Bass looked toward the observation post and saw two infra shapes coming their way. He removed his helmet.
"How does it look from here?" Captain Conorado asked as he reached them and removed his helmet. So did the second corpsman, who accompanied him.
"The zappers don't work as advertised. They knock them down and take them out of the fight for a moment or so, but don't keep them down for as long as the scientists said."
Conorado grunted. That fit in with his idea about how the zappers were tested and told him why the tests might be flawed, but he didn't want to say anything about it yet. "Let's take a closer look," he said.
The eeookk was only twenty meters away. They went to it first. Its limbs still twitched and an occasional spasm rippled through its body, but its unmoving head showed it was dead.
"Damnedest thing I ever saw," Conorado said when a spasm made the corpse jump slightly.
"You never saw a chicken on a farm," Bass said, looking at the eeookk. "You go out and catch one for dinner. You cut off its head and let it go. Then watch the body run around for a few minutes. When it falls down you pick it up and hang it by its legs until all its blood drains out and it stops moving. This looks like pretty much the same thing."
Behind them the Dragon roared off, ferrying Dornhofer back to the camp for transfer back to Avionia Station and any surgery that might be necessary.
"They can keep fighting after we kill them," Schultz said accusingly.
"We don't know that," Conorado said.
"Maybe they'll run around," Bass added with a shrug. "Maybe their fingers will even jerk on the trigger and fire random shots. Or maybe they'll fall down just like we do. But either way, they won't be fighting, they'll be dead." Cheerpt's rifle lay a few meters away. "Secure that weapon," Bass ordered Schultz. He knew he had to find things to occupy the man or there could be trouble soon.
"Let's go," Conorado said as soon as Schultz picked up the rifle. He headed toward the Cheereek corpse.
Unlike the eeookk, the Cheereek corpse was motionless. The corpsman knelt next to it and opened his medkit. The corpsman began laying out the instruments and containers he thought he'd need to examine the body, then slipped on a pair of impermeable gloves to protect himself from possible pathogens.
Bass looked at the area around the corpse. The gouges and scuffing on the ground made it obvious what happened. The Cheereek—or more likely their mounts—had panicked. They jostled one another as they scrambled to flee. This Cheereek was either knocked off his mount in the melee or was zapped by one of the two Marines. Whichever, it got trampled to a pulp. He saw three more rifles in the area.
"Lance Corporal Schultz, secure those weapons."
Schultz shot him an angry look and darted a glance at Hayes. He thought the junior man should be given the job of policing up the dropped weapons, but went to gather them without giving voice to his thoughts.
"Bring them here," Bass said when Schultz picked up the last rifle.
Schultz made to offer a rifle to Bass.
Bass shook his head. "See if you can field-strip it," he said.
"Field-strip." Schultz sighed softly. He put the rifles on the ground, then sat cross-legged and picked one of them up to examine closely. He quickly figured out how to unload it, then set about pulling and twisting various parts to see which of them might separate from one another. In three minutes he had it broken down into half a dozen parts. Each of the parts looked like it would require specialized tools for further disassembly.
"Kind of slow, Hammer."
Schultz gave Bass a hard look. "Different technology." He was unfamiliar with how the rifles functioned, but he knew picking up something he'd never handled before and figuring out that fast how to take it apart was pretty good.
"You're right." Bass acknowledged what Schultz hadn't said. "Now how fast can you put it back together?"
It took him less than thirty seconds.
"You might have just earned yourself a souvenir."
Schultz nodded once, sharply. He stood up with the reassembled rifle and tried its feel. "Wasn't made for humans," he said.
"But it was made by humans," Bass said. "Take them back to the OP."
Schultz looked pointedly at where Conorado stood over the corpsman who was still working on the corpse, with only Hayes nearby guarding them.
Bass nodded in the direction the Cheereek had taken off. "It's all right. We'll be able to see anyone coming long before they get here."
Schultz grunted, then turned and headed back to the observation post with the four rifles.
Bass joined Conorado. "What do you think we'll learn that the scientists didn't already tell us, Skipper?"
Conorado shook his head. "Probably nothing. Maybe something. The scientists didn't know these creatures would be able to see us in our chameleons, so there are things they don't know that we need to know." He gave Bass an odd look. "How much did you find out about the physiology of those aliens you ran into?" He was still angry that one of his platoons had fought aliens several months earlier, on what should have been a nothing deployment, and that he'd only just found out about it. And here his whole company was confronting a totally different alien species. Three centuries of humanity riding the spaceways without running into a single alien sentience, and now Marines from his company encountered two different—and very different from each other—sentiences in only a few months' time.
"I didn't find out a damn thing about them," Bass said. There was a haunted look in his eyes. "We never even found out why they vaporized when we flamed them." He turned his haunted look on the captain. "Anywhere we hit them, even glancing, they flared up."
Conorado shook his head. He couldn't visualize an entire body flashing into vapor from a direct blaster hit, much less a glancing one.
Both Marines looked at the corpsman, who was putting his equipment back in his medkit. He stood.
"Well, sir, it was hard to tell, he's got a lot of broken bones, but from what I can see, what we were told on Avionia Station about their gross anatomy and movement is accurate. I took a few fluid and tissue samples. Maybe I can learn something from them." He shrugged. "If for no other reason than to verify what we were already told."
"That's all we can ask of you, Doc." Conorado clapped the corpsman on the shoulder. "Let's go back to the others. The Dragon should be on its way to pick us up." He looked west and saw the dust cloud raised by an approaching Dragon.
While the rest of his men boarded the Dragon, Conorado spoke briefly to Sergeant Flett on his helmet radio and told him to send one of the UAVs east along the foot of the ridges.
Back at Smuggler's Ridge, Captain Conorado made a detailed report to General Cazombi.
Cazombi sighed deeply. "One incident of the Cheereek seeing one of your OPs could mean anything. Probably one of your Marines had his chameleon shield up, or they had some equipment out where it could be seen. Two incidents, the second where the men knew about the first, that sounds like, yes, the Cheereek can see in the infrared. This is a hell of a way to find out."
Conorado didn't comment. Ground commanders on his level found things out in "a hell of a way" entirely too often.
"Well, they know you're planetside and where you're at," Cazombi continued. "I want you to move out ASAP. I'll have Essays on the ground in an hour. Use them to move your people in their Dragons to a point halfway to the Cheereek encampment. Ride in as close as you can, then go by foot the rest of the way. See if there's an armory where they store the rifles. If there is, see if you can get someone into it to get some of those weapons out." He paused in thought for a moment before continuing. "I think we have to forget about getting all of them. Whatever else you do, don't let the Cheereek see any of your people. Don't put any of your people in jeopardy to get the weapons; we don't have body armor for them. Questions?"
"Sir, why wait for Essays? By the time they get here, I can have my Dragons at the Cheereek encampment."
"The Dragons leave traces on the grou
nd, the Essays don't. Understand?"
"Yessir. Good idea."
"Then let's do it."
"Aye aye, sir."
An hour later the Dragons boarded the Essays for the short hop. Three hours after that, when scouts led by Scout Captain Kkaacgh checked the demon-home, where Graakaak's war party had seen the mighty stones fall from the sky and magically fly away again, the place was empty. The only sign the scouts found to show the demons had ever even been there was a few spots of blood where Cheerpt had shot one. Graakaak gave the order to return to the rookery.
General Cazombi's brow furrowed deeply when he finished his conversation with the Marine commander. The Avionians can see in the infrared! That was the only way he could imagine them being able to see the Marines. Unless they had some sort of radar sense, or something like the echo location of bats. Or could sense electromagnetic radiation the way some fish did. And why shouldn't they have a nonhuman sense, when they weren't human? And why hadn't the scientists studying them discovered it? Or did they know about it and simply not think to include that tiny bit of information in their briefings and data packets? No, he thought, they wouldn't have neglected to tell him and the Marines about it, not if the lecture the laryngopathologist gave him on the biomechanics of Avionian speech—when all he wanted was information on their language—was any indication of their thoroughness.
No point in worrying about why they hadn't discovered this sense. That would be as much of a time and energy waster as agonizing over the Combined Chiefs decision for the Khe Sanh not to deploy its string-of-pearls. Either you accept reality and deal with it or reality will kill you. The reality he had to deal with was that the Marines had no advance knowledge of the Avionian ability to see in the infrared. The reality was that the Marines had to move across a sparsely vegetated flatland without being detected by beings who could see them. The reality was that he didn't have a string-of-pearls to feed the Marines the information they would need to make that move undetected.
The general thought about all the resources he had available. There were enough. All he lacked was permission to use them. Getting permission would be tough if not impossible; he doubted any of the scientists on Avionia Station understood enough about military necessities to realize how important detailed information about the steppe landscape was to those Marines down there. No matter how bluntly he said it, they probably wouldn't believe him if he told them they could have 120 dead Marines on the surface without a proper ground survey. Too damn many ivory tower scientists—and these scientists were definitely ivory tower—couldn't see one mil beyond their own specialties. But he wasn't about to risk the lives of those Marines on anyone's myopia.
He headed for the docking bay, sure that an Essay was in it. The chief petty officer who rode herd on the shuttle craft might be station personnel, but he was still a navy noncommissioned officer. Cazombi had no doubt the chief wouldn't hesitate to do the right thing when a general asked him for a small favor.
General Cazombi was right. Fifteen minutes after making his decision, he was in a shuttle headed for the Khe Sanh. Convincing Captain Natal took less than a minute. Convincing Commander Spitzhaven, the Khe Sanh's captain, took no time at all—he was under Natal's operational command and didn't need to be convinced, merely ordered. Natal didn't simply order Quantex, though, he took half a minute to convince the ship's captain. It took an hour longer to prepare and launch a ground-survey satellite.
Dr. Hoxey might not like it, and the Combined Chiefs might get their knickers in a bind over it, but it was done. The only thing Hoxey could do was order the satellite retrieved. By the time the surveillance crew solved the "technical problems" Commander Spitzhaven assured him they'd have in retrieving the satellite, its work would be done. The Combined Chiefs, a hundred light-years away, were even more impotent. They couldn't do anything at all unless somebody told them about it, which Cazombi had no intention of doing—and both Captain Natal and Commander Spitzhaven were adamant that no sailor would volunteer the information to the Combined Chiefs.
General Cazombi had no illusions that he was home free on his possible breaches of the Rules of Engagement, but he wasn't going to have dead Marines on his conscience.
Chapter 21
"I killed one," Cheerpt snapped. "They cannot be demons."
Graakaak jerked into threat posture, his mouth a head's length away from the Guard captain's outstretched throat.
"You shot it and it disappeared. That does not mean it wasn't a demon. Nor does it mean you killed it." Graakaak's breath was hot and threatening against Cheerpt's throat.
"It did not kill us. That proves it was not a demon."
"What did it do after you shot it?" Oouhoouh demanded. "It killed your eeookk and took your mind," the Chief of Staff said, answering his own question. "When the rest of us fled its wrath, it took the minds of two warriors and killed another one."
Cheerpt swallowed but bravely plowed ahead. "A demon would have killed all of us. The scouts said our dead was trampled, not killed by demon power."
Kkaacgh shifted uncomfortably on his perch. When he first saw the strange apparitions, he believed they were demons. He did not want to join Cheerpt in arguing with the High Chief, but... He stretched his neck up but remembered to keep his face level so the truth of what he said could be seen. "High Chief, I believe Guard Captain Cheerpt might be right."
Graakaak's head darted from nearly touching Cheerpt's throat to threateningly close to the Scout captain's. "You were the first to say they were demons. Explain yourself."
"High Chief—" Kkaacgh struggled internally and managed not to swallow. "—Guard Captain Cheerpt is right when he points out the demons did not kill us. All the stories say demons kill everyone who sees them."
Graakaak slowly withdrew from his threat posture and settled back on his perch. He cocked his head at Tschaah in question.
In agreement, the ancient Chief Councilor reluctantly lowered his head to chest level. "The Captain of Guards is right, High Chief. All the stories say the demons let none who see them live."
"If not demons, then what are they?" Graakaak demanded.
The four advisers exchanged glances. Even Cheerpt turned his head to look at the others.
At length, Kkaacgh ventured a guess. "Their heads are large and sit directly on their shoulders," he said. "They balance on top of their legs instead of between them like proper people. I have seen the images of demons Tschaah sometimes draws in the sand. The demons he draws resemble proper people. Perhaps these are Clumsy Ones' demons." The others all cackled at once, demanding to know why he thought that.
"I first saw them where the Clumsy Ones had their roost, and the Clumsy Ones' roost was no longer there. Perhaps they came to punish the Clumsy Ones."
"I was right," Tschaah said. "These demons disapprove of the Clumsy Ones trading with us. They fear to have the Great High Chief Graakaak armed with such weapons. We must hide the Clumsy Ones' weapons until the demons are gone."
"They are not demons!" Cheerpt interrupted. "And they are gone. We saw the sky stones that came and took them away."
"We saw the sky stones come and leave," snapped Tschaah. "We do not know what happened to the demons."
Graakaak considered his advisers and what they had said. Young Scout Captain Kkaacgh was astute, very astute. Why hadn't he noticed that much earlier? He would bear watching to learn what his ambitions were, to see if he presented a potential threat. And he might be right about the nature of the demons, or whatever they had encountered near where the Clumsy Ones' tree had been. Guard Captain Cheerpt had obvious ambitions, but he recently proved himself a worthy leader of warriors. Perhaps there was another use for him. Chief Councilor Tschaah was wise, as the old ones are supposed to be, even if he was as cautious as an old hen. But Graakaak knew if he followed Tschaah's advice too closely, he would never rule the world. Chief of Staff Oouhoouh was a puzzle. He had been too quiet during the deliberations. He had not stepped forward to take the lead in raidin
g the Aawk-vermin or the Koocaah-lice to prove the value of the Clumsy Ones' weapons. Very strange behavior for the war chief of the Cheereek. Perhaps he was getting too old for his position and should be removed as Chief of Staff. Maybe Chief of Staff would satisfy Cheerpt's ambitions. If not, he would have to die.
"I will think on these matters," Graakaak said. "One thing doesn't need thinking about." He fixed his gaze on Kkaacgh. "I must know if the Clumsy Ones or their demons return."
"High Chief, I will dispatch scouts to watch. I will place them myself. We will know swiftly if the Clumsy Ones or their demons return to that place or to a place near it." His chest was puffed out because the High Chief accepted his idea of the Clumsy Ones' demons.
Graakaak plucked four lesser stones from his perch and flipped them at his advisers.
Shortly after, Kkaacgh led twenty scouts out of the rookery. When they reached the place where the Clumsy Ones' roost had been, they found no sign of the Clumsy Ones' demons.
When the Essays picked up the Marines, they shot to suborbital altitude before diving back at an angle calculated to bring them down so the descent wouldn't be seen by the Cheereek. Then they zoomed nap-of-the-earth until they reached their LZ, a low place in the steppe. The Essays touched down for less than half a minute, discharged their Dragons, then headed back to orbit and Avionia Station.
The Dragons were roaring out over the steppe even as the Essays lifted. Ten kilometers from the last known location of the Cheereek camp, they stopped in a small pan and drew into a defensive circle. Their ramps dropped open and the Marines boiled out. The platoons had their assigned security sectors already, and every man in the company knew exactly where to go when he ran off the Dragons.
Then they waited for General Cazombi to get back to Captain Conorado with further orders. Two hours passed before the call came.
Seen from the height of a standing man—or from the stretched-neck height of a Cheereek—the arid steppe looked billiard-table flat, a plane broken only by occasional spikes of vegetation. But the appearance was deceptive. Eons of wind had sculpted shallow dips in the flats, and rains had slashed channels into its surface.
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