They’d recovered the bodies, but there was nothing to do then except bury them in a trench the bulldozer gouged for the purpose. Bastien was buried close to the ship. He’d bled out internally by the time his strikers had gotten him to doctors. Jagged fragments of the sergeant’s pelvis had severed two of the arteries in his groin.
“It shouldn’t have gotten into the air with the ducts plugged,” Rifkind said. “I don’t see how it happened.”
The widow traced her husband’s name with her finger. They’d used a rocker panel for a marker because the plastic wouldn’t decay like wood or the site’s coarse limy shale. It was the major’s idea.
Mrs. Suares turned. “The screens were covered by a bacterium,” she said. “It’s common in the air here.” She waved her hand.
“Yeah, but how could they take off?” Rifkind demanded. “There’s more to it than that.”
“The bacterium multiplies explosively in a high-velocity airstream,” Suares said. She spoke with the dispassion of an engineer discussing structural failure. Maybe she was. “It coated the tractor’s heat exchanger when the cooling fan ran for a few minutes also. There the immediate consequences were merely a loss of efficiency in the working fluid rather than catastrophic failure.”
Suares touched the grave marker again. “A low-level electrical charge prevents the bacteria from forming,” she added. “A very simple protection. Now that we recognize the problem. Joao always said that recognizing a problem was far more difficult than solving one.”
“Shit,” Rifkind said. She rubbed a fist into the opposite palm. “I’m going to go get some sleep.”
“Yes, I’ll go back also,” Suares said. Her lips smiled. “I’m not sure how much sleep I’ll get.”
The two civilians started toward the bonfires. Blohm heard Rifkind say, “This damned planet.”
“I’m not sure that it’s the planet that is damned,” Mrs. Suares replied in the starlit darkness.
* * *
The command group gathered fifty feet from the nearest bonfire. A tiny glowlamp burned in the center of the circle in consideration of Reitz and Lock who didn’t wear image intensifiers. Colonists spoke and sang to crying babies, but the crackle of burning wood was generally the loudest sound in the background.
“We’ll set out at mid-morning,” al-Ibrahimi said. “I’d like to leave at dawn, but it’ll be very difficult to get the civilians moving at all for the first few days.”
“How will we limit the amount of baggage?” Tamara Lundie asked. “They’ll almost certainly want to bring more than they can carry.”
The manager’s aide wore a bandage of plastic film to protect the antiseptic sealant sprayed over her wound. Her face looked drawn, but she spoke in the even tones that Farrell had come to associate with her.
“Major Farrell, do you have suggestions?” al-Ibrahimi asked.
Farrell shrugged. “Warn people but let them bring what they want,” he said. “They’ll throw it away themselves after an hour or two.”
“I’m worried about food,” President Reitz said. She snorted a tiny laugh as she thought about what she’d just said. “Among other things. But I don’t see how we can carry enough supplies to last until the relief ship arrives, even with both bulldozers pulling trailers.”
Farrell wondered if he should speak. He looked at al-Ibrahimi.
The project manager nodded awareness. To Reitz he said, “We won’t be carrying any food or water, madam. Our Strike Force guards are equipped with field converters which process any form of carbohydrate into edible rations. Pure water is one of the waste products. The colonists will operate the converters throughout the day as we march. That should provide a more than adequate volume.”
Farrell felt his fingers checking the magazine of his stinger. He forced himself to stop. “People won’t eat as much as you think, ma’am,” he said.
They wouldn’t eat as much as they ought to. Field rations when you’re exhausted were as attractive as wet sawdust. Swallowing them down was one more job for a body already overloaded by effort.
“Both tractors will retain their clearing blades,” Lundie said, correcting a false implication in Reitz’s question. “The tractor in operation at the head of the column won’t be able pull a load at the same time. The tractor out of service will pull two trailers with munitions for the Strike Force and ground sheets. Nothing more.”