"Is everybody out of the ship?" Farrell asked al-Ibrahimi, shouting because of the aircar idling beside them. Even feathered, the lift fans moaned as they dragged air down the filtered inlet ducts.
"There are mumble-mumble—" Lundie said.
"Shut your fucking motors off!" Farrell shouted at the building staffer driving the eight-place open car.
"Who do you think you are?" she shouted back. Farrell knew she was just nervous; and she wasn't in the military, much less under his command, but his anger spiked in a way that made everything but the driver's red face fade to the fringes of his awareness.
Lieutenant Kuznetsov, looking toward the tree line, reached into the vehicle and threw the main circuit breaker. The twin fans wound down with a last whisper of despair. Kuznetsov stepped away from the car, talking to one of the squads placed at the edge of the jungle.
"There are ninety-two colonists still on the ship," Lundie repeated. Her expression hadn't changed during the "discussion," but that in itself was a remark. "Most of them refuse to leave of their own will, but on Deck 13 the monitors failed to account for the residents before they left the vessel. The six persons missing from that deck may include some injured."
Lundie and her boss wore skeletonized headsets. The rigs had the same projection and communication abilities as the strikers' helmets, though they didn't protect the wearer. Al-Ibrahimi spoke in a quick, calm voice to someone. Farrell glimpsed a montage of twelve images when the project manager turned his head and the hologram aligned almost subliminally for Farrell as well.
Farrell ran his fingers over the pouches of his crossed bandoliers. He had four squads on the perimeter, a terrible deployment. The squads couldn't support one another because of the dead and fallen trees throughout the landing site. Besides, he didn't have any particular reason to assume the Spooks would attack at those particular segments of a perimeter over a mile around.
There was no doubt of the Kalendru presence. Quite apart from the bodies Blohm found, the Spooks had abandoned so much equipment that strikers turned up dozens of items while moving through the area.
Farrell had retained just under half his force near the ship as a reserve. If he'd concentrated all of C41 here any Kalendru attack, even a single sniper, might slaughter scores of civilians before strikers could get into position to stop them.
There were too fucking many civilians for C41 to draw a close cordon around them. If the strikers were to provide a forward defense, Farrell needed to know where forward pointed.
President Reitz and Councillor Suares had joined al-Ibrahimi. Farrell didn't see Lock, but the other councillor might be anywhere in the mass of civilians. Some of them now wanted to go back into the ship to get additional belongings. Lundie had asked Farrell to prevent that: the elected monitors, two per deck, were busy organizing the people for whom they were responsible, and the building staffers were emptying heavy cargo despite the threat of 10-1442 going over.
Farrell didn't much like putting his people on what amounted to crowd-control duties, but he didn't see a better solution. Sergeant Daye chose ten strikers for the job.
"Major?" al-Ibrahimi called. Ms. Reitz broke off whatever she'd been saying to the manager.
"Sir?" said Farrell as he moved a step closer. His visor's upper range echoed in miniature the view from the four perimeter squads. There was no reason he shouldn't talk to his superior until something popped.
"We've landed one hundred and twelve miles east of the intended site," al-Ibrahimi said, speaking to Farrell and the civilian officials together. "The asteroid the Kalendru placed was more massive than the grid that the Population Authority intended for us."
Al-Ibrahimi smiled. His thin, swarthy face was capable of humor all the more remarkable for flashing from his usual expression of reposed detachment.
"The degree to which these transports are automated," he added, "is a matter I'll take up with the relevant bureaux when we reach the correct site and the communications capsule prepositioned there."
"Aside from their active hostility our surroundings bear no resemblance to those the briefing chips led me to expect," Suares said. "Have we perhaps landed on the wrong planet, Mr. Ibrahimi?"
"No, though I'm afraid it's a particularly insalubrious region of the correct one," the manager said. "We're in a large crater which orbital imaging showed to have uniquely dense vegetation. Unfortunately, the attack and defense mechanisms so notable in vegetation elsewhere on BZ 459 are abnormally developed here as well."
Farrell nodded, thinking of Blohm's Spooks. He wondered if the managers' headsets received military transmissions. All Farrell had reported was the fact of the Spook bodies.
"The crater walls separate the local biota from the remainder of the planet," Lundie said. "The population pressures appear to have increased the rate of adaptation."
"What about the animals?" Suares asked. "Are they different as well?"
"The survey didn't use techniques that would penetrate the jungle canopy," Lundie said. "The probability is that the same pressures affected the zoobiota as well as the phytobiota. Perhaps more so."
Her words were chillingly emotionless.
"If the Kalendru landed here by chance," al-Ibrahimi said, "they were remarkably unlucky. As we most certainly are."
"We've got to begin ferrying people to the correct place at once," Reitz said. "We won't be able to complete the job before dark, but if this is as dangerous a place as you say we need to begin."
"Ma'am, you're right," said Farrell, "but I don't want to risk our only aircar until we know what the Spooks, sorry, the Kalendru, are up to. If the car overflies them, they'll shoot it down."
"Why are Kalendru here?" Reitz demanded. "Is the Unity sending colonies to the war zone? Is that it?"
"No," al-Ibrahimi said flatly. "The Spooks—"
He looked deliberately at Farrell and nodded.
"—shouldn't be here. A probe this far into human-settled space is risky, and that they chose to land on BZ 459 would be unthinkable had they not done so."
"A crash landing, perhaps?" Suares said. "Castaways?"
"No," said Lundie. "A prepared landing, on a magnetic mass placed with considerable effort."
"I just want to avoid them," said Farrell. "When we make it to the commo capsule, I'll call in a proper force to deal with them."
"That shouldn't be difficult," Lundie said. "I'll be on the aircar—with your agreement, sir?"
"You or me," al-Ibrahimi said. "I haven't decided yet."
Lundie's face went still in a fashion Farrell had learned was equivalent to another person's scowl. "There will be strikers in the car as guards," she resumed. "The military sensors in the helmets are capable of identifying Kalendru equipment at ranges beyond risk to us in this dense vegetation."
"Not really," Farrell explained. "We can only use high gain in a virtually sterile environment. The signatures of an aircar in operation swamp the signal from, say, a Spook laser's cooling mechanism."
"I can discriminate," Lundie said flatly. "My headset, cued to the helmets, can discriminate. The guards can filter their inputs as they desire. I'll use their passive sensors at maximum sensitivity."
She looked at the project manager. There was steel in her expression and flint in his.
Al-Ibrahimi smiled minusculy. "Yes," he said. "The initial flight to the grid will involve minimal personnel—my aide, the pilot, and however many personnel you choose to attach, Major."
"I'll go also," Suares said. He seemed surprised when everyone stared at him.
"For site planning," he explained, as if it should have been obvious. "As an architect, not because I'm a . . ." He waggled his hands to indicate the slight significance of his position as building councillor.
"We won't be able to ferry the heavy equipment and materials on the vehicle available," Suares added. "I need to plan housing construction as quickly as possible. Do we have an inventory of hand tools?"
"Yes," said Lundie.
"I'll ride along, sir," Kuznetsov said. "I've used commo capsules before."
"Who do you want to take with you?" Farrell asked.
Kuznetsov shrugged. "If we can really dodge the Spooks," she said, "I'm fine by myself. You need all the strikers here."
Farrell grimaced. "You got that right," he agreed. This balls-up could be straightened out inside of a week; but keeping the civilians alive for that week wasn't a job Art Farrell looked forward to.
"All right, Mr. Suares," al-Ibrahimi said. "I take your point. And as the sooner we start, the better, I—"
"Contact!" Farrell's helmet warned. "Contact!"
Flashes and explosions in series wracked the northern treeline.
"Don't touch that," Blohm warned. "It's sticky and I think the sap'll burn you."
Gabrilovitch turned with a sour expression toward the tree an inch or two from his elbow. The bark had the sheen of wet rubber. Now that the sergeant looked carefully, he noticed that bits of leaves and other detritus of the sort that falls from the canopy stuck out of the bole here and there. Not only were pieces being absorbed into the tree, the visible portions had a seared, shrivelled texture.
"Shit," he muttered. "Let's get back into the clearing. Those guys—"
He nodded toward the pair of Kalendru frozen in their death throes.
"—aren't going to tell us much."
"Yeah, all right," Blohm said. "You're the boss."
He hadn't called Gabe through the forest wall in the first place. Having the sergeant present was one more thing for Blohm to worry about in an environment that had plenty along those lines to begin with. Gabe wasn't careless, but he didn't understand yet that this forest was as dangerous as the jaws of a shark.
The major had attached Blohm and Gabrilovitch to Squad 2-1 to watch the northern perimeter, but Sergeant Kristal hadn't expected them to stick close. Her squad was used to working as a unit, just as the scouts were used to working with each other or alone. It made sense for Gabe to position himself and Blohm a hundred feet east of the nearest member of 2-1. That way the intervening vegetation would stop anything which reflex aimed before the shooter's consciousness worried about who else might be standing in that direction.
Gabrilovitch started under a sapling. Since he'd passed by it to join Blohm, the slender bole had kinked. Sprays of leaves now dangled where they would inevitably brush his helmet and back.
"Wait," said Blohm. He reached past the sergeant and severed the sapling near the ground with his powerknife. The foliage writhed as it fell.
"Fuck this fucking place!" Gabrilovitch whispered.
"Look, why don't I lead?" Blohm said. He stepped around the sergeant, choosing a course at an angle to the one he'd taken on the way in. Gabe nodded agreement, but he ground his boot heel onto the sapling before he followed.
Blohm wasn't echoing information from the helmet of any other striker. He needed to concentrate entirely on what he was doing. The hell with what was happening to somebody else.
The scouts would pass near the bole of a tree large even in this forest of giants, an emergent whose peak lifted a good fifty feet above the canopy. There was movement in the topmost branches. The helmet AI thought it was caused by a breeze that didn't reach the forest floor, but Blohm shifted his line on instinct. The tension squeezing his ribs eased, though nothing he could have pointed to had changed.
Blohm made two quick cuts with his knife. Branches twisted toward the incisions on their upper surfaces. The scouts stepped through the sudden gap in the forest wall, back to the area devastated by shock.
"I'm glad—" Gabrilovitch said.
Blohm signaled silence with his left hand. He flipped up his visor again and drew in a deep, slow breath. "Spooks," he said, his lips barely moving. "I smell them."
Gabe switched his visor display with his tongue, then said, "Breeze is at three-thirty degrees to your heading. Are you sure?"
He released his stinger. It clocked against the take-up reel under his arm. In its stead Gabe aimed the grenade launcher he carried clipped to his breastplate.
"I'm sure," Blohm said.
Gabrilovitch aimed the grenade launcher up at a sixty-degree angle so that its projectile would clear the saplings and windwrack. He fired twice. At the second choonk, brush crashed as if a herd of cattle just out of sight was charging the starship.
"Contact!" the sergeant cried. He emptied his magazine with four quick triggerpulls, turning as he fired so that by the time the high-trajectory projectiles fell they would intersect the invisible running figures. "Contact!"
Caius Blohm knelt, saying nothing. When a wraithlike Kalender suddenly rose behind a fallen tree only ten feet from Gabe struggling to reload, Blohm's stinger cut the Spook in half.
"Thought I'd broke it," Nessman said, probing the heel of his right foot gingerly with the fingers of both hands. The boot and his armored gauntlets lay beside him, but he wore the rest of his hard suit.
"It's okay, then?" Meyer said, holding the butt of the plasma cannon against her shoulder so that it wouldn't slip off the log. She peered at Nessman's foot by rotating the view on the lower range of her visor. She couldn't turn her head because her suit was buttoned up. The gorget locked her helmet to the back-and breast-armor.
"Damn thing's swelling," Nessman said. "I don't think it's broke, though." He tilted back so that she could see his grin through his open visor. "Beats hell out of hanging in the door till the ship fell over on me, though. Thanks, snake."
A creature the size of Meyer's middle finger hopped out of a hole in the log and stared at her with four eyes. It squeaked. The creature was bright green and stood on two legs, though when it hopped down the log it used all four.
"If it's swelling, you ought to get it looked at," Meyer said, peering through the plasma cannon's sight. She wondered if the little animal was poisonous. Most anything here was likely to be, from the quick warning the major had given C41 when he explained where screwed-up navigation had landed them.
Meyer was glad she was wearing a hard suit. She'd been antsy ever since Active Cloak. She was okay, though.
"Aw, the docs have got enough on their plates," Nessman said as he picked up his boot. "I'll just get this back on while I still can. Maybe when things settle down."
"That'll be a while," Meyer said.
Civilians trilled and hooted like swarms of birds. There wasn't a single open space large enough to hold all of 10-1442's passengers, not that half of them wouldn't have wandered somewhere else anyway. Deck monitors were trying to organize them, but the forest's shattered remains broke the landscape into sections as discrete as the partitioned cubicles of a hangar-sized office. The barrier distorted speech, and you couldn't see twenty feet in any direction.
A lot of civilians had been banged around when the transport skidded. Meyer couldn't imagine that as many as were shouting for doctors really had anything more wrong with them than bruises; but hell, she didn't know.
Meyer crouched, lowering the gun butt so that the muzzle pointed above the brush and fallen trees. Unbroken forest filled the projection sight. It was like staring at an oncoming tank, huge and implacable.
Nessman clamped his boot shut and gave a sigh of relief. "Goddam but it hurts when I squeeze it!" he said. "I sprayed it, so I figure I can walk all right till it wears off."
"Then we find you a doc," Meyer said.
All the strikers got first aid training and carried a basic medical kit. There were normally two specialist medics with a C-class company. C41 had gone into Active Cloak with only one. He, Hung Sen, was working on the legless sergeant of Gun 1 when a follow-up shell minced him and his patient together.
"Aw, I'm all right," Nessman said without a lot of emphasis. He reached for his gauntlets.
There wasn't a good field of fire for a stinger on this landing site, much less a plasma cannon. Any striker wearing a helmet in the line of fire would appear as a caret in the cannon's sight, but there was no way to tell if some civilians had walked behind a fallen thicket downrange to take a dump in privacy. You'd think people would worry more about having their asses blown away than they did about who might see that ass bare, but it wasn't true. Wasn't always true of strikers, either.
"Want me to—" Nessman said, rising to his feet.
"Contact!" the helmet warned. "Contact!"
Meyer pulled back the lever on the side of the guntube and let it go, switching power to the trigger mechanism. Launcher-fired grenades, two and then four more, went off near the perimeter to the northeast. One of them speared a branch skyward on a burp of orange flame.
Meyer horsed the weapon around to point in the direction of the blasts. The trunk slanted and the tree had been dead long enough that the bark fell away in large flakes under the gun's weight. The barrel wanted to slip down the log.
There were strikers a hundred yards away to the right of the weapon's current heading: two warning icons had flashed on the sight as it swung across them. Ten feet before the cannon's muzzle was a tangle of sapling and vines, knitted together in a gray and brown fabric. In a moment or two a company of Kalendru might come leaping over the barrier with their lasers ready and their inhumanly quick reactions. For now Meyer didn't have anything to shoot at.
Nessman, moving with care because he knew the hard suit made him clumsy, climbed onto the root ball beside Meyer. His visor was locked down. He pulled himself up hand over hand, kicking footholds in the mass of hardened clay. If his foot hurt, he didn't let it slow him.
Strikers chattered with excitement on the general push, but nobody had a better target than Meyer did. Another grenade went off, this time a hand-flung electric. It wasn't anywhere close to where Meyer expected the Spooks to be. She waited for her partner to cue her, working to control her breathing.
Nessman stood, balancing on the slippery trunk and six feet higher than before. "Vector, mark," he said, using the Heavy Weapons channel that only the two of them shared.
A vertical red line appeared on Meyer's faceshield display. It was about ten degrees left of where the gun pointed. She pivoted, bringing the sight pipper into line with the vector her partner transmitted. She was still aiming into the long pile of debris.
"Three Spooks," Nessman reported. "Four—"
A pair of pale saffron laser pulses stabbed for him. One turned a dead limb into a puff of smoke and splinters. The other hit Nessman's helmet with a flash and a crack like heartbreak.
Meyer squeezed the trigger. The barrier exploded into a fireball flinging detritus in all directions. The point-blank destruction shoved her as her body recovered from the cannon's recoil.
Plasma-scoured pits fogged the face of her visor. The vector line was brilliant against the muted background. Nessman was down.
Meyer realigned the cannon and fired again. Fifty yards downrange a treetrunk as thick as the one she used for a gun rest blew apart. The ends of the log lurched high; the twenty feet closest to the point of impact vanished in iridescent hellfire.
Kalendru—she couldn't tell how many, didn't care—had been just the other side of the log. The blast knocked them flat, but she saw movement. Meyer fired a third round along the channel she'd blown through the knotted wasteland, then a fourth on top of it.
Dead wood—dry, shattered, and heated to temperatures near those of a star's corona—bellowed upward in an inferno. Everything in front of Meyer was aflame. The tree on which the plasma cannon rested was beginning to smoke from the nearby blaze. Meyer's suit protected her from the heat.
She lowered the weapon's butt to the ground on her side of the log and staggered around the roots to find her partner or his body. From training she kept her stinger ready, but she didn't expect to need it.
Spooks didn't wear body armor. Meyer didn't think even she in a hard suit would have survived the fires of Gehenna she'd ignited to engulf these attackers.
"Watch this bastard," Abbado warned. He held the prisoner's right elbow; Methie held the left. Now that they'd dragged the grenade-stunned Spook all the way to Major Farrell near the ship, Abbado wished he'd brought Flea instead of leaving him with Horgen and the rest of the squad. "He bites."
The sergeant was barechested. His bloody tunic was draped over the Kalender's head for a makeshift hood.
Colonists crowded toward the command group with a rising murmur. It struck Abbado that in all likelihood no civilian on Bezant had ever seen a living Spook. "Give us some room, please!" said Top Daye.
Of course under normal circumstances, strikers didn't see living Spooks for very long either.
"Bites?" said Farrell. "Is he wounded?"
"Just knocked silly by a grenade," Abbado said. "I grabbed him and he bit the shit out of me. I, ah . . . I thought he might be rabid or something and the docs could . . ."
His wrist throbbed and was noticeably swollen. The Kalender's teeth, though delicate and smaller than a human's, were hell for sharp. The wound still oozed blood.
"Christ, yes!" Farrell said. He took the prisoner's arm himself. "Doctor! We need a medic here!"
"Yes, I am here," said Ahmed Ciler, the doctor Abbado'd met before. He wore a cleverly designed chest pack that folded down into a waist-level tray to display its contents. "Sergeant Abbado? Sit down and I'll look at that."
"I think he's got a bug or something, doc," Abbado said. He swallowed. His throat felt dry and he imagined he could feel it swelling shut. "He fought us all the way. Spooks aren't like that."
No concept of honor required Kalendru to continue fighting when resistance was useless. Spooks weren't cowards. They'd risk their lives on a chance just as readily as humans would. Where there was no reason to struggle—no main body for a rear guard to protect, no greater good to be purchased at the cost of an individual's life—overwhelmed Kalendru lapsed into perfect docility.
"He fought like an animal as soon as he came to, doc," Abbado said. Ciler teased a little serum onto the tip of a probe, then stuck the probe into the analysis port on the edge of his kit. "He kicked and twisted all the way back and he knew he couldn't get away. But he'd had a laser, it's not like he didn't have any mind left."
"It'll be a minute or two before the analysis is complete," Ciler said in a pleasant, soothing tone. "I added a military database when I learned where I was being sent. It's very unlikely that any Kalendru disease would affect a human being, and of course your immune booster is proof against such an event anyway. I'm going to clean and cover the wound. This may sting slightly."
Four strikers held the Spook spreadeagled. Daye pulled off the shirt Abbado'd thrown over the bastard's head to keep him from biting anybody else. Abbado felt like a damn fool, coming in to have his "wound" treated. Plenty of times he'd hurt himself worse and never even noticed it till he sobered up the next morning.
The way the Spook acted had scared Abbado. It was like having your pet goldfish try to take your finger off. There wasn't any real danger, but something was bad wrong for such a thing to happen.
Horgen could handle 3-3. It took two strikers to get this prisoner back to the command group. Abbado would have made the bite victim one of those escorts without even thinking about it if it'd been another squad member.
There was no doubt about any of that. But the truth was, Abbado'd been scared.
"There, that should do," Ciler said. He nestled the spray can back in its niche on the tray. The sealant tingled as it dried to a flexible, transparent scab over the toothmarks.
A chime sounded melodiously. Ciler touched a button that projected a dust-mote twinkle of holographic information. He smiled.
"Everything is perfectly normal," Ciler explained to the sergeant. "Any sensations you may have are merely the result of mechanical trauma, the bite."
His smile expanded. "Or imagination, of course," he said. "And you'll be pleased to know that based on the saliva sample, your prisoner is in good health also. Though suffering from deficiency in a few dietary proteins."
"Thanks, doc," Abbado said. He stood, feeling a relief greater even than sexual climax. He could handle the things he understood. It was the shit that came out of left field that made him shiver.
Lieutenant Kuznetsov was trotting down the ramp with the interrogation kit that they'd left in storage with the rest of the gear they weren't going to need at the landing. Who the hell expected there'd be Spooks here? The prisoner might be screwy, but screwy or not, electronic interrogation would let the strikers know what they were up against from that quarter.
Dr. Ciler looked toward the crowd around the prisoner, then grimaced and gave up the obvious thought. Abbado could have watched the interrogation by echoing the image from one of the officers, but Ciler didn't have that option.
"Let's see what's happening, doc," Abbado said, putting his arm through the crook of Ciler's. "Let us through, please!"
Civilians made way without complaint. C41 didn't know diddly squat about what was going on, but the strikers were used to being in life-and-death situations with no picture bigger than that of their gunsight images. For the colonists, being dropped into the shit without a clue must be terrifying. They were ready to defer to anybody who acted like he knew what he was doing.
Which Abbado did. Abbado knew he was leading Ciler to a place where the doctor could watch a Spook being interrogated.
The prisoner was now bound and gagged with lengths of the tape used to lock pallets into a starship's hold. 3-3 didn't have anything suitable for immobilizing captives, so they'd tied the Spook's wrists with a sleeve of the same tunic they'd used for a hood.
Abbado's back itched from ash and debris clinging to his sweaty skin. Insects kept lighting on him too. He needed to get another tunic from the ship. He looked up at 10-1442, wondering if the sucker was ever going to fall the rest of the way.
The prisoner thrashed his head from side to side and tried to kick. Methie sat on the Spook's bound ankles; Daye immobilized the head so that the major could fit the electrodes to the smooth scalp.
"What's this?" Farrell said. "Turn him face down. What the hell is this?"
The strikers flipped the Kalender on his belly. The big boss, al-Ibrahimi, and his aide watched with no more expression than a pair of lizards. Other civilians pressed closer by a process as gradual as a glacier sagging downslope.
There was a sac or cyst the size of a walnut at the base of the prisoner's skull. It was a darker, purplish gray than the skin around it. It looked obvious enough now, but Abbado and his strikers hadn't noticed anything when they were struggling with the Spook.
"Let me see that," said Dr. Ciler in a tone of sharp command. "Give me space, if you please!"
Ciler flopped his kit open and withdrew a probe. He held the sac steady with one hand and inserted the point with the other.
The doctor wasn't wearing gloves. Abbado felt himself twitch. There were more kinds of unthinking courage than what it took to unass an assault boat on a hot landing zone.
Ciler withdrew the probe and slid it into the analysis port. The prisoner's muscles tensed like the springs of a strain gauge. Abbado distinctly heard ribs crack in the instant before the spasm ended in death. The Spook's slim body relaxed like a slit bladder.
The kit chimed. Ciler frowned at the result; everyone who could see him waited. "It's Kalender nerve tissue," the doctor said. "But so thin an intrusion into the cyst shouldn't have caused such a reaction."
"Whatever it is, doc," the major said, "it's not a cyst."
He pointed. The lump had fallen away from the Kalender's flaccid corpse. The skin it had clung to was pale, almost white, but unmarked except for a puncture over the brain stem.
The lump lay on its back. Abbado saw eight tiny legs and, he supposed, a proboscis sticking from a body as swollen as the skin of a grape.
"Everyone check the back of your necks," Manager al-Ibrahimi said. "Immediately." His voice rang like wood blocks clapping.
Abbado patted his neck. The overhang of his helmet covered and protected him, the way it was intended to do against shrapnel from air bursts.
Dr. Ciler reached back with blunt, sensitive fingertips. "Oh God, the great and the merciful!" he cried in a despairing voice.
Abbado, acting with the killer's reflex that speed is life, brushed the doctor's hand aside. He caught the insect, for the moment no bigger than a rice grain, between his thumbnail and the callused pad of his trigger finger.
He squeezed. The insect burst with a spray of amber juice.
Ciler turned, his eyes full of wonder and relief. The striker grinned. "Favor for favor, doc," he said. "Get them quick before they grow."
More insects buzzed nearby. Abbado snatched another out of the air one-handed and crushed it, still smiling.