“You do that,” Kris said. “Chief, can you direct us to that other skeleton you found?”
“It’s off to your right, where the ground is steeper.”
Kris and her group moved that way. A number of Marines came and hammered in spikes with ropes attached. Dr. Lynch joined them, along with three Marines with CSI stenciled on their packs. The four of them roped up and began a careful descent.
Kris turned on the outside mic on her suit. The wind, weak but constant, made a whispering noise as it slipped over bones and through empty eye sockets. The thin dust moved constantly, eroding what it could. Even in so much death, the planet lived its own quiet life.
Careful as the Marines and scientist were, they added their own sound as carapaces cracked and broke. Dirt and bones broke loose and slid down the ridge. A place that had changed very little in two hundred years took this chance to slide away.
Kris waited silently while the descent team made its way down half the embankment.
“I’ve got something that looks like foot tracks,” a Marine announced, and started snapping pictures.
“Yeah, I think someone came down this hill before us and went back up,” he added as he finished his recording.
“We’ve got a real live skull, here,” Dr. Lynch announced as he reached their goal. “Several of the locals on top of him. As a guess, I’d say that before nature did its dust-to-dust thing here, the bodies hid this other body.”
“Any idea of cause of death?” Kris asked.
“I think it’s pretty clear,” the doctor said, reaching down and raising the skull for all to see. “This skull shows evidence of our old friend, blunt force trauma. Somebody bashed his brains out.”
“Murder,” Kris said.
“That the murderer tried to hide,” Jack added.
“Quite successfully,” Penny said, and went on like the cop’s daughter she was. “Look around. Whoever slaughtered this planet left none of their own behind. Normal morbidity says that some people would keel over from a heart attack, old age, occupational accidents. Yet we have no sign of any bodies. Somebody busted this poor soul’s skull, hid him among the ‘trash,’ and so we have a body to examine.”
“Sounds plausible to me,” the colonel said.
The doctor examined the skull. “I think we may be able to get some DNA out of those teeth, assuming this alien had teeth like us and DNA in them.”
He and the Marines began filling the body bag they’d brought down with the bones of the murdered alien. They had several bags and looked ready to fill the others with some of the local bodies.
“You might want to come over where I am,” Professor mFumbo called on net. “I’m in what we think is the invaders’ village.”
That involved a long hike across the scraped mountain. The village was nestled in a hollow between the hill they were on and the next hill over, which had also been leveled. As they made their way down into the protection of the valley, they took in what the planet had to show of its flora and fauna.
Lots of trees, bushes, and other brush had lived on this land once.
They were dead now.
It was easy to tell the attackers’ constructions from the locals’. They were made of mud bricks with wooden roofs. All were squat, one-story buildings that sprawled across the hill with no sense of urban planning. If there had been any kind of rainfall, the mud bricks would have flowed back to the ground the mud was dug from; but since someone had taken the water, the buildings survived.
Professor mFumbo waved them toward a hut he and several other boffins were coming out of. The other scientists headed for another hut to examine. The professor stayed to give Kris and her team the fruits of their initial examination.
“The rooms were tiny,” he said. “There is not much furniture, and what there is is hacked out of local wood.” He pointed at several rough-hewn bunk beds, stacked three high.
“They crammed them in, didn’t they?” Kris said.
“It was tight quarters,” the professor agreed. “And one thing more. There were no amenities. I mean that. None. Not running water. Not indoor plumbing.”
“They had to have something,” Kris said.
The professor pointed down the hill. “The water was apparently drawn from the nearby river even though an entire mountaintop was being shoved into it.”
“That’s rude,” Cara said.
“The pollution must have been horrible, but that’s what they apparently did,” the professor said.
Cara ducked into the hut, looked around for a moment, then came back with a question. “Where did they go to the bathroom?”
“That puzzled us for a while,” the professor admitted. “We’d examined several of the sites, looking for means of sewage disposal. We didn’t find any. No slit trench. No pit latrine. Once we started searching this place, a couple of the folks spotted lumps of scat scattered indiscriminately around the site.”
“Ew,” Cara said.
“They couldn’t have done that,” Penny said. “That would have left them open to all kinds of epidemics.”
“Apparently, they did it, anyway. Right out in the middle of everything,” the professor insisted. “My guess is they didn’t intend to stay long, and it’s possible that the folks who got assigned to dirtside duty weren’t the highest in their caste system or social structure. Here, your guess is as good as mine.”
Kris had to hunt for a word. “This boggles the mind?”
“Yes, it does,” Professor mFumbo agreed. “But then, so does working in an environment loaded with residual radioactivity from when you nuked them from orbit.”
“Somebody doesn’t care much for occupational safety,” Kris said.
“More likely they never heard of occupational safety,” Abby said. “Something tells me that these little hellions didn’t spend a lot of time on the ground. And when they did, it was years and years apart. They might regularly build new ships, but building huts on a mud ball? Not something Great-greatgrandpa liked to talk about.”
“You may have it right,” the professor said.
“Is there anything we can learn from their scat?” Penny asked.
“No,” the professor said. “I’m afraid it is a bit too old for us to get any DNA or other useful stuff from it. We have analyzed it. No surprise, their digestive system is very effective, and their food was very well processed. We couldn’t identify any specific foods from the resultant dung. We do know they ate pretty much the same minerals that we need and excreted very much what we do ourselves.”
Jack shook his head. “If their concept of personal hygiene was nothing better than what you think, we ought to find a lot of dead bodies.”
“Sorry, Captain, that doesn’t seem to be true. They slaughtered the local folks and left their bodies to rot in the air. But of their own, nothing.”
“Nothing but what appears to be a murdered and hidden one,” Kris said. “I very much want to see what information that body yields.”
“One body that we think might be one of the attackers. Not much to go on,” Jack pointed out.
“Too true,” Kris agreed, looking slowly around the wreckage. “All too true.”
“I may be able to change that,” came from Chief Beni on net.
“Please do,” Kris said.
“Since I spotted that one body, I’ve had every drone I could get loose doing low passes around alien villages. I think I’ve spotted two more endoskeletons. I’ll need permission to send Marines to pick them up, and we’ll need time on the longboats.”
“That you will have,” Kris said; she turned to Cara. “Have you seen enough?”