David Weber - Hell's Gate

He turned toward the standing trees where the enemy had formed his line, and more flashes came. Shouts in an alien tongue. Men rustling cautiously through the trees, circling around to get at the defenders' flanks. Strange, glassy tubes that belched flame and lightning, just as Kinlafia had described. And bodies. Everywhere he turned, Whiffing the air, Parcanthi saw bodies. Caught in tangled tree limbs, sprawled across toppled tree trunks … lying in neat rows.

He jerked his attention back to that flash and tried to recapture it, to wring more detail from it. He saw the dead laid out in careful rows, limbs arranged as if they were only sleeping. Other men moved among them, placing something small on each corpse. He could see Sharonian dead, as well as those of the enemy. They'd grouped the survey crew together, it looked like, but the images were so tenuous he couldn't tell for sure how many Sharonians there were. He was still trying to count when an unholy flash of light blinded him. The bodies began to burn with unnatural brilliance?

Parcanthi let out a yell and staggered back, gasping.

"What is it?" someone demanded, practically in his ear. "What did you Whiff?"

Parcanthi jerked around and found Hulmok Arthag standing at his shoulder.

"W-what?" he gulped, still more than a little disoriented.

"What did you Whiff?" Petty Captain Arthag asked again, and Parcanthi swallowed hard.

"They cremated the dead," he answered, his voice hoarse. "With something … unnatural."

"I'm starting to dislike that adjective," the Arpathian officer growled. He glowered at the clearing for a moment, jaw working as if he wanted to spit. Then he shook himself and looked back at the Whiffer. "What else did you get?"

Parcanthi gave himself a shake, regathering his composure.

"Part of the battle Kinlafia described, Sir. Just faint glimpses. The details are already fading, dissipating. They cremated our dead, as well as their own, but the images are so tenuous, it's hard to tell how many of our people were burnt."

"Keep trying," Arthag said in clipped tones. "We need to know if there were survivors."

"Yes, Sir. I know. I'll do my best."

"Good man." Arthag put a hand briefly on his shoulder, then nodded. "Carry on, then."

As Parcanthi got back to work, Arthag turned toward Soral Hilovar, who was searching through the fallen trees where the Chalgyn crew had taken shelter.

"Anything?" he asked, and the Tracer looked up with a bitter expression.

"Whoever these bastards are, they left damned little behind. If I could get my hands on something of theirs, I could tell you a fair bit, but they were fiendishly thorough scavengers. I haven't found anything they left behind, and not a single piece of Sharonian equipment, either,for that matter. I've found spot after spot where our people set down packs, or what were probably ammunition boxes, but they're gone. All I've got so far is this."

He held up a handful of spent cartridge cases, and Arthag gazed at them through narrow eyes.

"They mean to learn all they can from our gear," he said flatly, then inhaled and grimaced at the Tracer. "Nolis says they cremated the dead. I know it won't be pleasant, but try reading the ash piles."

He nodded toward the most open portion of the clearing, where Parcanthi stood in the midst of fire scars the length and shape of human bodies. Hilovar's jaw muscles bunched, but he nodded with the choppiness of barely suppressed anger. Not at Arthag, the petty-captain knew, but at what he was going to find out there.

"Yes, Sir," he bit out. "I'll do whatever it takes, Sir."

The normally cheerful Ricathian stalked toward the fire scars. At least he wasn't a novice when it came to crime scene work. His ten-year stint as a homicide Tracer in Lubnasi, the city-state of his birth, had inured him to mere human cruelty and suffering. He understood that people did violence to one another, even in a world of telepaths. But this …

The ash pits, while macabre, were less horrifying to a former homicide Tracer than they would have been to a civilian. Not that they didn't bother Hilovar anyway, of course. But that was because he could already tell they were tainted with something not quite right, something profoundly disturbing. Whatever it was, he'd already encountered it when he Traced the survey crew's actual death sites.

He put that memory out of his mind, focusing on the immediate task as he knelt beside the first human-sized scorch mark. There wasn't much left, not even bone. A few twisted, melted bits of metal glinted dully in the ashes, but there wasn't even much of that. Not enough to tell if the bits had been buttons, or buckles, or something else entirely. Just a few droplets, where something had melted and dripped away until it coalesced into ugly, formless flakes and bits too small even to call pebbles.

Simply touching the ashes and splashes of metal sent vile prickles up his arms. Everything he touched gave off the same feeling as the death sites had, only worse. More concentrated. The vibrations of the energy he would normally have sensed in a place where humans had been incinerated?a house fire, say?had been warped by something uncanny in these ash pits. The residues crawled along his skin uncomfortably, like being jabbed with thousands of microscopic pins.

When he doublechecked with Parcanthi on the location of cremation sites that were almost certainly Sharonian, then cross-referenced with sites which had definitely contained the enemy's dead, he found exactly the same residues on both, which led to an inescapable conclusion. Whatever they'd used to cremate their own dead had been used to burn the Sharonian dead, as well, so the odd residue wasn't a signature given off by the enemy's bodies. And whatever it was, they'd used something similar to kill the Chalgyn Consortium's people in the first place, because that weapon had left behind the same unsettling energy residue, all over the death sites. It was exactly the same residue as whatever they'd used to ignite the funeral pyres, and he couldn't make any sense out of it at all.

"How were they burned?" he muttered to himself without even realizing he'd spoken aloud. "Whatever it was, it was damned odd."

It's certainly hadn't been any fuel Hilovar had ever encountered. There was no wood ash, so it couldn't have been a traditional, archaic funeral pyre. It hadn't been kerosene, either, or some kind of flammable vegetable oil, or anything else he could think of. Besides, each of these fire scars was exactly the size of a single body… and they'd been burned out of the surrounding leaf mold without touching off a general conflagration. He saw the proof of that right in front of him, but the very idea was still ridiculous. He'd never heard of any fire intense enough to totally consume a human body … not to mention one that burned a neat hole out of drifts of dry leaves without spreading at all!

He furrowed his brow, trying to identify the elusive, disturbing sensation. It was more like the energy patterns near portals than anything else he could think of, but it wasn't the same as that, either. It was … different.

He growled in frustration and stood, looking around until he spotted Acting Platoon-Captain Arthag and Parcanthi. They were standing together to one side, and he strode briskly over to them. When he tried to explain his confusing impressions, the cavalry officer looked baffled, but the Whiffer blinked. He frowned for a few seconds, then nodded vigorously.

"I think you're onto something, Soral," he said. "I kept getting a Whiff of something really odd in this clearing. It was pretty strong where our people died, but it was even stronger over there." He pointed into the standing trees opposite the clearing where the crew had made its fatal last stand. "I got the strongest sense of it where I caught the flashes of those weird, shiny tubes Kinlafia described."