Seas of Venus(48)

"Whazzat?" demanded a rocketeer, spinning in an attempt to face all directions during the time something could reach him. Green Section had been windy ever since they'd heard what happened in center element.

"That's the Angels shelling some tree," Sergeant Britten replied with cool scorn as he continued to examine the arc of jungle he'd assigned himself to cover. "Normal base maintenance. Don't get your bowels in 'n uproar, huh?"

Johnnie bent and thrust his arms through the packstraps again. He held his rifle upright between his knees. "There's more Trojan Horse fungus ahead to the right," he said. "Give it a wide—"

A thirty-foot-long iguana—its ancestors had been iguanas—poked its head through a mass of reeds. It clamped shut the flaps over its nostrils, then came on at a rush. Green Prime was staring straight at the creature when it began its charge.

Some plant-eating forms had evolved into carnivores on Venus, but the iguanas remained vegetarians. Fronds of brush dangled away from the corners of the creature's mouth, then fell away as it bleated a challenge.

The bulls and rhinoceroses of Earth had been vegetarians also. That meant they attacked out of ill-temper and territoriality rather than from need for food; a distinction without a difference for the corpses they left behind them.

Green Prime knelt and aimed his weapons pod. Johnnie, struggling to free himself from his pack, saw the four rocket nozzles staring back at him. He flung himself to the side, abandoning his rifle.

"Watch it, you damned—" shouted Sergeant Britten.

Green Prime's first rocket ignited. The man who'd been beside Johnnie hadn't moved. The backblast caught him, and his flamethrower reload exploded.

The scream and white-hot glare of fuel threw the rocketeer off. The remainder of his ripple-fired pod raked the foliage to the side of the intended target.

The first missile had struck the bony scutes protecting the iguana's skull. If the range had been slightly longer—if the rocket had reached terminal velocity—it could have drilled straight through a comparable thickness of armor plate. The difference of a second's burn-time (the disadvantage of a rocket compared to a gun) was the difference between life and death for Green Prime.

His missile glanced from the lizard. The impact staggered the beast. That was not enough to keep it from clamping its jaws over the rocketeer's torso, then spewing out the remains in a froth of blood as the creature twisted for another victim.

Sergeant Britten's flamethrower licked across the blunt head at point-blank range. A ruff of red, orange, and blue flame enveloped the iguana as horny skin burned and colored its white destroyer. The creature lashed out in blind pain, flinging Britten in one direction and his flamethrower in another.

Johnnie rolled as though driven by the ball of fire incinerating his pack and the man beside it. The brush-cutting team had dropped their saw and were firing rifles. Explosive bullets glittered across the iguana's flank; even solids would have been useless against a creature of such bulk and armor.

Johnnie's pistol was useless also. He fired anyway, aiming at the back of the creature's knees as it strode forward. The splayed legs of the lizard's ancestors had been modified into a graviportal stance suitable for the giant's elephantine bulk.

The iguana—eyeless, lipless, and terrible—turned.

Something clasped Johnnie's nose. He screamed and tried to lash free of the grip while the lizard lumbered toward him.

Nothing was holding him. His filters had just closed for protection. Sergeant Britten, moving feebly, had collapsed the clump of Trojan Horse fungus when he landed. The lethal spores were drifting out in their broad-spreading trajectory.

One of the brush cutters threw down his rifle and ran. The other tried to reload but dropped one, then another, full magazine.

The iguana doubled itself in a sideways arc, then sprang straight again and flopped over on its spiny back. Its right legs kicked violently, but the left pair were frozen.

A rocketeer walked his load up the iguana's rib cage. The third and fourth missiles were close enough to terminal velocity that they exited the far side of the animal, sucking with them a puree of the creature's heart and lungs.

"Cease fire," Johnnie ordered. He forced his numb lips to blow out the words while he breathed only through his filters. "Cease fire, it's dead. Cease fire."

Under normal circumstances the iguana would have been invulnerable to the spores of the Trojan Horse, but Sergeant Britten's flame had burned off the lizard's nostril flaps. Black, questing streaks of fungus were already taking possession of the giant corpse.

"Lead Prime, report!" Uncle Dan's voice demanded in Johnnie's ears. "Any lead-element personnel, report!"