Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [52]
The destruction was selective as opposed to total. Many of the city’s buildings were still intact, from individual or group habitations to municipal facilities such as the central water-treatment plant. But the center of the city, where Administration had been located, was a spacious, silent crater. Ramparts of fused glass sloped down to a pile of vitreous slag in the center. On the northern outskirts of the city, a similar pit marked the spot where the colony’s intersystem space-minus communications shaft and facility had been located.
All that afternoon they scoured the capital in search of survivors, and found none. Those bodies that had not been incinerated by shot or subsequent fire displayed indisputable evidence of having been shattered by violence. Come early evening Trohanov found himself kneeling alongside an entire family. Trapped inside a small shop, they had evidently attempted to make a stand against whatever had ravaged their community. Signs that a blockaded doorway had been smashed inward lay scattered everywhere.
Whatever weapon had been used to kill them was thorough and messy. Though no forensic pathologist, Trohanov could see as clearly as anyone that something had struck each of the bodies and blown them apart. The remains of the father lay in the middle of the floor, where he had apparently attempted to intercept the intruders. Back in a corner they found the corpse of the mother splattered over those of two preadolescent boys. In a warmer climate the stench in the room, as elsewhere in the city, would have been overpowering. The cold, clear air of Treetrunk had helped to slow decomposition and decay. Otherwise, it would have been impossible for the crew to have continued their investigation.
As it was, several of the small group became sick at different times that afternoon. The slaughter gave every indication of having been carried out in a relentless and methodical fashion. Returning to the shuttle, Trohanov informed Hollis and the rest of his crew of what he and the others had found and took care to relay the visual information they had managed to collect. Returning to the ship, they compressed and sent it on its way to Earth, entangling it with the first quantum receiver that acknowledged their transmission.
In the silence of the bulbous ship no one slept. As soon as Trohanov felt able, he took a larger team back down to the surface. This time they set down near the colony’s first community and second city, the municipality that had been named Chagos Downs after the ship that had originally explored the Argus system. There was no shuttleport at the Downs, but there were landing facilities for suborbital aircraft. Unfortunately, those facilities had suffered the same fate as their much larger counterpart at Weald, and the crew once again had to set down in the nearest available field.
Chagos Downs was a mirror image of disaster, albeit on a smaller scale. The same conditions applied as they had encountered in the capital: Many structures had been left standing and intact, some with no sign of damage at all, while others had been completely reduced. As before, there were no survivors. Like the inhabitants of Weald, the citizens of the Downs had been slaughtered where they had been found; attempting to surrender to unknown assailants, lying in bed, slumped over instruments and other devices while busy at work, caught preparing meals, on the streets, and in hallways. From the eldest patient in the hospital to the youngest infant, no one had been spared.
Whoever, whatever had committed the atrocity had been relentlessly thorough in seeing to it that not one survivor was left breathing to comment on the cataclysm. Trohanov knew it was not his responsibility to try and find out who was responsible. The