"Your personnel have settled in, Major?" al-Ibrahimi said. He was looking in Farrell's direction, but his eyes were focused on the holographic display before him. Because the interference patterns were aligned toward the manager's side of the desk, Farrell saw only an occasional shimmer like cobwebs drifting through a sunbeam.
"We've spent our share of time on troopships, sir," Farrell said. "This is better than the usual. I'm not used to traveling without flight crew, but it seems to be working well enough."
The ship trembled every few minutes as it sequenced between bubble universes, navigating by means of the differentials between constants of velocity and momentum from one continuum to the next. To those aboard 10-1442 the sensation was similar to thunder so distant that it was felt, not heard.
"Statistically," al-Ibrahimi said, still watching his display, "fully automated operation is only insignificantly more dangerous than crewed spaceflight."
He looked at Farrell through the holographic curtain and smiled. "I trust I'm as capable of dispassionate analysis as the next man," he added, "but speaking as an individual I'd be just as pleased if the Population Authority spent a little more on transport costs."
Farrell shrugged. "Life has risks," he said. Some of his people worried more about transport than they did about what the Spooks had waiting at the far end, but it'd never particularly bothered him.
"Tamara's organizing the colonists into skill groups, but she'll be back shortly," the manager said. "I'll have her download full data on BZ 459 so that you and your company will know what you'll be facing after we land. Or I can do that myself, if you'd like?"
"We've got a week and a half," Farrell said. "I don't guess another hour's going to make any difference."
He cleared his throat, wondering how to get out what he'd come to ask. This was the first time he'd talked—really talked—to the manager.
"One advantage of the unusual makeup of the Bezant 459 colony," al-Ibrahimi said, "is that we have four fully-trained MDs. We don't have the equipment that would be available on a developed world, but we're far better off than the normal run of Population Authority initiatives."
"Look, sir," Farrell said abruptly. "You could have C41 relieved immediately as the security detail, right? You've got that power?"
"Yes I do," al-Ibrahimi said. "I could send a message capsule to the base at Varnum, approximately a day and a half from BZ 459. I would expect it to take the base commander a day to arrange for the personnel and transport, then three days for a full-sized vessel to make the return trip."
Al-Ibrahimi touched a control on his desk and nodded approval at whatever the database told him. He returned his attention to Farrell, smiled mildly, and said, "I have no intention of doing anything of the sort, however. I'm extremely pleased with the way your company has performed."
Al-Ibrahimi's eyes were an unusually deep blue. Farrell had found it disquieting when the manager watched the display while looking toward him. The weight of al-Ibrahimi's direct gaze was uncomfortable, though the fellow was perfectly calm.
"Sir, I appreciate you saying that," Farrell said. Only as the words came out did he appreciate how true they were.
Mostly in the Strike Force—in life, Farrell suspected, though life wasn't something he claimed to be an authority on—praise was a gruff, "Nice job!" Followed with a tougher mission the next time to prove the statement was sincere. Al-Ibrahimi sounded like he meant it, and it was important to him that Farrell knew he meant it.
"The thing is, sir," Farrell said, "we really need a stand-down. I suppose somebody at Regiment thought that's what he was doing, pulling C41 out of combat and letting my people, you know, relax."
"I don't think BZ 459 is going to be very relaxing, Major," al-Ibrahimi said. In a funny way, the manager struck Farrell as having a striker's personality. The man looking over that desk had the right focus on mission, the willingness to do whatever it took to achieve the objective. "Compared to one of your normal insertions, perhaps; but that's a relatively short period of time, whereas you'll be on BZ 459 for at least six months."
"Sir," Farrell said. Al-Ibrahimi hadn't gone through the roof when Farrell made the request, but Farrell no longer thought there was a snowball's chance in hell that the manager was going to pull C41 from the project. He hoped he wasn't whining, but he had to make this cold man understand. "It's not us I'm worried about, it's your people."
He shook his head and continued, "Look, I—shit, I love my strikers if the word means anything at all. But they're tight, really tight since the last mission. I'm afraid something's going to happen, somebody's going to nut and, you know, hurt a bunch of civilians. Hurt them bad."
He rubbed his forehead with the tips of all eight fingers. He could see it like it had already happened: a striker standing over a dozen bodies sprawled in a circle of guts and blood and scraps of bone. The only thing the image lacked was the striker's face. It could be anybody, God help them all. Up to and including the company commander.
"We shouldn't be around where people don't . . . understand what we're like, sir," Farrell said. He met al-Ibrahimi's still blue eyes. "We're not, not the way civilians mean it. We're not really human anymore."
"I'm also concerned about my people, as you put it, Major," al-Ibrahimi said calmly. "I appreciate the risks to all concerned rather better than you think I do. If I didn't believe that the risks were justified by the benefits of the colony having C41 as its security element, I wouldn't have accepted your assignment in the first place."
Farrell braced to attention. "Yessir," he said to a point beyond the manager's right ear. "I'll return to my strikers then, sir. You'll find C41 ready to carry out its responsibilities insofar as humanly possible."
He turned on heel and toe to the door. It was a parade-ground movement that strikers had little call for, but which al-Ibrahimi's glacial calm seemed to require.
"Major?" al-Ibrahimi said. Farrell glanced back over his shoulder.
"Please recall that I am the project manager, Arthur," al-Ibrahimi said. "You and your strikers are as surely my people as the civilians they guard."
He smiled. The manager's tone and expression were as sad as anything Farrell had seen at a funeral.
"Krishna!" said Caldwell as she watched the projected display. "They're going to put humans here?"
"They're going to put us here, Josie," Ace Matushek said. "I've never been sure we qualified as human."
Bipedal herbivores spread across the holographic landscape, killing everything in sight. "They weigh about forty pounds apiece," Abbado said, quoting the figure from the database. The creatures' forelimbs were modified into either horn-edged cutting blades or bulbous tanks of caustic which the creatures could spray a distance of several yards.
Individually the creatures weren't particularly imposing, but the image taken from a survey ship orbiting Bezant showed tens of thousands in the swarm.
"Like locusts," Foyle said. "Only they suck the plants dry instead of chewing the leaves off."
3-3 had a compartment to itself, so Abbado had the squad view the mission background as a unit. Strikers would repeatedly go over the data as individuals during the voyage, but Abbado knew that mission success depended not only on good personnel but on their ability to work together.
He'd have been more comfortable if the major had been able to brief all C41 together, but the transport wasn't configured to allow that. The major'd given C41 a pep talk in the rotunda of their deck, the only space available that held everybody—barely. The lifts kept opening, and there wasn't a large-scale holographic projector. Projection from a striker's helmet worked for one squad in its compartment, but you couldn't enlarge the image enough for the entire company to see details.
"These things don't fly," Abbado said. "Locusts don't bash farmers over the head if they're in the field when the swarm lands, though."
The creatures spooked an animal from its burrow. The solitary animal was an armored quadruped whose stubby limbs bore long claws. Half a dozen young clung to knobs on the adult's back. The adult bobbed forward awkwardly, handicapped by its rigid carapace.
"What're these bastards called, do we know?" Glasebrook asked.
"Anything you like, Flea," Abbado said. "Or anything the cits like, I suppose. There isn't anybody on Bezant to name them till we get there."
Dozens of bipeds stopped feeding and jogged ahead of the main swarm, moving to either side of the quadruped's track. The quadruped lurched to the right. A biped sprayed a cloud of white vapor over the quadruped's head and forequarters.
The victim rose on its hind legs, clawing furiously with both forelimbs. Two of the young lost their grip and rolled to the ground. Bipeds chopped at them and the adult indiscriminately. The victim's claws raked open several of the attackers and flung the bodies a dozen yards away, but the site crawled with more bipeds joining the fray.
A caustic fog covered the climax. Abbado didn't have any difficulty imagining what was going on.
The viewpoint panned upward. Individual creatures lost definition against the background. A wedge of landscape, broadening as it advanced, showed the ashen gray of vegetation from which all life had been sucked. Another scar, similar but for the moment smaller, appeared hundreds of miles west of the first as the image area expanded still further.
"The analysts figure broods hatch, go on for a while, and die," Abbado said, reading from a sidebar focused for his eyes only. "The critters must die or there wouldn't be anything left but bare rock."
"Can we spray the eggs before they hatch, Sarge?" Foley asked.
"Hell, Analysis doesn't know for sure they come from eggs," Abbado said. "Maybe, but for now we've got to figure on eliminating a swarm when they're looking pretty much the way that one was."
He didn't even try to keep the disgust out of his tone. Everything on Bezant in the database had come from orbital imagery and a few automated probes to sample the microbiota. Nobody'd bothered to put scouts on the ground. C41 had gotten a lot of tough missions, but Abbado had never before been handed one where he'd had so little hard data to go on.
"Do we have electric fencing?" Horgen asked. "Only it'd take a hell of a lot of fence if the whole settlement area's going to be covered."
"That's one problem," said Abbado, "but they don't think fences would stop them—"
He ran the chip back to a close-up of the swarm's advancing front.
"—and there I got to agree with Analysis. These things dam creeks so they can cross and weave rafts to get over rivers. A fence isn't even going to slow them down."
"So what is?" Methie asked.
"We are," said Abbado. "With our stingers. They can't run as fast as a man, and they can't even squirt you without you let them get inside ten feet or so. In broken terrain it'll be a problem, and they come by the righteous shitload. Fifty, sixty thousand Analysis figures. If a swarm heads in the direction of the settlement, we get in front of them and shoot every mother's son."
"Krishna," Caldwell repeated.
"Now, the chance of a swarm of those critters being in the wrong place may not be very high," Abbado continued as he indexed to the next set of images. "The large carnivores have overlapping territories, and it'll be a while before we stop having to kill the ones that replaced the ones we killed the week before."
An animal with four legs, a short body, and a whip-thin neck appeared in the projection area.
"These're ambush hunters," Abbado said, "and they charge at at least 65 miles an hour because that's what the one they spotted here was doing."
"Shit," muttered Matushek. "Shit, shit, shit."
Esther Meyer sat on her bunk with her helmet on. She viewed the Bezant data at 100 percent on her visor, completely blocking her sight of the compartment around her. Several strikers played cards on a footlocker elsewhere in the room. She was aware of their voices, but the words didn't impinge on a consciousness focused on the vessel's destination.
"Hey Essie."
"Besides being toxic at least to native lifeforms," said a voiceover from the database as a vine uncoiled in Meyer's apparent field of view, "this species appears to digest animal carcasses through rootlets—"
"Meyer! You there?" Knuckles rapped on her helmet.
Meyer flipped up the visor. "Nessman, you got a problem?" she snapped. She didn't like having her concentration broken, and she was plenty willing to revert relations with the willowy blond striker to their old hostile footing.
"Aw, Essie, I'm sorry," Nessman said, looking and sounding contrite. "I just wanted to know what you think about this place. Did you see what it said about disease? The colonists all need immune boosters!"
"Yeah, I saw," Meyer said. She ducked forward to lift off her helmet so that she wouldn't bang it against the upper bunk. "What's the big deal? We've all got boosters since basic training."
The booster was a porous ceramic shell the size of a little finger implanted in the user's left hip. It was a biofactory that cleaned the user's body of everything from viruses to parasites that were almost big enough to see with the naked eye.
The tradeoff for this protection was that each booster cost as much as a mid-quality aircar. For the military, that expense was reasonable. There was no point in training and transporting troops to a distant planet only to have them die of disease even before they closed with the Kalendru.
Colonists were another matter. Planets were scouted thoroughly before settlement, a luxury that an invasion force didn't have. If the microbiota was too dangerous, the Population Authority could simply pick another world. The number of nearby Standard Planets—Earthlike within tight parameters—was in the tens of thousands.
"But colonists?" Nessman said.
Meyer rubbed her scalp. Nessman looked like he was going to say something he shouldn't, like, "You want me to do that?" But he shut his mouth again and raised his right palm in a peace sign.
"I can't figure out what Military Command thinks it's doing," Meyer said. "Don't ask me to figure out the Pop Authority."
Nessman had been a rocketeer on Maxus. His crew had launched two of their rounds when a Spook lasered the third. Nessman came out of it okay because he happened to be squatting on the other side of his sergeant when the missile blew up in the cradle. He and Meyer were all C41 had left from Heavy Weapons; though Bateson had survived without his legs and when the strikers left Stalleybrass the medics still thought they might save Lieutenant Whichard.
Steve Nessman was a handsome fellow who liked women, or at any rate liked screwing them. He'd made a pass at Meyer a couple days after she was posted to C41.
Meyer turned him down flat. She'd met the type before. They were too full of themselves to be any damned good, and she wasn't naive enough any more to believe they actually meant any of the things they said before they got into your pants.
A few days after that, she'd been checking inventory alone when Nessman entered and closed the storehouse door behind him. He wouldn't take no, so she clawed for his eyes instead.
Nessman was stronger and he'd obviously had experience with this sort of thing before. He wasn't enough stronger that he'd be able to rape her without killing her first, though, and after thirty seconds or so he realized that was the choice. Nessman had banged her head against the floor, but although Meyer was groggy she came close to biting his nose off a moment later.
He'd gotten up then, dabbing at his scratches as he backed out of the storeroom. They hadn't spoken about the incident afterwards, neither between themselves nor to anyone else. In fact, they'd kept as wide a berth from one another as a unit the size of C41 permitted.
Active Cloak gave them a shared bond. The operation had been tough for everybody, sure, but it was damned near suicidal for Heavy Weapons Platoon. Meyer and Nessman hadn't become friends, but they were colleagues for the first time. Meyer hadn't asked to transfer to a different compartment when Kuznetsov automatically billeted her with Nessman and 1-1.
"I dunno, Essie," Nessman said. "There's a fuckup somewhere, and we all know where that leaves strikers. Swinging in the breeze. I don't like it."
"I'm not saying you're wrong, Nessman," Meyer said. "But if you want to know the truth, I'm looking forward to a place that doesn't have Spooks in it. Especially I'm looking forward to a place that doesn't have Spook tanks."
She glanced sharply at the other striker. Nessman was the closest thing Meyer had to a friend in this universe, and even on his best day she couldn't convince herself that she much liked him.
She chuckled at the irony. Nessman raised an eyebrow.
Blohm and Gabrilovitch watched as the image of a white mass launched itself from the top of a tree, expanding into a sticky sheet as it fell. It splashed onto one of a herd of small quadrupeds rooting for nuts among the tree roots. A thin umbilicus still tethered the sheet to the high branch.
The victim thrashed wildly. The net grew tighter, constricting as it congealed. The umbilicus began to retract.
"Hell, the animals are bad and the plants are worse," Gabrilovitch muttered. "This is going to be a bitch for you and me, snake."
The projected scene was a computer creation based on vertical imaging. You could never be sure how accurate a construct like this was. It was extremely dangerous because it looked perfectly real even though it wasn't. The virtual run-throughs of Active Cloak had all three floors of the garrison barracks occupied by Kalendru soldiers, for example.
"I don't see what's so bad about it," Blohm said. "Watch what trees you walk under, sure. But they'll have cleared a hundred square miles to prep for the colony, won't they? We won't see anything green till the crops start coming in."
Blohm liked the sergeant better than anybody else who'd commanded a scout section Blohm was in. Gabe knew that Blohm was quicker and had better instincts than he did. He didn't let it bother him. Gabrilovitch let Blohm set the agenda for the scouts and used his rank to put that agenda across in command group meetings.
Besides that, Gabe was as good a choice to cover Blohm's back as Blohm figured he'd find until they cloned Blohm himself.
"Negative on the site prep," Gabrilovitch said, shaking his head. "The only thing they did was plant a couple of message capsules and a landing grid for us to put down on. There's a pair of bulldozers with land-clearing blades on Deck One, but nothing in the way of herbicide like you'd figure. It's going to be a lot of work, and a lot of hand work, to open the settlement."
On the display the umbilicus continued to shorten, dragging the captured browser toward the treetop. The victim had ceased to struggle. It looked like a gigantic cocoon. Its body would feed the tree for the next several weeks.
"They going to expect us to do it, you mean?" Blohm said. "Hell, Gabe, before I transferred to the Strike Force, they had me burning shit on Christophe where the water table at the base was too high for septic tanks. I guess I can handle a saw if that's what it comes to."
"No way C41's going to be doing the labor, snake," Gabrilovitch said. "The cits are going to have to handle that while the strikers guard them. Look at how dangerous this place is! The work's going to have to be done, and the cits are going to be lucky if half of them don't get eaten by things like that—"
He gestured at the holographic image, by now no more than a normal-looking tree with a white lump perhaps of fungus among the leaves of its peak.
"—for all C41 can do to save them."
The display blacked out and segued into the next potential danger. For the moment the image looked like an ordinary bramble bush, but Blohm knew that would change shortly.
"Well," he said thoughtfully, "I don't know it's going to be that hard. We've got the database loaded in our helmets. The visor'll cue us if we come on one of these. Or whatever."
His finger prodded the image, scattering it into discordant shimmers until he withdrew and permitted the interference patterns to reform. An animal the size of a pig appeared, cropping shoots several yards away from the bush.
"And we'll, we'll clear it with a grenade or whatever."
"Some stuff isn't going to be in the database," Gabe said.
"That's so," Blohm agreed. "Especially at first. Sure, we'll have to be careful, but we're used to that, Gabe. Are you going to tell me this is as bad as a drifting minefield like we had to walk through on Kwam III?"
"There's something else you're not thinking about, snake," Gabrilovitch said. "The rest of the people may stick close to base, but the major's going to want you and me out in the boonies scouting. For things like those swarms and maybe worse stuff coming in. Tough as Kwam III, you say? Tougher, I'll bet you, and we're going to be out there pretty much the whole time C41's on planet."
"They'll scout in aircars," Blohm said, frowning.
"They got one, count them, one aircar on Deck One," Gabrilovitch said. "How long do you figure that's going to last with no more maintenance than a bunch of janitors can give it? It's not like this colony's got a real support echelon, you know."
The browser suddenly stiffened, kicking violently with all four feet. Its square head remained close to the ground. A close-up showed that a shoot had sprung open like an explosive harpoon when the animal bit down on it. Petals held the browser as if it was chewing a mouthful of fish-hooks. The bramble bush hunched forward to engulf the browser held by the barbed root tip.
"I guess you might be right, Gabe," Blohm said slowly.
"I'm going to go talk to the major," Gabrilovitch continued, "but I know what he's going to say. 'You volunteered for this unit, and by God you'll do the job I give you now that you're here.' That's what he'll say."
"I guess you're right, Gabe," Blohm said.
Blohm imagined himself in the jungle with nobody else around. It'd be like being alone on a planet. No responsibilities, letting his helmet report conditions. No decisions to make that affected anybody else, just following a patrol route.
"I'll see what I can do, snake," Gabe said as he rose. He shook his head. "But I figure we're fucked, you and me."
The situation Gabrilovitch described was what Caius Blohm had wanted since he killed a floorful of civilians during Active Cloak. Maybe there was a God after all.