Old Man's War 03 - The Last Colony (v1.5)

by Scalzi, John

  “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,” Hiram 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 it. 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. “It 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.

  Ja
ne 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.