Starfist: A World of Hurt Read Online Free PDF

dial as she set it. Guiding the point of the cutter with her fingers, she cut a five-centimeter-radius circle around the stem, where it entered the ground. The circle complete, she returned the cutter to its belt loop and probed into the cut with both hands. Her hands went all the way in; the cutter had gone the exact fifteen centimeters she wanted. Gently, she pushed farther, curving her fingers inward to meet under the plant. After twisting to break the plug free, she lifted it out and lowered it into the specimen pack.
    She settled back on her heels and studied the newly exposed ground where the specimen had grown. She pushed aside other top growth and looked some more. After a moment she spoke into her comm unit. "Elias, I'd like you to take a look at this."
    "Where are you, Jean?"
    "Don't you have me?" She checked the medallion on the left breast pocket of her field jacket. "My tracker seems to be working."
    "Oh, right. I've got you. Be there in a few minutes."
    Jean chuckled. Elias Sillanpa was a highly regarded zoologist, but tended toward absentmindedness and often forgot equipment that wasn't of immediate use in whatever he was studying at the moment. A crashing in the underbrush announced his approach. She shook her head. When he was stalking an animal, Sillanpa could slip through the densest growth as silently as a slug. At other times he was as noisy as a herd of kwangduks in a spindle forest.
    "What did you find, Jean?" he asked as he came close.
    She answered with a question of her own. "What kind of large fauna do we have here?"
    She knew full well the search party hadn't found any game trails larger than those used by the rodentlike animals that were a nuisance throughout Ammon.
    His face went blank for a moment while he considered, then turned bright. "None. What did you find?"
    She replied with another question. "Then what did this?"
    He looked at the exposed growth, then dropped to his hands and knees to examine it more closely. He touched a crushed leaf here, a bent stem there, a broken twig elsewhere.
    He lowered his head to sniff, turned it as though listening to the trampled foliage, then looked up.
    "I'd say that wasn't done by a large animal." Still on hands and knees, he crawled forward a dozen meters, poking and probing at the undercover and the ground as he went. "I'd say,"
    he said, standing and brushing debris off his knees as he looked farther along the line he'd crawled, "it wasn't an animal, it was some kind of landcar."
    Once they had a trail to follow, it only took a few more hours to find Samar Volga's mule. It sat where he'd left it, against a sturdy tree high up on the slope of a mountainside. From there it was a simple matter of deduction to climb higher to the saddle, where they found the rope Samar Volga had used to rappel into the valley below.
    Jean Lonnrot's eyes grew wide with excitement when she saw the hitherto unimagined flora within the valley, and she could barely wait to descend into it to collect specimens for study.
    Once the entire search party descended into the valley, Elias Sillanpa's reaction was equally excited--but for a distinctly different reason: he immediately noticed the total lack of animate life. Not only didn't he see any animals--or even insectoids--on the ground, in the branches, or flying, he saw no tracks, trails, scratches on tree trunks, chewed leaves, or scat. What kind of habitat was it that had no animals?
    "Spread out, everyone," Frans Ladoga ordered. When nobody moved, other than the happily gathering botanist, he realized he'd barely spoken aloud and tried again.
    "Everybody, spread out," he said more loudly. "See if you can find any sign of Volga."
    The others jerked, as though snapping out of trances. Lonnrot continued gathering, Sillanpa kept looking for signs of animals, and one of the policemen, Neva Ahvenan, stood listening. The others began looking for signs of the missing man's passage. Nobody bothered to cry out Volga's name. The ground