“I'm going down there. I need to see this place up close and personal,” Kris said.
“Kris,” Jack said.
“Jack, I don't want to read a report. I want to be there. See this the way it is. I've got a report to make to my great-grandfather and, I suspect, all of human space. Of this, I must bear witness,” she said, jerking a thumb at the view.
Jack gnawed his lower lip but said no more.
“Colonel, you want to come?”
“Definitely. Captain,” he said to Jack, “I hope you will provide us the assistance of your full forensic team. “
“I suspect we'll land all four longboats, what with the Marines and the boffins.”
“Can I come, too?” came in a small voice from where the door to the Tac Center had edged open a crack.
“Cara, what are you doing here?” Kris asked.
“Dada told me that you were going dirtside, and I ran down here to ask if I could go, too.”
“Dada?” Kris echoed the name of Cara's computer, one of Nelly's kids.
“I knew we'd made orbit around an interesting planet, from what the boffins were saying, so I asked Dada to listen in on her mom's net for anything that looked like fun.”
“Nelly?” Kris now said. “Do we have a security breach?”
“Ah, yes, Kris, it does appear so.” It was funny to hear a computer so embarrassed and searching for words. “I have all my other children on a shared net. I, ah, didn't notice that Dada had been lurking there, too.”
“It seemed like a good idea,” came in a different voice from Cara's. “You grown-ups are always ignoring us kids and never tell us anything.”
“Little pitchers have big ears,” Penny said, not making much of an effort to suppress a smile.
“Can I go? Please,” the thirteen-year-old pleaded.
“We could really use a field trip,” Dada added. “Professor Lynch is teaching us science, and he says videos can't capture the real feel of nature.”
Kris noticed that all the so-called grown-ups in the room were looking around at each other, none willing to make the call. She considered the subject of this landing, fields of dead bodies, and wondered if a kid belonged there.
Kris dodged that and tried another thought. “This field trip will be in space suits,” Kris said. “Do you have a suit?”
“Of course I do,” Cara said. “It was a little snug the last emergency drill, but it still fits. It should.”
Like most kids, Cara needed new everything at alarming frequencies. But the comment also reminded Kris that the kid
was
growing up. If memory served, Kris hadn't much liked it when adults remembered her smaller and didn't notice as she got bigger.
“Well,” Kris said, taking the bull, if not by the horns, then at least by something. “You'll have to ask your aunt.”
“Oh, you're tossing this my way?” Kris's maid snapped.
“Seems like a good idea,” Kris said. “She is asking for permission to leave the ship this time. I'd call that an improvement.”
The young subject of their consideration turned pink at the reference to her previous antic . . . and disaster. “I am asking this time. Please, can I go with you?”
Abby looked clearly torn. The kid was safe on the ship. As safe as any of them were. On the surface of a murdered planet . . . ?
“Is this Professor Lynch going down with the boffins?”
“He has asked to be included,” Professor mFumbo said.
“Do you have space for him?” Jack asked.
“That depends,” the professor said. “At present, I've got enough scientists to fill two launches. How many Marines are you taking down?”
Jack ran a worried hand through his hair. “I guess I'm taking two launches full of Marines, less the space taken up by these rubberneckers.”
Kris did a quick survey of the room. Penny raised her hand. So did the colonel and Abby. “Chief, you want to be included in this jaunt dirtside?”
“No way. That place looks cold and miserable, and I don't see anything down there that you can't bring up here for me to examine in the comfort of my own shop.”
Kris was none too sure of that, but for now, she'd let the devout coward worship at his personal altar.
“With Cara and Jack, you'll have five rubberneckers.”
“Hurray!” Cara shouted and headed off to get ready. She failed to close the door, so Kris could hear her skipping down the passageway, the very image of innocent joy.
Kris shook her head. “If we could bottle that, I'd buy a case.”
“It's our own damn fault that we lose it when we get old and grumpy,” Abby said, the picture of a grump herself.
“Okay, folks,” Kris said, standing up. “There's a planet down there. What happened to it is a crime screaming for whatever justice this universe can give. Let's go investigate the crime scene.”
23
The loaded launch flew across what had once been a sea. That fact was emphasized when Kris spotted something and got permission from the boson flying to use the third backup camera.
Nelly pointed it back to what had caught Kris's eye. There, in the middle of what was now a desert, were over a hundred calcified exoskeletons.
“Any guess what those are?” Kris asked.
“They look huge,” Jack said. “If this was ocean, then they must have filled the econiche held by the whale on old Earth.”
“That lobster would take quite a bit of melted butter,” the colonel said, smacking his lips.
“They look like a pod of beached whales,” Penny said, thoughtfully. “The receding water must have caught them there and left them high and dry.”
“That would be horrible,” Cara said, from where she sat beside Abby.
“I suspect we're going to be hearing that a lot,” Kris said, and had Nelly switch off the screen.
They were coming up on what some guessed to be the coastline. Kris had Nelly use the spare camera again to capture their landfall. There had been a city there, once. It hadn't been nuked but had been flattened by several rocks. The actual shore area was on the periphery of the zone of destruction.
The camera caught a long pier jutting out from the shore. Kris had gone fishing from just such a pier several times in different resorts around Wardhaven. What Kris would have taken for an amusement park, complete with roller coaster and Ferris wheel, passed quickly under them.
The Ferris wheel was over on its side, and the upper reaches of the roller coaster had been knocked loose. The cars from the coaster now spread along the ground beneath that break. They and the Ferris wheel still showed evidence of smashed and scattered exoskeletons.
“That's horrible,” escaped Cara in a whisper.
Nelly changed the picture. One of the vanished forests came into view. The scrub brush that had tried to rise in its place showed dead itself.
“Regrowth never had a chance,” Penny said.
“No,” Kris agreed.
Cara just stared at the pictures, her mouth open in a silent
Oh
. Apparently, there was a limit to how much horror one thirteen-year-old girl could respond to.
The 1/c bosun's mate piloting the launch was aiming for one of the cutoff mountains. Jack had seen to it that the first launch that got away from the
Wasp
was combat-loaded with Marines. They had come down there the orbit before.
Jack held Kris's launch on the
Wasp
until the skipper of first platoon reported, “Nothing hostile here bigger than an ant, Skipper. And even the bugs are skittering away from the noise the launch made.”
Still, the two launches with boffins were ahead of Kris's lander. Jack took Kris's security seriously, even when there was nothing much alive on a raped planet.
The landing was an experience; wind and what little rain there had been had done what it could to smooth the plain of the scraped-off mountain. Still, those who had done this did not have a shuttle landing field in mind as they did it.
Ron the Iteeche had wanted to join Kris on this drop, but his advisors had looked the landing zone over and talked him out of risking himself in the harness the humans would use to strap him into one of their landers. As knocked around as the landing was for Kris, she found herself glad that Ron had agreed to follow them on net and read the reports later.
The aft hatch of the launch opened slowly. With a whoosh, the residual air inside fled into the lower pressure outside.
“This planet has about one-quarter the air pressure of Earth,” Professor mFumbo reported. “The atmosphere's content is about what Mother Earth gave us, seventy-seven percent nitrogen and twenty-two percent oxygen, with minor contributions from other gases. What we have here is Earth atmosphere at thirty thousand feet. Please don't open your suit masks,” he added.
Kris led her team out of the lander, right behind Jack. At least he didn't have his automatic out.
The scene that met Kris's eyes brought her to a halt. Her mouth went tight, and her stomach flipped. “Desolation” was the only word that came to mind.
Death and desolation. As far as the eye could see was a dusty emptiness. Off to her right, a boffin from one of the other landers kicked over a stone and reached down. Protected from the blistering wind and sun, some sort of life clung to its underside.
“We're finding some lichens, a few mosses, and two kinds of fungi,” Professor mFumbo reported. “There are also some bugs that eke out a bare survival on them. Not much alive here, though.”
“Where are the bodies?” Kris asked.
“The Marines have the killing field staked out,” Jack said. “No one has entered it, yet. However, I think we have an answer to the colonel's question as to how they died.”
“What have they found?” the colonel asked.
“Residue of Sarin gas,” Jack said.
“Ugh,” was all the colonel said.
“What's Sarin gas?” Cara asked.
“Nasty stuff,” the colonel said.
“Illegal stuff,” Penny added.
“It's illegal for humans to use it on humans,” Kris explained. “ Against the laws of war and reason.”
“Think of it as a jacked-up insecticide,” the colonel said. “Especially if they mixed it with a bit of oil, it sticks to the skin, gets inside, and destroys your nervous system in as little as one minute. It makes it so you can't breathe.”
Through her bubble helmet, the girl's face again showed pain at what she heard, but words failed her.
“Want to go back to the lander?” Abby asked.
“No. No. I can take this,” Cara insisted.
“Do you have any idea how they delivered the gas?” the colonel asked Jack.
“No. The Marine guard has cordoned off the killing field. All they've done is a preliminary chemical check of the soil. That turned up the Sarin residue. The actual gas, thank God, broke down a long time ago.”
“Broke down?” Kris asked.
“Sarin is not very persistent,” Nelly said. “It degrades in the sun and rain.”
“Did we have enough rain here?” Kris asked.
From the looks of it, Jack tried to shrug. That's hard to do in a fully armored space suit. He finally said, “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“I've checked with the Marines doing the chemical check,” Nelly reported in a moment. “They are finding Sarin residue. No Sarin. I'd suggest that we wash down our suits after this, but I don't think you humans have anything to worry about.”
“Thank you, Nelly,” Kris said.
While they talked, they'd been walking toward two Marine guards standing at the edge of the flattened mountain. If the look of the scraped mountain was shocking, the sight along the rising ground below was beyond words.
Kris's experience with bugs had been limited. Loddy, the cook at Nuu House, kept a spotless kitchen. There had been one infestation of cockroaches when Kris was about Cara's age. Kris had helped the cook spread out the roach hotels and emptied them a few days later.
She remembered one other time when she'd helped the gardener with a particularly bad summer crop of some kind of bugs. She'd been three at the time and didn't want him to hurt the bugs. She'd spent as much time as her small attention span allowed picking bugs off the flowers and toddling over to the gate to send them flying free.
If she remembered right, she hadn't been allowed to play in the garden for several days after that. Once she'd scampered off to other interests, no doubt the gardener had done his job.
Someone had certainly done a job here.
The escarpment was covered with portions of shells or complete exoskeletons. Thousand and thousands of them. You could see where others had crawled off to die at the foot of the hill.
These weren't garden nuisances, sanitary challenges to a spick-and-span kitchen. These were intelligent creatures who built towns and roads that had lasted long beyond them.
One of the boffins, his suit said Dr. Lynch, made his way carefully down the hill. He stopped at the first complete body he found and stooped to examine it.
“There's no soft tissue left,” he reported. He lifted up the skull to examine it. “No teeth, just a ridge of chitin. I doubt there's anything left from which we could get DNA. Still, I'll collect a number of these more intact bodies and see if there isn't something they can tell us.”
“You do that,” Kris said. “Chief, can you direct us to that other skeleton you found?”
“It's off to your right, where the ground is steeper.”
Kris and her group moved that way. A number of Marines came and hammered in spikes with ropes attached. Dr. Lynch joined them, along with three Marines with CSI stenciled on their packs. The four of them roped up and began a careful descent.