Free Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) by Mike Shepherd Page A

many more would die. If she continued to be the lucky one, she’d survive. The emotions boiling up inside her now would not make it any better for those she’d lost.
    The professor just stared at Kris.
    Jack stepped in. “Jacques had a good question. Do you have any evidence at this time of an outgassing from this planet being left in its orbit? If there was water, air, and other material on that planet, it had to go somewhere.”
    The professor nodded. “We do have some evidence that this particular area of space is rich in nitrogen, oxygen, water vapors, and carbon compounds, including amino acids. We wanted to check these out on our approach to orbit before we said anything, though. I mean, why would anyone scatter this planet’s, ah, lifeblood, so wastefully?”
    That left the room in a dead silence.
    “When the Romans conquered Carthage, they sowed the ground with salt so that it could not grow anything and never recover from the defeat,” Nelly said, and fell silent.
    “If someone really hated the people of another planet,” Penny said slowly. “If they wanted to make sure life never grew up again on a planet, they’d take away the air, water, everything. They’d pound it to a pulp, and they wouldn’t care where what they ripped off went.”
    “Maybe that was the intent all along,” Jacques said. “Waste it. Waste them. Throw it away. Let nothing of it enter their own living cycles.”
    “Hatred that hot and that deep is . . .” Kris said. “But then, we’ve seen what they took from other planets.”
    “And killed everything that lived there,” Penny said, slowly eyeing the screen that showed the planet they were approaching. “Could it have started here?”
    “I doubt if we will ever know for sure,” Jacques said, “but the more we know, the better educated our guesses will be.”

9
    They made orbit an hour later and began the survey immediately. While Kris intended to pair the ships off and let them swing around each other to give the crew some down, that would have to wait a bit. For now, each ship went into a different orbit, one even into a polar orbit, as they mapped the planet, studying everything they could without touching anything.
    The mapping showed a planet that had been hit and hit hard. There was evidence of at least five uses of atomics. These were marked by the residual radiation on the ground. However, even those five areas had been hammered by nonatomic hits with large kinetic weapons at high speeds. When you factored in several places where volcanic activity had been triggered, the entire place was a pockmarked landscape of death.
    The mapping did identify a few areas where the original surface material still existed.
    Some of the mountains seemed to have been left alone. They still showed where treelike vegetation had stood. The remnant of that vegetation appeared to have been torched before it was left to die without air and water. The oceanic floor also looked like it had survived in some places, particularly the deepest trenches. Those would all have to be studied in greater detail.
    Although nothing appeared to be living now, the biologists still suggested that no landing be attempted.
    “We know something killed this planet. We don’t know what, if anything, was applied to kill the animal life or vegetation on it before or while they slammed the planet from space. It’s best we keep our hands off the place until we know more,” was the way Professor Labao reported their first findings.
    The orbital survey had already identified some kind of frozen substance at the poles. There might also be frozen water in some places underground. That allowed for the possibility of some kind of life surviving. Bitter experience on other planets had shown some of the most stubborn bugs to kill were also the most deadly toward humans.
    With enough problems on her hands, Kris was only too happy to steer well clear of any more.
    The third day of the survey, the ships gathered in