Cobra Outlaw - eARC (8 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Merrick had set his nanocomputer clock circuit to wake him after five hours. But the stress of the day, plus the hard floor of the hideout, made sleep elusive and unrestful. Four and a half hours after he and Anya had settled down, after already having been awake for a good half hour, he finally gave up.

Anya took the short night in stride. She also seemed to have accepted that her failure to lead them someplace useful wasn’t really her fault. Or if she hadn’t, at least she made no further apologies or self-deprecating comments about it.

The sky to the east had begun turning to blue, Merrick saw as he lifted the boulder and climbed back into the cool, fresh air, though the sun had yet to rise high enough to be visible over the mountains. He made a quick check for Trofts predators, and finding neither he and Anya headed off once again into the forest.

As he had the night before, Merrick made sure to watch and listen carefully for roving patrols. Once again, the aliens were conspicuous by their absence. Either they were still way the hell off elsewhere in the forest, far enough that their aircars weren’t audible, or else they’d concluded he really
was
dead and all gone back to their bases.

Merrick wished he could believe that. It would make life so much easier if he and Anya could move around more or less freely.

Unfortunately, he didn’t believe it for a minute. He’d taken down a Troft aircar with one of his fingertip lasers, and even though he’d tried to make it look like the shot had come from his hang glider’s control bar instead there was no way around the fact that advanced weapons weren’t something Muninn’s human slaves should have access to. Even if the Trofts believed he was dead, they would certainly keep up the search until they had at least recovered his body.

Maybe they weren’t patrolling the skies nearby because they were concentrating all their recovery efforts on the distant ravine. But no matter how impenetrable the area’s vegetation, sooner or later they would realize he hadn’t died there and would expand the search. When that happened, Merrick knew, he’d better have a plan ready.

The crash site that Merrick and Anya had seen two nights earlier from halfway up the mountain behind Anya’s village hadn’t been very revealing. It had been little more than a burned-edge gash through the trees, with the doomed vehicle itself out of sight. About all Merrick had been able to glean from the view was that it had been a large aircraft or small spacecraft, and further deduction had suggested it had been one of the freighters bringing in razorarms from Qasama.
Why
the Trofts wanted razorarms here, particularly razorarms that had learned that humans weren’t to be messed with, was still a mystery.

The crash was several days old, and Merrick wasn’t sure what exactly he thought he might find there. But he needed some answers, and he and Anya needed someplace to go. The crash site seemed like a reasonable place to start.

Merrick usually had a pretty good sense of direction. But navigating the Muninn forest proved trickier than he’d expected, with the terrain and occasional impassable clumps of trees and bushes forcing him to veer off course or sometimes turning him around completely. Fortunately, Anya had a better feel for the forest than he did and was always able to get them back on track.

Still, between the travel and the ever-present need for vigilance, progress was slow. The distance to the crash site was less than fifteen kilometers, but it wasn’t until early afternoon that they finally arrived.

At first glance, the ship looked to be in surprisingly good shape. It was about a hundred meters long, a fairly typical size for a Troft medium freighter. The style, too, was familiar: Merrick had seen other such ships hunting for razorarms back on Qasama. He and Anya had happened to arrive near the bow, and aside from some serious dents and cracks where the ship had plowed through the trees it looked mostly undamaged.

But that first look was deceptive. As they worked their way across the scorched ground alongside the wreck Merrick saw that the aft hull plates were blackened with heat stress, and there were considerably more cracks in the sides than even at the bow.

Anya spotted that, too. “Why is the back part more damaged than the front?” she murmured.

“I don’t know,” Merrick said. “Let’s take a look.”

The scorched ground and burned grass turned out to be much easier to traverse than the main part of the forest had been, though the ashes sometimes hid shards of broken tree or jutting roots that could trip up an unwary traveler. As they worked their way aft, Merrick began to pick up the stench of burned plastic, hydraulic and coolant fluids, and a dozen other odors that he couldn’t identify. Whatever had happened back there, it had clearly left a serious mess behind.

It wasn’t until they reached the rear of the ship that they found out just how big a mess it was.

“By the heavens and the land beneath,” Anya murmured, her voice nearly unrecognizable.

“Yeah,” Merrick agreed grimly, staring at the gaping, ragged-edged hole in the ship’s starboard stern. Beyond the hole, the compartment’s blackened walls were bent and cracked.

“What kind of weapon could have done such damage?” Anya asked, peering into the opening.

“Oh, there are plenty that could do that,” Merrick said grimly. “I saw some of them on Qasama. But I don’t think it was an attack. See how the edges of the hole angle outward? That implies the explosion came from inside, not outside.”

“Then it was an accident?”

“Probably,” Merrick said. “Let’s see if we can get inside—I think I see some gaps we can squeeze through.”

It
had
probably been an accident, Merrick reminded himself as he led the way carefully through the wrecked engine room. That was certainly the most likely explanation.

But he couldn’t help remembering that those two Trofts on the mountainside had seemed awfully interested in seeing what Merrick and Anya knew about the wreck.

An internal explosion could have been an accident. It could also have been sabotage.

The engine room’s doors were warped and jammed shut. But as he’d already noted, there were several cracks in the wall where seams had burst under the shock and pressure. They were narrow, but a couple of them proved to be passible. Merrick and Anya eased their way through, being careful not to slice clothing or flesh on the jagged edges, and headed inside.

Merrick had expected to find similar damage further in. To his mild surprise, the rest of the ship, even the sections just beyond the engine room bulkhead, seemed largely undamaged. The damage that
was
there looked more like a result of the crash than from the explosion. Apparently, the engine room had done a good job of containing the blast.

Just ahead of engine room was the cargo section, which had been sectioned off into smaller cage-size compartments by sturdy open-mesh barriers. Definitely a livestock setup, almost certainly for the razorarms they’d encountered a few times in the forest. All the cages were empty, their doors hanging open.

“No corpses,” Anya murmured, looking around. “They must all have escaped alive.”

“At least temporarily,” Merrick pointed out. “After a crash like that, there could have been a lot of walking wounded.”

“They may have been injured,” Anya agreed. “But none were bleeding.”

Merrick frowned, keying up his light-amps and infrared. There was nothing he could see in the pens that would support such a conclusion. “How do you figure that?”

“No blood flies,” Anya said, gesturing. “If there was blood, blood flies would gather to feed.”

Merrick winced. He hadn’t heard of blood flies before, but they didn’t sound pleasant. In fact, they sounded like something that would fit right into the Caelian ecological structure. “Unless they don’t like razorarms,” he reminded her. “They may only have a taste for local blood.”

Anya shook her head. “It’s not the blood itself they like, but the tiny creatures that gather and grow on the blood.”

“Tiny—? Oh; bacteria,” Merrick said, nodding. And it was reasonable to expect that
some
variety of Muninn’s bacteria would find razorarm blood an acceptable meal and breeding ground. “That’s good, actually. If the razorarms all made it out okay, the crew probably did, too. That means no bodies.”

“I’ve seen bodies before,” Anya said calmly. “Many of them. They don’t disturb me.”

Merrick felt his throat tighten. He’d seen bodies, too, far more than he liked. And they
did
still disturb him. “The living areas will be further forward,” he said. “We’ll take a look there, then go on up to the control section.”

The living areas were a mess. Chairs and tables that should have been stowed or secured were scattered around, and the decks were littered with small items that should similarly have been put away before landing. “The crash definitely seems to have taken them by surprise,” Merrick commented as they peered through the galley door. “Don’t seem to be any foodstuffs mixed in, though, so I’d guess no one was eating when the engine blew.”

“Does that mean they must have been nearly to the ground?” Anya asked. “All would have jobs to do at that time, would they not?”

“I don’t know,” Merrick said. “I really haven’t the faintest idea how a ship like this works.”

“But I thought you had penetrated to the control areas of the ship that brought us here,” Anya objected. “Didn’t you see how they operated?”

“Different situation,” Merrick said. “I only saw one small monitor station. Anyway, we were still just cruising at the time. I assume everyone has a job for landing, but I don’t know…” He paused as an odd thought struck him.

“What is it?” Anya asked, craning her neck to see further into the galley. “What do you see?”

“Nothing here,” Merrick said. “I was just thinking about the engine room. If someone was on duty back there he would probably have been vaporized by the explosion. That means a lot of blood, probably pretty evenly spread across the walls.” He gestured aft. “So just how fast do these blood flies of yours chow down, anyway?”

“Not so fast that they would have finished and been gone in only these few days,” Anya said slowly.

“So no one was on duty back there,” Merrick concluded, a knot starting to form in the pit of his stomach. He really
didn’t
know anything about spaceships; but at the same time, he couldn’t remember seeing a single drama set in space where
someone
wasn’t in the engine room, especially during liftoff and landing.

Of course, those dramas had dealt with human ships, not the Troft equivalents. On top of that, they
had
been fiction.

But it still seemed odd. “Or else he was on his way back—”

He tensed, looking around him. Somehow, while he’d been contemplating the mystery of the missing engineer Anya had managed to slip away. “Anya?” he called, turning around.

She was nowhere to be seen. “Anya!”

“Here,” her voice came from around the next corner ahead. “I thought I heard—”

Her voice cut off in mid-sentence. Swearing under his breath, Merrick charged down the corridor, hands curling into fingertip-laser positions. He rounded the corner—

And came to a sudden halt. Anya was standing in the middle of the corridor two meters ahead, her back to him, her shoulders stiff. “What is it?” Merrick asked, coming up beside her.

She lifted a hand to point in front of her. “Look.”

At a half dozen places down the corridor were clusters of softly buzzing insects, some motionless on the deck, the rest swarming lazily around them or going back and forth between the various clusters. Merrick frowned.

And then, the hairs on the back of his neck stiffened. “Are those…?”

Anya nodded. “Blood flies,” she said quietly. “How many masters, do you think, were aboard?”

Merrick looked down the corridor. Six clusters of flies. Six patches of blood.

Six dead Trofts?

Only it made no sense. This was a
corridor
, for heaven’s sake. Not the bridge; not engineering; not sickbay; not the mess room. The patches weren’t even clustered up against a wall, where the unfortunates might have been thrown by the impact of the crash.

Why in the Worlds would they all have been here? More importantly, why would they all have died here?

“Do we continue on?” Anya murmured.

Merrick took a careful breath. Six dead Trofts… “We go on,” he said. “There might be other…evidences…further forward.”

He was very careful, as he led the way past the flies, not to step on the spots where they were feeding.

They found no more clusters of flies as they moved through the corridors. But a few of the flies were still in evidence, flittering lazily about or pausing here and there on the deck. Merrick and Anya kept going; and finally, at the very front of the ship, they reached the control room.

To find one final cluster of blood flies, this group gathered around the pilot’s seat.

“So there was a seventh master aboard?” Anya asked, gazing at the circling insects.

“Looks like it,” Merrick said. “Remember the flies we passed on the way here? I think they were working on a blood trail.” He pointed aft. “Whatever happened back there, I’m thinking the pilot was still alive. He’d mostly bled out, but he had enough strength and presence of mind left to crawl up here and bring the ship down with a minimum of damage.”

“And then he died,” Anya murmured. “And then the other masters took away the bodies?”

“I assume so,” Merrick said. “It’s not like you could crash a ship like this without someone noticing. There would have been Trofts on the scene as soon as they could scramble their aircars, probably within an hour. They’d have searched the ship, retrieved the bodies—” He scowled at a conspicuously empty pair of slots on the control board. “And pulled the data records,” he finished. “Which means this little side trip was a complete waste of time. We still don’t know why the Trofts are bringing razorarms to Muninn, and it doesn’t look like there’s anything left in here that’s going to tell us.”

“Yet perhaps the ship could be of other use,” Anya said thoughtfully. “As you say, the masters have been here. Are they likely to return?”