The balloonists were out over the ocean-lake now, half a kilometer away and low. Sweggert marched his dozen troops across the camp to the empty tents at the end of the company street; he would do it in the open if he had to, but damned if he wouldn’t take a little privacy when he could get it. The tethered balloonist, further than ever from recuperating, had been moved there days since, along with the strobe light.
Sweggert stopped, swearing. Nan Dimitrova and Dalehouse were talking to the balloonist, and only a few meters away the Russian pilot, Kappelyushnikov, was complaining about something to Colonel Tree. Privacy, shit. But it didn’t matter; he had Colonel Menninger’s permission, and she was the one who counted. He retrieved the strobe and pointed it toward the hovering swarm.
Predictably, Dalehouse butted in. “What do you think you’re doing, Sweggert?”
Sweggert took time to aim the strobe and flash it to bring them in before he answered. “Gonna have a little fun. The colonel said it was okay.”
“Hell she did! Anyway—”
“Anyway,” Sweggert interrupted, “why don’t you go check with her if you don’t believe me? Would you move a little, sir? You’re getting between them and the light.”
Ana Dimitrova laid her hand on Dalehouse’s arm to keep him from replying. “It is not fun for the balloonists, Sergeant Sweggert. To experience sexual climax is very painful and debilitating. As you can see, this one is seriously affected. It may die.”
“What a way to go, hey, Ana?” Sweggert grinned. “Take it up with the colonel — hey, Dalehouse! What are you doing?”
Dalehouse had switched on his radio and was singing softly into it. Colonel Tree, beginning to pay attention, walked toward them, and Sweggert turned to him. “Colonel! We have Colonel Menninger’s permission to get the Loonies in for a fix, and this guy’s telling them to screw off!”
Tree stopped with his hands clasped behind his back and nodded gravely. “A dilemma,” he said in his soft child’s voice. “It will be quite interesting to see what they do.”
What they were doing was spreading themselves all over the sky, some dropping lower to catch the onshore breeze, others hesitating. They were singing loudly and discordantly, and the sounds came distantly from the sky and tinnily from the radio in Dalehouse’s hand. Sweggert stood rock-still, controlling the rage that was building up in him. Fucking Cong! When you had the CO’s permission, that was all you were supposed to need! Why wouldn’t Tree back him up?
“Gimme that,” he growled, reaching out for Dalehouse’s radio.
But Dalehouse’s expression had changed. “Hold it,” he snapped, and sang a quick phrase into the radio. The answer came back as a cascade of musical phrases; Dalehouse looked startled and Ana Dimitrova gasped, her hand to her lips. “Tree,” he said, “according to Charlie, there’s some Krinpit down the beach, and they’re eating a couple of people.”
“But Krinpit do not eat human beings,” objected Colonel Tree, and Sweggert chimed in: “There’s nobody down there. Nobody’s gone through the perimeter all day.”
Dalehouse repeated his question into the radio and shrugged. “That’s what he says. He could be wrong about the eating part, I guess — he doesn’t have a very clear concept of killing, except to eat.”
Sweggert put down the strobe. “We better tell the colonel,” he said.
Colonel Tree said, “That’s correct. You do so, Dalehouse. Sergeant, form your squad on the beach in thirty seconds, full combat gear. We’re going to see what’s happening.”
Half an hour later Marge Menninger herself, with thirty armed grunts behind her, met the first party coming back along the beach. There were no casualties, or at least none from the Food Bloc, but they were carrying two people. One was in a sort of sling made from two jackets knotted together, the other on Sergeant Sweggert’s shoulder, fireman-carry. They were both dead. When Sweggert put his burden down it was obvious why he had been easy to carry. Both legs were missing, and so was part of his head.
The other body was less mutilated, so that Marge Menninger recognized her at once.
It was Tinka.
Marge stood numbly while Sweggert made his report. No Krinpit in sight; they had got away, so far that they couldn’t even be heard. Both people were dead when they got there, but recently; the bodies were still warm. For that matter, they were still warm now. And the man had had a packet in a waterproof wrapping inside his shirt. Margie accepted it and tore it open. Microfiches — scores of them. The man’s ID card, which showed that he was the Indonesian Tinka had gone to contact. A pair of child-sized spectacles — flat glass, not optically ground. Why glasses? For that matter, how had the two got here? Had they been caught as spies and then somehow escaped? And how had they come the long distance from the Greasy camp to the beach where they died?
By the time they got back to the base, she had an answer to at least part of the question, because Dalehouse reported that the balloonists had spotted something farther down the beach that looked like the remains of a deflated rubber boat. She swung the tiny glasses from their elastic band as she listened, nodding, taking in all of it as information to process, not quite ready to take in the information of Tinka’s death as a pain to feel.
She looked down at the glasses. They were now almost opaque.
“That’s interesting,” she said in a voice that was very nearly normal. “They must be photosensitive glass. Like indoor-outdoor sunglasses.” She glanced up at the sullen red coal of Kung overhead. “Only what in the world would anybody want with them on Jem?”
SEVENTEEN
Six KILOMETERS down the shoreline from where he had slain the Poison Ghosts, Sharn-igon paused in his flight to scratch out a shallow pit under a bluff. He needed to hide because he needed to rest.
Digging was always dangerous for a Krinpit because of the Ghosts Below. But here it was unlikely they would be near — too close to the water. They did not like to risk their tunnels flooding. And the many-tree on the bluff above him was a good sign. The roots of the many-tree were distasteful to them.
As he settled himself in, Sharn-igon wondered briefly what had become of his cobelligerent, the Poison Ghost Dulla. He did not feel concern, as one might for a fellow being. He did not think of Dulla in that way. Dulla was a weapon, a tool, without “being-ness.” After they had slain the Poison Ghosts Dulla called “Greasies,” they had both fled, and of course Dulla had fled faster and farther. Sharn-igon did not think of that as a betrayal. If he had been the nimble one and Dulla the slow-moving, he would certainly have done the same. Dulla’s utility as a tool lay in his speed and in the way he was able to speak words to other Poison Ghosts that caused them to hesitate, to be uncertain, while Sharn-igon had time to come in upon them and kill. It was so very easy to kill Poison Ghosts! A few slashes, a blow with the club-claw — it took no more than that. Sometimes they had weapons, and Sharn-igon had learned to respect some of those weapons. But the two on the beach had had so little — a bright-sounding popgun whose tiny bullets bounced off his shell, a thing that squirted some sort of foul, stinging smell that made him feel queer and unpleasant for a moment but did not slow him in the kill. Such as they he could kill with or without his tool, the Poison Ghost Dulla.
He switched his carapace back and forth to wedge himself deeper in his pit and rested, his hearing receptors watchful toward the water, his feelers drilled deep into the soil to listen for vibrations from any approaching Ghosts Below. It was the burrowers he feared, more than any danger from the water or the beach.