Starfist: Blood Contact (24 page)

The drivers seemed unable to go even a hundred meters without slamming into something hard and sending vibrations thudding through the vehicles. All in all, Lieutenant Snodgrass would have called the ride "gut-wrenching," "torturous" and, yes, even "terrifying." But not "uncomfortable."

"We're out of the swamp, mountain ahead," the driver of the second Dragon in the column announced nearly five hours after leaving Aquarius Station.

Snodgrass's sigh of relief came out as a groan. Then he yelped as the Dragon clanked over an uneven bed of boulders.

The bouncing, jouncing, and banging were worse on the lower slopes of the mountain than they had been in the swamps—everything was harder there. It was another half hour before the terrain became so steep and rugged the Dragons couldn't continue. Everyone was rubbing at least one sore spot as they dismounted. They looked around in dismay. They were in the path of a recent landslide. A swath several hundred meters wide had been gouged from the forest that blanketed the mountainside. Boulders, ranging from gravel to house-size, littered the pathway. Broken tree ferns lay between, shattered stumps stuck up here and there. Insectoids of all sizes fluttered about the edges of the forest.

Hyakowa began putting out security even before Bass assembled the rest of the platoon and the med-sci team. In a moment second squad's second fire team, which Hyakowa had sent to the edge of the forest, reported back. The forest floor was covered with thick underbrush—they wouldn't be able to get through it without making a lot of noise.

Bass left his helmet on so the Marines in the security posts could hear him on their radios, but raised all helmet shields and rolled up his sleeves so the med-sci team members, none of whom had infras, could see him. He looked at his locator to determine their exact position before speaking.

"We have to go five kilometers that way." He pointed uphill and to the right. "We'll go up this slide for about a kilometer and a half, then we have to find a way through the forest."

"Why don't we go the same way those people went?" a member of the medical team asked. "Surely they followed some sort of path."

"Fine. Show me the path and we'll follow it." Bass looked directly at the corpsman who asked the question. Abashed, she looked at him and feebly lifted her hands in a gesture that said she didn't know where the path might be.

"That's right," Bass said. "We don't know how they got up there, so we have to find our own way." He saw worried expressions on some faces. Not on the Marines, though. Unknown landscapes were a natural environment for the men who went to strange places to fight the Confederation's battles. "Don't worry about getting lost." Bass directed his words to the medical team. "I've got our destination logged on my map, and I'm in constant touch with the string-of-pearls, so we'll always know where we are. If anybody does get separated after we get off this slide, don't worry about being lost. All you have to do is go downhill until you reach the swamp, turn right until you reach the slide, then go uphill until you reach the Dragons. We won't leave anybody behind. We're Marines.

"Any other questions?"

When there weren't any, he said to Hyakowa, "Leave one gun team with the Dragons for security.

Send out one fire team on each flank, then let's move."

CHAPTER 18

Lance Corporal Schultz took point, that went without saying. Almost every time third platoon was on the move, Schultz put himself in the position most likely to run into danger first. He didn't consider himself expendable, not by any means. He believed he was better at spotting an enemy or other dangers than anyone else in the platoon. Or the company. The truth be known, Hammer Schultz thought he was the best pointman in the entire Confederation Marine Corps, perhaps the universe. No troop formation he had ever led in a hostile situation was surprised by walking into an ambush. Not that Marines walked into ambushes very often—they were exceedingly good at what they did, and often carried top-of-the-line equipment that allowed them to do their jobs even better. But Schultz was so much better at spotting danger than most Marines that he simply didn't trust anyone else to do the job right. Besides, having someone not as good as he on the point would needlessly endanger him. And when the shooting started, Schultz wanted to fire the first shot. He firmly believed that the man who shoots first is most likely to live to talk about it—not that Schultz talked about the fire fights he'd been in, or much of anything else.

Schultz wanted that hot spot.

So Schultz led third platoon and the medical team up through the skree left in the wake of the landslide. He carefully picked his way around boulders and found paths where the footing was most stable across the gravelly areas. The route he followed and the care he took in finding it resulted in a slow pace for the column that followed him. For once, Lieutenant Snodgrass had been right, the members of the medical team weren't accustomed to covering any distance over rugged terrain. Quickly they were in danger of exhaustion. Fortunately, the slow pace allowed them to keep up. But Schultz wasn't looking for stable footing for the benefit of the medical team; he wanted stable footing in case the Marines had to move fast and fight. The route angled this way and that, but averaged more than a hundred meters from the torn edge of the forest.

A hundred meters short of the klick and a half Bass had given for the climb up the slide, Schultz started looking for sign of a route through the forest. He made a face, but didn't comment, when somebody else spotted a way first.

"Hey," Claypoole's voice crackled over the platoon net, "I see something." His position on the right flank had him closer to the forest than anybody else.

"Everybody, hold your places," Bass ordered over the platoon net. "Three-two, check it out."

"What do you have, Rock?" Corporal Kerr asked. He angled his own climb to his right to join Claypoole.

Claypoole raised an arm to let his sleeve slide up and expose it, then pointed under the fern trees.

"Looks like a game trail."

Kerr looked where Claypoole pointed and saw it—a line, maybe half a meter wide, where the moist dirt was packed down and slick-looking. "Could be," he said, and wondered what kind of animal made a slick trail. Nearly every game trail he'd ever seen looked trodden or scraped. The one before him was smoothly rippled, as if something heavy and uneven had rolled it out.

"What do we have?" Sergeant Bladon asked.

Kerr pointed.

"Cover me." Bladon slipped between the nearest tree ferns and squatted next to the slick. After studying it for a moment, he touched it and rubbed his fingers together. Standing, he wiped his fingers and returned to Kerr and Claypoole.

"Three-six, three-two," he said into his comm unit. "Those local amphibians—do they live this high on the mountain? The slick is damp with water. It's wet, but not slimy. I get the impression soft-bodied things use that trail."

"Is it clear enough for us to follow?" Bass asked.

"That's an affirmative. As far as I can see it's going in the right direction, and once we get in from the edge, there isn't very much in the way of underbrush. Not like down below."

"All right, we'll follow it. Hammer, get to it. See if you can parallel it without walking on it." Walking on a trail is seldom a good idea in a hostile situation—people tend to set ambushes and booby traps along trails. "Flankers out fifty meters."

Bladon heard MacIlargie groan over the squad net. "Don't worry, Mac," he said. "It's clear enough in there you won't be struggling through too much crap." Chuckling, he added, "And Corporal Kerr and I will both be able to keep an eye on you. You won't get into any trouble." Then he had to step aside to let Schultz pass under the trees. "Second fire team, take your flank. Stay clear of the trail," he ordered as soon as Corporal Dornhofer followed Schultz. He glanced toward MacIlargie in time to see the PFC

glare at him before sliding his light-amplifier screen into place. He held off a grin until his own light screen was in place.

The fernlike trees towered to ten meters and more. Their fanned fronds blocked most of the direct sunlight. The light that penetrated to the ground mostly filtered through the nearly translucent foliage.

Under them it was dim, almost like early dusk except for the greenish tinge to the light. Schultz led the way thirty meters uphill from the glistening trail. Kerr and his men flanked the platoon an equal distance downhill from it. The platoon's main body was probably far enough off the trail to be outside the killing zone of an ambush, yet close enough for the right-side flankers to keep it in view. Any farther and the density of the fern trees would completely block the view of the game trail—it wasn't really as clear as Bladon had told MacIlargie.

Kerr shivered when he lost sight of the rest of the platoon. His universe suddenly closed down to himself and the two Marines with him. The silence amid the fern trees was broken only by the quiet squelch of their footsteps on the damp ground, the occasional scrunch as one of them stepped on a treelet and broke its stem. Even those few sounds were muted by the proliferation of fronds, making the sounds seem eerily distant. The silence stood in sharp contrast to the din of the battle at Turlak Yar where he'd nearly been killed. The dim, greenish light was nothing like the desert brilliance that had drenched the village on Elneal. There, he'd been in a fighting position with one other Marine as the battle raged around them; here, he was in close contact with just two Marines. The mountainside forest was not a place where horsemen could mount a charge. And there was no detected threat. Still, being out of sight of the rest of the platoon in a potentially hostile situation brought back the memories of his last firefight, a tsunami that threatened to overwhelm him and curl him into a fetal ball from which he might never emerge—something had horribly killed the members of the scientific mission here, and that something might still be present. The surge of confidence Kerr had felt on the initial recon at Central Station abandoned him and he struggled to keep himself under control, to maintain vigilance, to prevent his men or anyone else from seeing the terror welling up in him. The recon at Central had been dangerous only in his mind; no enemy was there, no one had shot at him.

Something made a plop up ahead and he almost lost it. Almost, but not quite—the reflexes that had been drilled into him during his time in the Marines, and honed on many operations, took over. He dove to the ground and rolled, pointing his blaster in the direction of the sound. "Down!" he ordered on his fire team net, then immediately switched to the command circuit and reported, "Right flank has something up ahead." He dropped his infra screen into place. If there were warm bodies up ahead, he might be able to spot their heat signatures through the foliage.

"What is it?" Bass's voice came back.

"Don't know. I heard something." He flipped back to the fire team circuit. "Rock, Mac, do you see anything?"

"I can't see anything," Claypoole replied.

"I heard it," MacIlargie answered.

"We all heard it, but none of us see anything," Kerr reported.

"Where was it relative to you?"

"Sounded almost dead ahead."

"All right, I'm deploying the platoon on line, angled to your front. Go downhill, then swing back up, try to get behind it to check it out. Stay low in case we have to fire."

"Roger." Yes, stay low, stay very low. It wouldn't do at all to get fried by Marine fire. Kerr raised one arm at the elbow to expose his forearm and signaled Claypoole and MacIlargie to follow him, then slithered downhill on his belly. Turning up the amplifiers on his earpieces, he was able to hear them slithering behind him. He hesitated at the game trail, afraid to expose himself for the second or two it would take to slide across. Then he remembered his chameleons rendered him effectively invisible in the visual; he let his training and reflexes take over and slithered across. Fifty meters downhill he stopped and waited for the other two to reach him.

"How far ahead do you think it was?" he asked when they reached him.

Claypoole had his shields up, and Kerr saw him shake his head. MacIlargie simply said, "Dunno."

Kerr thought sound wouldn't travel far through the fern trees, the noise couldn't have been even fifty meters away, possibly half that or less. He rose to a crouch. "We'll go forty meters, then back up," he whispered. If there was an ambush waiting along the trail, they'd come at it from behind. He hoped they would. They had been uphill from the game trail. The ambush would be facing it unless the ambushers had heard the Marines behind them and turned around.

After going thirty-five meters Kerr stopped. "Mac, wait here for my signal," he said.

MacIlargie murmured "Will do," and lowered his infra screen so he could see Kerr's hand signal.

Five meters farther Kerr stopped again and ordered Claypoole, "Go five more meters, wait for my command."

"Right." Claypoole dropped his infra screen and went five more meters, stopped and looked back. He could just make Kerr out through the fern trees.

Kerr looked to his left and right, saw both of his men waiting for his command. He heard another plop and inwardly shivered. He still hadn't had his test of fire, still didn't know if he could fight again or if he'd panic. When they arrived at Central and his fire team scouted, they didn't meet anyone. This time he knew someone or something was up ahead. He took a deep breath to control a shudder. It was time for him to find out whether he still had it in him to be a Marine corporal or any kind of fighting Marine. He raised his left hand to shoulder level, then thrust it forward. The three Marines began moving uphill.

Fifteen meters up, before the game trail came back into sight, scattered hints of red began to appear on Kerr's infra screen, and his anal sphincter clenched. The hints of red didn't resemble human heat signatures. But whatever had killed those people at Central or in Aquarius Station didn't have to be human, or even warm blooded. It didn't even have to be intelligent.