Wildcatter (15 page)

* * *

Seth Broderick had a planet all to himself. He was as alone as a guy ever could be. Frustratingly, all he could see of his world was groundcover and a charred area like the scar of a large campfire. Control had avoided ridges when choosing a stable landing ground, so he was standing in a very slight hollow. He plodded up the gentle slope, arms spread to keep his balance, placing every step with care. Top speed was half a klick an hour now. He chattered to his plog.

“If you’ve watched many plogs, then I’m sure you’ve heard other prospectors say this, but I really wonder what this world smells like. The filter on my suit cuts out all the odors and dust…” He paused to catch his breath. “Another strange thing here is the silence. This is a very silent place. No birds singing, no dogs or traffic… Just the wind swishing this groundcover.”

At the top of the slope he found the chaotic rocks and pebbles more exposed, as if this were a later dump from some great fleet of trucks. Here the vegetation had not been burned, but he found dead remains of the ropy vines under some of the boulders, and collected a few fragments.

Although he was still standing on a plain, he had gained a slightly wider view. The sun was low in the sky, roughly north-north-east, but it would not set at this latitude yet, so he need not worry about darkness. The Tsukuba River lay somewhere to the north, heading eastward to the sea. Southeastward stood an ominous wall of cloud, not the storm he had flown over, another just as menacing. The chimneys must lie in that direction. To the south he ought to be able to discern the coastal ranges, but all he was sure of were some clouds that might be the sort that hung around above mountains.

To the north he thought he could see a white triangular wing pointed skyward, the remains of the Galactic shuttle, perhaps half a kilometer away. He had planned on being set down much closer to it.

“
Golden Hind
, can you place me?”

Jordan: “Your landing site was about 1.2 kilometers west of the chimneys. The Galactic shuttle is 0.6 klicks northeast of you.”

Right on! “And the river?”

“The major channel is at least three klicks north of the shuttle, but remember there are many minor channels.”

“Then I shall investigate the shuttle first and after that proceed to the colony. I doubt if I’ll get any farther over this terrain. What is Maria making of it? I was expecting alluvium—mud, not boulders. Is this crap glacial?”

“Maybe originally glacial,” Maria said. “The nearest I’ve ever seen are debris flows that you get in major floods. But that’s in mountains; I’ve never heard of anything quite like it on a river plain. Some of the rocks look well-rounded and some are freshly broken. It’s very poorly sorted—big stuff jumbled in with much finer. I can’t be sure without a closer look, but I suspect you’re seeing the product of those storm surges Control predicted. The river probably floods, but I can’t believe any river could throw boulders of that size around on what is basically flat ground. Anything that can do so must be extremely violent.”

“I can’t wait to meet it. Thanks. Prospector out.”

He made his way back down to his packs and collected two spare water bottles. He could always locate the packs by their transponders, but he very much doubted that he would be coming back for them.

* * *

Wading over that rubble in that gravity felt much like climbing a mountain while carrying a horse. It took him well over an hour to reach the shuttle, a distance he could have run in two minutes on Earth. Several times he nearly fell. Level patches were bad enough; the gentlest slopes, up or down, were even harder, because terrestrial eyes and reflexes couldn’t judge what was needed.

Still the only sound was the rush of the wind in the shrubbery. Every ten or fifteen minutes he heard that sound rising and lay down until it stopped howling and the wind dropped to a strong breeze again. Twice he thought he was going to be lifted bodily, and certainly would have been had he not had the vegetation to hang on to. He understood now how Dylan Guinizelli had let a gust of wind break his arm.

He collected a thumb-sized, four-legged beetle, a few stray weeds unlike the ferns, some fibrous material that he guessed was decayed wood-like matter left there by the storm surges, three broken shells with traces of organic material clinging to them, some tiny animal bones, and a dozen fecal pellets. Those would probably excite Reese more than all the rest. A single gram of organic material would yield thousands of exotic chemicals, but he found it hard to believe his packet of grunge would ever make him rich, despite the legends of old Mathewson and his bucket of dirt. It was not an inspiring collection and he might have to return with his sample bag more empty than full—unless, of course, he found some of the Galactic samples he could purloin. There would be a certain justice in that.

He had used up at least a third of his planned stay. He was tired. He was thirsty, and had emptied his first water bottle. Why couldn’t the damned planet have given him a nice flat meadow to run around on, as he had expected? A delta plain made of boulders was an absurdity.

Long before he reached the Galactic shuttle, he saw that it was a KR745, which could carry a team of five and made
Golden Hind
’s Oryo 9 look like a child’s toy. It had probably cost twenty times as much. JC liked to badmouth the multinationals, but even he never accused them of skimping on equipment. Seth found where the KR745 had touched down, charring the vegetation. He found the scars where it had dragged and bounced as the wind took it away. And he came at last to the gully where it now rested.

The KR745 had the standard delta wings for supersonic flight, but it was a “layflat” as opposed to a “standup” like
Niagara
. It landed level, not vertical. That might have been its undoing, if the crew had not appreciated the wind danger soon enough. Control should have done so, but with the two prospectors gone exploring, the biologist left aboard must have overruled Control’s advice to take off. Now what had once been a beautiful thing was an ugly corpse, lying like a dead bird in a shallow, sandy channel, resting on its port side against the far bank, with one wing pointing at the sky and the other crumpled underneath the fuselage. Its back had been broken, leaving the nose almost separated from the rest.

The channel was sinuous, its bed sandy not rocky, the first fine-grained sediment Seth had seen. No water was flowing, but Maria had been right about open water near the wreck, a shiny pond, rippling in the wind. More pools marking the low points of the channel, even on the limited stretch he could see before it curved out of view. Would they be salt tidal pools, or seepages of fresh groundwater from the river? He had no intention of tasting them to find out, but he would certainly take samples.

He was babbling about this to his plog when Jordan’s voice interrupted.

“Prospector, the shuttle will dock in about ten minutes. We can begin refueling at once, but how does the weather look down there?”

Weather? Seth glanced eastward and then used some words that would certainly have to be edited out before his plog could ever be made public. The storm was halfway up the sky, white on the crest, but black as death underneath, lurid with lightning flashes.

“Not good,” he added for publication. “What’s the timing?”

“Not good either. We think that brute is going to hit you in about two hours, and
Niagara
can’t get to you before then.”

“Two hours should give me long enough to take a look at the chimneys. This wreck must have been lodged here for two or three weeks. I can shelter inside it until the wind drops.”

“Keep in touch, Seth.”

“Stick around, won’t you? Prospector out.”

The rocky bank sloped gently, but gentle in that gravity felt like steep elsewhere. He slid and staggered down it without falling. Then, at last free to step out normally, he headed along the hollow to the wreck. His objective was the gaping hole just forward of the wings, which looked like an easy access. He hadn’t gone far when he saw the footprints, and those changed everything.

* * *

There were many prints, most of them old and faint, flattened by wind and rain until they were mere dimples in the sand. He might not have noticed them had they not been grouped into two distinct trails and highlighted by a few more recent tracks. Both trails began at the break in the shuttle. The wind had not yet had time to blur the latest set, although they did not look very recent. They were human footprints and their maker had been barefoot—reasonable in this climate, dangerous in this environment. One set ran eastward to the pond and the other west to a place where someone had been digging in the sand. Even your average Ph.D. could work out that the pond was for either drinking water or washing, while the digging site was a makeshift latrine. Animals dug pits, but not with a shovel.

Seth babbled to his plog about Man Friday and Robinson Crusoe while the rest of his brain raged against the extent of Commodore Duddridge’s treachery. Some of his shuttle crew had survived until very recently. They might even be still alive. The commodore had not merely given up too easily, he had deliberately flown away and marooned people to die on a planet one step up from Hell. Then the bastard had tried to cover up his crime by posting a quarantine beacon in the hope that Mighty Mite’s expedition would not come looking at the evidence. There was a charge of willful murder in Comrade Duddridge’s future.

Seth’s second thought—followed instantly by a surge of shame that he would think of such a thing at a time like this, when he had just discovered a fellow human being callously left to die—was that his financial future was now secure. If he returned alive to the real world, his plog was going to be a bestseller. It had all the syrupy drama and pathos of afternoon space opera, the sort of dreck churned out by teams of worn-out hacks to enliven the existence of Earth’s hopeless millions. He would be famous.

Jordan’s voice: “Are those prints human, Seth?”

“Yes, sir. Wait a minute, though…”

Seth laboriously lowered himself to his knees, and then crouched to view the sand at a low angle. The oblique sunlight helped. “The topmost set, yes,” he said. “And some of the older ones. But there are other tracks mixed in, bigger feet. Can you see this one?” He traced it out for the camera’s benefit: four toes in front, probably two behind. Or the other way around, of course. Every toe ended in a wicked claw. “Whatever it is, I don’t think it eats grass.”

He struggled to his feet again. “Now to look inside.”

“Watch you don’t get shot at,” Jordan said.

Wise advice. Seth decided he was already close enough to open negotiations.

“Ship ahoy!” He shouted as loud as he could, knowing how his mask would muffle his voice. “Hello, Galactic! Anyone home? Anyone looking for a ride back to Earth?”

Nothing happened except that the sun went out. The storm had now spread from horizon to horizon, but the wind had dropped, for the first time since he arrived on Cacafuego. The ferns were barely moving. He walked closer to the shuttle.

There was a dead fish lying outside the opening.

This time his voice definitely quavered.

“Now that fish is odd. The position looks too deliberate to be just chance. There are no other dead fish anywhere, not that I can see. Is this one meant to be bait, placed there to lure some animal closer? Or has someone left an offering to the gods who live inside? Any new planet is interesting, but this one is starting to look bizarre.” Also scary, even for him.

He shouted again. Still no response.

“I’m going closer.”

The opening in the fuselage marked where the shuttle had almost broken in two, a great wound like the mouth of a cave. The entrance was low enough that he had to stoop to see in.

He clattered his stun gun against the side and turned on his helmet light to scan the shadowed interior. He was looking through the former underbelly into a shambles that had been the biosafety laboratory, now lying on its side. Much sand had washed in, largely burying the heaps of smashed equipment and furniture on what had been a wall and was now the floor. The sand had retained many footprints, some human, others … not. About human length, but broader and
webbed
. Giant penguins?

There were bones mixed in with the debris. Although they looked more like fish bones than human, they suggested that this might be something’s lair. What something other than humans used a spade—which he now saw standing upright in the sand just inside?

There was a table, too, that had either landed almost exactly right way up or been placed in that position later. A drawer from a desk or chest stood upright on the table, handle at the top. Drawers in spacecraft did not fall out by accident, no matter how rough the turbulence, and he knew of no way that this one could have ended in that position unless it had been placed there by a sentient being.

The only exit from the lab had been in the forward bulkhead, now turned sideways so that the door hung open. He shouted again, and this time he heard a faint noise, more a groan than a cry.
And tapping!

“I’m coming in!” An obstacle course in 1.6 gees with an unknown carnivorous species at the end of it was every boy’s dream. Stun gun in hand, he ducked inside. A workbench against the former forward bulkhead was now turned sideways with its cupboard doors open. It made a practical ladder leading up to the door, but would it hold his now enormous weight?