Back | Next
Contents

Local Visitors

The air was hot and still and humid, but at least the trees towering to either side of the cut shaded the column from direct sun. Abbado noticed Dr. Ciler nearby, helping a woman with a cane. She was tramping along determinedly instead of riding on top of a trailer.

"Hey Doc?" he called. "How long do you think it's going to be before the leaves all go transparent so the sun can shine on us full strength?"

The old woman turned in horror. "Oh, dear heaven," she said. "Is that going to happen next?"

"The sergeant was joking, Mrs. Trescher," Ciler said. "Certainly I would applaud if I thought I'd have nothing worse to treat than sunburns, though."

A stinger fired from the front of the column, just a short burst. When a squad from First Platoon took the lead after four hours, 3-3 and the civilians they guarded let the front half of the column move past them. It didn't seem to Abbado that any location was more dangerous than another, but a lot of people were going to be convinced that wherever they were was the hot seat. God or the major kept the level of bitching down by rotating the order of march.

It had taken the new team about an hour to stop blasting the hell out of anything that looked weird. This whole fucking jungle looked weird. You had to learn to use stingers sparingly, a few pellets here and there to recon by fire. Otherwise you were likely to have half the squad reloading when the shit really hit the fan.

Abbado was responsible for over two hundred colonists in this position. The major'd given his squad leaders the choice of how they deployed their strikers. Abbado split his in pairs at intervals among the civilians. He didn't trust a lone striker when these damned trees were likely to come at you from both sides at once.

Abbado was alone at the head of the section, but what the fuck. That was the sort of decision you made when you let them give you the promotion.

There were still stretches of thirty or forty yards between pairs. The way the trail zigzagged meant sometimes civilians were out of sight of the nearest guards. You couldn't expect people hauling stretchers and too much of the wrong kind of luggage to stay in parade-ground formation. Abbado hadn't thought much about civilians since he enlisted, and what he did think hadn't been very positive. These folks were okay, the most of them.

Mrs. Florescu, the woman wearing Caldwell's extra boots, took the old lady's arm from Dr. Ciler. Florescu was carrying a soft bag in her left hand, dragging the bottom along the bulldozed ground. Abbado wouldn't have bet that either the bag or the woman would last out the day, but he'd sure give her credit for trying.

Meyer sat a little to one side of the track, taking off her hard suit. She looked drawn. Since she was already suited up, she'd moved to the lead dozer when Pressley bought the farm. Meyer kept the slot after 3-3 rotated back in the line. Abbado figured the vibration as the dozer chewed its way forward would have wrung him out in a lot less than four hours.

"Hey, Essie," he said. "Get tired of the scenery up front?"

The sound of a tree falling started and went on for a long time, too loud for conversation in a reasonable tone of voice even this far back in the column. Abbado motioned to the civilians nearest to him. "Take five," he shouted. They were getting too close to the staggering tail of the previous section. Mixing the groups was a worse danger than stringing the whole line out a trifle longer.

Meyer sucked water from her canteen. She shook her head. "The major took me off," she said. "I'm lazy. I'd ride the whole way if he'd let me."

The utter exhaustion in her eyes belied her words. There was no doubt in Abbado's mind that whoever was guarding the lead tractor was an even-money bet to be the next casualty.

After the initial disaster, the dozer hadn't run into anything that posed a danger to the vehicle itself. A stand of jointed, thirty-foot high reeds had bent suddenly from either side of the blade cut and lifted Meyer off the platform not long after she took over the job, though. Glasebrook's flame gun and the stingers of the rest of 3-3 had scythed the gripping reeds down before they proceeded to whatever was next on their agenda.

It had been real close. Meyer's hard suit was scarred by pellets Abbado had fired directly at her because there wasn't any choice.

The major put the scouts out in front when they rejoined. The route had been a lot less straight since then, but there hadn't been any more real problems.

The last civilians had meandered out of sight. Meyer released the catches of her back and breast, then started working on the leg armor. White-cored speckles with black rims marked where flame had spattered her right thigh piece.

"Well, hang in, snake," Abbado said. He saw the purple dot that marked the major moving rearward in the overlay miniaturized on the upper left corner of his visor. He'd already walked the length of the column, checking on how things were going. He seemed to be making another round. One tough mother, Six was.

Abbado turned and called to his weary civilians, "Mount up, people. We want to get to the barracks before the others use up all the hot water in the showers, right?"

Carrying seventy pounds of weapons and munitions, Sergeant Guilio Abbado started forward. He glanced back to make sure the colonists were following him. They were, many of them doing what they could to help others.

They were a damned good group of people, they were. He was proud of them.

Blohm focused on a tree twenty feet in diameter and said, "Mark!" The trunk was as smooth as a lamppost to the peak a hundred and fifty feet in the air. From there branches flared like the leaves of a root vegetable.

Instead of shading out lesser vegetation, the emergent's foliage was almost hidden above the main canopy. Only infrared and the AI's processing capability enabled Blohm to trace the limbs' course over the surrounding jungle.

"What's the problem with it, snake?" Sergeant Gabrilovitch asked. The scouts stood within arm's length of one another, but Gabe's visor echoed his partner's display. The sergeant didn't see anything exceptional about the tree except its size, and even that wasn't unique.

"The branches are hollow," Blohm explained. "See how thick they are? The AI says they couldn't be that thick if they were solid."

Gabe's expression didn't change as his eyes calculated that the two of them were well within the branches' seventy-five foot radius. The only reason he could imagine for the limbs to be hollow was that something poured out of them like beer from a spigot.

More likely, like fire from a flame gun.

"It's not meant for us," Blohm said quietly. "We're moving with the forest, not against it. But before the bulldozer gets close, somebody better cut the top off."

"Us?" Gabrilovitch asked. He carried a pair of 4-pound rockets taped to his thigh so that they didn't dangle.

Blohm shook his head. "That's not what we do, snake," he said. "That's for the other guys. I marked it for them."

"I—" Gabrilovitch said.

Blohm, suddenly tense, hushed him with a quick gesture. The environment had changed, subtly but suddenly. It felt like it'd begun to rain, though the drops wouldn't penetrate the leaves of the canopy for minutes more.

Blohm didn't know what was really happening. The only change you could expect from this forest was a change for the worse, though.

"Six," he said to key his transmission to the major, "this is Six-six-two. There's something going on. I don't know what it is, but keep your head up. Over."

Sergeant Gabrilovitch eyed the forest beyond and behind his partner. Gabe's mouth pursed stiffly, but you had to know him well to recognize that as a sign of tension.

"Six-six-two, this is Six," Major Farrell's voice replied. "Do you have a vector, Blohm? There's nothing showing up on the helmet sensors, yours included. Over." 

"Six, negative," said Blohm. "It's—sir, like the sun came up or the wind started to blow. It's just a feeling. Maybe nothing. Over."

The branches of a nearby sapling were drawing noticeably closer to the trunk. Blohm didn't know what that meant, but he wanted to be some distance away within the next minute or so.

"Six-six-two, yeah, maybe there's nothing to it, and maybe I'm going to be elected to the Grand Council of the Unity," the major said. "Break. Six-six-one—" Gabrilovitch, the titular patrol commander "—come on in. It's getting late enough that we'll camp before we've gotten any farther than you are now. And if something pops, I want all the help I can get back here. Six out." 

"Six, roger," Gabrilovitch said. Blohm was already indicating the start of their route to join the column.

Still seated, Esther Meyer detached the stinger's take-up spool from the stud on her breastplate and reattached it to her right shoulder where it was ready for use. She'd left most of the extra weapons and gear on the cab platform for Velasquez who took over for her.

She paused. The next part of the program was to walk forward, carrying the pieces of armor to the trailers by now well ahead in the column. Every moment she sat here the walk got longer and the job harder. Christ, she was wrung out.

"Hey, Essie," said Tomaczek as he trudged past. They'd trained together as recruits. Years later they both wound up in C41. Despite that they'd never had a lot to do with one another. "You all right?"

"Yeah, I just need to get moving," she said. She thought of asking Tomaczek to give her a hand with the gear, but he was already bent beneath enough weaponry to anchor a ship. Typical little-guy stuff . . . But who was Striker Esther Meyer to talk?

Tomaczek wasn't really interested in anything but putting one foot in front of the other. He vanished behind a screen of brush where the trail kinked just beyond where Meyer rested. Meyer hoped he'd notice if his helmet flashed a warning caret.

There hadn't been much trouble back of the lead squad thus far. Every once in a while motion in the canopy would draw a grenade or rocket. A pair of teenagers had slipped off the trail together. The strikers responding to the screams thirty seconds later found broad leaves unfolding from bodies already black and swollen. No problems other than that.

Meyer stared in the direction of the passing colonists without seeing them as she prepared to stand up. She suddenly realized that she was glaring toward (if not at) Councillor Matthew Lock, his wife and daughter.

Meyer and the adult Locks looked away in mutual embarrassment. She heard the little girl squeal, "Mommie! Mommie! It's the nasty lady!"

Fucking wonderful. At least the kid thought she was human, which is more credit than Meyer was ready to give herself.

Meyer put the leg pieces, the last bits of her hard suit, in the net bag. She stood, swaying slightly. Now she was going to have to pass the Locks again. If she'd just gotten her ass in gear when she should, she might never have had to see them again.

Ahead: screams, a stinger firing, and a whock-whock-whock that could have been several people chopping wood simultaneously.

Screams like large animals being disemboweled, probably an accurate description of what was going on.

Meyer dropped the bag and ran forward. "Get back!" she screamed to civilians who'd frozen on the trail. She rounded the corner.

The natives were humanoid and man-sized, brown-beige-green in color. Their skin had the waxy gloss of a healthy leaf. Tomaczek had killed at least one. His stinger ripped another standing over a civilian with a bloody club. The native lurched backward, spraying white ichor from the chest wounds.

Two more hacked Tomaczek from opposite sides. A third squirted the striker with thick liquid from a tube projecting above its forehead. Tomaczek's battle dress turned black where the fluid touched. He tried to aim his stinger but the pellets merely cratered the ground he fell on.

Meyer killed the pair continuing to chop at Tomaczek. There was blood, human blood, spattering everything. The barbed clubs slung it in all directions.

She jerked a civilian backward by the collar. The native striking down at the civilian hit the top of Meyer's helmet instead.

Meyer's knees buckled. Her vision reduced to black and white for an instant. She didn't have time to wonder if the problem was in the visor's electronics or her own optic nerves. Her stinger was almost in contact with the native as she fired, scooping his chest out like a shucked oyster.

Natives converged on her, still slashing at any unarmed civilians within reach. She shot one in the upper chest. He spun and went down, hacking at the body of a decapitated woman.

Short bursts because there wasn't going to be time to reload. She was alone.

Meyer squeezed off a head shot but let the stinger rise on recoil so that the pellets also shattered the raised right club arm. He was holding Matthew Lock by the hair with the other hand. The native's smooth skin broke instead of puckering like a human's. The native weapons looked like plastic extrusions.

The native with the tube on his head sprayed Meyer in the face. The visor saved her eyes, but the brown sludge was opaque on the outer surface. Her hands burned. She fired in the direction of the natives she'd seen coming for her when she shot the one with Lock instead.

A pair of clubs hit her helmet like trip hammers. She tried to squeeze the stinger's trigger but she had no feeling in her hands.

She felt the shock between her shoulder blades. There was no pain, only a flash of light that expanded into burning darkness.

"Medic!" Farrell shouted as he came around the angle in the trail. The colony's doctors weren't on the commo net but maybe a striker would relay the message.

The native's face was slimly oval. Its coloration would have been attractive on the outside of a house in a wooded setting. The black-throated tube projecting above the forehead looked like a cyclops' eye in the instant before Farrell's stinger blew the skull to white mush.

Farrell stepped aside or the civilian running in a crouch would have collided with him. Farrell bodychecked the native chasing the civilian and groped left-handed to hold the club arm. His stinger snarled a hundred pellets across and into the pair twenty feet distant hammering a fallen striker.

The native was stronger and heavier than its size suggested. The forest-toned body must not carry any significant amount of fat. Farrell's fingers slipped on the slick skin. The club struck awkwardly at his back, gouging stinger magazines in the crossed bandoliers. Farrell put his weapon against the native's neck and decapitated him with a short burst.

The body spasmed. Farrell flung it away and killed two natives still standing. Nessman came up the trail from the other direction and knocked the last one down with the butt of his stinger. He put half a magazine into the creature as it tried to rise. Nessman hadn't fired immediately because the native was slashing in the midst of a group of civilians trying to shield their offspring.

"Med—" Farrell said.

Dr. Ciler ran past and knelt. Dr. Weisshampl, eighty if she was a day, arrived literally in the arms of a pair of younger women. Four 2nd Platoon strikers were with her. Glasebrook, Methie, and a moment later Sergeant Abbado appeared behind Farrell. They turned to cover the jungle in all directions.

"Horgen's got our cits bundled together up the trail, sir," Abbado muttered without keying his helmet.

"C41," Farrell ordered. "Hold in place. Ten—twelve humanoids attacked section five with swords and acid sprays. The initial attackers have been eliminated. Echo my display but don't fucking interrupt unless there's an attack. Six out."

Farrell had left Tamara Lundie with the second tractor, fifty yards up the trail. The aide joined him, breathing hard. Her eyes had the open horror of a victim saved from drowning.

"How did it happen?" she asked in a husky whisper.

"Are the rest of the medics—the doctors—are they alerted?" Farrell said. He wasn't going to release his strikers to carry out first aid until he was damned sure there wasn't going to be a follow-up attack.

"Yes, they're coming," Lundie said. "Jafar has halted the column awaiting your instructions."

There were two strikers down. Tomaczek was dead. From helmet readouts the other, Meyer, was only stunned, bruised and burned. An edged club had hacked through a bandolier in the middle of her back. Farrell began to regret leaving the body armor behind except for a handful of suits for special purposes. But weight considerations meant it was armor or ammo, and they had to have the ammo . . .

Nessman was putting analgesic and counterirritant onto the backs of Meyer's hands where the native had squirted her. Farrell squatted to look at the first native he'd shot. Most of the face was missing, but Farrell could see that the acid spray was a hollow channel in the skull rather than being a manufactured weapon like the barbed clubs.

"They came out of the trees," Farrell said; still squatting, finally answering the aide's initial question. His hands trembled as he swapped his stinger's magazine for a full one. "They didn't make a fucking sound. Jesus, how many did we lose?"

Now that Farrell had the leisure, he heard the screams of the wounded and terrified. A four-year-old gripped her mother's hand and cried her heart out. The woman's body lay some distance away. The arm the child held had been hacked off at the shoulder, and the child had never released it.

The other two doctors and a man who'd risen to Director of Nursing but hadn't forgotten the basics reached the twenty-yard stretch where the slaughter occurred. There were speckles of blood everywhere.

Farrell fingered the weapon of the native with whom he'd grappled. The edge was more like that of a saw than a sword, but the scores of individual points were as sharp as broken glass. The material had a massy, slick feel. Flakes had spalled away in a few places, leaving conchoidal fractures in the surface.

"Seven adults and one child are dead," Lundie said with a precision Farrell supposed he should have been expecting. "Twelve adults and four children have been injured. I'm not an expert, but it appears to me that three adults and a child may not survive given the present conditions."

She swallowed and added, "I include your strikers in the two categories."

Farrell rose and looked at her. "Why didn't you pick them up?" he asked. "Was there something wrong with the sensors?"

"There was nothing wrong with the helmet sensors," the aide replied evenly. At this moment her eyes had no more depth than a reflection of the gray sky. "I've reanalyzed the data. There were no sound and vibration anomalies. The humanoids' movements were entirely within the normal parameters of the forest."

Farrell unhooked the damaged bandolier and removed the magazine that had taken the club stroke. Three teeth had penetrated the dense plastic; pellets dribbled out onto the bulldozed soil. "I don't understand," he said.

"Any forest moves," Lundie said. She was looking at the sprawled bodies, not in fascination but with the rock-jawed rigidity of someone forcing a memory on herself. "Everything living moves. The ground trembles when branches sway and even when roots take up water from the soil. Your sensors can feel that, Major."

Farrell grimaced. It was a joke in the Strike Force that you could hear a gnat fart if you cranked up your helmet high enough. Lundie really meant it, though. More to the point, she meant that she could discriminate among microsounds despite the hugely greater background of human feet, voices, and equipment.

"Why didn't you hear them, then?" he said. There'd been one blessing. The dozer blade raised a four- to eight-foot row of brush and scraped topsoil on the left, the side opposite the direction of the attack. None of the civilians had time to climb off the cleared path. That would have been as quick a death as the natives' weapons.

"Because their movements were within parameters," Lundie repeated. "Major, at any possible level of detail, those humanoids didn't come through the forest. They were the forest."

Meyer sat up, flexing her arms to make sure no ribs had been broken. Her partner Nessman watched anxiously. Councillor Lock knelt nearby. Blood splashed his head and torso, but none of it seemed to be his. Lock cradled a child's head in his lap. The body lay behind him, under that of its mother.

"In the future," Lundie said, "I'll use carbon dioxide levels. The humanoids are animate. They give off CO₂ as a waste product. The range isn't as long as vibration sensing should have been, but I'll be able to provide some warning. They won't surprise us the same way again."

Major Arthur Farrell scanned at the jungle. If there were a button he could push to turn this whole crater into a glassy desert, he'd do it in an eyeblink.

Back | Next
Contents
Framed

Back | Next
Contents

Local Visitors

The air was hot and still and humid, but at least the trees towering to either side of the cut shaded the column from direct sun. Abbado noticed Dr. Ciler nearby, helping a woman with a cane. She was tramping along determinedly instead of riding on top of a trailer.

"Hey Doc?" he called. "How long do you think it's going to be before the leaves all go transparent so the sun can shine on us full strength?"

The old woman turned in horror. "Oh, dear heaven," she said. "Is that going to happen next?"

"The sergeant was joking, Mrs. Trescher," Ciler said. "Certainly I would applaud if I thought I'd have nothing worse to treat than sunburns, though."

A stinger fired from the front of the column, just a short burst. When a squad from First Platoon took the lead after four hours, 3-3 and the civilians they guarded let the front half of the column move past them. It didn't seem to Abbado that any location was more dangerous than another, but a lot of people were going to be convinced that wherever they were was the hot seat. God or the major kept the level of bitching down by rotating the order of march.

It had taken the new team about an hour to stop blasting the hell out of anything that looked weird. This whole fucking jungle looked weird. You had to learn to use stingers sparingly, a few pellets here and there to recon by fire. Otherwise you were likely to have half the squad reloading when the shit really hit the fan.

Abbado was responsible for over two hundred colonists in this position. The major'd given his squad leaders the choice of how they deployed their strikers. Abbado split his in pairs at intervals among the civilians. He didn't trust a lone striker when these damned trees were likely to come at you from both sides at once.

Abbado was alone at the head of the section, but what the fuck. That was the sort of decision you made when you let them give you the promotion.

There were still stretches of thirty or forty yards between pairs. The way the trail zigzagged meant sometimes civilians were out of sight of the nearest guards. You couldn't expect people hauling stretchers and too much of the wrong kind of luggage to stay in parade-ground formation. Abbado hadn't thought much about civilians since he enlisted, and what he did think hadn't been very positive. These folks were okay, the most of them.

Mrs. Florescu, the woman wearing Caldwell's extra boots, took the old lady's arm from Dr. Ciler. Florescu was carrying a soft bag in her left hand, dragging the bottom along the bulldozed ground. Abbado wouldn't have bet that either the bag or the woman would last out the day, but he'd sure give her credit for trying.

Meyer sat a little to one side of the track, taking off her hard suit. She looked drawn. Since she was already suited up, she'd moved to the lead dozer when Pressley bought the farm. Meyer kept the slot after 3-3 rotated back in the line. Abbado figured the vibration as the dozer chewed its way forward would have wrung him out in a lot less than four hours.

"Hey, Essie," he said. "Get tired of the scenery up front?"

The sound of a tree falling started and went on for a long time, too loud for conversation in a reasonable tone of voice even this far back in the column. Abbado motioned to the civilians nearest to him. "Take five," he shouted. They were getting too close to the staggering tail of the previous section. Mixing the groups was a worse danger than stringing the whole line out a trifle longer.

Meyer sucked water from her canteen. She shook her head. "The major took me off," she said. "I'm lazy. I'd ride the whole way if he'd let me."

The utter exhaustion in her eyes belied her words. There was no doubt in Abbado's mind that whoever was guarding the lead tractor was an even-money bet to be the next casualty.

After the initial disaster, the dozer hadn't run into anything that posed a danger to the vehicle itself. A stand of jointed, thirty-foot high reeds had bent suddenly from either side of the blade cut and lifted Meyer off the platform not long after she took over the job, though. Glasebrook's flame gun and the stingers of the rest of 3-3 had scythed the gripping reeds down before they proceeded to whatever was next on their agenda.

It had been real close. Meyer's hard suit was scarred by pellets Abbado had fired directly at her because there wasn't any choice.

The major put the scouts out in front when they rejoined. The route had been a lot less straight since then, but there hadn't been any more real problems.

The last civilians had meandered out of sight. Meyer released the catches of her back and breast, then started working on the leg armor. White-cored speckles with black rims marked where flame had spattered her right thigh piece.

"Well, hang in, snake," Abbado said. He saw the purple dot that marked the major moving rearward in the overlay miniaturized on the upper left corner of his visor. He'd already walked the length of the column, checking on how things were going. He seemed to be making another round. One tough mother, Six was.

Abbado turned and called to his weary civilians, "Mount up, people. We want to get to the barracks before the others use up all the hot water in the showers, right?"

Carrying seventy pounds of weapons and munitions, Sergeant Guilio Abbado started forward. He glanced back to make sure the colonists were following him. They were, many of them doing what they could to help others.

They were a damned good group of people, they were. He was proud of them.

Blohm focused on a tree twenty feet in diameter and said, "Mark!" The trunk was as smooth as a lamppost to the peak a hundred and fifty feet in the air. From there branches flared like the leaves of a root vegetable.

Instead of shading out lesser vegetation, the emergent's foliage was almost hidden above the main canopy. Only infrared and the AI's processing capability enabled Blohm to trace the limbs' course over the surrounding jungle.

"What's the problem with it, snake?" Sergeant Gabrilovitch asked. The scouts stood within arm's length of one another, but Gabe's visor echoed his partner's display. The sergeant didn't see anything exceptional about the tree except its size, and even that wasn't unique.

"The branches are hollow," Blohm explained. "See how thick they are? The AI says they couldn't be that thick if they were solid."

Gabe's expression didn't change as his eyes calculated that the two of them were well within the branches' seventy-five foot radius. The only reason he could imagine for the limbs to be hollow was that something poured out of them like beer from a spigot.

More likely, like fire from a flame gun.

"It's not meant for us," Blohm said quietly. "We're moving with the forest, not against it. But before the bulldozer gets close, somebody better cut the top off."

"Us?" Gabrilovitch asked. He carried a pair of 4-pound rockets taped to his thigh so that they didn't dangle.

Blohm shook his head. "That's not what we do, snake," he said. "That's for the other guys. I marked it for them."

"I—" Gabrilovitch said.

Blohm, suddenly tense, hushed him with a quick gesture. The environment had changed, subtly but suddenly. It felt like it'd begun to rain, though the drops wouldn't penetrate the leaves of the canopy for minutes more.

Blohm didn't know what was really happening. The only change you could expect from this forest was a change for the worse, though.

"Six," he said to key his transmission to the major, "this is Six-six-two. There's something going on. I don't know what it is, but keep your head up. Over."

Sergeant Gabrilovitch eyed the forest beyond and behind his partner. Gabe's mouth pursed stiffly, but you had to know him well to recognize that as a sign of tension.

"Six-six-two, this is Six," Major Farrell's voice replied. "Do you have a vector, Blohm? There's nothing showing up on the helmet sensors, yours included. Over." 

"Six, negative," said Blohm. "It's—sir, like the sun came up or the wind started to blow. It's just a feeling. Maybe nothing. Over."

The branches of a nearby sapling were drawing noticeably closer to the trunk. Blohm didn't know what that meant, but he wanted to be some distance away within the next minute or so.

"Six-six-two, yeah, maybe there's nothing to it, and maybe I'm going to be elected to the Grand Council of the Unity," the major said. "Break. Six-six-one—" Gabrilovitch, the titular patrol commander "—come on in. It's getting late enough that we'll camp before we've gotten any farther than you are now. And if something pops, I want all the help I can get back here. Six out." 

"Six, roger," Gabrilovitch said. Blohm was already indicating the start of their route to join the column.

Still seated, Esther Meyer detached the stinger's take-up spool from the stud on her breastplate and reattached it to her right shoulder where it was ready for use. She'd left most of the extra weapons and gear on the cab platform for Velasquez who took over for her.

She paused. The next part of the program was to walk forward, carrying the pieces of armor to the trailers by now well ahead in the column. Every moment she sat here the walk got longer and the job harder. Christ, she was wrung out.

"Hey, Essie," said Tomaczek as he trudged past. They'd trained together as recruits. Years later they both wound up in C41. Despite that they'd never had a lot to do with one another. "You all right?"

"Yeah, I just need to get moving," she said. She thought of asking Tomaczek to give her a hand with the gear, but he was already bent beneath enough weaponry to anchor a ship. Typical little-guy stuff . . . But who was Striker Esther Meyer to talk?

Tomaczek wasn't really interested in anything but putting one foot in front of the other. He vanished behind a screen of brush where the trail kinked just beyond where Meyer rested. Meyer hoped he'd notice if his helmet flashed a warning caret.

There hadn't been much trouble back of the lead squad thus far. Every once in a while motion in the canopy would draw a grenade or rocket. A pair of teenagers had slipped off the trail together. The strikers responding to the screams thirty seconds later found broad leaves unfolding from bodies already black and swollen. No problems other than that.

Meyer stared in the direction of the passing colonists without seeing them as she prepared to stand up. She suddenly realized that she was glaring toward (if not at) Councillor Matthew Lock, his wife and daughter.

Meyer and the adult Locks looked away in mutual embarrassment. She heard the little girl squeal, "Mommie! Mommie! It's the nasty lady!"

Fucking wonderful. At least the kid thought she was human, which is more credit than Meyer was ready to give herself.

Meyer put the leg pieces, the last bits of her hard suit, in the net bag. She stood, swaying slightly. Now she was going to have to pass the Locks again. If she'd just gotten her ass in gear when she should, she might never have had to see them again.

Ahead: screams, a stinger firing, and a whock-whock-whock that could have been several people chopping wood simultaneously.

Screams like large animals being disemboweled, probably an accurate description of what was going on.

Meyer dropped the bag and ran forward. "Get back!" she screamed to civilians who'd frozen on the trail. She rounded the corner.

The natives were humanoid and man-sized, brown-beige-green in color. Their skin had the waxy gloss of a healthy leaf. Tomaczek had killed at least one. His stinger ripped another standing over a civilian with a bloody club. The native lurched backward, spraying white ichor from the chest wounds.

Two more hacked Tomaczek from opposite sides. A third squirted the striker with thick liquid from a tube projecting above its forehead. Tomaczek's battle dress turned black where the fluid touched. He tried to aim his stinger but the pellets merely cratered the ground he fell on.

Meyer killed the pair continuing to chop at Tomaczek. There was blood, human blood, spattering everything. The barbed clubs slung it in all directions.

She jerked a civilian backward by the collar. The native striking down at the civilian hit the top of Meyer's helmet instead.

Meyer's knees buckled. Her vision reduced to black and white for an instant. She didn't have time to wonder if the problem was in the visor's electronics or her own optic nerves. Her stinger was almost in contact with the native as she fired, scooping his chest out like a shucked oyster.

Natives converged on her, still slashing at any unarmed civilians within reach. She shot one in the upper chest. He spun and went down, hacking at the body of a decapitated woman.

Short bursts because there wasn't going to be time to reload. She was alone.

Meyer squeezed off a head shot but let the stinger rise on recoil so that the pellets also shattered the raised right club arm. He was holding Matthew Lock by the hair with the other hand. The native's smooth skin broke instead of puckering like a human's. The native weapons looked like plastic extrusions.

The native with the tube on his head sprayed Meyer in the face. The visor saved her eyes, but the brown sludge was opaque on the outer surface. Her hands burned. She fired in the direction of the natives she'd seen coming for her when she shot the one with Lock instead.

A pair of clubs hit her helmet like trip hammers. She tried to squeeze the stinger's trigger but she had no feeling in her hands.

She felt the shock between her shoulder blades. There was no pain, only a flash of light that expanded into burning darkness.

"Medic!" Farrell shouted as he came around the angle in the trail. The colony's doctors weren't on the commo net but maybe a striker would relay the message.

The native's face was slimly oval. Its coloration would have been attractive on the outside of a house in a wooded setting. The black-throated tube projecting above the forehead looked like a cyclops' eye in the instant before Farrell's stinger blew the skull to white mush.

Farrell stepped aside or the civilian running in a crouch would have collided with him. Farrell bodychecked the native chasing the civilian and groped left-handed to hold the club arm. His stinger snarled a hundred pellets across and into the pair twenty feet distant hammering a fallen striker.

The native was stronger and heavier than its size suggested. The forest-toned body must not carry any significant amount of fat. Farrell's fingers slipped on the slick skin. The club struck awkwardly at his back, gouging stinger magazines in the crossed bandoliers. Farrell put his weapon against the native's neck and decapitated him with a short burst.

The body spasmed. Farrell flung it away and killed two natives still standing. Nessman came up the trail from the other direction and knocked the last one down with the butt of his stinger. He put half a magazine into the creature as it tried to rise. Nessman hadn't fired immediately because the native was slashing in the midst of a group of civilians trying to shield their offspring.

"Med—" Farrell said.

Dr. Ciler ran past and knelt. Dr. Weisshampl, eighty if she was a day, arrived literally in the arms of a pair of younger women. Four 2nd Platoon strikers were with her. Glasebrook, Methie, and a moment later Sergeant Abbado appeared behind Farrell. They turned to cover the jungle in all directions.

"Horgen's got our cits bundled together up the trail, sir," Abbado muttered without keying his helmet.

"C41," Farrell ordered. "Hold in place. Ten—twelve humanoids attacked section five with swords and acid sprays. The initial attackers have been eliminated. Echo my display but don't fucking interrupt unless there's an attack. Six out."

Farrell had left Tamara Lundie with the second tractor, fifty yards up the trail. The aide joined him, breathing hard. Her eyes had the open horror of a victim saved from drowning.

"How did it happen?" she asked in a husky whisper.

"Are the rest of the medics—the doctors—are they alerted?" Farrell said. He wasn't going to release his strikers to carry out first aid until he was damned sure there wasn't going to be a follow-up attack.

"Yes, they're coming," Lundie said. "Jafar has halted the column awaiting your instructions."

There were two strikers down. Tomaczek was dead. From helmet readouts the other, Meyer, was only stunned, bruised and burned. An edged club had hacked through a bandolier in the middle of her back. Farrell began to regret leaving the body armor behind except for a handful of suits for special purposes. But weight considerations meant it was armor or ammo, and they had to have the ammo . . .

Nessman was putting analgesic and counterirritant onto the backs of Meyer's hands where the native had squirted her. Farrell squatted to look at the first native he'd shot. Most of the face was missing, but Farrell could see that the acid spray was a hollow channel in the skull rather than being a manufactured weapon like the barbed clubs.

"They came out of the trees," Farrell said; still squatting, finally answering the aide's initial question. His hands trembled as he swapped his stinger's magazine for a full one. "They didn't make a fucking sound. Jesus, how many did we lose?"

Now that Farrell had the leisure, he heard the screams of the wounded and terrified. A four-year-old gripped her mother's hand and cried her heart out. The woman's body lay some distance away. The arm the child held had been hacked off at the shoulder, and the child had never released it.

The other two doctors and a man who'd risen to Director of Nursing but hadn't forgotten the basics reached the twenty-yard stretch where the slaughter occurred. There were speckles of blood everywhere.

Farrell fingered the weapon of the native with whom he'd grappled. The edge was more like that of a saw than a sword, but the scores of individual points were as sharp as broken glass. The material had a massy, slick feel. Flakes had spalled away in a few places, leaving conchoidal fractures in the surface.

"Seven adults and one child are dead," Lundie said with a precision Farrell supposed he should have been expecting. "Twelve adults and four children have been injured. I'm not an expert, but it appears to me that three adults and a child may not survive given the present conditions."

She swallowed and added, "I include your strikers in the two categories."

Farrell rose and looked at her. "Why didn't you pick them up?" he asked. "Was there something wrong with the sensors?"

"There was nothing wrong with the helmet sensors," the aide replied evenly. At this moment her eyes had no more depth than a reflection of the gray sky. "I've reanalyzed the data. There were no sound and vibration anomalies. The humanoids' movements were entirely within the normal parameters of the forest."

Farrell unhooked the damaged bandolier and removed the magazine that had taken the club stroke. Three teeth had penetrated the dense plastic; pellets dribbled out onto the bulldozed soil. "I don't understand," he said.

"Any forest moves," Lundie said. She was looking at the sprawled bodies, not in fascination but with the rock-jawed rigidity of someone forcing a memory on herself. "Everything living moves. The ground trembles when branches sway and even when roots take up water from the soil. Your sensors can feel that, Major."

Farrell grimaced. It was a joke in the Strike Force that you could hear a gnat fart if you cranked up your helmet high enough. Lundie really meant it, though. More to the point, she meant that she could discriminate among microsounds despite the hugely greater background of human feet, voices, and equipment.

"Why didn't you hear them, then?" he said. There'd been one blessing. The dozer blade raised a four- to eight-foot row of brush and scraped topsoil on the left, the side opposite the direction of the attack. None of the civilians had time to climb off the cleared path. That would have been as quick a death as the natives' weapons.

"Because their movements were within parameters," Lundie repeated. "Major, at any possible level of detail, those humanoids didn't come through the forest. They were the forest."

Meyer sat up, flexing her arms to make sure no ribs had been broken. Her partner Nessman watched anxiously. Councillor Lock knelt nearby. Blood splashed his head and torso, but none of it seemed to be his. Lock cradled a child's head in his lap. The body lay behind him, under that of its mother.

"In the future," Lundie said, "I'll use carbon dioxide levels. The humanoids are animate. They give off CO₂ as a waste product. The range isn't as long as vibration sensing should have been, but I'll be able to provide some warning. They won't surprise us the same way again."

Major Arthur Farrell scanned at the jungle. If there were a button he could push to turn this whole crater into a glassy desert, he'd do it in an eyeblink.

Back | Next
Contents
Framed