The Last Colony

SEVEN

Roanoke revolves around its sun every 305 days. We decided to give the Roanoke year eleven months, seven with twenty-nine days and four with thirty. We named a month for each of the colony worlds our settlers came from, plus one for the Magellan. We dated the first day of the year to the day we arrived above Roanoke, and named the first month Magellan. The Magellan crew was touched, which was good, but by the time we named the months, it was already Magellan twenty-ninth. Their month was already almost over. They weren't entirely pleased about that.

Shortly after our decision to start allowing the colonists to homestead, Hiram Yoder approached me for a private meeting. It was clear, he said, that the majority of the colonists were not qualified to farm; they had all trained on modern farming equipment and were having difficulties with the more labor-intensive farm equipment the Mennonites were familiar with. Our stores of fast-growing, genetically modified seed would allow us to begin harvesting crops within two months—but only if we knew what we were doing. We didn't, and we were looking a potential famine in the face.

Yoder suggested we allow the Mennonites to cultivate crops far

the entire colony, thus ensuring that the colony wouldn't turn into an interstellar Donner party three months down the line; the Mennonites would apprentice the other colonists so they could receive on-the-job training. I readily agreed to this. By the second week of Albion, the Mennonites had taken our soil studies and used them to plant fields of wheat, maize and any other number of vegetables; they woke honeybees from their slumber to begin doing their pollination dance, pastured the livestock and were teaching the colonists of nine other worlds (and one ship) the advantages of intensive and companion planting, carbon and calorie farming and the secrets of maximizing yields in the smallest amount of space. I began to relax a little; Savitri, who had been making jokes about "long pig," found something new to snark about.

In Umbria, the fuglies discovered that fast-growing potatoes were good eatin', and we lost several acres in the space of three days. We had our first agricultural pest. We also completed the medical bay, with all its equipment in its own black box. Dr. Tsao was delighted when within hours she was using her surgery 'bot to reattach a finger a colonist had inadvertently sliced off with a bandsaw during a barn raising.

In the first weekend of Zhong Guo, I presided over Roanoke's first wedding, between Katherine Chao, formerly of Franklin, and Kevin Jones, formerly of Rus. There was much rejoicing. Two weeks later I presided over Roanoke's first divorce, fortunately not of Chao and Jones. Beata had finally gotten her fill of antagonizing Jann Kranjic and let him off the hook. There was much rejoicing.

By Erie tenth, we had finished our first major crop harvests. I declared a national holiday and day of thanksgiving. The colonists celebrated by building the Mennonites a meeting house, for which they only occasionally needed to ask for advice from the Mennonites themselves. The second set of crops was into the ground less than a week later.

In Khartoum, Patrick Kazumi went with his friends to play by the stream behind Croatoan's western wall. While running along the stream, he slipped, hit his head on a rock and drowned. He was eight years old. Most of the colony attended his funeral. On the last day of Khartoum, Anna Kazumi, Patrick's mother, stole a heavy coat from a friend, placed rocks in her pockets and waded into the stream to follow her son. She succeeded.

In Kyoto, it rained heavily four days out of every five, spoiling crops and interfering with the colony's second harvest of the year. Zoe and Enzo had a somewhat dramatic breakup, as often happens when first loves finally get on each other's nerves. Hickory and Dickory, overstimulated from Zoe's relationship angst, began openly discussing how to solve the Enzo problem. Zoe finally told the two to stop it; they were creeping her out.

In Elysium, the yotes, the coyote-like predators we'd discovered en our barrier, made their way back toward the colony, and attempted to work their way through the colony's herd of sheep, a ready source of food. Colonists began working their way through the predators in return. Savitri relented after three months and went on a date with Beata. The next day Savitri described the evening as an "interesting failure" and refused to discuss it further.

With Roanoke autumn in full swing, the last of the temporary housing tents folded for good, replaced with simple, snug houses in Croatoan and on the homesteads outside its walls. Half of the colonists still lived in Croatoan, learning trades from the Mennonites; the other half carved out their homesteads and waited for the new year to plant their own fields and yield their own crops.

Savitri's birthday—as measured on Huckleberry, translated to Roanoke dates—occurred on the twenty-third of Elysium; I gave her the gift of an indoor toilet for her tiny cottage, connected to a small and easily-drained septic tank. Savitri actually teared up.

On the thirteenth of Rus, Henri Arlien battered his wife Therese on the belief that she was having an affair with a former tentmate. Therese responded by battering her husband with a heavy pan, breaking his jaw and knocking out three of his teeth. Both Henri and Therese visited Dr. Tsao; Henri then visited the hastily assembled jail, formerly a livestock hold. Therese asked for a divorce and then moved in with the former tentmate. She hadn't been having an affair before, she said, but now it sounded like a damn fine idea indeed.

The tentmate was a fellow by the name of Joseph Loong. On the twentieth of Phoenix, Loong went missing.

"First things first," I said to Jane, after Therese Arlien came in to report Loong's disappearance. "Where has Henri Arlien been recently?"

"He's on work furlough during the day," Jane said. "The only time he's allowed to be by himself is when he has to pee. At night he's back in his stall at the jail."

"That stall's not exactly escape-proof," I said. In its former life it had held a horse.

"No," Jane said. "But the livestock hold is. One door, one lock, and it's on the outside. He doesn't get anywhere overnight."

"He could get a friend to visit Loong," I said.

"I don't think Arlien has friends," Jane said. "Chad and Ari took statements from their neighbors. Pretty much all of them said Henri had got what he deserved when Therese hit him with that pan. I'll have Chad check around, but I don't think we'll get much there."

"What do you think, then?" I asked.

"Loong's homestead borders the woods," Jane said. "Therese said the two of them had gone for walks out there. The fanties are migrating through the area, and Loong wanted to get a closer look." The fanties were the lumbering animals some of the folks saw at the edge of the woods not long after we landed; apparently they migrated, looking for food. We had caught the tail end of their stay when we arrived; now it was the early part. I thought they looked about as much like elephants as I did, but the name had stuck whether I liked it or not.

"So Loong goes out to look at the fanties and gets lost," I said.

"Or gets trampled," Jane said. "The fanties are large animals "

"Well, then, let's get a search party together," I said. "If Loong just got lost, if he has any sense, he'll stay put and wait for us to find him."

"If he had any sense he wouldn't be chasing after fanties in the first place," Jane said.

"You'd be no fun on a safari," I said.

"Experience teaches me not to go out of my way to chase alien creatures," Jane said. "Because they often chase back. I'll have a search party together in an hour. You should come along."

The search party began its search just before noon. It was a hundred and fifty volunteers strong; Henri Arlien may not have been popular but both Therese and Loong had a number of friends. Therese came to join the party but I sent her home with two of her friends. I didn't want to run the risk of her coming across Joe's body. Jane blocked off search areas for small groups and required each group to stay in voice contact with one another. Savitri and Beata, who had become friends despite their interesting failure of a date, searched with me, Savitri keeping a tight grip on an old-style compass she had traded for with a Mennonite sometime before. Jane, some measure down the woods, was accompanied by

Zoe' and Hickory and Dickory. I wasn't entirely thrilled with Zoe being part of the search squad, but between Jane and the Obin she was probably safer in the woods than back home in Croatoan.

Three hours into the search, Hickory bounded up, shadowy in his nanomesh suit. "Lieutenant Sagan wishes to see you," it said.

"All right," I said, and motioned for Savitri and Beata to come along.

"No," Hickory said. "You only."

"What is it?" I asked.

"I cannot say," Hickory said. "Please, Major. You must come now."

"We're stuck in the creepy woods, then," Savitri said, to me.

"You can head in if you want," I said. "But tell the parties on either side so they can tighten up." And with that I jogged after Hickory, who kept an aggressive pace.

Several minutes later we arrived where Jane was. She was standing with Marta Piro and two other colonists, all three of whom had blank, numb expressions on their faces. Behind them was the massive carcass of a fantie, wild with tiny flying bugs, and a rather smaller carcass farther beyond that. Jane spied me and said something to Piro and the other two; they glanced over to me, nodded at whatever it was Jane was saying and then headed back toward the colony.

"Where's Zoe?" I asked.

"I had Dickory take her back," Jane said. "I didn't want her to see this. Marta and her team found something."

I motioned to the smaller carcass. "Joseph Loong, it looks like," I said.

"Not just that," Jane said. "Come here."

We walked over to Loong's corpse. It was a bloody mess. "Tell me what you see," Jane said.

I leaned down and got a good look, willing myself into a neutral frame of mind. "He's been eaten at," I said.

"That's what I told Marta and the others," Jane said. "And that's what I want them to believe for right now. You need to look closer."

I frowned and looked at the corpse again, trying to see what it was I was clearly missing. Suddenly it snapped into place.

I went cold. "Holy God," I said, and backed away from Loong.

Jane looked at me intently. "You see it, too," she said. "He wasn't eaten. He was butchered."

The Council crowded uncomfortably into the medical bay, along with Dr. Tsao. "This isn't going to be pleasant," I warned them, and pulled the sheet back on what was left of Joe Loong. Only Lee Chen and Marta Piro looked like they were likely to vomit, which was a better percentage than I expected.

"Christ. Something ate him," Paulo Gutierrez said.

"No," Hiiam Yoder said. He moved closer to Loong. "Look," he said, pointing. "The tissues are cut, not torn. Here, here and here." He glanced over at Jane. "This is why you needed to show us this," he said. Jane nodded.

"Why?" Guiterrez said. "I don't understand. What are you showing us?"

"This man's been butchered," Yoder said. "Whoever did this to him used some sort of cutting tool to take off his flesh. A knife or an ax, possibly."

"How can you tell this?" Gutierrez said to Yoder.

"I've butchered enough animals to know what it looks like," Yoder said, and glanced up at Jane and I. "And I believe our administrators have seen enough of the violence of war to know what sort of violence this was."

"But you can't be sure," Marie Black said.

Jane glanced over to Dr. Tsao and nodded. "There are striations on the bone that are consistent with a cutting implement," Dr. Tsao said. "They're precisely positioned. They don't look like what you'd see if a bone was gnawed on by an animal. Someone did this, not something."

"So you're saying there's a murderer in the colony," Manfred Trujillo said.

"Murderer?" Gutierrez said. "The hell with that. We've got a goddamn cannibal walking around."

"No," Jane said.

"Excuse me?" Gutierrez said. "You said it yourself, this man's been sliced up like he was livestock. One of us had to have done it."

Jane glanced over at me. "Okay," I said. "I'm going to have to do this formally. As the Colonial Union administrator of the colony of Roanoke, I hereby declare that everyone in this room is bound by the State Secrecy Act."

"I concur," Jane said.

"This means that nothing said or done here now can be shared outside this room to anyone, under penalty of treason," I said.

"The hell you say," Trujillo said.

"The hell I do say," I said. "No joke. You talk about any of this before Jane and I are ready for you to talk about it, and you'll be in deep shit."

"Define deep shit," Gutierrez said.

"I shoot you," Jane said. Gutierrez smiled uncertainly, waiting for Jane to indicate she was kidding. He kept waiting.

"All right," Trujillo said. "We understand. No talking."

"Thank you," I said. "We brought you over here for two reasons. The first was to show you him"—I pointed to Loong, whom Dr. Tsao had hidden again under the sheet—"and the second was to show you this." I reached over to the lab table, pulled an object from underneath a towel and handed it to Trujillo.

He examined it. "It looks like the head of a spear," he said.

"That's what it is," I said. "We found it by the fantie carcass near where we found Loong. We suspect it was thrown at the fantie and it managed to pull it out and break it, or perhaps broke it and then pulled it out."

Trujillo, who was in the act of handing the spearhead over to Lee Chen, stopped and took another look at it. "You're not seriously suggesting what I think you're suggesting," he said

"It wasn't just Loong who was butchered," Jane said. "The fantie was butchered, too. There were footprints around Loong, because of Marta and her search party and me and John. There were tracks around the fantie as well. They weren't ours."

"The fantie was brought down by some votes," Marie Black said. "The yotes move in packs. It could happen."

"You're not listening," Jane said. "The fantie was butchered. Whoever butchered the fantie almost certainly butchered Loong. And whoever butchered the fantie wasn't human."

"You're saying there's some sort of aboriginal intelligent species here on Roanoke," Trujillo said.

"Yes," I said.

"How intelligent?" Trujillo asked.

"Intelligent enough to make that," I said, noting the spear. "It's a simple spear, but it's still a spear And they're intelligent enough to make knives for butchering."

"We've been here almost a Roanoke year," Lee Chen said. "If these things exist, why haven't we seen them before?"

"I think we have," Jane said. "I think whatever these things are, were the ones who tried to get into Croatoan not long after we arrived. When they couldn't climb their way over the barrier they tried digging under."

"I thought the yotes did that," Chen said.

"We killed a yote in one of the holes," Jane said. "It doesn't mean the yote dug the hole."

"The holes happened right around the time we first saw the fanties," I said. "Now the fanties are back. Maybe these things follow the herd. No fanties, no Roanoke cavemen." I pointed to Loong. "I think these things were hunting a fantie. They killed it and were butchering it up when Loong wandered onto what they were doing. Maybe they killed him out of fear, and butchered him afterward."

"They saw him as prey," Gutierrez said.

"We don't know that," I said.

"Come on," Gutierrez said, waving toward Loong. "The sons of bitches turned him into fucking steaks."

"Yes," I said. "But we don't know if he was hunted. I'd rather we don't jump to any conclusions. And I'd rather we didn't start panicking about what these things are or what their intentions are toward us. As far as we know they have no intentions. This could have been a random encounter."

"You're not suggesting we pretend that Joe wasn't killed and eaten," said Marta Piro. "That's already impossible. Jun and Evan know, because they were with me when we found him. Jane's told us to keep quiet, and we have so far. But this isn't something you can keep quiet forever."

"We don't need to keep that part quiet," Jane said. "You can tell your people that part when you leave here. You need to keep quiet about the creatures that did this."

"I'm not going to pretend to my people that this was just some sort of random animal attack," Gutierrez said.

"No one's saying you should," I said. "Tell your people the truth: that there are predators following the fantie herd, they're dangerous and that until further notice no one goes for walks in the forest, or goes anywhere alone outside of Croatoan if they can help ii. You don't have to tell them anything more than that for now."

"Why not?" Gutierrez said. "These things represent a real danger to us. They've already killed one of us. Eaten one of us. We need to get our people prepared."

"The reason why not is that people act irrationally if they think they're being hunted by something with a brain," Jane said. "Just like you're acting now."

Gutierrez glared at Jane. "I don't appreciate the suggestion that I'm acting irrationally," he said.

"Then don't act irrationally," Jane said, "because there will be consequences. Remember that you're under the State Secrecy Act, Gutierrez." Gutierrez subsided, clearly not satisfied.

"Look," I said. "If these things are intelligent, then among other things I think we have some responsibilities to them, primarily not wiping them out over what might have been a misunderstanding. And if they are intelligent, then maybe we can find a way to let them know they'd be best off avoiding us." I motioned for the spearhead; Trujillo handed it over. "They're using these, for Christ's sake"—waving the spear—"even with the dumb guns we have to use here, we could probably wipe them out a hundred times over. But I'd like to try not doing that if we can manage it."

"Let me try to put it a different way," Trujillo said to Hiram Yoder. "You're asking us to withhold critical information from our people. I—and I think Paulo here as well—worry that holding back that information makes our people less safe, because our people don't know the full scope of what they're dealing with. Look where we are now. We're all stuffed into a cargo container wrapped in cloaking fabric to keep us hidden, and that's because our government withheld critical information from us. The Colonial government played us for fools, and that's why we live like we do now. No offense."

"None taken," Yoder said.

"My point is, our government screwed us with secrets," Trujillo said. "Why would we want to do the same to our people?"

"I don't want to keep this a secret forever," I said. "But right now we lack information on whether these people are a genuine threat, and I'd like to be able to get it without people going a little crazy out of fear of Roanoke Neanderthals wandering in the brush."

"You're assuming people will go a little crazy," Trujillo said.

"I'd be happy to be proven wrong," I said. "But for now let's err on the side of caution."

"Inasmuch as we don't have a choice in the matter, let's err indeed," Trujillo said.

"Christ," Jane said. I noted an unusual tone in her voice: exasperation. "Trujillo, Gutierrez, use your goddamn heads. We didn't have to tell you any of this. Marta didn't know what she was looking at when she found Loong; the only one of you who saw it for himself was Yoder, and only because he saw it here. If we hadn't told you everything right now, you'd never have known. I could have cleaned this all up and not one of you would be the wiser. But we didn't want that; we knew we had to tell all of you. We've trusted you enough to share something we didn't have to share. Trust us that we need time before you tell the colonists. It's not too much to ask."

"Everything I'm telling you is protected by the State Secrecy Act," I said.

"We have a state?" Jerry Bennett asked.

"Jerry," I said.

"Sorry," Jerry said. "What's up?"

I told Jerry about the creatures and an update about the Council meeting the night before. "That's pretty wild," Jerry said. "What do you want me to do?"

"Go through the files we were given about this planet," I said. "Tell me if you see anything there that gives any indication that the Colonial Union knew anything about these guys. I mean anything."

"There's nothing on them directly," Bennett said. "I know that much. I read the files as I was printing them out for you."

"I'm not looking for direct references. I mean anything in the files that suggests these guys were here," I said.

"You think the CU edited out the fact this planet has an intelligent species on it?" Bennett asked. "Why would they do that?"

"I don't know," I said. "I: wouldn't make any sense. But sending us to a whole different planet than the one we were supposed to be on and then cutting us off entirely doesn't make any sense either, does it?"

"Brother, you have a point there," Bennett said, and thought for a moment. "How deep do you want me to go?" he asked.

"As deep as you can," I said. "Why?"

Bennett grabbed a PDA from his bench and pulled up a file. "The Colonial Union uses a standard file format for all its documents," he said. "Text, images, audio, they all get poured into the same sort of file. One of the things you can do with the file format is get it to track editing changes. You write a draft of something, you send it to the boss, she makes changes, and the document comes back to you and you can see where and how your boss made the changes. It tracks however many changes get made— stores the deleted material in metadata. You don't see it unless you turn on version tracking."

"So any edits that were made would still be in the document," I said.

"They might be," Bennett said. "It's a CU rule that final documents are supposed to have this sort of metadata stripped out. But it's one thing to mandate it, and another thing to get people to remember to do it."

"Do it, then," I said. "I want everything looked at. Sorry about becoming a pain in your ass."

"Nah," Bennett said. "Batch commands make life easy. After that it's a matter of the right search parameters. This is what I do."

"I owe you one, Jerry," I said.

"Yeah?" Bennett said. "If you mean it you'll get me an assistant. Being the tech guy for an entire colony is a lot of work. And I spend my entire day in a box. It'd be nice to have some company."

"I'll get on it," I said. "You get on this."

"On it," Bennett said, and waved me out of the Box.

Jane and Hiram Yoder were walking up as I came outside. "We have a problem," Jane said. "A big one."

"What?" I said.

Jane nodded to Hiram. "Paulo Gutierrez and four other men came past my farm today," Hiram said. "Carrying rifles and heading toward the woods. I asked him what he was doing and he said that he and his friends were going on a hunting trip. I asked them what he was hunting for and he said that I should know full well what they were planning to hunt. He asked me if I wanted to come along. I told him that my religion forbade the taking of intelligent life, and I asked him to reconsider what he was doing, because he was going against your wishes, and planning to murder another creature. He laughed and walked off toward the tree line. They're out in the woods now, Administrator Perry. I think they mean to kill as many of the creatures as they can find."

Yoder walked us to where he saw the men enter the woods and told us he'd wait for us there. Jane and I went in and started looking for the trail of men.

''Here," Jane said, pointing to boot marks on the forest floor. Paulo and his boys were making no attempt to keep themselves hidden, or if they were, they were very bad at it. "Idiots," Jane said, and took off after them, unthinkingly moving at her new and improved high speed. I ran off after her, neither as fast nor as quietly.

I caught up with her about a klick later. "Don't do that again," I said. "I'm about to heave my lungs out."

"Quiet," Jane said. I shut up. Jane's hearing had no doubt improved with her speed. I tried to suck oxygen into my lungs as quietly as I could. She began walking west when we heard a shot, followed by three more. Jane began running again, in the direction of the shots. I followed as quickly as I could.

Another klick later I entered a clearing. Jane was kneeling over a body that had blood pooling underneath it; another man sat nearby, propped up by the woody stump of a bush. I ran over to Jane and the body, whose front was spattered with blood. She barely glanced up. "Dead already," she said. "Shot between the rib and the sternum. Right through the heart, straight out the back. Probably dead before he hit the ground."

I looked up at the man's face. It took me a minute to recognize him: Marco Flores, one of Gutierrez's colonists from Khartoum. I left Flores to Jane and went over to the other man, who was staring blankly ahead. It was another Khartoum colonist, Galen DeLeon.

"Galen," I said, crouching down to get at his eye level. The salutation didn't register. I snapped my fingers a couple of times to get his attention. "Galen," I said again. "Tell me what happened."

"I shot Marco," DeLeon said, in a bland, conversational voice. He was looking past me, at nothing in particular. "I didn't mean to. They just came out of nowhere, and I shot one, and Marco got in the way. I shot him. He went down." DeLeon put his hands on his forehead and started grasping at his hair. "I didn't mean to," he said. "All of a sudden they were just there."

"Galen," I said. "You came out here with Paulo Gutierrez and a couple other men. Where did they go?"

DeLeon waved indistinctly in a westerly direction. "They ran off. Paulo and Juan and Deit went after them. I stayed. To see if I could help Marco. To see…" he trailed off again. I stood up.

"I didn't mean to shoot him," DeLeon said, still in that bland tone. "They were just there. And they moved so fast. You should have seen them. If you saw them, you know why I had to shoot. If you saw what they looked like."

"What do they look like?" I asked.

DeLeon smiled tragically and for the first time looked at me. "Like werewolves." He closed his eyes and put his head back in his hands.

I went back over to Jane. "DeLeon's in shock," I said. "One of us should take him back."

"What did he say happened?" Jane asked,

"Said the things came out of nowhere and ran that way," I said, pointing west. "Gutierrez and the rest of them went chasing after them." It hit me. "They're running into an ambush," I said.

"Come on," Jane said, and pointed to Flores's rifle. "Take that," she said, and ran. I took Flores's rifle, checked the load and once again started after my wife.

There was another rifle shot, followed by the sound of men yelling. I put on a burst of speed and came up a rise to find Jane in a broken grove of Roanoke trees, kneeling on the back of one of the men, who was yelling in pain. Paulo Gutierrez was pointing his rifle at Jane and ordering her off the man. Jane wasn't budging. A third man stood to the side, looking like he was about to wet his pants.

I leveled my rifle at Gutierrez. "Drop your rifle, Paulo," I said. "Drop it or I'm going to drop you."

"Tell your wife to get off Deit," Gutierrez said.

"No," I said. "Now drop your weapon."

"She's breaking his goddamn arm!" Gutierrez said.

"If she wanted to break his arm, it'd be broken by now," I said. "And if she wanted to kill every one of you, you'd already be dead. Paulo, I'm not going to tell you again. Drop your rifle."

Paulo dropped his rifle. I glanced over at the third man, who would be Juan. He dropped his, too. "Down," I said to the both of them. "Knees and palms on the ground." They went down.

"Jane," I said.

"This one took a shot at me," Jane said.

"I didn't know it was you!" Diet said.

"Shut up," Jane said. He shut up.

I walked over to Juan and Gutierrez's rifles and picked them up. "Paulo, where are your other men?" I asked.

"They're behind us somewhere," Gutierrez said. "These things popped out of nowhere and started running this way, and we came after them. Marco and Galen probably went off in another direction."

"Marco is dead," I said.

"Those fuckers got him," Deit said.

"No," I said. "Galen shot him. Just like you almost shot her."

"Holy Christ," Gutierrez said. "Marco."

"This is exactly why I wanted to keep this quiet," I said to Gutierrez. "To keep some idiot from doing this. You dumbfucks haven't got the first clue what you're doing, and now one of you is dead, one of you killed him, and the rest of you are running into an ambush."

"Oh God," Gutierrez said. He tried to sit up from his four-on-the-floor position but lost his balance, and collapsed in a pile of grief.

"We're going to walk out of here now, all of us," I said, walking over to Gutierrez. "We're going to go back the way we came in, and along the way we're going to pick up Galen and Marco. Paulo, I'm sorry—" I caught movement out of the corner of my eye; it was Jane, telling me to cut it off. She was listening for something. I looked over at her. What is it? I mouthed.

Jane looked down at Deit. "What direction did those things you were chasing run off in?"

Deit pointed west. "That way. We were chasing them, and then they disappeared, and then you came running up."

"What do you mean they disappeared?" Jane said.

"One minute we saw them and the next we didn't," Deit said. "Those fuckers are fast."

Jane got off Deit. "Get up. Now," she said. She looked over to me. "They weren't running into an ambush. This is the ambush."

Then I heard what Jane had been hearing: a soft mass of clicks, coming from the trees. Coming from directly above us.

"Oh, shit," I said.

"What the hell is that?" Gutierrez said, and looked up as the spear came down, exposing his neck to its tip, which slid into that soft space at the top of the sternum and drove itself into his viscera. I rolled, avoiding a spear of my own, and looked up as I did.

It was raining werewolves.

Two fell near me and Gutierrez, who was still alive, trying to pull out the spear. One grabbed the spear near the end and drove it down farther into Gutierrez's chest and shook it violently. Gutierrez spat up blood and died. The second slashed at me with claws as I rolled, ripping my jacket but missing flesh. I had kept my rifle and drew it up with one hand; the thing grabbed the barrel with both of its paws or claws or hands and prepared to pull it out of my grip. It didn't seem to know that a projectile could come out of the end; I educated it on the subject. The creature brutalizing

Gutierrez uttered a sharp click of what I hoped was terror and sprinted east, getting a running start at a tree, which it scaled and then hurled itself from, landing on another tree. It disappeared into the foliage.

I looked around. They were gone. They were all gone.

Something moved; I trained the rifle on it. It was Jane. She was pulling a knife out of one of the werewolves. Another werewolf lay nearby. I looked for Juan arid Deit and found them on the ground, lifeless.

"Okay?" Jane said to me. I nodded. Jane stood, holding her side; blood slipped between her fingers.

"You're hurt," I said.

"I'm fine," she said. "It looks worse than it is."

In the distance there was a very human scream.

"DeLeon," Jane said, and started running, still holding her side. I gave chase.

Most of DeLeon was missing. Some of him was left behind. Wherever the rest of him v,"as, it was still alive and screaming. A blood trail went from where he had sat to one of the trees. There was another scream.

"They're taking him north," I said. "Come on."

"No," Jane said, and pointed. In the east, there was movement in the trees. "They're using DeLeon as bait to lead us away. Most of them are headed east. Back toward the colony."

"We can't leave DeLeon," I said. "He's still alive."

"I'll get him," Jane said. "You get back. Be careful. Watch the trees and the ground." She was off.

Fifteen minutes later I breached the border of the woods and came back to colony ground to find four werewolves in a semicircle and Hiram Yoder standing silently at their focus. I dropped to the ground.

The werewolves didn't notice me; they were entirely intent on Yoder, who continued to stand stock-still. Two of the werewolves had spears trained on him, ready to run him through if he moved. He didn't. All four of them clicked and hissed, the hisses falling in and out of my sonic range; this was why Jane heard them before the rest of us did.

One of the werewolves came forward to Yoder, hissing and clicking at him, stocky and muscular where Yoder was tall and trim. It had a simple stone knife in one hand. It reached out a claw and poked Yoder hard in the chest; Yoder took it and stood there, silently. The thing grabbed his right arm and began to sniff it and examine it; Yoder offered no resistance. Yoder was a Mennonite, a pacifist.

The werewolf suddenly struck Yoder hard on the arm, perhaps testing him. Yoder staggered a bit from the blow but stood his ground. The werewolf let out a rapid series of chirps and then the others did, too; I suspected they were laughing.

The werewolf raked his claws across Yoder's face, shredding the man's right cheek with an audible scraping sound. Blood poured down Yoder's face; he involuntarily clutched it with his hand. The werewolf cooed and stared at Yoder, its four eyes unblinking, waiting to see what he would do.

Yoder dropped his hand from his ruined face and looked directly at the werewolf. He slowly turned his head to offer his other cheek.

The werewolf stepped away from Yoder and back toward its own, chirping. The two who had spears trained on Yoder let them drop slightly. I breathed a sigh of relief and looked down for a second, registering my own cold sweat. Yoder had kept himself alive by not offering resistance; the creatures, whatever else they were, were smart enough to see that he was not a threat.

I raised my head again to see one of the werewolves staring directly at me.

It let out a trilling cry. The werewolf closest to Yoder glanced over at me, snarled and drove his stone knife into Yoder. Yoder stiffened. I raised my rifle and shot the werewolf in the head. It fell; the other werewolves bolted back into the woods.

I ran over to Yoder, who had collapsed on the ground, and was pawing gingerly at the stone knife. "Don't touch it," I said. If the knife had nicked any major blood vessels, pulling it out could cause him to bleed out.

"It hurts," Yoder said. He looked up at me and smiled, gritting his teeth. "Well, it almost worked."

"It did work," I said. "I'm sorry, Hiram. This wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for me."

"Not your fault," Hiram said. "I saw you drop and hide. Saw you give me a chance. You did the right thing." He reached out toward the corpse of the werewolf, touching the sprawled leg. "Wish you didn't have to shoot it," he said.

"I'm sorry," I said again. Hiram didn't have anything more to say.

"Hiram Yoder. Paulo Gutierrez. Juan Escobedo. Marco Flores. Deiter Gruber. Galen DeLeon," Manfred Trujillo said. "Six dead."

"Yes," I said. I sat at my kitchen table. Zoe was at Trujillo's, spending the night with Gretchen. Hickory and Dickory were with her. Jane was in the medical bay; on :op of the gash in her side she had scraped herself up pretty badly chasing DeLeon. Babar was resting his head in my lap. I was patting it absentmindedly

"One body," Trujillo said. I looked up at that. "A hundred of us went into those woods, where you told us to go. We found blood, but not a single one of their bodies. Those things took them with them."

"What about Galen?" I said. Jane had told me that she'd found parts of him, leaving a trail as she went along. She stopped following after he stopped screaming, and when her own injuries kept her from going farther.

"We found a few things," Trujillo said. "Not enough to consider a body."

"Great," I said. "Just great."

"How do you feel?" Trujillo asked.

"Jesus, Man," I said. "How do you think I feel? We lost six people today. We lost godda—we lost Hiram Yoder. We would all be dead if it wasn't for him. He saved this colony, him and the Mennonites. Now he's dead, and it's my fault."

"It was Paulo who put that posse together," Trujillo said. "He went against your orders and he got five others killed. And put you and Jane in danger. If someone's going to shoulder the blame, it should be him."

"I'm not looking to blame Paulo," I said.

"I know you're not," Trujillo said. "That's why I'm saying it. Paulo was a friend of mine, as good a friend as I have here. But he did something foolish, and he got those men killed. He should have listened to you."

"Yes. Well," I said. "I thought making these creatures a state secret would keep something like this from happening. That's why I did it."

"Secrets have a way of getting out," Trujillo said. "You know that. Or should."

"I should have let everyone know about these things," I said.

"Maybe," Trujillo said. "You had to make a call here and you made it. It wasn't the one I would have thought you would make, I have to say. It wasn't like you. If you don't mind me saying so, you're not that good with secrets. People here aren't used to you having them, either."

I grunted assent and patted my dog. Trujillo shifted uncomfortably in his chair for a few minutes. "What are you going to do now?" he asked.

"Fuck if I know," I said. "Right now what I'd really like to do is put a fist through my wall."

"I'd advise against that," Trujillo said. "I know you don't like taking my advice on general principle. Nevertheless, there it is."

I smiled at that one. I nodded toward the door. "How are people?"

"They're scared as hell," Trujillo said. "One man died yesterday, six more died today, five of them disappeared, and people are worried they'll be next. I suspect most people will be sleeping inside the village for the next couple of nights. I'm afraid the cat is out of the bag about these creatures being intelligent, by the way. Gutierrez told a whole lot of people while he was trying to recruit for his posse."

"I'm surprised another group hasn't gone out looking for the werewolves," I said.

"You're calling them werewolves?" Trujillo said.

"You saw the one that killed Hiram," I said. "Tell me that's not what it looks like."

"Do me a favor and don't share that name," Trujillo said. "People are scared enough."

"Fine," I said.

"And yes, there was another group who wanted to go out and try to get revenge. A bunch of idiot kids. Your daughter's boyfriend Enzo was one of them."

"Ex-boyfriend," I said. "Did you talk them out of doing something stupid?"

"I pointed out that five grown men went out hunting for them and not a single one of them came home," Trujillo said. "That seemed to calm them down a bit."

"Good," I said.

"You need to make an appearance tonight, down at the community hall," Trujillo said. "People will be there. They need to see you."

"I'm not in any shape to see people," I said.

"You don't have a choice," Trujillo said. "You're the colony leader. People are in mourning, John. You and your wife are the only ones that came out of this alive, and she's in the medical bay. If you spend the entire night hiding in here, it says to everyone out there that no one gets away from these things alive. And you kept a secret from them. You need to start making up for that."

"I didn't know you were a psychologist, Man," I said.

"I'm not," he said. "I'm a politician. And so are you, whether you want to admit to it or not. This is the job of a colony leader."

"I tell you truly, Man," I said. "If you asked for the job of colony leader, I would give it to you. Right now, I would. I know you think you should have been colony leader. So. The job is yours. Want it?"

Trujillo paused to consider his words. "You're right," he said. "I thought I should have been the colony leader. Occasionally I still do. And someday, I think I probably will be. But right now, it's not my job. It's yours. My job is to be your loyal opposition. And what your loyal opposition thinks is this: Your people are scared, John. You're their leader. Do some goddamn leading. Sir."

"That's the first time you've ever called me sir," I said, after a long minute.

Trujillo grinned. "I was saving it for a special moment," he said.

"Well, then," I said. "Well done. Well done, indeed."

Trujillo stood up. "I'll see you around this evening, then," he said.

"You will," I said. "I'll try to be reassuring. Thanks, Man." He waved off the thanks and left as someone else came walking up to my porch. It was Jerry Bennett.

I waved him in. "What do you have for me?" I asked.

"On the creatures, nothing," Bennett said. "I did all sorts of search parameters and came out with squat. There's not a lot to go on. They didn't do a whole lot on exploring on this planet."

"Tell me something I don't know," I said.

"All right," Bennett said. "You know that video file of the Conclave blasting that colony?"

"Yes," I said. "What does that have to do with this planet?"

"It doesn't," Bennett said. "I told you, I checked all the data files for edits under a batch command. It scooped up that file with all the rest of them."

"What about the file?" I asked.

"Well, it turns out the video file you have is only part of another video file. The metadata features time codes for the original video file. The time codes say your video is just the tail end of that other video. There's more video there."

"How much more?" I asked.

"A lot more," Bennett said.

"Can you get it back?" I asked

Bennett smiled. "Already done," he said.

Six hours and a few dozen strained conversations with colonists later, I let myself into the Black Box. The PDA Bennett had loaded the video file into was on his desk, as promised. I picked it up; the video was already queued up and paused at the start. Its first image was of two creatures on a hill, overlooking a river. I recognized the hill and one of the creatures from the video I'd already seen. The other one I hadn't seen before. I squinted to get a better look, then cursed myself for being stupid and magnified the image. The other creature resolved itself.

It was a Whaid.

"Hello," I said to the creature. "What are you doing, talking to the guy who wiped out your colony?"

I started the video to find out.