“All set,” he said, and Heikki nodded.
“Let’s go.”
The downdraft from the rotos raised a low cloud of dust even from the heavy soil, and swirled what was left of the grass into twisted knots. Heikki ducked through the blasting wind, then turned slowly, letting the camera record the clearing and the jumper. The row of lights glowed green in her lens: all the systems were running, recording the scene at half a dozen levels. She nodded to herself, and switched the camera to automatic, leaving her right hand free for her blaster.
“Crawler tracks!”
Heikki looked up quickly at the sound of Sebasten-Januarias’s voice. The younger man was standing to one side of the clearing, almost inside the range of the nearest sonic. He made an eloquent face, but he did not move away. Heikki moved to join him, wincing as she, too, came within the sonic’s arc. The beam was inaudible, tuned as it was to affect a nonhuman nervous system, but she could feel the almost-vibration, an unpleasant pins-and-needles tingling, on her exposed skin.
“See? There,” Sebasten-Januarias said, and pointed.
To his right, running from the forest into the clearing, the familiar marks of a track-crawler showed stark against the dark mud. Automatically, Heikki turned the camera on them, panning slowly along their entire length, then crouched to examine the tread patterns more closely.
“It looks like a standard machine,” she said aloud, as much for the record as for the others’ benefit. “An Isu, maybe, or a Tormacher.”
“Lo-Moth uses both of them,” Sebasten-Januarias said.
Heikki looked sharply at him. “What do you mean?”
The pilot shrugged. “The company uses them, and then sells them used. There’s a lot of them on planet.”
No, Heikki thought, that may be true, but that’s not what you mean. That I’m sure of. She filed her questions, grimly determined not to let them go this time, and stood up, grunting under the weight of the camera. “We’ll check out the gondola.”
The metal teardrop lay crumpled against the half uprooted tree, the once-smooth curve of its nose smashed inward. Heikki made a face, dreading what she would find, but kept the camera running as she circled the tail and its broken rudders to the main hatch. The thin skin around it was scored by drill beams; the hatch itself dangled from a single exploded hinge.
“Christ—” Djuro began, and bit off whatever he would have said.
Heikki took a deep breath, a familiar coldness settling over her. She had dealt with sabotage before, with hijackings, violence, and death; it could be no worse than the job on Galilee, or the time on Kavanaugh when she’d had to kill the poacher. She swept the camera over the burn marks, lingering on each one, and then on the broken hatch, saying in a voice she hardly recognized as her own, “I note for the record evidence of forced entry, probably effected by means of a standard issue laser drill.”
Behind her, she heard Alexieva say something choked and inarticulate, but ignored it. She braced herself instead, hooking her hand carefully over the rough metal, and pulled herself up into the gondola. The floorplates, left unsecured to allow access to the cargo and ballast in an emergency, had been jarred loose by the crash, and lay at crazy angles like smashed paving stones. She balanced herself on the solid plate just inside the hatch, and panned slowly across the compartment. This had been an ordinary cargo latac; she was standing in what had been the main hold, between the tanks that should have held the gas for the envelope. That meant the distillery was underfoot, in the lower curve of the hull. The tanks had not ruptured, despite the gondola’s dented frame. She glanced at the dials, and saw her guess confirmed: both the tanks had been almost empty at the time of the crash. They must’ve been trying to keep the envelope inflated, she thought. With those holes burned in it, meters-long, they could run the distillery at full, and still go through both tanks in no time, and crash…. She stopped that train of thought abruptly. There was still no proof that the ripped envelope had been destroyed before the crash; it was just as possible that it had been destroyed to help hide any sign of the wreck.
“I’m going forward,” she said aloud, hearing still the coldness in her voice. “Jan, see if you can find the matrix.”
“What’s it look like?” Sebasten-Januarias asked. He made no protest at being left behind, and Heikki was remotely grateful.
“It should be in a quarter-crate,” she answered, and at the same time Alexieva sketched a shape a meter or so square. “It’ll be heavily padded.” Sebasten-Januarias nodded, and Heikki turned away, starting across the rocking floorplates before she could change her mind.
The midships hatch was intact, dogged open against the unbroken bulkhead. She studied it for a moment, then methodically turned the camera on it.
“You think it was opened after the crash?” Djuro said, coming up behind her.
“I don’t know,” Heikki answered. “The stress analysis will tell us.” But I’d bet it was, she thought, and stooped to examine the hatch frame more closely. Sure enough, the dull beige paint was scuffed and chipped, as though the hatch had been levered out of its seating. She recorded those marks as well, and ducked through the hatchway.
The technical compartment was as empty as the rest of the ship, though the buckled floorplates and broken screens betrayed that the frame had been twisted out of true. The crews’ seats stood empty, trailing webs of safety harness; papers had blown around the compartment like leaves, and lay drifted in one downhill corner. The only other sign of life was a canvas shoe lying beside the hatch that led to the control room. She bent to pick it up, curious, and saw the glint of bone and the purpling flesh still in it. She straightened, her emotions shutting down completely, and heard Djuro say, “Heikki, look at this.”
She turned as slowly as a sleepwalker. Djuro held up two pieces of a safety harness. “This was cut.”
“Record it,” Heikki said, and turned toward the control room. Remotely, she dreaded what she would find there, and so she did not hesitate, leaning through the crumpled frame into what was left of the compartment. The windscreen, which should have formed a quarter-sphere above the twin pilot stations, was bowed inward, almost on top of the twisted chairs. The heavy safety glass was crazed to transluscence, but had not shattered: a very minor mercy, Heikki thought. There were marks of fire along the forward walls, and smears of yellowing foam from the automatic extinguishers that had put it out. Probably short circuits in the consoles, she thought, automatically adjusting the camera to capture as much information as possible. There might be bits of bodies in the crumpled metal, but nothing larger, and she did not look too closely.
“Heikki.” Nkosi’s voice sounded in her earpiece, and she turned away from the burn-marked metal.
“Yes, Jock?”
“The orcs are moving back toward the clearing. I thought you would want to know.”
That was an understatement, Heikki thought. “Are the sonics having any effect?”
“They are still on the fringe of the effective zone,” Nkosi answered, “but I would say not. They are still coming toward us.”
“How long?” Heikki asked.
Nkosi’s voice was carefully casual. “Unless they slow down considerably, they will be here in about half an hour.”
“You waited a while before letting us know,” Heikki said, and could almost hear the pilot’s shrug as he answered.
“I did not see any point in worrying you before it was necessary. And I thought you should have as much time as possible in the wreck.”
“Right,” Heikki said, grimly, and turned back to the technical compartment. “You heard that?” she began, and Djuro nodded.
“We heard.”
“I think the orcs probably got the bodies,” Alexieva said, her face pale but composed. Sebasten-Januarias was nowhere in sight. Still back in the cargo section, Heikki thought. I hope.
“They can tolerate a certain amount of human flesh in their diet,” Alexieva went on, staring at the shoe that still lay against the f
orward bulkhead, “and they seem to like the taste. It’s happened before, a breeding group using a wreck site as a secondary food source. They’ll be sorry later, though, the young generally have problems on a long-term diet.”
She was talking to stave off the horrors, Heikki knew, but there was no time for that now. “We’ve got twenty minutes,” she said, riding over the other woman’s words. “We need to find the crystal matrix—or be sure it’s not on board.” She lifted her voice to carry to the cargo bay. “Jan, found anything?”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Sebasten-Januarias leaned into the hatchway. “I think you should see this.” His voice was tightly controlled. Oh, God, more bodies, Heikki thought, and followed him back into the bay.
Sebasten-Januarias had levered aside half a dozen of the distorted floor plates, stood now on the edge of the opening, the beam from his handlight playing on something in the wreckage below. Heikki glanced at Djuro, and saw the same mix of fear and disgust in his expression.
“What’ve you got?” she said aloud, keeping her voice deliberately neutral, and undipped her own light from her belt. Sebasten-Januarias did not answer, and she stepped up beside him, training her own light on the hole. Light flared back at her, glittering as though from a hundred, a thousand tiny mirrors. She blinked, dazzled, and then realized what she was seeing. Someone— and who else could it have been but the hijackers?—had smashed everything in sight, everything moveable, and swept the fragments into the lower hull on top of the distillery. She swept her light slowly across the glinting field, picking out bits that might have been part of the instrumentation, something that might have been a tape player, something that gleamed white as picked bone…. She swallowed hard, and swung the light away again.
“Sten, get your camera over here, too,” she said flatly, and trained her own machine on the field of debris. “Jan, Alexieva, I need more light.”
The others obeyed without speaking, and for a long moment there was no sound in the compartment except the faint whisper of the cameras. “Full reel, Heikki,” Djuro said at last, and Heikki glanced at her own indicator in some surprise. Ten seconds of disk left, she thought, and kept the machine going until the very end. She lowered the camera then, just as Sebasten-Januarias said, “Heikki, shouldn’t we, I don’t know, bring some of it back—?
Heikki shook her head. “There’s no time,” she said, and tried to speak gently.
“We’ll be back,” Djuro said, “probably lift the whole thing out, right, Heikki?”
“Probably,” Heikki agreed, and glanced at her lens. Almost in the same instant, Nkosi’s voice said in her ears, “Heikki, you had best come back right now.”
“On our way,” Heikki answered, and collected the others with a glance. “You heard the man. Let’s move.”
The clearing seemed deceptively peaceful, empty except for the jumper at the far end, its rotos beating steadily against the breeze. Alexieva threw back her head, unslinging the blast-rifle she had been carrying across her shoulders; as if in answer, a sound like a throaty cough sounded from beyond the trees to their left.
“They’re circling around the sonics,” the surveyor said, quite calmly now. “Go on, I’ll cover you.”
“Right,” Heikki said, and waved the others forward. She drew her own blaster and started after them, checking the charge as she moved. Alexieva backed after her, the blast-rifle levelled. They had covered perhaps two-thirds of the distance to the jumper when there was a movement in the trees to the left.
“Damnation,” Alexieva said, quite distinctly, and fired twice. The short bursts kicked up smoke and dirt at the forest edge—she had fired quite deliberately into the ground, Heikki thought, with a sort of remote surprise.
“Keep moving,” Alexieva called, and the first of the orcs edged out into the open. It was deceptively thin-limbed, a gangling biped, covered in mottled grey-green fur only a little lighter than the trees around it. It didn’t look very impressive, Heikki thought, lifting her own blaster, and then the creature coughed again, baring enormous yellow tusks. Alexieva fired again, still into the ground, but the orc hesitated only for an instant before slipping sideways past the little plume of smoke. It moved very fast, limbs blurring. Heikki fired twice, and missed both times. A second orc appeared, and then a third, fanning out to try and get between the humans and their ship. More shapes moved behind them, slipping between the trees. Alexieva took careful aim then, and fired twice more. The leading orc dropped. The survivors shrieked, enraged, and then the nearer of the two dropped to all fours beside the corpse, sniffing at the body.
Alexieva let out a sigh of relief. “Let’s go,” she said, not taking her eyes off the orcs. The second survivor was sniffing at the corpse now; with a snarl, the first cuffed it away and began to feed.
Heikki lowered her blaster, and sprinted for the hatch, Alexieva at her heels. Djuro hauled them both into the jumper, and dogged the hatch behind them. “Get us out of here, Jock,” he ordered, and Heikki echoed him, “Yeah, do it.”
The engines whined up to lifting pitch, the sound rising a little more quickly than usual. Heikki, starting to struggle to her feet, felt the jumper lurch into the air, and sank back onto the padded floor plates until Nkosi had stabilized the craft. The jumper shot upward, tipped at a slight sideways angle, and did not steady until they were well above the forest canopy.
“Is everything all right down there?” Nkosi said, after a moment.
“Just fine, Jock,” Heikki said, rather sourly, and Alexieva said, “I’m all right.”
“Good,” Nkosi answered. Heikki sighed, only too aware that she was shaking, and was glad to accept Djuro’s hand to help her to her feet.
“Back to Lowlands, Jock,” she said, and was too tired to care if the others heard the revulsion in her voice. “Take us home.”
CHAPTER 6
The flight back to Lowlands seemed interminable despite the fact that this time they took the most direct route. Heikki did her best to concentrate on the numbing task of editing the cameras’ data into a preliminary report, but by the time they landed at the Lowlands airfield, gliding down through the last of the afternoon’s rain, she had barely pulled together a crude precis. She shook her head, collected the disks, and followed Djuro from the jumper.
The field was sunlit again, despite the stray raindrops, light lancing through gaps in the slowly dissipating clouds. A warm wind ruffled the surface of the puddles, and set the jumper’s wings creaking faintly against their braces. Heikki looked toward the tower, shading her eyes against the low sun, and frowned. A low-slung car was sitting in the tower’s shadow, its windows blanked against the sun. A familiar figure— FitzGilbert, Heikki thought—stood beside it, her hands jammed belligerently into the pockets of her long overcoat.
“What the hell?” Djuro said, softly, and Nkosi said, from the jumper’s hatch, “Heikki, the tower says that Dam’ FitzGilbert is waiting to speak with you.”
“I see her,” Heikki said, without inflection. “Did the tower say what she wants?”
“Of course not,” Nkosi answered. “Did you expect they would?”
It wasn’t an unreasonable question, Heikki thought, irritably, but said nothing. She stared instead at the waiting car, chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip. The two Iadarans, emerging from the jumper, started to say something, and then fell silent, watching her. Heikki made a face, fully aware of the others’ stares, and jammed her hands into the pockets of her shift. “Wait here,” she said abruptly, and started across the hot-metalled strip toward the car, heedless of the wind that whipped the shift’s freefalling panels around her boottops.
FitzGilbert came to meet her, scowling, hands still buried in her pockets. “We got your message,” she called, as soon as her voice could be expected to carry across the space between them. Heikki raised a hand in answer, but said nothing until they stood almost face to face. FitzGilbert was wearing corporate uniform beneath the overcoat, the well-tailored high-collared jacket and
loose trousers seeming oddly out of place on the airfield. Her hair was braided up and back, held in place by a filigree net, invisible except when the sunlight caught it. Heikki was suddenly aware of her own disarray, of the undershift she’d slept in and the crumpled, well-worn shift, and her hair held back by a twist of cloth. She put that old inferiority aside, and made herself speak briskly.
“Then you know we found the latac.”
“So you said. Did you find the matrix?”
Heikki raised an eyebrow. “No. What do you mean, ‘so you said’? Has Lo-Moth lost so many craft that it can’t keep track of the wrecks?”
FitzGilbert had the grace to look abashed. “Our— principal—oh, hell, our parent company—wants to be sure it is the right craft before they spend the money. They’re being overcautious, but that’s their right.”
It was as close as FitzGilbert was likely to get to an apology, but Heikki was not appeased. “The serial numbers match, the crash site is damn close to the projected spot, and probably the foot we found can be matched to somebody’s medical records. I should’ve brought that with me.” FitzGilbert grimaced, and Heikki’s temper snapped. “Jesus, do you think we’re stupid, or just criminal?”
“I don’t think either,” FitzGilbert retorted, goaded, and stopped as abruptly as she’d begun, glancing over her shoulder toward the car. “You said you didn’t find the matrix?”
Heikki shook her head. “Whoever brought down the latac smashed everything moveable, but I think they took the matrix with them.”
FitzGilbert made a face, a tight movement on her lips that might have started out to be a bitter smile. “Our principal is taking the position that your job is done, now that you’ve found the site,” she said, her voice once more under tight control.
“My contract with Lo-Moth,” Heikki said, “hired me to analyze the wreck as well. And I think you might need that, considering.”
Mighty Good Road Page 17
