“I don’t know about ‘complete.’ The ship’s dark,” the medic said.
“What about this part?” I tapped with the wrench. “The fuel cells?”
“I guess it’s pretty much junk,” she said. “It’s all crushed and … and …”
“Julie’s body’s in there,” Laramie said. “Stuck there. We couldn’t get her out.”
“We didn’t really try,” the short one said. “No chance she survived.”
Sounded grim enough. “No chance at all?”
“Head crushed,” Laramie said, her voice husky. “And a lot more.”
“Could you see the control console? I mean … is it possible the power cells are intact?”
They looked at each other and shook their heads. “Couldn’t see in,” the medic said. “Didn’t go too far in.”
“She was … all over the place,” the little one said. “We had the communicator out, and the canteens, and didn’t want to go back in if we could help it. We called you guys and they said you’d get here in an hour or so.”
In their dreams. But I checked my watch and was surprised to see that only a couple of hours had passed since I took off.
I looked down in the direction they’d come from. “How far is the ship?”
“Maybe ten minutes down the trail,” Laramie said.
“It’s an actual trail?”
She nodded. “Easy going.”
“You didn’t cut it?”
“Huh-uh … it was just there.”
That wasn’t good. In the absence of people, it had to be a game trail. The planet had lots of herbivores, harmless enough in themselves. But the animals they were game for could be a problem. Probably one’s last problem.
I rummaged through the toolbox and selected the biggest screwdriver and some heavy metal shears, the kind that uses a heavy spring to magnify its force. A flashlight. Still one empty pocket in my fatigues. I wished for a grenade.
“What, you’re going back there?” the medic said.
“Guess I have to. You see an alternative?”
“I’ll come with you,” Laramie said. “You don’t have eyes in the back of your head.”
“I can’t—”
“Just give me the damned pistol and let’s get going.”
No place for chivalry here. I handed it to her and picked up the machine gun with an extra magazine. “You all stay inside here.” As if anyone would go out for a stroll without a handy machine gun. I hopped to the ground and jacked a round into the chamber. Scanned the jungle line and gave Laramie a hand down.
“Back the way we came?” she said.
“Might as well.” If we tried to beat a new way through the jungle, the noise might draw attention. Though the rain was pounding down pretty hard.
We were about a minute down the trail when we ran into our first fauna. It might have been a big green rock, to a casual observer. But six stubby, scaled legs appeared underneath it, and a large head craned out, bigger than a human head and sporting a bright yellow beak and bulging sky-blue eyes. A black wattle on the sides of the beak, and a crown of unruly black hair. Gills flaring, bright pink.
It hissed and tipped back, reaching out with two front legs—arms—that sported glittering black talons.
I fired once and the bullet spanged off its shell, apparently to no effect. I aimed for the head, but by then it was gone. Moving way too fast, for a turtle-ish thing the size of a small car.
It left behind a smell like burned chocolate.
“Ever see one of those?”
“Not so close,” she said in a small voice. “Sometimes we’d see them watching from a distance, smell them. But we never caught one.”
“Probably a good thing. It’s aquatic?”
“We first saw them in the ocean.”
“Wish they’d stay there.” The sound of the shot, though, might have chased them away, back to the water. Or they were hiding, lying in wait.
We hustled down the path, swatting at bugs occasionally, but the biggest animals we saw were about cat-sized. Or armadillo-sized; they all had shells. They didn’t attack, but they didn’t run away, either.
I smelled the wreck before I saw it. A wartime smell no one ever forgets. I swallowed back bile and Laramie bent over and puked.
She coughed a few times. “God. We haven’t been gone that long.”
The scientist in me followed the same thread. How long does it take for a hundred-some pounds of meat to decompose that much? I knew from a unit in forensic medicine that it should take all day, or more, even in this heat. Even with a body that had been squashed? That would speed things up.
“Probably some Venusian microorganism,” she said hoarsely. That made me feel queasy. Whatever it was, I was breathing it. We went around a long curve and found the wreck.
This ship was never going anywhere again. A big tree had crushed it between its reactor and fuel tanks, faint smell of hydrazine on top of the stench.
The ramp up was twisted and it creaked under our weight. We went up slowly, deliberately, not eager to get there.
Julie had been beautiful. Now her face was gone. Every place skin had been exposed was a mass of red and orange cilia, wriggling. Her body smelled of molasses and decay. Laramie edged around it without comment.
The smell was different from my memory of corpses on Earth, when I’d been an unarmed medic in a short war. Burial detail. This was less pungent, perhaps sweeter, perhaps more like mold. Most of mine had been dead for some while, though.
My feet didn’t want to move. I couldn’t take my eyes off the nightmare. I hadn’t known her that well, but we had flirted in a joking way back at Farside a couple of years ago. The mouth I’d kissed good-bye was grey bone now and too-white teeth.
“We don’t have all day,” Laramie said gently.
There were no lights inside the wreck, but I had a small penlight. Fortunately, the pilot controls were old-style, almost identical to the ones I’d trained on.
I unscrewed the access panel and held my breath when I touched the fuel-cell terminals with the two multimeter probes. Twenty-three volts, plenty.
“Think we’re okay.” I had to use the shears to free the fuel cell, doing maybe ten thousand credits’ damage. Send the bill to fucking Venus.
It weighed less than thirty pounds, clumsy rather than heavy. But I only had one free arm now. “Take this,” I said, and traded her the rifle for the pistol. “You better lead.”
By the time we inched past, the corpse was totally covered with the colorful worms, writhing more slowly. Nothing human visible. You couldn’t even see bones anymore.
The smell was gone.
“Same way?” she asked as we stepped carefully down the ramp.
“Yeah. What happened to the smell?”
“Nothing left to generate decomposition gases, I suppose.” She shook her head. “In just a few minutes, Jesus. Fast work.”
We had company before we reached the bottom of the ramp. A crawling horror about the size of a man was waiting patiently. A chimera with head and arms but no legs, just a long, tapering body, shiny with bright yellow scales. Three eyes that looked old and wise, over a red mouth dripping saliva. A grin full of sharp teeth. We both fired and missed, and it squirmed away. My second shot hit its tail. It wailed like an oboe with a bad reed, and it rose up to stare back at us malevolently before it ducked under my third shot.
“Get back in the ship?” Laramie said in a quavering voice.
“I don’t think so. If we can’t raise the ramp or close the door, we’re gonna just be dinner, as soon as it gets dark. Have to get back to my ship.”
We were at the edge of the ramp when something moved in the brush in front of us. “Christ!”
It also looked about man-sized, but then raised itself up on a combination of arms and tentacles. Dark blue and shiny and higher than my head.
I fired and missed; fired again and hit it square. It opened its mouth—bright red tongue and shark teeth—and said “Oh! Oh!” in a loud bass growl.