Remnant Population

“Now if we can just get the magnification working—” Chesva said. “Ah. There. Now what do you suppose that is?”

A visible light scan, this time, the low slanting rays of the setting sun making bold shadows… there were the buildings of the abandoned colony, arranged in neat rows, the forest ramparts with their longer shadows… and something moving between the houses.

Kira felt a shiver run down her back. Animals. Probably only animals, either the surviving domestic animals abandoned by the colonists, or the forest animals they had described. The aliens had been thousands of kilometers away; the colonists had lived there forty years without seeing anything dangerous. But the shadows they cast were long, upright.

“Thermal sources,” Chesva said. “Whatever they are, they’re warm-blooded, but not as hot as the powerplant.”

“Upright,” Kira said. She was glad to hear that her voice was steady.

“Yes.” His voice was as calm as hers. They were professionals, academics, adults… but her heart pounded. She knew… she knew these were not cows or sheep or monkeylike forest climbers. These were the ones who had destroyed a colony — blown up a shuttle — and now prowled about, learning entirely too much.

Sunlight vanished from the scene, and without the stark contrast of sun and shadow she could see nothing, not even movement. On the infrared, she could see the buildings radiating their stored heat. At a little distance, two clumps of brighter dots might be cattle and sheep. And between the blurred shapes of the buildings, she could see little pale dots moving. Abruptly they disappeared.

“Went inside something,” Chesva said. “One of the buildings.” She heard him swallow. “They’re really

there.”

“We’re theorizing ahead of our data,” Kira said, trying to sound professional. Chesva snorted.

“You know we’re not,” he said. “We just got more data than anyone else has had.”

“Yeah,” Kira said. “I think so.”

Suddenly the visual scan changed. Lights sparkled on the dark screen.

“We know so,” Kira amended. “They’ve figured out the lights—”

“Wouldn’t be hard,” Chesva said. He sucked his teeth, his only irritating habit, and then went on. “It wouldn’t take digits, necessarily. A hand-swipe — if those are standard toggle switches. A tentacle. Even a beak.”

“Bipedal,” Kira said. “Those upright shadows.”

“Not necessarily bi,” Chesva said. “But I agree, they’re upright. Let’s pull up one of the earlier frames and really go over it.”

“You do that. I want to watch this—” Kira waved at the screens. Lights. The computer said four lights.

She put a trace on the IR pattern that had moved, the little dots that had crossed the street and gone inside. Now that she had a moment to think, she called up the village street plan furnished by Sims Bancorp, and decided that the — indigenes, she had better think of them, rather than aliens — had gone into the multipurpose building that housed the control and monitoring functions, the rainwater storage tanks, schoolrooms, communal workrooms, and so on.

The computer bleeped; when she glanced at the visual display, another light had come on. She looked back at the village plan. Falfurrias, Bartolomeo et u. et m., it said. She translated the archaic notation: et ux et mater, “and wife and mother.” Originally built and occupied by Humberto and Ofelia Falfurrias. She looked up the evacuation report. Bartolomeo and Rosara Falfurrias had been taken up on shuttle 3-F;

Ofelia Falfurrias on shuttle 3-H.

Kira wondered why they’d been separated. She had always assumed families were transported together. Not that it mattered, really. She did wish they had an arrival manifest for the Sims Bancorp colony transport, but it hadn’t yet arrived where it was going. She wrinkled her nose, glad that she didn’t have to travel on the old, slow, sublight ships. Cryo made such travel possible, but nothing could make it efficient.

“I’ve got another light source,” she said to Chesva, who merely grunted. She glanced over, and saw that he was doing something to a single frame of the earlier visual data. His screen changed color, the images shifting to more contrasting hues.

Kira went back to her own investigations. Something — she was sure it was the same indigenes that had wiped out the second colony at landing — was in the buildings, and using at least the light switches. What else could they be using? She glanced at the Sims Bancorp material to remind herself what was down there. Waste recycler, which provided fuel for the basic powerplant producing electricity for the lights, the coolers, the fans, the pumps. The vehicles… some electrical, some running off biofuels. No aircraft, thank the Luck. No surviving boats… Kira wondered what had happened to them. With the electricity on, the indigenes could make the stoves hot and the coolers cold, but they couldn’t get into real trouble. She hoped. Like most colonies, this one had had few weapons, and the evacuation teams reported that they’d removed them.