“Guess we d better take a look personally.”
“I’ll wait for you,” she said.
Mike took his gun from his belt kit. “Stun darts,” he told Nadine. “Better safe…”
Nadine got her own out.
Mike looked at her. “You’re joining me, then?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.” She brushed a caterpillar-like something off her arm. “Yuck. You go find a leaf.”
Mike said, “We’ll need to reestablish plant and insect control here.” The bugs were designed not to bite people—as soon as their primitive little sensors recognized one—but sometimes that required crawling on you. “The jungle seems to be overrunning everything.”
“Yeah.”
They reached the Admin building in minutes. The only two-story structure in the little colony, its wide, debris-covered staircase yawned at them ten meters inside the front door. Some local version of ivy had followed its banister up as far as Mike could see. Nadine took the point without asking, flashing him a daredevil grin, and he smiled back at her. Excitement like this was hard to come by, and she wanted it all. He didn’t blame her.
They stepped through the entrance. The colony and its own eyes were still powerless, but Mike’s visor display told him the ship had activated the tiny cameras all crew members wore—there would be a visual record of anything out of sight of the overheads.
They climbed the stairs to the data management area, a circle built around a tall redwood that must have been one of the first plants started in the area. The hall was a torus around the tree, and the rooms were truncated pie-wedges around that.
“Here,” Kay called to them from a quarter circle around the inner balcony. They came and looked. Broken equipment, furniture, glass, artwork files were scattered around the floor.
“Animals?” Mike wondered out loud.
Kay shook her head. “I don’t think so; the door probably jammed shut when the power failed.”
“Probably. It should be reasonably safe,” Mike said, but he worried. No Earth life would have stayed inside for fourteen years waiting to attack the next thing to come through the door—but the possibilities included crazy robots and aliens.
Kay looked further down the ring. “I have a few more doors to open.”
Mike nodded, “Go ahead. But be careful.”
She nodded and left.
He looked at the room. It was utterly still. Kay’s probe showed everything he couldn’t see himself. Empty. He walked briskly into the middle of the room and turned, gun ready. His feet crunched pieces of plastic and glass on the floor. Nothing jumped him. He scuffed the dust off the floor with his right boot. There were stains beneath the dust.
“Nadine…”
“OK. I see it.” She came in, bent down, and placed her analyzer on one of the stains, brushing away shards of shattered plastic. This stuff is too tough to break from falling, Mike thought.
“Blood,” Nadine announced, standing up from the dark stain. “It almost looks as if they fought a battle with something. Something big and violent that hated computers.”
Mike shivered. Abduction? Sabotage? Insanity? “There’s nothing larger than squirrels and—what did they name them?—wood rats, left on the entire island.”
“You’re the one with a drawn gun.” With a wry grin, Mike pocketed his pistol. No alien attack this time. “Let’s see if there’s anything in the maintenance record. There should be some non-volatile memory left around here.”
He found what was left of the physical data storage rack on the floor. Parts of the pencil-sized broken optical data wands were scattered on the ground. “Whatever did this didn’t want to leave any records.”
But the wall mounted comm unit seemed intact. He pulled off the face plate and looked in its hole—the wand was still in it.
“But they missed one.” Its label glowed as his hand warmed it: “Data management room,” he read aloud. “Not full. It might have a record of what happened here.”
“I’m not sure I want to watch.”
Mike’s incoming call tone sounded. “Tanner,” he said.
“It’s Harrison. We’ve found their graves.”
“Graves?”
“Graves, Mike. Under the orchard. It’s a bloody burial ground! I’ve got the video on four.”
When was the last time, Mike wondered, that he’d heard of a body being buried? People died of accidents every now and then… but usually when there wasn’t enough of a body left to revive, the rest was ceremoniously burned. There were, of course, some sects, back on Earth.
“Opaque, display four,” Mike whispered. Instead of the room, he saw the orchard.
The site was covered by a canopy of fruit trees as wide and tall as oaks in this gravity.
Mike remembered seeing the area in passing on ground probe video—mounds in neat geometrical rows filling the spaces between the trees. He hadn’t thought that the mounds were anything unusual at the time. “It looks like cultivation.”
“Oh, not far off,” Ian said. “Those roots and branches would camouflage the radar image. I saw the survey VR, but it didn’t come through up there. Here, I felt it. Now that I recognize it—it’s obvious.” Ian was originally from Farnham, a town in England in an area still rich with old churches and cemeteries. “We opened two of the graves. They were buried in food preservation bags.”
The video zoomed in on two sacks lying in shallow pits ringed by dirt. The human forms within the sacks were clear. “We let the gas out, so come look if you want.”
The thought that one of those could be Dena sent shivers through Mike. “On our way.”
“Roger, Mike. If you don’t need me, I’ll be down the hill working on a transporter.”
Mike turned to Nadine “Plague?”
“Something biological, probably.” She shook her head. “But why didn’t they tell us? And why, literally, cover it up?”
He looked at the data wand for a moment, then put it in a coverall pocket; they could view it later.
“Yeager, alert everyone to be on the look out for symptoms of… something.” He turned to Nadine. “Let’s go.” They left the building and loped for the hill area. Outside, birds sang, leaves rustled, and brilliant flowers tossed in a gentle breeze.
The orchard reminded Mike of the inside of an empty cathedral. The tree trunks, grown large in the low gravity, stood like columns supporting a speckled green ceiling.
Nadine walked between them, scanning the mounds with a field radar probe. “There’s just enough cover to keep them cool and away from the wood rats, I should think. They get shallower, and less ordered as you go back in, as if whoever was digging them was running out of energy. There are remains in all of them.”
Mike shuddered.
Nadine touched him. “Go down and talk to Ian. I’ll handle—this.”
Mike nodded silently and stumbled down the hill.
Ian was trying to revive one of the colony’s ground vehicles, a flatbed transporter. Tool kits were laid out among the grass and flowers where one would more likely have put picnic baskets. Several of the crew stood nearby trying to act helpful.
But Ian was in his element. He’d worked on projects from the Venus sunshield to the Nova Britain Equilateral Power Station, and seemed to be familiar with almost any technology ever devised.
“If I can just hit the right waveform for this old power receptor,” Ian said. “There! Its little idiot brain is up.” He clapped his hands in satisfaction. “Now all we need to do is provide some energy If you’d be so kind as to hand me the end of that cable, Mike…”
Mike pulled his thoughts away from the bodies. Have to get back into the mission, he told himself. He wasn’t the only one who had lost relatives or friends here. “We have local power?” he asked. The colony had been stone dead, probably since the central computer had been destroyed.