Seas of Venus(114)

Another ant warrior jogged swiftly down the trunk toward him. Leaf pulled his multitool down and locked the take-up spool so that the lanyard hung in the extended position.

The island's peak was dominated by a cypress tree over three hundred feet in girth. OT Wilding had mumbled that the monster probably combined the trunks of up to a dozen individual trees which had grown together. The gigantic result had crushed all lesser vegetation in the neighborhood. Its mighty bole added several hundred feet to the island's thousand-foot elevation.

Leaf's present job was to knock the cypress down.

The ant trotted closer, drawn by scent and movement. Leaf held his multitool out. The ant slashed at it. Leaf pressed the stud. The welding arc popped the insect with a stench of formic acid.

"Goddam!" Caffey shouted. "What're you trying to do, kill us both? What if the barakite had lighted, huh?"

"Shut up and gimme some more of it," Leaf said.

The motorman was dizzy with muscle strain and lack of sleep. There was a rash around the collar of his tunic; the others said it was bright red. The rash itched spasmodically, burning like a ring of fire at the random times something set it off. Leaf's limbs were crisscrossed by grass cuts, some of them poisoned and all of them festering.

He had to keep going with the explosive, because if he stopped for more than a moment, he was going to tear Caffey's throat out.

The torpedoman handed Leaf a wad of barakite, then looked into the knapsack from which it had come. "Not much left," he said.

Leaf grunted. He began to form the explosive into a rope. His hands, particularly the muscles at the base of his thumbs, ached with the effort.

Brainard had led the survivors as high as the ridge would take them. In order to send a laser message, they either had to climb a tree to the top of the canopy—or create a gap where it stood.

"Hang on," the torpedoman muttered. "I'm going to shoot 'em."

"Huh?" said Leaf.

WHAM!

"You fuckin' idiot!" the motorman screamed. He grabbed for Caffey with his left hand. The cutting blade winked from the multitool in his right.

His legs cramped. He fell back as the torpedoman skipped away.

"What is it?" Brainard demanded. His disembodied voice was as harshly emotionless as life in this surface wilderness.

"We're okay," Caffey shouted back. In a lower voice, he snarled, "Look, I said what I was gonna do. Fuck off, will you?"

Leaf looked up at the tree trunk. The gun's muzzle blast had driven fragments of three ants into the soft bark. The bullet scar was a white-cored russet dimple in the striated gray surface.

It had been a fucking stupid thing to do.

Leaf opened his mouth to snarl at the torpedoman. Light streaming through interstices in the cypress leaves illuminated Caffey.

The torpedoman's bare skin was blotched with sores. He was allergic to insect bites, and the first-aid cream did him no more good than it did Leaf's own rash. The hard weight of the machine-gun had broken the skin over Caffey's shoulderblades on both sides. The wounds oozed in an atmosphere purulent with fungus spores. His staring eyes were red with pain and fear.

Leaf shivered.

"Don't do it again, huh?" he said. He worked one end of the strand of barakite into the glob of explosive containing the ant. That was the present terminus of the daisy chain he was weaving as far around the tree's circumference as possible.

Climbing a tree was suicide. This particular monster was guarded by a colony of ants which ate fleshy berries the cypress grew for the insects' sustenance. The ants in turn patrolled the vast expanse of bark and foliage, slaughtering interlopers with a catholic abandon.

No life form on the planet could survive the attack of up to ten thousand acid-tipped mandibles. Leaf and Caffey were at risk even on the ground, where they could move easily. Fifty feet up the trunk, with hands and feet constrained and gravity ready to strike the finishing blow, risk became the certainty of death.

The other option was to blow the tree down. That was emotionally satisfying as well as practical.

Leaf waddled two yards further around the trunk, pulling his thin strand of barakite with him. Though the bark had a smooth, glossy tinge, the explosive clung in an adequate fashion to fibrous irregularities in the surface.

"More," the motorman ordered, holding out his left hand. Undergrowth brushed his shoulder, then the back of his neck. Tiny hooks bit in; Leaf's rash flared incandescently. He turned and slashed in fury with the short blade of his multitool.

Caffey waited for the spasm to pass before he dropped a wad of barakite into the motorman's palm. "Just two besides this," he said. "And the one you've got in your pack."

Leaf pressed the barakite against the trunk in contact with the ribbon he had just laid there. "More," he said, and another doughy wad dropped into his hand.