Redliners(99)

He hadn't had time to get behind the Spooks before the survivors retreated from C41's storm of fire. He was following a group of six. Paralleling their course, rather, because he'd learned that a moving animal tended to sensitize the vegetation so it reacted instantly to the next one by.

The Kalendru were by their quickness and delicacy better adapted to survive here than humans were, but Blohm didn't have the impression that any of this group understood the forest the way he did. They overcame the forest with speed instead of brute force like the strikers of C41.

Caius Blohm coexisted with the forest, moving through it as a midge does a coarse screen. The forest might resent his presence, but it couldn't touch him while his mind remained one with it.

He hadn't seen the Kalendru since the first exchange of fire. They chittered to one another as they moved, but for the most part Blohm tracked his quarry by the way the forest itself reacted. Leaves turned, branches rustled without wind; even the air pressure shifted. All those things pointed to the Kalendru as surely as a blind man can locate the sun by the touch of light on his bare skin.

The Kalendru moved in quick spurts like mice scurrying from one bit of cover to the next in an open landscape. Blohm's progress was steadier and marginally faster. Eventually the Spooks would stop and Caius Blohm would not.

They were insertion troops, the Kalendru equivalent of the Strike Force. They wore baggy garments that stored body heat electrochemically in tubing along the seams, and they had facial scarves—which they'd pulled down as they ran—that absorbed CO2 from their breath.

But the Spooks had only personal lasers for armament and their clothing was ragged. Whatever they had been when they arrived on Bezant, these Kalendru were shipwrecked castaways now.

Blohm heard them pause on the other side of a fallen tree eight feet in diameter; its further end was lost in the undergrowth a hundred feet beyond. He moved close, careful not to touch the log. Fungus on the bark formed tiny fairy castles—turret on turret on turret, each sprouting from the top of the one below. Dust motes that drifted onto the amber droplets beading the domes stuck as if to hot tar.

The Kalendru were talking. If Blohm turned on his helmet, the translation program would have told him what they were saying. That didn't matter.

Moving with even greater care than before, Blohm worked around the fallen tree to the opposite side. A tangle of vines as dense and spiky as a crown of thorns now separated him from his prey. Miniature white flowers grew from the vines. Their faces rotated toward the human's warmth. The tips of the vines themselves began to stretch in his direction as slowly as lava oozing from a volcanic fissure.

Blohm smiled at the brambles. Oh, yes, he understood malevolence like theirs.

He took a grenade from his belt and tossed it over the vine thicket with an easy motion.

The morose jabbering became hooting terror. Blohm was moving away with the best speed safety permitted in case one of the Spooks did what Blohm would have done—throw a grenade back the other way.

None of them did. He heard thuds and despairing cries. Limbs thrashed. For ten or fifteen seconds Spook lasers screamed like angry cats on the other side of the brambles.

Blohm switched his stinger on and circled carefully to the opening by which the Spooks had entered the passage between the thicket and the fallen tree. He'd been sure of getting one of them, hoped to bag several. In the event, he heard none of them escape.

They were waiting for him, though only three could turn their heads in Blohm's direction. They'd attempted to climb to safety on the other side of the tree when the grenade landed among them. They stuck like six long-legged flies on a honey-coated rod.

Blohm reached down and dropped the grenade back into a trouser pocket. He hadn't armed it. The Kalendru didn't wear rank insignia any more than strikers did in the field, but one of the silent captives had the prominent facial veins that were signs of nobility among the species.

"You'll do," Blohm said to the officer. He'd switched on his helmet. Its voice synthesizer chittered a translation.

The Spook's torso and both arms were stuck to the log. He held a laser in his right hand, but it was glued in the fungus also. Blohm bent, aimed carefully, and chiseled away the log's surface with a long burst from his stinger.

The Spook hooted as splinters whacked his belly at fire-hose velocity. The chunk of bark holding him pulled loose at the bottom. Blohm grabbed the neck scarf and tugged hard, half-choking his captive but freeing him the rest of the way from the tree. The Kalender's arms were still pinioned like those of a yoked slave.

Blohm fired a single pellet into the laser. Plastic disintegrated with a fat purple spark. The captive flinched away, but he wasn't badly hurt.