Daring

22

As the hours passed, the picture grew more grim.

The gas giant had indeed recently lost a lot of weight. Say ten percent. Say in the last two hundred years.

Chief Beni chose to keep his eyes on his board, regularly having Da Vinci dig down with him beyond the standard human/computer interface to make sense of the raw feed coming in from the antennas.

The one bit of good news was that no reactors showed up anywhere in the system. The bad news was that no other jump point was identified, either.

Kris interrupted the chief’s work once for a question.

“When that alien ship came charging off that moon intent on killing us all, you said your sensors couldn’t get anything off the ship. Are you sure that your sensors can pick up anything off these aliens?”

“Ma’am, there is a difference between something being a big black hole of nothing in space and it being a charging bull of a ship that is doing its best to keep me from digging out interesting intel on it.

“Yes, they were masking a lot of what was going on inside their boat. But there was no question in any of our minds that there was a big houseboat down there powered by a reactor of unknown design. I could also tell you it had lasers and was shooting at us.

“Don’t worry, ma’ am. I may not be able to give you a readout of their captain’s battle board on one of these alien starships, but you can bet your last dollar that I’ll be able to tell you that they are there.”

“That’s good to hear,” Kris said.

Both the chief and the professor chose to stay at their posts. Kris’s main staff reported to the Tac Center; Jack walked in, followed by a high-gee station, which, now that Kris had been introduced to one, looked very much like a wheelchair.

“I don’t need a wheelchair,” Kris snapped.

“It’s not a wheelchair,” Jack shot back, “it’s a high-gee station.”

“I don’t need a high-gee station. We aren’t even making two gees.”

“It will support your knee. Kris, you don’t want to twist that knee and end up back in sick bay.”

“You’re sounding more like a mother hen than a security chief.”

“I’ll cluck, cluck as much as I have to if it keeps you from doing something stupid,” Jack said, doggedly.

“Humor him, Kris,” Abby said.

“I do not need a high-gee station, thank you very much.”

The station maneuvered itself up next to Kris’s elbow and showed no evidence of going away.

“You are a stubborn old pig,” Kris said.

“Oink, cluck, oink, cluck,” was all Jack said.

Kris switched from chair to station. The staff gave Jack, or Kris, it was hard to tell, a ragged round of applause.

Jack took the bow, one of his silly grins all over his face. Kris spread her hands like a reigning monarch and took a bit of a bow herself.

“Now can we get down to business?” she said.

Though once she was seated in the high-gee station, Kris did find that she was a lot more comfortable than she’d been in her usual chair. The station gave her bum knee support the chair didn’t.

The hint that she might not be as young as she used to be was painful to contemplate.

Before the team finished their light lunch, Kris rapped the table for their attention. “What does a planet look like that has been nuked from space?” she asked. “And can we tell the difference between that and a planet that just got nuked in the course of its own folks being disagreeable to each other?”

Colonel Cortez cleared his throat. “One of the few agonies we humans have spared the human race is that of global nuclear war. Simply put, I don’t think there’s any way to tell at a distance whether the nuclear bombs came from some alien in orbit or from your neighbor’s bombers and rockets from across the way, so to speak.”

“You’re no help. It sounds like you’re saying all we can do is guess,” Kris said.

“And very glad I am that there is insufficient data to go on so that we must guess,” the colonel said, showing no shame.

As it turned out, the closer they got to the planet, the less they needed to guess.

“We’ve identified at least twenty-six nuclear strikes,” the chief said. “That number may be low. Some targets might have taken several hits, and what we’re identifying as a single strike may be two or three hits that have run together over time.”

Later, Chief Beni expanded on that. “Kris, I’ve got what look like cities. Dead cities. Besides the two dozen or so that are radioactive hot, there are a whole lot more that seem to have taken very large hits that gutted their centers.”

“What kind of hits?”

“It’s hard to tell, but from the craters I’d say that someone threw some pretty big rocks at them at awfully high speeds.”

The colonel leaned forward. “ Any chance, Chief, that these are natural meteorite strikes?”

“Sir, as I said, these are smack-dab in the middle of what look to be major urban centers. Somebody built them, and somebody knocked them down. Big rocks came in fast and hit right in the bull’s-eye of the town. Once, maybe. Twice, possible. But Da Vinci and I are past a thousand and still counting.”

“That’s hostile action,” the colonel said, leaning back into his chair.

A half hour later, the boffins made their initial report.

“We think we have found something interesting,” Professor mFumbo said on net. “Very little of this planet is covered in water. There are no oceans. Just some large lakes. However, all the nuclear explosions and rock craters as well as what looks like a major road network that connects them are on high plateaus that definitely look like continental plates to our observation.”

A large picture of the planet appeared on the wall in Kris’s room. Her crew gathered around it.

“You will notice what some of my team are calling beaches,” the professor said, highlighting what looked like sandy areas along the edge of the plateaus.

“But they’re a long way from any water?” Jack said.

“There’s also a major difference in vegetation from the continental plates to what look like dried-up ocean beds. Oh, this is interesting.”

A second wall filled up with a new picture. “There are several places where there are these vast scrub wastelands. However, our early radar returns show knobs scattered over the landscape.”

“Knobs?” Kris said.

“Think stumps from where huge trees had been cut down and removed. On any of our planets, there would be laws requiring replanting and restoration management of the second growth. Our reference point is to a time in Earth’s past when uncontrolled harvesting and no subsequent effort to care for the land resulted in limited new growth.”

For the next several hours, more dismal information flowed into Kris’s Tac Center.

It became painfully clear that the planet had once had nearly seventy percent of its surface covered by water. Now it was less than fifteen percent.

The planet had once been home to a budding civilization. It was hard to take the measure of what those people had built, what with over two thousand of their larger urban centers blackened, some flattened, others radioactive.

The radioactive decay did help to time the event that had caused all this. Two hundred years ago.

As they came closer to their target, more pictures showed even more puzzling things. Mountains had had their tops removed. It hadn’t occurred in the razor-sharp manner of the vanishing box from Santa Maria. No, you could see the residue of the mountaintops. They had been shoved off the mountains and slid into the valleys below.

“Somebody strip-mined this planet as if there were no tomorrow,” Abby said. “Strip-mined it real ugly-like.”

The professor got back to Kris as they were decelerating two hours out from orbit.

“Our biologists are not at all happy about the level of growth on the planet. Assuming this . . . event . . . occurred two hundred years ago, nature should have done more to restore the biosphere.”

“Could the loss of water have led to desertification?”

“It seems worse,” the professor said.

“What about nuclear winter?” Nelly said.

“Nuclear what?” the professor asked.

“Kris had me do major research recently concerning nuclear weapons,” Nelly said vaguely. Professor mFumbo had not been involved in the talks between Kris and Ron the Iteeche concerning how the late Iteeche War had been waged and the lack of either side going to the long-forbidden use of atomic weapons.

“What’s a nuclear winter?” Kris asked. Nelly had briefed her about her research, but whatever this kind of winter was, it had not come up.

“Some people, back when nuclear weapons were available, feared that if they used them, the resulting clouds of debris and smoke might hurl particles high into the atmosphere. Enough particles and high enough that they could block out so much of the sun that there would not be enough solar energy arriving at the surface to permit plants to get in a full growing season. Nuclear weapons, volcanoes, or large asteroid hits might throw up so much gunk into the atmosphere that it brought on a multiyear-long winter.”

“I don’t understand,” the colonel said.

Nelly seemed to take a deep breath, and even sigh, before going into a deeper explanation. “If you go several years with no plants having a successful growth season, plant-eating animals die. Meat-eating animals may be able to scavenge their dead bodies, but sooner or later, all that food is gone and the carnivores die along with them. And plants can exhaust themselves sprouting, then being frozen, sprouting again and again but being hit time after time with a killing frost. In ancient Earth history, civilizations fell when volcanoes half a world away blew their top. The scientists on old Earth thought that a blend of asteroid hits and major volcanic action wiped out at least sixty to eighty percent of all life on Earth not once but twice.”

Kris shivered. “So whoever these people are, they were hit by nukes and high-speed rocks. Then their planet was strip-mined, their water stolen, and those still alive left to starve and freeze in the wreckage.”

“It looks that way,” the professor said. “Although they might not have lived very long. We can’t prove it yet, but the air pressure is about half of what would be needed to support our kind of life.”

“They stole their air as well!” Penny said.

“It looks that way.”

Abby whistled through her teeth. “I do not like whoever did this to these people. They are not nice at all, and I do not, for one, like them at all.”

The Wasp made orbit. The boffins and crew began a methodical and intense examination of what there was to see.

Low-flying drones sent back photographs. Some covered wide swaths of territory. Other robotic probes focused on specific sites. They hovered over the surviving towns and sought answers about the life that died there.

The local architecture was full of soaring lines and highrises. Many had been knocked down, but some still stood, defiant in their beauty. The undamaged towns were smaller; if they were human urban centers, none would have held more than five thousand people.

In the towns were murals and statues of their inhabitants. Apparently they’d been a population of intelligent insects, with an opposable thumb and a strong hive bent. Their architecture was soaring on the outside, but inside it was totally claustrophobic from a human perspective.

The general story that slowly grew told of desperate events. It fell to the colonel to put flesh on what they found.

“The nuclear strikes were aimed at decapitating the political infrastructure,” he said coldly. “No way to tell if they had one central government with various subdistricts or if they had several independent local governments. I think the attackers smashed the command and control centers with a lightning nuclear strike. This left the survivors headless and struggling to form a response.”

He paused for a moment to let that sink in.

“Likely, the attackers had only so many nukes. The rocks were cheaper, and they used them to flatten all the other large urban centers. This also disrupted the food-distribution network. The rock bombardment left people with a horrible choice. They could stay in their homes, among the familiar, and risk being blown to bits, or they could flee out into the countryside. With no food, shelter, or services, the outlook for survival wasn’t all that much better than staying put.”

“What a fate,” Penny said.

“It doesn’t look like they took it lying down. Where the attackers landed and set about plundering their planet, there are huge fields of bodies, carapaces spread over acres and acres where the defenders attacked and were mowed down.”

The colonel coughed to clear his throat. “I’d like to examine some of those killing fields. It would be helpful to know how the attackers murdered the locals.”

“Those are loaded words,” Kris said. She wasn’t getting much physical exercise these days, but jumping to conclusions was something she really intended to avoid.

“Holy Mother of God, Commander. I’ve looked at the data. You tell me words that do it justice,” the colonel snapped, then his gaze fell to the table in front of him as he struggled to regain his composure.

Kris said nothing. There were no other words she could think of. Still, she struggled to keep a tight rein on her emotions. She might have to open negotiations with the people who’d done this sometime soon.

At the moment, she’d rather negotiate with the devil himself than whoever murdered this planet.

“Do we have any physical evidence of who did this?” Penny asked.

“That’s been my job,” Abby said. “We’ve identified several sites that do not match the local construction. Wrong design. Wrong materials. Most of them are close to sites of major resource extractions. Say where several mountains were flattened or huge expanses of trees removed.”

A series of pictures flashed on the wall. They showed several villages. The alien construction used local material like mud bricks or wooden poles to make squat, one-story buildings that sprawled with little or no apparent planning close to the extraction sites.

“Are there any bodies other than the local insects left here?” Kris asked.

Both Abby and the colonel shook their heads. Abby went on. “We haven’t identified anything but the carapaces strewn about. There don’t appear to be any graves left around the aliens’ campsites.”

“They’re taking everything this planet has,” Kris said. “I guess that means they’re also taking back their own dead.”

“That may not be totally true,” Chief Beni said, interrupting.

“I had Da Vinci running a pattern recognition on all the killing fields. He spotted a skeleton among all those carapaces. One endoskeleton among all those exoskeletons. A vertebrate from the looks of it.”

“Please put that on-screen,” Kris said.

The wall opposite the one Abby was using came to life. Its picture was of death. A ridge was covered with the dried carapaces of thousands upon thousands. They were tossed and tumbled together. How much of that was postdeath and how much had happened as they died, only a weeping God could tell.

The picture zoomed in, fleeing from the full scope of the slaughter to concentrate on a smaller tragedy. Two or three carapaces had become disassociated in death. Barely visible under them was a skull.

Two empty eyes and a nose hole stared at Kris. The jaws had fallen open in a silent scream. There were long bones for arms and legs, and a collection of vertebrae where a backbone should be.

“It almost looks human,” Kris said in a whisper.

“It looks like the bastards who tried to kill us,” the colonel said.

“I’m going down there. I need to see this place up close and personal,” Kris said.

“Kris,” Jack said.

“Jack, I don’t want to read a report. I want to be there. See this the way it is. I’ve got a report to make to my great-grandfather and, I suspect, all of human space. Of this, I must bear witness,” she said, jerking a thumb at the view.

Jack gnawed his lower lip but said no more.

“Colonel, you want to come?”

“Definitely. Captain,” he said to Jack, “I hope you will provide us the assistance of your full forensic team. “

“I suspect we’ll land all four longboats, what with the Marines and the boffins.”

“Can I come, too?” came in a small voice from where the door to the Tac Center had edged open a crack.

“Cara, what are you doing here?” Kris asked.

“Dada told me that you were going dirtside, and I ran down here to ask if I could go, too.”

“Dada?” Kris echoed the name of Cara’s computer, one of Nelly’s kids.

“I knew we’d made orbit around an interesting planet, from what the boffins were saying, so I asked Dada to listen in on her mom’s net for anything that looked like fun.”

“Nelly?” Kris now said. “Do we have a security breach?”

“Ah, yes, Kris, it does appear so.” It was funny to hear a computer so embarrassed and searching for words. “I have all my other children on a shared net. I, ah, didn’t notice that Dada had been lurking there, too.”

“It seemed like a good idea,” came in a different voice from Cara’s. “You grown-ups are always ignoring us kids and never tell us anything.”

“Little pitchers have big ears,” Penny said, not making much of an effort to suppress a smile.

“Can I go? Please,” the thirteen-year-old pleaded.

“We could really use a field trip,” Dada added. “Professor Lynch is teaching us science, and he says videos can’t capture the real feel of nature.”

Kris noticed that all the so-called grown-ups in the room were looking around at each other, none willing to make the call. She considered the subject of this landing, fields of dead bodies, and wondered if a kid belonged there.

Kris dodged that and tried another thought. “This field trip will be in space suits,” Kris said. “Do you have a suit?”

“Of course I do,” Cara said. “It was a little snug the last emergency drill, but it still fits. It should.”

Like most kids, Cara needed new everything at alarming frequencies. But the comment also reminded Kris that the kid was growing up. If memory served, Kris hadn’t much liked it when adults remembered her smaller and didn’t notice as she got bigger.

“Well,” Kris said, taking the bull, if not by the horns, then at least by something. “You’ll have to ask your aunt.”

“Oh, you’re tossing this my way?” Kris’s maid snapped.

“Seems like a good idea,” Kris said. “She is asking for permission to leave the ship this time. I’d call that an improvement.”

The young subject of their consideration turned pink at the reference to her previous antic . . . and disaster. “I am asking this time. Please, can I go with you?”

Abby looked clearly torn. The kid was safe on the ship. As safe as any of them were. On the surface of a murdered planet . . . ?

“Is this Professor Lynch going down with the boffins?”

“He has asked to be included,” Professor mFumbo said.

“Do you have space for him?” Jack asked.

“That depends,” the professor said. “At present, I’ve got enough scientists to fill two launches. How many Marines are you taking down?”

Jack ran a worried hand through his hair. “I guess I’m taking two launches full of Marines, less the space taken up by these rubberneckers.”

Kris did a quick survey of the room. Penny raised her hand. So did the colonel and Abby. “Chief, you want to be included in this jaunt dirtside?”

“No way. That place looks cold and miserable, and I don’t see anything down there that you can’t bring up here for me to examine in the comfort of my own shop.”

Kris was none too sure of that, but for now, she’d let the devout coward worship at his personal altar.

“With Cara and Jack, you’ll have five rubberneckers.”

“Hurray!” Cara shouted and headed off to get ready. She failed to close the door, so Kris could hear her skipping down the passageway, the very image of innocent joy.

Kris shook her head. “If we could bottle that, I’d buy a case.”

“It’s our own damn fault that we lose it when we get old and grumpy,” Abby said, the picture of a grump herself.

“Okay, folks,” Kris said, standing up. “There’s a planet down there. What happened to it is a crime screaming for whatever justice this universe can give. Let’s go investigate the crime scene.”