Starfist: A World of Hurt (25 page)

Their blasters were fully charged and the safeties were on. He checked his own microwave sniper rifle, a weapon seldom used by FIST-level recon, to make sure its safety was on. He was less concerned with whether it was fully charged, since he didn't expect to find a target he couldn't resist--and if he did have the opportunity to take out an enemy commander, all it would take was one shot from his silent weapon.

"If they spot us, we shoot and scoot. You know what we're doing," he said. "Let's go."

Silently, invisible to casual observers, the four Marines rose from their places and drifted on an angle toward the slope fifty meters away. Their destination was a split in the ridgetop at the side of a saddle four klicks west and north of where the doomed UAV flight had crossed into the valley. They knew it was unlikely any human opponents could spot them, but unlikely didn't mean impossible, so recon Marines always moved carefully--other Marines thought preternaturally so--to avoid detection. This time they weren't positive who they were up against or what their capabilities were. This time their careful movement was so cautious they seemed nearly preternatural even by recon standards. Once they started angling up the slope, they only had to climb eighty meters to reach the split, but it took them more than a half hour standard to do it.

Steffan eased himself closer to the crack in the ridge next to the saddle and stopped less than ten meters from it. He reached into a side pocket of his pack and drew out a minnie, disguised as a native rat-size marsupialoid. He uncovered the control panel on his side and lightly touched the controls.

"HUD check," he said, and flicked his on. Immediately, a minnie's-eye view superimposed itself on his vision.

"I see it," Sonj said.

"Got it," Zhon concurred.

"It's clear," Makin said, speaking for the first time since infiltration.

Steffan touched a series of commands on the control panel and the minnie skittered forward, scooting under bushes and fallen leaves whenever possible. It paused at the edge of the split, its nose twitching as it sniffed the air moving through it, checking for vagrant molecules that could indicate human presence somewhere out of sight. A graph on the side of Steffan's HUD showed nothing out of the ordinary--as if anyone knew what was ordinary inside the interdicted valleys. He touched new commands and the minnie eased away from the edge and into the split. It paused and hunched its back; any observer who didn't know better would think it was defecating. But it was just dropping a comm relay to maintain its connection with Steffan. The patrol leader released it, and the minnie skittered along the bottom of the split on auto.

Flakes and chunks of rock had fallen from the sides of the split in the untold time since the top of the ridge had first cracked. Grains and clods of dirt fell from the top, as had leaves, twigs, and shootlets that failed to gain secure purchase above. The bottom was as uneven as such random falls could make it, and the scree sloped down from the center to the outsides so that standing men on opposite sides couldn't see each other over it. Much of the cracked floor was loose; flakes and chunks of rock balanced precariously one upon another.

The minnie scootched through temporary tunnels, scrabbled over loose rocks, burrowed through dirt and plant fall. Up and down the minnie went and from side to side, climbing the uneven, undulating floor to its peak.

At the midway point Steffan had it pause behind a screen of fallen foliage that roofed a small hollow between two chunks of rock. The minnie sniffed for telltale molecules, peering in visual and infra at the narrow wedge of ground it could see beyond the split's far side. It used its magnifier and light gathering capabilities to see deeper than a man could into the trees beyond. Its motion sensor, which could track the progress of a gnat at more than thirty meters, quivered with the effort of picking up movement. It perked and transited its ears, listening to the forest sounds that funneled its way.

Not a single sensor detected anything that didn't belong to forest flora.

Odd, Steffan thought. What pollinates the plants? According to the minnie's reports, there weren't even any insectoids in the forest's fringe.

He sent the minnie skittering forward to pause again when it reached the far side of the split and repeat its midway investigation. Still no sign of anything animate.

"Let's go," he said.

Corporal Sonj rose from where he'd hunkered invisibly against the rock wall, slipped past his team leader and into the split. Steffan followed him, with Makin coming third. Zhon brought up the rear. All but Steffan turned off their HUDs. Ahead of them the minnie skittered from rock to rock, bush to bush, staying as much out of sight of unknown lurkers in the forest as possible.

The Marines went through the split fast; the jumbled surface was too loose for them to stealthily crawl over or walk across, so they needed to get through fast, before anybody could spot the movement of the scree and react to it. On the other side they spread to the sides, two to the left, two to the right; fanned out, frozen, almost totally invisible. Even their infra signals were muted. They lay looking, listening, smelling the air. Their eyes drank in the riot of pinks, scarlets, ambers, blues, and manifold greens before them. They listened to the wind in the trees. Scents of alien flora wafted to their noses. They used every amplifier they had, looking and listening for any hint of anything they couldn't see or hear with their own eyes and ears.

There was less than they'd ever seen in any forest before; no sign of animate life--not even hungry or thirsty insectoids seeking to enter their chameleons.

Strange, stranger, strangest, Steffan thought. He did his best to ignore the sensation crawling along his spine.

They waited a quarter hour standard, a half, then an entire hour standard. Steffan and Sonj watched the progress of the minnie on their HUDs as it crept through the forest fringe and penetrated beyond where they could see from outside of the split.

"Sonj, minnie," Steffan finally said.

"Roger," Sonj replied, and momentarily busied himself releasing the team's other minnie.

"HUDs up," Steffan ordered when Sonj's minnie and its input appeared on his HUD. He transmitted a map to his men. Little of the interior of the geologically bizarre valley was clear on the map--there were no local maps, and the string-of-pearls hadn't yet managed to map surface detail with much accuracy through the dense forest cover. The route he traced on his map instantly appeared on his men's HUDs. So did the dots he indicated as rally points should they get separated. The route he sketched followed an irregular arc to a point four kilometers into the forest, where they would laager for the night, then back out again on a different irregular arc that led to a saddle three kilometers north and a bit west of their current position. Their you-are-here and the two minnies were also marked.

"Got it?"

"Got it," Sonj confirmed; the map was stored in his HUD for recall if needed.

"Check," Zhon replied.

"Stored," said Makin.

The four Marines eased into the forest, taking advantage of every bit of concealment, just as they would if they weren't in infradamping chameleons. Trying to follow in each other's unseen footsteps, they formed into a straighter line than infantry would. Their interval was also greater than the infantry would maintain in this denseness, just close enough for them to pick up the ultraviolet tags on the back of the helmet and boot heels of the man to their front.

The minnies scooted ahead of them, ranging up to twenty-five meters to the flanks.

There were watercourses on the forest floor, a lot of them, most merely thin trickles a man could step across without stretching. They came across very few with pools deep enough for a prone man to lay in submerged. That bothered Steffan; Skinks favored swamps and marshes, or at least streams deep enough for them to swim or crawl through as underwater pathways. Except when they used their small armored vehicles. But the armor required relatively open terrain, and the trees here were too close together for the Skink armor to easily maneuver. The way the soft ground oozed under his boots, he suspected it might be too soft for the armor even if the trees were spread widely enough--Skink armor had wheels and tracks, instead of being air cushioned like the Marine Dragons.

It took several hours of slow, cautious movement through the increasingly weird forest for the recon team to reach its laager point. It remained lush all the way, but they never heard an avian sing or saw a flying insectoid. The ground was barren of animal tracks and spoor. The only animate life they saw was tiny mites crawling on occasional tree trunks or the vines that sprawled across the occasional open area. And the open areas, none as large as ten meters along any axis, had been odd. In other forests, a patch opened when a tree fell, and didn't stay open for long before weeds, bushes, and saplings sprouted and grew in quest for sunlight. Here, the open areas looked like they'd been reserved for low-lying scrub brush and scattered weeds, as though trees had never grown in them. Was there something in the ground that made those patches inhospitable to the forest's trees? Then why hadn't a tree evolved that could take advantage of them?

They had questions but no answers. And not the slightest evidence of Skinks--or any other possible foe.

Steffan and Sonj sent their minnies up trees next to the open patch Steffan had chosen to mark as their laager. They wouldn't spend the night
in
the open, but alongside it. The minnies climbed the trees to recharge their batteries before the sun went down over the valley wall, and to briefly act as relays for communication with the string-of-pearls; comm had been broken and sporadic during their forest trek. The only download Command had for them was a slightly improved map of the forest floor. Neither of the patrols in the other two areas being reconned had reported sighting any enemy.

The minnies came back down after only a few minutes and were set to patrolling around the laager. The Marines ate cold rations and settled in for a fifty percent overnight watch--two sleeping for two hours while the other two remained up and alert. Steffan and Makin took the first watch.

The strangeness of the forest during the day only deepened after the sun set. The only sound was the soft sighing and occasional rattling of air currents in the trees; no
hoo's
of night-flying predators could be heard, nor buzzing nocturnal insectoid blood suckers, nor cries of night hunters or the squeals of captured prey.

Steffan looked around through his infra screen. The prone bodies of his men hardly registered against the constant background heat given off by decaying vegetation on the forest floor. The heat-muting function of the recon Marines' chameleons was functioning exactly as it should. They weren't even as visible in infrared as the Skinks he'd seen on Kingdom had been. Almost subconsciously, he tracked the minnies on his HUD; sometimes, when he looked carefully at where they were, he caught a quick infra flash of one of them as it skittered past his view.

Nothing else gave off infra signals. In some atavistic corner of his mind the faint glows became noncorporeal, ghostly. He shivered and raised his infra, opting for the light gatherer and magnifier shields instead. The moon was still below the top of the valley, but some starlight diffused through small gaps in the canopy. There wasn't much light for his screen to gather, but at least he wasn't blind. And even the flattened, depth-perception-deprived view of darkest night seen through his light gatherer and magnifier shields was better than the eerie sights seen in infra.

What was that?

A sudden rustle, as of something moving in the brush along the opposite edge of the small clearing. He saw nothing with light and magnification, switched to infra and still saw nothing.

"See anything?" he murmured into his comm.

"No, what was it?" Makin replied, his voice edgy but quiet. His posture, barely visible in infra, showed he had his blaster pointed in the direction of the sound and his fingers wrapped around its firing lever.

Steffan redirected one of the minnies to the area the sound had come from and flipped his "all hands alert" toggle. In seconds Sonj and Zhon responded. He slowly shifted his sniper rifle until it was in his shoulder and pointing at where he'd heard the sound. He flashed a half-second infra beam at it. Both clicked to acknowledge his point.

"Zhon, rear," the team leader ordered.

Zhon rolled to face into the forest and cover the team's rear.

The redirected minnie scooted through the area of the sound, pausing here and there for just a second or two to sniff and peer about, but found nothing. The four Marines waited in silence for long minutes. Steffan wondered if what he'd heard had been a rotten piece of wood collapsing. But no, it had sounded like movement. And he couldn't see anything that might have moved.

There it was again!
And this time he'd seen it! Almost saw it. In his peripheral vision.

Something had definitely moved. He slithered backward, took the safety off his sniper rifle, and directed the nearer minnie to investigate.

Nothing again. He sent the other minnie. Working together rapidly, the two minnies quartered the area. Nothing. Steffan's hair stood and the skin of his shoulders and back crawled. He
knew
he'd seen something move, but the minnies weren't able to find anything.

What was going on?

There was the sound of movement in a third place. Steffan turned to look toward it just in time to see a streamer of viscous fluid, gray in the gathered starlight, arcing toward him.

"SKINKS!" he shouted, twisting out of the streamer's path and pointing his sniper rifle at its source. He pressed the firing button, and a line of air seemed to shimmer from his muzzle to the clump of brush the streamer came from. The sniper rifle was no good in a pitched battle; it needed half a minute to recharge between shots. He drew his hand-blaster and sent a bolt of plasma into the same brush.

"They're over here!" Makin shouted, and fired his blaster in the direction of the original sound.