Orissus hawked, spat. Growled, “Could be. You know the Yanks wouldn’t design anything that would target a Yank.”
Nox leaned forward and threw up.
“Though I could be wrong,” Orissus said.
“It was a hypothesis,” said Leo.
“Then we’ve caught an alien virus,” said Faunus. “That’s not supposed to happen.”
Pallas swallowed painfully. Said, “It did.”
Galeo bent over his knees, talked into the ground. “So what do we do?”
Nox spat, stood up. “We do what we were sent to do.”
25
K
ERRY BLUE SLID BACK her canopy. It got snagged halfway back on the limpet net.
The net dispersed heat, so it was cool to touch. Kerry unlinked it to make a hole for her to get out of her Swift.
She climbed out of her cockpit, laughing. Looked around to see where everyone else was.
Great big lake over there. No bubbles that she could see. Nobody landed in that.
A voice in her headset sounded like Big Richard. “Can we do that again?”
The colonel was barking at them to call in by the numbers.
They’d come down in daylight into an area that couldn’t decide if it was field or forest. The rolling land was covered with high grasses of green, red, brown, and yellow, with clots of gray tree-ish things throughout.
Dak had come down in a stand of trees. He assured everyone loudly that the trees were thorny.
The air was warm. Kerry got out of her flight suit, then snapped her displacement collar back on. She tucked her landing disk into her field pack to bring with.
Not sure why they were lugging displacement equipment. They had orders to call for rapture only in the direst emergency.
Kerry pulled out the old-style camouflage netting from the Swift’s storage compartment and draped her Swift. She mustered with the others at the colonel’s coordinates.
The Marines were pretty well scattered, so mustering took a while.
They looked out for clokes, but there was nothing like a rotten stick-figured sponge in sight.
Tall grasses nodded in the yellow sunlight.
Asante Addai pulled up the coordinates for the cloke shipwreck on his omni to get oriented. With his eyes focused on the handheld, he pointed. “We need to go that way. South.”
“Into the lake,” said Kerry Blue.
“What?” Asante looked up from his handheld.
“There’s a BFL in the way,” said Carly.
Big lake. Very big. Actually it was more like an inland sea.
“Yes. Yes, there sure is,” said Asante seeing that now. “Good news is the shipwreck is on dry land. Three klicks as the crow flies.”
“That’s just wucking fonderful,” said Cain. “How far is that in dry miles?”
“More like eight klicks around the lakeshore.”
Colonel Steele got off the com with the
Merrimack
. He ordered his squad, “Bring your gear. Move out. We’re hiking around. This way.”
Steele took first point. Kerry Blue took ass-end Charlie. She was usually found in the farthest position from the colonel when they were on the ground. Wasn’t fooling anyone. But her comrades appreciated the charade.
The lake had shrunk from some past age, leaving a high, heavily forested and thorn-vined ridge around it.
Below the ridgeline lay a wide, flat shore of pebbled sand. The going was much easier down there, so that’s where they hiked, with the Old Man yelling at them once every klick not to bunch up.
Faces appeared up on the ridge, peeking between the gray trees. The faces had pointed muzzles and bright black eyes.
“What are those?” Kerry pointed up. “Are those foxes?”
“They look like foxes,” said Asante.
The pre-drop briefing said that the foxes were not aggressive toward humans. That was good because there seemed to be a whole tribe of them up there.
After a while, a trio of foxes came scampering down the incline. They were youthfully sleek. One was jet black. The other two reddish gray. They had huge claws.
The Marines were carrying swords, but no one felt an impulse to reach for his.
Steele had been issued a language nodule, but it didn’t seem to be working. The foxes came up to him humming the damnedest mash up of off-key notes, but the nodule was not translating a word.
The three creatures ran rings around the Marines like dogs playing, then they ran toward the steep slope and looked back, as if expecting the Marines to follow.
The Yurg tried throwing a stick, but the foxes didn’t seem to understand the concept of fetch.
“Stop playing with the animals,” Steele bellowed. “Keep up the pace.”
They continued their march toward the crash site.
The foxes acted increasingly frantic. And they were definitely trying to lead the Marines away from the shoreline.
Walking was easier on the lakeshore than up on the wooded ridge. Asante checked his omni for any activity that might have set off the foxes. He didn’t see anything threatening.
The foxes abandoned them. The trio threaded up the incline and disappeared with their troop into the trees.
Dak Shepard hiked in the shadow of the steep ridge rather than in the sunlight at the water’s edge. He set his pack down to adjust his boot. He’d picked up a thorn from somewhere.
A sudden
splat!
made him jump, lose his balance.
A tree, way up on the ridge, had dropped a soft-skinned bright orange pumpkin in front of him.
It splattered with an overripe stench.
Off to his right, an arc of water lifted. A silvery dart came at him—a dart more the size of a bus—opening up vast jaws as it came.
Dak dove out of the path of the oncoming mouth.
The lake serpent snapped up the pumpkin and writhed backward to the water.
Asante checked his omni. “That has to be a scylla.”
Dak cried, “I don’t give a—”
“Look out!” A silver blue-white flash just below the surface made the rest of the squad move away from the water’s edge.
Another scylla, or the same scylla, came arrowing up onto the beach. Rows of razor teeth showed inside the mouth that seemed to be a third of its endless body. It snatched something in its massive jaws and pushed the length of its eternal self back toward the water with its wide front fins.
Dak chased it, yelling, “It’s got my pack! Get it! Get it! Get it!”
The squad filled the lake monster’s head with exploding splinters. The beast died in the shallows.
It took all of the Marines to drag the thing up the beach, except for Asante who set his omni to watching out for other scyllas in the water.
Apparently it was every fish for himself. No one came to help this scylla. No one came to eat him either.
Dak’s pack was not inside the huge jaws.
“Oh, crap, he swallowed.”
Cain cut the scylla open with his sword, starting at its throat. He kept sawing down. And down. He had to hit stomach sometime.
“Are you sure this is the one that got your pack?” said Cain, sweat running down his face. “You better be sure.”
The Yurg took over sawing. He came to a big bladder that might be a stomach. It was undulating.
“Ho! Look at that!”
The Yurg sliced the bladder open. The inside of the bladder was entirely ringed with row after row of teeth. Even with its brain demolished, the scylla’s stomach was still chewing on pungent orange pulp. And on Dak’s field pack.
The Marines used shovels to fish Dak’s pack clear of the teeth. They left the stomach, still chewing, at the water’s edge.
Steele led the squad away from the lakeshore and up the steep embankment to take their hike through the trees on the high ground.
And they picked up their entourage of foxes again. This time it was the whole fox troop—maybe thirty of them—and they wanted to play. They frisked alongside the Marines, sniffing, bowing, running circles.
Asante looked up scyllas on the omni. He read aloud, “‘Fresh water aquatic carnivore.’ Hey. Get this. ‘Scyllas have been known to pull themselves thirty meters up the beach to get a stink pumpkin fallen to the ground in season.’”
“Really?” said Dak, sour. His pack reeked.
“You know? I don’t think that thing was going for your pack,” said Asante. “I think it was after the pumpkins. Your pack was collateral damage.”
“I don’t care!” said Dak. “How close are we to the spaceship?”
“According to this, we just passed it.” Asante lifted his hand, signaled the column to halt.
Dak stopped. “How far past?”
“You and I are past it. The rest of us aren’t.” Asante turned around. “I should be looking at it.”
“We walked over it?”
Asante backtracked ten paces. “We’re here. Yurg, you’re standing on it.”
Yurg looked down. “Not.” He stomped on solid ground.
Asante beckoned the rest of the column to come forward.
The trees were thinner here and smaller.
The foxes didn’t like this place, but they were not so emphatic as they’d been on the lakeshore around the scyllas. Here they held their tails over their noses. They didn’t like the smell.
“I don’t smell anything,” said Dak.
“I do,” said Carly. “It smells . . . clokey.”
It was the same dank smell that clung to her hand after she carried the severed cloke arm back to camp when they’d retrieved Roodoverhemd’s body.
The squad had been issued shovels and archaeologist’s trowels. Kerry looked at the trowel. Looked at the hard dirt. Looked at the trowel. “They are kidding.”
Big Richard jabbed his shovel at the dirt. Its blade cut a quarter inch in. He stopped. Backed away. “Exactly
how
far under is this thing?”
The foxes caught on to what they were about, moved in, and took over.
“Ho!
Frommage
!” Dak yelled. “Look ’em go!”
Hard-packed clay, pebbles, rocks, and roots went flying from under the foxes’ digging claws.
They soon hit curved metal and kept digging down around it.
The Marines stood back and watched. Steele couldn’t even order them in to assist. They would just be a drag on the operation.
A clumsy, fuzzy-coated baby fox waddled through the weeds and pawed at Dak’s boots. Dak picked the pup up. It had some weight to it, but a lot less than his field pack, and it was a hell of a lot cuter. Dak liked cute things. The pup was pudgy, its downy fur reddish-gray with black socks. “Hey ya, little guy.”
The fox puppy licked Dak’s chin.
“Flight Sergeant. What are you doing?” That was Colonel Steele.
Dak nodded his head down sideways to where the foxes were unearthing what was starting to look like a spaceship. “Supervising, sir.”
The fox pup curled into a comfortable ball in Dak’s arms and shut its big eyes.
“They’re doing a good job, sir,” said Dak.
The excavation crew had uncovered the whole alien spacecraft. Now they were cleaning their claws and combing their fur.
The alien ship’s design was a basic flying cigar. The bulk of it was an antiquated hydrogen powerplant. The rest of the vessel was a cylinder no bigger than a Swift.
“Skat. That’s not very big,” said the Yurg.
The dimensions were not human-sized. Neither were the clokes, so that made sense.
“Those things came in
this
?” Dak said, dubious. “This barge must have been stuffed like Kerry Blue’s locker.”
Mama fox came to collect her cub from Dak. She took the sleeping furball and popped it into her belly pouch. The opening contracted so fast, Dak wasn’t sure what he just saw.
“Did you see that?” Dak cried.
“Ignore the foxes!” Steele bellowed.
Icky Iverson found a round hatch in the spaceship’s fuselage. He pulled on it. And immediately dropped it back in place, surprised.
“It’s not locked!”
“Something must have come out,” said Rhino. She pulled the hatch back open.
“They came out a very long time ago,” said Asante, counting the strata in the dirt walls of the excavation pit.
“Look for a radio,” said Cain. “We’re supposed to check for radios.”
“Look how?” said Rhino. “I can’t get in there. Hell, I couldn’t get Carly in there.”
The hatchway was small. You couldn’t get a fox in there, and the foxes were not volunteering to try.
“Who’s got the crowbar?” said Rhino.