Excerpt
1 Q Two suns beat down on the eroded hills, cooking the air, making it hard to see the landscape except through a wavering mirage of heat. Captain Eli Dammond removed his hat, wiping the perspiration from his forehead, and peered for a moment at the sun--not the primary, but its dwarf sister: small, red, and swelling in the sky. The dwarf star was no bigger than his thumbnail at arm's length, but even so, it seemed to stoke the morning's heat to a near boil. This far from camp the landscape lay barren and uniform--gully and dune, gully and dune--for miles. It looked like so many lands in the Congress Worlds: blasted and sere from war. But here on Null, nature alone had done the job. At the crest of the next gully he saw Corporal Willem waving his arm. "Captain Dammond, over here. It's here." Corporal Willem pointed into the wadi and skidded down the far side, disappearing from view. Young Sascha Olander looked up at Captain Dammond for permission to run ahead and see Corporal Willem's prize. "It's no place for a youngster," Willem had groused on the hike out from camp, and he'd been right. But Eli was not about to deny the general's granddaughter her small adventure. At fourteen, she was beyond spoiling. The word had no meaning for a young woman who would have every privilege and never think twice about it. "Go ahead, then, Sascha," he said. He caught a glimpse of her grin before she was sprinting down the lee side of the hard-packed dune and up the next one. Eli set out after her, his boots crunching over a litter of sticks protruding from the soil. He went heavily armed, the range gun a comfortable bulk at his hip. Though the armistice had held for over a year now, if the ahtra broke the peace, no one would be surprised. Some, like Corporal Willem, hoped for it. The corporal had a regen arm and eye and looked forward to a little payback. As bad as regen limbs looked, the eyes were the worst, swollen translucent fruits that nevertheless gathered light and saw the world as well as the original, alpha eyes--better, the enlisteds vowed. Still, it was an uncharted world, and he had his people go armed. Topping the rise, he saw the three of them waiting for him in the wadi, poking at the dusty hulk that Corporal Willem had found earlier that morning. Next to Willem stood Luce Marzano, captain of the ship and 112 crew marooned on the planet for the past three years. Like Willem, she wore the brown uniform of infantry, patched in places, and faded by now to the color of sand. Alert but relaxed, she'd had plenty of time to ferret out trouble if there was any. But she'd made her report: the locale was devoid of life, inimical or otherwise. The enlisteds called the planet Null; in three years, they'd had no occasion to change their minds. The massive continent dominating this hemisphere was a quiet, scoured land, rumpled only by fingers of wind through sand. The most action this place would see was the dwarf star, coming round for a visit after a four-year absence, and bright enough now to cast a shadow at night. Sascha was already climbing on the bank above the contraption, kicking sand from around its metallic sides. "Sascha," Eli called. He waved her away from the device. The thing might be booby-trapped. But in three years, Marzano's crew had found twenty-eight similar objects--now twenty-nine--and none of them was wired to detonate. Captain Marzano met Eli as he strode down the bank into the wadi. She cocked her head toward the machine--a craft, by all appearances, just like the others. "Looks like this one's newly minted," she said. "Hell, it's in better shape than I am." Eli smiled at that, then fell back to neutral. Best to remember he might soon be a witness in an inquiry into her possible desertion from duty . . . But he liked Luce Marzano. She was tough and confident, and at forty-some, still handsome. And also gone missing the last two years of a war that had bled off the better part of a generation. Now, a year into the armistice, Eli's ship had found the marooned crew and the ruined ship Fury, presumed lost in action. Or now, it would seem, just lost. "So they've been here recently," Eli said, walking with Marzano toward the hexadron. It was half buried, like all the others, in the soil. Maybe it was good they went armed. "Recent enough," Marzano said. "They used this place for something. Training, maybe?" She squinted at the small vessel before them. Corporal Willem wiped a small section of hull clean of dust. "Like it's right off the assembly line, sir." When Willem said sir, he looked at Captain Marzano, instead of Captain Dammond, a slight that Eli ignored for now. He saved his object lessons for bigger lapses. Marzano's crew didn't like him snooping around the crashed Fury looking for signs of cowardice. Hell, he didn't like it. But Marzano herself was pushing hardest for a thorough search, urging Eli to inspect and document every ship system, mangled or not. There were things in her favor. Even if she could have repaired the giant fighting ship, it had no launch capacity from the ground. She had pulled off a minor miracle just negotiating an atmospheric entry and controlled crash-landing. So she wanted a clean bill of health exonerating her of sabotage, not an ambiguous report that would dog her career . . . and by God, he would give her that respect. It wasn't as though he had better things to do. Here he was, thirty-seven years old, a captain of the Sixth Transport Division--advancement prospects slim to none--with a grimy kettle of a ship and a crew that said his name like a wad of spit shot out. He wouldn't wish that fate on anyone, least of all Luce Marzano. " 'Spose there's ahtra bodies in this one, sir?" Willem asked. "That's what we'll find out," Eli answered. Willem's eyes were flat. He hadn't been talking to Eli Dammond, and probably didn't like being answered by an alpha captain who wore the blue of Transport while better men wore the brown of battle.
From the Paperback edition.
