“They look like Goliath Beetles,” Sergeant Shiva said.
“There is an old, old Earth expression,” Maid said, winking at me, “which postulates that if an ant were the size of a man, it could take a few buddies and carry off every building in New York, piece by piece. Here, the ants are bigger than cows.”
“With corresponding strength,” Gorilla assured us. “Which makes even the plant eaters formidable. Is anyone still wondering why the first two DRTs never came back? They didn’t necessarily have to encounter the Blobs.”
Blade patted his rifle affectionately. “A depleted-uranium round from this baby will squash any of those like a cockroach under my boot sole.”
Sergeant Shiva shrugged. “Maybe.”
Gorilla neglected to mention the fifth and sixth life forms now existing upon the planet, perhaps because they were so obvious; the Blobs and us. To these categories I might even add a seventh, more threatening than all the others, if our experiences with the strange laughter, the Presence, proved valid.
“Sergeant Shiva,” Captain Amalfi said, “get these DRT-bags ready to move …”
He suddenly froze, his attention glued to the monitor. The screen was going crazy, like something had snatched up the bot and was shaking it like a dog shaking an old rag. The bot’s three-sixty wraparound vision had failed to detect its assailant.
The screen went blank.
C·H·A·P·T·E·R
FOURTEEN
The bot’s destruction like that, without forewarning, shook the team speechless. Everyone stared disbelievingly at the blank screen. Finally, Maid breathed what we were all thinking, “It didn’t stand a chance. How could whatever it was have struck without our seeing it first? That bot had orbital sensors.”
“Maybe we weren’t looking,” Atlas offered. “Maybe we had glanced away.”
Gorilla shook his head. “I was looking the entire time.”
“It was fast, damned fast,” Ferret said.
Master Sergeant Shiva’s scar looked drawn and inflamed.
“The Blobs,” Blade growled. “It was the fuckin’ Blobs.”
Captain Amalfi shot me a look. “Kadar San? Was it the Blobs?”
I had experienced a slight jolt of taa in the split instant before the attack. I couldn’t be sure if my intuition had picked up something, or if the incident had occurred so suddenly that my system was merely reacting. I reached out now with my mind and searched the entire area. I only read emotions, sensed them, if the target were sentient and expressed emotion. I found nothing out there.
Oh, God. Kadar, we have to depend on you. We’re doomed.
The thought, fully focused, nearly knocked me off my feet before I realized it came from Maid. I looked at her in amazement. It was the first time I had actually received telepathic communications from a Human in a fashion I recognized. She must also possess the Talent, whether she was aware of it or not.
“Doom is a little harsh,” I said to her. It was her turn to look shaken.
“What are you talking about?” Sergeant Shiva demanded impatiently.
I hesitated. “I do not think it was the Blobs. I can sense them now, but they are faint and in the distance.”
“Then, what was it?” the Captain insisted.
I had no answer for that.
“What the fu-uck does the elf know?” Blade snarled. “He can’t sense his own bad breath.”
No one defended me, but Maid kept looking at me.
I’m sorry, Kadar San.
“Apology accepted,” I said.
She blushed. “You’re reading my thoughts.”
I smiled and left it at that. It was safer for me if they all concluded that I could read what they were thinking.
“All right, all right,” Captain Amalfi said in frustration. “It had to be one of the insects. Prepare for debarkation. The bell tolls. Send out the other bots.”
Sergeant Shiva extended the landing tube to the river’s surface, then nudged its sealed exit to the bank and secured it. Viewcams fed back to the monitor the image of the grassy clearing surrounded by forest. The grass was actually purple, but it was so dark it looked black. Nothing moved on the screen. It was still raining as hard as ever. It drummed on the tube.
Four more “insect” bots, larger than the first, these equipped with self-defense mechanisms, were ejected out through the tube and deposited into the clearing. They immediately scurried different directions into the forest to set up a security perimeter and feed their observations back to the submerged pod. After several more minutes of nothing happening, Ferret the point man picked up his weapons and ruck.
“Luck,” Atlas said.
“Luck,” Ferret said back, crawling on his belly into the tube where its force field quickly committed him to the drenched clearing.
He was virtually invisible to the normal eye in his chameleons. Infrared detectors in our combat helmets picked up his life presence and fed it directly into our central nervous systems. We watched him on the screen as a red energy source.
He first checked the perimeter to make sure the bots hadn’t missed anything. Then he did his own squat in the trees to employ his sensor implants against the environment. After awhile, he passed back the word and the rest of us prepared to cycle through the process of debarking.
“Is there an old, old Earth expression for this?” I asked Maid.
She smiled ruefully through her tension. “Yeah. It’s called ‘Now the shit will hit the fan.’”
The team transported alert and edged into the clearing in the driving hard rain. Lightning cracked and sizzled. The debarkation tube contracted out of sight into the submerged landing pod. It was a bit unsettling, this closing off our escape route. From hither on, the pod’s computers were programmed to respond only to the ranking team member still alive. If no orders were received after nine days, it automatically reactivated itself, no matter that we were alive or dead, and returned to the orbiting Stealth. The Tsutsumi would recover the ship and pod for analysis of the daily data log the team fed back into the pod’s memory banks.
It was going to be a long nine days.
I looked warily about, “seeing” through the infrared only the heat sources of my companions. I felt with my mind, probed, but there seemed to be nothing out there. At least not nearby. Still, I had the feeling that we were not alone, notwithstanding that the bots had checked out the area and that Ferret had re-checked. I kept thinking of the crazy sourceless laughter. The presence, the Presence, which was how I began thinking of it.
The others also had a case of the nerves. I sensed the transformation as the team reverted to its previous edginess. Atlas spun around and around in defense. Taking stock. He lumbered into Blade and Blade roughly pushed him away.
“Asshole.”
“Who’s the asshole, asshole?”
Instead of intervening to maintain military discipline, as he should have done, Captain Amalfi stood back and observed with … amusement? He left it to Sergeant Shiva to restore order and get the march lined out.
“Moving Overwatch,” the Team Sergeant ordered.
The team moved out in two elements, one leading and one tailing to “overwatch” the first. Captain Amalfi ordered me to stay with the command element, which consisted of the CO and the radio operator, Sergeant Gunduli. Ferret automatically assumed point with one of the scout robots, with a second bot in advance of them. Atlas dropped back on Tailend Charlie. The remaining two security bots ranged one on either flank. It was an efficient way to march and, under the circumstances, as safe from surprise attack as could be expected.
It no longer mattered what had occurred back on Galaxia. Politics, prolie problems, Homelanders, traitors … That was all behind us now. Here on Aldenia we either functioned as a team and trusted each other, or we perished separately and became the third lost DRT.
Our destination was about three days’ hard travel away, through some of the most inhospitable country in the galaxy, as we had already seen. The previo
us two DRTs had landed within a day’s march of the range of mountains in which the Blobs’ signature had been localized — and neither returned. It was assumed the Blobs had discovered them upon insertion and eliminated them, thus the explanation for our longer distance.
We trekked through a thick wet wood where rain drumming on the foliage muffled sounds of our progress. In places, the vegetation grew in such abandon that Ferret had to hack our way through with a laser. It would rain and rain hard for long periods, then stop suddenly in the middle of raindrops. The fog disappeared almost immediately, as though sucked away by a giant vacuum. Sunshine never actually appeared, just a kind of translucent gray light that made the planet seem slightly less forbidding. Apparently, the short rain-free intervals provided sufficient light, combined with the hot house warmth, to allow wantonness of foliage.
Then the rain started again.
Gravity here was slightly stronger than on Galaxia, but much weaker than on my home planet of Ganesh where I weighed in excess of three hundred kilograms. For all her small size, Maid wouldn’t even be able to get out of bed on my planet. The atmosphere was breathable, although we remained temporarily on manufactured air to reduce our susceptibility to toxicity. We would gradually accustom our bodies to the thicker, coarser atmosphere of Aldenia until by the second day we were weaned from the bottle.
There were many streams, naturally, most of them shallow, and almost as many lakes, around which we lost time detouring. After several encounters with unusually aggressive purple water snakes as big around as city water mains, we learned to steer back from the large bodies of water. Giant dragonflies also hunted the lakes, landing on water surfaces like helicopters and skittering across in the manner of air cushion boats. Herds of Goliath Beetles browsed the lakeside grassy swamps. Symbiotically, they attracted scavengers, who lured out small furry mammals, who were in turn pursued by predator insects and on up the food chain to meat-eating scorpion-things and dinosaur-like lizards. I dreaded what might happen were we confined on Aldenia longer than expected and our chameleons expired so that the local fauna might actually see us.
All this raw unsettled real estate, like vacant lots everywhere, was available for a reason.
Gorilla’s pack required a big man to carry it, and Gorilla was the big man. His ruck was stuffed with all kinds of techno gear: sensors, receivers, materials for more bots ranging from the size of a normal mosquito to a children’s pet guinea pig. The human males with all their macho muscular enhancements and implants were all enormous specimens. I felt … elfin in comparison, never mind that the density of my natural bone and muscle furnished me strength far beyond my size. Especially in less gravities than on Ganesh.
We halted frequently to give Gorilla a chance to work his techno magic for the Blobs. His gadgets proved of little value at this range, what with the thick atmosphere charged with the ozone electricity of almost-constant lightning. I stood to one side, outside the circle of Humans, and attempted to work my own magic. I felt around in the low range of mountains occasionally visible through a break in the forest and cloud cover, probing with my mind for some contact with another sentient being.
Whenever I managed some fleeting bond with the Blobs, they felt slimy and sinister, although not exactly evil, and left a bitter and unpleasant aftertaste. The connection was always weak and there seemed to be no distinction between individuals. It was like they were a single entity with multiple forms. Even so, they seemed to be in many fewer numbers than should have been the case were they building an advance base for the invasion.
“They are not so near,” I assured Captain Amalfi. “They have not moved from their original location.”
“You are sure, Kadar San?”
“Of that I am sure.”
I was much less certain of the Presence that seemed to come and go within our midst. The others were not so much aware of it, I observed, as they were reactive to it. Tension suddenly spiked whenever it appeared, almost as though it were mocking us. The air thickened, the light darkened, and the wind stilled, even though hanging mosses and lianas continued to grasp and grope. Team members clawed and snarled and snapped at each other; the aftertaste in my senses went beyond slimy and sinister.
“Fu-uck!” Blade bitched in exasperation when Ferret on point held up a halting hand and suspiciously sniffed the air with his built-in hypersensitivity. “What the fuck is it now? Put me on point if the bastard is scared of his shadow.”
“Fuck yourself,” Gorilla retaliated through the helmet intercoms. “The only reason you weren’t eaten before when you were here is because you’re enough to turn a maggot’s stomach.”
I didn’t think the Presence, whoever or whatever it was, had the power at the moment to cause us physical harm, although its strength appeared to be growing. At first, as on the pod, it appeared for only a few seconds. Those periods were growing longer until by the end of the day and the approach of the shorter of Aldenia’s two nights, it was with us a few minutes at a time, leaping and flitting about us like a hate-filled poltergeist begetting mischief.
I feared that whatever its intent, it was with us until we departed this cursed graveyard of my people.
C·H·A·P·T·E·R
FIFTEEN
DAY THREE
We came to a river, black and swollen and crashing through the jungle. Although Aldenia had two moons — orbiting each other, but still two moons — as well as two suns, their ambient and passive light could not penetrate the cloud cover. Night, when it fell, would be total. Captain Amalfi called a halt while there was still enough light to make camp.
“We’ll cross when it’s daylight again,” he decided. “Don’t get too comfortable. It’s going to be a short night.”
About two hours, actually. It was the first of the two nights.
Gorilla set up the bots on perimeter security and activated a hand monitor through which he maintained perimeter surveillance through the robots. Ferret took off his helmet and sniffed the air like a hunting animal. Both soon declared it safe enough that the team could deactivate chameleons while in camp to save them for the more dangerous marches. We emerged into each other’s view as actual figures rather than simple energy heat sources.
The team quickly erected individual pop-up bivvies against the ubiquitous rain and warmed rations with energy tabs. It was a convivial meal time, the Presence choosing not to honor us with its company at the moment. Maid went on her encrypted com channel to relay the day’s report back to the pod’s computers. Atlas and Ferret went back to battering each other with good-natured verbal swords, to the amusement of the rest of the team. I almost felt a part of the group. I was also a bit envious of Maid’s sitting next to Atlas.
Gorilla suddenly stiffened at a silent perimeter alarm. My own special senses were dormant; they didn’t seem to work on bugs, most reptiles, and furry creatures.
“Penetration! Three o’clock!” he warned.
The team switched to defensive mode, swiftly and automatically from long practice working together. Ferret, Gorilla, Maid, and Sergeant Shiva locked into a circle around camp, weapons facing outward. I joined Captain Amalfi, Blade, and Atlas on the ready reaction force. We moved out hurriedly, but cautiously, toward the machine that had emitted the danger signal.
We drew near to a furious thrashing about in the underbrush and saw our bug-like sentinel engaged in combat with one of a pair of giant hunting hellgrammites. Robots were programmed to defend their controllers. The first carnivore had instinctively counterattacked. It and the bot were locked in a manner similar to mating insects. Although the hellgrammite was many times larger than the little bot, the bot was putting up a pretty good fight.
While the second predator warily circled the combatants looking for an opening, the little bot latched itself onto the juncture between its enemy’s head and its enormous yellow-green carapace. It shot out monomolecular spikes, its primary weapon, and literally shredded the hellgrammite’s head. The creature’s deadly mandible flew fr
ee. Green-pink fluid sprayed the surrounding foliage and us. The dying insect continued to thump and quiver, shaking the bot free and hurling it into the grasp of the other creature.
The second terrible beast, larger than the first, made short shrift of the robot. Micro-energy innards and metal exoskeleton exploded in different directions. The creature worried the larger pieces with its mandibles for a few seconds, mindlessly attempting to consume it, before it gave up. It reared up and its multi-faceted eyes on stems looked around for more appealing prey. They fixed on us. We had left camp in such a hurry that none of us had donned helmets and activated our chameleons.
Curious about what sort of meals we might make, the enormous insect advanced, swiveling its eye stems down toward us like microscopes examining microorganisms on a slide. Captain Amalfi took aim with his Punch Gun, a blobby-looking submachine pistol that fired an energy rod that obliterated anything it struck. It was deadly effective within fifty meters or so, but useless at ranges beyond that.
Eager for a kill, Blade beat him to the trigger. The Gauss sniper rifle came issued with auto-tracker Hornet ammo, which sought out its target with incredibly accurate sensor tracking. However, Blade’s vanity in his marksmanship refused to allow him to use anything other than old-fashioned “dumb” ammunition. The seven millimeter projectile with its high velocity and extreme range capability, which could reach out to ten thousand meters to touch somebody, virtually exploded the hellgrammite at such close range, spraying us with a disgusting blood slime. What was left of the creature lay in two main twitching parts, while other pieces of it dangled like ornaments in the surrounding trees.
Blade swaggered over, hacked up a goober from his throat and spat it at the remains. He patted his rifle. “Told you this baby would squash ’em like cockroaches.”
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