Star Force: Bloodlust (SF54) (5 page)

One of the units was near his head, the other near his
feet and situated so they would swing ‘up’ with gravity’s pull on his body and
the rest of the unit. At the moment he was ‘standing’ vertical with his body
spinning a bit to the left that he wasn’t able to control until he finally tipped
the upper edge slightly forward and allowed gravity to settle the orientation
on the anti-
grav
‘pins.’ That left him facing down
ever so slightly as he moved forward, gaining speed slowly as he crossed the
landscape with the Lacvamat lazily keeping pace beside him.

The flight pack or ‘eagle’ as they referred to it
wasn’t a combat piece, given its size and awkwardness. He couldn’t fight with
it on his back when on the ground and it made him a sitting duck in the air,
but if one needed a good view and the ability to cross terrain quickly without
a dropship or fighter the flight pack was the way to go.

It was a civilian tool, but one that came in handy in
a variety of situations.

Brad continued tagging Lacvamat sites so Donn could
see through the battlemap where to go without having to wander randomly, but as
he did so he tried to get a feel for the debris impacts. He imagined most of
the crash craters were underneath the little peach domes they’d constructed,
but he was able to spot scratch marks and some other small trash on the barren
landscape, with him actually descending to one spot for a look.

When he landed he deactivated the anti-
grav
and walked across to a scrub bush, carrying the 280
lb
pack like it was a Knight riding piggyback. One Lacvamat
landed with him while the others kept to the sky, circling overhead and
watching.

Brad knelt and picked up a marble-sized piece of
charred metal, holding it in his armored hand.

“
Ship debris?
”
he asked.

“
Everything of
consequence has been recovered
.”

“
How large of a
radius have you recovered pieces from?
”

“
Wherever
you see our collectors.
We set
them on top of the locations rather than moving the items for study.
”

“
Are the objects
still here?
” he asked, dropping the tiny fragment.

“
Some have been
removed for further study after a forensic analysis was completed.
”

“
Do you happen
to know the spot where the ship exploded…in the air, I mean?
”

“
It is marked
.”

“
How?
”

The Lacvamat tilted its head to the air and looked in
a specific direction. Brad followed its gaze and saw nothing.

“
What am I
supposed to see?
”

“
Hear
,” it
corrected him. “
The beacon is auditory
.”

Brad adjusted the controls for his helmet and searched
through the range of sounds that his ears weren’t capable of processing…finding
a light, repetitive ‘beep’ that he was able to isolate the location of. Using
his helmet’s zoom he examined that position, finding a tiny object hovering in
midair there.

“
What is the
purpose?
”

“
To
assist the search teams, as well as to mark remembrance
.”

“
I want to get a
look from that vantage point
.”

“
Can you fly
that high?
”

“
I can go to
orbit if needed…I’ll just run out of air
.”

“
Then follow
,”
the Lacvamat said, a bit more eager to help than the others.

Brad reactivated his flight pack and took off again,
angling up to a spot high in the air where he began to mentally calculate the
possible debris patterns, as well as working in all the little dome sites
below, trying to figure out some insight that the natives may have missed.

5

“This it?”
Donn asked.

“Yes,” Brad answered from high in the sky overhead.
“The distortion ripples are centered about two meters to your left.”

“Give me a moment,” the Archon said, sitting down on
the ground crosslegged by himself while the rest of his team was out inspecting
various sites, mostly those that the Lacvamat had set up. The striker had an
escort with him, but they stood back and remained silent, not understanding
what the Human was doing but not caring to question him either.

Donn took a deep breath through his filter mask and
extended his senses, clicking on his Pefbar and looking down into the ground
around him. He was sitting on what he would have described as a ‘sand wash’ in
that it wasn’t hard packed ground. It was firm enough, but the top layer was
loose and had moved around a bit in a pattern Brad had spotted from above.
There was no visible debris in the area, but they’d seen similar crash site
damage before and suspected there were pieces that had been buried and covered
over in the turbulence.

The Archon was sitting down to get his head an extra
meter of range, with the Jedi pose being a mere afterthought. Focusing his
Pefbar into a ‘spotlight’ cone he searched beneath him as far as it would reach
before rotating it around and scanning the area. The grainy black/white images
in his mind were hard to decipher the further away they got, but he did find
several rocks beneath him that had been caught up in what was a small ravine
that had been filled in with sediment, probably years before, but the top layer
and several jabbing scars beneath were made of looser material that he knew was
a recent deposit.

And at the bottom of those scars were six pieces of
untouched debris.

Donn activated his all-team comm. “Got something guys,
but it’s going to require some digging.”

Galia was down on her hands and knees, her head buried
in the hole she was scooping out with her big armored hands that was already
two meters deep. Her white armor was only half visible, from the chest on out
to her legs and feet which were almost vertical as she kicked dirt and tiny
rocks up past her body as she dug further with the assistance of an Archon’s
Pefbar as a guide.

Donn was digging his own hole a few steps away, as
were four other Archons while an army of Lacvamat surrounded them and the site,
keeping others away and monitoring the Humans closely. They’d called for
digging equipment of their own, but Donn wanted to get to it first…plus he
didn’t want to wait. The softness of the wash being what it was they’d decided
to go at it by hand, though in his case he was actually scooping as much
telekinetically as he was pawing it out, though with his head down in his own
gopher hole the Lacvamat couldn’t tell the difference.

“Got something,” Galia said over the comm, but Donn
kept digging after his own and didn’t pop his head out, seeing that he was only
half a meter away from his.

“Brad?” Donn asked.

“Got it,” the free Archon said, stepping over to Galia
while the others continued to dig and tapped the big Knight on the butt twice,
hard enough to get her attention. She pulled out and let him down into the hole
where he started pushing away small amount of debris telekinetically and
cleaning off the edges of the shrapnel as one of the medics came up behind him
and stuck a probe into the hole beside him.

“Concentration is spiking.
Nothing
too dramatic, but far higher than the latent amounts in the air.”

“This is a big one,” Brad commented as he ate away at
the sharp and frayed edges of the junk, creating a little cave around it as he
progressed and having to make a little telekinetic dome above his head to catch
falling material to keep it from refilling the hole. What he caught he chucked
back out past his legs, making for a dirt sprinkler that was spitting out a nearly
constant fine spray of material as opposed to
Donn’s
hole that was chucking large
glumps
out periodically.

“Galia, we need to widen the hole. Play plow please,”
Brad said, pointing her to his right.

“Muscle coming,” she said, kneeling beside him and
reaching her thick arms down in next to his hip and pulling large handfuls of
material out from the sidewall. A lot of material fell back in, but Brad pushed
it back up to her and between the two of them enlarged the entrance to more
than two meters wide, enough for him to finally pry the piece loose. It was too
heavy to lift telekinetically, so he leveraged it out by hand to get it loose
then pulled out, letting Galia do the heavy lifting while he added some
telekinetic pull from a distance.

It took a while to get it out, given the bad angle the
Knight had to reach down at, but eventually the trashcan-sized, razor sharp
fragment came out and she put it down on the flat ground nearby with both
medics scurrying over to it and taking samples…with a trio of Lacvamat techs
coming over as well.

One of the medtechs looked at his sensor analysis and
immediately pulled out a device from his satchel of equipment and placed it on
the ground nearby. With the flip of a button a semi-visible bubble shield
activated over top forming a 3 meter high and wide radius around the piece of
junk that would contain the atmosphere inside but otherwise wouldn’t interfere
with their movement.

“
Containment
shield
,” he explained to the Lacvamat. “
The
debris has a fresher concentration of toxin given that it’s been buried since
impact.
”

One of the flyers extended a wingtip and touched the
shield perimeter, finding that it could move through without interference,
then
it stepped inside and touched a device to the debris
next to the medtech.

“
I am detecting
only trace amounts
.”

“
Our equipment
is more sensitive, and I think there’s enough of a concentration lingering on
the debris to get a sufficient sample for a full analysis
.”

“
We have samples
taken from the bodies of the infected
,” the Lacvamat said, as if his
collection was both pointless and redundant.

“
I’d like a
comparison. The more we know the better
.”

“Got one,” Donn said, pulling a baseball sized piece
out of his hole with two more segments still buried a few inches lower.

“Bring it over here, please,” the other medtech asked.
“Inside the shield.”

Donn stood up and walked it over, then headed back to
his hole for further digging.

The second medtech waved a sensor around the device,
picking up a decent concentration of the toxin on one side, with almost nothing
on the other…indicating that, as they suspected, the toxin was released through
an explosion that coated the various pieces as they were hit in the blast
radius.

“Any idea what this junk is?”
Galia wondered over the comm.

“Afraid I’m not that kind of tech,” the medic replied.
“But that doesn’t really matter. It’s the toxin on the pieces that we need.”

“Have you determined if it’s safe for us yet?” she
asked, watching him work as the others continued to dig in their holes.

“Just collecting now.
Analysis later.
I’d keep your armor on, just in case.”

“Do I need to take a dirt bath before heading back
inside the ship?”

The medic laughed, then fell short when he realized
she was serious. “No, we’ve got some cleansing fields that will do a better job
of it.”

“Inside the ship?”

“Yeah…oh, crap. Guess the Kiritas will have to bring
them out.”

“Worry about that later,” Donn said, coming back out
with another piece as more Lacvamat flew in, some of which were carrying
equipment bundles of their own. “This is a piece of a gravity drive. Scan it.”

The medic did as requested as the other was still
pulling samples off the big piece. “Yeah, we’ve got good levels on this piece
as well.”

“Liquid?” Donn guessed.

The medic chewed on his lower lip inside his helmet
for a moment, but it was the other one that answered.
“Almost.
These particles resemble more of a gel. It’s mostly cloying powder now though.”

“Binder?”

The medic shook his head.
“Can’t
tell with this equipment.
Have to wait until we get back to the ship.”

“Do you think you have enough to identify?”

“Should.”

“Good,” Donn said, heading back to his hole to get the
third piece.

After the Humans were done with the debris pieces
they’d recovered the Lacvamat took possession and conducted their own analysis,
but the small amount of toxin recovered, equal to about 6 grams of material,
was more than enough for the pair of medtechs to do a thorough analysis. Coupled
with the blood and tissue samples the Lacvamat grudgingly allowed them to take
from several of the infected the next day, they were able to get a good handle
on what the toxin was and how it had been delivered…as well as how to shut it
down within the local population.

The shutting down part wasn’t something they could
accomplish on site, unfortunately, but once they got back to a system with
access to the communications grid they’d get the data to Earth where they’d be
able to synthesize what was needed. To date no relay had been built in any of
the Lacvamat systems, with them preferring to remain somewhat isolated within
the ADZ. That choice was going to cost them many more lives in the coming days,
but at least Donn knew that they could eventually stop the spread of the
toxin…which was, in fact, a bioweapon.

It was an airborne spread, self-replicating toxin that
was accomplished through a bacteria that did the spreading and acted like miniature
factories for the toxin. Typically bioweapons were viruses or some manner of
manipulation of an individual’s body to cause it to malfunction. This didn’t
fit that mold for the toxin produced was straight up poisoning…it was the fact
that it was being manufactured within the individuals’ bodies by the bacteria
that made it a very creative and dangerous weapon…especially since the toxin it
produced specifically targeted an aspect of Lacvamat physiology.

That particular function, a regulatory organ that was
interlinked with their blood stream and balanced various levels of nutrients
and natural toxins, was caused to go berserk, in some cases shutting down and
in others triggering massive surges in a very random fashion. In this way the
Lacvamat infected would not die of the same cause, disguising the source aside
from the fact that the mass of deaths occurring were happening at relatively the
same time.

The Lacvamat had identified the toxin in their
bloodstream but had missed the bacteria…or rather had ignored it, for it
mimicked the types found in the planetary atmosphere. It was almost as if
someone had purposefully disguised the toxin producing nano-factories to keep
them from being discovered. The medtechs had a quibble over that, with one
suggesting that it was coincidence and the other believing it had been
intentional. Either way, the Lacvamat had missed the source, believing that the
toxin was somehow being spread from individual to individual when in truth it
was the bacteria doing it.

And that
bacteria was
airborne…at
least it could survive in the air, which was why trace amounts of the toxin had
been detectable upon arrival. Unless a way was found to neutralize the effect
of the toxin or kill the bacteria it was possible that the bioweapon would
spread across the entire planet…not to mention potentially spread to other
systems by infected individuals or even just some bad air taken in during a
cargo transfer.

The bacteria wasn’t a crazy spreader, which was also
probably why it had been missed, but its growth and spread rate was solid and
steady, meaning that whoever had done this intended to kill off the entire
planet’s population…and potentially all other Lacvamat within the ADZ if they
expected carriers to move it to other worlds.

It was fortunate that they’d put the quarantine in
place immediately. Hopefully none of the bacteria had been transferred off the
planet to date.

But the medtechs’ analysis left Donn and his team with
more questions. First of which was whether the toxin would be harmful to any
other race. A brief inquiry into that led to three other potential problems,
those being the Bali,
Veeslah
, and Quo…all minor
members of the ADZ. They had a similar circulatory system that may or may not
be affected, but for all the ‘major’ races there would be no threat, though
they could still be carriers of the bacteria.

Which begged the second question of why blow up a ship
in atmosphere to begin the spread of the bacteria when all it would take was
one person arriving on planet and unleashing a small sample into the
atmosphere. Given enough time it would spread and the Lacvamat would grow sick
and die just the same, even just sending a contaminated person in amongst the
population could do it, in theory, but a small, pure sample of the weapon was a
sure way to get it deployed, so why go for the huge amount they’d deposited in
the explosion?

It was faster, obviously, but Donn had a gut feeling
that wasn’t the reason. Someone wanted to be seen doing it. Though no one had
claimed responsibility the destruction of the ship and the subsequent mass
infections and deaths made it clear this was an attack, whereas a small, covert
planting of the bacteria would have left no traceable source. If your aim was
to kill the Lacvamat that would have been your best bet, and to do it on all
their worlds and the worlds they frequented in other systems. Contaminate them
all simultaneously then sit back and watch them die.