Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [55]
“Then aliens are responsible.”
“Nothing is certain yet,” she reminded him. “No conclusions have been drawn. It’s too soon, and the evidence is still being assembled. We won’t be the ones to render the final judgment anyway. You know that. It will be decided back on Earth.” She fell to murmuring into her recorder.
Derwent had already finished upstairs. Four guests had been staying at the inn at the time of the attack. Besides the proprietor’s family there was also a second couple who had worked for the owners. The number of deceased jibed with the records a search team had accessed in the nearest town, except for a Sithwa Pirivi, age twenty, whose body had not yet been located. That meant nothing, he knew. The young woman might have been elsewhere at the time of the attack, visiting friends, shopping in town, or simply out hiking, and would have been killed there instead of in the vicinity of the inn where she worked. It was going to take time to fill in the blanks in the record of Treetrunk’s exterminated population. People traveled, both for reasons of work and recreation, and did not always perish where they lived.
The chore of recording and evaluating the tens of thousands of decomposing dead was a distressing and difficult task. Not everyone adjusted as efficiently or pragmatically as the team of Derwent and Hudson. As time wore on many had to be relieved, some only long enough to recover their equilibrium, others permanently. Throughout the appalling work the teams and their support groups persevered. The number of identified dead rose from the tens of thousands into the hundreds of thousands.
And still there were no answers. Working alongside their conscripted civilian counterparts, practitioners of military forensics struggled with the available evidence in an increasingly frustrating and futile attempt to try and identify the perpetrators of the atrocity. The executioners had left nothing behind, not even footprints. If they had utilized weapons firing explosive projectiles they had gathered up every shell casing, intact or fragmentary, so its origin could not be identified.
One aspect of the attack the researchers felt confident in propounding: It had taken the colonists completely by surprise. How else to explain the utter absence in surviving records of any reference to the invasion? If someone had jotted a report or warning down on a piece of paper, or whispered frantically into a personal recorder, there was no record of it. It was as if the population had stood blithely by while whoever was responsible for their brutal demise had proceeded methodically with their gruesome work. The pathology teams were specifically instructed to look for any such surviving testimony.
“You’d think there’d be a note somewhere.” Having finished his work at the inn, Derwent was wandering through the reception area while Hudson tidied up the last of her responsibilities. “A sketch drawn by some poor terrified kid, or a description buried in a coded file.”
“There isn’t an intact file left on the planet subsequent to the day of the final encounter.” Hudson rose from where she had been crouching. “Not only were these people surprised by their attackers, they were surprised repeatedly. It’s crazy. But I agree with you. No matter how much of a shock this attack was to the populace, someone ought to have left a recoverable message somewhere.” She looked up at him out of her colorless implants. “It wouldn’t take much. A couple of words. ‘Humans did this’ would be enough to get started on. Or ‘Thranx here, killing everybody.’ Or ‘Unknown aliens have landed.’ Anything, anything at all.”
Derwent nodded as he lowered his instrument and started outside. “Anything’s better than nothing. And right now, nothing is what we got. I don’t suppose you’ve heard any different from any of the other teams?” As he strode toward the skimmer, their military escort reluctantly bestirred themselves.
She shook her head. “It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re working out in the country, like us, or downtown in one of the bigger