by David Drake
"Good work, Britten," Johnnie said. "Lead element, follow me."
He hadn't been sure of exactly what was in the section the flamethrower swept, but he knew that where the jungle met a beach or stream bank, the flux meant that the nearest life forms were particularly savage and determined. Once the team had penetrated the immediate wall, they had a chance with the jungle's ordinary denizens.
"What?" blurted Red One, who hadn't understood—and hadn't understood that orders must be carried out instantly if they were any of them to survive. "Wha . . . ?"
"Force Prime to all personnel," said Uncle Dan's voice over the earphones, "Lead Prime, your orders transferring Red One and Force Two are approved. Red One, trade weapons with Force Two so that he's got a full bottle. And move out!"
John Gordon, ensign in the Blackhorse for a matter of days, stepped forward as point man in an operation that was at least as dangerous as anything the veterans behind him had ever attempted in their years of service.
It felt good.
17
One had a cat's face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat's pace,
One crawled like a snail. . . .
—Christina Rossetti
Light enhancement gave Johnnie a good view of outlines, but he switched his visor to thermal imaging as he stepped out of the chute's protection. Sensors in his helmet mapped the temperature gradients around him down to variations of a half degree. His AI fitted the blotches of heat into patterns which it highlighted on the visor when required.
Vines were at air temperature. The stick insect, poised vertically along a tree bole near the course Johnnie planned, was several degrees warmer. Though "cold-blooded," the insect had warmed itself by muscle contractions so it could strike with maximum speed and suppleness when the line of men passed beside it.
Johnnie switched back to light-enhanced vision and aimed, using the lower set of sights.
"Sir, what're you—" Sergeant Britten said in a low voice.
The grenade launcher beneath the rifle barrel went bloonk! The heavy recoil jarred Johnnie's shoulder, even though he let it rock him back instead of trying to fight it.
The grenade detonated with a bright green flash, blowing the insect's head to pulp and throwing the fifty feet of body into furious motion as dangerous as that of a runaway bulldozer. Medium-sized trees crashed as the not-yet-corpse careened through the jungle in a series of jointed motions.
"God almighty!" said Sergeant Britten.
"Right, let's move," Johnnie said as he stepped into the reality of a forty-pound pack that he hadn't worn in the simulator. Some food, some medical stores. . . .
Mostly ammunition. For his rifle, grenade launcher, and the little pistol on his hip. The raiders couldn't shut off the jungle just because they'd emptied their magazines, and Nature's scoring program had very tough sanctions for losers. . . .
Twenty yards away, a patch of ground quivered in the midst of the ash and embers. Leaves lay on it, but the sheen of mud was bright around their edges.
"Watch it," Johnnie whispered, facing his first real test. "That looks like a swamp-chopper burrow. I'll move close and when it rises I'll—"
"Excuse me, sir," said Sergeant Britten blandly. He held the nozzle of his flamethrower in his left hand so that his right was free to unhook a heavy grenade from his belt. "Let's try it my way first."
The veteran lobbed the grenade like a shot put, putting his upper body behind the throw with a grunt. The missile arched down and entered the soft ground with a sullen plop. The explosion that followed was a mere burp of sound, more a quiver through Johnnie's boot soles than a blast.
A column of mud and water shot ten feet into the air, then subsided. Bubbles with a sheen of blood rose and burst for thirty seconds more.
"I thought that might be simpler, sir," Britten said. "No . . . extra credit for neatness here, you see."
"Right," Johnnie said, tight-lipped. "Thanks." He set off past the lair, now harmless.
There was a trail near the end of the burned wedge, worn by God-knew-what and headed in something close to the planned bearing. Johnnie decided to follow it, since the ground was likely firmer than that of most of this low-lying area. They'd still have creeks to cross, and there wasn't a safe way to do that.
But then, there wasn't a safe way to fight any war—unless you were a politician.
The lead element proceeded several hundred yards without incident. Johnnie was on point, and his men were spaced at six-foot intervals behind him—tighter than would be safe against human enemies. He moved slowly, looking in all directions and switching his visor repeatedly between modes of vision.
"Don't forget the canopy," he warned on the general net. "Keep looking up. That's where the real bad ones'll be."
Some of the real bad ones.
The hot, saturated air felt like a bucket of molasses as he slogged through it, and the broad straps of his pack were knives. He couldn't let discomfort affect his alertness, but he didn't see how he could avoid that happening.
Too little light penetrated the forest canopy for there to be a heavy growth of green plants at ground level, but masses of fungus in a variety of forms made up for the lack.
Johnnie paused. Thermal mapping told him that the figure crouching beside the trail wasn't the lizard it seemed to be. It was a toadstool, a Trojan Horse fungus, which had grown into a distorted shape that would attract rather than repel larger, hungry predators. Therefore—
"Red Section," he ordered, pointing. "Together on my count of three, hit that. One, t—"
A member of blue Section fired off the magazine rifle he carried in addition to a flamethrower reload. The surface of the lizard-form puffed out yellow spores launched by chambers of compressed gas within.
"Flame!" Johnnie shouted, knowing it was too late even through Sergeant Britten had anticipated the order by triggering his flamethrower. Helmet filters clamped over Johnnie's nostrils; he squeezed his lips shut against the urge to suck in air through his mouth when his nostrils were constricted.
The white dazzle of Britten's flame-rod touched the fungus and turned it into a soft gush of light as its methane chambers exploded. A second flamethrower intersected with the sergeant's.
The third member of Red Section didn't fire. He lay on his back, arching in convulsions. Either the man had sucked spores in through his mouth, or he'd gone into anaphylactic shock from mere skin contact.
His tongue was black, and there was no life behind his bulging eyes.
The bare backs of Johnnie's hands prickled.
"Right," said Johnnie. He felt cold, as though he'd just stepped into ice water, but that was merely his sweat. "Force Prime, lead element has one fatal. Force Two, take the fresh flamethrower. Blue Two—" the man who'd fired his rifle "—carry the sergeant's flamethrower besides your own equipment."
"Hey, I can't carry—"
Johnnie slapped the side of the man's helmet with his rifle butt.
"You dickhead!" he screamed. "You just killed him, don't you see? That toadstool was waiting to be attacked so its spores would have first crack at fresh meat to grow on! And that's just what you gave them! Your buddy!"
The dead man's face was entirely black now, but the color was more than chemical reaction. Tiny fingers of fungus were already reaching up from the skin, speeded by the warmth of the flesh and the violent struggle for place through which life here had evolved.
"Oh," said the rifleman. He took the heavy flamethrower Sergeant Britten held out to him. "Oh."
Johnnie turned and vomited off the side of the trail.
"Lead element, are you able to proceed?" Uncle Dan demanded from his position back with the rear guard.
Johnnie spat, then wiped his mouth and swallowed. "Roger, lead element proceeding," he said in a voice he didn't recognize as his own.
That was the first time he'd seen a man die.
It wouldn't be the last.
* * *
; Dawn was a blaze of heat and enough additional light that the enhancement circuitry in the helmet visors was no longer necessary. Colors became real—and therefore more boringly uniform, black/green/gray, than the computer had made them for the sake of contrast.
The expedition was making very slow progress; but they had time, since there was nothing they could do when they reached the harbor shore except wait until midnight.
The trail met a creek, black with tanin and decay products. Track and watercourse together twisted off to the southeast, away from the harbor. The shallow banks were less than ten feet apart, an easy jump for the men if they hadn't been carrying their loads of weapons and equipment.
"Force Prime," Johnnie said as he eyed the water. It didn't look very deep, but they were going to have to check that before they entered it. "We've reached a stream. We'll need fencing."
The heavy equipment—the three boats, the mats for soft ground, and the fences to block a safe pathway through running water—were in the relatively-safe center element. Those burdened troops were almost defenseless, but their two unladen guards needed to watch only the flanks.
"Roger, I'll send some forward," Uncle Dan replied calmly . . . as calmly as Lead Prime, Johnnie himself. "What width do you—"
There was a roar and screams, audible through the air as well as over the helmet radios. Rifles ripped out their magazines in single, barrel-melting bursts. A pair of back-pack rockets added their whack-SLAP! sounds to the jungle-muffled din.
Johnnie's men spun around, staring vainly through the undergrowth. A few of them started to move toward the sound of the guns.
"Lead element, circle around Lead Prime!" Johnnie ordered sharply. "The sound will bring—"
And it did, sweeping like a flying carpet ten feet high above the water of the creek: head grotesquely small against the forty-foot expanse of flattened ribs on which it glided, but still wide enough to swallow a man whole.
It was genetically a snake, but the skill with which evolution had molded its body into an airfoil permitted it to fly for more than a mile if it found a tall enough tree from which to launch its attack.
Johnnie fired a grenade, but the creature banked and presented its body edge-on as he did so. The projectile sailed harmlessly above it and detonated in a mass of vegetation which hid even the flash.
The snake wasn't heading for the lead element but rather for the commotion which had caught its attention. Sergeant Britten raised and swung his flamethrower, but the weapon was too heavy to track at the speed of the flying target.
Johnnie sighted on the saffron scales of the snake's underside and slid an embroidery of three-shot bursts along them, working from mid-section to head as the target flashed past. The creature suddenly buckled in the air, braking its flight just long enough for Britten to whack the flat body in half with his rod of ravening flame.
The pieces fell separately, on to either side of the stream. As they did so, Green One punched a rocket through the front half.
"God almighty . . . ," Sergeant Britten muttered again. He took his right hand from the flamethrower's grip and waggled it in the air. The fine hairs were singed off the back of his fingers. The weapon's nozzle glowed orange from the long stream he'd fed through it.
"Keep watching the front and sides," Johnnie ordered in a pale, distant voice. "Somebody else will take care of what's behind us."
He fumbled with the fresh magazine. He'd gripped the rifle so hard that his fingers were almost numb.
The roars from the following elements had died away. It took repeated orders from Force Prime before the shooting there stopped, however.
"Lead Prime," Uncle Dan reported, "the fence is coming forward now. We won't be able to recover all of it, so try not to cross any more creeks, okay?"
Johnnie could hear men panting up the trail toward him. "Ah . . . Force Prime, what's the problem with the fencing?" he asked.
"No problem with the fence," his uncle said bluntly. "We just don't have the men to carry it any more."
Sergeant Britten had fitted his flamethrower nozzle to a full container of fuel. The container he'd used, completely empty, lay on the ground beside him. Rootlets were beginning to explore it for the possibility of food.
Two men of center element, uninjured but with harrowed looks on their faces, struggled forward with their loads of electronic fencing.
"What happened back there?" a rocketeer demanded.
Johnnie opened his mouth to tell the questioner to do his job and leave center section to its personnel—
But the rocketeer had already taken one end of the bundled fence; and anyway, Johnnie wanted to hear the answer as badly as his men did.
"It was a spider," the other bearer muttered. "I didn't see anything, it just . . . somebody shot, and it knocked me down like, like, I don' know. . . ."
"The rest a you, keep watching," Sergeant Britten ordered gruffly. "We're maybe going to get more company."
There was a post in the center of each roll of fencing. The troops set them in the soft ground of the creek bank, about six feet apart. The bearers—engineering techs—unfastened the small control pods atop the posts.
"It grabbed Bodo and Taylor, both of them," the first tech amplified. "I tried to . . . I tried to hit it with the boat—"
"You were carrying the fence, weren't you?" Blue Three objected.
"Watch the trees!" snapped Britten.
"Bodo here had fence, Taylor 'n' me, we had the boat," the bearer corrected in a voice without emotion. He depressed a button. The post rotated. The free end of the fencing began to extend itself through the water like a sliding door of fine mesh. His partner at the other post did the same.
"They hit it with rockets, but it didn't stop," the second tech said, resuming the story. "Only it turned and grabbed the rocketeer instead."
"Saved my life," said the first bearer. "Saved my life."
The three rocketeers of Green Section shied. They darted their eyes across the waste of fungus and trees with new alertness.
The fences were hung from jointed drive rods. They reached the far bank and crept up it a few feet in two roughly-parallel lines. Their metallic fabric was flexible enough to follow the contours of the muddy ground. There was a bright spark from within the stream; a bubble of steam burst to the surface.
"They hit it with a flamethrower," the first tech said. "The hair, it was burning all over it, burning and stinking . . . but it kept sucking on Taylor and he just sagged like a balloon going flat. . . ."
"Let's go," said Johnnie.
"Just a moment, sir," Britten said as he unhooked another grenade, this time an incendiary, from his belt. He armed it, and tossed it into the fenced portion of the stream. "You guys better get back."
"Yeah, we gotta get the boat," one of the techs said. They stumbled off together, oblivious of the grenade fuze sizzling in the creek behind them.
The main charge went off with a roar of colored steam. Globules of fire darted from the haze and vanished. Dark water, drawn from both up- and downstream, surged through the net and set off further sparks as creatures were electrocuted.
The fence combined a battery of sensors with a sophisticated control system—and a high-voltage power pack in its anchor. Water did not short the current paths—as it would have done without the computer control. When the sensors detected contact with an object which had an electrical field of its own—a living object, whether plant or animal, large or small—a surge fried the interloper.
The grenade burned out. Water continued to splutter and roil for several seconds longer.
"Mighta been safe before, sir," Britten said. "But again, that mighta been just the wrong stretch of bottom between the fences. I figure it's clear now, though."
"Lead element, follow me," Johnnie said as he stepped into the bubbling water. His trousers were moisture-sealed, but the fabric felt hot and clammy as it pressed against him.
He knew more about the jungle and its threats than the others did; but t
he veteran sergeant knew the importance of using all the firepower you had available. In war—with men or nature—no force was excessive if you were the one still standing at the end. . . .
* * *
The two men in front of the column with powered brush saws waited while Johnnie compared the relief map projected on his visor against his hand-carried inertial locator. Machines—even (especially) the most sophisticated machines—fail. When something as important as the expedition's precise position in a lethal jungle was involved, an ounce of redundancy was more than justified.
"We're almost there," he said. He'd settled his pack on the ground while he took the bearings. The release of weight felt like a long rest. "Well, almost to where we'll wait for, for . . . to go off tonight. Another three hundred yards."
Thunder boomed a regular drumbeat in the middle distance, its direction diffused by the surrounding leaves and branches.
"Whazzat?" demanded a rocketeer, spinning in an attempt to face all directions during the time something could reach him. Green Section had been windy ever since they'd heard what happened in center element.
"That's the Angels shelling some tree," Sergeant Britten replied with cool scorn as he continued to examine the arc of jungle he'd assigned himself to cover. "Normal base maintenance. Don't get your bowels in 'n uproar, huh?"
Johnnie bent and thrust his arms through the packstraps again. He held his rifle upright between his knees. "There's more Trojan Horse fungus ahead to the right," he said. "Give it a wide—"
A thirty-foot-long iguana—its ancestors had been iguanas—poked its head through a mass of reeds. It clamped shut the flaps over its nostrils, then came on at a rush. Green Prime was staring straight at the creature when it began its charge.
Some plant-eating forms had evolved into carnivores on Venus, but the iguanas remained vegetarians. Fronds of brush dangled away from the corners of the creature's mouth, then fell away as it bleated a challenge.