I won’t reveal your location
, Gomez sent.
I don’t want the enclave to know about us either.
At least, not right now. Not when there were only two marshals standing here and God knew how many people in the enclave.
I just want to see the property
, Gomez sent. And in case they didn’t understand that, she added
, I want to know how big it is
.
One hundred
, the translator answered.
She hoped to God that was 100 humans and not 100 buildings. But she didn’t ask that question either. All would be answered soon enough. She simply sent a thank you and kept going.
The weird underbrush was thinning. She recognized this area. It took her back to the trail carved into the wilderness—or what she thought of as wilderness. She could cut across the trail and head directly to the enclave, or she could backtrack, and take a much larger trail that had forked from this one a click back.
She was about to take the long route when the Eaufasse peeped at her again. It made that same gesture with its arm (at least she thought of it as an arm), the gesture she had thought of as
Come on
.
Maybe that was actually what it meant.
If we stay off the trail
, she sent to the translator,
are we in danger of walking in protected areas?
That was probably too complicated for them
, Washington sent her on their private link.
There was no answer, at least not immediately.
Of course. Permission. Walk you want. Okay.
“Or maybe not,” Washington muttered, just loud enough for her to hear.
She smiled. They continued. As long as she had permission on the record—or something she understood to be permission—she was going to take the easier route.
The land was hilly here, with more thick underbrush. The Eaufasse would touch branches as it went by, probably wishing it could pull itself along with them like it had before. It would lose Gomez and Washington quickly if it did that.
As rough as the terrain was, the distance they had to cover was relatively short. They reached a hill. The hill wasn’t that high, but the hillside was steep.
Down, down
, the translator sent.
Gomez and Washington looked down, seeing nothing but groundcover. But the Eaufasse with them made that
Come on
gesture again, only its head was pointed toward the top of the hill.
Then it fell on its—stomach? front? Gomez wasn’t certain what to call that part of its anatomy—and started pulling itself through the underbrush. So that was what the translator meant by
down
.
You gotta be kidding me
, Washington sent her.
Something wrong?
Rainger sent.
Not with us
, Gomez sent.
Collection there yet?
They say they’re an hour out
, Rainger sent.
I can join you
.
We’re okay,
she sent again.
Except for this stupid obstacle course,
Washington sent, then promptly fell on his belly. It wasn’t like they hadn’t done this in training. They’d pull themselves forward by their elbows or their gun barrels or their knives, sometimes for hours.
But Washington was a lot closer to that training than Gomez was. She hadn’t done this in nearly a decade. Plus she didn’t know what this ground, and this groundcover, was composed of.
Still, she flopped down and pulled herself forward, using the branches. They actually moved with her, and she wondered if they were some kind of creature. She remembered that feeling she had earlier, that they had clawed at her boots. She wasn’t sure if they were physically pulling her forward now.
The movement through the underbrush was a lot quieter than she expected it to be. She could barely hear the rustle of Washington and the Eaufasse ahead of her. It took almost no time to reach the crest of the hill.
The branches formed a web in front of her, but she could see through the openings. She could have sworn that the branches weren’t in that position when she had started up the hill, but she didn’t say anything. She’d seen too many strange things throughout her career to doubt her impressions now.
She moved just a little closer to the edge. Washington was at her left, the Eaufasse was at her right. It almost flattened against the ground, looking like a pile of branches all by itself. The perfect camouflage.
She blinked a high-powered scope over her right eye. For the moment, she kept her left open. The red lines of the map converged before her, but she didn’t need them.
The enclave looked like an eyesore against the landscape. Gray buildings, made with that weird self-grow permaplastic that colonists often used, rose from the underbrush like rectangular rocks.
She blinked the map away, and closed her left eye, letting the scope in her right eye magnify even further.
Seven buildings, six in a circle around a large main building of some kind. The underbrush had been destroyed here, and it looked like there was some kind of dome or force field around the enclave itself. The underbrush ended several meters away from the first two buildings.
The enclave looked like it had been here for a long time.
Do you have any idea what they do here?
she sent to the translator.
No
, it answered.
How long has this enclave been here?
she asked.
Unknown
.
Long time. Guess.
That was clear enough. The fact that the enclave had been here a while complicated matters although not with the Earth Alliance. Earth Alliance law was clear on this point. In a Territory, Earth Alliance enclaves were guests at the whim of their hosts. If the guests offended the host, the guest had to leave, no matter how much it had invested or how long it had been there.
The problem wasn’t the law. The problem was enforcing the law.
And that was the saga of her entire career.
She deactivated the scope and glanced at Washington. He looked at her, and she could see on his face the same frustration that she felt.
They were going to have to monitor these bastards, maybe for months, while they waited for the Earth Alliance Military Guard to arrive. Then it would take a small-scale war to get these idiots out of here. After, of course, someone—probably her—tried to talk them into leaving voluntarily.
The diplomats got the easy job in these situations. The diplomats got to talk to the locals who barely understood Standard and who probably didn’t understand Earth Alliance customs at all.
She
was going to have to talk with the humans who had been here for years, humans who didn’t want to be found, humans who were probably doing something they believed to be ideologically pure or economically beneficial. Humans who would probably go to war—either for their beliefs or their fortune.
And she wasn’t sure which one was worse.
Because they would both cost her months of her life—and, if she wasn’t careful, her life itself.
She sighed, then glanced at Washington again. He was looking at the enclave with great concentration, probably through a scope of his own.
We need to set up surveillance, something as modern as we have, so that their monitors won’t find it right away
, she sent to him.
And we’ll do something from orbit, of course
.
And maybe, if the diplomats did their job and got permission from the Eaufasse, they could fly little bug-like cameras around the enclave itself.
She was tempted to go down to the edge of the enclave and see if someone would let her in. But if they didn’t—or even if they did—she would tip her hand. The enclave would know that the Eaufasse were aware of them, and would know that the Eaufasse had contacted the FSS.
She glanced at the Eaufasse. It looked like part of the groundcover. She’d never seen such effective camouflage. Only the glistening of its eyes, and the fact that she knew it was there, let her see it at all.
Let’s go
, she sent, and wondered how the hell they were going to back their way out of this mess. And by that, she meant both the branch groundcover, and the situation here on Epriccom.
***
The corpses proved dicey in and of themselves. It took nearly 24 hours to remove them from their resting place in the clearing, and get them to the orbiting ship. Several of the branches had worked their way into the corpses and had to be dislodged. Of course, no one wanted to do that without the Eaufasse’s permission, and no one quite knew how to ask for it.
Plus no one knew if it were possible to carry bodies out of the place where they had died. If this were a Disty-run area, the problems would be extreme. The Disty believed that bodies contaminated everything, and had elaborate rituals for dealing with them.
The Eaufasse didn’t seem to have problems with bodies, but the translations weren’t really clear on anything. She was guessing, and sometimes not even guessing on much evidence.
At least she knew the shuttle landing points were safe. An actual diplomat had handled that negotiation years ago, when the Eaufasse started talking about joining the Earth Alliance. Theoretically, the diplomat’s translator had actually spoken Fasse fluently, although she always had her doubts about someone’s ability to speak well with a new culture.
The Eaufasse had a space traffic system, but not a physical port. Instead, they had landing areas near all of their major population centers.
Gomez had landed her two shuttles at the area nearest the bodies. She had brought two shuttles because she had known there might be difficulties. The shuttle landing area had been some distance from that clearing, and the group had had to walk, because humans didn’t fit in Eaufasse transports and the Eaufasse wouldn’t let Gomez use her own transports.
Walking back with the bodies, even bagged, had been difficult at best.
Gomez was happy that Rainger and the collection team handled that little mess. She had a little mess of her own.
She needed to coordinate everything, from the diplomats to the arrival of the Earth Alliance Military Guards. She also needed someone who spoke both Standard and the Eaufasse’s language well. Fortunately, that person wasn’t too far away.
Unfortunately, that person wasn’t really a person at all.
Uzven was Peyti, another scrawny alien type with long limbs and branch-like fingers. The Peyti had filtered their way deep into the Earth Alliance, mostly in a legal capacity, because they loved interactions, law, and rules—especially bending them through legal methods. So it surprised Gomez to have a Peyti translator, although, when she thought of it, it made some kind of sense: the Peyti had to talk with others as well.
The problem was that Peyti were fragile. They didn’t breathe oxygen, and so always wore a filter over their faces, providing them whatever the hell it was that they breathed. They also didn’t eat the same things humans did. Peyti tired easily—probably because they were operating in a hostile environment all of the time.
And, what annoyed her the most was that she could never tell their gender. It shouldn’t have annoyed her, but it did. She wanted to know what she was dealing with, even if it had no bearing on the circumstance.
The Peyti were unusually reticent about gender. It was considered offensive to ask. The names certainly didn’t give a clue either. This one, who arrived by shuttle from some nearby station, was named Uzven, which sounded just like every other Peyti name that she had ever heard.
She didn’t have much interaction with it when it first arrived because she placed it on the link with the collection team, Rainger, and the Eaufasse translator. But she would need the Peyti soon. She needed to figure out what was going on with these corpses.
She needed as much information as possible before the diplomats and military arrived. Her experience showed her that they often screwed things up.
No available diplomatic unit was near Epriccom. And she wasn’t going to let the Earth Alliance Military Guards anywhere near Epriccom until she had diplomats and translators in place.
Her team would be alone here for weeks, maybe even months. She had sent for help, but as yet had no idea when it would arrive.
Until then, her investigative team was on its own.
She had been alone on the Frontier many times before. She had done well in most of those instances, so well that she had the best team and the best resources.
If she couldn’t handle the situation on Epriccom, no one could.
***
Gomez’s ship, the
EAFS Stanley
, was one of the flag ships in the FSS fleet. The ship had all of the bells and whistles the squad could ask for, from the latest weapons’ systems to the best forensic labs to several prisoner wings. Not to mention an entire section designed for non-standard passengers.
She had set up the non-standard section to Peyti normal, hoping she wouldn’t need it for anything else during this part of the trip. But she was less concerned with the non-standard section than she was with the forensic lab. She wanted to find out what the heck was going on with these corpses and why they caused the Emir to send for the FSS in the first place.