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they had completed the greetings and introductions.
"There are Terran corpses out on the South Field. We've found twelve so far, a
few together, the others strewn out over a wider area. There are more in some
of the vehicles." He had an athletic build, with sharp, clean features, dark
curly hair, alert eyes, and a lively yet economic style of speech and manner
that gave Kyal confidence. The kind of person who knew his job and would get
things done with a minimum of talk and fuss, he thought to himself. That would
be Yorim's kind of person too.
"Corpses?" Casselo repeated. The three arrivals from the crawler still
connected to the hut's air lock exchanged questioning looks. This added a new
dimension to the job, which would probably call for some new expertise to be
brought in.
"How come they weren't spotted sooner?" Yorim asked.
"They're a fair distance out," Brysek replied. "We've been concentrating
mainly here, around the base. Their suits are the same gray as the dust, which
doesn't help. You'd think they were meant as camouflage."
"Military," Casselo said.
"What kind of condition are they in?" Kyal asked.
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"Shot to pieces," one of the technicians threw over his shoulder from a table
by the wall, where he was reading something. Brysek nodded confirmation.
"We've got some clips. Here, I'll show you a few." He got up and led the way
across to a bank of communications gear. The others closed up around as he
activated one of the screens and brought up a series of indexed frames showing
the remains. They made his point about the difficulty of spotting them.
Even from what must have been tens of yards, the twisted gray forms lying amid
the dust and boulders could easily have been mistaken for rocks and shadows.
Close-ups showed the damage as ranging from lacerated suits and shattered
helmets to scattered body parts and fully dismembered torsos. The corpses
themselves were not reduced to skeletons, as was universally true of human
remains found on Earth, but still possessed their solid softer tissues a
dried, shriveled husks covering the bones. All the same, this would make them
prize trophies for the biologists.
"We haven't attempted moving any of them," Brysek said. "They look pretty
fragile. Probably best preserved out there, anyway. I figured we'd leave that
to the specialists."
Casselo nodded approval. "Good man." He sent an inquiring look at Kyal. "What
do you want to do? Go and see them now, while we've still got the crawler
attached outside? Or get settled in and have a look around here first?"
Kyal couldn't see that it would make much difference either way."Whatever you
prefer," he replied.
"You're the boss."
Casselo shook his head. "Not here, Master Reen. This will be your patch now.
You might as well get
used to it from the beginning."
It took Kyal a few seconds to adjust to the feeling like trying on a new coat.
Yorim was looking at him with a mixture of amusement and curiosity. "Let's get
our bearings here inside the base first," he decided. "A day more won't make
any difference to the time the corpses been lying out there." He licked his
lips pensively and looked at Brysek. "The last thing we had to eat was a quick
snack in the docking bays on the
Explorer when we changed ships. "How about starting with the canteen, after
we've stowed our things?"
"We can eat first, right here," Brysek said.
"I was hoping you'd say something like that," Casselo told Kyal.
Although the interior of the Terran structures had been pressurized to a
comfortably breathable level and seemed to be holding, they put on back
harnesses with air bottles, and respirator masks close at hand clipped to the
straps, before proceeding through the surface tube and connecting lock. Full
suits would have been too cumbersome. In the event of any failure short of
explosive which was hard to visualize as likely the respirators would get them
back to the huts on the safe side of the lock. The precaution would be relaxed
once the structure had been fully examined and pronounced safe.
Walking on the one-sixth-normal-gravity lunar surface was unaffected inside
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