Wildcatter

The rocky bank sloped gently, but gentle in that gravity felt like steep elsewhere. He slid and staggered down it without falling. Then, at last free to step out normally, he headed along the hollow to the wreck. His objective was the gaping hole just forward of the wings, which looked like an easy access. He hadn’t gone far when he saw the footprints, and those changed everything.

* * *

There were many prints, most of them old and faint, flattened by wind and rain until they were mere dimples in the sand. He might not have noticed them had they not been grouped into two distinct trails and highlighted by a few more recent tracks. Both trails began at the break in the shuttle. The wind had not yet had time to blur the latest set, although they did not look very recent. They were human footprints and their maker had been barefoot-reasonable in this climate, dangerous in this environment. One set ran eastward to the pond and the other west to a place where someone had been digging in the sand. Even your average Ph.D. could work out that the pond was for either drinking water or washing, while the digging site was a makeshift latrine. Animals dug pits, but not with a shovel.

Seth babbled to his plog about Man Friday and Robinson Crusoe while the rest of his brain raged against the extent of Commodore Duddridge’s treachery. Some of his shuttle crew had survived until very recently. They might even be still alive. The commodore had not merely given up too easily, he had deliberately flown away and marooned people to die on a planet one step up from Hell. Then the bastard had tried to cover up his crime by posting a quarantine beacon in the hope that Mighty Mite’s expedition would not come looking at the evidence. There was a charge of willful murder in Comrade Duddridge’s future.

Seth’s second thought-followed instantly by a surge of shame that he would think of such a thing at a time like this, when he had just discovered a fellow human being callously left to die-was that his financial future was now secure. If he returned alive to the real world, his plog was going to be a bestseller. It had all the syrupy drama and pathos of afternoon space opera, the sort of dreck churned out by teams of worn-out hacks to enliven the existence of Earth’s hopeless millions. He would be famous.

Jordan’s voice: “Are those prints human, Seth?”

“Yes, sir. Wait a minute, though…”

Seth laboriously lowered himself to his knees, and then crouched to view the sand at a low angle. The oblique sunlight helped. “The topmost set, yes,” he said. “And some of the older ones. But there are other tracks mixed in, bigger feet. Can you see this one?” He traced it out for the camera’s benefit: four toes in front, probably two behind. Or the other way around, of course. Every toe ended in a wicked claw. “Whatever it is, I don’t think it eats grass.”

He struggled to his feet again. “Now to look inside.”

“Watch you don’t get shot at,” Jordan said.

Wise advice. Seth decided he was already close enough to open negotiations.

“Ship ahoy!” He shouted as loud as he could, knowing how his mask would muffle his voice. “Hello, Galactic! Anyone home? Anyone looking for a ride back to Earth?”

Nothing happened except that the sun went out. The storm had now spread from horizon to horizon, but the wind had dropped, for the first time since he arrived on Cacafuego. The ferns were barely moving. He walked closer to the shuttle.

There was a dead fish lying outside the opening.

This time his voice definitely quavered.

“Now that fish is odd. The position looks too deliberate to be just chance. There are no other dead fish anywhere, not that I can see. Is this one meant to be bait, placed there to lure some animal closer? Or has someone left an offering to the gods who live inside? Any new planet is interesting, but this one is starting to look bizarre.” Also scary, even for him.

He shouted again. Still no response.

“I’m going closer.”

The opening in the fuselage marked where the shuttle had almost broken in two, a great wound like the mouth of a cave. The entrance was low enough that he had to stoop to see in.

He clattered his stun gun against the side and turned on his helmet light to scan the shadowed interior. He was looking through the former underbelly into a shambles that had been the biosafety laboratory, now lying on its side. Much sand had washed in, largely burying the heaps of smashed equipment and furniture on what had been a wall and was now the floor. The sand had retained many footprints, some human, others … not. About human length, but broader and webbed. Giant penguins?

There were bones mixed in with the debris. Although they looked more like fish bones than human, they suggested that this might be something’s lair. What something other than humans used a spade-which he now saw standing upright in the sand just inside?