“No, Doctor,” the captain replied firmly. “At least, not directly. Although composed of metal with plastic-insulated circuitry, the appendages were designed for precise and delicate work rather than hard labor or fighting, although there would have been nothing to stop it using those digits, as we DBDGs have been known to do, to operate a variety of destructive weapons. I’ll be looking for anything like that when I’m searching the ship. All the evidence points to our robot friend being dead on arrival, and the type of heat and blast injuries it sustained were too unfocused to be caused by a Corps hand-weapon.
“And now,” it went on, looking at the opened seams in the hull plating of the ship all around them, “I have to examine the body of a larger, metal cadaver, one that is more familiar to me.”
Prilicla used his antigravity belt to move outside and fly forward to the control deck while Murchison stayed with the captain, both to satisfy its curiosity and to help move aside troublesome debris. There was minimal risk because both of them were experienced in negotiating ship wreckage, and he was pleased that neither their voices in his headset nor their feelings indicated that they were taking risks.
When they rejoined him, the two crescents of facial fur over the captain’s eyes, and its emotional radiation, were indicating extreme puzzlement. / ‘ I don’t understand this,” it said, gesturing aft. “Discounting the effects of atmospheric heating and buffeting on the hull the way down, the ship’s systems and linkages—power, guidance life support—are all in pretty good mechanical order. Why should one of the officers have had to go aft to operate the main thrusters on manual? But that is what he did, and the answer has to be here somewhere in control.”
“Including, friend Fletcher,” said Prilicla, “the reason why the casualties wanted us to stay away from their ship?”
“That, too, Doctor,” it replied. “And thank you for the reminder and gentle warning, which I’m pretty sure is unnecessary. Pathologist Murchison reported earlier that, apart from their severe burn trauma, there is nothing clinically abnormal about the patients’ condition. On the way here she also told me that the only microbes present were the usual harmless, Earth-human bugs that came on board with them and were trapped in the air-circulation system, plus a few airborne varieties native to this world which cannot cross the planetary species barrier and so need not concern us.
“I agree with everyone exercising a high degree of caution,” it went on, its feelings if not its voice registering impatience, “but surely it is no longer necessary to wear sealed suits, or for your team to continue working in an isolated, prefabricated unit with limited facilities rather than on Rhabwar’s casualty deck. There is nothing to threaten us here.”
“It must be nice,” said Murchison, radiating sarcasm, “to feel so sure of yourself.”
“Friend Fletcher,” Prilicla said quickly, in an attempt to reduce its growing irritation and head off a possible exchange of verbal violence, “no doubt you are quite right in everything you’ve said, but I, for physiological reasons that have made my people a species of arrant cowards, am extremely cautious. Please humor me.”
The captain nodded and its feelings once again became calmly analytical as it began its examination of the damaged control consoles around them. It trained the vision pickup on each and every item and discussed its observations for the recorders. Apart from a few minutes checking with Naydrad on the condition of the casualties, they watched in silence the progress of a technically-oriented postmortem as painstakingly thorough as any the pathologist had performed on organic cadavers. Prilicla had always derived pleasure from watching an expert at work, and he knew that his feelings of appreciation and admiration ere being shared by Murchison. But finally the work was done and the captain was staring at them with an expression and emotions that could only be described as a large and perplexed question mark.
“This doesn’t make sense,” it said. “The main and secondary computer systems are down. That shouldn’t happen. They are strongly encased, protected physically and electronically in case of damage during a major malfunction or collision. They perform the function of the black boxes in atmosphere craft so that, in the event of an accident, the investigators have some idea of what went wrong. But there was nothing structurally wrong with Terragar except that all its computers are dead, or as good as. This is ridiculous. With all our fail-safe systems and protective devices, that should not have happened—–”