"Disturbing?" The pilot looked uncertain. "Like what, Captain?"
"Like I don't know - yet. Use your own judgment." He tapped the communicator on his duty belt. "We'll keep in touch."
Stepping out of the shuttle, it was difficult to believe that anything was amiss. Indigenous wildlife filled the nearby forest and the open meadow with intermittent alien song. Arboreal life-forms flitted among the trees and skittered through the waist-high blue-bladed ground cover. Plotting a simple straight line, Trohanov led his people away from the shuttle and into the woods.
The gently rolling ground did not slow them, and the absence of dense underbrush except in isolated copses allowed rapid progress. With the shuttleport lying to their northeast, Trohanov calculated, if they maintained their current pace they ought to reach the southernmost outskirts of the city by midafternoon. That would not allow much time for exploring, but they ought to be able to secure transport into the city center. Someone at Administration would be able to clear things up and to explain the nature of whatever emergency had befallen the colony.
But there was no transport readily available in the southern suburbs of Weald. There was very little left of the suburb they entered, or for that matter of the rest of the city.
Its inhabitants, it was revealed, were as dead as their communications.
Whatever smoke and flame had risen from the ruins had long since burned itself out. Except for the occasional darting shape of a native scavenger working the dead, the city was devoid of movement. Finding and righting a small skimmer that still retained half its power charge, they succeeded in covering considerably more ground than they would have been able to do on foot.
The destruction was selective as opposed to total. Many of the city's buildings were still intact, from individual or group habitations to municipal facilities such as the central water-treatment plant. But the center of the city, where Administration had been located, was a spacious, silent crater. Ramparts of fused glass sloped down to a pile of vitreous slag in the center. On the northern outskirts of the city, a similar pit marked the spot where the colony's intersystem space-minus communications shaft and facility had been located.
All that afternoon they scoured the capital in search of survivors, and found none. Those bodies that had not been incinerated by shot or subsequent fire displayed indisputable evidence of having been shattered by violence. Come early evening Trohanov found himself kneeling alongside an entire family. Trapped inside a small shop, they had evidently attempted to make a stand against whatever had ravaged their community. Signs that a blockaded doorway had been smashed inward lay scattered everywhere.
Whatever weapon had been used to kill them was thorough and messy. Though no forensic pathologist, Trohanov could see as clearly as anyone that something had struck each of the bodies and blown them apart. The remains of the father lay in the middle of the floor, where he had apparently attempted to intercept the intruders. Back in a corner they found the corpse of the mother splattered over those of two preadolescent boys. In a warmer climate the stench in the room, as elsewhere in the city, would have been overpowering. The cold, clear air of Treetrunk had helped to slow decomposition and decay. Otherwise, it would have been impossible for the crew to have continued their investigation.
As it was, several of the small group became sick at different times that afternoon. The slaughter gave every indication of having been carried out in a relentless and methodical fashion. Returning to the shuttle, Trohanov informed Hollis and the rest of his crew of what he and the others had found and took care to relay the visual information they had managed to collect. Returning to the ship, they compressed and sent it on its way to Earth, entangling it with the first quantum receiver that acknowledged their transmission.
In the silence of the bulbous ship no one slept. As soon as Trohanov felt able, he took a larger team back down to the surface. This time they set down near the colony's first community and second city, the municipality that had been named Chagos Downs after the ship that had originally explored the Argus system. There was no shuttleport at the Downs, but there were landing facilities for suborbital aircraft. Unfortunately, those facilities had suffered the same fate as their much larger counterpart at Weald, and the crew once again had to set down in the nearest available field.
Chagos Downs was a mirror image of disaster, albeit on a smaller scale. The same conditions applied as they had encountered in the capital: Many structures had been left standing and intact, some with no sign of damage at all, while others had been completely reduced. As before, there were no survivors. Like the inhabitants of Weald, the citizens of the Downs had been slaughtered where they had been found; attempting to surrender to unknown assailants, lying in bed, slumped over instruments and other devices while busy at work, caught preparing meals, on the streets, and in hallways. From the eldest patient in the hospital to the youngest infant, no one had been spared.
Whoever, whatever had committed the atrocity had been relentlessly thorough in seeing to it that not one survivor was left breathing to comment on the cataclysm. Trohanov knew it was not his responsibility to try and find out who was responsible. The crew member who had spoken out earlier doubtless had being doing no more than voicing the concerns and opinion of many of his colleagues. They were crew on a deep-space transport: not soldiers, not mass-homicide investigators, not government operatives. Whatever had happened on Treetrunk was terrible, but it was not their business to try and fix responsibility. Nor could Trohanov leave his ship under Hollis's command to resume its voyage while he remained behind to await the first official response from Earth. Pragmatically, he and his companions could do nothing with the anger and helpless fury that boiled within them except bottle it.
Reluctantly, they returned to the ship and resumed their itinerary. Until the day and hour of their deaths, the memory of what they had seen never left them, remaining as clear and sharp as the air of the devastated world itself.
Little had changed when the three warships emerged from space-plus dangerously close to the planetary mass. Settling into equidistant orbit, their instrumentation between them covering and monitoring every meter of the cloud-swathed globe beneath, they dropped nine shuttle craft into the clouds and clear air below. Each was far larger than that of the cargo ship that had preceded them. On board were soldiers as coldly efficient and highly trained as Earth and its colonies could produce, armed with the most advanced weaponry their military research institutes could manufacture.
Setting down simultaneously at predetermined locations in the planet's habitable equatorial zone, the independently functional squads immediately established defensible perimeters around their respective shuttles. Once these landing sites were secured, ground transports were unloaded from the craft and boarded by half of each squadron's personnel. Leaving the entrenched perimeters that now surrounded the heavily defended shuttle craft, these armed skimmers and their smaller escorts moved out in carefully designated search-and-rescue patterns.
They found little changed and nothing significantly different from the halting, barely adequate pair of reports that had been filed by the crew of the cargo transport that had first made the grisly discovery. Fanning out from their landing sites, they checked the towns first, then moved on to isolated hamlets, individual farms, mines, and tiny frontier outposts. The degree of physical destruction varied, but nowhere did they find anyone alive, nor any record in any of the surviving instrumentalities of what had happened.
As soon as the military commander of the expedition was satisfied that no threat remained on the surface, at least insofar as his troops could determine, the members of the scientific team were allowed to descend. Forced to remain on their assigned ship while the soldiers secured the ground, they were in a quiet frenzy of fervor to begin their work. Over their protests each was assigned an armed guard. Until some answers were forthcoming the military was taking no chances. Pathologists and recorders, biologists and scanners were forced to operate under th
e watchful eyes of edgy soldiers.
The scientists' escorts were not uneasy because they feared attack. Indeed, they would have welcomed it. To the last man and woman they had seen too much death on what had previously been considered a mellow, pastoral, even boring world. Women clutching infants, old men slain in the doorways of their homes, children shot down in the street: It was too much for some of them. Those who gutted their way through the last of the patrols wanted something to shoot at, something to kill. No plague had wiped out the inhabitants of Argus V, no secretive native uprising had surprised the colonists in their beds. The evidence was indisputable that advanced killing technology had been at work in the peaceful forests and meadows.
The question that was on everyone's mind - soldier, scientist, and starship crew alike - was, Whose?
Derwent was tired of trideeing bodies. After the first sickening couple of days his stomach settled down and he was able to go about his job more or less normally and at a faster pace. The labor was necessary, he knew. Not only so that relatives on other worlds could identify slain relations but so that the research team being put together back on Earth would have as much information to work with as possible. Hudson, his partner, was reciting into her recorder in her familiar monotone. It was her job to render a preliminary judgment on cause of death.
Dozens of additional personnel were active in other districts. Since landing, no one had enjoyed a day off. Given the condition of many of the bodies there was no time to spare. Not with hundreds of thousands of corpses to evaluate. For teams such as Derwent and Hudson, long hours in unpleasant conditions had become the norm. Every body, or remnant thereof, had to be dutifully recorded and evaluated.
Outside the ruins of the small country inn a corporal and two privates stood guard, stood being perhaps too strong a word. Derwent didn't mind when the three sat down and set their weapons aside, conversing quietly among themselves. The small skimmer that had transported the team and its supplies rested nearby, powered down and open to intrusion. The recording specialist was not worried. From the time the first squad of marines had touched down they had encountered no opposition. Nor had any trouble manifested itself since. Nothing interfered with the work of the pathologists or coroners.
Whatever had exterminated the population of Argus V was nowhere in evidence. If the relentless and thorough attackers had suffered casualties they had been careful to take their dead and wounded away with them, as well as erase any evidence of their existence. Only human bloodstains and fragments of human bodies were found. The use of generic and not especially sophisticated weapons of destruction precluded the rapid identification of the killers. Nothing remained of their handiwork except the corpses of their victims.
To the psychologists, that suggested that the assailants feared retribution. As well they should. There wasn't a soldier among the relieving force who did not go to bed night after night dreaming of imaginary alien necks to wring.
Derwent was more of a realist. Knowing nothing of those who had destroyed the colony, it was premature to assign blame even to imaginary enemies. For all they knew the invading force might have been renegade humans from one of the other colony worlds.
"What motivation could another colony possibly have for carrying out a massacre like this?" Hudson had challenged him. Light glinted off her implanted lenses. She was a pert, spirited lady whom the adjective vivacious fit in more ways than one, and she was not slow to defend an opinion.
Phlegmatic and blunt, Derwent argued for the sake of dissention.
They were not a particularly well-matched team, but their personal disagreements did not hamper their work.
"How should I know? Not having the mind-set of a mass murderer myself, I can't begin to imagine a reason." He stepped over the body of an eight-year-old boy whose head and legs had gone missing.
"Then shut up," she told him curtly. "If you can't give reasons, you don't have a hypothesis."
"Oh so?" Swinging his recorder around the front room of the inn, he made sure to keep the extensive damage to the back wall in frame. "All right, I'll guess. Maybe somebody was jealous about the amount of aid these people were receiving. Maybe they thought they could steal whatever was really valuable and save themselves some hard work. Maybe a grudge developed between this colony and another."
"None of those makes any sense." She was bent over the remains of a middle-aged couple who had died in each other's arms. "Even if one of them did, or if several of them did, all of them taken together with another half dozen added don't serve to rationalize the annihilation of six hundred thousand people. Humans don't do this sort of thing."
Derwent laughed curtly. "Read your prehistory."
"All right," she conceded, "they don't do it anymore. We haven't turned on ourselves to this extent since the conclusion of the Second Dark Ages."
"Then aliens are responsible."
"Nothing is certain yet," she reminded him. "No conclusions have been drawn. It's too soon, and the evidence is still being assembled. We won't be the ones to render the final judgment anyway. You know that. It will be decided back on Earth." She fell to murmuring into her recorder.
Derwent had already finished upstairs. Four guests had been staying at the inn at the time of the attack. Besides the proprietor's family there was also a second couple who had worked for the owners. The number of deceased jibed with the records a search team had accessed in the nearest town, except for a Sithwa Pirivi, age twenty, whose body had not yet been located. That meant nothing, he knew. The young woman might have been elsewhere at the time of the attack, visiting friends, shopping in town, or simply out hiking, and would have been killed there instead of in the vicinity of the inn where she worked. It was going to take time to fill in the blanks in the record of Treetrunk's exterminated population.
People traveled, both for reasons of work and recreation, and did not always perish where they lived.
The chore of recording and evaluating the tens of thousands of decomposing dead was a distressing and difficult task. Not everyone adjusted as efficiently or pragmatically as the team of Derwent and Hudson. As time wore on many had to be relieved, some only long enough to recover their equilibrium, others permanently. Throughout the appalling work the teams and their support groups persevered. The number of identified dead rose from the tens of thousands into the hundreds of thousands.
And still there were no answers. Working alongside their conscripted civilian counterparts, practitioners of military forensics struggled with the available evidence in an increasingly frustrating and futile attempt to try and identify the perpetrators of the atrocity. The executioners had left nothing behind, not even footprints. If they had utilized weapons firing explosive projectiles they had gathered up every shell casing, intact or fragmentary, so its origin could not be identified.
One aspect of the attack the researchers felt confident in propounding: It had taken the colonists completely by surprise. How else to explain the utter absence in surviving records of any reference to the invasion? If someone had jotted a report or warning down on a piece of paper, or whispered frantically into a personal recorder, there was no record of it. It was as if the population had stood blithely by while whoever was responsible for their brutal demise had proceeded methodically with their gruesome work. The pathology teams were specifically instructed to look for any such surviving testimony.
"You'd think there'd be a note somewhere." Having finished his work at the inn, Derwent was wandering through the reception area while Hudson tidied up the last of her responsibilities. "A sketch drawn by some poor terrified kid, or a description buried in a coded file."
"There isn't an intact file left on the planet subsequent to the day of the final encounter." Hudson rose from where she had been crouching. "Not only were these people surprised by their attackers, they were surprised repeatedly. It's crazy. But I agree with you. No matter how much of a shock this attack was to the populace, someone ought to have left a recoverable message somewhere."
She looked up at him out of her colorless implants. "It wouldn't take much. A couple of words. 'Humans did this' would be enough to get started on. Or 'Thranx here, killing everybody.' Or 'Unknown aliens have landed.' Anything, anything at all."
Derwent nodded as he lowered his instrument and started outside. "Anything's better than nothing. And right now, nothing is what we got. I don't suppose you've heard any different from any of the other teams?" As he strode toward the skimmer, their military escort reluctantly bestirred themselves.
She shook her head. "It doesn't seem to matter if you're working out in the country, like us, or downtown in one of the bigger communities. It's the same everywhere. All dead, and nothing to implicate the possible killers." She hazarded a thin smile. "Somebody'll find something somewhere. You don't slaughter six hundred thousand people without leaving a few clues behind. It's only a matter of time."
"Better be soon." Climbing into the skimmer, Derwent settled himself into his seat. Their next stop was a small vegetable farm located six kilometers northwest of the inn. He had no doubt what they would find there. "I hear that back on Earth and the colonies people are raging at their local government ministers. That's not surprising. They want a face to attach to this enemy."
"Revenge may be a primitive emotion, but it's one that's likely to always be with us." Given her smaller frame, it required more of an effort on Hudson's part to board the vehicle. As the soldiers began to pile in and take up their positions she strapped herself in next to Derwent, making sure first that her precious recorder was secured. "I'd like to personally eviscerate a few of whoever's responsible for this myself."
As the skimmer whined to life and began to lift he looked at her in surprise. "Seriously? You never struck me as the violent type."
She glanced over at him, her petite features not far from his own. The optiplants glittered like herkimer diamonds. "I never saw two hundred dead children all huddled together in one place before, either."