Mike sighed. “OK. Now put everything into searching for a survivor. The odds are small that we can locate him through the foliage, but it’s our best chance of finding answers. And maybe solutions. Yeager out.”
Silently, he called up a review of the data. It filled the wall—other pieces of the puzzle had come in: the personal effects of the colonists had been left untouched, except here and there where they had apparently been used as weapons of opportunity on each other. Food and water supplies proved to be free of poison, drugs, or biologicals. One maser transmitter had been torched, and the two backups taken out with axes.
Various discharged weapons were found all over the colony—many more than occasional hunting would explain. They had been made locally, by the colony’s nano-replicator. Bullets, arrowheads, and crossbow bolts found in the bodies of some of the colonists matched the weapons.
In the main dormitory, the crew of Yeager had made perhaps their most disturbing discovery. One wall was covered with primitive drawings of stick figures dancing around a fire. One female figure was being carried into the flames by others. The scene was done in what turned out to be human blood. There was another blood painting of a dagger in a human heart, with one word: “Why?”
“Psychotic art?” Mike asked.
Nadine shook her head. “Maybe an effort to communicate the horror of what they were doing, even as they did it. That’s the last of the autopsies.” She gestured to a holographic display over her lab bench. She was hollow-eyed and weary from ten days of intensive effort. “That woman burned to death, leaving charred bones and little else.”
Mike regarded what was left of this body with revulsion. “I don’t know how you keep going,” he told her. “Have you slept at all?”
She flashed a quick, wry smile. “I dope myself down for four hours out of twenty, then dope myself up again. Don’t look at me! Doc Bailey on the Cochran has been working just as hard.” She sighed. “I haven’t been outside for over a week. At least the work keeps my mind off… other things. I heard it rained today,” she said with a weak smile.
“Just a shower. Prettiest rainbows I ever saw. The flowers smell like a dream.”
“I don’t dare dream, Mike. Corpse after corpse. These people deliberately, willfully destroyed their bodies while they were still alive.”
Mike looked at her bleakly, and nodded. She was different, older, harder. It wasn’t just tiredness; she hardly looked like the same person. She… “You’ve cut your hair.”
“I wanted to do something, something really self-abusive. But I didn’t dare do anything really significant. Not while I have all this responsibility. So I just hacked it away—butchered it.” She laughed like a wicked child. “A self-destructive catharsis, and Harrison said he liked it!”
“You hacked pretty evenly, I’d say. Got it kind of tapered.”
“I used the scalpel.” She stared at him.
He pulled her from her chair and put his arms around her.
“Squeeze tighter, lover. It helps a little. Pain helps. I’ve stabbed myself twice, you know. Deliberately. Just for a release. Felt great. Almost like, you know—”
“Nadine!”
She made a hollow laugh. “I took care not to hit anything vital, and I’m taking an endorphin antagonist to dull the response now. But I’m walking a chemical tightrope. Too much and I can’t think, too little and…” She looked into his face with haunted eyes.
He hugged her as hard as he dared.
After a squeeze that hurt his arms, she said, “OK, back to work.” She pointed to a fractured bone in the video. “The left arm—two of those bones had been broken at least a week before she died. She was right-handed.”
“Why didn’t they tell us?” Mike asked, rhetorically more than anything else.
But Nadine answered. “I think they were ashamed.”
“Ashamed?”
“Suppose itching, or maybe sex, became fatal, but we couldn’t stop doing it?” Nadine looked at him. “Sex was really dangerous once, you know. People died in childbirth. Then there was a fatal sexually transmitted virus that fed on the immune system itself. People did it anyway.”
He looked at her, remembering.
She flashed a smile at him. “Have you looked at the data stick we found in the computer room yet?”
Mike shook his head and grimaced. “Damn. I forgot I had it.” He patted his coverall pocket and found it. “Here. Since Ian found the graves it’s been one thing after another.”
Nadine touched his arm gently and motioned to her reader. Mike dropped the wand in the hole.
“Left wall,” Nadine said. “Let’s see the last thirty minutes.”
A monotone holographic image sprung up in front of the clinic wall screen: a half-sized view of the colony’s central data room, then intact, and two occupants walking eerily in front of the screen like ghost images. The maintenance surveillance record was silent—a privacy constraint—and of course, its subjects were now “ghosts.”
Mike froze as their appearance sunk in. They looked like primitive aborigines, naked except for tattered shorts and an unbelievable number of rings and other things piercing their bodies—noses, ears, biceps, lips, everywhere. They were caressing each other with an almost crazy intensity, tearing at their adornments as they did, and blood flowed freely. Mike shot a look at Nadine. Her eyes were wide with horror—or fascination—and oblivious to him. He touched her arm.
She nodded slowly. “In my considered medical opinion, they’re having fun. Maybe too much fun.”
The man fell to the floor, clearly exhausted, and said something. The woman shook her head and kissed him. He spoke again, seeming to plead, and she finally nodded. Suddenly the man flung out his arms and yelled what was clearly: “Now!”
The woman took a knife from somewhere, held it high, then brought it violently down. Nadine stared. Mike turned away.
When he turned back, the woman’s image stood over a mutilated body, the knife still protruding from a mass of gore in the abdominal area. She cried and laughed at once, grinning, almost prancing around the room, raking herself with her nails. She went to the optical interface shelf and, one by one, pulled the CPUs off, threw them on the floor, and began stomping on them. White bone shone through her bloody, shredded feet before she was done with the third one. When she took the fourth, the record went blank. Without regulation, power had shut down. Mercifully.
Mike shook his head, shuddering. “We’ll have the Cochran play back everything. There may be some… clue.”
Nadine shivered, but seemed fascinated as well. “I think she wanted to protect us from knowing. But why is she so happy? Why the endorphins?”
“Madness?”
“That’s the symptom—what’s the cause? Got to be biological,” Nadine whispered. “You don’t want to be cured. You want madness to run its course. That utter destruction gave them an ecstasy literally worth dying for. She wanted to keep us from knowing what—what I’m beginning to feel.”
“Nadine…” Mike put his hands on her shoulders. “I don’t want to lose you.”
She grabbed his hands hard and dug her fingernails into his skin. “Then join me,” she whispered.
“Nadine!”
She sat silent for a minute at least, breathing deeply. Then her eyes shut a moment, and Mike watched as she called up the hologram of the autopsy statistics. In an unsteady voice, fighting for detachment, Nadine started to go over the results. “Thirteen of the bodies were immolated.”
Mike nodded, grimly.
“All women,” Nadine continued. “It matches that ritualistic scene in blood on the dorm wall. I’d guess the women wanted it that way, more tactile, more feeling in our skins. With the guys, it’s deep wounds. Bones with knife scars made during life. Bones shattered by gunshot. I’ll bet a bunch of them just walked up to each other and blazed away at ten paces. They deliberately didn’t shoot to kill; there are too few gunshot wounds here that would be immediately fatal in and of themselves.”