Hanson was picking her way through a triple line of bodies, each lying on its own length of plastic tarp.
“Can I give you a hand with anything, ma’am?” Garroway asked her.
“I’m looking for signs of rank,” she told him. “You’re sure these bodies haven’t been tampered with? Stuff taken?”
He shrugged. “Not since they were brought here. I can’t speak for what happened when the collection parties picked them up.”
“They should have left the bodies in place,” Hanson said, grimacing with distaste. “How are we supposed to learn anything with you people pawing over them and going through their stuff?”
“We’re Marines, ma’am,” Garroway said, his voice stiff. What the hell was this civilian implying?
She looked up at him, then stood. “I’m sorry, Marine,” she said. “It’s been a rough day. No offense.”
“None taken, ma’am.” He relaxed a little then, but only a little. “Just what is it you’re looking for?”
She sighed. “Anything the leaders might use to mark them as leaders,” she said. “I don’t know…a badge, a medallion, special markings on their armor, anything to make the boss Ahannu stand out from the rest.”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” he said. “The ones I’ve seen have come in all different kinds of armor, different weapons. It’s more like fighting a mob than an army.” He pointed at a partially charred body twice the size of the others lying nearby…one of the big Ahannu the Marines had begun calling trolls. “Even their soldiers are different from one another, you know, in size and color and stuff. Maybe those big guys are the leaders?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Those appear to be specially bred mutations, a warrior class, if you will. They’re not very smart. How about some sort of baton or staff?”
“Ain’t seen nothing like that,” Womicki said, joining them. He pointed to a pile of weapons and standards lying on the ground nearby. “Unless you mean those battle flags some of them carry.”
“No,” Hanson said. “Those appear to be clan insignia of some sort, but the ones who carry them aren’t leaders. The thing is, we think the Ahannu passed on a lot of social conventions to our ancestors back in ancient Sumeria besides agriculture and hygiene…things like kingship and caste systems and the idea that someone has to be on top. If that’s so, we’d expect to see some emblem of rank among them, some way they could recognize one another and know who was in charge.”
“Well, some of them do have fancier body armor,” Garroway said. He pointed at another Ahannu body. “And some don’t have any armor at all.”
“Hell, I thought the Frogs weren’t supposed to have any sex,” Garvey said, amused. He poked at a tentacular, bulb-headed member between the legs of the Ahannu corpse with the muzzle of his rifle. “What’s this?”
“Oh, they have sex,” Hanson said. “Our first contact with them here at the mission was just with drones, and we thought they were hermaphrodites. But there are males and females too.”
“No balls,” Womicki observed.
“Internal gonads. Apparently, they’re like some species of fish on Earth, and change sex when they need to, either because there aren’t enough of the opposite sex available at the moment, or maybe it’s part of a regular cyclical life-change.” She shook her head. “There’s so damned much we don’t understand about them.”
“Maybe the sex differences are what you’re looking for,” Vinita suggested. “You know, the males are the leaders? Or the females?”
“No. We haven’t been able to correlate sex with their social ordering yet,” Hanson said. “Although it is possible there are other sexes or somatypes we haven’t seen yet.”
Garroway noticed something and stooped, awkward in his armor. Reaching out cautiously, he touched the head of the Ahannu corpse, turning it to the side.
The head was long and narrow, gray-green in color and very lightly scaled, with a bony ridge across the top of the skull that extended over the nasal opening all the way to the lipless mouth. There were no external ears, though a bone-ringed opening behind the jaw showed where the hearing organs were located. The golden eyes, each the size and shape of a pear, dominated the upper face, with jagged, horizontal slits for pupils.
This one had taken a death wound to the right side of its skull. A ragged gash opened the head from the deeply cleft chin almost to the skull crest, revealing white bone, yellowish blood and tissue, and a stringy mess of red-purple jelly slowly oozing from the wound onto the pavement.