There were no other words she could think of. Still, she struggled to keep a tight rein on her emotions. She might have to open negotiations with the people who’d done this sometime soon.
At the moment, she’d rather negotiate with the devil himself than whoever murdered this planet.
“Do we have any physical evidence of who did this?” Penny asked.
“That’s been my job,” Abby said. “We’ve identified several sites that do not match the local construction. Wrong design. Wrong materials. Most of them are close to sites of major resource extractions. Say where several mountains were flattened or huge expanses of trees removed.”
A series of pictures flashed on the wall. They showed several villages. The alien construction used local material like mud bricks or wooden poles to make squat, one-story buildings that sprawled with little or no apparent planning close to the extraction sites.
“Are there any bodies other than the local insects left here?” Kris asked.
Both Abby and the colonel shook their heads. Abby went on. “We haven’t identified anything but the carapaces strewn about. There don’t appear to be any graves left around the aliens’ campsites.”
“They’re taking everything this planet has,” Kris said. “I guess that means they’re also taking back their own dead.”
“That may not be totally true,” Chief Beni said, interrupting.
“I had Da Vinci running a pattern recognition on all the killing fields. He spotted a skeleton among all those carapaces. One endoskeleton among all those exoskeletons. A vertebrate from the looks of it.”
“Please put that on-screen,” Kris said.
The wall opposite the one Abby was using came to life. Its picture was of death. A ridge was covered with the dried carapaces of thousands upon thousands. They were tossed and tumbled together. How much of that was postdeath and how much had happened as they died, only a weeping God could tell.
The picture zoomed in, fleeing from the full scope of the slaughter to concentrate on a smaller tragedy. Two or three carapaces had become disassociated in death. Barely visible under them was a skull.
Two empty eyes and a nose hole stared at Kris. The jaws had fallen open in a silent scream. There were long bones for arms and legs, and a collection of vertebrae where a backbone should be.
“It almost looks human,” Kris said in a whisper.
“It looks like the bastards who tried to kill us,” the colonel said.
“I’m going down there. I need to see this place up close and personal,” Kris said.
“Kris,” Jack said.
“Jack, I don’t want to read a report. I want to be there. See this the way it is. I’ve got a report to make to my great-grandfather and, I suspect, all of human space. Of this, I must bear witness,” she said, jerking a thumb at the view.
Jack gnawed his lower lip but said no more.
“Colonel, you want to come?”
“Definitely. Captain,” he said to Jack, “I hope you will provide us the assistance of your full forensic team. “
“I suspect we’ll land all four longboats, what with the Marines and the boffins.”
“Can I come, too?” came in a small voice from where the door to the Tac Center had edged open a crack.
“Cara, what are you doing here?” Kris asked.
“Dada told me that you were going dirtside, and I ran down here to ask if I could go, too.”
“Dada?” Kris echoed the name of Cara’s computer, one of Nelly’s kids.
“I knew we’d made orbit around an interesting planet, from what the boffins were saying, so I asked Dada to listen in on her mom’s net for anything that looked like fun.”
“Nelly?” Kris now said. “Do we have a security breach?”
“Ah, yes, Kris, it does appear so.” It was funny to hear a computer so embarrassed and searching for words. “I have all my other children on a shared net. I, ah, didn’t notice that Dada had been lurking there, too.”
“It seemed like a good idea,” came in a different voice from Cara’s. “You grown-ups are always ignoring us kids and never tell us anything.”
“Little pitchers have big ears,” Penny said, not making much of an effort to suppress a smile.
“Can I go? Please,” the thirteen-year-old pleaded.
“We could really use a field trip,” Dada added. “Professor Lynch is teaching us science, and he says videos can’t capture the real feel of nature.”
Kris noticed that all the so-called grown-ups in the room were looking around at each other, none willing to make the call. She considered the subject of this landing, fields of dead bodies, and wondered if a kid belonged there.