindulan is your contact in--"

  "Quiet!" Jamie snapped back. "My weapon's hot. If I twitch the wrong way, I'll kill her, whoever she is." He eased back his trigger finger, flipped on the safety, deselected all ammo, powered down the tracking system, and shut off the night scope as well, just to be on the safe side. He checked over the weapon one last time. Then and only then did he allow himself to succumb to the shakes. I could have killed her I could have killed her Bindulan sent her I could have--