Ryan eyeballed the expanse of unprotected ground below. He couldn’t argue with what Jak and Mildred had said. The trouble was, they had run out of completely risk free options. “I’m going to go check the arroyo,” he said, shouldering his scoped longblaster’s sling. “Anybody wants to stay here, that’s okay.”
Whether they wanted to or not, none of the others stayed behind.
It was midmorning by the time they had descended the rim and safely crossed the canyon. The burial spot was in a dry creek bed that followed the sweeping S-curve of the canyon wall. From a long way off, they could make out the hatching of black scorch marks on the rock face. As they got closer, they could see the deep cuts in its surface, as well.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed when the arroyo finally came into view.
The creek bed looked as if it had been systematically dynamited. It was an obstacle course of scattered mounds and deep pits of discolored dirt. The chapparal and sagebrush that had lined the dry channel was uprooted and fire blackened.
“Some of the gear’s been dug up, that’s for sure,” J.B. offered.
“Not get far, though,” Jak said. He bent and picked up a half buried piece of black armored material, the end of which was shredded into a fan of stiff fibers.
“That’s part of a gyroplane’s main rotor,” Ryan stated.
“More pieces of it are scattered all over the place, but they’re a lot smaller than that,” Mildred said. “Looks to me like it absorbed a direct hit from a missile.”
“Another gyroplane landed and took off over here,” Krysty said. She pointed at deep parallel marks made by an aircraft’s skids. “And look at these wheel marks…”
Ryan knelt beside the tire prints. They were a yard wide and sank eighteen inches into the dirt.
“Big suckers,” J.B. remarked as he looked over Ryan’s shoulder. “I make it three wags. And from the boot prints all around, twenty-five or so ground troops.”
Ryan nodded. The jury was still out on whether Gabhart and the others had left as recruits or as prisoners. “Spread out and let’s see what else we can find,” he said.
They fanned out along the edge of the disturbed area and then set off in a search line across the creek bed’s unnatural ups and downs. It quickly became clear that all of the other world battle gear had been recovered, but not by whom or why. Then Dean let out a shout.
When Ryan and the others joined the boy, he was standing on the edge of a blast crater. He stared down at a black gauntleted hand and arm sticking out of the sand.
Mildred nudged it with her boot and it toppled over. It was severed at the elbow. She picked it up by the wrist.
They all gathered around for a better look at the stump end of the grisly relic. The battlesuit material had been sliced through cleanly.
“That’s a laser cut,” J.B. said.
“An Achilles’ heel!” Doc exclaimed. “It would appear that our foes can be harmed by then: own terrible weapons. Their armor isn’t invincible, after all.”
“Something else there,” Jak said. With that, he hopped into the bottom of the pit. When he climbed out, he was carrying the lower half of a battlesuit helmet. It had been cut twice crosswise by a laser beam, once at the neck where it joined the suit’s collar, and again just below the point where the wearer’s nose would have been. The upper part of the helmet, the visor and the wearer’s skull were missing, perhaps carried off by some animal.
“Found this at the bottom, too,” the albino said. He showed them a red brimless cap with the word FIVE stitched on the front.
Mildred took the cap from Jak and examined it more closely. The inside was caked with dried blood. “This was Ockerman’s,” she said, referring to Gabhart’s systems engineer. “It looks like at least one of our friends didn’t go back to the dark side.”
“Where’s the rest of him, though?” Dean asked.
“Let’s keep looking,” Ryan said.
They never did find Ockerman’s body, or his head, for that matter, but a few minutes later they came across another corpse. It, too, was missing numerous parts.