Tenacious

13

Two days later, they found the half-clothed clan. They were five men, six women, and four babes in arms. They were also thin, dirty, and ragged, but their rags were clearly related to those of the dead body back on the glass plain.

It was Professor Labao who made the report, formally, and in Kris’s day cabin to a full staff meeting. He had a lot more to report.

“We have also conducted a full, though remote, examination of the body. While the glass plain seems most devastated, it is not, however, totally absent of life. Dust has been blown in. Seeds as well, along with bugs and other microlife. In the immediate area around the body, a veritable metropolis of tiny creatures has sprung up.”

“That’s mighty nice of them to keep him company, seeing that he’s dead,” Kris observed.

“Most of the life is indigenous to our subject planet. There is, however, one exception.”

“Something not from here?” Kris said.

“Definitely. It’s a fungus. We traced it to one of his toes. It has DNA, a three-base version, I might add. It’s interesting that fungus collected from this planet is also base three, but this fungus’s DNA doesn’t match anything here. Not even close.”

“Hold it,” Jacques said. “This body has evidence of alien pathogens.”

“That’s what I said.” Professor Labao did not take questioning well.

“No, excuse me, Professor, what I mean is that this body arrived at its death location carrying something that is alien to this planet. In this case, it was fungus, and the local biota seems to be handling it well. But in other cases, it might be much more deadly. Your Highness, I may have an explanation as to why the tribes local to the glass plain are not very friendly to each other. It may also explain why the other tribes don’t want to have anything to do with any of them, either.”

“They come from different disease pools,” Kris said, drawing her own conclusion. “It must be like the encounter by the natives of the Americas with the European disease pool. They had nothing to match it and lost in the trade. These folks here fear each other because the occasional encounter in the past has led to pandemic.”

“Exactly,” the professor said. “None of them appears equipped with anything close to modern medical treatments. Once a new bacteria or virus gets free here, it could wreak havoc.”

“Okay, now what about the clothes on the dead body?” Kris said.

“Machine woven, of that we are sure. The fiber has been heavily processed, it’s more a synthetic than a natural cloth. It doesn’t match anything in our database.”

“I wouldn’t expect it to,” Kris said, but she was losing herself in thought.

“We look like them,” she said softly.

“Yes,” the professor answered. “We have filmed them bathing, and, ah, procreating. We are very similar. This verifies the initial reports from your first encounter as well as the bodies we were able to examine from your captured ship.”

“So, if we were to slip out from all our different technology, we might pass ourselves off as one of them.”

“I don’t like where this is going,” Jack said, clearly not willing to let his husbandly role suppress his security-chief duties. Or maybe the husband gig was reinforcing the job.

“If we could make contact with one of these groups,” Kris said. “Get them talking to us . . .”

“Yes,” Jack said, “but as soon as we started talking, they’d know we weren’t from here and they’d be trying to claw our eyes out with their fingernails.”

“Are you sure, Jack?” Kris asked. “These people were marooned here by some sort of high-tech society for some reason. Have we found the dissenters from the highly regimented crews of those ships? If we could talk to them, would they tell us what is going on here?”

“A great idea, Admiral,” the Marine colonel said, “but it seems to me that you’ve jumped from A to L to Z. Shouldn’t we look at some of the stuff in between to make sure it fits your conclusion?”

“Yes, oh wise Security Chief,” Kris said, keeping it formal in a formal setting. In another time and place, he might have rated a stuck-out tongue. “Let’s see what more we can find. Do you have anything else, Professor?”

He did.

“As Nelly had suspected, at least three areas of the planet have been subjected to heavy laser attack in recent times and likely from space. One of them may have been as recent as ten thousand years ago. We found evidence of cobbled roads and the rusted remains of ironwork in the areas around that most recent site. We did not find evidence of recent occupation. Indeed, the locals steered clear of that bay and the upland valley.”

“You develop technology and you get zapped by Zeus’s lightning,” Jack observed.

“No wonder that tribe didn’t want to be anywhere close to where our shuttle was making noise and leaving contrails,” Kris said.

“If this is the home world of the aliens,” Penny said, “it appears they have not abandoned it.”

“They’re protecting it,” Jacques said, “from modern technology, or so it seems.”

“And will very likely protect them from us, if they find us here,” Kris added. “Okay, crew. Is it safe down there?”

“We’ve done our best to avoid contact,” the professor said. “However, there have been no attacks on our survey base camps. We have, of course, located them in remote locations in the hope of not encouraging any such attacks.”

“Then I want to see what’s in that pyramid,” Kris said. “Jack, you figure out a way for me to get down there safely in some manner that won’t get your panties in a twist.”

“Aye, aye, my Lord and Iron Mistressness,” he said.