guess we can assume that the site itself isn't going to wash away, or float away. For the rest, the domes are insulated against lightning, but who knows what's likely to happen to the equipment? Especially in all this lightning.'
Her words proved only too prophetic; for although the rain lasted less than an hour, the deluge marked a forty-degree drop in temperature, and the effects of the lightning were permanent.
When the storm cleared, the news from the site was bad. Lightning had not only struck the ward-off field generator, it had slagged it There was nothing left but a melted pile of plasteel and duraloy. Tia didn't see how one strike could have done that much damage; the generator must have been hit over and over. The backup was corroded beyond any repair, though Haakon-Fritz and Les labored over it for most of the night Too many parts had been ruined, probably while it sat in its crate through who-knew-how-many transfers. Never once uncrated and checked, and now Doctor Aspen's team paid the price for that neglect.
Tia consulted with Doctor Aspen in person the next morning. There was little sign of the damage from where they sat, but the results were undeniable. No ward-off generator. No protection from native fauna, from insectoids to the big canids. And if the huge grazers, the size of moose, were to become aggressive, there would be no way to keep them out of the camp. Ordinary fences would not hold against a herd of determined grazers; the last team had proved that.
'I don't have a spare in the holds,' Tia told the team leader. 'I don't have even half the parts you need for the corroded generator. There were no storms like the one last night mentioned in the records of the previous team, but we should assume there are going to be more. How many of them can you handle? Winter is coming on, and I can't predict what the native animals are going to do. Do you want to pull the team out?'
Doctor Aspen pursed his lips thoughtfully. 'I can't think of any reason why we should, my lady,' he replied. 'The only exterior equipment that had no protection was the ward-off generator. The first team stayed here without incident all winter, there's nothing large enough to be a real threat to us, so far as I can tell. We'll have a few insects, perhaps, until first hard frost. I imagine those jackal-like beasts will lurk about and make a nuisance of themselves. But they're hardly a threat.'
Alex, feet up on the console as usual, agreed with the archeologist. 'I don't see any big threat here, either. Unless lightning takes out something a lot more vital.'
Tia didn't like it, but she didn't challenge them, either. 'If that's the way you want it,' she agreed. 'But we'll stay until the rains are over, just in case.'
Stay they did; but that was the first and the last of the major storms. After the single, spectacular downpour, the rains came gently, between midnight and dawn, with hardly a peal of thunder to wake Alex. She had to conclude that the first storm had been a freak occurrence, something no one could have predicted, and lost a little of her ire over the lack of warning from the previous team. But that still didn't excuse the corroded generator.
Still, the weather stayed cold, and the rain left coatings of ice on everything. It would be gone by midmorning, but the difficulty in walking around the site meant that the team changed their working hours, beginning around ten-hundred and finishing about twenty-two-hundred. Despite his recorded disclaimer, Doctor Aspen insisted on working alongside his students, and no one, not even Haakon-Fritz, wanted him to risk a fell on the ice.
Meanwhile, Tia made note of a disturbing development. The sudden cold had sent most of the small game and pest animals into hiding or hibernation. That left the normally solitary jackal-dogs without their usual prey, and in what appeared to be seasonal behavior, they began to pack up for the winter, so that they could take down the larger grazers.
The disturbing part was that a very large pack began lurking around the camp. Now Tia regretted her choice of landing areas. The site was between her and the camp; that was all very well, especially for observing the team at work, but the dogs were lurking in the hills around the camp. And with no ward-off generator to keep them out of it.
She mentioned her worry to Alex, who pointed out that the beasts always scattered at any sign of aggression on the part of a human. She mentioned it again to Doctor Aspen, who said the animals were probably just looking for something to scavenge and would leave them alone once they realized there was nothing to eat there.
She never had a chance to mention it again.
With two moons, both in different phases, the nights were never dark unless it was raining. But the floodlights at the site made certain that the darkness was driven away. And lately, the nights were never silent either; the pack of jackal-dogs wailed from the moment the sun went down to the moment the rains began. Tia quickly became an expert on what those howls meant; the yipping social-howl, the long, drawn-out rally-cry, and most ominous, the deep-chested hunting call. She was able to tell, just by the sounds, where they were, whether they were in pursuit, and when the quarry had won the chase, or lost it.
Tia wasn't too happy about them; the pack numbered about sixty now, and they weren't looking too prosperous. Evidently the activity at the site had driven away the larger grazers they normally preyed on; that had the effect of making all the smaller packs join up into one mega-pack, so there was always some food, but none of them got very much of it They weren't at the bony stage yet, but there was a certain desperate gauntness about them. The grazers they did chase were escaping five times out of six, and they weren't getting in more than two hunts in a night
Should I suggest that the team feed them? Perhaps take a grav-sled and go shoot something and drag it in once every couple of days? But would that cause problems later? That would be giving the pack the habit of dependence on humans, and that wouldn't be good. Could they lure the pack into another territory that way,
