His weapons retracted. He could still hear the herd thundering away, but the loudest noise right now was his yammering heart. The medical grid display showed just how much adrenaline was coursing through his blood. Beneath Ms Skin, his skin was already chilling as the immediate danger faded out.
He called up the telemetry grid, checking on the Skins under his command. Everyone, it seemed, had survived the jeep's madcap dash. Looking around, he could see them picking themselves up. Dust churned through the air, glowing ocher in the bright sunbeams pouring through the broken forest canopy.
"Sarge?" Lawrence asked. "You intact?"
"Holy shit, man," Ntoko spat. "Yeah, I guess so." It was the lead vehicles that had taken the brunt of the macrorex charge. Too close to get out of the way, either they'd raced into the forest like Lawrence, or the Skins had abandoned them to take their chances on foot. The jeeps toward the rear of the column had enough time to turn and drive clear of the rampage, though most of the trucks were too bulky and slow to maneuver like that. In total, four jeeps and one truck had survived. Over twenty Skins had perished, either mauled by tusks or trampled to death. There were a number of other casualties, as well.
One of the macrorexes had been felled, the victim of intense carbine fire from three Skins who made their stand from the edge of the forest. They'd managed to shatter its enormous skull. Even so, raw inertia had kept it slithering forward until it crunched into one of the bulky trees, knocking the trunk almost horizontal. It had plowed up a broad furrow of slick black earth behind it Captain Lyaute set up a field camp on the side of the forest. There were fifty-four survivors, of whom seventeen were injured; another five had damaged Skin. Two platoons were assigned to gather up what weapons and equipment they could find amid the trail of destruction left by the macro-rexes. Communications with the spaceport were patchy. There seemed to be something wrong with the satellite relay. Lyaute's urgent request for airborne evacuation was tamed down flat. Two helicopters were already down. Other scout companies had been attacked. The governor was keeping the remaining helicopters assigned to guarding the spaceport.
A platoon dispatched to find out what had happened to the macrorexes reported that they were now milling about quietly a kilometer down the road. There was no sign of the new-natives who'd been spotted riding them.
Lyaute announced they were going to pile the wounded onto the remaining vehicles and make their way directly back to the spaceport. It was going to be a slow trip: some of the injuries were bad, and everyone else was going to walk escort. It had taken two and a half hours to drive out to the factory, and it was midday now; he estimated they should be able to make it back for nightfall. Lawrence knew that was bullshit.
"We'll take point, sir," Ntoko told the captain. "Scout out any trouble lying ahead of you."
Lyaute agreed quickly enough. None of the other sergeants volunteered their platoons.
Lawrence switched to a secure link and asked the sergeant: "Why? Those dinosaur monsters were only the start; they won't be the last assault today, no way. We'll get hit by whatever it is they've got out there."
Ntoko was walking along the line of salvaged weapons. He picked up a couple of rotary feed grenade launchers and handed one to Lawrence. "Maybe, maybe not" His voice was quiet and intent. "Look at it this way. The captain's just given us the pick of the weapons. We can deploy in a decent formation so nobody takes us by surprise. And we'll be a good distance out in front."
"Big deal."
"Think, man. Right now we're in shit that doesn't get any deeper. Those injured guys we've got, there's some that are in a real bad way. They're going to slow the rest of the company down."
"Yeah, but—"
"You been keeping up on tactical? There's not enough hydrogen to lift everyone off, Lawrence. That's if they even get the spaceplanes down past the windshrikes. Now do you want to be at the front of the line?"
Lawrence looked around the temporary camp. The wounded were being helped onto the jeeps. Field medics had already used a lot of aid kits getting them ready for that first move. A couple of engineers were working on a jeep, replacing bent suspension components with parts cannibalized off a wreck.
He had to admit, the company was hurting. When that happened, you mucked in and made sure everyone got back to base okay. That's what his training and first instinct was, anyway. Ntoko had drilled that into him. Being part of a unit was what it was all about.
Now there was doubt, among other disturbing notions, bubbling around in his thoughts. But selling out the others... Although his loyalty had always been to the platoon itself. What the hell did a simple corporal know about the overall strategy? He couldn't take the whole invasion force into account, much less save them. So where did you draw the line?
"We should never have come here," Ntoko said.
Lawrence took the bulky grenade launcher from the sergeant and slung the ammunition bag over his shoulder. His Skin AS interfaced with the weapon's targeting system. "Yeah, right."
Platoon 435NK9 set off first, walking down the battered track that was the road back to Roseport. Ntoko had put Lawrence and Nic out in front, leaving the rest in single file, spaced about seven meters apart. He brought up the rear himself.
Lyaute's brief was to flush out any possible ambushes. Don't bother too much with investigating potential sightings, just use firepower to eliminate new-natives. The rest of the company would follow a couple of hundred meters behind.
Twenty minutes along the road they'd already built the distance to four hundred meters. Ntoko had dictated the pace to Lawrence. "I'll handle any flak from Lyaute," he'd said. They didn't get any. The electronic interference was relentless. It had to be more than simple powerblock jamming. They were almost reduced to line-of-sight communication.
At the start Lawrence was busy with his AS, pulling in relevant data. They had enough bloodpaks to last twenty hours. He figured if they hadn't reached the spaceport by then they'd be dead anyway, though he found it somewhat unnerving that they couldn't just shed the Skins if they ran out of supplies. They needed some kind of protection from the oxygen. Ntoko had talked about disconnecting the helmet and using it purely as an air filter. It could remain plugged into the neck valves, and the body's organs would be able to sustain it without too much strain. Lawrence also called up tactical scans from the low-orbit observation satellite, trying to predict ambush points. He would have handed over his entire mission bonus (not that he expected to get one) for a realtime infrared scan of the area around them. But the low-orbit satellites had dropped out of the communications network hours ago.
"Surprised you're with us anyway, Corp," Nic said as they splashed through a stream. "What happened to your transfer over to the starship boys?"
Lawrence would like to blame it all on Morteth, Laforth and Kmyre. But it wasn't really their fault. They were the trigger, not the cause. They'd been dismissed from Z-B as soon as the platoon arrived back on Earth, sullen and thuggishly resentful to the end, swearing vengeance. It was the whole way the Arnoon village incident had been dealt with that troubled him. Maybe it was his own background that was the real problem, but he just kept thinking that the three of them should have been prosecuted. That way there would be accountability, responsibility. By agreeing to help out and play it quiet and canny he'd collaborated with the company. It was the kind of deal his father would have made. "The real way the world works," Doug Newton called it.
So what the fuck did I ever leave Amethi for?
When he thought about it these days it was only ever Roselyn and the pain she'd inflicted. Joona hadn't been too far wrong about the companies and their uniculture. Every human world was developing into a bland Xerox of Earth. Except for Santa Chico, of course.
"I got my promotion," Lawrence said. "It was more important at the time. I can transfer over to the starship division whenever I want."
"Not after this," Nic said. "We aren't going to have any starships left."
Lawrence kept expecting L
yaute to order them to slow down and wait. He'd kept up the same pace for over an hour and a half, striding along the track of beaten-down tigergrass. The jeeps were out of sight behind them now. Communications with Lyaute and his two lieutenants was becoming very intermittent. They just kept calling in their position and progress whenever they got a link.
Even in Skin, Lawrence was sure he could feel this planet's thick, heavy atmosphere working against him. There seemed to be a slight resistance to every movement. It wasn't gravity, Santa Chico was .95 Earth standard. It had to be the sluggish air pushing against him. Another damn problem.
Haze from the powerful sun was a further side effect. Anything more than a kilometer away wobbled in the heat radiating off the ground in fast distortion ripples. It played hell with their long-range sensors. Infrared was hopeless, of course. All a new-native had to do was crouch down in the tigergrass, and scrub, and he'd become invisible. Platoon 435NK9 all had their laser radars on, sending out fans of pale-pink light to sweep the sides of the road. So far they'd had a few probable sightings, but nothing they could shoot at.
Ten kilometers out from the factory, the road emerged from the end of a wide valley onto a gently undulating lowland terrain of tigergrass. It made a change to have an open view of the countryside ahead, though when Lawrence scanned his helmet sensors around, the eternal wave motion of tigergrass in the wind swamped the discrimination program.
"Nothing in sight," he reported.
"Keep going," Ntoko replied.
They moved out. Away to the north Lawrence could see a couple of macrorexes moving along a stream. Their ponderous motion was easy enough to see, as was their grubby hide color against the bright tigergrass. He wondered what kind of nerve it took to climb up on the back of one of those brutes and goad it into a run. More than he had, that was for sure. Who in Fate's name thought of doing such a thing in the first place?
"Somebody moving," Nic said.
"Where?"
"Two hundred meters southwest."
Lawrence expanded Nic's telemetry grid, meshing the sensor imagery to his own. There was something, a blur that wasn't all heat shimmer.
"I think we have a shadow," Lawrence told Ntoko.
"We've got a couple back here as well," Ntoko said.
Lawrence called up a tactical map. There was a small group of buildings a couple of kilometers ahead and to the east with small homesteads ranged around it, barely large enough to be classed as a village. The satellite sweep had revealed some activity, but that was a day out of date. Lyaute hadn't bothered investigating the place when they'd driven past that morning.
"Close in," Ntoko ordered.
"Easier target for them," Lawrence said over the secure command link.
"I know that. But they're sneaking in anyway, that means they're going to attack. This way we've got a better firepower concentration."
Lawrence's audio sensors picked up a number of warbling calls out amid the tall tigergrass. He was tempted to play one back at them on high volume. The Skin AS couldn't translate them.
A small bronze-colored bird darted above the tigergrass, moving fast toward them. It had three wings, one smaller than the others, and used some kind of spinning motion, like an asymmetric propeller. Silver-tipped wings traced bright spiral afterimages as they caught the sunlight. Nic shot it with his nine-millimeter pistol. It burst apart in a mist of blood.
"What are you shooting at?" Ntoko asked.
"Nothing, Sarge," Lawrence said. "Just a bird."
"You guys keep calm up there."
"You hear that?" Lawrence asked.
"I don't trust nothing in this place," Nic grunted.
Lawrence's sensors were picking up bursts of motion all around now. New-natives were dashing through the tigergrass, running for a few meters, then ducking down. None of them were closer than 150 meters. More of the bronze birds were being flushed out of the clumps of tigergrass by their antics. Lawrence watched them flitter about. He wasn't quite as suspicious as Nic, but he had his doubts. There were a lot of them. When he asked his AS to run a check through its files on indigenous life, there was no reference. But then the information was limited to a few dozen prominent species like the windshrikes and macrorexes.
The birds were clumping together in small flocks of six or seven, swooping and curving just above the tips of the tiger-grass. The more Lawrence watched them the more he was convinced that they were being driven in toward the platoon.
"Sarge?"
"Yeah, man, I got them. But I can't see us shooting every one—we don't have enough ammo for that, even if we could hit them."
One of the telemetry grids on Lawrence's display flashed red.
"Shit!" Kibbo yelled.
"What is it?" Lawrence could see from Kibbo's telemetry that his Skin suit had been struck by something.
"Took a hit. Ahh, shit."
Lawrence turned to see Kibbo fifty meters away, stumbling badly. He fell to his knees, clutching an arm. Skins were running toward him.
The telemetry grid was scrolling down weird data. Lawrence had never seen anything like it. Something had penetrated the carapace, but it was small, barely a couple of millimeters wide. If a bullet had split the surface, the tissue underneath should have absorbed it and clotted immediately. But the synthetic muscle around the puncture was starting to overheat. Its nerve fibers were failing.
Kibbo started screaming. His medical readouts were going wild.
"Down," Ntoko ordered. "Keep down, people."
Lawrence arrived just as Kibbo fell flat on his face. His arms and legs started thrashing, hammering into the ground.
"Some kind of convulsion."
"What's his medical program doing, for fuck's sake?"
"It's his Skin, it's spasming."
Ntoko hurried up, so Lawrence was looking right at him when the dart struck. It slammed into the grenade-launcher ammunition bag he was wearing on his back, nearly knocking him off his feet. He dropped to all fours, grunting hard at the impact Lawrence scrambled over and pushed his sensor focus on the little crater in the bag.
"What the hell was it?" Ntoko demanded.
"Don't know." Lawrence shifted to infrared. The small hole was damp. Spectrographic analysis revealed an unknown type of hydrocarbon fluid. "Shit. Could be some kind of bio weapon." His Skin deployed its aerosol nozzle and sprayed the area with a multispectrum neutralizing agent. The fluid fizzed a livid saffron.
Kibbo screamed again, his bucking lifting him off the ground. The rest of the platoon circled around, not knowing what to do. The Skin's AS and medical systems couldn't even stabilize him. The wild motions stopped suddenly. His helmet's emergency disposal valves opened. Blood poured out.
"Jesus!"
The Skins lurched back, fearful that any of the crimson fluid should splash against them.
"Was that the birds?" Nic asked. "Did they do that?"
"No way, man," Amersy said. "How could they?"
Lawrence risked a quick look around. The air was full of hundreds of fast-spinning birds, a sparkling river that hurtled through the sky. They'd formed a complete ring around the platoon.
"These are the people whose granddaddies invented Skin," Nic said. "If anyone knows how to shut us down, it's them."
"Shoot them," Ntoko ordered. "Carbines out; give me a circular formation, ten-degree overlap. Move."
They were firing as they rose to their feet hosing the bullets at the thick dazzling stipple gyrating around them. The birds broke apart, soaring higher in a scintillating plume. Targeting individual birds was impossible at that distance.
Foster screamed at the same time his telemetry grid flashed its alert. He toppled over, limbs jerking about. The rest of them automatically dived for cover.
"They're killing us," Jones cried. "We're fucking dead. Dead!"
Foster's agonized gurgling was filling the general communication link.
"Lawrence, incendiary grenades," Ntoko said. "We're going to start using this goddamn envi
ronment to our advantage. Range two hundred and fifty meters, semicircular pattern. You take north."
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