A scream split the driving sound of the rain: "The fence is down!" and lights all over the camp blinked to life. Coats were grabbed, and rain hats.
Mary Ann ran out into the mud and the bleeding sky, pulling on her coat as she went. They moved across the compound in a broken wave, running north to the grazing grounds. She splashed through puddles, slipped in mud, blinded by the rain. There was a scream to the left: "I found another one." She saw Jean Patterson struggling with a weak, terrified calf, wrestling it to the ground.
Mary Ann wiped the rain out of her face, tilled her head against the wind and, panting, headed for the swarm of hand-lamps buzzing around the fence. The wire was broken. It was ripped away from the posts, almost as if a jeep had been driven through it. The corrugated metal shelter was a shambles, and the corral was empty.
Desperately, in confusion, she began looking for tracks, spoor, anything. She recognized the wild laugh that came to her lips for the hysteria it was. In this rain, a herd of mastodons could have tromped through, and there simply wouldn't be any trace.
Cadmann was already at the shelter and stirring at the ground. A flash of lightning revealed a mass of blood and tissue working between his fingers. He grimaced in disgust. "No dog did this."
There were more yells, as more of the calves were found staggering in the darkness, braying into the wind. Zack puffed hard as he ran up. "What happened here, Weyland?"
"Hell if I know, and I don't think we're going to find out until morning, either."
"Take the calves over to the horse corral. They'll keep." Zack bent, looked at the metal. The sheeting looked as if it had been ripped with a power tool. "Jesus Christ. What could do something like this?"
Cadmann shook his head, but when he looked up at Mary Ann, there was both concern and vindication in his frown, a mixture that made her feel uneasy.
"What happened here?" Zack whispered again.
"I can tell you what happened," Terry said. Mary Ann whipped her head around at the ugly tone of his voice.
"What happened is that someone's been predicting trouble, and now we've got it. Happy, Weyland?"
Mary Ann wanted to spit in his face, ashamed that someone had spoken aloud the words she was whispering to herself. Instead, she balled up her hands and shouted, "Just go to hell, Terry!"
"To hear your boyfriend tell it, we already have."
Then he turned, walking away into the rain. Mary Ann knelt beside Cadmann, putting her arm around his shoulders.
He was shaking.
Chapter 5
AUTOPSY 1
What's the matter, you dissentious rogues,
That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,
make yourselves scabs?
SHAKESPEARE, Coriolanus
The Skeeter autogyro hummed up from the bank of the Miskatonic, crested the gorge and pivoted slowly, hovering. Its shielded tail rotors beat a curtain of dust from the ground.
Tau Ceti crawled towards the western mountains, a tiny glare-point momentarily eclipsed by the tarpaulined shape swinging from the belly of the gyro. Zack Moscowitz shielded his eyes against the glare with one hand, with the other held the veterinary clinic's door open. Sylvia Faulkner and Jerry Bryce emerged running. The doctor kept ahead of the dust cloud. He waved the Skeeter along the approach corridor between the animal pens and the shops.
Jerry must have come straight from his bed. His eyes were puffy; his unruly brown hair looked like the brambles that circled the plain. Sylvia wondered if he would be able to handle tonight's work.
"Where ‘d they find Ginger?" Zack coughed dust, hawked and spat.
Sylvia flinched. That kind of rudeness was totally out of character for Zack. "Half a kilometer upriver. Barney spotted it on his third flyby."
The Skeeter's engine whined, laboring as it hovered. Surely an illusion: the two-man craft could handle a ton of cargo. The calf's remains shuddered on the nylon palate as it spooled down, until palate and corpse flattened against an aluminum gurney.
Sylvia and Jerry wheeled the gurney into the clinic. The bulge beneath the tarp was not the shape of a calf. This wasn't going to be fun.
Stamping feet thundered in the horse pens as the colts and fillies backed as far away as they could. They tossed their manes, snorting, nostrils flaring. Zack sympathized totally. "No, it doesn't smell pretty, does it?" He stood back as the cart was wheeled up the ramp into the clinic. Sylvia guided, Jerry pushed. "I still can't believe this is happening." He eased the door shut behind them.
Jerry took the cart the rest of the way in. Sylvia watched as the Skeeter dipped toward the western wall of brambles. "We haven't found anything on the infrared?"
"Nothing but turkeys and pterodons," Zack said quietly. "I've been checking every half hour. Nothing on visual, nothing on audio, nothing on infrared or radar. For a hundred square kilometers." He wagged his head in disgust. "I don't know what to think. If there's something out there, it means trouble. But if there isn't anything out there... did you say who found this?"
"Carr."
"Yes, right. May I?" She handed Zack the clipboard and he jotted a note to himself. His handwriting, neurotically neat at the best of times, looked machine-printed.
Sylvia took his arm affectionately. "Zack—don't try to be everywhere at once. We'll take care of this." He started to protest, and she turned his chin, examining his bloodshot eyes. "You get any sleep?"
"Usually I count sheep. You wouldn't believe what was vaulting the fence last night—"
Jerry peeled back the outer tarp.
"Sheez!" Sylvia moved back from the sudden stench of unrefrigerated flesh. It smelled wet and suncooked and corrupt: the kind of odor that conjures an image of hungry flies and heavy spices; the smell that permeates a back-street butcher shop on a warm summer afternoon.
Zack was trying to back out of the room, but the sight and moist sound as the tarp was peeled away held him transfixed. As the last layer of cloth left the corpse, he grunted in disgust and turned his head.
One of the calf's legs was gone. Another was broken, chewed almost completely through, hanging at an angle. A hideously raw wound gaped in the center of the body. Skin and muscle had been ripped away, ribs snipped cleanly or shattered, jagged edges jutting through the flesh. The bones were grooved and splintered as if something had tried to push Ginger sideways through a wheat thresher.
Marnie hooked a gauze mask around her ears. "All right, Jerry, start the camera." Her voice had a lisp that turned "Jerry" to ‘Sherry', although she pronounced each word with extreme care.
Jerry looked up at the ceiling. "Cassandra. Program. Autopsy assistant. Run."
A glowing crystal at the end of a gooseneck extension snaked down from the ceiling. The video camera paused patiently as Jerry adjusted a collar at the top of its neck. Its red eye winked on. "Okay. Program is running. Recorders on. Go, Marnie."
Marnie wheeled over the tray of instruments and pulled on rubber gloves. The stomach wound swallowed her arms to the elbow.
"I note puncture marks around the throat without further damage inflicted there. Buttocks and abdominal muscle removed. I suggest that death was caused by severing of the jugular and carotids, but that the attacker dragged his prey to safety, and there consumed the, ah, missing tissue and internal organs." Her delivery was precise enough to compensate for much of the mushiness of her lisp. Years from now this would be seen all over the Earth.
"The bones are neatly sheared—almost too neatly, I would think.
Jerry, take a look at this."
Her husband came to her side and pulled on a pair of plastic gloves. "Sylvia," he said quickly. "Get on the console and follow us with the camera." The glowing crystal wound its way to Marnie's shoulder and perched there, peering. "What have you got?"
"Just a moment." Sylvia fiddled with the controls: suddenly the abdominal wound was floating in front of her, in living color. Her own stomach rolled, and she leached some of the color from the video stage. Little of this would be seen by Earth's billions. Too much blood. Maybe there was an underground market?
Jerry's hand walked into the image, pointing at a rib that hadn't been ripped away. His scarecrow body moved smoothly now, in familiar habit patterns. "We have bite marks here—" His fingers traced several notches. "I want a projection based on bite radius, jaw pressure and overall strength. Whatever killed Ginger had power. It had to move her fast."
"I'm not doing anything useful," Zack said. "I'm going over to Control to check the infrared returns." No one answered. "I just hope to hell something has come up."
As soon as he was out of the room, Marnie looked up. "Nothing yet? Not a flicker?"
Sylvia shook her head. "Nothing. Not one of the Skeeters has picked up anything larger than a turkey."
"And Cadmann's still out there looking?"
"First out, last back. You know Madman Weyland." The torn flesh disappeared from the video stage, replaced by a two-dimensional column of numbers. Sylvia turned to the computer monitor. "Cassandra. Imaging." As she talked her words and numbers were transformed into lines of color. She manipulated them with an optical pencil until they became teeth and a crude mandible.
Marnie exchanged terse words with her husband. They looked at the wounds and the luminous outline hovering in the air in front of the pregnant biologist, and tried to shut down their imaginations. They were not entirely successful.
Ginger had yielded up the last of her secrets, and lay quiet now, refolded within her shroud of waterproofed canvas.
The operating room reeked of disinfectant and strong coffee. They sipped coffee while they examined the video image. A disembodied brace of teeth without muscle or flesh floated in the air, grinning, mocking their confusion.
"I come up with something like a hyena's jaw, more teeth, broader bones." Sylvia's finger traced the jawline.
"Not strong enough," Jerry sighed. "Remember the way the ribs were sheared. Cleanly. I can't think of anything strong enough—"
"—to cut those bones?" Marnie shook her head. "We're not talking strength here. There are plenty of animals who have the strength. It's the pressure I can't believe." The camera hummed. "So much force concentrated in such a small area. You're talking about a carnivore built like a stegosaurus—leviathan body, peanut head." She drained her cup, clattering it down on the counter. "And I don't believe that, either."
"Don't believe what?" Sylvia was staring at those jaws. The teeth would be like shears, and unbelievably powerful. She shuddered.
"I don't believe a carnivore the size of a rhino with the speed of a leopard." Marnie threw her hands into the air. "I'm sorry! There's just nothing that size on the island."
"Maybe it swam over," Sylvia said in a small voice.
"But there's nothing here now."
"Maybe it swam back."
Jerry stared at the image for a long moment, then shook his head uneasily. "We'd better hope to hell that that's just exactly what it did."
The pterodon beat its leathery brown wings in slow motion, craning its claw-hammer head to skaw displeasure at the humming, hovering intruder in its domain. Frightened at first, it had lost some of its natural caution, spiraling closer and closer to the thing, trying to decide if it posed a threat. Suddenly the bulbous head of the intruder erupted in light, turning dusk into midday burning brighter than Tau Ceti at its height. Blinded, the pterodon cawed and reversed its arc, heading for the safety of its nest, high in the crags of Mucking Great Mountain.
Cadmann chuckled and wiggled the searchlight toggle, playing the Skeeter's beams around the pond at the base of the mountain. It scanned clear, except for a few samlon near the surface. Nothing large had been near it recently: the infrared would pick up a man-sized heat trace half an hour old.
Fed by trickles of snow melt and a tributary from the southern highlands, the pond was the largest body of still water for fifty square kilometers. If there was a large carnivore in the vicinity, surely it knew of this watering hole. Perhaps it even fished for samlon here...
The pond stared up at him, a blind eye around the edges, dead black in the center. The water shivered as he brought the Skeeter down for a closer look. "How deep are you, fella--?"
Before the thought could congeal, his earphones buzzed. Cadmann cleared his throat into the microphone. "Weyland here. Found anything?"
It was Zack on the other end. "Not a thing, Cad. You?"
"Not yet, but—"
"We need to have Town meeting tonight. Head on in."
"I've still got a quadrant to sweep."
Cadmann could almost hear Zack counting under his breath.
"Cadmann—you've already swept your entire area twice. Everyone else is in. We've been at this all day. We need to talk, and nobody wants to wait any longer."
"But—"
"I'm too tired to play martinet, Cad. Do me a favor and just come back in."
The pond stared at him. Something about it made his stomach itch with tension. He wheeled the Skeeter around for a long look at the plateau. The brambles were struggling for a foothold on the square kilometer of naked rock, and Cadmann saw that yes, a trap could...
Suddenly he was smiling as he climbed, spun the Skeeter around and dived toward the lights of the Colony.
There were no colorful newsreels or densely worded technical briefs displayed on the walls of the communal meal hall. There were no sharp, tangy vegetable smells, and no warm buzz of camaraderie.
A low mutter of disgust tinged with fear wound its way through the group as they faced the floating image of the dead calf, its wounds marked with flashing green labels.
Mary Ann gripped Cadmann's hand; her nails bit into his palm every time the camera zoomed in on a wound, until he carefully disengaged her hand and put it firmly in her lap.