Seas of Venus(45)

Mostly ammunition. For his rifle, grenade launcher, and the little pistol on his hip. The raiders couldn't shut off the jungle just because they'd emptied their magazines, and Nature's scoring program had very tough sanctions for losers. . . .

Twenty yards away, a patch of ground quivered in the midst of the ash and embers. Leaves lay on it, but the sheen of mud was bright around their edges.

"Watch it," Johnnie whispered, facing his first real test. "That looks like a swamp-chopper burrow. I'll move close and when it rises I'll—"

"Excuse me, sir," said Sergeant Britten blandly. He held the nozzle of his flamethrower in his left hand so that his right was free to unhook a heavy grenade from his belt. "Let's try it my way first."

The veteran lobbed the grenade like a shot put, putting his upper body behind the throw with a grunt. The missile arched down and entered the soft ground with a sullen plop. The explosion that followed was a mere burp of sound, more a quiver through Johnnie's boot soles than a blast.

A column of mud and water shot ten feet into the air, then subsided. Bubbles with a sheen of blood rose and burst for thirty seconds more.

"I thought that might be simpler, sir," Britten said. "No . . . extra credit for neatness here, you see."

"Right," Johnnie said, tight-lipped. "Thanks." He set off past the lair, now harmless.

There was a trail near the end of the burned wedge, worn by God-knew-what and headed in something close to the planned bearing. Johnnie decided to follow it, since the ground was likely firmer than that of most of this low-lying area. They'd still have creeks to cross, and there wasn't a safe way to do that.

But then, there wasn't a safe way to fight any war—unless you were a politician.

The lead element proceeded several hundred yards without incident. Johnnie was on point, and his men were spaced at six-foot intervals behind him—tighter than would be safe against human enemies. He moved slowly, looking in all directions and switching his visor repeatedly between modes of vision.

"Don't forget the canopy," he warned on the general net. "Keep looking up. That's where the real bad ones'll be."

Some of the real bad ones.

The hot, saturated air felt like a bucket of molasses as he slogged through it, and the broad straps of his pack were knives. He couldn't let discomfort affect his alertness, but he didn't see how he could avoid that happening.

Too little light penetrated the forest canopy for there to be a heavy growth of green plants at ground level, but masses of fungus in a variety of forms made up for the lack.

Johnnie paused. Thermal mapping told him that the figure crouching beside the trail wasn't the lizard it seemed to be. It was a toadstool, a Trojan Horse fungus, which had grown into a distorted shape that would attract rather than repel larger, hungry predators. Therefore—

"Red Section," he ordered, pointing. "Together on my count of three, hit that. One, t—"

A member of blue Section fired off the magazine rifle he carried in addition to a flamethrower reload. The surface of the lizard-form puffed out yellow spores launched by chambers of compressed gas within.

"Flame!" Johnnie shouted, knowing it was too late even through Sergeant Britten had anticipated the order by triggering his flamethrower. Helmet filters clamped over Johnnie's nostrils; he squeezed his lips shut against the urge to suck in air through his mouth when his nostrils were constricted.

The white dazzle of Britten's flame-rod touched the fungus and turned it into a soft gush of light as its methane chambers exploded. A second flamethrower intersected with the sergeant's.

The third member of Red Section didn't fire. He lay on his back, arching in convulsions. Either the man had sucked spores in through his mouth, or he'd gone into anaphylactic shock from mere skin contact.

His tongue was black, and there was no life behind his bulging eyes.

The bare backs of Johnnie's hands prickled.

"Right," said Johnnie. He felt cold, as though he'd just stepped into ice water, but that was merely his sweat. "Force Prime, lead element has one fatal. Force Two, take the fresh flamethrower. Blue Two—" the man who'd fired his rifle "—carry the sergeant's flamethrower besides your own equipment."

"Hey, I can't carry—"

Johnnie slapped the side of the man's helmet with his rifle butt.

"You dickhead!" he screamed. "You just killed him, don't you see? That toadstool was waiting to be attacked so its spores would have first crack at fresh meat to grow on! And that's just what you gave them! Your buddy!"

The dead man's face was entirely black now, but the color was more than chemical reaction. Tiny fingers of fungus were already reaching up from the skin, speeded by the warmth of the flesh and the violent struggle for place through which life here had evolved.