ONE

 

 

THE STENCH MADE her eyes water. Marshal Judita Gomez had a protect-strip over her mouth and nose, but the stench still got through. Something had died here. Something big, or many somethings big. The fact that the stench was so strong meant she would have to destroy her clothes. Nothing anyone had invented had been able to take the overpowering smell of corpses out of clothing.

At least nothing had done it to her satisfaction.

And perhaps nothing could have satisfied her. Every time she found a corpse, she felt the death viscerally. It became part of her. Perhaps it made sense, then, that it would seem to be part of her clothing as well.

She carefully moved several flat leaves, following the Eaufasse into the cluster of trees. She hadn’t studied this culture at all, just responded to their call. So she touched what the Eaufasse touched and stepped where the Eaufasse stepped, which was hard, since the Eaufasse was the size of a thin twelve-year-old human child with extra-long legs and feet the size of fists.

Be extremely careful, she sent to her partners Kyle Washington and Shakir Rainger through their links. They’d been with the Earth Alliance Frontier Security Squad for years, but she wasn’t sure they’d ever been in a situation like this before.

She wasn’t sure she had ever been in a situation like this before.

The Eaufasse Emir had contacted the Earth Alliance about an enclave of humans hiding in the back country, near one of the Eaufasse’s major cities. The Eaufasse was one of sixteen different sentient species on Epriccom, the habitable moon of an uninhabitable planet in a sector of space that the Earth Alliance dubbed the Frontier.

Ever since its formation, the Earth Alliance had given several sectors of space the Frontier designation. That meant most of the planets within the sector had applied for Earth Alliance membership—or were potential applicants for membership. Most sectors ended up becoming part of the Alliance, but every once in a while, the designation backfired, leaving the sector unapproved or with only a few Alliance planets, making it difficult for anyone from the Alliance to do business there.

And no matter what the Alliance said, what its propaganda dictated, the Alliance was always about business.

Gomez moved slowly. She loved her job, even at moments like this, moments when a single misplaced footstep could cause an interstellar incident. Her work was not the same from hour to hour, let alone day to day or week to week, and she saw parts of the known universe that most people never got to see.

She focused on the steps in the dirt before her, noting the strange plants that slid toward her feet. They seemed to move without wind or even being touched.

She’d been trained to watch for cues like that, things that might mean whatever she was looking at was sentient. She carefully avoided those plants, and she sent a message through the secured link to her deputies to do the same.

She didn’t expect them to answer. One reason she had chosen Washington and Rainger for this mission was because they had the most experience of all her deputies in first-contact situations. Not that this was the first time humans had contact with the Eaufasse, but as far as she could tell, this was the first time that the Earth Alliance authorities—not diplomats—had in-person contact. And in-person contact was always different from contact through networks and links.

For one thing, it was infinitely more dangerous.

The Earth Alliance Frontier Security Squad had jurisdiction in any sector designated Frontier. But jurisdiction didn’t mean they could override local laws. It simply meant that the FSS investigated, policed, and patrolled any Earth Alliance members who found their way to a Frontier planet.

And usually, the shadiest Earth Alliance members found their way to the outskirts of Earth Alliance territory, knowing that the FSS was underfunded and spread much too thin.

Gomez was deeply aware of that right now. She needed half a dozen deputies, not the two she always traveled with. The Emir believed that the human enclave was up to no good—at least that was how the translation program had filtered the Eaufasse’s extremely complex language.

The relationship with the Eaufasse was so new that very few Eaufasse spoke Standard, and those who did didn’t speak it very well.

One of those Standard-speaking Eaufasse was just outside the investigation area, listening in on a link hooked up to both Gomez and the Eaufasse tracker/police officer/military official who led the small group to the corpses.

The language barrier was still so complete that she wasn’t sure what job the Eaufasse in front of her actually had.

Finally, the group reached a clearing. The ground dipped here in a bowl shape, and she knew without looking that the corpses were here. The nose never lied.

She held up a fist, so that her deputies stopped moving. They froze. They didn’t dare do anything else. One wrong word, one wrong gesture, one wrong step, and the FSS officer could find herself on the wrong side of an alien judicial system.

There were exceptions for marshals. Exceptions were part of the agreements made with Frontier planets. But that didn’t mean every single culture on those planets abided by the rules, nor did it mean that the Earth Alliance would always defend a marshal’s behavior, particularly if some authority in the Alliance felt the marshal was out of line.

We would like to spread out along the rim of this small clearing, Gomez sent through the joint alien-marshal link. Do we have your permission to do so? If not, where should we stand?

The Eaufasse responded quickly. Of course, permission.

And she had no idea if that meant she had permission to stand wherever she wanted or if she had to wait while it translated her request to the Eaufasse leading her.

That Eaufasse turned its pointed head toward her. Its eyes, large and liquid, fixed on hers. Then it waved one of its extra-long limbs toward her, in what seemed like a very human gesture for Continue.

She knew better than to assume she knew what the Eaufasse meant by the gesture.

After a moment, it tilted its head away from her, and another message came through the link.

Of course. Permission. Stand you want. Okay.

She cursed silently. She hoped that meant it was okay to stand where she wanted. At least she had it on record.

She put down her fist, gestured for the others to join her, and moved near the Eaufasse. It hunched toward the bowl like a mangled question mark.

The two deputies fanned out beside her, moving as cautiously as she was.

The clearing had an open view to the sky. Epriccom’s bright sun made the plants glow bluish green. Epriccom had the right oxygen mix for humans, which made it an enticing planet for development, but it was clearly an alien place.

So alien, in fact, that it took her a moment to recognize the bodies in the tangle of vines, leaves, and branches that passed for ground cover here.

The bodies were equidistant apart. They sprawled face down, heads turned toward her, arms outward, feet bent. They were so bloated she couldn’t tell much about them—male, female, age. Nor could she quite comprehend what they were wearing; in most areas the bloating was so severe that they had burst through their clothes.

The identical positions, and the fact that they sprawled face down, however, led her to believe they had been killed. Whether or not they had been dumped here was another matter.

She suppressed a sigh. She also didn’t know what kind of killings Eaufasse did, if any, and how they treated their dead.

May we approach the corpses? She sent through the links.

Of course. Permission. Stand you want. Okay.

“Okay,” she muttered. Washington glanced at her, his mouth a thin line.

She started down the incline, leading the way. Washington and Rainger followed, doing their best to walk where she had. Branches clawed at her boots, and she had the impression that some of the stuff had scuttled away from her feet.

Her heart pounded. She hated this kind of thing. She always felt out of her depth in situations that involved killings in Frontier planets. She had no idea what the temperature ranges were, how the local flora and fauna interacted with rotting material, what kind of insects—if any—went after corpses, and on and on.

She could only guess at things, and she was terrified she would guess wrong. Not only did her future depend on the correct moves, but often so did the future relationship between the Earth Alliance and the Frontier planet.

When she was within a few meters of the bodies, she turned slightly toward the deputies.

Spread out, she sent through the private links. Tell me if you can make any sense of this. Try to limit your guesses to the ones you’re at least half certain of.

Rainger gave her a grim smile. Washington nodded once. They picked their way around the other side, with Rainger continuing until he stopped above the corpses’ heads. He crouched. So did Washington near one of the corpse’s backs.

Gomez stood near the feet, gazing upward. As she’d been traveling here, she had downloaded all the information she could find on the Eaufasse. She’d stored a backup copy on a chip in her thumb. Not that there had been a lot of information, just the preliminary report, filled with the usual happy-shiny crap about what a great planet it was, how accommodating the locals were, and how happy they would be to cooperate with any Earth Alliance culture that wanted to set up a base here.

No initial cultural difficulties, not with the advance team, and no mention of crime at all. Now whether that meant that the Eaufasse didn’t commit crimes against each other or whether it meant that the Eaufasse had a different conception of crime than the Alliance did was anyone’s guess.

And search she did, but hadn’t found anything on Eaufasse death rituals. So that meant the advance teams and the later observers weren’t allowed to see what the Eaufasse did. But she had learned not to interpret that either. It might mean that they kept the rituals private like some cultures kept bathing private or it might mean that the teams simply hadn’t been near a death so didn’t get to see what the Eaufasse did in that circumstance.

Not that it mattered now. She couldn’t find the answer she wanted. She had no idea if these corpses were arranged in an Eaufasse death position or one of the other fifteen species on this planet had been involved in any way or if she was looking at a human-on-human crime.

She sighed softly. She had hoped for a simple knife in the back of one of the deceased, with a note attached, explaining all the reasons for the crime—or at least something similar, something that was obvious and unambiguously human-on-human.

Something she could deal with.

“Rainger,” she said out loud, knowing that the Eaufasse could hear her conversation and would do its best to translate it for the other Eaufasse. “Send for the collection team. Tell them you’ll meet them here, and remind them of the delicacy of the recovery effort.”

“Yes, sir,” Rainger said. “Mind if I continue to examine the scene, sir?”

“Don’t touch anything,” she said. “In fact, make a secondary recording. Get up close. The more information we have the better.”

He nodded.

“Washington,” she said. “You’re with me.”

“Sir?” he said, looking startled.

“We came here to remove a human enclave,” she said. “I think we should see what we’re facing.”