He turned and stared open-mouthed at the compound. All too vivid in his memory was his last sight of it, littered with what the heavyworlders had ruthlessly discarded: the little hyracotherium’s body, neck snapped in a totally unnecessary display of brutality; Terilla’s lovely botanical sketches ground into the dust; discs and shards of records. He heard thunder rolling. His heart skipped as he whirled anxiously toward the slope where he had first seen the bobbing black line of stampeding hadrosaurs which the mutineers had unleashed on the compound. But now the thunder was atmospheric.
In the midst of the sudden Iretan downpour, Kai now stared at an amphitheater of sand and stone.
The only signs that humans had once inhabited the site were two broken stumps where the force veil had formed an opening. How long had it taken the scavengers of Ireta to reduce the mountains of dead hadrosaurs and scour the site clean? Not so much as a horn was left. And the lack of vegetation gave him no clue as to the passage of time. The amphitheater had been only a sandy bowl when they occupied it.
Of their own anxious accord, his eyes strayed, to register the reassuring absence of menaces stampeding from the plain. Kai hadn’t realized how that event had branded itself into his subconscious. He would have to try Discipline in sleep that night. He couldn’t have an inhibiting incident crop up, possibly to interfere later with situations on different planets at an awkward moment.
“Where?” Tor had emerged from the vehicle and trundled beside him.
Kai pointed to the site of Gaber’s dome, bleakly remembering that they had had to leave Gaber’s body. It, too, had been returned to dust. In space, he had always wondered at that archaic burial phrase. It was appropriate here.
“The core was there!”
Tor slid down the slope, the unevenness of the surface posing no problem, but Kai noticed that the Thek left a steaming trail. He followed the stone was still hot enough to penetrate Kai’s thick boot sole.
“Here?” The sound grated out of Tor as the Thek stopped in the designated site.
“This was the site of the geology dome, the main shelter was precisely here,” and Kai walked to the position. “The individual accommodations were across that part of the compound.”
Then he stared at Tor because that was the longest plain speech he had ever made to a Thek and he wondered if the creature absorbed statements not couched in the short speech they preferred. He opened his mouth to structure the explanation properly when a rumble from Tor stopped him.
Not for the first time, Kai wondered if the silicon life-form might have hidden telepathic ability.
Now that he thought of it, you always knew what a Thek wanted to find out despite its succinct 20
Anne McCaffrey – Dinosaur Planet II – The Survivors speech. You could distinguish a command from a question that required a yes or no answer, yet there had only been the one or two cue words to elicit a response.
Tor was on the move again, this time in an obvious search pattern. An extremity in the shape of a broad flange was poised just above the surface of the dusty compound floor. The Thek progressed ten meters in one direction, abruptly turned and examined the adjacent strip.
Clearly any effort on Kai’s part would be redundant, so he strode down the slight slope to where the veil opening had been. Only the stubs of the heavy-duty plastic column remained, and gouges proved they had been subjected to treatment its designer had never envisaged.
Kai knew that the mutineers had moved the sleds from the original parking site. They would have had to do it manually since Bonnard had hidden the power packs. Kai stood, raking the surrounding area with calculating eyes. There was no telling now how wide a swathe the dead hadrosaurs had made. He was also certain that the mutineers had grossly underestimated the scope of the stampede.
Still, the mass of animals would have had to funnel through the narrow rock gorge leading to the compound. The sleds would have been taken to a place reasonably secure, which suggested uphill but nearby. The sleds were weighty, even for the muscles of heavyworlders. And they’d been some what rushed, having hoped to fly the four craft out of the area.