Harker crawled over the field of death, over the remains of shattered bodies. The front of his spacesuit became caked with mud and some not–quite–dried blood that had an inhuman, oily consistency. The drizzle was becoming harder, turning to rain, but still steaming up from the radioactively heated ground. Clouds of vapor fogged his way, hiding the object of his search. Still Harker crawled, keeping to the direction he knew to be the true one.
His leg was on fire, and every centimeter of the crawl was hell, a surrealist’s nightmare of the world gone mad. Once he thought he heard a scream, and he looked around, but there was no one nearby. It must have been a hallucination. He’d had them before on the battlefield, under pain.
He reached his goal after an eternity of crawling. He could dete
