"Get off me, goddamn it!" he yelled, but to no avail. The limits of his command authority were clear; the Marines would let him make minor choices, like whether they lived or died, but not large ones, like whether he lived or died. They ignored his furious demands so completely that in the end he had no choice but to settle for chuckling in bemusement.
Several minutes passed, and then the pile began to erupt as arms and legs disentangled. There were a few good-natured wisecracks that he pointedly did not hear, and then a hand pulled him to his feet. He noticed in passing that it was as dark as the inside of a mine, and he was wondering what had changed their minds and convinced them to let him up when his helmet was placed on his head and the light amplifiers on the visor engaged. Pahner was standing in the doorway of the tent.
"Well," the captain said wearily, "we've had a visit from your friend's vampires."
The grenadier was twenty-two, stood a shade over a hundred seventy centimeters, and, according to his file, weighed ninety kilos. He'd been born on New Orkney, and he had light reddish hair that ran thick on the backs of his freckled hands.
He no longer weighed ninety kilos, and the freckled hands were skeletal and yellow in the beam from the flashlight.
"Whatever it was," Kosutic said, "it sucked out just about every drop of blood in his body." She pulled up the chameleon cloth and pointed to the marks on his stomach. "These are at all the arteries," she said, turning the head to show the marks at the neck. "Two punctures, side-by-side, just about the width of human canines. Maybe a little closer."
Pahner turned to the lance corporal who'd been the grenadier's buddy. The Marine was stonefaced in the light from the lamp as she faced the company and platoon leadership with a dead buddy at her feet.
"Tell me again," Pahner said with iron patience.
"I didn't hear a thing, Sir. I didn't see a thing. I was not asleep. Private Wilbur did not make a sound, nor were there any significant sounds from the direction of his hooch."
She hesitated.
"I... I might have heard something, but it was so faint I didn't pay it any attention. It was like one of those sounds in a hearing test, where you can't really tell if it was a sound or not."
"What was it?" Kosutic asked, checking the inside of the bivy tent for any indication of what had slipped in and out of the camp with such deadly silence. The small, one-man tents were shaped like oversized sleeping bags with just enough room inside for a person and his gear. Whatever had killed the private had entered and left the tent without any apparent trace.
"It... sounded like... a bat," the plasma gunner admitted unhappily, fully aware of how it was going to sound. "I didn't think anything of it at the time."
"A bat," Pahner repeated carefully.
"Yes, Sir," the Marine said. "I heard a real quiet flapping sound once. I looked around, but nothing was moving." She paused and looked at the semicircle of her superiors. "I know how it sounds, Sir... ."
Pahner nodded and looked around.
"Fine. It was a bat." He drew a deep breath and looked back down at the body. "To tell you the truth, Corporal, it sounds like just another creature on another world we don't know much about.
"Bag him now," he told Kosutic. "We'll have a short service and burn him in the morning."
The Marine body bags could be set to incinerate their contents, which allowed bodies to be recovered rather than left behind. After the cremation, the bag was rolled up like a sleeping bag around the ashes and became just another package which could be carried with a minimum of weight and space.
"A bat," he muttered, shaking his head again as he walked back into the darkness.
"Don't worry about it, Troop," Gulyas told D'Estrees definitively with a tap on the arm. "We're on a new planet. It might have real vampire bats, and those are sneaky suckers, let me tell you." The lieutenant had grown up in the mountains of Colombia, where vampire bats were an old and known enemy. But Terran vampire bats didn't suck a corpse dry.
"It might have been real vampires," the corporal said dubiously.
The morning dawned with a sleepy, nervous company of Marines praying the fierce G-9 star back into the sky. After recovering the mines and sensors and conducting a brief service for Wilbur, they moved out down the valley on the jungle side of the mountains with a much more cautious attitude toward their new home.
Roger continued to walk with Cord as they moved down the gentler valley on the western side of the range. The pass was high and dry, which gave it some of the temperature characteristics of the desert beyond, and the morning was very cool when they first broke camp. The low temperature caused the Mardukan to move slowly, almost feebly; the isothermic species was obviously not designed for cold weather. But as the day progressed and the sun cleared the peaks at their backs, the oppressive heat of the planet came on full force and the shaman awoke fully, shook himself all over, and gave the grunt Roger had come to recognize as Mardukan laughter.
"Woe for my quest, but I will be happy to leave these awful mountains!"
Roger had been looking around at the banded formations in the walls of the valley and thinking the exact opposite. They were beginning to reach the low hanging clouds, the second cloud layer that obscured the lowland jungles, and the humidity was already increasing. Along with the gathering heat it made for conditions well suited to a steam bath, and he wasn't particularly elated by the thought of wading deeper into them.
But for now, the steep valley had temporarily plateaued, and Roger stepped aside from his slot in the column again as he paused to examine the small cirque. The valley was obviously a product of both runoff and glaciation, so temperatures must have been much lower at some point in the planet's geologic history. The remnants of that geologic event had produced a valley of surpassing beauty to a human's eyes.
The kidney-shaped valley was centered by a modest lake, about a half-hectare in area, fed from small streams that plumed down the rocky walls, and a primary stream that was apparently intermittent stretched up into the heights. The company had already refilled its bladders from the pool, and the water had been proclaimed not only gin-clear but fairly cool.
The upper and lower ends of the valley were marked by moraines, small mounds of stones, which had been dropped by the glacier in its retreat. The upper moraine would have been a perfect spot for a house with a breathtaking view of the lake and the jungles laid out below it. By the same token, the lower moraine could have provided a prime source of building materials.
The striated walls of the valley were clearly a product of the uplift that had formed the entire chain, but their strata indicated that at one point, long, long, long ago, they'd been part of a plain or shallow seabed. Roger noted evidence in different places of both coal and iron formations, specifically of banded iron, which was the richest possible form. The fairly pleasant, for a human, valley was perfect for mining development. Of course, as Cord's comment reminded him, for any scummies exiled to it, it would be a lesser ring of Hell.
"Oh, I don't know," he disagreed. "I like it here. I love mountains—they offer up the soul of a planet to you if you know what you're looking at."
"Pah." Cord snorted and spat. "What does a place like this hold for The People? No food, cold as death, dry as a fire. Pah!"
"Actually," Roger said, "there's a lot of good geology up here."
"What is this 'geology'?" the shaman asked, shaking his spear at the valley walls. "This 'spirit of stone'? What is it?"
It was Roger's turn to snort as he took off his helmet and ran a hand over his hair. He'd put it up in a bun, and the lake looked awfully inviting. He badly needed a shampoo, but the Mardukan's question intrigued him away from that thought.