Robert Miller snatched at his flapping face mask, catching it before the wind could make off with it. He refastened it beneath his hood, and gave Ike a thumbs-up, after which both men returned to the task of lowering the shuttle's bay ramp into the thin snow covering the alien ground.
The shuttle had come down in the plains in the northeastern corner of a great equatorial valley. Surrounded for thousands of miles by soaring mountains, the resulting large, enclosed land mass was about the size of Earth's continental United States, and enjoyed the highest air pressure on the moon; close to that of Earth at fourteen thousand feet above sea level. Which made it just about tolerable if you were a mountain climber.
Which Miller was. He'd been on climbs on a dozen worlds, mostly on BuReloc business, but frequently for sport. That expertise had been the major reason for his assignment as the CoDominium's man on this survey mission. Thin air was not usually a problem for him, nor cold, but he most definitely did not wish to stay on this moon any longer than necessary; certainly not for the rest of his life. The shuttle crash had inspired his mind into a protective overdrive, and he'd thrown himself into his work with a fierce abandon.
Still, he'd learned all he could from his samples here on the plains. He needed to get to the foothills to look for exposed ore, and that meant he needed the ground car. Owens and Connolly had shown no interest whatsoever in anything he did, and that was fine with him. This Ike fellow was less obnoxious, and had readily agreed to help him with this much, at least.
Miller had noticed that Ike was largely unaffected by the thin air, and the cold as well. Obviously the fellow was of terrestrial mountain stock, but Miller had very little to do with anyone on the trip out here, and still less with Ike or Mike. He'd guessed Greece, or perhaps Turkey, but unlike the rest of the crew, Miller had made the connection between minor ship malfunctions and implications of Spanish ancestry for Ike and Mike. He might guess at their background, but he said nothing. He wondered if this Ike was the Company man aboard the Fast Eddie; his control officer had warned him there was certain to be one, despite BuReloc's efforts to get him out here on a "clean" ship.
Miller didn't anticipate a problem in any case; the Companies and their lobbyists in the CoDo Senate were powerful, to be sure, but they weren't foolish enough to confront BuReloc directly over one marginally useful world, whatever its economic potential. The Companies had the real power these days, but the CoDominium government still controlled the courts. The courts decided who was sentenced to "remedial colony support services," their euphemism for forced deportation, almost always for life, and the Companies had a lot of older executives with troublesome young children and grandchildren who frequently made the mistake of thinking themselves above the law. When he thought about it, Miller considered it a rather tawdry system of checks and balances, but it worked, and anyway, he didn't think about it much.
The ramp was locked in place, exposing the bulky ground car which had been idling within the bay for the last fifteen minutes. Ike helped Miller into the cab, and they drove it down the ramp. Miller was about to wave and drive off when Ike clambered into the seat beside him and shut the door with a grin.
Miller stared at the engineering crewman with a frown.
"You don't need to come with me."
Ike shrugged. "No work to do; th' shuttle is tota." He waved impatiently toward the mountains. "Let's take a ride."
Miller decided then that Ike was just obvious enough to be the Fast Eddie's Company spy; still, he was glad for the companionship. He set the inertial navigation computer, put the ground car in gear and rolled off east toward the foothills.
Inside the shuttle, Owens cursed. "Well, great. That Christless Spaniard just took off for a joyride with the BuReloc spook."
"Oh, terrific. That's bloody swell." Finally losing his temper, Connolly threw a fused circuit board against the wall. After a moment, he calmed down. "Well. It's not like we'd a whole lot for them to do here, I suppose."
The communications panel chimed, and Potter's voice crackled into the cabin. "Shuttle One, acknowledge."
"Yeah, Emmett, we're here," Owens answered.
"I think we've got some good news for you."
Owens and Connolly shared a brief, hunted look. "Roger that, Emmett," Owens fought to control his voice. "What's the scoop?"
"Liu's been working on the Number Two Shuttle, says he can have it ready in about eight days for a one-way trip to your site."
A strangled laugh slipped past Owens' lips. "Well-Jesus Christ, Emmett! What good is that going to do us?"
"Shut up, Owens," Connolly shouted, taking over the communications panel. "What have you got in mind, Emmett?"
Potter explained Liu's plan, and the four of them went over the details for the next eighty-five minutes. The Fast Eddie's signal was beginning to fade as Potter added: "And please, Brian; be very thorough when you take soundings of that landing area. We don't want to hit another sinkhole like you did and have two busted up elevators in the basement."
Owens laughed an acknowledgement as he signed off.
Potter's signal had been gone for a full minute before Connolly put a hand to his forhead in panic. "Oh, my God . . . the sounding equipment; it's all in the ground car with Miller and Ike."
Owens began trying to raise the BuReloc man and their own engineering crewman, to no avail. "Jesus, they haven't been gone more than an hour and a half, how far could they get?"
Connolly sat back in his chair and closed his eyes.
"I suppose," he said finally, "that we can take some comfort in the idea that not very much more can go wrong on this trip."
Owens kept calling Miller and Ike, trying not to think about how wrong Connolly could be.
Miller and Ike were gone for five days, and the rest of the crew had given them up for dead. Owens and Connolly had begun clearing a landing area a few hundred yards north, taking soundings manually with a metal pole heated by a battery pack, for although there was snow on the ground, the ground frost beneath was quite thin. Despite the moon's miserable cold, it was extremely dry this close to the sheltering mountains that separated the valley from the sea winds. The clearing was done with no tools heavier than makeshift brooms and piled rocks to keep fresh drifts out.
Owens and Connolly had been sweeping clear the landing zone in a clockwise pattern, and had reached eight-thirty when the Navigator noticed his British First Officer staring off into the distance.
"Christ, Connolly, you're not snowblind, are you?"
Connolly dropped his broom and started running past Owens. "It's the ground car; it's Miller and Ike, come on!"
Powder clouds of dry snow puffed up around their feet as the two men ran toward the ground car, the thin, cold air of the wretched little moon raking their lungs in spite of their face masks. Owens thought that men might one day learn to run on this forsaken rock, but they would never enjoy it.
The ground car slowed and turned in their direction when they were within fifty yards, and both of them could see the carcass of some large, shaggy quadruped draped over its hood. Owens and Connolly staggered to a fast walk.
"What the hell is that?" the Navigator wheezed.
"Indigenous life form." Connolly too was panting as they closed the distance. "Herbivorous grazer, I suspect; likely inhabitant for this sort of terrain.
Owens shook his head. "First kill on the new world. Man has arrived."
Connolly threw him a sidelong glance; Owens was not the sort of fellow who made pronouncements on the morality of his species. And in any case, something about the animal carcass bothered him. Even as they approached, it looked wrong to him; too-lumpy. "Oh, bloody hell," Connolly said abruptly.
The ground car had chuffed to a halt as they reached it, and both Connolly and Owens could see all the details of the mooselike animal tied securely to its hood. And tied behind it, giving it the unnatural appearance Connolly had noted, was the body of a man wrapped in plastic. The feet protruded from one end, revealing the thick, CoDo issue explorer's boots of the engineering crewman Icaoruis, better known as Ike.
Miller popped the door and leaned out. "There was an accident, he said. "I'm sorry."
Neither Owens nor Connolly said anything, and Miller went on: "Get in, we'll drive him back to the shuttle."
Owens turned without answering and headed back for the clearing. After a moment, Connolly followed, leaving Miller standing in the open door of the ground car cab. Finally, the BuReloc man settled back into the cab and drove on to the shuttle. Owens took his hand from his pocket just long enough to casually raise his middle finger to Miller as he passed.
"What do you think happened?" Potter asked during the next communications cycle.
Connolly sighed. "I don't know, Emmett. Miller says they were up in the foothills, digging at some crystalline ore, when they saw this musk-ox-antelope thing. Ike apparently thought it would be good eating, so he shot it with one of the rifles from the ground car. Then, when he was climbing down to the carcass, some big predator jumped him out of nowhere, apparently trying to steal the kill. Ike lost his footing, and fell into a defile before Miller could do anything."
"How did Miller get the carcass away from the predator?"
"He says he drove it off with the other rifle. Possible, I suppose."
Potter's silence ate up a good deal of their precious communications time. "Do you believe him?"
"Hell, no," Owens said firmly in the background.
Connolly sighed. "I don't know, Emmett. The animal carcass looks pretty torn up, like a tiger was at it for a minute or two. Miller recovered Ike's rifle when he brought the corpse up. Both are pretty banged about."
"All right. Liu's a little ahead of schedule, he says the second shuttle will be ready in two more days. We've gotten a little sloppy in our radio contacts; that's not to happen anymore. I want you or Owens on this line every ninety minutes, clear?"