Starfist: A World of Hurt (4 page)

It took more than a week to assemble the searchers and gather the equipment and supplies they would need. He used that time to quietly conduct an aerial search and survey the area, using aircraft and crews from Olympia's police department.

The aerial search revealed no sign of Samar Volga or any other person in or near Haltia, though it did update the official map database, which hadn't been done since the Bureau of Human Habitability Exploration and Investigation had completed its cursory examination of Maugham's Station more than two generations earlier. That was better than nothing.

Under the lead of Third Assistant Minister Frans Ladoga, the search party set out thirty-nine days after Samar Volga left Olympia for the wilds of Haltia.

On the third day of the search, Jean Lonnrot knelt to peer closely at fresh growth in the ground cover under the multicanopy forest trees. She brushed her gloved fingers through a tangle of blue-tinged leaves of a type she'd never before seen, wondering what gave them their odd color. An experienced botanist, she slipped her other hand into a pouch on her field belt, where her fingers fell immediately on a specimen pack of exactly the right size and opened it, ready to receive the plant. Gently, she groped through the leaves until she found the main stem and followed it to the ground. Holding the specimen pack in her teeth, she drew the digger from its holder and barely glanced at the control dial as she set it. Guiding the point of the cutter with her fingers, she cut a five-centimeter-radius circle around the stem, where it entered the ground. The circle complete, she returned the cutter to its belt loop and probed into the cut with both hands. Her hands went all the way in; the cutter had gone the exact fifteen centimeters she wanted. Gently, she pushed farther, curving her fingers inward to meet under the plant. After twisting to break the plug free, she lifted it out and lowered it into the specimen pack.

She settled back on her heels and studied the newly exposed ground where the specimen had grown. She pushed aside other top growth and looked some more. After a moment she spoke into her comm unit. "Elias, I'd like you to take a look at this."

"Where are you, Jean?"

"Don't you have me?" She checked the medallion on the left breast pocket of her field jacket. "My tracker seems to be working."

"Oh, right. I've got you. Be there in a few minutes."

Jean chuckled. Elias Sillanpa was a highly regarded zoologist, but tended toward absentmindedness and often forgot equipment that wasn't of immediate use in whatever he was studying at the moment. A crashing in the underbrush announced his approach. She shook her head. When he was stalking an animal, Sillanpa could slip through the densest growth as silently as a slug. At other times he was as noisy as a herd of kwangduks in a spindle forest.

"What did you find, Jean?" he asked as he came close.

She answered with a question of her own. "What kind of large fauna do we have here?"

She knew full well the search party hadn't found any game trails larger than those used by the rodentlike animals that were a nuisance throughout Ammon.

His face went blank for a moment while he considered, then turned bright. "None. What did you find?"

She replied with another question. "Then what did this?"

He looked at the exposed growth, then dropped to his hands and knees to examine it more closely. He touched a crushed leaf here, a bent stem there, a broken twig elsewhere.

He lowered his head to sniff, turned it as though listening to the trampled foliage, then looked up.

"I'd say that wasn't done by a large animal." Still on hands and knees, he crawled forward a dozen meters, poking and probing at the undercover and the ground as he went. "I'd say,"

he said, standing and brushing debris off his knees as he looked farther along the line he'd crawled, "it wasn't an animal, it was some kind of landcar."

Once they had a trail to follow, it only took a few more hours to find Samar Volga's mule. It sat where he'd left it, against a sturdy tree high up on the slope of a mountainside. From there it was a simple matter of deduction to climb higher to the saddle, where they found the rope Samar Volga had used to rappel into the valley below.

Jean Lonnrot's eyes grew wide with excitement when she saw the hitherto unimagined flora within the valley, and she could barely wait to descend into it to collect specimens for study.

Once the entire search party descended into the valley, Elias Sillanpa's reaction was equally excited--but for a distinctly different reason: he immediately noticed the total lack of animate life. Not only didn't he see any animals--or even insectoids--on the ground, in the branches, or flying, he saw no tracks, trails, scratches on tree trunks, chewed leaves, or scat. What kind of habitat was it that had no animals?

"Spread out, everyone," Frans Ladoga ordered. When nobody moved, other than the happily gathering botanist, he realized he'd barely spoken aloud and tried again.

"Everybody, spread out," he said more loudly. "See if you can find any sign of Volga."

The others jerked, as though snapping out of trances. Lonnrot continued gathering, Sillanpa kept looking for signs of animals, and one of the policemen, Neva Ahvenan, stood listening. The others began looking for signs of the missing man's passage. Nobody bothered to cry out Volga's name. The ground cover looked as if it had never been trod by man's foot, and the rope Volga had used to rappel into the valley obviously hadn't been used in several weeks.

After a few minutes of peering nervously into shadows, Officer Ahvenan sidled over to Sillanpa. "I don't like this," he whispered.

"Neither do I," the zoologist whispered back.

"It's too quiet."

"There are no animals."

They heard a rustling in the branches and looked up toward the sound, but couldn't see what made the noise.

"It's just the wind in the trees," Sillanpa said when he failed to see anything.

"Then how come there's no wind up there?"

Sillanpa looked higher. Ahvenan was right,
nothing
was moving in the trees.

Just then someone called out, "I found something!" and everybody rushed to see what it was.

It was a camera. Within minutes two more were found. There were two trids and a 2-D. All were broken open and plants grew through them. Frans Lagoda told the others to leave the cameras in place, but to retrieve the recording crystals in case they could still be read.

Farther into the undergrowth, the search party found what they were afraid they'd find--human bones. They were still covered with clothing, but all the flesh was gone; they had been more thoroughly scoured than anybody would expect from the likely length of time they'd been there--especially with the clothing relatively undisturbed.

When they attempted to lift the skeleton into a forensic bag, they found they had to cut it free of tendrils that grew from the ground, through the clothing, and into the bones. When they finally picked it up and bagged it, the disarticulated bones slid together into a pile.

"Let's go," Lagoda said. "We found what we came for." He cast a worried look around.

They'd found Samar Volga, but they had no idea what killed him--and whatever it was might still be nearby.

There was rustling in the trees as they filed out of the forest, back to the steep slope leading up to the saddle. Officer Ahvenan, the last person out, didn't see the streamer of greenish fluid that arced out from the bush and just missed his heel as he left the trees.

Outside again, Frans Lagoda ordered cameras and other sensors placed to observe the slope leading up to the saddle. If whatever killed Volga was still inside the valley, he wanted a warning if it tried to come out.

In due time forensic pathologists determined that some of the cratering on a few of the bones had been caused by a yet to be determined acid and noted that fact in the Unexplained Expiration report frontier worlds were required to file with the Department of Colonial Development, Population Control, and Xenobiological Studies whenever cause of death was unknown.

They routinely filed an Unexplained Expiration report for the two people who next died in a hidden valley. And for the one after that as well.

CHAPTER THREE

Nobody had ever officially bothered to give 43q15x17-32, an uninhabited planet orbiting a smallish, nondescript G-2 star, any formal name other than its alphanumeric designation in the
Atlas of Non-Habitable Planetary Bodies of Human Space.
The Bureau of Human Habitability, Exploration, and Investigation--commonly called by the acronym "BEHIND"--had taken one quick look at the planet and summarily rejected it as a candidate for human colonization. They didn't even think it worthwhile for mineral exploitation.

The planet 43q15x17-32 certainly wasn't much to look at. It was a blotchy brownish-red with occasional scabrous splotches of cobalt blue or washed-out green. The blue wasn't water (its seas were a sickly gray) and the green wasn't plant life--it was exposed mineral veins. So were the other surface colors. The only land-based plant life on the planet was scraggly mattings of algaelike bacteria at the fringes of its oceans. There wasn't any terrestrial animal life. No one other than xenobiologists studying the origins of life had any interest whatsoever in the plants or animals that might eke out a living in the planet's oceans.

The atmosphere was too thick to breathe, but that didn't matter, since the air was mostly ammonia and methane anyway. The surface was hot and the atmosphere crackled constantly from permanent lightning storms.

The planet 43q15x17-32 was uninviting enough that no one ever casually visited it. Even among life-origins xenobiologists, only the most enthusiastic, or the most desperate for a paper devoted to something on which nobody else was working, ever bothered to come to study--and few of them were willing to stay very long. When the xenobiologists who did visit later mentioned the planet, they called it the "Rock" in a tone that strongly suggested it was unpleasant.

Then there were the miners, who also called 43q15x17-32 the "Rock," though more in a tone of despair. They didn't count as visitors, though, and so far as the Confederation of Human Worlds knew, they weren't there at all.

The miners were convicts from St. Helen's, serving sentences anywhere in duration from five years to life. "Life" was a nominal sentence, though; the environment was so harsh and the work so onerous that almost nobody managed to survive five years. Even the soldiers and sailors who guarded the mining operation were disciplinary problems who were posted to the Rock in lieu of court-martial and prison. In order to prevent mutiny, the soldiers and sailors were billeted on an orbiting space station and spent only one week in four planetside. More, they were promised that upon successful completion of a tour of duty, negative entries in their records would be fully expunged and they would be honorably retired on pensions equal to eighty percent of St. Helen's median income--which was considerably more than most of them could ever hope to earn through any activity that wouldn't put them at risk of serving as miners on the Rock themselves.

The St. Helen's mining operation on the Rock was a tightly held state secret. It had to be--the original evaluation of St. Helen's by the Bureau of Human Habitibility, Exploration, and Investigation had determined that the planet didn't have desirable metals and rare earths in sufficient quantity to make mining commercially viable--information that was easily accessible to anyone who felt like checking. So it was generally known among those who traded with St. Helen's for refined metals that the mining operations were somewhere off-planet. Exactly
where
was a state secret. After all, the mining operations were highly lucrative, and there were four human worlds closer to the Rock than St. Helen's. Any of them could make a strong case that 43q15x17-32 was in its legitimate area of possession, and that by exploiting the Rock's mineral wealth, St. Helen's was engaging in interstellar piracy.

There was precedent for such a claim. In the twenty-third century, Steinenborg brought a similar charge against Alhambra for mining an inhospitable world called Hell. The Confederation Supreme Court found in favor of Steinenborg, though by the time the court passed judgment, there had been a rebellion on Hell and the world gained independence.

Nonetheless, Alhambra was required to pay reparations severe enough to impoverish it for a generation.

Unfortunately for St. Helen's, We're Here!--a planet settled by one of the first waves of colonists from Earth, and the planet nearest to the Rock--found out.

"I'm picking up some anomalous EMR, Skipper," Lieutenant Hope Bluebird said. She was the communications officer of the We're Here! navy heavy cruiser,
Goin'on.

"Tell me about it," replied Commander Moon Happiness, captain of the
Goin'on.

"Looks like bleed from a focused burst-comm."

"Where?"

"Seems to be coming from the Rock. I'm also picking up what looks like kinetic drive signals along the burst-comm track. But it doesn't look right for drive engines. Too small, more like a shuttle. Too far out for a shuttle, though. A couple of AU."

Captain Happiness thought about that for a bit. A couple of AU out from the Rock would put the shuttle at a distance similar to that between Earth and Sol's asteroid belt. Bluebird was right, that was
way
too far out for a shuttle. Unless it was an orbital body that wasn't on the
Goin'on
's charts, which he seriously doubted. He asked the radar officer, Ensign Freelion, if he had picked up any such. He hadn't.

"Sir," Freelion said, "the shuttle's moving on an intercept path toward the Rock."

Captain Happiness thought a bit more, then asked, "Have either of you read up any on cloaking?" Neither had heard of cloaking.

"The Confederation Navy's working on it," he told them. "It's supposed to make starships show up as something smaller."

"Stealth technology?" asked Bluebird.

"Similar," Happiness confirmed. "Stealth doesn't work on anything bigger than a Bomarc 36V. Cloaking is supposed to."