Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [60]
“I am glad to know that we are not alone.” The thranx had a well-developed sense of sarcasm. “Better your people should look to the AAnn, press them on their absence from the collective effort to unearth explanations, and watch the skies of your other colonies.”
“Everyone from New Riviera to Cachalot is on alert,” Lee assured the bug. “Every arriving ship has to undergo checks and quarantine that would have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago. It’s a monumental inconvenience, but most people understand the need.”
“Inconvenience is better than genocide.” Examining a torn length of the familiar white human writing material, Reldmuurtinjak patiently set it in one of the three piles that were rising slowly beside him. “What have you heard from the central coordinating authority? Is there any news?”
Leaning back against a melted mass of plastic that had once been a storage locker, Lee sighed resignedly. They were all tired from their fruitless researches. Arriving in orbit around Treetrunk, everyone had been flush with energy and enthusiasm, each man and woman in his complement certain they would be the one to find the key that would unlock the mystery of the colony’s destruction. As the days wore on and became weeks, then months, nascent eagerness gave way to uncertainty, then to resignation, and lastly to a kind of professional ennui. No one expected the next building, the next box, the next electronic file, to provide anything more informative than the routine details of everyday life leading up to the disaster. He wondered if the thranx ran a similar gauntlet of discouraging emotion. If so, they did not show it—at least, not in any fashion a watching, wondering human could decipher.
“No,” he replied. “Not a thing. I heard that a Quillp team working east of Chagos Downs thought they’d stumbled onto the wreckage of a downed nonhuman shuttle, but it turned out to be a privately registered aircraft. Strictly suborbital. Hundred percent human design and manufacture.” In response to the unasked corollary he added, “No evidence of arms or armament was found in its vicinity, so it must have been local.”
Reldmuurtinjak was intrigued. “Among my kind individuals do not have access to their own shuttlecraft. There are private suborbital vehicles capable of very high-speed flight, but nothing that is competent for extraatmospheric travel. No individual entity smaller than a hive operates its own flights into orbit.”
“In that we are different,” Lee explained. “Among my kind large nongovernmental organizations engaged in trade and commerce often operate their own vessels, which are naturally equipped with proprietary shuttles. There are also certain very wealthy individuals who have access to privately owned and operated ships, even starships, together with their associated shuttlecraft. It’s not common, but it’s not unheard of, either. That’s the most likely explanation for what the Quillp found. Remember what I told you earlier about the possibility of fanatic human xenophobes mounting their own attack on the settlements. The first step in plotting something like that would be to obtain adequate untraceable interstellar transportation. That means acquiring not only starships, but also unused or unregistered landing capability.”
Reldmuurtinjak indicated that he understood. “Nothing else, then?”
Lee shook his head regretfully. “Only rumors that the money and resolve to keep our work here going is drying up. There are people on Earth and the colonies who want to concentrate the relevant research resources elsewhere.”
“As in finding a species to blame for what took place.”
Lee did not dispute the thranx’s observation. How could he,