Two minutes later, Wilson and Lee’s squad were in front of a partially collapsed Quonset hut. “I think this is it,” Lee said, to Wilson. “The HQ, I mean.”

“How do you figure?” Wilson said.

“Largest building inside the colony proper,” Lee said. “Have to have some place for town meetings.”

“I can’t argue with that logic,” Wilson said, and looked at the hut, concerned about its stability. He looked over at Lee and her squad.

“After you, Lieutenant,” Lee said. Wilson sighed and pried open the door to the hut.

Inside the hut were two bodies and a whole lot of mess.

“Looks like something’s been at them,” Lee said, tapping one with a foot. Wilson saw Jefferson, looking at the body, turn a sicklier shade of green than he already was.

“How long have they been dead, do you think?” Wilson asked.

Lee shrugged. “Between the time they sent the distress call and we got here? Couldn’t be less than a week.”

“Since when do wildcat colonies report back?” Wilson asked.

“I just go where they tell me, Lieutenant,” Lee said. She motioned to Jefferson and pointed at one of the bodies. “Check that body for an ID chip. Colonists sometimes put them in so they can keep track of each other.”

“You want me to go through the body?” Jefferson asked, clearly horrified.

“Ping it,” Lee said, impatiently. “Use your BrainPal. If there’s a chip, it’ll respond.”

Wilson turned away from Lee and Jefferson’s truly compelling discussion and headed farther into the hut. The bodies had been in an open area that he suspected, true to Lee’s hunch, was used for colony gatherings. Farther in were a set of what used to be cubicles and a small enclosed room.

The cubicles were a shattered mess; the room, from the outside, at least, looked intact. Wilson was hoping the colony’s computing and communications hardware were in there.

The room door was locked. Wilson jiggled the door handle a couple of times to be sure, then looked at the other side of the door. He pulled out his multipurpose tool, formed it into a crowbar and pulled the pins out of the door hinges. He set the door aside and looked into the room.

Every piece of equipment had been hammered into oblivion.

“Crap,” Wilson said to himself. He went into the room anyway to see if anything was salvageable.

“Find anything?” Lee asked a few minutes later, appearing by the door.

“If someone likes puzzles, they could have fun with this,” Wilson said. He stood up and gestured to the remains of the equipment.

“So nothing you can use,” Lee said.

“No,” Wilson said. He bent down and grabbed a piece of debris and held it out for Lee to take. “That’s supposed to be the memory core. It’s been hammered out of usability. I’ll take it back and try to get something out of it anyway, but I wouldn’t be holding out hope.”

“Maybe some of the colonists’ computers and handhelds will have something,” Lee said. “I’ll have my people collect them.”

“That would be nice,” Wilson said. “Although if everything tied through this central server, it’s possible everything got wiped before this got broken up.”

“It wasn’t just destroyed in the fighting,” Lee said.

Wilson shook his head and motioned to the wreckage. “Locked room. No other damage to this part of the hut. And it looked to me like the damage here was methodical. Whoever did it didn’t want what was stored on it to get captured.”

“But you said the door was locked,” Lee said. “Whoever ran over this place didn’t stop to check the computer.”

“Yeah,” Wilson said, and then looked over at Lee. “What about you? Get anything off the bodies?”

“Yeah, once Jefferson figured out what he was doing,” Lee said. “Martina and Vasily Ivanovich. In the absence of any other evidence to the contrary, I’ve nominated them as the two who ran the computers here. I’m having the teams check the other bodies for ID chips, too.”

“Anything else but their names?” Wilson asked.

“The usual biometric data,” Lee said. “I pinged the Tubto see if there was anything in its databases, but there wasn’t anything. I wasn’t expecting there to be, unless they happened to be ex-CDF.”

“Just two more idiots on a spectacularly ill-advised colonization attempt,” Wilson said.

“With about a hundred and fifty other idiots,” Lee said.

“And thus the Colonial Union is infinitesimally smarter,” Wilson said. Lee snorted.

In the distance came the sound of someone retching. Lee craned back to look. “Oh, look, it’s Jefferson,” she said. “He’s popped.”

Wilson got up to look. “That took a little bit longer than I expected,” he said.

“He’s been driving us all a little crazy with the gung ho thing,” Lee said.

“He’s new,” Wilson said.

“Hopefully it wears off,” Lee said, “before the rest of us kill him.”

Wilson smiled at this and then threaded back through the mess to Jefferson.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. He was kneeling by the body of the late Vasily Ivanovich, a puddle of sick off to his side. His other two fire team members had found some other place to be.

“You’re hanging out near two partially decomposed, partially eaten bodies,” Wilson said. “Being sick is a perfectly rational response.”

“If you say so,” Jefferson said.

“I do say so,” Wilson said. “My first mission, I almost wet myself. Throwing up is fine.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jefferson said.

Wilson patted Jefferson on the back and glanced over at Vasily Ivanovich. The man was a mess, bloated and with a significant amount of his abdomen chewed away by scavengers. From his vantage point, Wilson could see into the gnawed-on remains of Ivanovich’s digestive system.

Inside of which something glinted.

Wilson frowned. “What is that?” he said.

“What is what, sir?” Jefferson asked.

Wilson ignored him and looked closer and then, after a minute, thrust his glove into what remained of Ivanovich’s stomach.

Jefferson gagged but didn’t have anything else to throw up, so instead he stared openly at the small, glittery thing in Wilson’s gore-coated hand. Wilson delicately picked out the thing with his other hand and held it up in the light.

“What is that?” Jefferson asked.

“It’s a data card,” Wilson said.

“What was it doing in his stomach?” Jefferson asked.

“I have no idea,” Wilson said, and then turned his head. “Lee!” he shouted.

“What?” Lee shouted back from the other side of the hut.

“Have your people look for a functioning PDA and bring it to me immediately,” he said. “One that takes data cards.”

Shortly thereafter, Wilson had jammed the data card into a handheld and connected his BrainPal to the computer.

“Why would he swallow a data card?” Lee asked, as she watched Wilson.

“He wanted to keep the data out of enemy hands,” Wilson said. He was simultaneously going through the file hierarchy on the data card.

“That’s why he destroyed the computer and communications equipment,” Lee said.

“I’d have more answers for you if you let me actually concentrate on what I’m doing,” Wilson said. Lee shut up, slightly annoyed. Wilson ignored this, closed his eyes and focused on his data.

Several minutes later, Wilson opened his eyes and looked at Ivanovich with something that approached wonder.

Lee noticed. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

Wilson looked up at Lee blankly, and then back to Ivanovich, and then at the body of Martina Ivanovich.

“Wilson,” Lee said.

“I think we better take back these bodies,” Wilson said.

“Why?” Lee asked, looking at the corpses.

“I’m not sure I can tell you,” Wilson said. “I don’t think you have the clearance.”

Lee looked back at Wilson, annoyed.

“It’s not about you,” Wilson assured her. “I’m pretty confident I don’t have the clearance either.”

Lee, not precisely satisfied, looked back at the Ivanoviches. “So you want us to haul these up to the Tub.”