Redliners(81)

Gabrilovitch swore softly. "How long do you figure it'll take us to get back to the column, snake?" he asked.

"Too long," Blohm said. Too long, or I'd be headed back right now even if they hang me for desertion when I get there.

There was less than an hour to sunset. It would arrive like a curtain falling in these latitudes. Besides, even if he tried to make the last of the distance at night—and maybe he could, just maybe—the attack would be over by a few minutes from now.

"Those kid-killing bastards," Blohm said, his lips barely moving. "Those bastards."

Sergeant Abbado stuck his head out of the opening in the ship's hull. A moment later he and Matushek thrust a Spook through, dangling him by arms that looked so pale that they were almost transparent. The prisoner was humming loudly, a Kalendru sign of misery and despair.

Foley took the Spook by one leg and reached up to grip him under the arm to lower him to the ground. The Spook seemed catatonic. He was thin even by Kalendru standards; Blohm wondered if there'd been any food in the compartment where he was hiding.

Gabe started forward to give Foley a hand. Matushek boosted Abbado to where he could climb out in turn. Blohm eyed a tree on the other side of the crashed vessel. Its branches were drawing up by minute increments.

Nobody expected a problem: Kalendru stopped fighting as soon as they were captured. Maybe Foley should've been paying more attention to the Spook and less to his sergeant, but any experienced striker was likely to have done the same thing.

The Spook twisted out of Foley's grip with the Kalendru equivalent of hysterical strength and ran toward the jungle, humming even louder. His eyes were open but Blohm didn't think they were focusing.

Gabe shouted and ran to block the prisoner's escape. Foley stumbled as he tried to follow. Blohm knew he couldn't help unless the Spook changed direction, but he sprinted anyway out of the reflex to chase whatever runs away.

The Spook took a gazelle-like leap toward the unbroken forest. Gabe waved his arms, still shouting. Blohm saw what was about to happen and called, "Let him go! Gabe—"

The Spook leaped again. Gabrilovitch dived after him, grabbing the Spook around the shoulders in a high tackle. Together they smashed into a shooting tree about a dozen feet high.

The head of the young tree burst with a vicious crack. Gabe cried out. He and the Spook hit the ground and bounced apart, concerned now with their own wounds rather than each other. The prisoner was clutching his thigh while Gabrilovitch had a hand on his left shoulder. Because they'd been in motion when they touched the trunk, the blast of spikes hadn't caught them squarely.

Blohm reached the victims first. He pried his partner's hand away. There were three closely-spaced puncture wounds; the points of the spikes poked through the back of Gabe's battledress, just below the collarbone. A tree this small didn't fire missiles as heavy and powerful as the adult whose spikes had raked the humans at the crash site.

Blohm took a first aid patch from his medikit and slapped it over the entrance wounds. It closed the holes and leached pain killers through the skin at a rate metered by needs. In a few seconds a color-coded display on the back of the patch would provide a rough diagnosis of the injuries and prognosis.

Foley and Sergeant Abbado joined them. The sergeant looked as grim as a war hammer. He took the Spook by the wrists to anchor him and pull his hands away to expose his wounds. There was only one, a neat hole in the right thigh with no exit.

"Doesn't look too bad," Abbado said. "Guess we got lucky. But this means we've got to carry the sonofabitch back to the column for interro—"

The Kalender's body stiffened. The edges of the wound had darkened. A purple discoloration continued to spread across the gray skin even though the Spook's heart and circulatory system had obviously quit for good. His mouth opened and the tongue thrust out, pink and as stiff as a dog's dong.

"Poison!" Gabrilovitch said. "Oh, Christ, I've been poisoned."

"No," Blohm said, looking at the readout on Gabe's patch: everything well in the green. "You haven't, but the Spook sure as hell was. Their chemistry's different and the trees here aren't targeted for us. Yet."

"I think," said Sergeant Abbado, "that we'll stick here with the ship until daylight instead of starting back right now."

He looked at the sky and the jungle, then added, "God damn this place."



"Tell your civilians to lie flat next to the berm!" Farrell ordered as he ran forward. The two satchels of grenades he'd grabbed from the lead trailer swung in his left hand, pulling him off balance with every stride. The stinger wasn't heavy enough to compensate, even though he held it out for leverage. "Squad Two-two come forward, the rest of you hold in place. All civilians down, down flat! Over!"