Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [54]
Dozens of additional personnel were active in other districts. Since landing, no one had enjoyed a day off. Given the condition of many of the bodies there was no time to spare. Not with hundreds of thousands of corpses to evaluate. For teams such as Derwent and Hudson, long hours in unpleasant conditions had become the norm. Every body, or remnant thereof, had to be dutifully recorded and evaluated.
Outside the ruins of the small country inn a corporal and two privates stood guard, stood being perhaps too strong a word. Derwent didn’t mind when the three sat down and set their weapons aside, conversing quietly among themselves. The small skimmer that had transported the team and its supplies rested nearby, powered down and open to intrusion. The recording specialist was not worried. From the time the first squad of marines had touched down they had encountered no opposition. Nor had any trouble manifested itself since. Nothing interfered with the work of the pathologists or coroners.
Whatever had exterminated the population of Argus V was nowhere in evidence. If the relentless and thorough attackers had suffered casualties they had been careful to take their dead and wounded away with them, as well as erase any evidence of their existence. Only human bloodstains and fragments of human bodies were found. The use of generic and not especially sophisticated weapons of destruction precluded the rapid identification of the killers. Nothing remained of their handiwork except the corpses of their victims.
To the psychologists, that suggested that the assailants feared retribution. As well they should. There wasn’t a soldier among the relieving force who did not go to bed night after night dreaming of imaginary alien necks to wring.
Derwent was more of a realist. Knowing nothing of those who had destroyed the colony, it was premature to assign blame even to imaginary enemies. For all they knew the invading force might have been renegade humans from one of the other colony worlds.
“What motivation could another colony possibly have for carrying out a massacre like this?” Hudson had challenged him. Light glinted off her implanted lenses. She was a pert, spirited lady whom the adjective vivacious fit in more ways than one, and she was not slow to defend an opinion.
Phlegmatic and blunt, Derwent argued for the sake of dissention. They were not a particularly well-matched team, but their personal disagreements did not hamper their work.
“How should I know? Not having the mind-set of a mass murderer myself, I can’t begin to imagine a reason.” He stepped over the body of an eight-year-old boy whose head and legs had gone missing.
“Then shut up,” she told him curtly. “If you can’t give reasons, you don’t have a hypothesis.”
“Oh so?” Swinging his recorder around the front room of the inn, he made sure to keep the extensive damage to the back wall in frame. “All right, I’ll guess. Maybe somebody was jealous about the amount of aid these people were receiving. Maybe they thought they could steal whatever was really valuable and save themselves some hard work. Maybe a grudge developed between this colony and another.”
“None of those makes any sense.” She was bent over the remains of a middle-aged couple who had died in each other’s arms. “Even if one of them did, or if several of them did, all of them taken together with another half dozen added don’t serve to rationalize the annihilation of six hundred thousand people. Humans don’t do this sort of thing.”
Derwent laughed curtly. “Read your prehistory.”
“All right,” she conceded, “they don’t do it anymore. We haven’t turned on ourselves to this extent since the conclusion