Despite the confidence he had in the MHW, Evan was still intimidated. The creature was twice the size of the suit. Its body oozed around a single rotating globe lubricated with what looked like glycerine. The globe fitted neatly into a huge socket in the creature's underside. Using the globe like a ball bearing, the Prismite could pivot and turn with astounding agility. The globe was translucent, and Evan could clearly make out the dendritic inclusions within.
Four dark red eyes like enormous rubies were glaring at him. They surrounded a twisting, powerful silicate trunk. The tip of the thick protuberance was lined with sawlike blades.
"Local carnivore or the food-chain equivalent," Evan observed with forced calm. "I presume it can't hurt us?"
"Naturally not. It apparently intends to try, however. The action should be instructive."
The suit was correct in its assumption. The globe spun, kicking up sand and bits of ground cover as the rotund killer charged. At the same time the flexible trunk snapped out straight as a lance and all the saw blades at the tip lined up. It also demonstrated another neat trick which took Evan completely by surprise.
Half a dozen glassy cables emerged from the body and shot out to lasso the MHW
"Your vital signs are racing," the suit admonished. "There is no need for concern as long as you are secured inside me."
"I know that." Evan was upset that the suit should think it necessary to reassure him, equally angry at himself for responding like a child. He tried to calm himself. His pulse slowed.
Despite the pull of the cables the suit did not budge. Weight and stabilizers kept it upright and in place. There was a splintering sound as the trunk-lance struck the suit's chest. Vicious silicate sawteeth began to grind against the duralloy. They would have made a bloody mess of anything as fragile as human flesh and bone, but the outer surface of the MHW wasn't so much as scratched.
Evan watched with interest as the futile attack continued. When he felt the suit had had enough time to record everything of interest, he spoke. "End it. We've spent enough time here."
"Yes Sir."
The carnivore persisted even though its teeth had been ground almost flat against the duralloy. It would have to be discouraged. A small tube emerged from beneath Evan's left arm. There was a crackle and a bright flash of light. The six cables dropped away and the monster retreated, wobbling crazily on the single globe. It fell over, the globe spinning and tossing sand into the air as it struggled to regain an upright stance. When it finally did so, the thing pivoted and sped off into the forest, weaving drunkenly as it smashed through crystalline growths or bounced off those too large to roll over.
"What did you use?"
"A powerful electric charge, sir. I was programmed to be highly selective in my choice of weapons. Standard defensive measures would not be very useful here. A laser, for example, might be reflected back at us. But a strong electrical discharge disrupts the internal systems of silicate photovores. The results are satisfactory with the added benefit of not killing a local lifeform needlessly. Sometimes it is better to sow confusion than death."
"I'm sure the conservationists who designed you would agree," Evan murmured. He surveyed the ground ahead. "Anything else likely to threaten us?"
"No sir."
"Then let's not waste any more time."
"Excuse me, sir, but I should prefer to avoid the growths directly ahead."
Evan frowned inside the suit. Nothing but low ground cover lay between them and the station perimeter. "What growths?"
"Allow me to adjust your Hausdorf lenses, sir." Evan's visor flickered, darkened slightly, and suddenly half a dozen humped growths appeared not more than three meters in front of him.
"Where the hell did those come from?" They looked like tumbleweeds sculpted out of crystallized maple syrup. Their edges blurred even as he stared at them.
"They have been there all along, sir. My programming identifies them as Fransus clumpings. It is not yet determined whether they are plant or animal."
"Right now I'm not interested in their classification. Why didn't I see them before?"
"Human eyes cannot see into fractal dimensions, sir. Fransus clumpings exist entirely within pure fractal space, between the second and third dimensions. Apparently not all local lifeforms can see into fractal space either. A wonderful camouflage."
"By alt means, let's go around them." If something could exist entirely in fractal space, it was conceivable it had defensive weaponry which could function in fractal space. Evan had no desire to test the effectiveness of something he couldn't see.
It was clear that the station's defensive perimeter had collapsed. The grounds were alive with organosilicate forms. More than communications had failed there.
As he strode between the buildings he saw that Prism was taking the installation apart. Huge vitreous vines were draped over one structure after another, while smaller growths followed in the wake of the larger, hunting for cracks or broken windows. The walls of plastic and metal were being methodically reduced to their basic chemical constituents and then consumed. The extent of the destruction hadn't been nearly as obvious from above. Now that he was in the midst of it he began to wonder if anyone had survived.
Where was the station staff?
"Try suit-to-suit frequencies," he commanded the MHW
Again there was no response. He resorted to shouting through the helmet's voice membrane, his voice rising above the squeaks and whines that resounded around him, also to no avail.
He called up a map of the station on his visor. A few more strides found him standing outside the communications center. It was thickly overgrown. Long thin ropes of green glass enveloped the curved roof and walls. Thin tendrils protruded from bunches of bright red spikes and penetrated the disintegrating walls.
The door was shut, sealed from the inside. He could have forced it easily with the MHW, but since he'd resolved to disturb as little as possible, he sought another entrance instead. There were several which hadn't been installed by the station's builders.
On the sunny side of the building, where the overgrowth was thickest, he found that the red spikes had combined with a massive green cable to rip a hole in the wall large enough to admit hide, suit and all. He crawled through.
As he did so he noticed how the red spikes were pushing steadily deeper into the plastic while the flexible tendrils sought cracks to penetrate. They looked like vanadanite crystals gone berserk. One whole section of wall had been reduced by some kind of solvent to a mass of plastic foam. He put his sheathed hand right through it. When he pulled it back, the resultant hole was alive with frantic, squirming black shapes that were eating the plastic.
Inside he commenced a detailed examination of what was left of the communications center of the station. Everything, from floor to furniture, was under attack by Prismatic lifeforms.
"I thought HW buildings were designed to be completely animal- and insect-resistant," he murmured.
"Normally they are," the suit replied. "However, this is not a normal world. The lifeforms have no precedents in the lexicon of Commonwealth discoveries. It is a unique environment that calls for unique countermeasures."
"Which the staff here wasn't prepared to take. That's clear enough."
He turned abruptly, went back for another look at the hole in the wall. "I wonder how it's done."
From beneath his right arm a sampling hose reached into the plastic muck, inhaled briefly, and withdrew. Several minutes passed while the analytical laboratory built into the suit did its work. The answers appeared on his visor screen soon after, in the form of long complex molecules that were breaking apart even as he stared.
"Polycyanoacrylates are tough, but very vulnerable to distortion. Most of the potassium is missing. When the small creatures remove that, the rest of the wall resin is reduced to garbage."
"Why potassium?"
"Who knows?" the suit said. "Perhaps they ingest it to increase their internal electrical conductivity."
"Maybe." He looked back into the room. "I'd still like to know what happened to the staff."
He found three of them a few minutes later in the next room, where the transmission and receiving instrumentation was located.
Like the exterior door, the one leading to the inner chamber had also been sealed from inside. Unlike the other, it had been penetrated somehow, the seal broken. One figure was tying against the deepspace transmitter console. Perhaps he'd been trying to send a last, desperate message. Evan could only guess, because the man was as dead as his companions.
The figure was barely identifiable as male. The flesh was intact, but all the bones had been eaten away from inside. A hunger for potassium again, and calcium too, Evan surmised. The fleshy envelope that remained was not in very good condition. Ire was glad of the suit which filtered the air he breathed. Silicate forms or no, obviously enough common bacteria were present to initiate the process of decomposition.
The man's life beacon was intact. The light that pulsed from the tiny sensor embedded in his right wrist, however, was a pale, weak red, indicating that the beacon had been active for some time.
The theory behind the beacons was simple and straightforward. Any threat, danger, or trauma that sufficiently and adversely affected the beacon's owner would automatically activate the device, radiating strong signals to bring help. Everyone traveling to or working on a new world was required to have one installed. Despite the protection afforded by his MHW, Evan had one in his own wrist.
But there'd been no one left on Prism to respond.
The second occupant of the chamber also showed the flashing light. The third did not. His battery had given out prematurely.
"I guess they never got their message off."
"No sir," said the suit quietly. A laser pointer came to life, drew Evan's attention to the back of the console.
Two barely visible transparent filaments ran from a tiny pinecone-shaped growth that clung to the back of the console. They crawled up the console and vanished through a minuscule hole in the metal. Evan touched them and they quivered slightly.
Disdaining tools, he used a hand to rip away the back panel, involuntarily jerked his hand back as a huge ball of downy tendrils spilled out onto the floor. They twisted slowly and deliberately, curling in and over themselves as each sought a new purchase.
What he could see of the complex interior of the communications console had been reduced to mush. Chips and circuits ended in bubbles of moist fiber. "Sample."
Out went the suction tube a second time. Tendrils were stolen for analysis and then spit out again.
"Yttrium," the suit eventually announced. "A minor but important component in much communications equipment. This growth is after the yttrium in the components."
"So it eats the whole inside out of the console just to get at a tiny amount of one rare earth. A real gourmet." Evan traced the path of the two invading tendrils to the pinecone growth. "Surely they ran regular checks on their equipment. I can't believe somebody missed seeing this."
"Excuse me, sir, but you are operating under a misconception. The tendrils did not arise from this small growth on the floor and then penetrate the console. The tendrils are growing from the inside out."
That explains it, Evan thought. A spore or something had slipped through the building's filters and lodged inside the console. Maybe it had come in on somebody's suit and somehow been shielded from the disinfecting unit mounted in the floor by the front door. Possible sources of infection were many. The staff had probably had no idea of the extent of the damage until it was too late.
Leaving the console, he walked over to the second figure. The woman had been in her late forties. She was lying comfortably on a couch. Perhaps she'd been asleep when the final blow had fallen. She was almost intact.
Blue, olive green, and yellow tendrils emerged from the couch to penetrate every part of her body. Except for the presence of the tendrils she might have been resting comfortably.
Evan reached out to run a hand along one leg. Through the suit's tactile sensors the limb felt normal. He used both hands to tear the tough duty suit from ankle to thigh. The skin was undamaged, though wrinkled and dried. He ran a hand along the bare leg.
As he did so the skin peeled up like parchment. Beneath, where muscle and bone should have been, was a lump of solid green glass. Tiny shapes, like oversized corpuscles with legs, were moving about just beneath the transparent surface. They scattered, fleeing from the unexpected light.
Evan drew back, feeling the gorge rise in his throat. For an instant he was tempted to burn the abomination. Logic held him back. The woman was already dead. More than dead. Cremation would entail a useless waste of energy.
Nothing so obscenely deceptive marked the demise of the third occupant of the building. The young man had been neatly dismembered, like a child's doll awaiting repair. Arms and legs lay less than a dozen centimeters from their joints. The head had been removed to an equal distance from the shoulders. A man in six pieces, waiting for somebody to put him back together again. It was neat enough to be disturbing.
Evan found he was glancing occasionally over his shoulder. Stupid, he told himself. The MHW would warn him of any approaching danger and deal with it before he was so much as aware of its presence. He forced his attention back to the corpse. Other than having been separated into six pieces, it appeared to be undamaged. Nothing was missing- no, that wasn't quite true.
"There's no blood."
"It would have evaporated by now," the suit suggested.
"Maybe, but there aren't even any stains. There ought to be stains." He knelt to examine the floor. Standard universal matting; rubberized, flexible, and supportive. But it should show stains. Therefore the blood had been removed before it had a chance to reach the floor.
"Iron, sir," the suit hypothesized. "Iron, and potassium again. Apparently different lifeforms here go after different minerals. It is clear that they make no distinction between the station itself and its inhabitants. Both are nothing more than sources of valuable minerals."
Evan couldn't keep the edginess out of his voice. "Not me. I'm nobody's mine."
He returned to the communications console and tried a number of the apparently undamaged controls. None of the telltales on the panel lit up. A weak glow from one readout indicated that the nullspace generator buried deep beneath the station was still intact, but that was understandable. It was sited in solid ferrocrete thirty meters below the surface. That was SOP. So the beam could be powered if it could be purged of hungry, invading lifeforms. He clung to that thought gratefully. It was hard to maintain a positive attitude amid so much devastation.
"I don't see any reason for optimism," he muttered aloud, "but we're obligated to check out the rest of the station."
"Yes sir."
It took the rest of the long local day to prowl through the remaining structures. Some were empty save for their complement of opportunistic colonizers. Others contained surprises more gruesome than anything he'd seen in the communications building.
In the last warehouse he surprised three motile carnivores working a corpse. The fragments of the victim's suit identified him as a member of the life sciences support team, but that was about all Evan could tell about him.
Each of the carnivores (a term more descriptive than accurate, Evan knew, since they couldn't properly be termed meat-eaters) was the size of a large dog. They were tripedal, with each foot ending in a supportive pad. Organic bodies were wrapped in protective silicate exoskeletons boasting sharp black spines. They ignored Evan's entrance completely, so intent were they on ingesting the remainder of the unfortunate staff member. Droplets of solvent oozed from their mouths.
Logic be damned, Evan thought angrily. "Burn 'em!"
"Perhaps one should be preserved for future study." As the suit made its suggestion the three scavengers turned and attacked. Their powerful jaws had no effect whatsoever on the MHW's exterior, nor did the solvent they secreted.
"I said burn them," Evan snapped loudly. This time the suit didn't respond verbally. Instead, it extended a laser and methodically melted each of the attackers into a puddle of slag and carbonized flesh.
They died silently, fighting to the last, their persistence as horrible as their appearance.
"Let's get out of here." Evan turned. "We still haven't checked the dormitories." He pushed impatiently through the pink tendrils that had already begun to seal off the entryway. A brief electronic squeal accompanied each destructive swing of his metal-encased arm.
The first dorm building was empty, but the second contained a surprise-two bodies untouched by dissolving parasites. They lay in their beds on the second floor. Each man had a neat hole in his head just above each ear. The second man held a needler tightly in his right hand. The other lay sprawled across his bed at an unnatural angle.
"This one shot that one, then lay down and committed suicide."
"Why?" the suit asked. Intelligent as it was, deductive reasoning wasn't one of its strengths.
"Impossible to know for certain, since neither of them can tell us. Despair, perhaps. I imagine everything went to hell pretty quickly near the end."
What particularly interested him, though, were not the two additional bodies but the neat row of survival suits, twenty in all, hanging on their holders on the back wall of the room. None looked damaged. He pulled one off the rack and inspected it carefully. Intact and ready to receive its owner. Each suit would have been fashioned for a specific staff member; it was important that they fit perfectly. None was as massive as the MHW encasing him, but they seemed tough enough to resist the assaults of black-seined scavengers and predatory plant-life.
Yet none of them had been donned by their owners. The staff of the station had been slain, every one of them, before they could get into their suits.
Again he looked at the pair of dead men, lying unprotected on their beds only seconds away from the potential protection of their suits. What kind of attack could strike that quickly? Or was everyone at the station the victim of something more subtle, like overconfidence? Once more he found himself looking over his shoulder, nervously eying dark corners. These were highly trained people, the best, the most resourceful. Nothing, not even a world as alien as Prism, should have been able to surprise them so quickly. And they were, every one of them, dead, slain before they could don their suits.
Suddenly he didn't care. Suddenly all he wanted was to repair the deepspace communicator and get the hell out of there. For the first time in his life, Evan Orgell was frightened. It was a brand-new sensation and not a pleasant one.
"Easy, sir. Relax. There is no danger. I am not a standard-issue survival suit. I am the MHW, and everything is under control."
Evan slowed his breathing, took a sip of iced fruit juice from the helmet dispenser. "Sorry. I'm not easily unsettled." He swallowed more juice, took a last look around the room. "Let's get over to Administration and Records. We've got a job to do."
He spent the rest of the day and most of the next running through those records which had survived the attentions of the local life without coming any closer to an explanation of how two dozen highly trained people had been overwhelmed and killed without so much as having a chance to don the survival suits that might have saved them. They hadn't been torn to shreds by some unimaginably huge carnivore, nor had they all been destroyed internally by the same kind of parasite or disease. Except for the pair who'd been needle-shot, cause of death remained a matter of some uncertainty.
He did not work in silence. The forest surrounding the station, and, for that matter, the station itself, was filled with the cries and hums and squeaks of creatures largely unseen. Occasionally a deeper roar reverberated through the silicates, but nothing materialized to attack him. Still, he took no chances and slept within the security of the MHW.
The records contained information that would be invaluable to the company. All of it fit comfortably in the MHW's copious storage chips, where it would await transfer to company facilities. The irony was that the information couldn't be utilized until he also produced an explanation for the disaster which had devastated the station.
Nowhere within the lengthy discourses and dissertations that had been fled by the station's staff was there anything to hint at the catastrophe that was going to befall them. Yet something capable of such rapid and utter destruction must exist. He was surrounded by proof of its existence.
There was one final mystery.
The dormitory where he'd found the two dead men held twenty-four racks but only twenty survival suits. Personnel records indicated twenty-four expedition members. He lead buried the remains of twenty scientists and technicians. The time had come to locate the other four. Of course, he could have gone to work on the beam first, but even as anxious to be away as he was, he would rather die than leave a job incomplete.
"They have to be around here somewhere," he told the MHW. "Trouble is, we've found several bodies with dead beacons."
"I will run a sensitive." Evan waited while the suit performed the high-intensity scan. Within a modest range it would pick up even the slightest emanation from beyond the station perimeter.
"Observation tower."
It was the one place Evan hadn't personally inspected because it seemed an unlikely place to find survivors. The tower elevator was broken, the controls having been chewed up by tiny plant and animal forms, but the four metal struts that supported the three-story structure were still in place, though one had white bubbles forming on its flanks. A precursor to consumption, Evan knew.
He chose the next strut to the left and started climbing, the suit negotiating the almost vertical ascent without straining. As soon as he'd gained the top he punched in a window and climbed through.
Two of the missing four members of the station staff lay on the floor inside, dead, and in their survival suits. The instrumentation surrounding them had hardly been touched, the destructive lifeforms not having reached so high yet.
What of these newest corpses? Had they had time to don their suits before disaster struck or had they already been wearing them when the rest of the camp was devastated? He bent over the nearer figure. Behind the protective visor was the face of an older man. Gray hair and mustache, strong features. Even in death he looked competent. His eyes were closed, his expression serene. He might have been sleeping.
Then Evan saw the small tear in the fabric of the suit, just below the ribs. It was almost unnoticeable. He reached toward it.
"Don't touch that," the suit said warningly.
Evan jerked back his metal-clad hand as though he'd put his bare flesh into a flame.
"What is it? Another local lifeform?"
"Several. Death here is confirmed. There is no need to touch the body."
Evan frowned, discovered that he was sweating slightly despite the reaction of the suit's coolers. "What's the matter? Surely there's nothing here that can damage you."
"Preliminary investigation suggests caution is more sensible than bravado. Survival suits are woven of acryvar. They can be melted, but they are not easily torn. I will enlarge the opening further to provide a better view." Again the small laser put in an appearance, its beam set for cutting this time instead of killing.
In a second the slit was half a meter long. "Now open it, but carefully, and keep control of yourself."
"I'm always in control of myself," Evan replied irritably. Despite his self-assurances, he found that his stomach was turning. He was convinced he'd already seen everything the planetary lifeforms could do to a human body.
He was wrong.
Where the man's stomach should have been was a round cavity filled with dark green liquid. Resting in the center of this placid pool were three disk-shaped objects. Tentacies radiated from them in all directions. They looked like a cross between starfish and fried eggs. As he was staring open-mouthed one of the small tentacles trembled, lifted, and squirted something at him.
It struck the visor of his suit directly in front of his right eye. He wrenched back violently, smashing his head into the roof of the chamber. The MHW's internal compensators protected him from concussion, but he was still rattled.
A second squirt struck him over the other eye. The fluid had no effect on the suit. Following this second assault the remaining two starfish disks reached up and over with their own tentacles, grabbed the flaps of the suit Evan had pulled aside, and covered themselves up again.
Evan discovered that he was shaking. "What the hell was that?"
"Defensive reaction utilizing gastric juices."
"Well, if the idea is to shock or surprise a potential intruder, it succeeded."
"The intent is considerably more lethal than that. Look to your feet."
Evan leaned forward, looked down. Several drops of the liquid which had been sprayed on his visor had dripped onto the floor. Smoke was rising from half a dozen places where the fluid was eating through the metal.
"That's gastric juice?" Evan had to work hard to keep his voice even.
"Very few substances can harm a strongly bonded silicate form. That's nitric acid. So is the pool occupying the stomach area of that unfortunate gentleman. I suspect his companion here has suffered similar treatment."
"If that's nitric acid in his gut, then there shouldn't be anything left of his belly, much less the rest of his body."
"I suspect that the creatures which secrete it have somehow lined the stomach cavity with a material impervious to their own juices. Thus secure from outside interference, they can dissolve bones and flesh at their leisure."
"Hell," Evan muttered. "I only hope the poor bastards were dead before those things infested them. You're sure about the other one?" He nodded in the direction of the second body.
"I detect the presence of identical acidic compounds."
"All right, how did their suits get ripped? Survival suits aren't supposed to tear."
"Evidently these did. I should think the acryvar capable of withstanding the effects of nitric acid, but perhaps the suits were weakened by something else before the bodies here were invaded. Again we have many questions, sir, and no answers.
"Of course, once the integrity of a suit has been violated, many varieties of native life could subsequently gain entrance. Then it would not take much to induce death. A dilute injection of nitric acid into the bloodstream, for example."
"Spare me the details." Evan made a last search of the observation deck, checking drawers and consoles. The several large storage cabinets were all secured. Using the suit's strength he broke the locks. The cabinets contained assorted instruments, computer storage chips, and personal effects. There was no sign of the two survival suits that were still missing. Having no one else to discuss the matter with, he sat down and talked to the MHW. "This is the last refuge. We've been all over the station. So where are the others?"
"I think it reasonable to assume that the suits are with their owners, though in what condition I cannot imagine. They certainly did not save these two unfortunates. We must at least begin to consider the possibility that the missing suits and their owners have been completely destroyed."
"Even if that's the case," Evan argued, "their beacons would survive."
"Nothing can be taken as assured on this world. Granted that what you suggest is so, if they have been ingested in large pieces, then the beacons in question may have been carried in the gut of some scavenger a considerable distance from the station."
Evan sighed. "I wish you wouldn't keep bringing up facts that contradict my hypotheses. In any case, we have to account one way or another for both the missing suits and personnel. Who's still unaccounted for?"
The screen on the inside of his visor lit up. "A security and supplies technician, Aram Humula; and a xenobiologist, Martine Ophemert."
Evans considered. "There's an outside chance they might still be alive, you know. If they were outside the station perimeter when the disaster struck, engaged in field work or something, they night have survived."
"Why then have they not returned?"
"Several possible reasons. Fear, confusion. They may have been injured and are holed up somewhere awaiting help. Or," he added uneasily, "they might be worried that whatever destroyed the station is still in the vicinity." He ran his fingers over one pristine console. "Most of the instrumentation up here is in good shape. No power, of course. As fond as the local lifeforms are of rare metals and mineral salts, I can imagine what they've done to the station's power grid by now. Maybe that's what happened to the defensive perimeter. Maybe it never had the chance to stop whatever it was that got in here because the power had been cut off. Backup included."
"That is possible," agreed the MHW "A beacon locator was built into me specifically for this mission, but its range is-"
"I know. I'm familiar with your specs." He let his gaze wander out across the crystalline, spectral forest, wondering how much of it he was seeing and how much more lay beyond the range of his vision, Hausdorf lenses notwithstanding. "We won't find a better place to signal-seek than from up here. You might as well make a three-sixty scan. Take your time and work as far out as you can."
"Excessive scanning is inadvisable."
"You'll have plenty of time to recharge. The days here are long and you couldn't ask for more intense sunlight. Besides, you have plenty of reserve power."
"I know, but I am programmed to be cautious when it comes to high power expenditures."
"Well, we should only have to do this once."
Movement caught Evan's eye. Several dozen tiny flying creatures had attached themselves to his left leg. They were bright yellow, with tiny green eyes and spiral wings. The length of their piercing mouthparts was twice that of their bodies. They were frustrating themselves on the duralloy skin of the MHW
Evan brushed them off, caught the last one, and held it up to the light. It struggled to get airborne again while emitting a short, sharp whine. He crushed it between his fingers. It didn't collapse in on itself so much as it splintered. The whine went away.
Meanwhile the MHW had extended a single gleaming metal rod from its backpack. The rod unfolded to form a rectangular antenna.
"Scanning," the suit informed him unnecessarily.
Evan waited quietly while the machinery did its job. Starfish that made their homes in pools of nitric acid in your belly. (lass fibers that dissolved away your bones. Suddenly the opportunities afforded by his visit to Prism paled beside the comforts of home. He wanted off this world, and soon.
He'd planned to regale his friends and colleagues with elaborate stories of his adventures on a strange alien world without precisely identifying it. Now even that pleasure was to be denied him. By choice, because he hadn't seen much on Prism so far that would enliven a party by the telling of it.
"I have one beacon fairly close in," the suit said, interrupting his reverie.
Evan nodded, wondering if the suit would correctly interpret the movement. He moved to the smashed-in window, took a last look at the bodies, and began to climb down the support strut.
Huge strides quickly carried him beyond the station boundaries. In a small field of blue rotors he found suit number twenty-three-and its occupant.
The MHW ran an ident light over the bands that crisscrossed the chest, analyzing the frequency of the feebly pulsing beacon.
"Aram Humula."
Evan nodded as he bent to examine the body. It was a good thing the emergency beacon had been implanted in the wrist, because the rest of the body had been crushed almost flat.