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Night Sounds

"Mr. Blohm?" Seraphina Suares, leading a train of children, said to Sergeant Gabrilovitch.

"That's him," Gabe said, nodding across the minilantern's circle of light. "What is it you need, ma'am?"

Blohm rolled down the sleeve of his tunic without speaking. There was a line of tiny ulcers across the inside of his elbow, but they'd been shrinking in the past hour. His immune booster was handling the microorganisms.

Blohm's body temperature had been elevated by about half a degree ever since 10-1442's hatches opened. His augmented system was fighting off local diseases. The slight fever didn't seem to affect his judgment dangerously. He hoped the same was true for everybody in the expedition, but that wasn't something he could do much about.

The woman met Blohm's eyes. She was too old for any of the six children to be her own. The eldest was probably ten, the youngest no more than two and carried in her arms. She smiled. "Sergeant Kristal said that Mr. Blohm would be responsible for feeding me and the children. She directed us here."

"Oh," Blohm said. He'd removed his equipment belt, but the converter was still in its pouch. "Okay, that was the deal. I . . . What is it you want to eat? Not that you're going to tell much difference."

"I think it's best that we try whatever you planned for yourself," the woman said. "Sit down, children, and be sure to stay on the plastic. Mirica, dear? Won't you sit down?"

A four-year-old with bangs and short dark hair remained standing. Her eyes had the thousand-yard stare that Blohm had seen often enough before—on redlined veterans. None of the kids looked right.

Gabrilovitch looked over the gathering and rose. "Guess you've got it under control, snake," he said. "I'll see you after my guard shift."

Blohm drew on his left-hand glove as he walked to the brush piled at the edge of the clearing the bulldozers had cut for the night. The ground was covered with quarter-inch roofing plastic. It was temperature-stable—bonfires burned in several parts of the camp—and too tough for anything to penetrate overnight, though there was still a danger of shoots or roots coming up between the edges of sheets.

God or the colonist brain trust said that the forest wouldn't be as active after the sun set. Blohm was willing to believe that; but he didn't expect to sleep very soundly the first night, even during the hours he didn't have guard.

"I wasn't expecting, ah, kids," Blohm said. He worked loose a four-foot length of root and sawed it off with his knife. Any organic would work so long as it fit the mouth of the converter. He wasn't sure how much he'd need, but this was a start.

"We're the widow and orphans brigade," the woman said. Her voice was too even for the soul behind it to be calm. "I'm Seraphina Suares. I said I'd look after children who'd been, who'd, you know. I lost my husband when the aircar crashed."

"Ah," Blohm said. He extended the converter's doubly-telescoping base and opened the top flap, focusing on the task with needless concentration. He didn't know why he felt embarrassed. Hell, he'd been an orphan himself; raised by the state in Montreal District.

Mrs. Suares checked the feet of one of the younger boys for blisters. The ten-year-old was changing the infant's diaper. Several of the kids were bandaged though the silent one, Mirica, didn't seem to have received any physical injury. She was about the age of the Spook he'd killed in the doorway at Active Cloak.

Blohm stuck one end of the root into the converter; the box began to hum. He steadied the root with his gloved hand, feeling a faint vibration. Converters dissociated organic material at the molecular level, not by grinding or other mechanical means, but it was as fast a process as combustion.

"I've got it set for chicken and rice," Blohm said. "That seems to do as well as anything. Do you have something to put this in, ah, ma'am?"

"Children, take out your cups and spoons," Mrs. Suares said. "And Mr. Blohm, please call me Seraphina if you can. Is your nickname Snake?"

The children were taking a variety of containers from their little packs. A six-year-old raised an ornate metal mug that had set somebody back in the order of a year's pay for a striker. The mug and the clothes on the kid's back were the only things remaining of his family.

"Hold it here," Blohm said, drawing a cup down to the output spigot. A gush of thick gruel spurted until the child drew back. "Next one, step up. It's not that bad and it's got all the vitamins and whatever."

The bad light was actually an advantage. The flavor of food from the converter could be varied somewhat, but the color was always gray. In daylight, you had to remind yourself you weren't eating wet cement.

Another kid stuck her cup under the spigot. Others were staring at the first one as he dug his spoon doubtfully into the glop. Mirica was as still as a stump, but at least she'd taken out an eared mug in the shape of a grinning face.

"Ah, snake's not a nickname, ma'am," Blohm said. "Not exactly."

It's what veterans call each other instead of miss and mister, which we're not . . . 

Rather than say that aloud, Blohm muttered, "My name's Caius, ma'am. I guess it doesn't matter a hoot what you want to call me."

"Caius, then," Mrs. Suares said with satisfaction. Blohm didn't remember anybody calling him by his given name before.

They got through five of the kids without a problem. Two ate with something like enthusiasm, which said more for their appetite than the meal. Mrs. Suares was feeding the two-year-old from her own bowl.

Mirica took the filled cup and even tasted a spoonful. After a moment she cradled her head in her arms and began to sob. The mug slipped from her hand and oozed its contents onto the ground.

"Oh, sweetheart, darling," Mrs. Suares said with sad concern. "Please, darling, you've got to eat. We all have to keep our strength up so that we aren't a burden on people like Caius here. Please, Mirica. Please sweetheart?"

Blohm detached his mess can from the bottom of the converter. "I know how she feels," he said to Mrs. Suares. "They had a hell of a time getting me to eat at the creche when I was a kid too."

He didn't think about the creche much, but it wasn't that he'd had a bad time there. It was a lot like the army. Not great but mostly okay; and anyway you better get used to it because that was what life was going to be until you died.

"Are you all right, Caius?" Mrs. Suares said.

"Sorry," Blohm muttered. He must have been staring at her or some damned thing. "Sorry.

"But you know, thinking back . . . Hey," he said. "Mirica? Do you like tapioca pudding? That was the only thing they could get me to eat."

Blohm carried the converter over to the berm and dumped its contents onto the wrack from which it had come. Kneeling in the lanternlight, he reset the output and fed an additional length of root into the system. "I never thought of doing this myself, you know? Shit, it must be fifteen years since I had tapioca pudding."

The converter's holding tank had a non-stick surface that wouldn't even raise a meniscus if filled with water. The kid's mug would have to be washed to get the "chicken and rice" out of it, so Blohm ran the new batch into his own can.

They all watched him as he put his finger into the can and tasted it. Even Mirica turned her head, though she didn't lift it from her arms. "Goddam," Blohm said in surprise. "It tastes like tapioca pudding."

He looked at Mrs. Suares. "Ma'am," he said, "this is the first fucking thing I've had through this bitch that tastes like it ought to. It's good. Here kid, you try it."

Mirica stuck her finger out. Mrs. Suares started to say something but caught herself.

Staring solemnly at Blohm, the child licked the goo off her finger, then straightened into a sitting position. He and she each took another fingerful of the sticky mass.

Blohm shook his head. "Fuck if I know why I never thought of doing this before, ma'am," he said. He suddenly realized he wasn't speaking to another striker. "Oh, Christ," he muttered. "Ma'am, I'm sorry about my language. With the kids and all."

"You have nothing at all to be sorry for, Caius," Mrs. Suares said with a smile warmer than the still night air. "And it's Seraphina, please."

Esther Meyer heard somebody talking in a low voice to the doctor who'd just checked her over, but she didn't open her eyes. Kristal had told her she was off the guard rotation tonight. Meyer didn't think she was hurt that bad, but she wasn't going to argue with the decision.

She was okay. She just felt like she'd been dragged all day behind the tractor instead of riding on it. She was face down, her cheek against the cool plastic. Her back hurt like hell whichever way she lay, though the doc said nothing was broken. He'd injected an enzyme to reabsorb the swelling by morning.

The plastic sheeting was fairly stiff, but it creaked and rippled when someone walked on it. Meyer felt somebody stop and kneel on the other side of her. "Yeah?" she muttered. Best guess was she was about to learn she was on guard after all.

"Striker Meyer?" said an unfamiliar voice. "I'm Councillor Matthew Lock. I came to apologize."

Meyer tried to turn over. She gasped and swore with pain. Relaxing, she took a deep breath.

"Striker Meyer?" the voice repeated in concern. "Please don't—"

"Can it!" Meyer wheezed. "Just give me a sec—"

She lurched into a sitting position. Her muscles relaxed into patterns that didn't stress bruised and knotted tissue. The relative lack of pain was sudden pleasure.

Meyer smiled into the citizen's worried face. "It's just getting from one posture to the other that's a problem," she said, wiping her brow absently. "They couldn't give me the stuff they would've done in a base hospital because then somebody'd have to carry me, right?"

Lock swallowed and nodded. He looked like he'd lost ten pounds since she'd seen him in the ship. After that—all Meyer remembered was a flash of Lock's face as the native convulsed away. It'd been as much luck as Meyer's skill that she hadn't blown the cit's head off with the same burst, but there hadn't been a lot of time.

"Striker Meyer," Lock said formally. Fire lit half his face; the other side was sketched by the fainter, even glow of an electric lamp. "I've already withdrawn my complaint to the project manager about your conduct. I want to apologize to you personally as well."

He cleared his throat. "I told Manager al-Ibrahimi that I'd first acted like a fool in the ship, then compounded my error by complaining like a fool to him. He assures me that no disciplinary action had been contemplated in any case."

Lock gave her a wry smile. "So you don't have to worry about fools running the expedition, just fools among the civilians you guard."

"That's okay," Meyer said. She tried to shift her weight sideways. Staying in the same position gradually hurt worse than moving to a new one. The choice of when to move was a bitch, though. She grimaced. "I'm sorry it happened. I screwed up."

Meyer thought of saying it was the compartment that got to her rather than the woman and the screaming kid, but that didn't matter now. It hadn't much mattered before either. You either fuck up or you do your job. She'd fucked up.

"I didn't understand how quick you had to be to survive," Lock said softly. He turned his face from Meyer. His eyes were on the forest, but she wasn't sure they were focusing.

"When the savages came out of the trees I just looked at them," Lock said to the forest. "And one of them grabbed Alison. And I said, I said, `What are you doing?' and he cut her head off. Like that. And he grabbed me and you killed him."

The civilian stared at his hands, washed clean of his daughter's blood. He began to cry. "You were trying to keep us alive and I didn't understand," he said through the tears. "I'm a lawyer, Ms. Meyer. I don't belong here, and I didn't understand."

Meyer turned her head. "Nobody belongs here," she said. "Human beings don't. The jungle doesn't like us."

She cleared her throat. Lock wiped his eyes with his sleeve, angry at the weakness but not attempting to disguise it.

"Well, it'll be okay soon," Meyer said. "It's not as though we were planning to stay."

Esther Meyer tried to remember when was the last time she'd thought she belonged anywhere.

When the bonfires flickered, branches beyond the cleared margin looked as though they were moving, but Farrell's helmet knew better. Though—

The natives had fooled the helmets once. Fooled Tamara Lundie on the vibration sensors, and not enough infrared signature to give Tomaczek more than a heartbeat's warning.

Farrell smiled tightly toward the project manager and his aide. Neither of them reacted, but President Reitz paused in mid-breath.

"I was just thinking," Farrell said. "You can't live without trusting something. Even if you can't trust it."

"I consider the day's progress very satisfactory," al-Ibrahimi said, either because he didn't understand what Farrell meant or more probably because he did. "The humanoid attack was unexpected and costly, but C41's speed and skill limited the scope of the catastrophe. Tamara assures me that in the future we'll have at least some warning."

"Yes," said Lundie, a syllable edged with cold anger.

"I wonder if the Kalendru ship crashed and they've been looting it," Farrell said. "I've been thinking about those clubs. They're plastic, not stone or wood or something."

"According to analysis by Professors Gefayal and Bronski," al-Ibrahimi said, "the clubs are a complex folded protein, stiffened and hardened with silica. The professors don't believe the clubs could have been cast. They suggest that they must have been grown."

"But they were animals," Reitz objected. "They didn't have any technology. Only the weapons, and those so simple."

"A culture can have biological sophistication while remaining very simple in the mechanical realm, madam," Lundie said.

"Which is true but doesn't answer the question of how the bodies of three of the twelve humanoids were themselves modified to spray caustic," the manager said. "The sophistication is undeniable, but I remain doubtful that the humanoids themselves are more than agents. We'll have to wait to gather more data before we determine who is the principal."

Farrell thought about the Spooks who'd attacked the expedition the day before. They were already brain dead. Whoever was in charge didn't like Kalendru any better than it did human beings.

"We're closer to the magnetic anomaly now," he said. "I'm going to send a scout to check it tomorrow." He played with his stinger. "If you approve."

"You're in tactical command," al-Ibrahimi said. "If there are more Kalendru on BZ 459, we need to know it."

"None of the species we're encountering is in the database," Tamara Lundie said. She didn't seem to be speaking to anyone in particular. "The survey wasn't exhaustive, but it had to have been thorough. It would have taken more effort to invent so large a self-consistent database than it would to orbit the planet a few times gathering imagery."

The sentence ended with the closest approach to an exclamation point that Farrell had yet heard in the aide's voice.

"Tamara, I believe you're reacting to toxins from your injury," al-Ibrahimi said. "I'll monitor the sensors for you. Go to one of the doctors and direct him or her to sedate you for a three-hour period. After that we'll examine your condition."

"I can't," Lundie said. She gripped the bandaged wrist with her good hand and squeezed until tears sprang from her eyes. "Sir, you need your sleep. I'll carry out my duties."

Farrell stood with a poker face to conceal his aches and the patches of skin rubbed raw by his equipment. "Sir," he said to the project manager, "I need to make the rounds of my duty section. I know where Doc Ciler is. I'll take her by. Miss?"

"I'd appreciate that, Major," al-Ibrahimi said. "Tamara, analyze the probable result of having a psychotic overseeing our sensor data."

"I'm not . . ." Lundie said, but she rose to her feet at Farrell's gentle pressure.

"You're perilously close or you wouldn't suggest that you'll carry out your duties when you're obviously incapable of doing so," her superior said. He spoke with the emotionless impact of so many hammer blows.

"Yes sir," Lundie said. "Major Farrell, I believe I'm able to walk unaided. I'd appreciate being able to hold your arm."

"Sure," Farrell said. "We'll find the doc and he'll fix you up fine."

He remembered the time he'd screamed that he was still in command, that he was still capable of leading C41, as Leinsdorf held him down for a medic to sedate. He'd been seeing double images from the knock on the head and giving orders to dead people, some of them dead for years.

Farrell led Lundie through groups of colonists sleeping or trying to ready themselves for tomorrow's march. She closed her eyes. Children were crying; children, and a few adults.

"The biota of this crater bear only a family resemblance to what the survey ship reported for the planet as a whole," Lundie said in tones of flat despair. "And that was bad enough. Without data, Major, what chance do we have?"

"You've got us," Farrell said. "For what it's worth, ma'am, you've got us."

Guilio Abbado walked among the sleeping colonists, not in a hurry and taking no particular course. The roof sheets unrolled to eight by twenty feet each. They were laid with a slight overlap. People were supposed to stay a foot back from the seams. Mostly they did, but folks moved in their sleep.

And some of them were sloppy, strikers as well as cits. Abbado hadn't found any rootlets quivering murderously around the edges, but his boot had prodded a few legs and butts until they moved someplace safer.

Caius Blohm sat beside his unrolled null sack, closer to the berm than most folks wanted to sleep. The scout had finished his guard shift twenty minutes before, when 3-3 came on duty. It wasn't always easy to sleep, even after a day of exhausting strain.

"Hey, Blohm," Abbado whispered in greeting. "Looks like the brain trust was right about things settling down after dark."

"Hey, Sarge," the scout said. "So far, so good."

The null sack murmured. Abbado looked at it, the visual equivalent of trying to grab a handful of jelly.

"It's one of the orphans," Blohm muttered. "She was having trouble sleeping. Ms. Suares and me thought . . ."

"Caius?" a little voice said. The child stuck her head out of the sack's mouth. Christ, she was little.

"I'm here, Mirica," Blohm said. A small hand reached out of the sack. He took it in his. "You're all right, honey."

"Hold me, Caius?" the child said.

"Guess I'll get back to work," Abbado said, attempting to keep his tone completely neutral.

"Just a second, honey," Blohm said in a voice gentler than anything Abbado'd ever expected to hear from him. "I gotta talk to the sarge for a minute, that's all."

The scout rose in a motion that would have made a cat look awkward and motioned Abbado with him to touching distance of the berm. "Listen, Abbado," Blohm said. "There's nothing going on. She's scared because her folks got greased and I'm taking care of her. You see?"

"Hey, don't get your knickers in a twist," Abbado said as forcefully as he could in a low voice. He felt like a dog facing a cobra. "I was there, remember? I saw the poor kid with her mom's arm. If she's got nightmares and needs somebody to hold her, what the fuck do you expect?"

"Ah, shit, Sarge," Blohm said, relaxing with a quiver like a released spring. "I forgot you knew. Shit, I thought . . . You know, some of the guys."

"This was a bitch of a place even before the wogs showed up," Abbado said calmly, starting to relax a little himself. "Well, maybe they ate the Spooks before they got around to us, you think?"

"I looked at the recordings of the attack," Blohm said bitterly. He hadn't listened to Abbado. "Those bastards were killing kids because they wanted to. The one that chopped her mom, he was going for Mirica when Nessman waxed him."

"Remember to get some sleep yourself, snake," Abbado said. He moved away, walking slowly. "The major's got us tapped for your backup tomorrow. I don't want you stepping in shit cause you're tired."

"Roger, Sarge," Blohm whispered. "Sorry for coming down on you like that."

Caldwell was twenty yards distant, standing near the roots of a tree toppled by a dozer. Abbado walked toward her, knowing his helmet would caret anything it saw as a danger. A quiet night thus far.

There were strikers in C41 whose sexual tastes were well outside the mainstream. Sometimes that was why they'd enlisted in the Strike Force to begin with. A guy everybody expected to die was cut slack in other ways. Abbado didn't think that was the case with Blohm, but he'd have kept his mouth shut anyway.

Caius Blohm wasn't somebody he wanted to fuck with. The chances of surviving Bezant were bad enough already.

Partly it was a day's experience for himself and the helmet database, but the main reason Blohm could safely cross a mile of jungle in less than an hour was that he didn't have to nursemaid Sergeant Gabrilovitch. That was a hard way to think of Gabe, but it was the truth.

The shooting tree stood in a grove of tall reeds whose foliage hung down like a fan dancer's props. The sprays of compound leaves were slightly russet, a hue different enough from that of most vegetation to call attention to itself—

And to conceal what was behind it, Blohm assumed. Exactly like the dancer's fans.

This was the first shooting tree Blohm had seen since he got beyond the margins of the landing site. As he moved gingerly closer, his helmet located half a dozen more in the immediate vicinity. The AI built swatches of surface or a shape implied by surrounding vegetation into a predicted presence. The largest tree was eight inches in diameter; much smaller than the one that discharged at the landing site, but large enough to be lethal.

Blohm eased a reed stem sideways with his knife. He didn't switch on the blade. Leaf fans rustled against one another.

It was at least possible that the reeds were harmless in themselves, merely screening for the shooting trees. Using the stinger barrel and the silent knife together like a spreader clip, Blohm opened a narrow window to look beyond.

Bingo.

"Six, this is Six-six-two," he whispered. "The anomaly is a Spook ship, all right. But it hasn't landed here, it's crashed. Six-six-two over."

The Kalendru vessel was a globe much smaller than 10-1442. It lay on its side; the bottom and outriggers were only a dozen feet from Blohm's vantage point. Heating in the magnetic eddies of takeoff and landing swirled the plates with color.

The hull maintained its basic shape, but there was some crumpling and a number of seams had started. As Blohm watched, something raised its head from one of the ragged gaps in the metal and looked back at him.

"Why doesn't he shoot?" Tamara Lundie asked, viewing the relayed image of the creature's triangular head. The compound eyes had the soft gleam of faceted amber. The beak was saw-edged and long enough to shear through a human with a single bite.

The column was halted while both bulldozers snarled into a tangle of branching fungi that grew like a wall through the green jungle. Gills flaring fifty feet in the air shook clouds of poisonous spores when any part of the system was touched. Helmet filters protected the strikers, but Manager al-Ibrahimi had ordered clearance of a much wider path than usual to protect the colonists.

"I don't tell Blohm how to do his job," Farrell whispered. He had to force himself to speak at all, though he knew the creature couldn't hear them talk. It raised twin crests of feathery tissue, sensory receptors of some variety. They could be for hearing or scent, or both together.

"Note the coils of vine attached to the outriggers," al-Ibrahimi said. "When the vessel took off, their grip spun it sideways. The pilot wouldn't have had time to respond."

Like the aircar, Farrell thought as he looked at the tight spring of vine. He wouldn't have noticed it without the manager's comment. By timing its attack, the jungle had let the ship's own power effect its destruction.

The beast's crests shrank back against the skull; the head withdrew. Blohm's unseen hands let the reed stems back into their original alignment, closing the realtime image in a blur of vegetation.

"Sir," Farrell said to al-Ibrahimi. "I'm going to send my other scout to guide five strikers to the ship. I want to develop the threat and if possible to clear the vessel. A ship that size could carry five hundred troops and their equipment. Maybe they're all dead, but if there's a couple companies of them holed up in the bow I'd rather know it now."

He half smiled. "Not that I'm sure what I'd do about it."

The administrators' headsets not only received Strike Force transmissions, they projected imagery as air-formed holograms without a combiner field. Al-Ibrahimi nodded as he watched an image that to Farrell was only shimmers.

"You are in tactical command, Major," he repeated. "I myself am less concerned with the threat the Kalendru pose than in the question of what they're doing on BZ 459, but I hope your plan will provide answers to both."

The older man looked directly at Farrell. Even smiling his face was a swordblade. "That shows a foolish lack of pragmatism in me; which would surprise my colleagues no end, wouldn't it, Tamara?"

His aide didn't answer. She was viewing, or reviewing, images transmitted from the scout's helmet.

Farrell gave his orders in a short series. He got a crisp, "Yes sir," from Kristal, who'd be splitting a section of civilians among the strikers guarding the sections ahead and behind; an unenthusiastic "Yes sir, understood," from Gabrilovitch, who had a damned good idea of what it entailed; and from Abbado, "Roger," in a tone of vaguely resentful boredom, as though 3-3 had been ordered to pull a double guard shift.

Blohm didn't make an audible reply. The dot that marked him on Farrell's visor overlay winked twice.

Pretty much as Farrell expected. He'd have been a piss-poor commanding officer if his troops surprised him after this long together.

"The opening was too narrow for the animal's whole body to get through," Lundie said. "How could Striker Blohm be sure of that?"

"I don't know that he was sure," Farrell said. "If it had come straight out at him, he'd have reacted. He'll react if it comes out another hole. It got in some way."

Most of the time you weren't sure of anything. You usually didn't have a real target, you never had all the information. You played the percentages, you played hunches. You prayed a lot, said the words anyway; or you swore, using a lot of the same words, and you knew it didn't matter a damn either way. If the universe decided this was your time, it was going to nail you whatever you did.

"Six, this is Two-three," said Verushnie from the lead squad. "The dozers have opened a track. Shall we proceed? Over." 

"Two-three, roger," Farrell said. "Out."

The sound of brush tearing had ended. Metal clanged as a tractor was reattached to the trailers. The tone was off because foliage muted the high frequencies more than it did the low components of the sound.

Farrell nodded to the administrators. He hitched his gear to loosen its grip on his flesh. "I'm moving up with the second section," he said. "We're going to be shorthanded till Three-three gets back, but I don't think we'd be safer to wait."

"Major?" Tamara Lundie said. "According to his personnel records, Sergeant Abbado has had severe discipline problems. But you trust him."

"Ma'am," Farrell said. The conscious part of his mind watched himself and the two administrators from a high vantage. Instinct and emotion controlled everything else. "Since he's served with me, Sergeant Abbado has never had a problem any time that it mattered. If your records say anything else, you can stuff them up your ass."

He strode up the column, nodding to strikers readying themselves to move.

The lead bulldozer shook the striker guarding it worse than the tractor pulling the trailers did; but when you dismounted from the lead dozer you didn't have to run to catch up with the trailers to stow the hard suit. It was a trade-off, and anyway Meyer was too tired to care. After a while you could lose track of what you'd been doing.

She unlatched the gauntlets first. She'd been on the lead. That meant she had a good five minutes to strip before the trailers wobbled by. She wondered if she'd make it.

Somebody sat down beside her. "Can I help you?" he asked.

"Lock?" she said. "You want to throw the catches, you go right ahead. I'm so stiff I'll crack if I try to get the back of the gorget."

Civilians staggered by, too exhausted to notice Lock and Meyer except as obstacles in the trail. Most of them had thrown away all personal belongings except the clothes they wore and a bulging pocket or purse. The strikers were tired too, but they kept their weapons ready.

Lock loosened the catches with the forceful certainty of somebody doing a job for the first time and determined to get it right. Meyer shifted her posture so that the civilian could lift pieces of armor as she loosened them.

When Lock had worked the heaviest piece, the back-and-breast clamshell, over Meyer's right arm, she raised her visor and looked at him. His eyes were a green far more vivid than his chestnut hair.

"What are you after?" Meyer asked bluntly.

"I want you to teach me to shoot," Lock said, just as bluntly.

"Don't be fucking stupid," Meyer snapped. "I'm not training cadre."

"You can teach me the basics, how to load and fire and the theory at least of aiming," Lock said in a tone minutely harder. The iron within was beginning to crush the velvet glove. "I don't expect to become a marksman, but in the event that the savages attack again I can be something more positive than another potential victim whom you need to protect."

"I can't—" Meyer said.

"There are extra weapons now," Lock said, not raising his voice but trampling over the striker's half-formed thought without hesitation. "Those of your dead fellows. I've already spoken to Manager al-Ibrahimi. He's agreed pending approval by the military authorities."

The civilian smiled wryly at his formal phrasing. "I realize you'll have to get permission from Major Farrell," he added. "But there's no reason he shouldn't grant it."

Meyer began stuffing the pieces of armor into the pouch. She shook her head. "You'd blow your foot off or shoot somebody in the back by mistake," she said.

Lock held the mouth of the net bag open. "Not if you do your job, Striker Meyer. I don't have the correct reflexes, I understand. But I don't have the wrong ones either. I don't panic."

The second tractor was getting louder. It must be just around the nearest kink in the trail.

"That savage was holding me," Lock said. He straightened, lifting the pouch himself. "I don't need to be a crack shot to help under those circumstances. I just need a gun and the basics of how to use it."

"The bag goes on the first trailer," Meyer said. The tractor, its huge blade lifted vertically like a second roof over the cab, snarled into view.

"Striker Meyer," Lock said. "They were my wife and my daughter. It was my job to protect them and I couldn't. I should have protected them!"

"You're a fucking civilian!" Meyer said. "It was my job to protect you all, you stupid son of a bitch! Do you think I don't know how bad I fucked up?"

Meyer and Lock squeezed close to the edge of the cut as the tractor passed them. The squeal and clanking of the tracks and the high-pitched whine of the generator were overwhelming. The driver and guard were anonymous in their hard suits, but the wounded and infirm looked down from the piled trailer with gray concern.

"Yeah, I'll teach you to use a stinger," Meyer said as the trailer came abreast of them. "If the major okays it. I owe you that much."

"Holy shit," Abbado said in relief when he saw the striker waiting for them beneath the trunk of a tree knocked down when the Spook ship crashed. "I didn't think we were going to make it, snake. Even with you coaching us."

"Hey, Sarge," Blohm replied without turning around. "This tree's been dead long enough that it doesn't squirt poison, but don't touch the bark."

The tree was six feet in diameter. The upturned roots kept the bole high enough for the five strikers to walk under, but they all crouched anyway. Abbado'd left Methie behind for the knee and Glasebrook because, face it, Flea was clumsy.

While 3-3 trekked through the jungle, the scout had carefully circled the Kalendru ship. Abbado studied the fallen vessel. As usual, the first view of the objective thrilled him even though he'd gone over Blohm's images.

"Is there any way in but that crack?" Gabrilovitch asked. He seemed more uncomfortable in the jungle than the strikers of 3-3 were. Greater exposure, Abbado supposed.

Everybody's got a limit to the repetitive stress he can take. Abbado wondered how Blohm was holding up. You couldn't talk about Blohm's mental state in the terms you'd use for most people, even most strikers, of course.

"That's the only opening I've found," Blohm said. Their voices were barely audible. "It's eight feet long and ranges from seven inches to about thirty. The hatches are closed. From the way lichen's started to grow across the metal, they've stayed closed ever since the crash."

"And the critter inside?" Abbado asked.

Blohm shrugged. "He hasn't showed himself again. There may be more than one. It's nothing from the database."

"Naturally," Horgen muttered.

The ruptured seam was eight feet up, running parallel to the ground because of the way the ship lay. Thick vines snaked into the opening, but they didn't affect the wide point in the center. The root ends were lost in the jungle.

Spook ships generally had single-compartment decks. That meant there was plenty of room for the beast inside.

"We haven't seen many animals," Caldwell said.

"There's the wogs," said Matushek. "They're animals. Did you see what they did to the civilians when they attacked?"

"Okay, this is pretty straightforward," Abbado said. "We'll go to intercom on the squad channel. Me and Foley go forward with two fuel-air grenades each. We toss them in. When they blow, we boost Horgen and Matushek to stand at the edge of the hole with rockets. The critter'll be dead but it'll likely still be thrashing around. You guys keep hitting him as long as he's moving, four rockets apiece. Foley, you lift the rest of us to the hole, starting with me. When you've done that, you stay on the ground for rear security with Gabrilovitch and Blohm. Understood?"

Gabrilovitch grimaced. "We're scouts," he said. "You want us on point?"

"This is a standard clearance operation," Abbado said. "Nothing Three-three can't handle. You're way too important to the major for you to get your ass blown away by a ricochet."

"What if the thing sticks its head out when we throw the grenades?" Foley asked.

"Then Ace and me blow it off," said Horgen.

Abbado unhooked a grenade with either hand and thumbed the arming switches live. "Let's do it, people," he said as he rose to his feet.

As Abbado took his first step toward the Kalendru vessel, the creature's head rose snout-first through the crack. The triangular skull was too large to fit the thirty-inch opening any other way. Because the skin lay close over the bone without a layer of muscle between, the beast had the look of a reptile or insect rather than a mammal.

"It can't get—" Abbado said, trying to estimate the risk of tossing his right-hand grenade past the head and neck.

The creature licked out a twenty-foot tongue flaring at the tip into a pair of sucker-tipped mandibles. It gripped Abbado around the waist and snatched him back toward fangs as long as his forearm.

Matushek and Horgen fired rockets simultaneously. The warheads detonated deep in the creature's skull. A fireball of unexpended fuel seared Abbado's bare hands as the double shockwave snatched the grenades away from him.

"Fire in the hole!" he wheezed as he went over in a backward somersault. He'd only been ten feet from the rocket warheads when they went off. The half of the tongue clinging to him flew free and thrashed into the jungle in the same general direction as the live grenades.

What remained of the creature's head flailed the hull in a sleet of stinger pellets until another rocket severed the neck. Abbado's grenades lifted bubbles of seared foliage without harm to the strikers. An instant later, two shooting trees burst with sharp cracks. Their spikes stripped narrow cones of the jungle still farther away.

Foley stepped past the huge head. The lower jaw twitched, but it had no upper surface to close against. He tossed his grenades into the opening, then added another pair to replace Abbado's.

Abbado wobbled to his feet. Orange fire and the stench of burning meat belched from the cracked seam.

"Let's get them," Abbado croaked as he staggered forward.

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Contents
Framed

Back | Next
Contents

Night Sounds

"Mr. Blohm?" Seraphina Suares, leading a train of children, said to Sergeant Gabrilovitch.

"That's him," Gabe said, nodding across the minilantern's circle of light. "What is it you need, ma'am?"

Blohm rolled down the sleeve of his tunic without speaking. There was a line of tiny ulcers across the inside of his elbow, but they'd been shrinking in the past hour. His immune booster was handling the microorganisms.

Blohm's body temperature had been elevated by about half a degree ever since 10-1442's hatches opened. His augmented system was fighting off local diseases. The slight fever didn't seem to affect his judgment dangerously. He hoped the same was true for everybody in the expedition, but that wasn't something he could do much about.

The woman met Blohm's eyes. She was too old for any of the six children to be her own. The eldest was probably ten, the youngest no more than two and carried in her arms. She smiled. "Sergeant Kristal said that Mr. Blohm would be responsible for feeding me and the children. She directed us here."

"Oh," Blohm said. He'd removed his equipment belt, but the converter was still in its pouch. "Okay, that was the deal. I . . . What is it you want to eat? Not that you're going to tell much difference."

"I think it's best that we try whatever you planned for yourself," the woman said. "Sit down, children, and be sure to stay on the plastic. Mirica, dear? Won't you sit down?"

A four-year-old with bangs and short dark hair remained standing. Her eyes had the thousand-yard stare that Blohm had seen often enough before—on redlined veterans. None of the kids looked right.

Gabrilovitch looked over the gathering and rose. "Guess you've got it under control, snake," he said. "I'll see you after my guard shift."

Blohm drew on his left-hand glove as he walked to the brush piled at the edge of the clearing the bulldozers had cut for the night. The ground was covered with quarter-inch roofing plastic. It was temperature-stable—bonfires burned in several parts of the camp—and too tough for anything to penetrate overnight, though there was still a danger of shoots or roots coming up between the edges of sheets.

God or the colonist brain trust said that the forest wouldn't be as active after the sun set. Blohm was willing to believe that; but he didn't expect to sleep very soundly the first night, even during the hours he didn't have guard.

"I wasn't expecting, ah, kids," Blohm said. He worked loose a four-foot length of root and sawed it off with his knife. Any organic would work so long as it fit the mouth of the converter. He wasn't sure how much he'd need, but this was a start.

"We're the widow and orphans brigade," the woman said. Her voice was too even for the soul behind it to be calm. "I'm Seraphina Suares. I said I'd look after children who'd been, who'd, you know. I lost my husband when the aircar crashed."

"Ah," Blohm said. He extended the converter's doubly-telescoping base and opened the top flap, focusing on the task with needless concentration. He didn't know why he felt embarrassed. Hell, he'd been an orphan himself; raised by the state in Montreal District.

Mrs. Suares checked the feet of one of the younger boys for blisters. The ten-year-old was changing the infant's diaper. Several of the kids were bandaged though the silent one, Mirica, didn't seem to have received any physical injury. She was about the age of the Spook he'd killed in the doorway at Active Cloak.

Blohm stuck one end of the root into the converter; the box began to hum. He steadied the root with his gloved hand, feeling a faint vibration. Converters dissociated organic material at the molecular level, not by grinding or other mechanical means, but it was as fast a process as combustion.

"I've got it set for chicken and rice," Blohm said. "That seems to do as well as anything. Do you have something to put this in, ah, ma'am?"

"Children, take out your cups and spoons," Mrs. Suares said. "And Mr. Blohm, please call me Seraphina if you can. Is your nickname Snake?"

The children were taking a variety of containers from their little packs. A six-year-old raised an ornate metal mug that had set somebody back in the order of a year's pay for a striker. The mug and the clothes on the kid's back were the only things remaining of his family.

"Hold it here," Blohm said, drawing a cup down to the output spigot. A gush of thick gruel spurted until the child drew back. "Next one, step up. It's not that bad and it's got all the vitamins and whatever."

The bad light was actually an advantage. The flavor of food from the converter could be varied somewhat, but the color was always gray. In daylight, you had to remind yourself you weren't eating wet cement.

Another kid stuck her cup under the spigot. Others were staring at the first one as he dug his spoon doubtfully into the glop. Mirica was as still as a stump, but at least she'd taken out an eared mug in the shape of a grinning face.

"Ah, snake's not a nickname, ma'am," Blohm said. "Not exactly."

It's what veterans call each other instead of miss and mister, which we're not . . . 

Rather than say that aloud, Blohm muttered, "My name's Caius, ma'am. I guess it doesn't matter a hoot what you want to call me."

"Caius, then," Mrs. Suares said with satisfaction. Blohm didn't remember anybody calling him by his given name before.

They got through five of the kids without a problem. Two ate with something like enthusiasm, which said more for their appetite than the meal. Mrs. Suares was feeding the two-year-old from her own bowl.

Mirica took the filled cup and even tasted a spoonful. After a moment she cradled her head in her arms and began to sob. The mug slipped from her hand and oozed its contents onto the ground.

"Oh, sweetheart, darling," Mrs. Suares said with sad concern. "Please, darling, you've got to eat. We all have to keep our strength up so that we aren't a burden on people like Caius here. Please, Mirica. Please sweetheart?"

Blohm detached his mess can from the bottom of the converter. "I know how she feels," he said to Mrs. Suares. "They had a hell of a time getting me to eat at the creche when I was a kid too."

He didn't think about the creche much, but it wasn't that he'd had a bad time there. It was a lot like the army. Not great but mostly okay; and anyway you better get used to it because that was what life was going to be until you died.

"Are you all right, Caius?" Mrs. Suares said.

"Sorry," Blohm muttered. He must have been staring at her or some damned thing. "Sorry.

"But you know, thinking back . . . Hey," he said. "Mirica? Do you like tapioca pudding? That was the only thing they could get me to eat."

Blohm carried the converter over to the berm and dumped its contents onto the wrack from which it had come. Kneeling in the lanternlight, he reset the output and fed an additional length of root into the system. "I never thought of doing this myself, you know? Shit, it must be fifteen years since I had tapioca pudding."

The converter's holding tank had a non-stick surface that wouldn't even raise a meniscus if filled with water. The kid's mug would have to be washed to get the "chicken and rice" out of it, so Blohm ran the new batch into his own can.

They all watched him as he put his finger into the can and tasted it. Even Mirica turned her head, though she didn't lift it from her arms. "Goddam," Blohm said in surprise. "It tastes like tapioca pudding."

He looked at Mrs. Suares. "Ma'am," he said, "this is the first fucking thing I've had through this bitch that tastes like it ought to. It's good. Here kid, you try it."

Mirica stuck her finger out. Mrs. Suares started to say something but caught herself.

Staring solemnly at Blohm, the child licked the goo off her finger, then straightened into a sitting position. He and she each took another fingerful of the sticky mass.

Blohm shook his head. "Fuck if I know why I never thought of doing this before, ma'am," he said. He suddenly realized he wasn't speaking to another striker. "Oh, Christ," he muttered. "Ma'am, I'm sorry about my language. With the kids and all."

"You have nothing at all to be sorry for, Caius," Mrs. Suares said with a smile warmer than the still night air. "And it's Seraphina, please."

Esther Meyer heard somebody talking in a low voice to the doctor who'd just checked her over, but she didn't open her eyes. Kristal had told her she was off the guard rotation tonight. Meyer didn't think she was hurt that bad, but she wasn't going to argue with the decision.

She was okay. She just felt like she'd been dragged all day behind the tractor instead of riding on it. She was face down, her cheek against the cool plastic. Her back hurt like hell whichever way she lay, though the doc said nothing was broken. He'd injected an enzyme to reabsorb the swelling by morning.

The plastic sheeting was fairly stiff, but it creaked and rippled when someone walked on it. Meyer felt somebody stop and kneel on the other side of her. "Yeah?" she muttered. Best guess was she was about to learn she was on guard after all.

"Striker Meyer?" said an unfamiliar voice. "I'm Councillor Matthew Lock. I came to apologize."

Meyer tried to turn over. She gasped and swore with pain. Relaxing, she took a deep breath.

"Striker Meyer?" the voice repeated in concern. "Please don't—"

"Can it!" Meyer wheezed. "Just give me a sec—"

She lurched into a sitting position. Her muscles relaxed into patterns that didn't stress bruised and knotted tissue. The relative lack of pain was sudden pleasure.

Meyer smiled into the citizen's worried face. "It's just getting from one posture to the other that's a problem," she said, wiping her brow absently. "They couldn't give me the stuff they would've done in a base hospital because then somebody'd have to carry me, right?"

Lock swallowed and nodded. He looked like he'd lost ten pounds since she'd seen him in the ship. After that—all Meyer remembered was a flash of Lock's face as the native convulsed away. It'd been as much luck as Meyer's skill that she hadn't blown the cit's head off with the same burst, but there hadn't been a lot of time.

"Striker Meyer," Lock said formally. Fire lit half his face; the other side was sketched by the fainter, even glow of an electric lamp. "I've already withdrawn my complaint to the project manager about your conduct. I want to apologize to you personally as well."

He cleared his throat. "I told Manager al-Ibrahimi that I'd first acted like a fool in the ship, then compounded my error by complaining like a fool to him. He assures me that no disciplinary action had been contemplated in any case."

Lock gave her a wry smile. "So you don't have to worry about fools running the expedition, just fools among the civilians you guard."

"That's okay," Meyer said. She tried to shift her weight sideways. Staying in the same position gradually hurt worse than moving to a new one. The choice of when to move was a bitch, though. She grimaced. "I'm sorry it happened. I screwed up."

Meyer thought of saying it was the compartment that got to her rather than the woman and the screaming kid, but that didn't matter now. It hadn't much mattered before either. You either fuck up or you do your job. She'd fucked up.

"I didn't understand how quick you had to be to survive," Lock said softly. He turned his face from Meyer. His eyes were on the forest, but she wasn't sure they were focusing.

"When the savages came out of the trees I just looked at them," Lock said to the forest. "And one of them grabbed Alison. And I said, I said, `What are you doing?' and he cut her head off. Like that. And he grabbed me and you killed him."

The civilian stared at his hands, washed clean of his daughter's blood. He began to cry. "You were trying to keep us alive and I didn't understand," he said through the tears. "I'm a lawyer, Ms. Meyer. I don't belong here, and I didn't understand."

Meyer turned her head. "Nobody belongs here," she said. "Human beings don't. The jungle doesn't like us."

She cleared her throat. Lock wiped his eyes with his sleeve, angry at the weakness but not attempting to disguise it.

"Well, it'll be okay soon," Meyer said. "It's not as though we were planning to stay."

Esther Meyer tried to remember when was the last time she'd thought she belonged anywhere.

When the bonfires flickered, branches beyond the cleared margin looked as though they were moving, but Farrell's helmet knew better. Though—

The natives had fooled the helmets once. Fooled Tamara Lundie on the vibration sensors, and not enough infrared signature to give Tomaczek more than a heartbeat's warning.

Farrell smiled tightly toward the project manager and his aide. Neither of them reacted, but President Reitz paused in mid-breath.

"I was just thinking," Farrell said. "You can't live without trusting something. Even if you can't trust it."

"I consider the day's progress very satisfactory," al-Ibrahimi said, either because he didn't understand what Farrell meant or more probably because he did. "The humanoid attack was unexpected and costly, but C41's speed and skill limited the scope of the catastrophe. Tamara assures me that in the future we'll have at least some warning."

"Yes," said Lundie, a syllable edged with cold anger.

"I wonder if the Kalendru ship crashed and they've been looting it," Farrell said. "I've been thinking about those clubs. They're plastic, not stone or wood or something."

"According to analysis by Professors Gefayal and Bronski," al-Ibrahimi said, "the clubs are a complex folded protein, stiffened and hardened with silica. The professors don't believe the clubs could have been cast. They suggest that they must have been grown."

"But they were animals," Reitz objected. "They didn't have any technology. Only the weapons, and those so simple."

"A culture can have biological sophistication while remaining very simple in the mechanical realm, madam," Lundie said.

"Which is true but doesn't answer the question of how the bodies of three of the twelve humanoids were themselves modified to spray caustic," the manager said. "The sophistication is undeniable, but I remain doubtful that the humanoids themselves are more than agents. We'll have to wait to gather more data before we determine who is the principal."

Farrell thought about the Spooks who'd attacked the expedition the day before. They were already brain dead. Whoever was in charge didn't like Kalendru any better than it did human beings.

"We're closer to the magnetic anomaly now," he said. "I'm going to send a scout to check it tomorrow." He played with his stinger. "If you approve."

"You're in tactical command," al-Ibrahimi said. "If there are more Kalendru on BZ 459, we need to know it."

"None of the species we're encountering is in the database," Tamara Lundie said. She didn't seem to be speaking to anyone in particular. "The survey wasn't exhaustive, but it had to have been thorough. It would have taken more effort to invent so large a self-consistent database than it would to orbit the planet a few times gathering imagery."

The sentence ended with the closest approach to an exclamation point that Farrell had yet heard in the aide's voice.

"Tamara, I believe you're reacting to toxins from your injury," al-Ibrahimi said. "I'll monitor the sensors for you. Go to one of the doctors and direct him or her to sedate you for a three-hour period. After that we'll examine your condition."

"I can't," Lundie said. She gripped the bandaged wrist with her good hand and squeezed until tears sprang from her eyes. "Sir, you need your sleep. I'll carry out my duties."

Farrell stood with a poker face to conceal his aches and the patches of skin rubbed raw by his equipment. "Sir," he said to the project manager, "I need to make the rounds of my duty section. I know where Doc Ciler is. I'll take her by. Miss?"

"I'd appreciate that, Major," al-Ibrahimi said. "Tamara, analyze the probable result of having a psychotic overseeing our sensor data."

"I'm not . . ." Lundie said, but she rose to her feet at Farrell's gentle pressure.

"You're perilously close or you wouldn't suggest that you'll carry out your duties when you're obviously incapable of doing so," her superior said. He spoke with the emotionless impact of so many hammer blows.

"Yes sir," Lundie said. "Major Farrell, I believe I'm able to walk unaided. I'd appreciate being able to hold your arm."

"Sure," Farrell said. "We'll find the doc and he'll fix you up fine."

He remembered the time he'd screamed that he was still in command, that he was still capable of leading C41, as Leinsdorf held him down for a medic to sedate. He'd been seeing double images from the knock on the head and giving orders to dead people, some of them dead for years.

Farrell led Lundie through groups of colonists sleeping or trying to ready themselves for tomorrow's march. She closed her eyes. Children were crying; children, and a few adults.

"The biota of this crater bear only a family resemblance to what the survey ship reported for the planet as a whole," Lundie said in tones of flat despair. "And that was bad enough. Without data, Major, what chance do we have?"

"You've got us," Farrell said. "For what it's worth, ma'am, you've got us."

Guilio Abbado walked among the sleeping colonists, not in a hurry and taking no particular course. The roof sheets unrolled to eight by twenty feet each. They were laid with a slight overlap. People were supposed to stay a foot back from the seams. Mostly they did, but folks moved in their sleep.

And some of them were sloppy, strikers as well as cits. Abbado hadn't found any rootlets quivering murderously around the edges, but his boot had prodded a few legs and butts until they moved someplace safer.

Caius Blohm sat beside his unrolled null sack, closer to the berm than most folks wanted to sleep. The scout had finished his guard shift twenty minutes before, when 3-3 came on duty. It wasn't always easy to sleep, even after a day of exhausting strain.

"Hey, Blohm," Abbado whispered in greeting. "Looks like the brain trust was right about things settling down after dark."

"Hey, Sarge," the scout said. "So far, so good."

The null sack murmured. Abbado looked at it, the visual equivalent of trying to grab a handful of jelly.

"It's one of the orphans," Blohm muttered. "She was having trouble sleeping. Ms. Suares and me thought . . ."

"Caius?" a little voice said. The child stuck her head out of the sack's mouth. Christ, she was little.

"I'm here, Mirica," Blohm said. A small hand reached out of the sack. He took it in his. "You're all right, honey."

"Hold me, Caius?" the child said.

"Guess I'll get back to work," Abbado said, attempting to keep his tone completely neutral.

"Just a second, honey," Blohm said in a voice gentler than anything Abbado'd ever expected to hear from him. "I gotta talk to the sarge for a minute, that's all."

The scout rose in a motion that would have made a cat look awkward and motioned Abbado with him to touching distance of the berm. "Listen, Abbado," Blohm said. "There's nothing going on. She's scared because her folks got greased and I'm taking care of her. You see?"

"Hey, don't get your knickers in a twist," Abbado said as forcefully as he could in a low voice. He felt like a dog facing a cobra. "I was there, remember? I saw the poor kid with her mom's arm. If she's got nightmares and needs somebody to hold her, what the fuck do you expect?"

"Ah, shit, Sarge," Blohm said, relaxing with a quiver like a released spring. "I forgot you knew. Shit, I thought . . . You know, some of the guys."

"This was a bitch of a place even before the wogs showed up," Abbado said calmly, starting to relax a little himself. "Well, maybe they ate the Spooks before they got around to us, you think?"

"I looked at the recordings of the attack," Blohm said bitterly. He hadn't listened to Abbado. "Those bastards were killing kids because they wanted to. The one that chopped her mom, he was going for Mirica when Nessman waxed him."

"Remember to get some sleep yourself, snake," Abbado said. He moved away, walking slowly. "The major's got us tapped for your backup tomorrow. I don't want you stepping in shit cause you're tired."

"Roger, Sarge," Blohm whispered. "Sorry for coming down on you like that."

Caldwell was twenty yards distant, standing near the roots of a tree toppled by a dozer. Abbado walked toward her, knowing his helmet would caret anything it saw as a danger. A quiet night thus far.

There were strikers in C41 whose sexual tastes were well outside the mainstream. Sometimes that was why they'd enlisted in the Strike Force to begin with. A guy everybody expected to die was cut slack in other ways. Abbado didn't think that was the case with Blohm, but he'd have kept his mouth shut anyway.

Caius Blohm wasn't somebody he wanted to fuck with. The chances of surviving Bezant were bad enough already.

Partly it was a day's experience for himself and the helmet database, but the main reason Blohm could safely cross a mile of jungle in less than an hour was that he didn't have to nursemaid Sergeant Gabrilovitch. That was a hard way to think of Gabe, but it was the truth.

The shooting tree stood in a grove of tall reeds whose foliage hung down like a fan dancer's props. The sprays of compound leaves were slightly russet, a hue different enough from that of most vegetation to call attention to itself—

And to conceal what was behind it, Blohm assumed. Exactly like the dancer's fans.

This was the first shooting tree Blohm had seen since he got beyond the margins of the landing site. As he moved gingerly closer, his helmet located half a dozen more in the immediate vicinity. The AI built swatches of surface or a shape implied by surrounding vegetation into a predicted presence. The largest tree was eight inches in diameter; much smaller than the one that discharged at the landing site, but large enough to be lethal.

Blohm eased a reed stem sideways with his knife. He didn't switch on the blade. Leaf fans rustled against one another.

It was at least possible that the reeds were harmless in themselves, merely screening for the shooting trees. Using the stinger barrel and the silent knife together like a spreader clip, Blohm opened a narrow window to look beyond.

Bingo.

"Six, this is Six-six-two," he whispered. "The anomaly is a Spook ship, all right. But it hasn't landed here, it's crashed. Six-six-two over."

The Kalendru vessel was a globe much smaller than 10-1442. It lay on its side; the bottom and outriggers were only a dozen feet from Blohm's vantage point. Heating in the magnetic eddies of takeoff and landing swirled the plates with color.

The hull maintained its basic shape, but there was some crumpling and a number of seams had started. As Blohm watched, something raised its head from one of the ragged gaps in the metal and looked back at him.

"Why doesn't he shoot?" Tamara Lundie asked, viewing the relayed image of the creature's triangular head. The compound eyes had the soft gleam of faceted amber. The beak was saw-edged and long enough to shear through a human with a single bite.

The column was halted while both bulldozers snarled into a tangle of branching fungi that grew like a wall through the green jungle. Gills flaring fifty feet in the air shook clouds of poisonous spores when any part of the system was touched. Helmet filters protected the strikers, but Manager al-Ibrahimi had ordered clearance of a much wider path than usual to protect the colonists.

"I don't tell Blohm how to do his job," Farrell whispered. He had to force himself to speak at all, though he knew the creature couldn't hear them talk. It raised twin crests of feathery tissue, sensory receptors of some variety. They could be for hearing or scent, or both together.

"Note the coils of vine attached to the outriggers," al-Ibrahimi said. "When the vessel took off, their grip spun it sideways. The pilot wouldn't have had time to respond."

Like the aircar, Farrell thought as he looked at the tight spring of vine. He wouldn't have noticed it without the manager's comment. By timing its attack, the jungle had let the ship's own power effect its destruction.

The beast's crests shrank back against the skull; the head withdrew. Blohm's unseen hands let the reed stems back into their original alignment, closing the realtime image in a blur of vegetation.

"Sir," Farrell said to al-Ibrahimi. "I'm going to send my other scout to guide five strikers to the ship. I want to develop the threat and if possible to clear the vessel. A ship that size could carry five hundred troops and their equipment. Maybe they're all dead, but if there's a couple companies of them holed up in the bow I'd rather know it now."

He half smiled. "Not that I'm sure what I'd do about it."

The administrators' headsets not only received Strike Force transmissions, they projected imagery as air-formed holograms without a combiner field. Al-Ibrahimi nodded as he watched an image that to Farrell was only shimmers.

"You are in tactical command, Major," he repeated. "I myself am less concerned with the threat the Kalendru pose than in the question of what they're doing on BZ 459, but I hope your plan will provide answers to both."

The older man looked directly at Farrell. Even smiling his face was a swordblade. "That shows a foolish lack of pragmatism in me; which would surprise my colleagues no end, wouldn't it, Tamara?"

His aide didn't answer. She was viewing, or reviewing, images transmitted from the scout's helmet.

Farrell gave his orders in a short series. He got a crisp, "Yes sir," from Kristal, who'd be splitting a section of civilians among the strikers guarding the sections ahead and behind; an unenthusiastic "Yes sir, understood," from Gabrilovitch, who had a damned good idea of what it entailed; and from Abbado, "Roger," in a tone of vaguely resentful boredom, as though 3-3 had been ordered to pull a double guard shift.

Blohm didn't make an audible reply. The dot that marked him on Farrell's visor overlay winked twice.

Pretty much as Farrell expected. He'd have been a piss-poor commanding officer if his troops surprised him after this long together.

"The opening was too narrow for the animal's whole body to get through," Lundie said. "How could Striker Blohm be sure of that?"

"I don't know that he was sure," Farrell said. "If it had come straight out at him, he'd have reacted. He'll react if it comes out another hole. It got in some way."

Most of the time you weren't sure of anything. You usually didn't have a real target, you never had all the information. You played the percentages, you played hunches. You prayed a lot, said the words anyway; or you swore, using a lot of the same words, and you knew it didn't matter a damn either way. If the universe decided this was your time, it was going to nail you whatever you did.

"Six, this is Two-three," said Verushnie from the lead squad. "The dozers have opened a track. Shall we proceed? Over." 

"Two-three, roger," Farrell said. "Out."

The sound of brush tearing had ended. Metal clanged as a tractor was reattached to the trailers. The tone was off because foliage muted the high frequencies more than it did the low components of the sound.

Farrell nodded to the administrators. He hitched his gear to loosen its grip on his flesh. "I'm moving up with the second section," he said. "We're going to be shorthanded till Three-three gets back, but I don't think we'd be safer to wait."

"Major?" Tamara Lundie said. "According to his personnel records, Sergeant Abbado has had severe discipline problems. But you trust him."

"Ma'am," Farrell said. The conscious part of his mind watched himself and the two administrators from a high vantage. Instinct and emotion controlled everything else. "Since he's served with me, Sergeant Abbado has never had a problem any time that it mattered. If your records say anything else, you can stuff them up your ass."

He strode up the column, nodding to strikers readying themselves to move.

The lead bulldozer shook the striker guarding it worse than the tractor pulling the trailers did; but when you dismounted from the lead dozer you didn't have to run to catch up with the trailers to stow the hard suit. It was a trade-off, and anyway Meyer was too tired to care. After a while you could lose track of what you'd been doing.

She unlatched the gauntlets first. She'd been on the lead. That meant she had a good five minutes to strip before the trailers wobbled by. She wondered if she'd make it.

Somebody sat down beside her. "Can I help you?" he asked.

"Lock?" she said. "You want to throw the catches, you go right ahead. I'm so stiff I'll crack if I try to get the back of the gorget."

Civilians staggered by, too exhausted to notice Lock and Meyer except as obstacles in the trail. Most of them had thrown away all personal belongings except the clothes they wore and a bulging pocket or purse. The strikers were tired too, but they kept their weapons ready.

Lock loosened the catches with the forceful certainty of somebody doing a job for the first time and determined to get it right. Meyer shifted her posture so that the civilian could lift pieces of armor as she loosened them.

When Lock had worked the heaviest piece, the back-and-breast clamshell, over Meyer's right arm, she raised her visor and looked at him. His eyes were a green far more vivid than his chestnut hair.

"What are you after?" Meyer asked bluntly.

"I want you to teach me to shoot," Lock said, just as bluntly.

"Don't be fucking stupid," Meyer snapped. "I'm not training cadre."

"You can teach me the basics, how to load and fire and the theory at least of aiming," Lock said in a tone minutely harder. The iron within was beginning to crush the velvet glove. "I don't expect to become a marksman, but in the event that the savages attack again I can be something more positive than another potential victim whom you need to protect."

"I can't—" Meyer said.

"There are extra weapons now," Lock said, not raising his voice but trampling over the striker's half-formed thought without hesitation. "Those of your dead fellows. I've already spoken to Manager al-Ibrahimi. He's agreed pending approval by the military authorities."

The civilian smiled wryly at his formal phrasing. "I realize you'll have to get permission from Major Farrell," he added. "But there's no reason he shouldn't grant it."

Meyer began stuffing the pieces of armor into the pouch. She shook her head. "You'd blow your foot off or shoot somebody in the back by mistake," she said.

Lock held the mouth of the net bag open. "Not if you do your job, Striker Meyer. I don't have the correct reflexes, I understand. But I don't have the wrong ones either. I don't panic."

The second tractor was getting louder. It must be just around the nearest kink in the trail.

"That savage was holding me," Lock said. He straightened, lifting the pouch himself. "I don't need to be a crack shot to help under those circumstances. I just need a gun and the basics of how to use it."

"The bag goes on the first trailer," Meyer said. The tractor, its huge blade lifted vertically like a second roof over the cab, snarled into view.

"Striker Meyer," Lock said. "They were my wife and my daughter. It was my job to protect them and I couldn't. I should have protected them!"

"You're a fucking civilian!" Meyer said. "It was my job to protect you all, you stupid son of a bitch! Do you think I don't know how bad I fucked up?"

Meyer and Lock squeezed close to the edge of the cut as the tractor passed them. The squeal and clanking of the tracks and the high-pitched whine of the generator were overwhelming. The driver and guard were anonymous in their hard suits, but the wounded and infirm looked down from the piled trailer with gray concern.

"Yeah, I'll teach you to use a stinger," Meyer said as the trailer came abreast of them. "If the major okays it. I owe you that much."

"Holy shit," Abbado said in relief when he saw the striker waiting for them beneath the trunk of a tree knocked down when the Spook ship crashed. "I didn't think we were going to make it, snake. Even with you coaching us."

"Hey, Sarge," Blohm replied without turning around. "This tree's been dead long enough that it doesn't squirt poison, but don't touch the bark."

The tree was six feet in diameter. The upturned roots kept the bole high enough for the five strikers to walk under, but they all crouched anyway. Abbado'd left Methie behind for the knee and Glasebrook because, face it, Flea was clumsy.

While 3-3 trekked through the jungle, the scout had carefully circled the Kalendru ship. Abbado studied the fallen vessel. As usual, the first view of the objective thrilled him even though he'd gone over Blohm's images.

"Is there any way in but that crack?" Gabrilovitch asked. He seemed more uncomfortable in the jungle than the strikers of 3-3 were. Greater exposure, Abbado supposed.

Everybody's got a limit to the repetitive stress he can take. Abbado wondered how Blohm was holding up. You couldn't talk about Blohm's mental state in the terms you'd use for most people, even most strikers, of course.

"That's the only opening I've found," Blohm said. Their voices were barely audible. "It's eight feet long and ranges from seven inches to about thirty. The hatches are closed. From the way lichen's started to grow across the metal, they've stayed closed ever since the crash."

"And the critter inside?" Abbado asked.

Blohm shrugged. "He hasn't showed himself again. There may be more than one. It's nothing from the database."

"Naturally," Horgen muttered.

The ruptured seam was eight feet up, running parallel to the ground because of the way the ship lay. Thick vines snaked into the opening, but they didn't affect the wide point in the center. The root ends were lost in the jungle.

Spook ships generally had single-compartment decks. That meant there was plenty of room for the beast inside.

"We haven't seen many animals," Caldwell said.

"There's the wogs," said Matushek. "They're animals. Did you see what they did to the civilians when they attacked?"

"Okay, this is pretty straightforward," Abbado said. "We'll go to intercom on the squad channel. Me and Foley go forward with two fuel-air grenades each. We toss them in. When they blow, we boost Horgen and Matushek to stand at the edge of the hole with rockets. The critter'll be dead but it'll likely still be thrashing around. You guys keep hitting him as long as he's moving, four rockets apiece. Foley, you lift the rest of us to the hole, starting with me. When you've done that, you stay on the ground for rear security with Gabrilovitch and Blohm. Understood?"

Gabrilovitch grimaced. "We're scouts," he said. "You want us on point?"

"This is a standard clearance operation," Abbado said. "Nothing Three-three can't handle. You're way too important to the major for you to get your ass blown away by a ricochet."

"What if the thing sticks its head out when we throw the grenades?" Foley asked.

"Then Ace and me blow it off," said Horgen.

Abbado unhooked a grenade with either hand and thumbed the arming switches live. "Let's do it, people," he said as he rose to his feet.

As Abbado took his first step toward the Kalendru vessel, the creature's head rose snout-first through the crack. The triangular skull was too large to fit the thirty-inch opening any other way. Because the skin lay close over the bone without a layer of muscle between, the beast had the look of a reptile or insect rather than a mammal.

"It can't get—" Abbado said, trying to estimate the risk of tossing his right-hand grenade past the head and neck.

The creature licked out a twenty-foot tongue flaring at the tip into a pair of sucker-tipped mandibles. It gripped Abbado around the waist and snatched him back toward fangs as long as his forearm.

Matushek and Horgen fired rockets simultaneously. The warheads detonated deep in the creature's skull. A fireball of unexpended fuel seared Abbado's bare hands as the double shockwave snatched the grenades away from him.

"Fire in the hole!" he wheezed as he went over in a backward somersault. He'd only been ten feet from the rocket warheads when they went off. The half of the tongue clinging to him flew free and thrashed into the jungle in the same general direction as the live grenades.

What remained of the creature's head flailed the hull in a sleet of stinger pellets until another rocket severed the neck. Abbado's grenades lifted bubbles of seared foliage without harm to the strikers. An instant later, two shooting trees burst with sharp cracks. Their spikes stripped narrow cones of the jungle still farther away.

Foley stepped past the huge head. The lower jaw twitched, but it had no upper surface to close against. He tossed his grenades into the opening, then added another pair to replace Abbado's.

Abbado wobbled to his feet. Orange fire and the stench of burning meat belched from the cracked seam.

"Let's get them," Abbado croaked as he staggered forward.

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