A couple hundred meters in, the three of them found a ruined corpse.
“Give me the sampler,” Dahl said to Mbeke, who was carrying that piece of equipment. She unslung the device and gave it to Dahl, who knelt and pushed the sampling tool into what remained of the corpse’s abdomen.
“It’ll be a couple of minutes for this thing to give me a result,” Dahl said, not looking up from the corpse. “The sampler’s got to go through the DNA library of the entire colony. Make sure that whatever got this guy doesn’t get me while we’re waiting.”
“I’m on it,” he heard Cassaway say. Dahl returned to his work.
“It’s someone named Fouad Ali,” Dahl said, a couple of minutes later. “Looks like he was the colony doctor.” Dahl looked up and past Ali’s corpse, into the woods. “The blood trail continues off that direction. Do we want to keep looking?”
“What are you doing?” Dahl heard Mbeke ask.
“What?” Dahl said, and turned around to see Cassaway pointing his pulse gun at him, and Mbeke staring at Cassaway, confused.
Cassaway grimaced. “Damn it, Fiona, can’t you ever just shut up?”
“I’m with Fiona,” Dahl said. “What are you doing?” He tried to stand up.
“Don’t move,” Cassaway said. “Don’t move or I’m going to shoot you.”
“It looks like you’re going to shoot me anyway,” Dahl said. “But I don’t know why.”
“Because one of us has to die,” Cassaway said. “That’s how it works on the away teams. If Q’eeng’s leading the away team, someone is going to die. Someone always dies. But if someone dies, then whoever’s left is safe. That’s how it works.”
“The last person who explained this idea to me got chopped up into little pieces even after someone else died,” Dahl said. “I don’t think it works the way you think it does.”
“Shut up,” Cassaway said. “If you die, Fiona and I don’t have to. You’ll be the sacrifice. Once the sacrifice is made, the rest are safe. We’ll be safe.”
“That’s not the way it works,” Dahl said. “When was the last time you were on an away team, Jake? I was on one a couple of weeks ago. It’s not how it works. You’re missing details. Killing me isn’t going to mean you’re safe. Fiona…” Dahl glanced over at Mbeke to try to reason with her. She was in the process of raising her own pulse gun.
“Come on, guys,” Dahl said. “Two pulse gun blasts are going to be hard to miss.”
“Put your gun on low power,” Cassaway said to Mbeke. “Aim for the center mass. When he’s down, we cut him up. That’ll cover us. We can explain the blood by saying we were trying to save—” And that’s as far as he got before the things dropped out of the tree above and onto him and Mbeke.
The two of them fell, screaming as they tried to fight off the things now tearing into their flesh. Dahl gaped for a second then ran in a burst toward the colony, sensing rather than seeing that his sudden movement had only barely saved him from being jumped on himself.
Dahl weaved through the trees, screaming for Q’eeng and Taylor. Some part of his brain wanted to know if he was running in the right direction; another part wanted to know why he wasn’t using his phone to contact Q’eeng. A third part reminded him that he had a pulse gun of his own, which might be effective against whatever was currently eating Cassaway and Mbeke.
A fourth part of his brain was saying,
He was listening to the fourth part.
His eye caught a break in the woods, and in that break he could see the distant trailers of the colony and the forms of Q’eeng and Taylor. Dahl screamed at the top of his lungs and ran in a straight line toward them, waving his hands to get their attention. He saw their tiny forms jiggle, as if they heard him.
Then something tripped him and he went down.
The thing was on him instantly, biting and tearing at him. Dahl screamed and pushed and in his panic saw something that looked like it could be an eye and jammed his thumb into it. The thing roared and reared back and Dahl pushed himself back from the thing, and it was on him again and Dahl could feel teeth on his shoulder and a burning sensation that let him know that whatever had just bit him was also venomous. Dahl looked for the eye again, jabbed it a second time and got the thing to reel back again, but this time Dahl was too dizzy and sick to move.
Dahl woke up to see his friends surrounding him.
“Ack,” he said.
“Finn, give him some water,” Duvall said. Finn took a small container with a straw from the holder at the side of the medical bay cot and put it to Dahl’s lips. He sipped gingerly.
“I’m not dead,” he eventually whispered.
“No,” Duvall said. “Not that you didn’t make an effort. What was left of you should have been dead when they brought you back to the ship. Doc Hartnell says it’s only luck that Q’eeng and Taylor got to you when they did, otherwise that thing would have eaten you alive.”
The last phrase jogged something in Dahl’s memory. “Cassaway,” he said. “Mbeke.”
“They’re dead,” Hanson said. “There wasn’t much left of them to get back, either.”
“You’re the only one from the away team still alive,” Hester said. “Besides Q’eeng.”
“Taylor?” Dahl croaked.
“He got bit,” Duvall said, correctly interpreting the question. “The things have a venom. It doesn’t kill people, it turns them psychotic. He went crazy and started shooting up the ship. He killed three of the crew before they brought him down.”
“That’s what they think happened at the colony,” Finn said. “The doctor’s record shows that a hunting party got bit by these things, went back to the colony and started shooting up the place. Then the creatures came in, took the dead and killed off the survivors.”
“Q’eeng was bit too, but Captain Abernathy had him isolated until they could make an antivenom,” Hanson said.
“From your blood,” Hester said. “You were unconscious so you couldn’t go crazy. That gave your body time to metabolize and neutralize the venom.”
“He was lucky you survived,” Duvall said.
“No,” Dahl said, and lifted his arm to point at himself. “Lucky he needed me.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“What are these?” Dahl asked from his bed, taking one of the buttonlike objects that Finn held in his hand.
“Our way to sneak up on Jenkins,” Finn said, passing out the rest. “They’re delivery cart ID transponders. I pried them off disabled carts in the refuse hold. The cargo tunnel doors register each time they’re opened and closed and look for identification. If you’re a crew member, your phone IDs you. If you’re a cart, one of these do.”
“Why not just leave our phones behind and have no ID?” Hanson asked, holding his button up to the light.
“Because then there’s an unexplained door opening,” Finn said. “If this Jenkins is as paranoid and careful as Andy here thinks he is, that’s not going to escape his notice.”
“So we leave our phones behind, take one of these, and go on after him,” Dahl said.
“That’s the plan I came up with,” Finn said. “Unless you have a better one.”
“I just spent two weeks doing nothing but healing,” Dahl said. “This works for me.”
“So when do we go find this guy?” Duvall asked.
