"Found him!" Piet said./"Eleven o'clock!" Stephen said, pointing./"There it is!" I said.
Metallic wreckage was strewn along hundreds of meters of sandy waste, though the ship at the end of the trail looked healthy enough. It was a cheaply-constructed freighter of the sort the Feds built in the Back Worlds to handle local trade.
"They came in on automated approach," Piet guessed aloud. He boosted thrust and gimballed the nozzle nearly vertical. "Hit a tooth of rock, ripped their motors out, and there they sit since. Which may be fifty years."
The cutter dropped like an elevator whose brakes had failed. Piet made a tight one-eighty around the crash site, killing our momentum so that he didn't have to overfly for the horizontal approach normal with a single-engined cutter.
"Not very long," Stephen said. "Light alloys wouldn't be so bright if they'd been open to the atmosphere any length of time."
We crossed the trail of torn metal, then blew out a doughnut of dust as we touched down within twenty meters of the freighter's side hatch.
Piet turned his head and smiled slightly. "If I don't keep my hand in, Stephen," he said, "I won't be able to do it when I have to."
"You could fly a cutter blindfolded on your deathbed, Captain," Lightbody said. "Begging your pardon."
Lightbody squeezed by to undog the hatch. I could have done that job if anybody's life had depended on it, but none of us still aboard the Oriflamme needed to prove things to our shipmates.
Weyston's air was thin and sulfurous, unpleasant without being dangerous. The system was charted but unoccupied. Federation cartographers hadn't even bothered to give the place a name, since there was nothing beyond the planet's presence to bring a vessel here.
We needed to reseal the Oriflamme's hull; this was the suitable location closest to Lord's Mercy. We had sufficient reaction mass for some while yet-which was a good thing, because observation supported the note in the pilotry data that the planet had no free water whatever.
I stood deliberately as Lightbody swung himself onto the coaming of the dorsal hatch. "Give you a hand, sir?" he asked, reaching toward me.
"I'm not proud," I said. I clasped the spacer's shoulders and paused, steeling myself to flex my legs and jump.
"I've got him, Lightbody," Stephen said. He clasped me below the rib cage and lifted me like a mannequin onto the cutter's hull.
I laughed. "All right," I said, "you've convinced me I'm bloody useless and a burden to you all. Can we look over the wreck, now?"
Stephen handed Lightbody a rifle and his own flashgun as I slid down the curve of the hull to the ground. This flight was basically recreation, but there was no place on the Back Worlds where we were safe. By now, it didn't strike any of us as silly to go armed on a lifeless world.
There was movement inside the wreck.
"Hello the ship!" Piet called. No one responded. I powered my cutting bar.
A man in gray trousers and a blue tunic hopped from the hatch. Stephen presented his flashgun. "No!" the stranger shouted. "No, you can't shoot me!"
"We don't have any intention of shooting you, sir," Piet said. He crooked his left index finger to call the man closer. The fellow had a sickly look, but he was too plump to be ill fed. "Are there any other survivors?"
"No one, I'm the only one," the Fed said.
I walked around him at two arms' length. I wouldn't have trusted this fellow if he'd said there was a lot of sand hereabouts. He'd been relieving himself out the hatch; and almost out the hatch.
"Anybody aboard?" I called, waiting for my eyes to adapt to the dim interior. The power plant was dead, and with it the cabin lights.
The chamber stank. Blood and brains splashed the forward bulkhead above the simple control station.
I jerked my head back. Piet and Stephen were behind me. The castaway squatted beneath the muzzle of Lightbody's rifle.
"His name's McMaster," Stephen said, nodding toward the Fed. "He was the engineer. Doesn't seem as happy to be rescued as you'd think."
"Let's check the other side," I said, walking toward the freighter's bow. "Is there any cargo?"
The hatch from the cabin to the rear hold had warped in the crash, though there was probably access through the ship's ripped underside.
"Windmills," Stephen said. "They lost the starboard thrusters maybe a month ago on a run from Clapperton to Bumphrey. This was the nearest place to clear the feed line, but the AI wasn't up to the job of landing."
Piet said, "Two Molts and the human captain were killed in the crash. I don't think McMaster is completely. ."
"Oh, he's crazy," Stephen said. "But he started out a snake or I miss my bet."
The graves were three shallow mounds in the lee of the wreck. I prodded with the blade of my cutting bar and struck mauve chitin ten centimeters below the surface. Stephen dragged the corpse of a Molt out by its arm. The creature's plastron was orange and had a spongy look.
"She hit the bulkhead during the crash," Piet said. "I don't think we need disturb the others."
Together we scooped tawny sand over the corpse again. I used my bar, the others their boots. "Decided where the next landfall is going to be?" Stephen asked.
"Clapperton," said Piet. "There's a sizable Fed colony there, but Lacaille and the pilotry data agree that only one of the major land masses is inhabited. We can fill with water and maybe hunt meat besides."
We had the Molt covered as well as it had been when we started. Stephen stepped back from the grave and surveyed the landscape. "What a hell of place to be buried," he said.
"It's only the body," Piet said in mild reproof.
We all felt it, though. This was a world with no life of its own, that would never have life of its own. Being buried here was like being dumped from the airlock between stars.
Stephen frowned. He stepped to the third mound and pulled something from the sand.
I squinted. "A screwdriver?" I said.
Stephen held it out to us. "That's what it was made for," he said softly.
The shaft was stained brown. Sand clung to the dried fluid. Not blood, but very possibly the copper-based ichor that filled a Molt's circulatory system.
Stephen wagged the tool delicately in the direction of the castaway on the other side of the wreck. "Didn't trust there'd be enough food to last till. . whenever, do you think?" he said.
"The crash unhinged him," Piet said.
Stephen raised an eyebrow. Piet grimaced and said, "We can't leave a human being here!"
Stephen flung the screwdriver far out in the sand. "Then let's get back," he said mildly. "Only-let's not name this place for Uncle Ben, shall we? He won't know, but I do."
CLAPPERTON
Day 290
Air heavy with moisture and rotting vegetation rolled into the hold as the ramp lowered. Though we'd landed after sunrise so that the glare of our thrusters wouldn't alert distant Fed watchers, the thick canopy filtered light to a green as deep as that reaching the bottom of a pond. Treetops met even over the river by which we'd entered the forest.
We piled out of the vessel. Our exhaust had burned the leaf mold to charcoal traceries which disintegrated when a boot touched them. Black ash spurted to mix with steam and the gray smoke of tree bark so wet that it only smoldered from a bath of plasma.
There were twenty of us to start, though another crew would lay hoses to the river as soon as we were out of the way. Six of the men were armed. The rest of us carried tools and the net which, once we'd hung it properly, would camouflage the Oriflamme's track. Piet had nosed us between a pair of giant trees and almost completely into the forest, but the starship's stern could be seen from an autogyro following the river at canopy height.