Redliners(41)

"Ah, shit, snake," Gabrilovitch said. He didn't waste his breath ordering Blohm to return.

The forest murmured. Blohm felt he'd stepped into a dark cave and heard a beast breathing somewhere in the twisted grottos beyond; waiting, considering its options.

Saplings and the boles of full-grown trees were planted more thickly than Blohm had learned to expect in other jungles. Normally, except where streams and clearings permit light to reach the ground, the foliage of the monster trees forms a canopy hundreds of feet in the air and starves lesser growth.

Seeds sprout on stored energy and die as pale wraiths of their hope unless one of the neighboring giants falls during the sapling's brief window of opportunity. In this forest, chinks in the canopy permitted young trees to continue to grow if not exactly to flourish. They'd be ready to replace their forebears immediately.

Blohm moved without haste, like a shopper moving down a store aisle. His helmet scanned in all directions for sudden movements. Blohm kept not only his eyes but his whole mind open against danger.

Particularly he watched the treetops and higher branches. Moving through this forest was like city fighting: the real dangers lurked in the upper stories.

Fans set up an echoing howl in the clearing behind him. They were flying the expedition's sole aircar out of the hold. The starship and those around it existed in a world with only peripheral connection to Blohm's.

He didn't touch any tree. He always looked before he placed his foot for the next step. And he moved with a ghost's effortless silence, wrapped in a shroud of total awareness.

The pair of Kalendru soldiers hadn't been so careful. They'd run through the little clearing bounded by the triplet of trees and now stood in contorted poses.

Sap had sprayed simultaneously from the ruptured bark of the three trees. Blohm judged it had started as an aerosol, but it must have set instantly because the weapons the Spooks dropped in their terror hadn't reached the ground.

The sap dried clear, though air bubbles and ripples in the surface distorted images in the hardened mass. Blohm thought refraction explained the corpses' blurred outlines, but when he switched his visor to microwave imaging he realized his mistake.

The sap had been intensely corrosive as well as entombing its victims in mid-stride. The Spooks looked fuzzy because their bodies had started to dissolve in the instant they were caught. Even the metal and plastic of their equipment was pitted.

"C41," Blohm reported, "mark. The Spooks got here ahead of us, but I don't think they're our main problem. The forest doesn't like them any better than it does us. And people, it doesn't like us even a little bit."





Survival, Considered as an Option


"Is everybody out of the ship?" Farrell asked al-Ibrahimi, shouting because of the aircar idling beside them. Even feathered, the lift fans moaned as they dragged air down the filtered inlet ducts.

"There are mumble-mumble—" Lundie said.

"Shut your fucking motors off!" Farrell shouted at the building staffer driving the eight-place open car.

"Who do you think you are?" she shouted back. Farrell knew she was just nervous; and she wasn't in the military, much less under his command, but his anger spiked in a way that made everything but the driver's red face fade to the fringes of his awareness.

Lieutenant Kuznetsov, looking toward the tree line, reached into the vehicle and threw the main circuit breaker. The twin fans wound down with a last whisper of despair. Kuznetsov stepped away from the car, talking to one of the squads placed at the edge of the jungle.

"There are ninety-two colonists still on the ship," Lundie repeated. Her expression hadn't changed during the "discussion," but that in itself was a remark. "Most of them refuse to leave of their own will, but on Deck 13 the monitors failed to account for the residents before they left the vessel. The six persons missing from that deck may include some injured."

Lundie and her boss wore skeletonized headsets. The rigs had the same projection and communication abilities as the strikers' helmets, though they didn't protect the wearer. Al-Ibrahimi spoke in a quick, calm voice to someone. Farrell glimpsed a montage of twelve images when the project manager turned his head and the hologram aligned almost subliminally for Farrell as well.

Farrell ran his fingers over the pouches of his crossed bandoliers. He had four squads on the perimeter, a terrible deployment. The squads couldn't support one another because of the dead and fallen trees throughout the landing site. Besides, he didn't have any particular reason to assume the Spooks would attack at those particular segments of a perimeter over a mile around.

There was no doubt of the Kalendru presence. Quite apart from the bodies Blohm found, the Spooks had abandoned so much equipment that strikers turned up dozens of items while moving through the area.