Abbado scanned for heightened CO2 levels. The concentration was normal. A breeze drew air into the slot, so there must be a vent at a higher level. The tree's hollow trunk provided a chimney for the humanoids living within.
"Grenades?" said Horgen, taking one in her hand.
"Not till we know what's inside," Abbado said. He loosened his bandoliers. The rain was coming harder, dripping from leaf tips and the underside of branches. Even a downpour couldn't make the air more humid.
"Right," said Blohm, stepping forward.
Abbado touched the scout's arm, drew him back. "My job," he said. "Your job was to get us here."
Abbado released and reextended his stinger to be sure its sling hadn't jammed. He jogged across the ten yards of open space to the tree.
His shoulders didn't quite brush the edges of the hole, but he had to duck his head slightly to clear the top. The opening fitted the humanoid warriors the way the cutter does cookies that come from it. There were two right-angle bends in the passage beyond, a left and a right. The walls were a light trap, dead black and porous.
Abbado stepped around the second bend, expecting darkness and God alone knew what else. He found what else.
The interior was a cavern whose walls glowed like windows of hammered glass. The light baffle was to keep the tree from shining out into the nighted jungle like an advertising sign.
The entire tree was hollow. The floor sloped from the entrance where Abbado stood into a bowl-shaped cavity of even broader dimensions.
He recognized the figures first. Humanoids of slighter build than the warriors crawled over something that looked like a fuel bladder which filled almost half the cavern's volume. The tenders polished the bladder with wads of gray fabric.
A pair of giants detached themselves from nooks in the sidewall and shambled toward Abbado. They were twelve feet tall and carried edged clubs that must have weighed a hundred pounds. Similar monsters stepped into sight farther from the entrance. They shook off coatings of the amber gelatine which had sealed them into individual cells.
Abbado armed a rocket. The nearest giants raised their clubs.
Man-sized capsules clung to the wall of the cavern. There were hundreds in the highest row, forty feet above the ground. Lower down the light of the surface behind the translucent capsules showed the shadows of developing forms. Those at floor level contained fully-formed warriors.
The bladder twitched and deposited another egg high up on the wall. The bladder was alive. Its head and torso were as large as those of the giants but dwarfed by the swollen obscenity of the abdomen to which they attached. Its beak was thrust into the wall of the tree. A line of scarred punctures around the cavern indicated that at intervals the creature changed the point from which it sucked sap.
The mother.
Abbado fired his rocket into the abdomen of the mother in instinctive revulsion instead of killing the right-hand guard as his conscious mind had planned. Backblast reflected from the cavern wall flung him forward. The giants' clubstrokes, scissoring from either side, struck behind him.
The giants stood between Abbado and the entrance. They raised their clubs with the deft ease of elephants lifting their trunks. Abbado dived between them, collided with the first bend in the passage, and pulled a pair of grenades from his belt. He tossed them into the cavern, then tossed two more.
He'd managed to dodge around the second baffle before the bombs went off. The blast spat him like the cork from a champagne bottle instead of smashing him against the dense wood. He sprawled on the bare ground, then rose to all fours with difficulty.
"How many rockets we got?" Abbado asked. His eyes were closed. His back and neck ached, and his calves had a chilly prickle that probably meant they were bleeding. "I want all your rockets."
"Sarge, you can't go back in there," Matushek said.
"We all go back in there," Abbado said. He pushed himself upright and turned around. "The rest of you keep the big fuckers off me. And I take care of that filthy thing, I swear I do. Fast! Give me the rockets now."
They only had six including the motor whose warhead Abbado'd used to pop open the bridge hatch. The patrol was heavy on ammo and grenades; Horgen, Foley, and Matushek carried grenade launchers as well as stingers. 3-3'd prepared for a shipload of Spooks without much in the way of rocket targets.
Well, they'd need the grenades. Maybe the stingers too, though Abbado doubted pellets had enough penetration to bring down one of those guards in time to do him any good.
He armed the six rockets. He carried one in each hand; the other four—three and a half—dangled from his belt. Arming the rockets was about the most dangerous thing Guilio Abbado had done since he enlisted, but it wasn't like there was a lot of choice.