Seas of Venus(105)

A large insect might trust its armor to protect it while browsing on the vines and later berries, but Leaf already had enough experience with surface life to imagine the results. The brambles gave only until the animal was fully within their mass. Then—

Just like a fishnet. A thorn-studded fishnet.

The CO looked at the tangle without expression. "We'll go on," he said flatly. "I can't cut that."

"Hey!" said Caffey. "We can blow it clear! With the barakite."

"No," said Wilding. "We'll use the barakite to burn it. We don't want to pulverize the rock."

Brainard looked from Wilding to Leaf. "All right," he said. "Leaf, you'll lay the charges. All right?"

Leaf nodded. "Yessir."

He shrugged to slide the pack straps off his shoulders. At first his muscles wouldn't respond; then the load slipped abruptly. The straps scraped his arms, and the pack itself bruised the backs of his thighs.

"We'll use portions of the barakite from everybody's pack," the ensign continued. "And don't let any ignite that you don't mean to burn."

"Yessir," Leaf muttered. He knelt to begin work.

Brainard turned and cut at the grass rustling lethally closer to the human interlopers. Leaf saw that the CO had difficulty raising the cutting bar enough to use it.

Leaf rolled a ball of explosive between his palms, forming it into a coarse thread. The barakite was tacky in the moist heat, but the plasticizing additive retained its tensile strength so that Leaf could create a creamy white strand as thin as his little finger before the material broke under its own weight.

Caffey began forming a thread of his own when he saw what the motorman was doing. At Brainard's order, the other enlisted men passed blobs of barakite to the chiefs. They were probably glad to be rid of a few pounds of their burdens. . . .

When he had six strands of explosive, each a yard and a half long, the motorman paused. "Okay, that'll do," he muttered to his hands.

Caffey held out a canteen. "Have some water first," he said.

Leaf was too exhausted to argue with any suggestion. "Yeah, sure," he said. He reached for his own canteen.

Water was no problem. The condensing jacket on each crewman's canteen would fill the quart flask within ten minutes in this saturated atmosphere.

"Naw," said the torpedoman. "Use mine."

Leaf took the canteen and drank deeply. His eyes flashed open.

For the first time he noticed that the torpedoman carried two canteens. This one was full of rum.

Caffey grinned. "Essential to life," he said.

"You bet," said Leaf. "Now, everybody keep the hell back."

The brambles trembled softly toward him. He thought for a moment, then said, "Sir, lemme borrow the rifle, okay?"

Brainard handed the weapon over without comment. Leaf set one end of a barakite thread over the flash hider at the rifle's muzzle and used the weapon to feed the explosive through the thorns.

A black twig two feet into the mass suddenly flared its "bark" into a pincushion of spines tipped with brilliant blue. Leaf shouted and jumped backward.

Two black eyes winked at him; a forked tongue dabbed at the air. The tiny lizard folded its scales as suddenly as it had erected them and scurried back into the tangle.

Caffey had his machine-gun leveled.

"What?" Ensign Brainard demanded. "What?"

Leaf took a deep breath. "Nothing," he said. "Stay clear."

He checked around him. Wheelwright supported OT Wilding, and Brainard had dragged Leaf's own pack a safe three yards away. The barakite strands lying on the ground were as good a compromise as Leaf could judge between being out of the way and being ready to use. . . .

He tucked the first thread another inch into the brambles which were already closing on it, withdrew the rifle and tossed it to Brainard, and lit the barakite with his multitool.

Leaf instinctively covered his ears as he ducked away, but the sound was a vicious snarl rather than an explosion. A wave of heat slapped his back.

When the motorman looked around, the half-consumed strand had already fallen to land on rock through the gap its radiance cleared. For several feet to either side, the brambles themselves burned with sullen orange flames, dim by contrast with the blue-white dazzle which had ignited them. Even beyond that range, vines drew back as heat seared away their moisture.

A haze of barakite residues oozed through the tangle. Leaf grabbed a second strand of explosive. He sucked in another deep breath and plunged into the sudden clearing while blobs of barakite still sputtered, cracking rock with the last of their energy.

There was no time for finesse now, but there was less need for it also. The initial blast of heat had stunned the brambles and robbed them of much of their thorn-clawed speed. Leaf tossed his thread of barakite over a slope of vines whose outer surface was already baked brown.