Less than a week, he thought, and already five graves.
Lieutenant Colonel Juan Sebastiano stared grimly at the low mounds of carbonaceous soil covering the earthly remains (if "earthly" was the word) of five members of the expedition of which he suddenly found himself second in command, that of the American Soviet Socialist Republic to the asteroid 5023 Eris. The only thing missing to set the appropriate tone, he thought, was the oppressive drizzly overcast of their first couple of days here.
Their hosts, however, the giant molluscs who claimed this place by virtue of previous occupancy, had adjusted its atmosphere. Rain would now fall at night when it wouldn't represent an inconvenience. At present, without producing shadows, a diffuse golden glow seeped through overhead to tumble down a series of small craters overlapping in broad natural stairsteps, across the newly spaded ground.
Lush undergrowth surrounded the forlorn gravesite beneath sequoia-dwarfing plants supporting the world-enveloping organic canopy. "Super kudzu," Dr. Kamanov had called them. The asteroid was covered, more densely than any closeups of the Moon or Mars Sebastiano had studied during training, with impact features of all sizes, cloaked in vegetation. They textured the land in unpredictable ways. General Gutierrez had begun using a thesaurus to find synonyms of "hill" and "ridge" for reports which would probably never be transmitted back to Earth now.
Poor old Kamanov.
Sebastiano drew on an unfiltered, unsanctioned cigarette which his boss's son, Second Lieutenant Danny Gutierrez, had smuggled inboard the McCain, one of three old NASA shuttles that had borne them hundreds of millions of klicks deeper into space than Soviet Man had ever ventured before. He guessed that made them all heroes of some kind. To the ASSR they were no more than expendable veterans of various small conflicts it was politically unpragmatic to commemorate. Or they were incompetent (or overly competent) bureaucrats, or officers who couldn't keep their opinions to themselves, or enlisted personnel who insisted on remaining individualsin short, nonteam players, well worth disposing of even if they discovered nothing of value out here among the debris of a broken planet.
Or a planet that had never been.
A blue-gray wisp from the cigarette's front end irritated the colonel's nose. It was nothing, he supposed, to what the back end must be doing to his lungs. He'd given up the habit years ago, in fighter school. Since then he'd struggled for physical and mental survival through three brushfire wars, each bloodier, each emptier of meaning and purpose, than the last. But it had taken these five incredibly stupid, wasteful deathsand certain attendant complications which had only aggravated tensions over conflicting claims to the asteroidto get him started smoking again.
Kamanov occupied the grave on the far left. Like most members of the expedition, Sebastiano had grown fond of the old man over the year-long voyage and the longer training period before that. More in love with life and fuller of it than anyone the colonel had ever known, as mission geologist Kamanov had been among a small group on loan from the Russiansthis was billed as a cooperative venture, after all, on behalf of a new and fragile United World Soviet held together at this moment in history by wishful thinking and gunship diplomacy. He'd been horribly murdered to make a political point which seemed more obscure to Sebastiano with every day that passed.
In the next grave lay Delbert Roo, carried on the expedition roster as a mining-equipment operator, but in reality a KGB enforcer who'd drawn his last breath without learning (except in that last astonished fraction of a second) that there were individuals he wasn't free to terrorize and torture as he wished.
Broward Hake, in the third grave, had been Roo's colleague in thuggery. He was dead due to a regrettable mistake, the .45 caliber pistol bullet that had finished him having been meant for someone else.
Colonel Vivian Richardson, in the fourth grave, had been the mission's original vice-commander and possibly an agent of the Russian KGBas opposed to the American KGB which was openly represented on the expedition. She'd died the same as Hake, or at least by a projectile of the same caliber, suggesting to Sebastiano that there might be some justice in an otherwise uncaring universe, since she'd been the one who'd shot the man.
At the end of the dismal row was a fifth grave, that of Marine Corps Major Estrellita Reille y Sanchez, a lovely redheadlovely no longerwho'd started the whole mess against her better judgment, having been given certain unpleasant tasks to perform whether she wanted them or not. Her life had been choked off in its twenty-ninth year as Kamanov's had in his sixty-ninth. In Sebastiano's opinion it had been too soon for either of them. Life was too short, no matter how long it lasted.
There should have been a sixth grave for Semlohcolresh, that irascible old slug. (Technically, he and his fellow monstersmake that "sapient living fossils"were descendants of Silurian-era molluscs.) There might have been, too, if his culture's burial customs were anything like humanity's. Sebastiano didn't know what the nautiloids, with their exotic philosophy, considered decent under the circumstances, but in any case it was academic. The squidlike body of Semlohcolresh, along with its multicolored Volkswagen-sized shell, had been dissolved into its constituent nuclei in the matter-energy converter his peopleand the nightmare menagerie they'd brought with them across cosmic lines of probability from countless versions of Earthused to power their colony here.
"Colonel?"
Behind him Sebastiano heard a footfall, then the polite, apologetic cough of someone he outranked. It was Major Jesus Ortiz, newly appointed captain of the Hatch. Sebastiano dropped his cigarette, slowly pivoted his bootsole on it, and turned from contemplation of the graves.
"What's up, Maje?"
"Could you come back to the Dole, Juan, ASAP? Mission Control's on the horn and they don't sound happy. The general's asking for you. He looks worried."
The Banker! Sebastiano shuddered. It can only be the Banker!
But he nodded and, following the major, headed in the direction of the campsite where the shuttles rested in a triangle which, more and more, seemed to him like the circled wagons of frightened pioneers in hostile Indian territory.