October 2204

"They went in there." Sherry pointed.

The afternoon was quiet and deadly still The sun rode in a cloudless sky, It was not, of course, a bright sun. The dusty Quiveras Cloud, within which this system had drifted for three thousand years, prevented that. Randall Nightingale looked around at the trees and the river and the plain behind him, and considered how rare, in this equatorial place, was a summer's day.

In his mind, he replayed the screams. And the staccato sounds of the stinger blasts.

His pilot. Cookie, was checking his weapon. Tatia shook her head, wondering how Gappy could have been so dumb as to wander off. She was redheaded, young, quiet. Her usually congenial expression was bleak.

Andi watched the line of trees the way one might watch a prowling tiger.

Capanelli and his two colleagues had started just after dawn, Sherry explained again. They'd entered the forest despite the prohibition against getting out of sight of the lander. And they hadn't come out.

"But you must have heard what happened," said Nightingale. The three members of the party had been wearing e-suits and talking to each other on the allcom.

She looked, embarrassed. "I went in the washroom. Tess called me when it started to happen." Tess was the AI. "When I got out, it was over. There was nothing." Her lip trembled, and she looked on the edge of hysteria. Tess had recorded a few seconds of screams. And that was all they had.

Nightingale tried calling them, and heard only a carrier wave. "Okay," he said. "Let's go."

"All of us?" asked Andi. She was blond, chunky, usually full of wisecracks. One of the boys. At the moment, she was strictly business.

"Strength in numbers," he said.

They spread out across the hardscrabble grass, glanced at one another for mutual support, and started toward the tree line. "There," Sherry said. "They went in there."