by David Drake
The bamboo shoots were thumb-thick. The stems were yellow, and the lower leaves were yellow-brown.
The undersurface of each leaf was a hooked mat. The foliage began to tremble outward as the plants sensed human warmth.
God alone knew how thick the belt was.
Wilding bent and swung his cutting bar. Contact triggered the 20-inch blade in a petulant whine. Stems toppled, but their leaves clutched at Wilding’s arm as they fell.
“Right,” Brainard said. His voice was as calm as that of an accounting adding figures. “We need to get moving. Yee, take the Number Two slot and Caffey will fall in just in front of me for a while.”
“Ah…?” Yee said. “How about the gun?”
“Fuck you,” said Caffey. Instinct, not intellect snarled in his voice. The injured man hugged his heavy weapon to him with both arms.
Wilding resumed cutting. The bamboo rustled as it fell. Sometimes the stems remained upright, gripped by the mass of their neighbors. Wilding forced them aside. His uniform was in shreds, and a sheen of blood coated his arms.
The bamboo went on forever. Wilding cut, and stepped, and cut. He lost track of time and was conscious only of dull pain.
“Hey,” a voice said.
Wilding swung. The bar cut on either stroke, but the rotator muscles of his shoulder screamed with strain after ten minutes of alternate backhands.
“Sir?” said the voice. “I hear something.”
Wilding swung. He couldn’t see for the sweat in his eyes and the burning red haze which overlaid his mind.
Yee grabbed him by the shoulder. The bar dropped from Wilding’s nerveless fingers. “Sir!” the gunner said. “I hear something.”
So did Wilding, now that his body had stopped moving. His mind re-engaged. A rhythmic crunching sound, amazingly loud. He couldn’t tell what direction it came from because of the scattering effect of the dense stems.
Wilding looked over his shoulder. Leaf had paused six feet behind Yee; the next man in line was hidden by the walls of the ragged trail. Nobody wanted to bunch up here.…
“Pass the word back to Mr Brainard,” Wilding whispered to the nervous gunner. “Tell him that—”
The wall of bamboo crashed forward. Wilding shouted and grabbed for his cutting bar. The net of interlaced stems sprang down and held him as immobile as an insect in amber.
A three-ton grasshopper smashed its way across the trail. Its legs were modified to graviportal stumps. One of its clawed feet came down squarely on the net of bamboo which held Wilding.
The stems took up some of the shock, but Wilding screamed as he felt tendons go in his right ankle.
NOVEMBER 24, 379 AS. 0211 HOURS.
A dozen of them sauntered down the Palm Walk together, giddy with drink and the odor of the tropical blooms among the trees. The clubs were still open, but establishments in this restricted area had no need for garish advertisement. The entrances were lighted in pastels which set off the broad corridor rather than illuminating it.
Wilding was at the front of the loose group. The woman on his arm was a short-haired blonde from a cadet branch of the McLain family. He thought her name was Glory, but he was too drunkenly cautious to risk a scene if he were wrong.
The blonde said, “I want to go—ooh!”
Wilding tried to fold her in his arms. “I want to go ooh with you too, darling,” he said. “Let’s—”
The blonde twisted away from him. Wilding goggled at her in amazement.
“Oh my god!” grumbled one of the men. “Is Tootles still around? He stayed in the Azure, didn’t he?”
“Hal?” called a woman’s half-familiar voice.
Wilding turned. The figure shambling toward him was only a blur against the arbor in which she had waited, but her eyes were well adapted to the Palm Walk. “Oh, Hal,” she blurted, “thank God it’s you! You’ve got to help me.”
“Patrol!” the blonde shrieked. “Patrol! Where are you, you lazy bastards?”
There were discrete cameras and audio pick-ups every hundred yards down the corridor. As soon as the blonde screamed, a bright blue strobe light flashed a quarter-mile away at the guarded entrance which separated the Palm Walk from the public areas of Wyoming Keep.
“Now, you haven’t any business here, madam,” Wilding said, queasy with the shock of the unknown. It couldn’t be anyone he knew. He still couldn’t make out the woman’s features, but her body odor and the stench of cheap perfume flared his nostrils. “If you don’t cause any trouble, then I’m sure the Patrol will let you—”
“Hal, my God, it’s me, Francine!” the figure cried. “You’ve got to help me see Tootles.”
Good God, it was Francine.
“Tootles picked her up somewhere,” a man explained to his companion. “Then she found him in bed with her maid and hit him with a bottle. She tried to kill him!”
A Patrol scooter, silent except for the hiss of its tires against the pavement, sped toward the disturbance. Its strobe pulsed across Francine’s swollen features. She looked as though she had applied her make-up in the dark.
“Tootles isn’t here, Francine,” Wilding said. He wondered if she was armed.
Chauncey Callahan, Tootles, had started the evening with their party but he’d dropped away hours ago. Nobody else in the group knew Francine as well as Wilding himself did.
Francine snatched his wrist. Her trembling grip had no strength, but her false nails felt like the touch of broken glass. “Hal, you’re my friend,” she wheezed. “You’ve got to explain to Tootles that it was just a mistake, that I love him.”
“Sent her back where she belonged, of course,” said an ice-voiced woman in answer to a question Wilding hadn’t heard. “Which was nowhere.”
The Patrol scooter pulled up so hard that it squealed. Three men jumped out. One of them swept the group with a hand-held spotlight. The white glare steadied on Francine’s raddled, desperate face. Her dilated eyes glowed red in the beam.
“Hal, please,” she begged as the other two Patrolmen seized her elbows. Her nails left scratches as she lost her grip on Wilding. “Hal, you remember me! You remember me!”
Francine’s blouse was of a natural material from the planetary surface, a soft clinging fabric that fluoresced in white and blue-white light. The cloth blazed now in spotlit radiance, but that only emphasized the stains and tears which had made the garment too worthless to barter for drugs.
Francine pulled the blouse open. Her breasts sagged. “You remember!” she screeched.
“Get her out of here!” Wilding shouted as he turned his face.
One of the Patrolmen injected Francine with something. She sprawled limp and let the pair of them load her into the scooter.
The third Patrolmen switched off the spotlight. The strobe pulsed twice more, then cut off also.
“I’m very sorry for this problem, ladies and gentlemen,” the senior Patrolman said. His tone was unctuous over an edge of real concern. This could mean his rank, his job, or—or he could fall into the bleak emptiness reserved for those who had basked in the favor of the powerful, and then lost that favor. Empty days filled with algal protein and holonews images of the glittering folk with whom he had once been in daily contact. A life sentence to a prison bounded by the pressure walls of the Keep.
A life like that of Francine, drooling in the back of the Patrol vehicle.
“Unfortunately, the man at the entrance recognized the woman and didn’t check her name against the updated admissions list,” the Patrolman continued. The filament of his spotlight was a fading orange blur. “I trust that none of you were injured, or…?”
“You useless bastards!” the blonde shrilled. “We could have been—”
Wilding grabbed the woman’s shoulder. “Shut up,” he said very distinctly.
Glory, if her name was Glory, gasped and nestled against him.
Wilding waved at the scooter and its contents. “Get her out of here,” he demanded. His voice rose. “Get her out of my l
ife!”
“At once, Mr Wilding,” said the Patrolman in relief. He leaped aboard the vehicle. The driver had already started it rolling.
The scooter sped back toward the entrance to the Palm Walk and oblivion. Its tires keened like a woman sobbing.
8
MAY 17, 382 AS. 1723 HOURS.
We been rammed by a fucking battleship! Leaf thought as the bamboo crashed down in a monstrous bow wave.
The grasshopper’s headplate was smoothly curved and a yard across. The waxy chitinous surface gave no purchase to the hooked foliage, and six powerful legs drove the creature through stems that proved a nearly impassible barrier to humans.
OT Wilding vanished beneath a mat of vegetation that muffled his screams. Yee tried to jump out of the way, but the disaster was too sudden. He got his torso clear, but the stems that cascaded over the trail pinned the gunner’s hips and feet to the ground.
Yee lay on his back, yelling as he tried to aim at the behemoth which knocked him down. The muzzle of his rifle was tangled, and its light bullets weren’t going to have much effect on the grasshopper anyway.
Leaf’s pack held forty pounds of barakite. He had squeezed the doughy explosive into fist-sized balls after he cut it from the second warhead. He reached over his shoulder with his left hand and grabbed a wad; his right thumb poised on his multitool’s welding trigger.
He didn’t light the explosive. The huge insect was just trying to get away.
The grasshopper’s body was much like that of its Earth-born ancestors, but its armored legs were straight and short to carry the mass of its Venus-adapted form. It moved in a succession of tripods: the center leg on the right balancing with the front and back legs on the left while the other three drove forward, then the opposite pattern.
Because the grasshopper was at a full run, the cases of its vestigial wings lifted to uncover the creature’s external lungs: fungoid blotches of red, oxygen-absorbent tissue spaced along the midline on both sides of the grasshopper’s body. Air diffused through spiracles would not sufficiently fuel the life-processes of so large a body.
The digestive system in the grasshopper’s yellow-striped abdomen rumbled a farewell to K67’s crew as the beast vanished again into the bamboo.
Leaf giggled with relief. Then he saw the scorpion.
Yee’s heavy pack had prevented him from being thrown flat. “Somebody fucking help me!” the gunner bellowed as he used his rifle butt to lever himself upright.
“Look out!” Leaf shouted.
Yee rotated his head from Leaf—
To the new track the grasshopper had smashed through the vegetation—
To what had driven the grasshopper off in panic.
The grasshopper had been chewing a path through the bamboo entanglement for days. Leaf and Yee looked down the corridor. New shoots grew from the close-cropped soil at increasing height, in a pattern of pale green/bright green/yellow green.
The scorpion carried its flat belly six feet above the ground. It strode toward the humans with saw-toothed pincers advanced.
Yee screamed and fired the whole magazine of his rifle in a burst that made the barrel glow. Bullets sparkled across the lustrous purple-black head, destroying several of the simple eyes. Jacket fragments clipped tiny holes in the nearest foliage.
“Run!” the gunner shrieked. Bamboo still gripped his legs to the knees. He twisted, then twisted back when he realized he was trapped.
“Geddown!” Leaf bawled. The motorman pressed the stud trigger of his multitool, snapping the arc alight. The scorpion pounced.
Yee dropped the fresh magazine he was trying to insert into the rifle. He thrust the weapon out crosswise as a shield. The scorpion’s right pincer gripped the rifle’s receiver; its left reached beneath the weapon and caught Yee around the waist. The paired claws were eighteen inches long.
Leaf knew there was no use in running, but he would have run anyway except that the bamboo held him also. He touched the welding arc to his lump of barakite.
He wasn’t left-handed. He flung the explosive in a clumsy overhand motion as soon as it started to sputter. Tiny globules flicked his hand and wrist. The intense heat raised blisters instantly.
The scorpion tore Yee out of the bamboo. The gunner was no longer screaming. Blood soaked the waist of his torn uniform and fanned broadly across his chest from nose and mouth.
The blob of barakite was softened by its own combustion. It splattered over the arachnid’s head instead of flying into the open mouth as Leaf had intended.
The scorpion’s pincers thrust the victim between its side-hinged jawplates while the flames roared with blue-white laughter. Sparks flew in all directions. Somebody fired his rifle past the motorman.
Gobbets of burning barakite ignited the load of explosive in Yee’s pack.
The spark became the sun—
Became a volcanic pressure—
That shriveled the vegetation gripping Leaf and hurled him back away from its white heart.
SEPTEMBER 24, 366 AS. 1050 HOURS.
“Wait for us!” Peanut Leaf squealed in a voice that hadn’t broken by now, his twelfth birthday, and didn’t look like it would be getting any longer to try. The oil-drum barricade spouted smoke and orange flame before any of the retreating 5th-Level war party reached it, and the Leaf brothers were at the end of the rout.
“Yee-hah!” shrilled a 3rd-Level warrior as he flung a spear made of plastic tubing with a metal head.
The point nicked Peanut Leaf’s thigh; the thick shaft caught the boy a blow solid enough to stagger him. Peanut would have fallen, but Jacko, fourteen and strong for his age, seized his brother’s arm and propelled him like a tractor drawing a cart.
“Don’t you fall, you little bastard!” he shouted. “They’ll kill you!”
Peanut wasn’t in the least doubt about that.
Mongo and Race were already down—which meant dead, unless the 3rd-Level warriors had been in too much of a hurry to make sure by slitting their throats. It had been a ratfuck, an ambush sprung in the air shaft while the 5th-Level war party was just setting out on what was supposed to be a raid.
Now.…
Kacentas, War Dragon of the 5th Level, had planned for the possibility of retreat by sliding drums of waste oil across the home corridor. Three hard-faced girls of the Auxiliary were stationed there with torches to ignite the barricade if the raiders were driven back.
The disaster had been so abrupt that the girls lit the drums in the faces of their own warriors, rather than those of the enemy.
The leading warriors cursed and squealed, leaping the drums before the oil was properly alight. The pall of smoke rolled upward and down, following the convection patterns of Block 81’s climate control.
An arrow took Kacentas in the air. He tumbled to what would have been the safe side of the barricade.
The Leaf brothers sprinted into the curtain of smoke. Peanut gagged, but the air was clear immediately in front of the barricade. Fuel blasted upward in terrifying columns to mushroom against the corridor ceiling.
The Patrol would arrive within minutes, but within seconds it would be too late.
“Come on!” Jacko cried.
All the other 5th-Level warriors had vanished—except Hurst, who lay at the base of the drums with eyes staring upward from a pool of blood. Hurst had managed to run all the way from the air shaft with his jugular torn open by a spearthrust.
Peanut skidded to a halt. “I can’t!” he wailed to the barricade. The heat was a concrete presence.
“Come on!” Jacko repeated shrilly.
He picked up his brother by the throat and the seat of his pants. As he turned to hurl the younger boy to safety, a thrown club rang off Jacko’s skull and stunned him.
Peanut fell to the floor. He had lost his steel mace back in the air shaft. There were 3rd-Level warriors all around them. His eyes were open, but his mind refused to accept what he saw.
Jacko was still on his feet. Two of the enemy prodd
ed him with their spears. They didn’t drive the points home. Instead, they thrust Jacko backwards, into the oil fires.
Jacko screamed. His arms flailed as if he were trying to swim away from the agony, but there was no way out. For a moment, Jacko’s torso forced down the flames, but then the orange-red blanket roared up to cover him again.
And he still screamed.
Sirens and strobe lights flooded the corridor. The 3rd-Level warriors were running away, but Jacko did not move. His black arms lifted from the ebbing flames in a hollow embrace, and his skull greeted the Patrolmen with a lipless grin.
Jacko’s throat had shriveled shut. His brother screamed for both of them.
9
MAY 17, 382 AS. 1724 HOURS.
Newton was reloading. Brainard shoved past him and aimed his rifle.
He didn’t fire. When the scorpion reared high over the trail it had a face like the heart of the sun and he had to glance away.
The roaring brilliance was barakite burning, not a vision of Hell.
When Brainard looked up again, the scorpion was careening away in a series of spastic convulsions. When its jointed tail straightened, the creature was more than twenty feet long from jaws to stinger … but the jaws were gone, the whole head was a blazing ruin, and so long as the decorticated monster continued in its current direction, it was no further danger to K67’s crew.
Volleys of shots crackled and whined through the foliage as the ammunition in the backpack went off in the barakite fire. Cartridges without a gun-barrel to direct them weren’t particularly dangerous. On a bad day, a bullet or fragment of casing might put an eye out.
That was nothing to worry about, since OT Wilding was gone and they were all dead without his special knowledge.
Just before the scorpion crashed out of sight through a thicket of hundred-foot willows, a human leg fell from the shriveled chitin of its mouth.
Brainard blinked at the purple afterimages of the flame. His ears rang, and his nostrils were numb with the smell of barakite and burning flesh. The suggestion of fried prawns was probably from the scorpion.