“Mr. Sinclair, I trust next time you’ll remember your purpose here when an opportunity such as that arises!“
“Piotr, enough!” Dr. Rice had a glare matching her words. Jeremy was glad she seemed to be on his side. “We lost one of our people back there to the smaller species, we don’t know how the large ones would have reacted to our presence.”
“Bah! They were herbivorous! You saw them, they were no threat!”
“They were five, six times as tall as we are and probably outweighed us by a factor of one hundred. Whether they wanted to eat us or not, causing them to stampede would have ended our mission.”
Jeremy found himself nodding. He’d been more in line with Lance Corporal Kate at the time that any native was a potential enemy. Now that he’d had time to think about it, he found himself agreeing more with Dr. Rice and Dr. Bronislav. Jeremy was a technician. Being a scientist had never been what he’d wanted out of life, but he was good at it and it was interesting. What had once been a cover story had become the real him.
He stretched and looked around. They were resting and eating a hastily put together meal of protein powders and flavored water, all of it from the ship. The scans continued to read positive for the planet being safe for human consumption, but so far they’d only tested the air. All of them, in fact, had their helmets off.
Jeremy continued to slug around in his unpowered suit — stripping out of it meant being naked. A tech that was slated to be the science post’s systems specialist, Anita Cuseros, had already checked out the power supply and pointed out that he’d overloaded it to the point where the breaker had blown on it and the unit had still managed to fuse itself into a melted mass of scrap.
He wasn’t the only one, one of the Marines that had landed safely had a suit that had lost power too. Freak occurrence, they’d said. His entire power pack had blown, but at least the suit was designed so that the explosion had been directed away from his body. Now the Marine was struggling to do anything — the military suits were far heavier than the civilian versions.
The good news was that the other two transports had landed without incident. Technicians, some from the ship and some contracted to stay with the science colony, scrambled to unload and erect the equipment. The first was a defensive perimeter consisting of energized walls matched with ultrasonic generators. The high frequency sound waves had been tested to drive animals away and inflict debilitating nausea on humans and the three other species of primates that survived the industrialization of Earth.
Some excitement from a section of the wall caused Jeremy to look over. A tech came jogging back, cursing as he ran. “Just blew a coil,” he called out when he saw the questioning look on Jeremy’s face. He hurried over to a large crate and pulled out a fresh one. He tossed the used one to the ground and jogged back past without a word.
“Jeremy?”
He ignored his boss. The rifle had been returned to the Marines, lessening his load. He walked over stiffly to the discarded coil and bent down to pick it up. He picked it up and checked it over, looking for obvious signs of damage. A half twist later he found it, a crack that showed scorch marks as the supercharged gas inside had blown free of it. He frowned, studying it a moment longer, then tossed it back on the trampled grass.
“Problem?”
Jeremy jumped, he hadn’t heard Dr. Rice approach. “No, just curious. We seem to be having a lot of problems with our equipment.”
“Was there something wrong with that too?” Rice asked him.
He shrugged. “I mean yeah, obviously. It’s blown, but it looks like it had a weak spot on the coil.”
“That’s a pretty standard part,” She observed.
Jeremy nodded. “I know, but statistically it happens.”
She grunted. “Don’t wander off like that. I need an assistant and a replacement is years away. The compound’s not secure yet.”
He jerked his head around to look at her. “We’re surrounded by Marines and other people! Doctor, there’s no chance of anything happening!”
She opened her mouth but was interrupted by a distant screech that echoed from the jungle beyond the swamp. After the last traces of the primal scream faded she lowered her voice and said, “I don’t think there’s anywhere that’s safe on this planet, Mr. Sinclair.”