It was out of the question to lay her down on the rocket-blasted ground, still hot and strewn with jagged tile-shards, so we looked around for the nearest flat surface that might serve. This turned out to be the empty bed of Gnel’s fetch, about a hundred feet away. We carried the Geometer on our shoulders, quick-stepping as fast as we could without dropping her. Suur Maltha, the concent’s physician, met us halfway and was probing the patient’s neck with her fingertips before we had even set her down. Gnel, thinking fast, got a camp pad rolled out just in time. We laid the Geometer down on it, head on the tailgate. She was in a loose, pale blue coverall, the back sodden with what was obviously blood. Suur Maltha ripped the garment open and explored the body with a stethoscope. “Even allowing for the fact that I can’t be sure where the heart is, I hear no pulse. Just some very faint noises that I would identify as bowel sounds. Roll her over.”
We got the Geometer on her stomach. Suur Maltha cut the fabric away. It was not just soaked with blood but perforated with many holes. Maltha used a cloth to swipe a mess of gore away from the back, revealing a constellation of large round puncture wounds, extending from the buttocks up halfway to the shoulder, mostly on the left side. Everyone inhaled and became silent. Suur Maltha regarded it for a few moments, mastering her own sense of shock, and then looked as if she might be about to deliver some clinical observation.
But Gnel beat her to it. “Shotgun blast,” he diagnosed. “Heavy gauge—antipersonnel. Medium range.” And then, though it wasn’t really necessary, he delivered the verdict: “Some SOB shot this poor lady in the back. May God have mercy on her soul.”
One of Maltha’s assistants had had the presence of mind to shove a thermometer into an orifice that she had noticed down where the legs joined. “Body temp similar to ours,” she announced. “She has been dead for maybe minutes.”
The sky fell on us. Or so it seemed, for a few moments. Someone above had cut the shroud lines of the parachute and it had collapsed on our heads. Startling as all hell, but harmless. Everyone spread out and got busy pawing, dragging, stuffing, and wadding. There was no coherent plan. But eventually a lot of avout came together in the middle of the plaza, corralling a huge wad of chute-stuff which they pushed and rolled up the steps of the Temple to get it out of the way. When it was obvious that there was an oversupply of these chute-wranglers, I turned back towards the probe, meaning to go and give the people there an update. My inclination was to run. But soldiers in head-to-toe suits were coming down the ramp in force and I thought that running might only excite someone’s chase instinct.
Orolo and Sammann were examining an artifact that had been in the capsule—the box that Cord had seen on the occupant’s lap. It was made of some fibrous stuff, and it contained four transparent tubes filled with red liquid. Blood samples, we figured. Each was labeled with a different, single word in Geometer-writing, and a different circular ikon: a picture of a planet—not Arbre—as seen from space.
Soldiers yanked it out of our hands. They were all around us now. Each sported a bandolier loaded with what looked like oversized bracelets. Whenever they encountered an avout they’d yank one off and ratchet it around the avout’s throat, whereupon it would come alive and flash a few times a second. Each collar had a different string of digits printed on its front, so once they’d captured a picture of you, they would know your face and your number. It didn’t require a whole lot of imagination to guess that the collars had tracking and surveillance capabilities. But as sinister and dehumanizing as all of this was, nothing came of it, at least for now—it seemed that they only wanted to know who was where.
Fraa Landasher acquitted himself well, demanding—firmly but calmly—to know who was in charge, by what authority this was being done (“What law covers alien probes, by the way?”) and so on. But the soldiers were all dressed in suits made for chemical and biological warfare, which didn’t make engaging them in dialog any easier, and Landasher didn’t know enough about the legal procedures of this time and place. He could have mounted a fine legal defense 6400 years ago but not today.
A contingent of four soldiers, distinguished by special insignias that had been hastily poly-taped onto their suits, approached the probe and started to unpack equipment. Two of them climbed up on the scaffold, shooed away the fraa who was inside of it, and began collecting samples and making phototypes of their own.
The soldiers had naturally come to the probe first. They communicated well with one another because their suits had wireless intercoms, but they couldn’t hear or talk to us very fluently. When they did talk to us, it was to boss us around, and when they listened, it was with something worse than skepticism—as if their officers had issued a warning that the avout would try to cast spells on them. The ones who entered the probe might have noted some red fluid, but it wasn’t as obvious as you might think—the capsule had very little uncluttered floor space, the lighting was poor, and the acceleration couches were upholstered in dark material that didn’t show the stain. The face shields on the soldiers’ helmets kept fogging up. Their gloved hands could not feel the sticky wetness, their air-filtration devices removed all odors. Standing near the probe, getting used to the collar snugged around my neck, I realized that a long time might actually go by before any of the soldiers became aware of the fact that a Geometer had come down in this capsule and was lying dead in the back of a fetch a hundred feet away. The billion people watching Sammann’s feed over the Reticulum all knew this. The soldiers, isolated in their own secure, private reticule, had no idea. Sammann, Orolo, Cord, and I kept exchanging amazed and amused looks as we collectively realized this.
Yul distracted everyone for a while. He shoved away the soldiers who came to collar him, then, when they aimed weapons at him, negotiated a deal that he would collar himself. But once he’d put it on and the soldiers had walked away, he pulled the collar right off over his head. He had a thick neck and a small skull. The collar scraped his scalp and lacerated his ears, but he got it off. Then, having satisfied himself that he could do it, he pulled it back on again.
An officer finally noticed the small crowd of uncollared avout gathered around Gnel’s fetch, and sent a squad over to take care of them. It seemed that we were free to move about as long as we didn’t try to run away or interfere with the soldiers, so I followed them at a distance that I hoped they would consider polite.
Collared avout were being herded toward the Temple steps. Nearby, a line of soldiers was moving across the Teglon plaza, bent forward at the waist, picking up stray tiles and other debris that might go ballistic when they began landing things there. Big vertical-landing aerocraft were keeping station in the sky above, waiting for the landing zone to be prepared. I reckoned that the general plan was to load us on aerocraft and take us away to some kind of detention facility. The longer I could delay being on one of those flights, the better.
The squad leader did not show the least bit of curiosity as to what these half-dozen avout were doing in the back of the fetch, but only ordered them to move away from the vehicle and line up for collaring. The avout complied, looking nonplussed. A soldier circled around behind the fetch to check for stragglers. He saw the dead body, started, unslung his weapon—which drew the attention of his squad-mates—then relaxed and put the weapon back over his shoulder. He approached the fetch slowly. Something in his posture told me he was communicating with his mates on the wireless. I got in close enough to hear the squad leader saying to Suur Maltha—obviously the physician, since she was all stained with blood—“You have one casualty?”