According to my charts, I was about four miles from the site of the conflict, which is to say, the ammunition dump. I was retracing the steps of our team. They’d actually started on the far side of the planet, maybe three thousand miles away, and taken a high-speed aircar here under cover of night, but they’d gone the last few miles on foot.
I looked for signs of a camp, but then realized that a covert attack team wouldn’t make a camp, but would just continue to their target before they were spotted.
The ground was level, not overgrown at all, and I just kept walking until I came to it. It wasn’t hard to spot. There was a raw crater close to 500 yards in circumference and maybe 40 feet deep, the remains of the ammo dump. Evidently the rescue ships on both sides couldn’t handle both the living and the dead; there were skeletons of both men and Patrukans littering the place, picked clean by small animals and even smaller insects. The Patrukans’ bones had a blue-green tint to them; I never did find out why.
I walked the area. It must have been one hell of a battle. There was absolutely no place to hide, nothing to duck behind. A night attack shouldn’t have made any difference: if the Patrukans had FTL ships and pulse cannons, they sure as hell had all kinds of vision aids that could turn night into day. I remember once, when I was a kid, standing at the top of Cemetery Ridge and wondering how Pickett ever got his men to charge up the long, barren slope where they were just sitting ducks; I felt the same way looking at the site on Nikita.
The other thing I wondered about was how surviving this kind of battle could give anyone a taste for charging men with loaded weapons or otherwise risking their lives. They should have been so grateful they lived through it that all they wanted to do was celebrate each day they were still alive.
Those were my first impressions. Then I began analyzing the site as a soldier. You wouldn’t want to get too close to the dump, because you didn’t know what was in it or how big an explosion it would make. And you didn’t want any survivors picking your team off, so you’d have tried to surround the place so you could shoot any Patrukan who lived through it. The crater was more than a quarter of a mile across, so you’d want your men stationed perhaps a mile and a half across from each other, or given the accuracy of their weapons, maybe even farther. Say, two miles or a bit more.
I studied the area again. Okay, from a minimum of a one-mile radius, and a distance of more than a quarter mile from each other along the circumference, I saw how they could have gotten separated. If you’re wounded, your first inclination is to retreat to safety, not to stay within range and seek out your teammates. Then, once you felt you were safe, you couldn’t be sure all the enemy were dead, and your wounds were starting to stiffen up or worse, and the last thing you’d do is go looking for the other survivors.
So each of the five men was essentially on his own until the rescue team arrived, and it hadn’t arrived for another week. Did they have a week’s supply of food and water? If not, could they live off the land? Did they have any medication at all? How badly were they wounded, and how had they managed to survive? I didn’t know, but I had ten days to figure it out.
Then I reminded myself that that was just the first part, the easier part, of the problem, and that I had a little less than ten days to figure everything out.
The sun started dropping lower in the sky—the planet had a 19-hour day—and I decided that I’d better make camp while I could still see. I pulled my stationary bubble out of my pack, uttered the code words that activated it, waited a few seconds for it to become a cube seven feet on a side, and tossed my pack into it after removing some rations. I ordered the door to shut, then picked up a few branches, gathered them into a pile, and set fire to them with my laser pistol. I tossed three H-rations into the flames. They’d roll out of the fire when they were properly cooked, and I decided to eat them without any water or beer, as I sure as hell didn’t want to run out of drinkables in seven or eight days and have to partake of the nearby river.
I looked out across the barren plain, wondering why sentient life hadn’t taken hold here as it had on so many hundreds of similar worlds. Nature always seemed to find a reason to endow one or two species with brainpower, no matter how weird or unlikely they looked. But there had been no reports of any sentience on Nikita. In fact, though the Patrukans mentioned larger animals, the human attack party hadn’t seen anything bigger than the little rodentlike creatures I’d seen, but that made sense: no carnivore is willing to risk getting injured unless the odds are greatly in his favor, because an injured carnivore will usually die of hunger before he heals enough to hunt again. So when they saw the aircar, or even the men themselves, any large predator would have steered clear of them.
Or did it make sense? There were five badly wounded men scattered around the landscape, hardly in any condition to defend themselves, and yet they went unmolested until the rescue ship arrived. That implied that the Patrukans were wrong and there weren’t any large carnivores, but I couldn’t buy it, because life gets bigger on a low-gravity world, not smaller.
I decided it could wait for tomorrow. What lived on Nikita didn’t have anything to do with what I’d come here to learn, and I certainly wasn’t going to go looking for large carnivores in the dark.
My attention was taken by each of the H-rations crying “Done!”, one after the other, and rolling up to my feet, where each in turn popped open.
I started on the Ersatz Stroganoff, finished it off, then attacked the Mock Parmesan. By the time I was done I was too full to eat the third one, and ordered it to close itself again.
“I will be safe for 16 Standard hours,” it announced. “After that I will self-destruct so that no one becomes ill from my contents. The self-destruction will be silent and will not adversely effect any men, even if one is holding me at the time.”
It fell silent and clamped shut.
I looked up and saw Nikita’s three moons, all of them quite small, racing across the sky. I’d been stationed on Earth for a couple of years, and I’d gotten used to our own large moon making its stately way across the sky. I’d forgotten how fast the smaller moons can travel.
I dictated the day’s experiences, findings and thoughts into my computer. Night fell while I was doing so, and when I was finished I decided to take a little walk to work off my dinner. I left the fire burning so I wouldn’t stray too far and could easily find my way back, then headed off to my left.
When I’d gone half a mile I decided I was far enough from my makeshift camp, and began walking in a large circle around the fire. I’d circled it once, and was circling it a second time when it went out, and I figured I’d better go back and get a few more branches to start it up again. I’d covered about half the distance and was passing a thick stand of trees when I heard a hideous alien roar behind me.
I turned to face whatever it was, but something was already leaping through the air at me. The moons were on the far side of Nikita, and I could barely see its outline. I ducked and turned, and the bulk of its body sent me flying through the air. I landed about six feet away, felt my leg give way and heard the bone snap. I rolled over once and reached for my laser pistol, but it was too quick. I still couldn’t make it out, but it didn’t seem to share that problem. Claws raked deep into my arm and the pistol fell from my hand. Then it was on top of me before I could even reach for my sonic weapon. Teeth raked my face and neck. I reached out, seemed to find a throat, and did my damnedest to hold it at bay, but it was a losing battle. The creature was on top of me, and I could tell it weighed at least as much as I did. It kept pressing forward, and my blood-soaked right arm was starting to go numb. I brought my unbroken leg up hard, hoping it was a male and that it had testicles, but it didn’t seem to have any effect whatsoever.
I could feel hot breath in my eyes and on my cheek, and I knew I had about four seconds left before it overpowered me—and then, suddenly, it was yelping in pain and fear, and it wasn’t atop me any more.
I listened for the snarling of something even bigger—something