Jack McDevitt

Deepsix

PROLOGUE

October 2204

"They went in there." Sherry pointed.

The afternoon was quiet and deadly still The sun rode in a cloudless sky, It was not, of course, a bright sun. The dusty Quiveras Cloud, within which this system had drifted for three thousand years, prevented that. Randall Nightingale looked around at the trees and the river and the plain behind him, and considered how rare, in this equatorial place, was a summer's day.

In his mind, he replayed the screams. And the staccato sounds of the stinger blasts.

His pilot. Cookie, was checking his weapon. Tatia shook her head, wondering how Gappy could have been so dumb as to wander off. She was redheaded, young, quiet. Her usually congenial expression was bleak.

Andi watched the line of trees the way one might watch a prowling tiger.

Capanelli and his two colleagues had started just after dawn, Sherry explained again. They'd entered the forest despite the prohibition against getting out of sight of the lander. And they hadn't come out.

"But you must have heard what happened," said Nightingale. The three members of the party had been wearing e-suits and talking to each other on the allcom.

She looked, embarrassed. "I went in the washroom. Tess called me when it started to happen." Tess was the AI. "When I got out, it was over. There was nothing." Her lip trembled, and she looked on the edge of hysteria. Tess had recorded a few seconds of screams. And that was all they had.

Nightingale tried calling them, and heard only a carrier wave. "Okay," he said. "Let's go."

"All of us?" asked Andi. She was blond, chunky, usually full of wisecracks. One of the boys. At the moment, she was strictly business.

"Strength in numbers," he said.

They spread out across the hardscrabble grass, glanced at one another for mutual support, and started toward the tree line. "There," Sherry said. "They went in there."

Nightingale led the way. They proceeded cautiously, drawing together again, weapons at the ready. But these were researchers, not trained military types. To his knowledge, none had ever fired a stinger in anger. Seeing how nervous they were, he wondered whether they didn't have as much to fear from themselves as from the local wildlife.

The sunlight dimmed beneath the canopy, and the air temperature dropped a few degrees. The trees were tall and fleshy, their upper branches tangled in a canopy of vines and large spade-shaped leaves. Thick cactuslike growths were everywhere. The ground was covered with vegetable debris. Overhead, an army of unseen creatures screeched, scratched, ran, and flapped. As was the case in forests everywhere, he knew, the majority of animals would be found living in the canopy and not on the ground.

The e-suit reduced his olfactory sense, but imagination came to his rescue, even in this curious woodland, and he could smell the pines and mint of his native Georgia.

Biney Coldfield, the starship's captain and pilot of the third lander, broke in to inform him she was approaching and would join the search as soon as she was down.

He acknowledged, letting his irritation show in his voice. Cap-naelli had embarrassed him, ignoring the established guidelines and plunging into an area with such limited visibility. It made them all look like rank amateurs. And had probably gotten him killed.

Nightingale scanned the ground, trying to spot footprints, or any sign Gappy's group might have left in passing. But he saw nothing. At last he turned to the others in his party. "Do we have a woodsman, by any chance?"

They looked at one another.

"Where were they going?" he asked Sherry.

"Nowhere in particular. Straight ahead, I guess. Following the trail."

Nightingale sighed. Straight ahead it was.

Something raced up a tree. At first glimpse he thought it resembled a squirrel, but then he saw it had extra legs. It was their first day on Maleiva III.

A couple of birds circled them and settled onto a branch. Red-birds. They looked like cardinals, except that they had long beaks and turquoise crests. The colors clashed.

"Wait a minute," Sherry said.

"What?" demanded Nightingale.

She raised her hand for quiet. "There's something behind us." They whirled as one and weapons came up. In their rear, a tree limb fell. Nightingale backed into something with spines.

Cookie and Tatia went back and looked. "Nothing here," they reported.

They moved out again.

There was little space for walking. They were constantly pushing through bushes and fighting their way past brambles. He pointed out a couple of broken stalks that suggested something had come this way.

Then he stepped into a glade and saw them.

All three were lying still. Their force-field envelopes were filled with blood. Their faces were frozen in expressions of terror and agony.

Sherry came out behind him, gasped, and started forward.

He stopped her and held her until she calmed down a bit. The others scanned the trees for the attacker. "Whatever it was," said Tatia, "it's not here now."

Sherry freed herself from him, approached the bodies, moving progressively more slowly, and finally dropped to her knees beside them. He watched her whisper something. Watched her rock back on her haunches and stare into the trees.

He joined her, put a hand on her shoulder, and stood wordlessly, looking down at the carnage.

Andi came up beside him. She'd been a close friend of Al White's for years. She sighed and began quietly to sob.

Tatia remained at the edge of the glade, glancing first at the bodies and then hardening her gaze and surveying the ring of trees.

Biney, listening from the third lander, broke in: "What's going on, Randy?"

All the Wood was trapped inside the Flickinger fields, so it was difficult to make out details of the wounds. But each of the three looked as if he'd been jabbed, bitten, gouged, whatever, numerous times. The wounds looked small, he thought. The attacker had been small. Attackers. There had certainly been more than one.

He must have said it aloud. "Small?" said Biney. "How small?"

"Rat size, maybe. Maybe a little bigger."

Whatever they had been, they'd succeeded in tearing off a few pieces of meat, although they hadn't been able to eat any of it because they couldn't extract it from the e-suits.

The area had been the scene of a battle. Scorch marks on some of the trees. Pulp blasted away from the soft-bodied vegetation, and a green viscous liquid bleeding out. Several overhead branches were blackened.

"They were shooting up," said Nightingale.

They, gathered almost unconsciously into a circle, backs protected, and stared at the trees and the canopy.

"Man-eating squirrels?" said Andi.

Several shrubs were burnt-out. One tree down. But no corpses or other remains of large predators. "There's no sign of whatever did it."

"Okay," Biney said. "We're just setting down. We'll be there in a few minutes. You might want to head out. Forthwith."

"Can't leave the bodies. And we don't have enough muscle here to move them." Cookie was the only full-size male. Nightingale himself was barely as big as Andi, the smallest of the women.

"Okay. Wait for us. We'll be with you as soon as we can."

A couple more birds settled onto a branch. The ugly cardinals.

"You all right, Andi?" asked Nightingale, putting an arm around her.

"I've been better."

"I know. I'm sorry. He was a good guy."

"They were all good guys."

Tatia's head came up. "Over there," she said.

Nightingale looked, but saw only trees.

The e-suit tended to dampen sound. He turned it off so he could hear better. The cold bit into him. But something in that direction was padding around.