Brazil led them first to the distress beacon, if only to prove to himself that he was correct. They examined it carefully, and agreed that there was no way it could be sending.
But the little lifeboat monitor connection to the mother ship still said it was.
So they climbed back in and sped northward, the mystery so pressing on them that they barely noted the Markovian ruins near the camp and along the route. The ship’s computer had located the two missing shuttlecraft on a plain near the north pole, and that seemed the next likely place to investigate. If anyone was left alive, he would be there.
“Why do you think they are up there?” Vardia asked Brazil.
“My theory is that the murderer couldn’t trap one of them in the base camp and that that one took a shuttle and flew off. There must have been a chase, and that plain is where they met up,” the captain replied. “We’ll know in a little while, because we’re almost there.”
Being in a lifeboat with a major spatial propulsion unit, Brazil was able to make the long trip by going back up into orbit and braking back down again. Thus, the nine-hour journey was reduced to just a little over ninety minutes. He braked to the slowest speed he could maintain as they cleared a last mountain range and came upon a broad, flat plain.
“There they are!” Vardia almost shouted, and they all looked ahead at the two craft, small silver disks in the twilight, shown prominently at the edge of a slight discoloration in the plain.
Brazil circled around the spot several times.
“I can see no one,” Hain reported. “Not a sign of life, not a pressure suit, nothing. They may still be in the craft,” he suggested.
“Okay,” Brazil replied, “I’ll set down a few hundred meters from them. Hain, you stay back just outside this boat and cover me. The other two of you stay inside. If anything happens to us, the mother ship will reclaim the boat.”
There was a soft bump, and they were down on the surface of Dalgonia. Brazil reached into the broad, black belt he wore on the outside of his pressure suit and removed one of two pistols and handed it to Hain.
The pistols didn’t look like much, but they could fire short pulses of energy at rates from one per second to five hundred per second, the latter not doing much for aim but able to spread things enough to knock off a small regiment. There was a stun setting that would paralyze a man for a half hour or more, but both men placed their weapons on full.
There were seven ugly bodies far to the south.
Brazil eased out of the hatch in the eerie silence of a near vacuum, and, keeping the two shuttlecraft always in view, moved to cover behind the lifeboat. That was a relatively safe haven. Since the boat had been built to take a tremendous amount of stress and even friction, it would be impervious to any weapons likely to be in the hands of their quarry.
Hain emerged shortly after, having more trouble climbing down with his bulk despite the weak gravity. He chose a position just forward of the nose where he was mostly sheltered but could still use the edge of the boat to steady his pistol.
Brazil, satisfied, moved cautiously forward.
He reached the nearest craft in less than two minutes. “No sign of life yet,” he told them. “I’m going to climb up on top and have a look inside.” He mounted the rail-type ladder along the side of the shuttle and walked over to the entry hatch.
“Still nothing,” Brazil reported. “I’m going in.”
It took only another three minutes to get inside and find nobody home. He then repeated the sequence with the second craft and found it empty too, although this one showed signs that somebody had spent many hours there.
“Come on up, anybody,” he called. “There’s no one here, or for many kilometers around. See what you make of it.”
Hain told Wu Julee to join him. Vardia climbed out last, and they all went over to the captain, who was standing near the second shuttle and looking anxiously at the ground. Brazil noted with some amusement that Vardia clutched her nice, pretty sword.
“Look at the ground here,” he said, pointing to the tracks of a person in a pressure suit coming up to a point at which the dust around was greatly disturbed for a large area.
“What do you make of it, Captain?” Hain asked.
“Well, it looks as if my theory’s right, anyway. See—the first one was here, then saw the second one land, and he hid out on the back of the shuttle. When the pursuer—the guy who landed second I assume was the murderer—found nobody home, he walked around to here”—Brazil gestured at the mottled dust thrown about—“and was jumped by the first person from on top. They fought here, then one took off across the plain, the other in pursuit. See how we get only the toe tracks coming out of the fight scene?”
Vardia was already following the tracks out onto the plain. Suddenly she stopped short and stared, incredulous, at the ground. “Captain! Everyone! Came here!” she called urgently. They rushed up to her. She was pointing at the ground immediately ahead of her.
The fine dust was thinner here, and the rock changed color from a dull orange to more of a gray, but at first they didn’t see what she meant. Brazil went over and stooped down. Then it sank in on him.
At the place where one man had stepped, just where the two strains of rock met, there was half a footprint. Not the running type—it was angled, so that a little less than half of a grown man’s footprint, pressure suit pattern and all, was visible in the orange. Where it met the gray, there was unbroken dust.
“How is it possible, Captain?” Vardia asked, awed for the first time in her life—and not a little scared.
“There must be an explanation. It’s a freakish thing—but I’d believe almost anything after all we’ve seen. I’m sure we’ll find their prints continue farther on. Let’s see.”
They all walked onto the gray area for some distance. Vardia suddenly looked back to make certain that they were making footprints, and was relieved to see that they were. Suddenly she stopped short.
“Captain!” she exclaimed, that toneless voice suddenly tinged with panic and fear. The rest caught it, stopped, and turned. Vardia was pointing back at the ships from which they had come.
There were no shuttlecraft. There was no lifeboat. Only a bleak, unbroken orange plain stretching off to the mountains in the distance.
“Now what the hell?” Brazil managed, looking all around him to see if they had somehow turned around. They hadn’t. He looked up to see if he could spot anything leaving, but there was nothing but the cold stars as darknesss overtook them.
“What happened?” Hain asked plaintively. “Did our murderer—”
“No, that’s not it,” Brazil cut in quickly, a cold chill suddenly going through him. “No one person—not even two—could have managed all three craft, and nobody but me could have lifted that lifeboat for another two hours.”
There was a sudden vibration, like a small earthquake, that knocked them all off their feet.
Brazil broke his fall and held on in a crouch on his hands and knees. He looked up suddenly.
The whole area seemed bathed in eerie flashes of blue-white lightning, thousands of them!