Delta Pavonis by John Maddox Roberts, Eric Kotani Page B

Schubert suggested. "Say we couldn't get anything out and transmitted directly to Avalon in desperation."
    "What about Kurz and the other teams?" someone asked. "They'll be along in a few days."
    "Kurz will love it, when I explain things to him,"
    Forrest insisted. "We'll meet them as they land and clue them in. After all, he's the expedition leader, so it's his name that'll be attached to it. He's just like the rest of us; none of us may ever have a chance at a coup this big. Even if we all get sacked, so what? The publicity from this discovery will make us all famous, if we handle it right."
    Dierdre could see right away that he had struck just the right note. The others first looked apprehensive, then skeptical, then, finally, enthusiastic. They had been virtually resigned to a career of dead-end positions on obscure expeditions. Trouble with the authorities had been an inevitability rather than a danger. The prospect of a big payoff made up for a great deal of risk.
    "Hell, yes, let's go!" said Okamura. He already wasn't afraid of much.
    "Yeah!" Govinda said, her usual jitters transformed to aggressiveness.
    "Let's do it," Hannie said, almost placidly. Her calm acceptance of the proposition seemed to decide the others. One by one, they signaled assent.
    "Great," Forrest said. "We rest up for the rest of today. Tomorrow morning, we hit those cliffs. Now that we know there are large carnivores here that're fully equipped to eat us, I'm doubling the guard. While there's light, I want you to gather plenty of firewood. We want big fires tonight."
    "We want regular overhead scans," Govinda said. "Those flying dragons spook me."
    Forrest turned to Colin. "How about it? What size of prey did those things go for?"
    "From what was known at the time the Island Worlds left Sol, about the largest they could manage was a good-sized fish. Maybe they could pick up something the size of a small child, but that's about the maximum."
    "That's a relief," Govinda said.
    "Hold it," Colin cautioned. "That's just what was known. It takes specialized conditions to become fossilized, and the flying reptiles were rarer than most. Just when the paleontologists thought they'd found the biggest one, somebody'd discover an unknown species twice as large. We just don't know how big they got. You find a lot of fossils of a particular dinosaur, it usually means there were a lot of them, herd animals like the triceratops, or maybe they just lived around the right type of mud that's ideal for fossilization. There may have been thousands of species that never were discovered."
    "Okay, we watch the sky, just in case," Forrest ordered. "And nobody leaves the camp in groups of less than four. Damn, I wish they'd let us have more beam rifles. Okay, nobody goes out of sight of the camp unless Sims or Okamura goes along with a beamer." He pointed at the two men in question. "If one of you goes out with a mission, the other stays with the camp. Clear?" The two security men nodded stolidly.
    When everyone was settled in for the evening around a rather large fire, Dierdre decided to bring up the most vexing subject once more. "How did they get here?" She didn't have to elaborate; everyone knew what she referred to. To her surprise, Steve Forrest wasn't annoyed at the question.
    "It's too soon to draw any conclusions," he said, "but let's look at what little we know. Some years ago, Derek Kuroda found the Rhea Objects. They were of alien origin, and it was by studying them that Sieglinde Kornfeld-Taggart developed the star drive that brought us here. Nobody knows how old those alien power packs were when Kuroda found them. They might have been left behind an hour before he found them, or they might have been millions of years old.
    "What they meant, without question, was that aliens had visited the Sol system. It could be that they took samples and brought them back here."
    "But," Fumiyo interjected, "nobody's found any alien artifacts in this system."
    "How do we know