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dark-skinned
Marine complied, stepping to her side and leaning down to examine what Melissa
was looking at.   
       “What do you make
of that, Sergeant?” Melissa asked as the young man squatted down to her level.
       Adams locked his
pulse rifle into a holster on his back, then reached down and placed a hand
near the object in question. “Looks like a boot print, ma’am.”
       Melissa nodded.
“Mind if I take a look at the bottom of your shoes?”
       The sergeant didn’t
hesitate. He stood, turned around, and offered his foot to the OSI agent for
her inspection. Melissa used a small recording device to take an image of the
man’s shoe. “Thank you, Sergeant.”
       “Of course, ma’am.”
       The flash of the
recorder having caught his attention, Shawn stepped up to where the two were
poised. “What do you think?” Shawn asked as he leaned down to Melissa’s side.
       “I can’t be
positive until I make a sample comparison, but my eyes tell me this is where
the Valley Forge’ s team set down and
started lifting…well, whatever was in here up to their ship,” she said, waving
her hand slowly around the space. “These prints on the ground seem consistent
with standard issue Unified Marine Corps boots.”
       Unlocking his rifle
from his back, Adams moved the weapon down to his side. “Any ideas about what
was in here, ma’am?”
       She looked around
the cavernous space, but could only shake her head. “It’s impossible to say at
this point. I can’t even offer a guess. Hopefully something we find on Delta
Base will tell us.”
       “You think they
might have left a clue?” Shawn asked as he regarded the boot print embedded in
the dust.
       “Back on the Icarus , Lieutenant Garcia said that the Valley Forge was sending down waves of transport craft to the surface. If
the carrier and her escorts were destroyed before they had a chance to retrieve
everything they came for, something might still be here.”
       Both Shawn and
Adams nodded in agreement. “So, where to next?” Shawn asked, helping Melissa to
her feet.
       She brushed the
dust from her hands and twisted her head slowly, scanning the space and getting
her proper bearings. “I’d like to check out the administrative building.”
       Shawn nodded with
understanding. “You think there’ll be anything left in there?”
       Melissa shrugged.
“It’s worth a shot. Maybe we can find a manifest or something that recorded the
contents of this building.”
       The multi-legged
crawler, having finished its scan, ambled out of the hangar and left the
assembled officers bathed in silence.
       Adams looked down
to the computer built into his left gauntlet. “I have a bearing and distance
for the admin building, ma’am.”
       Melissa stepped
over to him just as Adams initiated the computer’s embedded holo-emitter. A
small map, with their current location indicated by a blinking dot, appeared
and turned a few inches over the surface of the computer.
       “All right,” she
said after scanning the map for a moment. “Let’s go.”

 
    * * *

 
       Back on board the Rhea , Richard Krif was anxiously
awaiting an update from the planet’s surface. As he paced the walkway behind
the communications officer’s station, a young technician approached him with a
digital reader. Captain Krif recognized him as the specialist he had ordered to
perform a deep scan of something unusual the sensor team had noticed lingering
in low orbit not long after Kestrel’s team had departed.
       “You have something
for me, specialist?”
       The young man
seemed nervous as he approached the Captain. Krif knew this was par for the
course for most of the younger people on the ship. Sometimes, it seemed, the
majority of the crew paced the passageways and crawlspaces uneasily, constantly
in fear of running into “the old man” in some remote corner of the enormous carrier.
Krif maintained a tight ship, and that