Lock gave her a wry smile. “So you don’t have to worry about fools running the expedition, just fools among the civilians you guard.”
“That’s okay,” Meyer said. She tried to shift her weight sideways. Staying in the same position gradually hurt worse than moving to a new one. The choice of when to move was a bitch, though. She grimaced. “I’m sorry it happened. I screwed up.”
Meyer thought of saying it was the compartment that got to her rather than the woman and the screaming kid, but that didn’t matter now. It hadn’t much mattered before either. You either fuck up or you do your job. She’d fucked up.
“I didn’t understand how quick you had to be to survive,” Lock said softly. He turned his face from Meyer. His eyes were on the forest, but she wasn’t sure they were focusing.
“When the savages came out of the trees I just looked at them,” Lock said to the forest. “And one of them grabbed Alison. And I said, I said, `What are you doing?’ and he cut her head off. Like that. And he grabbed me and you killed him.”
The civilian stared at his hands, washed clean of his daughter’s blood. He began to cry. “You were trying to keep us alive and I didn’t understand,” he said through the tears. “I’m a lawyer, Ms. Meyer. I don’t belong here, and I didn’t understand.”
Meyer turned her head. “Nobody belongs here,” she said. “Human beings don’t. The jungle doesn’t like us.”
She cleared her throat. Lock wiped his eyes with his sleeve, angry at the weakness but not attempting to disguise it.
“Well, it’ll be okay soon,” Meyer said. “It’s not as though we were planning to stay.”
Esther Meyer tried to remember when was the last time she’d thought she belonged anywhere.
* * *
When the bonfires flickered, branches beyond the cleared margin looked as though they were moving, but Farrell’s helmet knew better. Though—
The natives had fooled the helmets once. Fooled Tamara Lundie on the vibration sensors, and not enough infrared signature to give Tomaczek more than a heartbeat’s warning.
Farrell smiled tightly toward the project manager and his aide. Neither of them reacted, but President Reitz paused in mid-breath.
“I was just thinking,” Farrell said. “You can’t live without trusting something. Even if you can’t trust it.”
“I consider the day’s progress very satisfactory,” al-Ibrahimi said, either because he didn’t understand what Farrell meant or more probably because he did. “The humanoid attack was unexpected and costly, but C41’s speed and skill limited the scope of the catastrophe. Tamara assures me that in the future we’ll have at least some warning.”
“Yes,” said Lundie, a syllable edged with cold anger.
“I wonder if the Kalendru ship crashed and they’ve been looting it,” Farrell said. “I’ve been thinking about those clubs. They’re plastic, not stone or wood or something.”
“According to analysis by Professors Gefayal and Bronski,” al-Ibrahimi said, “the clubs are a complex folded protein, stiffened and hardened with silica. The professors don’t believe the clubs could have been cast. They suggest that they must have been grown.”
“But they were animals,” Reitz objected. “They didn’t have any technology. Only the weapons, and those so simple.”
“A culture can have biological sophistication while remaining very simple in the mechanical realm, madam,” Lundie said.
“Which is true but doesn’t answer the question of how the bodies of three of the twelve humanoids were themselves modified to spray caustic,” the manager said. “The sophistication is undeniable, but I remain doubtful that the humanoids themselves are more than agents. We’ll have to wait to gather more data before we determine who is the principal.”
Farrell thought about the Spooks who’d attacked the expedition the day before. They were already brain dead. Whoever was in charge didn’t like Kalendru any better than it did human beings.
“We’re closer to the magnetic anomaly now,” he said. “I’m going to send a scout to check it tomorrow.” He played with his stinger. “If you approve.”
“You’re in tactical command,” al-Ibrahimi said. “If there are more Kalendru on BZ 459, we need to know it.”
“None of the species we’re encountering is in the database,” Tamara Lundie said. She didn’t seem to be speaking to anyone in particular. “The survey wasn’t exhaustive, but it had to have been thorough. It would have taken more effort to invent so large a self-consistent database than it would to orbit the planet a few times gathering imagery.”