Redliners(29)

He ran the chip back to a close-up of the swarm's advancing front.

"—and there I got to agree with Analysis. These things dam creeks so they can cross and weave rafts to get over rivers. A fence isn't even going to slow them down."

"So what is?" Methie asked.

"We are," said Abbado. "With our stingers. They can't run as fast as a man, and they can't even squirt you without you let them get inside ten feet or so. In broken terrain it'll be a problem, and they come by the righteous shitload. Fifty, sixty thousand Analysis figures. If a swarm heads in the direction of the settlement, we get in front of them and shoot every mother's son."

"Krishna," Caldwell repeated.

"Now, the chance of a swarm of those critters being in the wrong place may not be very high," Abbado continued as he indexed to the next set of images. "The large carnivores have overlapping territories, and it'll be a while before we stop having to kill the ones that replaced the ones we killed the week before."

An animal with four legs, a short body, and a whip-thin neck appeared in the projection area.

"These're ambush hunters," Abbado said, "and they charge at at least 65 miles an hour because that's what the one they spotted here was doing."

"Shit," muttered Matushek. "Shit, shit, shit."



Esther Meyer sat on her bunk with her helmet on. She viewed the Bezant data at 100 percent on her visor, completely blocking her sight of the compartment around her. Several strikers played cards on a footlocker elsewhere in the room. She was aware of their voices, but the words didn't impinge on a consciousness focused on the vessel's destination.

"Hey Essie."

"Besides being toxic at least to native lifeforms," said a voiceover from the database as a vine uncoiled in Meyer's apparent field of view, "this species appears to digest animal carcasses through rootlets—"

"Meyer! You there?" Knuckles rapped on her helmet.

Meyer flipped up the visor. "Nessman, you got a problem?" she snapped. She didn't like having her concentration broken, and she was plenty willing to revert relations with the willowy blond striker to their old hostile footing.

"Aw, Essie, I'm sorry," Nessman said, looking and sounding contrite. "I just wanted to know what you think about this place. Did you see what it said about disease? The colonists all need immune boosters!"

"Yeah, I saw," Meyer said. She ducked forward to lift off her helmet so that she wouldn't bang it against the upper bunk. "What's the big deal? We've all got boosters since basic training."

The booster was a porous ceramic shell the size of a little finger implanted in the user's left hip. It was a biofactory that cleaned the user's body of everything from viruses to parasites that were almost big enough to see with the naked eye.

The tradeoff for this protection was that each booster cost as much as a mid-quality aircar. For the military, that expense was reasonable. There was no point in training and transporting troops to a distant planet only to have them die of disease even before they closed with the Kalendru.

Colonists were another matter. Planets were scouted thoroughly before settlement, a luxury that an invasion force didn't have. If the microbiota was too dangerous, the Population Authority could simply pick another world. The number of nearby Standard Planets—Earthlike within tight parameters—was in the tens of thousands.

"But colonists?" Nessman said.

Meyer rubbed her scalp. Nessman looked like he was going to say something he shouldn't, like, "You want me to do that?" But he shut his mouth again and raised his right palm in a peace sign.

"I can't figure out what Military Command thinks it's doing," Meyer said. "Don't ask me to figure out the Pop Authority."

Nessman had been a rocketeer on Maxus. His crew had launched two of their rounds when a Spook lasered the third. Nessman came out of it okay because he happened to be squatting on the other side of his sergeant when the missile blew up in the cradle. He and Meyer were all C41 had left from Heavy Weapons; though Bateson had survived without his legs and when the strikers left Stalleybrass the medics still thought they might save Lieutenant Whichard.

Steve Nessman was a handsome fellow who liked women, or at any rate liked screwing them. He'd made a pass at Meyer a couple days after she was posted to C41.

Meyer turned him down flat. She'd met the type before. They were too full of themselves to be any damned good, and she wasn't naive enough any more to believe they actually meant any of the things they said before they got into your pants.

A few days after that, she'd been checking inventory alone when Nessman entered and closed the storehouse door behind him. He wouldn't take no, so she clawed for his eyes instead.