Anne McCaffrey - Mystery of Ireta

Also by Anne McCaffrey

Published by Ballantine Books

Decision at Doona

Dinosaur Planet

Dinosaur Planet Survivors

Get Off the Unicorn

The Lady

Pegasus in Flight

Restoree

The Ship Who Sang

To Ride Pegasus

Nimisha’s Ship

Pegasus in Space

Black Horses for the King

THE CRYSTAL SINGER BOOKS

Crystal Singer

Killashandra

Crystal Line

THE DRAGONRIDERS OF PERN BOOKS

Dragonflight

Dragonquest

The White Dragon

Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern

Nerilka’s Story

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Dragonsdawn

The Renegades of Pern

All the Weyrs of Pern

The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall

The Dolphins of Pern

Dragonseye

The Masterharper of Pern

The Skies of Pern

By Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough:

Powers That Be

Power Lines

Power Play

A Gift of Dragons

By Anne McCaffrey and Todd McCaffrey

Dragon’s Kin

DINOSAUR

PLANET

1

KAIheard Varian’s light step echoing in the empty passenger section of the shuttlecraft just as he

switched off the communications unit and tripped the tape into storage.

“Sorry, Kai, did I miss the contact?” Varian came in out of breath, her suit dripping wet, and bringing

with her the pervasive stench of Ireta’s “fresh” air, which tainted the filtered air of the shuttle’s pilot cabin.

She glanced from the unlit communications panel to his face to see if he was annoyed by her tardiness,

but a triumphant grin cut through her feigned penitence. “We finally captured one of those herbivores!”

Kai had to grin in response to her elation. Varian would spend long hours tracking a creature in Ireta’s

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damp, steaming, stinking jungles—hours of patient searching which all too often proved unproductive.

Nevertheless, short of resorting to Discipline, Varian found it nauseatingly irksome to sit still in a

comfortable chair through a Thek relay. Kai had wagered with himself that she would manage to avoid

the tedious interchange with some reasonable excuse. Her news was good and her excuse valid.

“How’d you manage to capture one? Those traps you’ve been rigging?” he asked with genuine interest,

though those same traps had taken his best mechanic and kept him from completing the seismic grid his

geologists needed.

“No, not the traps.” There was a hint of chagrin in Varian’s tone. “No, the damned fool creature was

wounded and couldn’t run away with the rest of the herd.” She paused to give her next statement full

emphasis. “And, Kai, it bleeds blood!”

Kai blinked at her announcement. “So?”

“Red blood!”

“Well?”

“Are you a biological idiot? Red blood means hemoglobin . . .”

“What’s odd about that? Plenty of other species use an iron base . . .”

“Noton the same planet with those aquatic squirmers Trizein’s been dissecting.They have a pale viscous

fluid.” Varian was fleetingly contemptuous of his failure to recognize the significance. “This planet’s one

mass of anomalies, biological as well as geological. No ore where we should be striking pay dirt by the

hopper-load, and me finding creatures larger than anything mentioned in text tapes from any planet in all

the systems we’ve explored in the last four hundred galactic-standard years. Of course, it may be all of a

piece,” she added thoughtfully, as she pushed back the springy dark curls that framed her face.

She was tall, as were so many types born on a normal-gravity planet like Earth, with a slender but

muscularly fit body which the one-piece orange ship suit displayed admirably. Despite the articles

dangling from her force-screen belt, her waist was trim, and the bulges in her thigh and calf pouches did

not detract from the graceful appearance of her legs.

Kai had been elated when Varian was assigned as his co-leader. They’d been more than acquaintances

on shipboard ever since she had joined theARCT-10 as a xenob vet, on a three-galactic-standard-year

contract. TheARCT-10 —like her sister ships in the Exploratory and Evaluation Corps—had basic

administrative and operations personnel who were ship-born and ship-bred. But the complement of

additional specialists, trainees and, occasionally, high-echelon travelers for the Federated Sentient Planets

changed continually, giving those on board the stimulation of meeting members of other cultures,

subgroups, minorities and persuasions.

Kai had been attracted to Varian first, because she was an extremely pretty girl and second, because

she was the opposite of Geril. He had been trying to end an unsatisfactory relationship with Geril, who

had been so insistent that he’d had to change his quarters from the ship-born to the visitors’ area of

Earth-normal section in order to avoid her. Varian happened to be his new next-door neighbor. She was

gay, bubbling with humor and intensely interested in everything about the satellite-sized exploratory

vessel. She quickly infected him with her enthusiasm as she chivvied him into taking her on a guided tour

of the various special quarters which accommodated the more esoteric sentient races of the FSP in their

own atmosphere or gravity. Varian told him she’d been planet-bound—on how many diverse planets did

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not signify—so that she felt it was high time she saw how the Explorers and Evaluators lived. Especially

since, she added, as a xenob vet, she often had to correct some of EV’s crazier judgments and mistakes.

Varian was a good narrator, and her tales of planetary adventures, both as a youngster trailing after

xenob vet parents and as junior in the same specialty, had fascinated Kai. He’d had the usual planetary

tours to combat ship-conditioned agoraphobia, and indeed had spent a whole galactic year with his

mother’s parents on her birthworld. But he felt his must have been dull worlds in comparison to those

responsible for Varian’s wild and amusing experiences.

Another way in which Varian surpassed Geril was in her ability to argue pleasantly and effectively

without losing her temper or wit. Geril had always been oppressively serious and too eager to denigrate

anything which did not meet with her unconditional approval unconditionally. In fact, long before Kai

heard that Varian was to be his co-leader, he had realized that she must have had Discipline, young as

she appeared to be. He’d gone as far as to tap for a printout of her public history from the EV’s data

banks. Her list of assignments had been impressive even if the public record did not give any assessment

of her value on those expeditions. However, he noticed she had been promoted rapidly—this, combined

with the number of assignments, indicated a young woman slated for increasing responsibility and more

difficult assignments. Granted her addition to the Iretan expedition had been made almost at the last

minute when life-form readings had registered on the preliminary probe, but with her background Ireta

ought not to post too many problems. Yet the planet was, as she’d said, rampant with anomalies.

“I suppose,” she was saying, “if one has a third-generation sun with planets, one must expect

peculiarities; such as Ireta, whose poles are hotter than its equator, stinking of—I’ll remember the name

of that plant yet . . .”

“Plant?”

“Yes. There’s a small plant, hardy enough to be grown practically anywhere on temperate Earth-type

worlds, which is used in cooking. In judicious quantities, let me add,” she said with a wry grin. “Too

much of it tastes like this planet smells. Sorry, I digress. What did the Theks say?”

Kai frowned. “Only the first reports have been picked up by our wandering Exploratory Vessel.”

Busy mopping off the worst of her wetness, Varian turned to stare at him, towel suspended. “Fardles!”

She sat slowly down in the chair next to him. “That’s unnerving! Just the first?”

“That’s what the Theks said . . .”

“Did you allow time enough for them to manage a reply? Scrub that question.” Varian slumped against

the backrest as she added, “Of course,you did,” giving him full credit for his ability to deal with the

slowest moving and speaking species in the Federated planets. “That’s unlike EV. They’re usually so

desperately greedy for initial reports, not just for the all-safe-down.”

“Myexplanation is that spatial interference . . .”

“Of course.” Varian’s face cleared of anxiety. “That cosmic storm the next system over . . . the one the

astronomers were so hairy anxious to get to . . .”

“That’s what the Theks say.”

“In how many words?” asked Varian, her wry humor reasserting itself.

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The Theks were a silicate life form, much like rock and extremely durable, and though not immortal,

certainly the closest a species had evolved toward that goal. The irreverent said that it was difficult to

know a Thek elder from a rock until it spoke, but a human could perish of old age waiting for the word.

Certainly the older a Thek grew and the more knowledge he acquired, the longer it took to elicit an

answer from him. Fortunately for Kai, there were two young Theks on the team sent to the seventh

planet of this system. One of them, Tor, Kai had known all his life. In fact, though Tor was considered

young in relation to the lifespan of his species, he had been on theARCT-10 since the exploratory vessel

had been commissioned one hundred and fifty galactic-standard years before. Tor constantly confused

Kai with his great-great-grandfather, who had been an engineering officer on theARCT-10 and whom

Kai was said to resemble. It gave Kai a feeling of curious satisfaction to be on the same mission as a

planetary co-leader with Tor. His conversation with Tor, while lengthened by space distance and Thek

speech habits, was comparatively brisk.

“Tor had one word, actually, Varian. Storm.” Kai added his laughter to Varian’s.

“Have they ever been wrong?”

“What, Theks in error? Not in recorded history.”

“Theirs? Or ours?”

“Theirs, of course. Ours is too short. Now, about thatred blood?”

“Well, it’s not just the red blood, Kai. There are far too many other unlikely coincidences. Those

herbivores we’ve been shadowing are not only vertebrates and bleed red blood, but now that I’ve got

close enough to have a good look, the things are pentadactyl, too.” She opened and closed her fingers at

him in a clawing motion.

“Theks are pentadactyl . . . after a fashion.” Kai was well pleased they had no visual contact during the

interchanges, as the Theks had an unnerving habit of extruding pseudopods from their amorphous mass,

which tended to distract the viewer, sometimes to the point of nausea.

“But not vertebrate or red-blooded. And not coexistent with another totally different life form, like

Trizein’s marine squares.” Varian fumbled at the opening of her belt pouch and withdrew a flat object,

well wrapped in plastic. “It’ll be interesting,” she spread the syllables out, “to see the analysis of this

blood sample.” With a graceful push, she rose from the swivel chair and strode out of the pilot cabin, Kai

following her.

Their boot heels echoed in the emptiness of the denuded passenger section. Its furnishinings now

equipped the plastic domes grouped below the shuttle in the force-screened encampment. But Trizein’s

work was better accomplished in the air-conditioned storage compartment which had been converted

into his laboratory. A terminal to the ship’s computer had been rigged up in the lab so that Trizein rarely

stirred from his domain.

“So you’ve finally got an occupant for your corral,” Kai said.

Varian nodded. “See, I was right to plan ahead. At least we’ve a place big enough to stash him/it/her.”

“Don’t you know which sex?”

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“When you see our beast, you’ll understand why we haven’t taken a close enough look to know.” She

shuddered suddenly. “I don’t know what got to it, but whole chunks have been torn from its flank . . .

almost as if . . .” She swallowed hastily.

“As if what?”

“As if something had been feeding on it—alive.”

“What?” Kai felt his gorge rise.

“Those predators look savage enough to have done it . . . but while the creature was still living?”

The appalling concept silenced them both for several strides. A civilized diet no longer included animal

flesh.

“I wonder if Tanegli’s having any luck with those fruiting trees,” she said, quickly redirecting the

conversation.

“D’you know if he did take the youngsters with him? I was setting up the interchange.”

“Yes,” said Varian, “Divisti went, too, so the kids are in good hands.”

“Just as well,” said Kai a little grimly, “someone can manage them. I wouldn’t relish explaining to the

EV’s third officer if anything happened to her pride and joy.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Kai saw Varian bite her lip, her eyes sparkling with suppressed amusement.

It was an embarrassingly well-known fact that young Bonnard had a case of hero worship for the team’s

male co-leader.

“Bonnard’s a good kid, Kai, and means well . . .”

“I know. I know.”

“I wonder if food on this planet tastes the way most things smell,” said Varian, again changing the

subject. “If fruit tastes of hydrotelluride . . .”

“Are we food-low?”

“No,” said Varian, who was charged by the expedition’s charter to procure any additional food

suppliers needed. “But Divisti is a cautious soul. The less we use of the basic subsistence supplies, the

better. And fresh fruit . . . you ship-bred types may not miss it . . .”

“Land-born primates have no dietary discipline.”

They were both grinning, Varian cocking her head to one side, her gray eyes sparkling. The first day

they’d met, at a table in the humanoid dining area of the huge EEC ship, they’d teased each other about

dietary idiosyncrasies.

Born and brought up on the ship, Kai was used to synthesized foods and to the limited textures

provided. Even when he’d been grounded for brief periods, he had never quite adjusted to the infinite

variety and consistencies of natural foods. Varian had boasted that she could eat anything vegetable or

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mineral and had found the ship’s diet, even when augmented from the life-support dome with freshly

grown produce, rather monotonous.

“I’d call it educated tastes, man. And if the fruit tastes at all decent, you may be perverted to an

appreciation ofreal food.”

Just as they reached the lab, the panel shushed open, and an excited man came charging toward them.

“Marvelous!” He halted mid-stride and, losing his balance, staggered against the panel wall. “Just the

people I need to see. Varian, the cell formation on those marine specimens is a real innovation. There are

filaments, four different kinds . . . just take a look . . .” Trizein began pulling her back into his laboratory

and gesturing urgently for Kai to follow.

“I’ve something for you, too, my friend.” Varian extended the slide. “We caught one of those heavy-duty

herbivores, wounded, bleeding red blood . . .”

“But don’t you understand, Varian,” Trizein continued, apparently deaf to her announcement, “this is a

completelydifferent life form. Never in all my expeditionary experience have I come across such a

cellular formation . . .”

“Nor have I come across such an anomaly as this, contrasting to your new life form.” Varian closed her

fingers about the slide. “Do be a love and run a spectro analysis on this?”

“Red blood, you said?” Trizein blinked, changing mental gears to deal with Varian’s request. He held the

slide up to the light, frowning at it. “Red blood? Isn’t compatible with what I’ve just told you.”

At that moment, the alarm wailed unnervingly through the shuttle and the outside encampment and tingled

jarringly at the wrist units that Kai and Varian wore as team leaders.

“Foraging party in trouble, Kai, Varian.” Paskutti’s voice, his thick slurred speech unhurried, came over

the intercom. “Aerial attack.”

Kai depressed the two-way button on his wrist unit. “Assemble your group, Paskutti. Varian and I are

coming.”

“Aerial attack?” asked Varian as both moved quickly to the iris lock of the shuttlecraft. “From what?”

“Is the party airborne, Paskutti?” Kai asked.

“No, sir. I have coordinates. Shall I call in your teams?”

“No, they’d be too far out to be useful.” To Varian he said, “Whatcan they have got into?”

“On this crazy planet? Who knows?” Varian seemed to thrive on the various alarms Ireta produced, for

which Kai was glad. On his second expedition, the co-leader had been such a confirmed pessimist that

the morale of the entire party had deteriorated, causing needless disastrous incidents.

As usual, the first blast of Ireta’s odorous atmosphere took Kai’s breath away. He’d forgotten to

replace the deodorizing plugs he’d removed while in the shuttle. The plugs helped but not when one was

forced to breathe through his mouth, as he was while running to join Paskutti’s rapidly forming squad.

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Though the heavy-worlders under Paskutti’s direction had had farther to come, they were the first to

arrive at the assembly point as Kai and Varian belted down the slope from the shuttle to the force-screen

veil lock. Paskutti shoved belts, masks and stunners at the two leaders, forgetting in the urgency of the

moment that the casual thrust of his heavy hand rocked the light-framed people back on their heels.

Gaber, the cartographer who was emergency duty officer, came puffing down from his dome. As usual,

he’d forgotten to wear his force-screen belt though there was a standing order for those belts to be worn

at all times. Kai would tag Gaber for that when they got back.

“What’s the emergency? I’ll never get those maps drawn with all these interruptions.”

“Forage party’s in trouble. Don’t wander off!” said Kai.

“Oh, never, Kai, never will I do anything so simple-witted. I assure you. I shan’t move from the controls

one centimeter, though how I’m ever to finishmy work . . . Three days behind now and . . .”

“Gaber!”

“Yes, Kai. Yes, I understand. I really do.” The man seated himself at the veil controls, glancing so

anxiously from Paskutti to Varian that Kai had to nod at him reassuringly. Paskutti’s heavy face remained

expressionless, as did his dark eyes; but somehow the heavy-worlder’s very silence could indicate

disapproval or disgust more acutely than anything he might have growled.

Paskutti, a man in his middle years, had been in ship security for most of his five-year tour with EEC. He

had volunteered for this assignment when the call had gone through the mother ship for secondaries to

assist a xenob team. Heavy-worlders often took semi-skilled tours on other worlds on the EEC ships as

the pay was extremely good. Two or three tours would mean that a semi-skilled individual could earn

enough credit to live the rest of his or her life in relative comfort on one of the developing worlds.

Heavy-worlders were preferred as secondaries, whatever their basic specialty might be, because of their

muscular strength. They were paid to be the muscles of humanoid FSP, generally a comment made

respectfully, since the heavy-worlders were not just muscle men but numbered as many high-ranking

specialists as any other humanoid subgroup.

There was, however, no question that their sheer physical presence—the powerful legs, the compact

torso, massive shoulders, weather-darkened skin—provided a visual deterrent that prompted many

sentient groups to hire them as security forces, whether merely for display or as actual aggressive units.

Contributing to the false notion that heavy-worlders were ill-equipped with mental abilities was the

unfortunate genetic problem that, though their muscle and bone structure had adjusted to bear the heavy

gravities, their heads had not. Consequently, at first glance they did look stupid. Away from the harsh

gravity and climactic conditions that bred them, heavy-worlders also had to spend a good deal of their

time in heavy-grav gyms to maintain their muscular strength and to enable them to make a satisfactory

adjustment when they returned to their home worlds. Perversely enough, the heavy-worlders were

intensely attached to their natal worlds, and most of them, having made their credit balance high enough

to retire in comfort, happily returned to the cruel conditions that had developed their subgrouping.

Paskutti and Tardma had joined the expedition out of sheer boredom with their shipboard security

duties. Berru and Bakkun as geologists had been Kai’s own choices since it was always good to have a

few heavy-worlders on any team for the advantage of their physical attributes. Both he and Varian had

been pleased when Tanegli, as botanist, and Divisti, as biologist, had answered the request for such

specialists. When they had made planetfall and Varian had seen the unexpectedly large type of animal life

which populated Ireta, she had blessed the heavy-worlders on her team. Whatever emergency they were

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going to meet now would be approached with much more confidence in such company.

Paskutti nodded at Gaber as the cartographer’s hands twitched above the veil controls. Slowly the veil

lifted while Varian, by Kai’s side, shuffled with impatience. One couldn’t fuss Gaber by reminding him

that this was an emergency and speed was essential.

Paskutti ducked under the lifting veil, charging out, the squad at his heels, before Gaber had completed

the opening. It was, as usual, raining a thin mist, which except for the heavier drops, had been deflected

by the main screen as had the insects small enough to be fried by contact.

They could hear Gaber muttering anxiously under his breath about people never waiting for anything as

Paskutti gave the closed-fist upward gesture that meant sky-trailing. The rescuers activated their lift-belts

and assumed the formation assigned them at Paskutti’s original briefing on emergency procedures. Kai

and Varian were in the protected positions of the flyingV formation.

Aloft, Kai turned his combutton to home in on Tanegli’s signal. Paskutti gestures westward, toward the

swampy lowlands, and indicated speed increase as his other hand adjusted his mask.

They flew at treetop level, Kai remembering to keep his eyes horizontal, on Paskutti’s back. Oddly

enough his tinge of agoraphobia bothered him less in the air, as long as he didn’t look directly down at

the fast-moving ground. He was cushioned by the air-stream of his passage, an almost tactile support at

this speed. The monotonous floor of conifers and gymnosperms which dotted this part of the continent

waved briefly at their passage. High, high above, Kai caught a glimpse of circling winged monsters.

Varian hadn’t yet had a chance to identify or telltale any of the aerial life forms: the creatures warily made

themselves scarce when the explorers were abroad in lift-belts or sleds.

They increased altitude to maneuver the first of the basaltic clines and then glided down the other side,

skimming the endless primeval forest, its foliage in ever-varied patterns of blue-green, green and

green-purple. They met the first of the thermal downdrafts and had to correct, buffeted by the air

currents. Paskutti signaled descent as the best solution. For him, it was, with his bulk of heavy

grav-trained muscles, flesh and bone, but Kai and Varian had to keep compensating with their lift-belts’

auxiliary thrust jets.

As the buzz of the homer intensified, Kai began to berate himself. He ought not to have allowed any

exploratory groups beyond a reasonable lift-belt radius of the compound. On the other hand, Tanegli was

perfectly capable of combating most of the life forms so far seen here while dealing with the exuberant

nature of the youngsters in his charge. So what aerial trouble could they have fallen into? And so quickly.

Tanegli had left in the sled just prior to Kai’s scheduled contact with the Theks. They could barely have

made their destination before running afoul of whatever it was. Tanegli would surely have mentioned any

casualty. Then Kai wondered if the sled had been damaged. They’d only the one big unit and the four

two-man sleds for his seismic teams. The smaller sleds could, in a pinch, take four passengers, but no

equipment.

The land dropped away again and they corrected their flight line. Far in the purple distance the first range

of volcanoes could be seen on the edge of the inland sea—a lake that was doomed to be destroyed by

the restless tectonic action of this very active world. That was the first area he’d had tested for its

seismicity because he’d worried that perhaps their granite shelf might be too close to tectonic activity and

would turn mobile. But the first print-out of the cores had been reassuring. The lake would subside,

probably giving way to small hills pushed up from beneath, clad with sediment and eventually folded

under, for this was the near edge of the stable continental shelf on which the encampment had been

placed.

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The steamy, noxiously scented heat of the swamp-lands began to rise to meet them; cloying humidity

intensified the basic hydrotelluride stench. The homer’s buzz grew louder and became continuous.

Kai was not the only member of the party scanning ahead. Far-sighted Paskutti saw the sled first, in a

grove of angiosperms, parked on a sizable hummock that jutted into the swamp, away from the firmer

mass of the jungle. The great purple-barked, many-rooted branches of the immense trees, well-scarred

by herbivorous assaults, were untenanted by avian life, and Kai was beginning to feel the anger of relief

overcome concern.

Paskutti’s arm gesture caught his attention and he followed the line of the heavy-worlder’s sweep

toward the swamp, where several tan objects were slowly being dragged under the water by the pointed

snouts of the swamp-dwellers. A minor battle began as two long-necked denizens contended for the

possession of one corpse. The victor claimed the spoils by the simple expedient of sitting on the body

and sinking with it into the muddy waters.

Tardma, the heavy-worlder directly in front of Kai, pointed in the other direction, toward firmer land,

where a winged creature, obviously recovering from a stun blast, was swaying upright.

Paskutti fired a warning triplet and then motioned the group to land on the inland side of the grove. They

came to a running stop, the heavy-worlders automatically deploying toward the swamp since the

likelihood of attack was from that quarter. Kai, Varian and Paskutti jogged toward the sled from behind

which the foragers now emerged.

Tanegli stood waiting, his squat solid bulk a bastion around which the smaller members of the party

ranged. The three youngsters, Kai was relieved to see, appeared to be all right, as did the xenobotanist,

Divisti. Then Kai noticed the small pile of assorted brilliant yellow objects in the storage cage of the sled:

more of similar shape and color were strewn about the clear ground of the small grove.

“We called prematurely,” said Tanegli by way of greeting. “The swamp creatures proved curious allies.”

He replaced his stunner in his belt and dusted his thick hands as if dismissing the incident.

“What was attacking you?” Varian asked, staring about her.

“These?” asked Paskutti as he dragged a limp, furred and winged creature from behind the trunk of a

thick tree.

“Watch out!” said Tanegli, reaching to his belt before he saw the stunner in Paskutti’s. “I set the gun on a

light charge.”

“It’s one of those gliders. See, no socket for the wing to fold,” Varian said, ignoring the protests of the

heavy-worlders as she moved the limp wings out and back.

Kai eyed the pointed beak of the creature with apprehension, suppressing an irrational desire to step

back.

“Carrion-eater by the size and shape of that jaw,” remarked Paskutti, peering with considerable interest.

“Well and truly stunned,” Varian said with a final twitch of arrangement to the wings. “What was dead

enough to attract it here?”

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Anne McCaffrey - Mystery of Ireta

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