Blood Contact

by David Sherman

  "Yes, it caused terrible burns," Bynum added.

  "If that stuff was used here," Staff Sergeant Hyakowa said, "how can you defend against it?"

  "Good question," Bynum answered. "One thing is to deprive it of oxygen by submerging it in water. Another is to get it off you as quickly as possible. These people were no doubt caught entirely by surprise, so they didn't have a chance."

  "It had to have been pirates," Snodgrass blurted, apparently accepting Dr. Bynum's theory.

  "How do you get that, Lieutenant?" Hyakowa asked.

  "Who else? You know one of my objectives is to check the accuracy of the Project Golem projections, and we know pirates are fully capable of commiting an act like this. Pirates, that's who I say did this."

  "Hmm. I don't know," Bass replied. "I admit I don't know much about pirates, Lieutenant, but I do know the use of acid-spraying weapons is not, tactically or practically speaking, the best way to engage an enemy. And then there's the destroyed electronic equipment." He turned to Dr. Bynum. "But absent any other explanation, Commander, I accept yours. If whoever did this, pirates or whatever, is still around, we'd better be ready to deal with them."

  Bass looked at the men standing around him. None had ever seen such slaughter before. Fortunately, it had all happened so long ago that surveying the destruction now was more like exploring old catacombs with ancient skeletons lying around than walking through a butcher shop, which the place must've looked like just after the attack. But each man could imagine what must have happened here. And each also knew that it must have required a lot of manpower to kill all those people. And Bass could tell that the men of first squad, although wary of potential danger, were ready to confront it.

  "Okay," he said, "we have two more stations to visit. There may be survivors somewhere. Let's saddle up."

  "Charlie," Hyakowa said on the way out of the administration building, "I sure hope whoever did this on Waygone is long gone by now."

  Bass did not reply, but he could not get Dr. Bynum's statement out of his mind, that whoever killed all those people were "very nasty customers." And he did not think they had been pirates. But what about those missing electronic components? In the pit of his stomach an unfamiliar and very uncomfortable knot of cold fear was growing.

  Absently, Lieutenant Snodgrass fingered the ring he'd put in his pocket. He took it out and examined it. It was beautiful, with a large gem of some sort in the center and an ornate scroll design around the setting. Somebody's class ring, he realized. He looked inside. What he saw there made him catch his breath. And then he began laughing. The laugh rose to an hysterical, gasping, breathless crescendo, and when the lieutenant was able to partially regain control of himself, he started all over again. He held the ring out at the astonished Marines, trying to tell them something, but was laughing and gasping so hard that nobody could understand him. At last he made a supreme effort to get a grip on himself and was able to shout, "Dr. Morgan, I presume?" and convulsed with laughter all over again.

  Bass and Hyakowa exchanged troubled glances. "Shit," Bass sighed, "don't we have enough problems? Keep your eye on that boy, Wang. He's going to be big trouble."

  Chapter 16

  Dean crouched in the shade of a building, scanning the sector of the forest he'd been assigned to watch. Owen, suffused a dull pink, indicating he was resting, perched comfortably on Dean's left shoulder. Dean was particularly alert, as were all the Marines, and more than a little nervous after what they'd discovered at Central Station. Corporal Pasquin had been on the squad circuit three times in the past fifteen minutes, asking for reports.

  Dean could see nothing bigger than the tube-shaped, flying insects moving out there. It was getting very hot. A tiny drop of perspiration slid slowly down his right temple.

  "I hope you aren't sleeping, Lance Corporal," a voice rasped from behind him. Startled, Dean whirled around. It was Pasquin, making a personal check of his fire team's positions. Dean was embarrassed that the corporal had come up on him without being detected and irked that Pasquin would even think he might doze off on guard.

  Dean didn't bother to answer. Relations between them had been tense and utterly formal since their run-in at the promotion party. When the corporal did not follow through on his threat to bring him up on charges for insubordination, Dean had been relieved. But, ironically, he had also lost some respect for Pasquin, because it proved he was not a man of his word—and he spoke rashly. Now, Pasquin squatted down beside him. "Hot," he said. Dean nodded. Out of the corner of his eye Dean noticed that Owen had turned from pink to greenish-yellow, which he knew from experience indicated the woo was upset about something but not yet frightened. Ignoring Pasquin, Dean lowered his infra screen and scanned the tree line. Nothing. He blew air out of his lungs—whew!—and raised the screen.

  "See something?" Pasquin asked as he tensed and shifted the position of his blaster.

  "No. I just noticed Owen here changed colors. I thought he might have sensed something. I think he can tell when danger's nearby."

  Pasquin snorted derisively. "I've never heard such crap before, Dean, taking a goddamn pet on a deployment, much less going on alert whenever he shits."

  Oh, no, Dean thought, here he goes again! "Well, Top Myer said I could bring him along, and Gunny Bass didn't object, Corporal. Besides, Owen's not just my pet, he's—well—he's third platoon's mascot."

  "I know, I know."

  "And really, Corporal, the woos can sense danger. When we were down in the caves on Diamunde, Owen—"

  "Ah, shit! ‘Diamunde,’ ‘Wanderjahr,’ ‘Elneal’—that's all I ever hear from you guys! Can't you ever talk about anything else?"

  "Well, excuse me all to hell. I'm sorry you weren't with us." Touché for insinuating I'd go to sleep on guard, Dean thought. Instantly, he felt embarrassed by his remark. It was too much like bragging. "Sorry. I was just—" Dean turned his head to look directly at the corporal as he spoke.

  "Goddamnit, Dean, keep your eyes to the front! You're responsible for the security of this sector. Don't go dozing off or screwing around with that goofy-looking pet of yours there." Pasquin spoke in a voice loud enough to be heard in the forest.

  "Keep it down," Dean said. "Look, Corporal, all I was saying was—"

  "Shut up, Lance Corporal Dean! Don't tell me what to do. Goddamnit, one of these days I'm going to strangle that stupid-looking little shit." He thrust a stiff finger out at Owen, who'd begun to turn a light shade of blue.

  Dean leaped to his feet so quickly Owen almost lost his balance. "You even breathe on Owen, and so help me I'll—" Dean shouted, forgetting his noise discipline. Pasquin stepped back quickly—and bumped into Staff Sergeant Hyakowa, who'd come from the nearby platoon command post to investigate the shouting.

  "What's going on here?" the platoon sergeant asked quietly.

  "Uh, nothing, Staff Sergeant," Pasquin muttered, his face reddening. Hyakowa looked inquiringly at Dean, who remained silent.

  Hyakowa studied the two for a moment. "All right," he said at last. "Keep it down out here. Pasquin, come with me." Hyakowa took Pasquin to the nearest building, which turned out to have been a nursery for the station's children. The brightly colored toys lying in disarray all about the small room contrasted vividly with the Marines' chameleons. Hyakowa sat atop what must have been the matron's desk while Pasquin remained standing.

  "I know all about what you did to get kicked out of the 25th," Hyakowa said without preamble.

  Pasquin felt a rush of embarrassment at the mere mention of his former unit, 25th FIST, "the Fighting 25th," as it was called, a unit with a history almost as illustrious as that of the 34th. Pasquin had felt deeply disgraced that he'd been transferred out. "What happened there was an accident, Staff Sergeant," he muttered defensively. When he heard the whining sound of his own voice in the tiny room, he felt even more embarrassed.

  Hyakowa shrugged. "Sure. A very stupid mistake." Privately, Hyakowa thought differently. Pasquin had panicked, it was a
s simple as that, and men had died. Gunny Bass, for some unfathomable reason, saw it differently, so here Pasquin was. "They sent you to us, Pasquin, because we needed replacements after Diamunde. Battalion told the Skipper he didn't have to keep you if he didn't want you. They said they'd send you to another company or keep you at HQ. Captain Conorado did not want you, Corporal Pasquin."

  Pasquin said nothing at first, just shifted position slightly. He'd gotten the impression he was less than welcome when Captain Conorado had given him a cold reception. His first impulse was to respond, "Well, to hell with you, then!" and spend the rest of his enlistment on the staff. Now, he asked, "Well, then why...?"

  Hyakowa nodded. "Bass convinced him otherwise. Bass saw something in you or in your records, Pasquin, that convinced him you were still a Marine. The captain decided to give you a chance to prove it."

  Pasquin's face turned red and he stiffened. "I am still a Marine," he said, clenching his teeth. "Goddamnit, Staff Sergeant, what happened with 25th FIST was an accident, it could've happened to anybody! The IG cleared me of responsibility."

  Hyakowa smiled to himself. That's the spirit, he thought. Maybe Bass had been right. He slid lightly off the desk and stood in front of Pasquin. "Forget about it. That was then. This is now. And now," his voice hardened and he extended a forefinger at Pasquin, "you are riding one of my best men, for whatever reason, I don't know." He punctuated each word with a jab of his finger. "Now listen up. This shit must cease. We are in a very difficult situation here. We may be up against something—" He searched for the right word. "—well, unusually deadly. Everybody's on edge and everybody's got to keep his cool. Whatever it is that's bothering you, Pasquin, you put it behind you and lay off these men."

  The two stood facing each other for a moment. It was very hot and close in the nursery and each man had begun to perspire.

  "You are on trial here, Pasquin," Hyakowa continued, "and I am the judge. You screw up one more time, like you just did out there, and your ass is going back to the Fairfax minus those corporal's chevrons. And I'll tell you something else..." The platoon sergeant's voice had now turned as hard and cold as ice. "If you get any of these men hurt because of poor judgment or lack of guts, you are finished, goddamned finished with the Corps." Hyakowa was breathing heavily, and for just an instant it wasn't Pasquin standing there before him at all, but the cowardly ensign who'd left one of his men in the enemy's hands back on Elneal. Hyakowa got control of himself again. "Do we have an understanding, Corporal Pasquin?"

  "Y-Yes, Staff Sergeant, we do," Pasquin answered immediately.

  "Good. Now get back to your position. We still don't know whether anyone's out there."

  "All right," Bass said after surveying the carnage and destruction throughout Central Station, "the plans for this station show two alternate data storage locations. Let's find them and see if any of them are intact."

  "I've already got my sci people on it," Dr. Bynum said. Off to the side, Lieutenant Snodgrass grimaced. He should have been the one to think of that. How was he ever going to demonstrate his right to lead the expedition if those two kept thinking of everything before he did?

  "I'm going to check my people while we wait," Bass said. "Call me immediately when your people find something."

  "Will do, Gunny," the doctor replied, and followed Bass out of the administration building.

  Snodgrass was left alone. He looked about the admin building's assembly room. The furniture, much of it overturned, was pitted and sagging. He shuddered as he tried to imagine what had happened. At least the techs from the med-sci team had bagged the skeletons and sent them back to the Fairfax County.

  A sudden clatter made him jump, and he spun toward it, drawing his hand-blaster. He didn't see anyone. That chair, one of the toppled chairs, he was sure it was in a different position than before. Wasn't it? Had it settled until it overbalanced and come to a new resting position—or did something he couldn't see knock it over? He wasn't sure, nothing in the room looked the way it should. Was someone in the room with him, hidden from his view? He couldn't see anyone no matter how hard he looked or how much he changed his position to look from all directions.

  "Who's there?" he called out, and was glad his voice didn't crack. No one answered. Was it his imagination? No, he was sure he'd heard a sound—and no one was there to make a noise. They didn't have any images of whoever attacked the station. Could it be the invaders wore chameleons, like the Marines did, and were still here? He wouldn't see anyone in chameleons, he didn't have an infra viewer, nor did he know the cues to look for to see someone wearing the invisibility uniform.

  Tensely, he looked and listened. Nothing moved in his view. He didn't hear anything in the room other than his own breathing and the thudding of his heart. He glanced toward the door and wondered if it was close enough for him to get to before some invisible assailant shot him, or grappled with him to bear him down and beat him to a bloody, broken pulp. He had to try to get out of the room, to escape whoever was there with murder on his mind. He had to.

  At first his feet refused to move, and when they finally did, they were so awkward he almost tripped himself. But he made it out of the room and down the corridor to the outside without falling. He didn't hear any sound of pursuit. He thought of how silly he'd look if he said he'd heard a noise and been frightened of it, so he didn't say anything to anyone, though he did cast frequent, anxious glances toward the entrance to the admin building.

  "That's the damnedest thing I ever saw," Data Technician Second Class Savanajivpahni said, tapping his display. The science people had set up their computers under a tarp next to the admin building, and were examining the data crystals of shuttle activity before communications from the planet ceased.

  Gunny Bass was a few meters away, checking the data from the various sensors and the RPV that showed on Dupont's display board. He heard the tech's exclamation and rushed under the cover, getting there just ahead of Dr. Bynum and Lieutenant Snodgrass.

  "What is it?" he asked, leaning over Savanajivpahni's shoulder for a closer look. Dr. Bynum and Lieutenant Snodgrass crowded in next to him to watch the display. They saw a blip suddenly appear on the screen, move a short distance, then disappear. An instant later another blip appeared, closer to the center of the display. The two positions were too far apart for the blips to have been the same object. The second blip disappeared and a third, almost on top of the control center, appeared.

  Savanajivpahni pointed at the numbers and symbols that scrolled up the side of the display. "These show speed, distance, vector, and mass," he said. "According to them, the blips are shuttles moving faster than shuttles are supposed to go in atmosphere. Each of them came out of nowhere, and neither of the first two returned after it disappeared. The way they act," his voice developed a quiver, "it's like they shifted into Beamspace, and the blips are the same shuttle flicking in and out of Beamspace. But you can't do that in a planet's gravity well."

  Bass unbent and stood looking up under the edge of the tarp at the sky for a long moment as he thought about it. The only thing that made sense was that someone had an improved Beam drive that the Confederation Navy didn't know anything about. An improved Beam drive that worked not only in a gravity well, but also in atmosphere, would explain the strange blips and mean that all three were the same shuttle. It didn't seem possible, but that was the only explanation that made sense.

  Bass looked back at the display, which was looping through the strange blipping again. "What's that?" He pointed at the stationary blip.

  "That reads as a starship, civilian cargo."

  "What's it doing there?" Bass knew where Society 437 was in its supply cycle. As he watched, a smaller blip dropped out of the starship and looped into a spiral toward the planetary surface.

  Savanajivpahni shook his head. "I don't know, but it just dropped a shuttle." He glanced at the scrolling data. "If I'm reading the vector right, it's headed toward Aquarius Station."

  The intermittent blip
s of the apparent shuttle flicking in and out of Beamspace reappeared on the loop. Then the blip of the cargo starship flared up. When the flare faded away, the blip wasn't there anymore.

  "What happened?"

  "Somebody blew up the civilian ship."

  "What else have you found?" Bass asked, trying to make sense of it.

  "Over here," another tech said.

  Bass glanced at the name tag on the woman's shirt: LARISHNAMOVA. "What do you have?" he asked.

  "I've been working on the visuals from the security cameras beginning a few minutes before the unidentified shuttle landed. I've patched them together into a montage." Larishnamova twiddled a dial and flicked a toggle. "I'm afraid it doesn't tell us much." She moved so Bass and Bynum could see her display screen more easily. "This first is outside the control center," she said. An odd-looking shuttle settled into place and a hatch cracked open on its side. A tube of some sort extended a few centimeters out of the hatch and sprayed a stream of greenish fluid at the camera. The image blanked out. "That's all I could get from that one. Whatever that fluid was, it melted the camera."

  Bass reflected a moment and remembered seeing various slagged protuberances on some of the buildings.

  Another scene appeared on the display screen, the outside of the admin building. Everything appeared normal until a greenish stream shot out and the visual blanked out. Another scene flickered on. "This is inside the main entrance of the admin center," Larishnamova said. "I have it starting right when the previous one blanked out." The view was of the lobby, as seen from a position high on the wall in a corner. A man, probably a security guard, was lounging behind a short counter in the upper right corner of the picture. The entryway was on the left side, and other doors were visible on both sides of the security counter. The entrance door suddenly flew open and a stream of greenish fluid shot across the lobby at the guard a moment before another stream of fluid flew at the camera and knocked it out.