Hogg picked up a shovel and handed the impeller to Barnes. “She’s switched off right now,” he said. “Which would be a pretty good way to leave her unless you want to blow somebody’s ass off for fun.”
“I’ll be careful, mother,” Barnes said with a grin. Hogg sniffed and gestured with his free hand for Daniel to follow him into the brush.
Hogg and the Sissies respected one another and had been through some tense times together. Both sides had a genial contempt for the group the other represented, however. Daniel had a foot in either camp. He found the mutual chauvinism amusing, since they’d shown that in a crisis they’d join ranks against a common enemy.
Hogg held the sharpened blade of the shovel out in front of him like a horseman’s lance and duckwalked down a tunnel of branches growing from pedestals of dirt laced high by roots. The soil was so light and dry that even here in the riverbed the breezes carved it away except where something bound it.
Daniel’s hands were empty, so he scrambled along on all fours. The knife on his equipment belt would make a satisfactory weapon at close quarters, but he saw no need to draw it now.
“There you go, master,” Hogg said, making room for Daniel by squeezing against a bush whose tiny white berries grew from the underside of its leaves. He pointed with the shovel; its broad tip had a wicked sheen where he’d stroked the metal to an edge.
He indicated a bush whose stems swelled at intervals into fist-sized nodules. They weren’t the result of disease as Daniel had thought when he first viewed them, but rather reservoirs in which the plant stored a white, starchy substance. Daniel had tasted a pinch and found it flavorless but not apparently harmful. He’d thought of using it to supplement their diet if necessary.
Half this bush had been stripped: the stems cut a foot or two above the ground, then cut again to excise the nodules. The undamaged stems looked forlorn, springing from a base meant for twice their number.
“It’s not sawed,” Hogg said, “and it’s not hacked with a machete either. I’d say either teeth or a sharp little knife.”
Daniel flicked on his handlight. The sky was still bright enough for normal vision, but he needed more intensity to judge how fresh the cuts were. Bark curled resiliently under the pressure of his fingertip. He said, “It didn’t happen more than a day ago.”
“Not even that, dry as this place is,” Hogg said. “Less than an hour, I’d say. I’ll bet he scampered when the thundering herd come down the bank.”
“It could be a castaway,” Daniel said. He didn’t know what he believed, so he stated what seemed the most reasonable possibility. “Out of rations and living off the land.”
“Could be,” Hogg said. From his tone, he didn’t know what he believed either. “That don’t explain why he ran, though. I sure hell wouldn’t want to be alone in this place if there was a choice.”
He resumed waddling forward, along the trail rubbed in the friable soil. The markings were faint, but even Daniel could have followed them; Hogg had another generation’s worth of experience in woodcraft.
Fifteen feet ahead, he gestured to one of the chopped-out nodules, dropped beside the track. Daniel nodded.
“Captain, is things all right?” Dasi asked through the helmet. The fact that it was a spacer checking rather than Sun, the petty officer in charge, was a bad sign. “Over.”
“Unit,” Daniel said, “Hogg and I are scouting the perimeter. There’re no problems, we’re just making sure. Captain out.”
The trail had led them back to the wall of the dry channel. A block of sandstone the diameter of a dinnerplate projected from the bank. It didn’t look as though it belonged there. Hogg tested it with the heel of his left hand, leaning some, then all of his weight against it. “Stuck in from the other side and wedged, I say,” he commented.
Daniel grimaced. “We need to keep moving,” he said. “Much as I’d like to go after it, we can’t take the time to do that now.”