Pedro Hylander had been the biologist on Gabhart’s expeditionary team. His armless, legless, battlesuit clad torso sat propped up against some boulders at the base of the canyon wall. He was without a helmet, and the vultures had been at him. They had emptied his eye sockets and torn off his lips and cheeks. Fat black flies crawled over his ruined face. Ryan could tell that the poor bastard had been alive when the birds got to him. Blood had crusted all down his chin and neck and the battlesuit’s chest plate. His heart was still pumping when the vultures ripped out his tongue.
“They could’ve chilled him clean if they’d wanted to,” J.B. said. “They messed him up like that and let him die slow for a reason.”
“Could have been payback because Gabhart’s team went renegade, or because they fought back when they were found,” Mildred suggested.
Ryan stepped over to the cliff to examine the score marks on the rock face more closely. Up to this point, he had only seen the laser weapons cut through thin material—wood, steel, bone. From the shallow gouges in the sandstone, it appeared there were limits to the penetrating power of the laser weapons. The beams removed a few inches of rock at a time, but couldn’t cut through more than that in a single swipe.
His curiosity satisfied, he surveyed the battlefield again. After a minute or two, he gave the others his conclusions. “It looks to me like Gabhart and the others had some advance warning,” he said. “They could have seen the satellite track across the sky like we did, or mebbe they spotted the troops at a distance, or came across their wheel marks and knew what they meant. Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, they had enough time to get back here and recover some of their gear before the enemy showed up. We know at least two of them got into their battlesuits.”
“They must’ve put up a hell of a fight,” Krysty said, “but it doesn’t look like they did any damage to the opposition.”
J.B. shook his head. “Even if they’d gotten all their gear up and running,” he said, “they still didn’t stand a chance. They were cornered, and then hit by a combined air and ground attack.”
“How long ago did it happen, Jak?” Ryan said.
The albino brushed aside the surface of one of the blast pits until he came to damp sand. “Three days,” he said. “Mebbe less, not more.”
“And from the boot tracks we know the unit that hit them was around twenty-five strong, three wags, and at least one gyro,” Ryan said. “It could have been a roving scout force, but it’s hard to believe that their finding our friends was an accident. There’s just too much country to hide in around here. Seems to me the attackers had to have scanned them from satellite, or they left sensors here that got tripped when Gabhart and the others came back to pick up their battle gear.”
The companions had already encountered some of this remote sensing technology. They were surrounded by a terrain littered with loose rocks of various sizes, any one of which might have been a camouflaged motion or sound detector.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, my dear Ryan,” Doc rumbled, leaning on his swordstick, “but if your assumption is valid, then the die is already cast. In all likelihood, the enemy has tracked us here in exactly the same manner.”
“Fraid so.”
“Which means that even as we speak, they are probably on their way to intercept us.”
Ryan didn’t try to refute Doc’s conclusion.
He couldn’t.
After they had all recrossed the creek bed, J.B. took another look at the tire tracks. “The opposition didn’t make camp after the assault,” he said. “They just hit and git. From the tracks, it looks like they towed the missile gantry truck out of the hole we dug and drove it away with them.”
“We better get a move on,” Ryan said. “If we head out the canyon mouth, we can see which way they came from.”
Jak nodded. “I’m point.”
As the companions started to follow the albino, Ryan put a hand on Dean’s shoulder. “Wait a second, son,” he said softly, drawing him aside. “We need to talk.”