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  He closed and dogged the hatch to the small compartment the three men would live in during this journey to... wherever the hell Novo Khongor was. Then he stood, feet spread, fists jammed on his hips, and glared at them long enough to make them very nervous. He kept glaring until they began to sweat.

  "I don't know where you're really going or what you did," he began softly, "but it can't be anywhere or anything good. What did you do?"

  The three cast quick glances at each other. Pasquin, as senior man, spoke. "We didn't do anything wrong, Top. Honest."

  Myer snorted. "A corporal and two lance corporals? Infantry? You expect me to believe you didn't do anything wrong? What, do you think I've spent my career as a chaplain's assistant?" They later swore that smoke and flames shot from his nostrils when he snorted.

  "All right, then, answer one question for me—and tell me the absolute truth." He waited until each of them agreed. "Did any of you say anything, I mean word one, to anyone outside of Company L about what really happened on Avionia?"

  "No, Top!" they said simultaneously.

  "Absolutely not, First Sergeant," Corporal Pasquin said. "We all know what would happen to anyone who let it slip. I think before anybody in the company would let anything slip you'd have to get him so drunk he couldn't talk."

  Myer peered intently at them. They didn't flinch, and he decided they were probably telling the truth.

  "Well, then," he said in a more conversational voice, "the three of you, for reasons unknown, are departing on a deployment to a place nobody I know has ever heard of on an unspecified mission. As you well know, every time Company L or an element of it deploys, I give an unofficial briefing to the men before we arrive on-station. Sometimes I have information to impart that is unavailable to our commanders. Sometimes I put a different slant on the mission." As he spoke he removed his fists from his hips and clasped his hands behind his back. He began pacing from side to side; the compartment only allowed two steps in each direction. "This is the only chance I have to brief you on this mission, and it's very difficult because I have no idea where you're going or what your mission is." He shook his head and a corner of his eye twitched. Three of his Marines were going somewhere and he had no idea what harm they would face. What could he possibly say to help them accomplish their mission and stay alive and unharmed?

  "You are Marines. Moreover, you are members of the most decorated combat unit in the Confederation Marine Corps, 34th FIST. Even more than that, you are members of Company L, the best infantry company in the entire Marine Corps. You know that." He wheeled on them and glared. "Don't let it go to your heads! It doesn't matter how good a Marine you are or how good your unit is. All it takes is one lucky shot and you're dead! That's what combat is, it's a toss of a coin." He stopped glaring and resumed pacing.

  "Wherever this place is you're going, whatever your mission is, once you get there, remember four things. You are among the best of the best. You represent not only yourselves, but Company L, 34th FIST, and the entire Marine Corps. You will accomplish your mission, whatever it is, and you will return to Camp Ellis alive and in one piece." He glared again. "Just remember, if you don't come back to me alive and in one piece, your asses are mine." He came to attention. "Corporal Pasquin, Lance Corporal Claypoole, Lance Corporal Dean, good hunting." He grasped each of their hands to shake, then spun about and left, almost forgetting to undo the hatch before opening it.

  "Don't you ever scrub the air in this scow?" he snarled at the first sailor he passed. Particles in the air had to be the explanation for his watering eyes.

  Chapter Eight

  This happened a dozen years earlier:

  "Mud. That's all this damn place has," First Geologist Donny Yort snorted.

  Only one of the people seated at the conference table in the senior staff meeting room reacted to the geologist's blunt statement, Dr. Horter Hottenbaum, the administrative chief of the exploratory mission to the planet Society 362.

  "But—" Hottenbaum began.

  Yort looked levelly at his boss and cut him off. "Mud to a depth of up to a mile in places." Yort enjoyed making people think by using archaic units of measurement. He pushed a button on the control panel set into the tabletop in front of him. A series of 2-D images marched past on vidscreens placed so everyone at the table could see them without turning around. The display wasn't necessary, but Yort also enjoyed showing graphically what he was talking about—he believed it made people think what he was saying had great importance and they would pay it closer attention. Some of the images were of low, shallow-sided hills, others of plains; several showed forests that appeared more to drip than to grow. Inset in the corner of each image was a close-up of the ground, which was uniformly brown and wet. "Nowhere less than a hundred meters. My opinion is that just getting through the mud to begin drilling for minds could make drilling cost-prohibitive."

  "But Engineering's got..." Hottenbaum twirled a hand in front of his chest; he was a botanist and couldn't think of the term. "...got stuff to harden mud so it can be drilled through." He looked at Chief Engineer Baahl for confirmation.

  "Polyfrazillium-3," Baahl said. "Inexpensive, easy to use. Can cake a hundred-meter-diameter column of firm dirt through a mud lake half a kilometer deep."

  "So—" Hottenbaum looked triumphantly back at Yort, but Baahl interrupted him. "On a dry day." The chief engineer shook her head.

  Hottenbaum was so dismayed by her comment he didn't notice the way her hair billowed out when she shook her head, a sight he normally loved. "Beg pardon?" he said.

  "Polyfrazillium-3 won't set on a day with humidity over seventy-five percent. I don't think anyplace on this planet ever dries out that much." Baahl glanced at the chief meteorologist for confirmation.

  "To put it in layman's terms," Chief Meteorologist Slyvin said with a shrug as he pushed a button on his console, "the sun never shines here." He stifled a smile when that pompous Yort's images were replaced by his. The images of the planetary surface were replaced with a picture taken of the planet during the exploration ship's approach several months earlier. It showed solid, globe-girdling cloud cover. "The average humidity planet-wide is ninety-two percent. Average number of days per annum without rain in all reporting areas, 0.7. Average annual rainfall in all reporting areas..." He shook his head. "I don't understand why Society 362 isn't covered with a worldwide ocean."

  Society 362 had an unofficial name, Quagmire, but nobody ever used it in staff meetings or anyplace else it would be recorded.

  "But—" Society 362 was the first exploration mission on which Hottenbaum was chief administrator. He dearly wanted it found habitable so it could be colonized. Few scientists ever served as chief administrator on more than one expedition. He needed a finding of habitability to ensure his place in history.

  Dr. Achille Marcks, the expedition's chief psychologist, knew that and wasn't about to let Hottenbaum raise another objection. He cleared his throat loudly and said, "Dr. Hottenbaum, let me remind you that nearly three-quarters of the members of this expedition are veterans of at least one other BHHEI mission, and several hundred have multiple explorations behind them. We have been here for eight standard months. The weather, with its constant overcast, is such that 943 out of the 1,006 people on this expedition have had to be treated for the form of depression known as ‘seasonal affective disorder.’ At this time..." He consulted his personal vid even though he could have used the tabletop console to put the data up for all to see as the geologist and meteorologist had. "...261 are unable to perform more than the most rudimentary functions of their roles due to SAD. Perhaps a few score of them will require extended talk and/or chemical therapy after they leave here. Psychology has no choice but to recommend, in the strongest terms, against colonization."

  "But the centauroid life-forms are so interesting, they have to be studied." Hottenbaum turned pleading eyes toward the faunal life-form group head.

  "Come on, Horter!" said Chief Biologist Winny Rendall. "We've seen he
ptapods on enough other worlds; they've lost their novelty."

  "But they don't have heads—"

  Rendall cut him off with a sharp laugh. "So what? When you look at the location of the sense and ingestion organs, everything is within the normal range of location and relationship." He shrugged "Casing the brain inside the thorax makes more sense than our exposed housing. The head and neck are pretty vulnerable to injury, you know."

  "Colonists aren't necessarily the best people to do an in-depth study of a new world's biota." Dr. Angela Streeth, the chief botanist, jumped in before Hottenbaum could raise another objection. "They're too busy trying to make the planet habitable to expend resources on studying flora and fauna. A specially designated and designed scientific study group can do the job better." She grimaced. "My team hasn't found anything interesting yet, and more than half of my people are working at less than full capability." She nodded at Marcks.

  Dr. Horter Hottenbaum looked from face to face and sighed. Every department head was opposed to opening Society 362 for colonization. "Then there's no need..." He couldn't bring himself to finish asking the question.

  "I recommend we go home now," said First Deputy Administrator Egon. "We can write our reports on the journey."

  They left a month later on the next supply ship. The ship didn't take them directly back to the Bureau of Human Habitability Exploration headquarters on Earth, it first stopped at Kingdom, a colonized world just three light-years from Quagmire, to drop off a consignment of intestinal flora culture. Kingdom's theocracy wanted the world to be totally independent, but not all of the nutrients necessary for healthy human life were readily available yet. A recent plague had attacked the intestinal flora of the colonists, and they were facing famine from their reduced ability to digest food. Only crew who were needed to transfer the floral consignment and receive the minerals Kingdom used as trade goods were allowed off the ship during the two days it was in orbit. This wasn't by command of the ship's captain, it was by order of the theocracy. The monks of the Holy Regiment of the Shepherd's Crook, who served as customs agents inside the ship, permitted no unauthorized persons to debark. The monks looked like they were fully prepared to use the Confederation military blasters they carried. An armed shuttle hovering outside the transport's docking bay backed them up. No one on the ship to Kingdom objected, the planet was subject to frequent rebellions by those colonists who believed Kingdom should allow more individual freedom.

  As the mission's shuttles took off from Quagmire, from the edge of the nearby rain forest a small group of centauroids unlike any the BHHEI mission had encountered in nine months of study watched quietly. When the last of the shuttles vanished into the upper atmosphere, they regrouped into a circle.

  "The monsters have gone," one said with relief.

  "Have they truly gone or will they return?" another asked, watching the sky through his dorsal eyes.

  The biggest centauroid lashed out to thump the worrier between his retracted primary eyestalks. "Look at us when you talk," he snarled. "You are being rude."

  The worrier instantly retracted his dorsal eyestalks and extended his primaries. He lowered his torso and pointed his primaries at the leader's mid-feet. "Those monsters frighten me. Four limbs are unnatural." His voice was muffled by the mud inches below his mouth.

  Another shuddered. "And those huge lumps where their primary eyestalks should be! They are uglier than any demon the shaman warns us about."

  Others began babbling of their disgust at the appearance of the monsters. The leader ignored them. He extended his torso to its fullest height and aimed his primary eyestalks at the just-abandoned BHHEI base. He came to a decision.

  "They had many tools and other objects," he said "Maybe they left something in those..." His vocabulary failed him. The centauroids didn't construct buildings or live in caves, their nests were roofed with living branches teased into place for that purpose, and had open sides. "We must search." He slapped one of the others on a forelimb. "Go. Bring back our females and young. Also more hunters."

  The designated messenger dipped his torso and bounded up into a nearby tree. He used all six limbs to scramble along the branches from tree to tree—arboreal travel was far faster than slogging through the undergrowth.

  A hunter who had been silent swiveled his primary eyestalks toward the base. "What if they set traps?"

  "Our females and young will find them," the leader said firmly. Secretly he wasn't so sure his kind could find all the traps the monsters might have left. What sort of traps might monsters such as the ones who just left be capable of conceiving?

  The humans hadn't set any traps; the vid, trid, and audio recorders left running didn't count. In any case, the record the vids, trids, and audios made would never be seen by a human unless another mission was sent to Quagmire. Even then, the next mission would have to visit Central Station and retrieve the recordings before the dank atmosphere degraded the storage media beyond recovery.

  Neither had the mission left behind anything usable—usable to humans, that is. The centauroids, on the other hand, were fascinated by the decomposing foodstuffs in the composters. Even more interesting to them were the items they were able to dig out of the nonorganic trash pit: rapidly corroding broken screws, a cracked bubble matrix, the partly carbonized innards of a comm unit that had overloaded and burned out. One searcher thought she was caught by a trap when she squeezed a mostly used tube of adhesive and it stuck the phalanges of a forelimb together. She thought she was crippled for life, but a few days later the normal scaling of her dermis sloughed off enough surface cells to remove the adhesive. Most fascinating of all were the few wrappers from consumable items that hadn't yet degraded. The wrappers were impervious to just about everything and could be torn only at their tear strips, which, of course, had already been torn. Because people found such wrappers useful for more than merely preserving consumables between manufacture and use, they were designed to not degrade until they had been buried in a landfill for several days. The leader gathered the wrappers to be tied together for use as ceremonial capes. He thought they would be far more impressive than the leaves normally used for that purpose. The centauroids moved on and eventually migrated away. Nothing else untoward happened for a dozen standard years. Then monsters came again.

  The hunter hunched behind the foliage of a tree at the edge of a sluggish river. He watched the monsters on the island for a long time. Soft rain gently pelted his shoulders and back, and ran down his body to drip onto the ground below. Finally he decided to move closer to the monsters. He was too young to have seen the monsters that had visited earlier, but he'd heard all of the stories and thought these might be different. According to the tales, the earlier monsters were more uniform in size, about the same size as people. Some of the new monsters looked to be at least twice the size of people, and the smaller ones were the size of young people, not adults. He was pretty sure the smaller ones weren't immature monsters; it was always the small ones who seemed to be leaders and the big ones were workers. Were they different kinds of monsters? That was as peculiar a thought to the hunter as the monsters coming in different sizes: his kind had not domesticated animals. He had never heard of the earlier monsters striking each other. During the time he watched from the tree he had seen several monsters strike each other, sometimes smaller ones striking larger ones. The large ones never hit back.

  He couldn't be sure, but the skin color of the monsters seemed different from what he had been told about those who had left half a lifetime earlier. Their outer coverings were all the same color and pattern. He'd not heard that the earlier monsters all had the same coverings; the older hunters, who had seen them frequently, described them as wearing many different coverings, most in colors nobody had ever seen before. One thing he was sure of from his own experience: the nests the new monsters constructed were different from the nests the others had made; he had been one of the young who searched the monster camp after the others left.

  He w
asn't going to go closer in the open; two other hunters had come into this area in recent days. They hadn't returned. The hunter suspected the monsters had killed them. He would get closer to the monsters, but they wouldn't see him. Then he would return to his clan and report what he learned.

  Keeping foliage between himself and the island, he swiftly clambered to the ground. He lay his spear where he could find it easily on his return and lowered himself to his belly. He dropped his thorax as well, with his shoulders hunched high enough only to keep his mouth out of the mud, and slithered into the water. The patter of the rain on the river's surface masked the small wake he made entering the water. Completely submerged, he paddled to the middle of the river to take advantage of the slight current. There, next to a leafy branch drifting with the current, he buoyed upward enough to break the surface with his dorsal eyestalks and snorkeled his nostrils. If monsters on the island saw his eyestalks and snorkel, they would think the organs were leaves on the branch. Maybe when he got closer he would find a way to bend his body so he could raise a tympanum above the water and listen to the monsters. The sounds of the monsters might have meaning to the shaman and the elders.

  The river ran very slowly and it took considerable time for the hunter to get appreciably closer to the island. He swiveled his dorsal eyestalks to take in as much detail as possible, but almost none of what he saw made sense to him. All of the monsters were doing something, none were simply relaxing on that fine, drizzly day. Most of them rushed from one nest to another, many hunched as though they disliked the rain. Why would monsters dislike rain? As one smaller monster went from one nest to another; a larger monster accompanied it, holding a large leaf over it so the drizzle didn't fall on it. Very peculiar. Sometimes monsters moved objects from a nest into a smaller nest then climbed into the smaller nest. Then the small nest moved! The first time he saw that, the hunter was so frightened he almost swam away. But the small nest didn't move toward him, so he stayed. None of the small nests moved toward him. Instead, one by one, they all went to the largest nest and entered it, so he stopped being afraid. After he witnessed that phenomenon several times, he recognized a pattern to the movement: the small nests loaded objects from one particular small nest, went into the largest nest, then returned to the first nest and repeated the process. They must have been moving things into storage. But why move them if they were already in a nest? That didn't make any sense to him.