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Landing

"Now for God's sake remember it's not a real combat drop!" Farrell ordered. He spoke slowly and distinctly, because the magnetic flux bringing the ship to a soft landing played hell with radio transmission despite enhancement by the strikers' helmet AIs. "Wild shooting is going to scare the civilians. Six out."

10-1442's every plate and stringer vibrated at a different frequency. This single-use Pop Authority ship hadn't been built to the standards of the transports C41 was used to. Farrell didn't consider the situation worse, just different. Military transports, torqued by hundreds of liftoffs and landings, often clanged a single bell note that meant sympathetic vibration was doing its best to hammer to death the vessel and everyone aboard her.

"One minute to landing," Lieutenant Kuznetsov reported in a distorted voice.

Kuznetsov was at Hatch C with her former First Platoon; Farrell himself had Hatch A with most of Second Platoon. Sergeant Bastien had commanded Third Platoon at Active Cloak. He'd survived so he now had them at Hatch B. A scratch group of Heavy Weapons, the scouts, and four orphan strikers of line squads were under Sergeant Daye at Hatch D. It didn't bother Farrell that C41 was so far down on officers from its Table of Organization strength, but he sure wished he had more stingers and grenade launchers ready for the next few moments.

"Welcome to the pastoral beauties of Bezant," called Sergeant Kristal. "No expense has been spared to make your stay a pleasant one."

Second Platoon strikers close enough to hear her laughed. C41 was loose for this landing. Nobody was careless. The strikers were poised with their weapons aimed, reloads and backups ready . . . but nobody really believed the wildlife was a danger on the same scale as Kalendru troops.

It wasn't, of course. Art Farrell's real concern was what came next, guarding a thousand civilians from that wildlife.

"Thirty seconds to landing," Kuznetsov said.

The trouble with the transport's automatic operation wasn't the voyage, which had gone as smoothly as any similar period Farrell had spent on a starship, but right now: the landing. 10-1442 was a can of meat until the four bottom-deck hatches opened—which they would do whether or not anybody aboard wanted them to, and before the human cargo had the slightest view of what was waiting for them outside.

A Population Authority advance team had fabricated a landing grid from the system's asteroid belt, then used a robot lander to drop the mass to the colony site. The actual location might be miles away from the one planners on Earth had penciled in. That could be a problem anywhere; on Bezant, 10-1442 might land right in front of a swarm of murderous herbivores. Deck 1 was for C41 alone until Farrell was very damned sure the site was as safe as his strikers could make it.

"Five seconds to landing," Kuznetsov said.

The vibration rose to a roar so loud that Farrell's helmet had to filter it. The transport generated identical magnetic polarities in its own lower hull and the upper surface of the grid. The charges repelled one another. The transport settled to the grid, slowing progressively because magnetic effect increased as the cubed reciprocal of the distance.

The transport touched down, its seams wheezing and groaning. Huge bolts withdrew, unlocking the upper edge of the hatches. Farrell winced at themechanism's bangbang/bangbang/bangbang/bangbang. The only thing he'd heard that sounded quite like that was the hull of an assault boat taking fire, and he'd heard that often enough.

"Careful, people," Farrell ordered as the hydraulic rams whined in the relative silence. "Nobody gets more than twenty feet from the ship until I—"

The transport slid with a grinding of metal, then began slowly to topple.

"Watch out for the cargo!" Farrell shouted. "If those bulldozers shift—"

The hatches, three-quarters of the way down, continued to open outward. A green wall of vegetation towered in the middle distance.

Farrell let the sling snatch his weapon and gripped the hatch coaming with both hands. His boots slipped on the deck; the ship tilted farther.

The ship was falling more or less away from Farrell at Hatch A. Metal screamed; the hull was taking stresses at angles where it wasn't braced. He heard the seam between the transoms of Holds C and D fold inward and tear.

When the deck was at a 30-degree angle, Farrell waited for the accelerating rush whose momentum would flatten the fat cylinder against the ground. The starship halted. The reason it stopped didn't matter any more than the reason it had tilted in the first place.

"Out of here, strikers!" Farrell cried as he got a boot onto the coaming and launched himself from the vessel. He pulled his stinger into firing position before he hit the ground twenty feet below, tucked into a roll, and came to his feet ready for whatever Bezant wanted to throw at him.

They'd landed in the middle of deep forest, but the vegetation within forty feet of the hold was yellowing. The flux which braked thousands of tons of starship generated enormous waste heat in the magnetic mass. That soaked into the soil and killed the roots of the surrounding plants.

Farrell was familiar with the process: he'd seen the same thing when he boarded at Emigration Port 10. But to have yellowed and dried to their present condition these trees had to have been cooked weeks ago, not in the past few minutes as the transport landed.

Until he got clear, Farrell had guessed the ship slid because the grid was misaligned. In fact there wasn't a landing grid at all. They'd braked against a nickel-iron asteroid which had been dropped to the planet unformed.

The asteroid made a perfectly satisfactory magnetic mass, but its domed, pitted upper surface wasn't even notionally flat. 10-1442 had lowered itself into contact, then slipped sideways until it overbalanced. The only reason they hadn't gone completely over was that the open hatches braced them.

Temporarily. The starship creaked as it wobbled. A gust of wind, subsoil cracking under the strain, or the collapse of Hatch D's hydraulic rams could finish the job at any moment.

C41 was out of the vessel, even the two strikers per hatch wearing full hard suits because Farrell hadn't known what to expect. "C41, perimeter a hundred feet out!" he ordered. "Nobody in the footprint where the ship's going to fall. Out."

He stayed where he was while his strikers, laden with weapons and equipment, lumbered away from the ship. Farrell needed to be central because he didn't know where the threat would be coming from.

He knew for certain that there was a threat, though.

He manually keyed the liaison channel. "Farrell to Ibrahimi," he said. "Get your civilians out immediately, but for God's sake keep them close to the ship. Farrell out!"

If the chunk of nickel-iron had been a natural meteor moving at orbital velocity, it would have blasted a crater the size of Emigration Port 10. Only droplets would remain on the site. The bulk of the projectile would have splashed through the stratosphere and rained down in a circle thousands of miles across.

This mass had been dropped at deliberate speed with braking rockets like those which slowed the grid where the transport had been intended to land. A raw asteroid wasn't suitable to land a human transport, but Kalendru military vessels used outriggers of variable length to permit them to come down safely on crude surfaces.

"C41, watch out for company," Farrell said. He tried to watch both his strikers and the masked schematic of their deployment on his visor. "This is a Spook site, and they're going to be coming for us. Six out."

When 10-1442 started to slide, Esther Meyer's first flashing thought was that the planet had opened its green maw and was swallowing them. She hadn't seen much of Bezant yet, but she'd seen enough to dislike it.

Meyer was in her hard suit, ready to push her dolly of cannon shells down the ramp to wherever Top or the major decided they wanted the weapon emplaced. Now she jerked the two heavy cannisters out of their clamp restraints and let the little support device bound off one side of the lowering ramp.

The gun was dollied-up also. Nessman switched his lift fan off, collapsing the air cushion. The dolly continued to slide down the increasing slope. Nessman jammed a boot in the crack between the hull proper and the lowering hatch. With that purchase he was able to keep the heavy gun from spilling wildly out of the ship.

Meyer tried to drag her cannisters up the deck to where she could hook an arm through a cargo strap. When that didn't work she sat down. Her boots had non-slip soles, but the seat of Meyer's ceramic armor was close to being a frictionless surface. It still seemed like the natural thing to do when she was trying to keep from falling out of a starship that was about to topple on whatever was below it.

"C41, watch for cargo shifting," the major's voice warned. This boarding deck had no partitions, just stanchions and the lift shafts which acted as structural columns. The circumference of the deck was open. Items too large for the lifts to carry to higher levels were secured in the remaining volume.

It was possible that one of the vehicles was going to break loose, but that wasn't Meyer's first concern. She'd chance having a bulldozer land on her and hope it wouldn't crush the hard suit. The entire mass of 10-1442 was something else. She'd never be found.

The ship stopped tilting. "Everybody out!" Sergeant Daye ordered, pausing at the edge of the hatch to make sure his people were clear before he jumped. Daye gripped the jamb with one hand and bent to help Nessman with the cannon's weight.

"Fuck it I'm caught!" Nessman shouted. He thrashed his right leg. The hatch had flexed. It pinched his left boot.

Meyer let one of the ammo cans go. Daye tried to pull Nessman free. Meyer judged the distance and swung her remaining can against the back of Nessman's armored foot. The shock sprang him loose.

Meyer and Nessman, clumsy with their hard suits and the equipment they still clung to, tumbled down the ramp to ground only marginally softer than the steel deck. Sergeant Daye grabbed both of them by an arm to help them up. "Set it where the bitch won't fall on you!" he said, pointing vaguely to the right. "Christ what a ratfuck!"

Meyer scooped up the handle of the second can and moved, using the ammo's momentum to swing her body for each next step. Nessman cradled the gun in both arms and waddled forward as though he was carrying an anvil. A good-sized anvil wouldn't have been any heavier or more awkward than the load he did have.

Trees a hundred and fifty feet high formed the main wall of the forest, swathed in vines and curtainlike mosses. For a hundred feet out from where 10-1442 now teetered, retro rockets had seared to death the larger trees; the asteroid's final impact shattered the boles to blazing splinters. Brush had already grown twenty feet high, but the leaves of the nearer shrubs were curled.

The lesser ground cover, mostly plants with claw-tipped leaves the size of a man's hand, was dead and gray. Stems crumbled under Meyer's armor. Even strikers in ordinary boots and battledress strode through the shrivelled tracery without noticing. The only green near the ship were vines growing inward along the ground from the edge of the blasted area. They looked like the spokes of a gigantic wire wheel.

There wasn't a good field of fire anywhere. Nessman picked a stump uprooted when the magnetic mass hit and laid the barrel of the plasma cannon across it. He was only ten feet from where Hatch A wiggled in the air, no part of it touching the ground. The weapon was too awkward and heavy to carry any farther.

Meyer, bent like a knuckle-walking ape, dropped the ammo cannisters beside the gunner and gasped with relief. They were probably clear of the ship when it went over, but if they weren't she was too wrung out to care.

She'd heard the warning about Spooks, though she didn't understand it. She switched her sensors to high sensitivity. The immediate blur of warning signals—movement, vibration, and IR sources, all careted in different colors on her visor—virtually blinded her.

Fuck it. She'd rather be able to see a Spook if he hopped up in front of her than hope to identify him before he was close enough to be a danger. Meyer cut back immediately on all inputs except electronic. The AI notched striker gear out of the search spectrum unless the user deliberately entered friendly signatures, so that wasn't a problem.

The ground was coarse red limestone that scuffed to gritty dust beneath the strikers' feet. The thin topsoil didn't look sufficient to sustain trees the size of those surrounding the site. Obviously it was, but Meyer could see why the impact of the magnetic mass had so thoroughly cleared the area.

Civilians poured out of the ship like ants from an overturned hill. Crying and shouting, they stumbled to the ground. Almost all of them came from Hatch D, the only one whose ramp reached the ground. The risk that the ship would fall in that direction didn't seem to affect them if they even noticed it.

"Hey, keep clear!" Nessman shouted. A dozen people, at least three generations of a single family, ran in front of the plasma cannon. They held hands as they headed toward the living forest.

Maybe they thought the starship was going to explode. They could be correct, but Meyer remembered the briefing information on Bezant. If 10-1442's powerplant blew, it couldn't kill those idiots any deader than the local wildlife would.

Strikers shouted at the running civilians. Lieutenant Kuznetsov tried to head them off, but they had a lead and no equipment to weigh them down.

Meyer aimed her stinger and raked the ground ten feet in front of the adult male who was more or less leading the conga line. Ash and wood spurted several feet in the air. Where the pellets hit quartz in the soil, there were satisfactory sparks as well. The civilians threw themselves flat weeping and hugging one another.

Meyer reloaded her weapon. She'd only fired off a hundred or so pellets, but this wasn't a place to trust ninety percent readiness.

She hadn't realized how simple life had been on C41's normal insertions. She could almost wish that the problem on Bezant was Kalendru troops rather than human civilians.

"Gee but I want to go home," somebody hummed on the squad push as 3-3 advanced toward the unbroken forest wall. "I'm tired and I—" 

"Horgen, shut the fuck up!" Abbado said.

Insects were buzzing around them. That was unusual in an environment to which humans hadn't brought their own bugs. Mostly people were different enough chemically that the local insect-equivalents didn't recognize them as possible dinner.

Larger carnivores were generally less picky, of course.

"Sorry, Sarge," Horgen muttered.

They were all jumpy, and not just because the landing was so awful. Abbado and three members of his present squad once had crawled from a boat that spread itself across half a mile of prairie when Spook gunfire had knocked out the braking nozzles on final approach. The problem was that the whole mission had been unfamiliar, and now all the planning was down the tubes besides.

"Sarge, I've got something," Methie said in a whisper. He echoed a pink highlight to the lower, panoramic view on Abbado's visor.

"Methie, switch places with me," Abbado said. He eased to his right.

The squad froze in place. There was ten feet between strikers to give 3-3 a respectable frontage. Abbado wasn't willing to increase the interval any further, though his flank personnel were already a hundred feet from the nearest support.

The major was pushing a squad out to each cardinal point, probing the landing site. C41 didn't have the troops to secure the entire treeline. Matushek and Glasebrook wore hard suits, so Abbado'd put them on the ends of his skirmish line. He didn't know if that was the right decision or not. He didn't have a clue as to what 3-3 was getting into.

Abbado reached Methie's slot, twenty feet to the right of his own. The visor indicated there was an object with straight lines lying at the base of a sapling whose branches were spiked clubs. It was twenty feet beyond the strikers, on the edge of the circle cleansed when flux baked the soil to coarse stone.

How the artificial intelligence knew whatever it was had straight lines was beyond Abbado. Ground cover and leaves that had yellowed and fallen from the tree when its roots were cooked hid everything but a lump so far as the human eye could tell. Well, that was why strikers' helmets had sensors and internal data processing.

"I had a little drink—" A pause. "Sorry, sarge." 

"Okay, we're going to move up all together," Abbado said. The squad's helmets were locked on 3-3's separate channel—actually a pattern of frequency hopping rather than a frequency in itself. Abbado wanted to be able to talk normally to his strikers even though they were spread out to shouting range. "Very slow, straight forward, and remember, it could be a mine."

"It could be a rock with a smooth fracture," Foyle said. He must have remoted a close-up of Methie's view to his own visor.

"The AI didn't say it was a rock," Abbado said. "The AI said it was a thing, and the AI doesn't make mistakes like strikers do."

Civilians were leaving the starship the way milk gurgles from a dropped jug. They pooled around the vessel in clothing that they'd doubtless brought because they thought it was suitable for a frontier. The brightly colored garments quivering on Abbado's panorama display struck him as incongruous, but the civilians might be right. It wouldn't take long to get tired of the grays and drabness of the immediate surroundings. Didn't plants on Bezant have flowers?

"Okay, everybody hold up," Abbado said. "Methie, you slide back behind me."

Abbado knelt. He could see that the object beneath the seared vegetation was flat and angular if not square. The AI didn't warn of a booby trap. He extended his stinger toward the mound, using the fat barrel as a probe.

Maybe he ought to have one of the hard suits do this. Their gauntlets weren't as delicate as Abbado's bare hands, though; and besides, he was squad leader.

He prodded the object. Dead leaves rustled bitterly. Nothing exploded. The AI was right. It wasn't a bomb. Abbado picked the thing up in his left hand.

It was a fabric pouch with individual cells for three batteries. Two batteries were in place. They were of a type familiar to Abbado: they would fit into the butt compartment of a shoulder-fired Kalendru laser.

"Six from Three-three," Abbado said, still kneeling. He used the identifier to key his transmission to Farrell rather than switching his helmet manually. "I've got a Spook ammo pouch here with two batteries in place. It doesn't look too weathered. Over."

He tried to scan the treeline. IR told him there were no large animals but as for the rest, while none of the saplings in the intermediate zone was more than an inch and a half in diameter, there were enough of them that they concealed the details beyond them as effectively as a gauze curtain.

"Three-three, understood," the major's voice said. "Break, C41, we've got recent Spook equipment north of the ship. Patrol leaders continue to advance to the forest edge but hold there. Look particularly for any sign of a trail. Out." 

"You heard him, people," Abbado muttered as he rose. He ducked around another grim tree that looked like a stick figure wearing spiked boxing gloves. This one still had its leaves. "Keep your eyes open and—"

He heard a crackswish behind him. He didn't have any idea what it meant—except it meant Guilio Abbado had fucked up.

"Watch—" he shouted as his instincts tried to throw him to the ground. Something whacked him in the middle of the back and hurled him twenty feet without his boots touching the ground.

Abbado's nose rapped the inside of his visor, bloodying it. His ribs ached. His body armor had stopped the blow and spread it evenly across the whole surface of his backplate, but it had still been one hell of a wallop.

"Sarge, the tree hit you!" Caldwell said. "The tree!" 

The ground cover where Abbado landed was still alive. Thorns were tearing the backs of his wrists and hands. He swore and pulled himself loose. Pain stabbed up and down his sides, but that was stressed muscle. He knew the feeling of a broken rib stabbing splinters toward a lung.

"C41," he said, unable to prevent his voice from wheezing. "The trees that have spikes on the branch tips, mark—"

He blinked to load the image of the sapling he was looking at. The ground cover at Abbado's feet still waved leaves toward him like the paws of a rending beast. Drops of his blood splashed the shiny surfaces.

"—can bash you like you wouldn't believe if you come close. And watch the fucking ivy, too, it moves and it bites. Three-three out."

Abbado scuffed his boot across the vegetation, tearing stems from the roots. Leaves caressed his legs to mid-shin, but the barbs couldn't penetrate the boots or tough battle dress leggings.

The sapling that he'd stepped close to had three branches spaced equidistant around the slim trunk. Two of them were still cocked up at about a forty-five degree angle skyward as they had been. The third now lay flaccidly against the trunk. Some of the thorns had broken off when the knobby end smacked Abbado's backplate.

Stinger pellets didn't ricochet at short range—they were moving way too fast. They and generally whatever they hit disintegrated. Abbado still aimed deliberately because the starship was downrange.

He triggered a ten-round burst, blasting the tree apart at the roots as effectively as a charge of explosive could have done. The sapling toppled toward him as though it was trying to get in one last blow. It wasn't tall enough by a foot or two to reach.

"Three-three, let's go," Abbado said.

There hadn't been any real point to chopping the tree down: there were hundreds more just like it in the immediate area that the strikers would just have to avoid. It was the only thing Abbado could do to solace the ache in his ribs, though.

Caius Blohm squatted among uprooted trees which lay against their living brethren like strikers flung dying into the arms of their fellows. Blohm touched nothing but the ground. Leaves brushed his shanks and boot tops with the dry sound of snake scales. He ignored them as he merged himself with the forest beyond.

"Do you see anything, snake?" Gabrilovitch asked. He knelt, fidgety, a dozen feet from Blohm. The sergeant wore gloves. He'd cleared his immediate surroundings with his powerknife, but the sight of leaves groping vainly toward him seemed to get on his nerves.

"Shut up, Gabe," Blohm whispered.

He wasn't being insubordinate. He didn't have enough conscious intellect left at the moment to be polite. Blohm was coming to an understanding with the forest.

The forest wanted to kill him. Wanted to kill all humans. Wanted to kill everything alive that wasn't forest.

Blohm raised his visor so that he could breathe the still air pulled from the trees when the sun's heat created an updraft from the clearing.

A powerful motor whined to life in the ship's hold. Treads clattered on the decking: somebody was driving one of the bulldozers out. Blohm couldn't have seen 10-1442 even if he'd turned around. There were too many small trees, living and dead, in the way.

The noise didn't break Blohm's concentration. It was just an element of his surroundings, like the booming call from somewhere to the west. Low frequency sounds travelled for amazing distances through a forest because the sound waves were too long for even tall trees to act as effective baffles.

Though at first glance the forest appeared uniform, Blohm's AI had differentiated a hundred and thirty-five species of trees. Only three of them were noted in the database, which put survey information about on a par with what strikers learned to expect from military intelligence.

Vines hung from the tallest nearby trees. In some cases Blohm could see the vine's own leaves flaring in the canopy, seemingly having forced aside the foliage of the host tree.

One species had striations like braided cable. It rooted at the base of the tree it climbed but also sent a tendril toward the landing site with the determination of water sliding down a chute. Surface roots anchored the tendrils, but there were no leaves or other apparent reason for the plant's expenditure of energy.

Blohm wasn't trying to make sense of the forest's individual elements. He was forming a gestalt of the whole. Everything the forest did was hostile to foreign life. Therefore the tendrils were a threat. Eventually Blohm would figure out how—the why didn't matter—but the method of the threat was less important than knowledge of the threat's existence.

No decisions to make. No noncombatants. The whole forest was Blohm's enemy. He felt his lips spreading in a smile.

The second bulldozer clanked out of the ship. The track plates had deep cleats that rang and squealed on the hard surfaces. These tractors were solely for use in wild terrain. They'd tear up any pavement with which they came in contact.

The tracks were of monobelt construction. Miniature clutches in the track pins locked the lower surface of each tread into a single rigid beam, spreading the load to greatest efficiency. The massive vehicles could cross ground too boggy to support a man walking. At the end of the run the pins declutched so that the take-up roller could lift the plates.

Blohm hadn't been sure they—the others, the civilians—would be able to get the bulldozers clear before 10-1442 fell. The air was almost dead still and the soil had baked to rock when the vegetation was cleared. Maybe the ship would remain upright for centuries.

The others were going to need the bulldozers if they were to survive any time in this place. Caius Blohm thought that he might have been able to come to an accommodation with the forest if he'd been alone.

He locked his visor down to check by technology what his instinct told him. "Gabe," he said, "there's something funny just ahead there. You see those three trees, mark?"

"I see the trees," Gabrilovitch said doubtfully. If he'd completed the thought, it would have been, "But there's nothing funny about them."

The trees were fat and grew in a triangle with eight or ten feet between trunks. Their gray bark was smooth except for a single vertical slit running the length of each bole. The triplet was only a dozen yards out in the undamaged forest, but Blohm couldn't see through the intervening barrier of saplings and shrubs to be sure what the lower twenty feet of the boles looked like.

The tops stood only a hundred feet in the air and should have been shaded by the taller trees. Instead, the luxuriant fronds spread beneath a sky as open as that of an apartment building's airshaft.

"See how the trunks split?" Blohm said. "The splits line up with a common axis."

The odd pattern wasn't what had drawn his attention. Blohm had noticed it after he got the feeling to begin with.

"There ought to be undergrowth between the trees," he went on. "There's not, but there's something below the level we can see because the IR reading's a fraction higher than it is a few feet either way."

"Okay, snake," Gabrilovitch said. "What do you figure?"

"I'm going to take a look," Blohm said. He held the curtain of moss aside with the barrel of his stinger and slipped past. His knife was in his left hand but he hadn't switched on the blade.

"Ah, shit, snake," Gabrilovitch said. He didn't waste his breath ordering Blohm to return.

The forest murmured. Blohm felt he'd stepped into a dark cave and heard a beast breathing somewhere in the twisted grottos beyond; waiting, considering its options.

Saplings and the boles of full-grown trees were planted more thickly than Blohm had learned to expect in other jungles. Normally, except where streams and clearings permit light to reach the ground, the foliage of the monster trees forms a canopy hundreds of feet in the air and starves lesser growth.

Seeds sprout on stored energy and die as pale wraiths of their hope unless one of the neighboring giants falls during the sapling's brief window of opportunity. In this forest, chinks in the canopy permitted young trees to continue to grow if not exactly to flourish. They'd be ready to replace their forebears immediately.

Blohm moved without haste, like a shopper moving down a store aisle. His helmet scanned in all directions for sudden movements. Blohm kept not only his eyes but his whole mind open against danger.

Particularly he watched the treetops and higher branches. Moving through this forest was like city fighting: the real dangers lurked in the upper stories.

Fans set up an echoing howl in the clearing behind him. They were flying the expedition's sole aircar out of the hold. The starship and those around it existed in a world with only peripheral connection to Blohm's.

He didn't touch any tree. He always looked before he placed his foot for the next step. And he moved with a ghost's effortless silence, wrapped in a shroud of total awareness.

The pair of Kalendru soldiers hadn't been so careful. They'd run through the little clearing bounded by the triplet of trees and now stood in contorted poses.

Sap had sprayed simultaneously from the ruptured bark of the three trees. Blohm judged it had started as an aerosol, but it must have set instantly because the weapons the Spooks dropped in their terror hadn't reached the ground.

The sap dried clear, though air bubbles and ripples in the surface distorted images in the hardened mass. Blohm thought refraction explained the corpses' blurred outlines, but when he switched his visor to microwave imaging he realized his mistake.

The sap had been intensely corrosive as well as entombing its victims in mid-stride. The Spooks looked fuzzy because their bodies had started to dissolve in the instant they were caught. Even the metal and plastic of their equipment was pitted.

"C41," Blohm reported, "mark. The Spooks got here ahead of us, but I don't think they're our main problem. The forest doesn't like them any better than it does us. And people, it doesn't like us even a little bit."

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Framed

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Landing

"Now for God's sake remember it's not a real combat drop!" Farrell ordered. He spoke slowly and distinctly, because the magnetic flux bringing the ship to a soft landing played hell with radio transmission despite enhancement by the strikers' helmet AIs. "Wild shooting is going to scare the civilians. Six out."

10-1442's every plate and stringer vibrated at a different frequency. This single-use Pop Authority ship hadn't been built to the standards of the transports C41 was used to. Farrell didn't consider the situation worse, just different. Military transports, torqued by hundreds of liftoffs and landings, often clanged a single bell note that meant sympathetic vibration was doing its best to hammer to death the vessel and everyone aboard her.

"One minute to landing," Lieutenant Kuznetsov reported in a distorted voice.

Kuznetsov was at Hatch C with her former First Platoon; Farrell himself had Hatch A with most of Second Platoon. Sergeant Bastien had commanded Third Platoon at Active Cloak. He'd survived so he now had them at Hatch B. A scratch group of Heavy Weapons, the scouts, and four orphan strikers of line squads were under Sergeant Daye at Hatch D. It didn't bother Farrell that C41 was so far down on officers from its Table of Organization strength, but he sure wished he had more stingers and grenade launchers ready for the next few moments.

"Welcome to the pastoral beauties of Bezant," called Sergeant Kristal. "No expense has been spared to make your stay a pleasant one."

Second Platoon strikers close enough to hear her laughed. C41 was loose for this landing. Nobody was careless. The strikers were poised with their weapons aimed, reloads and backups ready . . . but nobody really believed the wildlife was a danger on the same scale as Kalendru troops.

It wasn't, of course. Art Farrell's real concern was what came next, guarding a thousand civilians from that wildlife.

"Thirty seconds to landing," Kuznetsov said.

The trouble with the transport's automatic operation wasn't the voyage, which had gone as smoothly as any similar period Farrell had spent on a starship, but right now: the landing. 10-1442 was a can of meat until the four bottom-deck hatches opened—which they would do whether or not anybody aboard wanted them to, and before the human cargo had the slightest view of what was waiting for them outside.

A Population Authority advance team had fabricated a landing grid from the system's asteroid belt, then used a robot lander to drop the mass to the colony site. The actual location might be miles away from the one planners on Earth had penciled in. That could be a problem anywhere; on Bezant, 10-1442 might land right in front of a swarm of murderous herbivores. Deck 1 was for C41 alone until Farrell was very damned sure the site was as safe as his strikers could make it.

"Five seconds to landing," Kuznetsov said.

The vibration rose to a roar so loud that Farrell's helmet had to filter it. The transport generated identical magnetic polarities in its own lower hull and the upper surface of the grid. The charges repelled one another. The transport settled to the grid, slowing progressively because magnetic effect increased as the cubed reciprocal of the distance.

The transport touched down, its seams wheezing and groaning. Huge bolts withdrew, unlocking the upper edge of the hatches. Farrell winced at themechanism's bangbang/bangbang/bangbang/bangbang. The only thing he'd heard that sounded quite like that was the hull of an assault boat taking fire, and he'd heard that often enough.

"Careful, people," Farrell ordered as the hydraulic rams whined in the relative silence. "Nobody gets more than twenty feet from the ship until I—"

The transport slid with a grinding of metal, then began slowly to topple.

"Watch out for the cargo!" Farrell shouted. "If those bulldozers shift—"

The hatches, three-quarters of the way down, continued to open outward. A green wall of vegetation towered in the middle distance.

Farrell let the sling snatch his weapon and gripped the hatch coaming with both hands. His boots slipped on the deck; the ship tilted farther.

The ship was falling more or less away from Farrell at Hatch A. Metal screamed; the hull was taking stresses at angles where it wasn't braced. He heard the seam between the transoms of Holds C and D fold inward and tear.

When the deck was at a 30-degree angle, Farrell waited for the accelerating rush whose momentum would flatten the fat cylinder against the ground. The starship halted. The reason it stopped didn't matter any more than the reason it had tilted in the first place.

"Out of here, strikers!" Farrell cried as he got a boot onto the coaming and launched himself from the vessel. He pulled his stinger into firing position before he hit the ground twenty feet below, tucked into a roll, and came to his feet ready for whatever Bezant wanted to throw at him.

They'd landed in the middle of deep forest, but the vegetation within forty feet of the hold was yellowing. The flux which braked thousands of tons of starship generated enormous waste heat in the magnetic mass. That soaked into the soil and killed the roots of the surrounding plants.

Farrell was familiar with the process: he'd seen the same thing when he boarded at Emigration Port 10. But to have yellowed and dried to their present condition these trees had to have been cooked weeks ago, not in the past few minutes as the transport landed.

Until he got clear, Farrell had guessed the ship slid because the grid was misaligned. In fact there wasn't a landing grid at all. They'd braked against a nickel-iron asteroid which had been dropped to the planet unformed.

The asteroid made a perfectly satisfactory magnetic mass, but its domed, pitted upper surface wasn't even notionally flat. 10-1442 had lowered itself into contact, then slipped sideways until it overbalanced. The only reason they hadn't gone completely over was that the open hatches braced them.

Temporarily. The starship creaked as it wobbled. A gust of wind, subsoil cracking under the strain, or the collapse of Hatch D's hydraulic rams could finish the job at any moment.

C41 was out of the vessel, even the two strikers per hatch wearing full hard suits because Farrell hadn't known what to expect. "C41, perimeter a hundred feet out!" he ordered. "Nobody in the footprint where the ship's going to fall. Out."

He stayed where he was while his strikers, laden with weapons and equipment, lumbered away from the ship. Farrell needed to be central because he didn't know where the threat would be coming from.

He knew for certain that there was a threat, though.

He manually keyed the liaison channel. "Farrell to Ibrahimi," he said. "Get your civilians out immediately, but for God's sake keep them close to the ship. Farrell out!"

If the chunk of nickel-iron had been a natural meteor moving at orbital velocity, it would have blasted a crater the size of Emigration Port 10. Only droplets would remain on the site. The bulk of the projectile would have splashed through the stratosphere and rained down in a circle thousands of miles across.

This mass had been dropped at deliberate speed with braking rockets like those which slowed the grid where the transport had been intended to land. A raw asteroid wasn't suitable to land a human transport, but Kalendru military vessels used outriggers of variable length to permit them to come down safely on crude surfaces.

"C41, watch out for company," Farrell said. He tried to watch both his strikers and the masked schematic of their deployment on his visor. "This is a Spook site, and they're going to be coming for us. Six out."

When 10-1442 started to slide, Esther Meyer's first flashing thought was that the planet had opened its green maw and was swallowing them. She hadn't seen much of Bezant yet, but she'd seen enough to dislike it.

Meyer was in her hard suit, ready to push her dolly of cannon shells down the ramp to wherever Top or the major decided they wanted the weapon emplaced. Now she jerked the two heavy cannisters out of their clamp restraints and let the little support device bound off one side of the lowering ramp.

The gun was dollied-up also. Nessman switched his lift fan off, collapsing the air cushion. The dolly continued to slide down the increasing slope. Nessman jammed a boot in the crack between the hull proper and the lowering hatch. With that purchase he was able to keep the heavy gun from spilling wildly out of the ship.

Meyer tried to drag her cannisters up the deck to where she could hook an arm through a cargo strap. When that didn't work she sat down. Her boots had non-slip soles, but the seat of Meyer's ceramic armor was close to being a frictionless surface. It still seemed like the natural thing to do when she was trying to keep from falling out of a starship that was about to topple on whatever was below it.

"C41, watch for cargo shifting," the major's voice warned. This boarding deck had no partitions, just stanchions and the lift shafts which acted as structural columns. The circumference of the deck was open. Items too large for the lifts to carry to higher levels were secured in the remaining volume.

It was possible that one of the vehicles was going to break loose, but that wasn't Meyer's first concern. She'd chance having a bulldozer land on her and hope it wouldn't crush the hard suit. The entire mass of 10-1442 was something else. She'd never be found.

The ship stopped tilting. "Everybody out!" Sergeant Daye ordered, pausing at the edge of the hatch to make sure his people were clear before he jumped. Daye gripped the jamb with one hand and bent to help Nessman with the cannon's weight.

"Fuck it I'm caught!" Nessman shouted. He thrashed his right leg. The hatch had flexed. It pinched his left boot.

Meyer let one of the ammo cans go. Daye tried to pull Nessman free. Meyer judged the distance and swung her remaining can against the back of Nessman's armored foot. The shock sprang him loose.

Meyer and Nessman, clumsy with their hard suits and the equipment they still clung to, tumbled down the ramp to ground only marginally softer than the steel deck. Sergeant Daye grabbed both of them by an arm to help them up. "Set it where the bitch won't fall on you!" he said, pointing vaguely to the right. "Christ what a ratfuck!"

Meyer scooped up the handle of the second can and moved, using the ammo's momentum to swing her body for each next step. Nessman cradled the gun in both arms and waddled forward as though he was carrying an anvil. A good-sized anvil wouldn't have been any heavier or more awkward than the load he did have.

Trees a hundred and fifty feet high formed the main wall of the forest, swathed in vines and curtainlike mosses. For a hundred feet out from where 10-1442 now teetered, retro rockets had seared to death the larger trees; the asteroid's final impact shattered the boles to blazing splinters. Brush had already grown twenty feet high, but the leaves of the nearer shrubs were curled.

The lesser ground cover, mostly plants with claw-tipped leaves the size of a man's hand, was dead and gray. Stems crumbled under Meyer's armor. Even strikers in ordinary boots and battledress strode through the shrivelled tracery without noticing. The only green near the ship were vines growing inward along the ground from the edge of the blasted area. They looked like the spokes of a gigantic wire wheel.

There wasn't a good field of fire anywhere. Nessman picked a stump uprooted when the magnetic mass hit and laid the barrel of the plasma cannon across it. He was only ten feet from where Hatch A wiggled in the air, no part of it touching the ground. The weapon was too awkward and heavy to carry any farther.

Meyer, bent like a knuckle-walking ape, dropped the ammo cannisters beside the gunner and gasped with relief. They were probably clear of the ship when it went over, but if they weren't she was too wrung out to care.

She'd heard the warning about Spooks, though she didn't understand it. She switched her sensors to high sensitivity. The immediate blur of warning signals—movement, vibration, and IR sources, all careted in different colors on her visor—virtually blinded her.

Fuck it. She'd rather be able to see a Spook if he hopped up in front of her than hope to identify him before he was close enough to be a danger. Meyer cut back immediately on all inputs except electronic. The AI notched striker gear out of the search spectrum unless the user deliberately entered friendly signatures, so that wasn't a problem.

The ground was coarse red limestone that scuffed to gritty dust beneath the strikers' feet. The thin topsoil didn't look sufficient to sustain trees the size of those surrounding the site. Obviously it was, but Meyer could see why the impact of the magnetic mass had so thoroughly cleared the area.

Civilians poured out of the ship like ants from an overturned hill. Crying and shouting, they stumbled to the ground. Almost all of them came from Hatch D, the only one whose ramp reached the ground. The risk that the ship would fall in that direction didn't seem to affect them if they even noticed it.

"Hey, keep clear!" Nessman shouted. A dozen people, at least three generations of a single family, ran in front of the plasma cannon. They held hands as they headed toward the living forest.

Maybe they thought the starship was going to explode. They could be correct, but Meyer remembered the briefing information on Bezant. If 10-1442's powerplant blew, it couldn't kill those idiots any deader than the local wildlife would.

Strikers shouted at the running civilians. Lieutenant Kuznetsov tried to head them off, but they had a lead and no equipment to weigh them down.

Meyer aimed her stinger and raked the ground ten feet in front of the adult male who was more or less leading the conga line. Ash and wood spurted several feet in the air. Where the pellets hit quartz in the soil, there were satisfactory sparks as well. The civilians threw themselves flat weeping and hugging one another.

Meyer reloaded her weapon. She'd only fired off a hundred or so pellets, but this wasn't a place to trust ninety percent readiness.

She hadn't realized how simple life had been on C41's normal insertions. She could almost wish that the problem on Bezant was Kalendru troops rather than human civilians.

"Gee but I want to go home," somebody hummed on the squad push as 3-3 advanced toward the unbroken forest wall. "I'm tired and I—" 

"Horgen, shut the fuck up!" Abbado said.

Insects were buzzing around them. That was unusual in an environment to which humans hadn't brought their own bugs. Mostly people were different enough chemically that the local insect-equivalents didn't recognize them as possible dinner.

Larger carnivores were generally less picky, of course.

"Sorry, Sarge," Horgen muttered.

They were all jumpy, and not just because the landing was so awful. Abbado and three members of his present squad once had crawled from a boat that spread itself across half a mile of prairie when Spook gunfire had knocked out the braking nozzles on final approach. The problem was that the whole mission had been unfamiliar, and now all the planning was down the tubes besides.

"Sarge, I've got something," Methie said in a whisper. He echoed a pink highlight to the lower, panoramic view on Abbado's visor.

"Methie, switch places with me," Abbado said. He eased to his right.

The squad froze in place. There was ten feet between strikers to give 3-3 a respectable frontage. Abbado wasn't willing to increase the interval any further, though his flank personnel were already a hundred feet from the nearest support.

The major was pushing a squad out to each cardinal point, probing the landing site. C41 didn't have the troops to secure the entire treeline. Matushek and Glasebrook wore hard suits, so Abbado'd put them on the ends of his skirmish line. He didn't know if that was the right decision or not. He didn't have a clue as to what 3-3 was getting into.

Abbado reached Methie's slot, twenty feet to the right of his own. The visor indicated there was an object with straight lines lying at the base of a sapling whose branches were spiked clubs. It was twenty feet beyond the strikers, on the edge of the circle cleansed when flux baked the soil to coarse stone.

How the artificial intelligence knew whatever it was had straight lines was beyond Abbado. Ground cover and leaves that had yellowed and fallen from the tree when its roots were cooked hid everything but a lump so far as the human eye could tell. Well, that was why strikers' helmets had sensors and internal data processing.

"I had a little drink—" A pause. "Sorry, sarge." 

"Okay, we're going to move up all together," Abbado said. The squad's helmets were locked on 3-3's separate channel—actually a pattern of frequency hopping rather than a frequency in itself. Abbado wanted to be able to talk normally to his strikers even though they were spread out to shouting range. "Very slow, straight forward, and remember, it could be a mine."

"It could be a rock with a smooth fracture," Foyle said. He must have remoted a close-up of Methie's view to his own visor.

"The AI didn't say it was a rock," Abbado said. "The AI said it was a thing, and the AI doesn't make mistakes like strikers do."

Civilians were leaving the starship the way milk gurgles from a dropped jug. They pooled around the vessel in clothing that they'd doubtless brought because they thought it was suitable for a frontier. The brightly colored garments quivering on Abbado's panorama display struck him as incongruous, but the civilians might be right. It wouldn't take long to get tired of the grays and drabness of the immediate surroundings. Didn't plants on Bezant have flowers?

"Okay, everybody hold up," Abbado said. "Methie, you slide back behind me."

Abbado knelt. He could see that the object beneath the seared vegetation was flat and angular if not square. The AI didn't warn of a booby trap. He extended his stinger toward the mound, using the fat barrel as a probe.

Maybe he ought to have one of the hard suits do this. Their gauntlets weren't as delicate as Abbado's bare hands, though; and besides, he was squad leader.

He prodded the object. Dead leaves rustled bitterly. Nothing exploded. The AI was right. It wasn't a bomb. Abbado picked the thing up in his left hand.

It was a fabric pouch with individual cells for three batteries. Two batteries were in place. They were of a type familiar to Abbado: they would fit into the butt compartment of a shoulder-fired Kalendru laser.

"Six from Three-three," Abbado said, still kneeling. He used the identifier to key his transmission to Farrell rather than switching his helmet manually. "I've got a Spook ammo pouch here with two batteries in place. It doesn't look too weathered. Over."

He tried to scan the treeline. IR told him there were no large animals but as for the rest, while none of the saplings in the intermediate zone was more than an inch and a half in diameter, there were enough of them that they concealed the details beyond them as effectively as a gauze curtain.

"Three-three, understood," the major's voice said. "Break, C41, we've got recent Spook equipment north of the ship. Patrol leaders continue to advance to the forest edge but hold there. Look particularly for any sign of a trail. Out." 

"You heard him, people," Abbado muttered as he rose. He ducked around another grim tree that looked like a stick figure wearing spiked boxing gloves. This one still had its leaves. "Keep your eyes open and—"

He heard a crackswish behind him. He didn't have any idea what it meant—except it meant Guilio Abbado had fucked up.

"Watch—" he shouted as his instincts tried to throw him to the ground. Something whacked him in the middle of the back and hurled him twenty feet without his boots touching the ground.

Abbado's nose rapped the inside of his visor, bloodying it. His ribs ached. His body armor had stopped the blow and spread it evenly across the whole surface of his backplate, but it had still been one hell of a wallop.

"Sarge, the tree hit you!" Caldwell said. "The tree!" 

The ground cover where Abbado landed was still alive. Thorns were tearing the backs of his wrists and hands. He swore and pulled himself loose. Pain stabbed up and down his sides, but that was stressed muscle. He knew the feeling of a broken rib stabbing splinters toward a lung.

"C41," he said, unable to prevent his voice from wheezing. "The trees that have spikes on the branch tips, mark—"

He blinked to load the image of the sapling he was looking at. The ground cover at Abbado's feet still waved leaves toward him like the paws of a rending beast. Drops of his blood splashed the shiny surfaces.

"—can bash you like you wouldn't believe if you come close. And watch the fucking ivy, too, it moves and it bites. Three-three out."

Abbado scuffed his boot across the vegetation, tearing stems from the roots. Leaves caressed his legs to mid-shin, but the barbs couldn't penetrate the boots or tough battle dress leggings.

The sapling that he'd stepped close to had three branches spaced equidistant around the slim trunk. Two of them were still cocked up at about a forty-five degree angle skyward as they had been. The third now lay flaccidly against the trunk. Some of the thorns had broken off when the knobby end smacked Abbado's backplate.

Stinger pellets didn't ricochet at short range—they were moving way too fast. They and generally whatever they hit disintegrated. Abbado still aimed deliberately because the starship was downrange.

He triggered a ten-round burst, blasting the tree apart at the roots as effectively as a charge of explosive could have done. The sapling toppled toward him as though it was trying to get in one last blow. It wasn't tall enough by a foot or two to reach.

"Three-three, let's go," Abbado said.

There hadn't been any real point to chopping the tree down: there were hundreds more just like it in the immediate area that the strikers would just have to avoid. It was the only thing Abbado could do to solace the ache in his ribs, though.

Caius Blohm squatted among uprooted trees which lay against their living brethren like strikers flung dying into the arms of their fellows. Blohm touched nothing but the ground. Leaves brushed his shanks and boot tops with the dry sound of snake scales. He ignored them as he merged himself with the forest beyond.

"Do you see anything, snake?" Gabrilovitch asked. He knelt, fidgety, a dozen feet from Blohm. The sergeant wore gloves. He'd cleared his immediate surroundings with his powerknife, but the sight of leaves groping vainly toward him seemed to get on his nerves.

"Shut up, Gabe," Blohm whispered.

He wasn't being insubordinate. He didn't have enough conscious intellect left at the moment to be polite. Blohm was coming to an understanding with the forest.

The forest wanted to kill him. Wanted to kill all humans. Wanted to kill everything alive that wasn't forest.

Blohm raised his visor so that he could breathe the still air pulled from the trees when the sun's heat created an updraft from the clearing.

A powerful motor whined to life in the ship's hold. Treads clattered on the decking: somebody was driving one of the bulldozers out. Blohm couldn't have seen 10-1442 even if he'd turned around. There were too many small trees, living and dead, in the way.

The noise didn't break Blohm's concentration. It was just an element of his surroundings, like the booming call from somewhere to the west. Low frequency sounds travelled for amazing distances through a forest because the sound waves were too long for even tall trees to act as effective baffles.

Though at first glance the forest appeared uniform, Blohm's AI had differentiated a hundred and thirty-five species of trees. Only three of them were noted in the database, which put survey information about on a par with what strikers learned to expect from military intelligence.

Vines hung from the tallest nearby trees. In some cases Blohm could see the vine's own leaves flaring in the canopy, seemingly having forced aside the foliage of the host tree.

One species had striations like braided cable. It rooted at the base of the tree it climbed but also sent a tendril toward the landing site with the determination of water sliding down a chute. Surface roots anchored the tendrils, but there were no leaves or other apparent reason for the plant's expenditure of energy.

Blohm wasn't trying to make sense of the forest's individual elements. He was forming a gestalt of the whole. Everything the forest did was hostile to foreign life. Therefore the tendrils were a threat. Eventually Blohm would figure out how—the why didn't matter—but the method of the threat was less important than knowledge of the threat's existence.

No decisions to make. No noncombatants. The whole forest was Blohm's enemy. He felt his lips spreading in a smile.

The second bulldozer clanked out of the ship. The track plates had deep cleats that rang and squealed on the hard surfaces. These tractors were solely for use in wild terrain. They'd tear up any pavement with which they came in contact.

The tracks were of monobelt construction. Miniature clutches in the track pins locked the lower surface of each tread into a single rigid beam, spreading the load to greatest efficiency. The massive vehicles could cross ground too boggy to support a man walking. At the end of the run the pins declutched so that the take-up roller could lift the plates.

Blohm hadn't been sure they—the others, the civilians—would be able to get the bulldozers clear before 10-1442 fell. The air was almost dead still and the soil had baked to rock when the vegetation was cleared. Maybe the ship would remain upright for centuries.

The others were going to need the bulldozers if they were to survive any time in this place. Caius Blohm thought that he might have been able to come to an accommodation with the forest if he'd been alone.

He locked his visor down to check by technology what his instinct told him. "Gabe," he said, "there's something funny just ahead there. You see those three trees, mark?"

"I see the trees," Gabrilovitch said doubtfully. If he'd completed the thought, it would have been, "But there's nothing funny about them."

The trees were fat and grew in a triangle with eight or ten feet between trunks. Their gray bark was smooth except for a single vertical slit running the length of each bole. The triplet was only a dozen yards out in the undamaged forest, but Blohm couldn't see through the intervening barrier of saplings and shrubs to be sure what the lower twenty feet of the boles looked like.

The tops stood only a hundred feet in the air and should have been shaded by the taller trees. Instead, the luxuriant fronds spread beneath a sky as open as that of an apartment building's airshaft.

"See how the trunks split?" Blohm said. "The splits line up with a common axis."

The odd pattern wasn't what had drawn his attention. Blohm had noticed it after he got the feeling to begin with.

"There ought to be undergrowth between the trees," he went on. "There's not, but there's something below the level we can see because the IR reading's a fraction higher than it is a few feet either way."

"Okay, snake," Gabrilovitch said. "What do you figure?"

"I'm going to take a look," Blohm said. He held the curtain of moss aside with the barrel of his stinger and slipped past. His knife was in his left hand but he hadn't switched on the blade.

"Ah, shit, snake," Gabrilovitch said. He didn't waste his breath ordering Blohm to return.

The forest murmured. Blohm felt he'd stepped into a dark cave and heard a beast breathing somewhere in the twisted grottos beyond; waiting, considering its options.

Saplings and the boles of full-grown trees were planted more thickly than Blohm had learned to expect in other jungles. Normally, except where streams and clearings permit light to reach the ground, the foliage of the monster trees forms a canopy hundreds of feet in the air and starves lesser growth.

Seeds sprout on stored energy and die as pale wraiths of their hope unless one of the neighboring giants falls during the sapling's brief window of opportunity. In this forest, chinks in the canopy permitted young trees to continue to grow if not exactly to flourish. They'd be ready to replace their forebears immediately.

Blohm moved without haste, like a shopper moving down a store aisle. His helmet scanned in all directions for sudden movements. Blohm kept not only his eyes but his whole mind open against danger.

Particularly he watched the treetops and higher branches. Moving through this forest was like city fighting: the real dangers lurked in the upper stories.

Fans set up an echoing howl in the clearing behind him. They were flying the expedition's sole aircar out of the hold. The starship and those around it existed in a world with only peripheral connection to Blohm's.

He didn't touch any tree. He always looked before he placed his foot for the next step. And he moved with a ghost's effortless silence, wrapped in a shroud of total awareness.

The pair of Kalendru soldiers hadn't been so careful. They'd run through the little clearing bounded by the triplet of trees and now stood in contorted poses.

Sap had sprayed simultaneously from the ruptured bark of the three trees. Blohm judged it had started as an aerosol, but it must have set instantly because the weapons the Spooks dropped in their terror hadn't reached the ground.

The sap dried clear, though air bubbles and ripples in the surface distorted images in the hardened mass. Blohm thought refraction explained the corpses' blurred outlines, but when he switched his visor to microwave imaging he realized his mistake.

The sap had been intensely corrosive as well as entombing its victims in mid-stride. The Spooks looked fuzzy because their bodies had started to dissolve in the instant they were caught. Even the metal and plastic of their equipment was pitted.

"C41," Blohm reported, "mark. The Spooks got here ahead of us, but I don't think they're our main problem. The forest doesn't like them any better than it does us. And people, it doesn't like us even a little bit."

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