"Nothing in sight," he reported.
"Keep going," Ntoko replied.
They moved out. Away to the north Lawrence could see a couple of macrorexes moving along a stream. Their ponderous motion was easy enough to see, as was their grubby hide color against the bright tigergrass. He wondered what kind of nerve it took to climb up on the back of one of those brutes and goad it into a run. More than he had, that was for sure. Who in Fate's name thought of doing such a thing in the first place?
"Somebody moving," Nic said.
"Where?"
"Two hundred meters southwest."
Lawrence expanded Nic's telemetry grid, meshing the sensor imagery to his own. There was something, a blur that wasn't all heat shimmer.
"I think we have a shadow," Lawrence told Ntoko.
"We've got a couple back here as well," Ntoko said.
Lawrence called up a tactical map. There was a small group of buildings a couple of kilometers ahead and to the east with small homesteads ranged around it, barely large enough to be classed as a village. The satellite sweep had revealed some activity, but that was a day out of date. Lyaute hadn't bothered investigating the place when they'd driven past that morning.
"Close in," Ntoko ordered.
"Easier target for them," Lawrence said over the secure command link.
"I know that. But they're sneaking in anyway, that means they're going to attack. This way we've got a better firepower concentration."
Lawrence's audio sensors picked up a number of warbling calls out amid the tall tigergrass. He was tempted to play one back at them on high volume. The Skin AS couldn't translate them.
A small bronze-colored bird darted above the tigergrass, moving fast toward them. It had three wings, one smaller than the others, and used some kind of spinning motion, like an asymmetric propeller. Silver-tipped wings traced bright spiral afterimages as they caught the sunlight. Nic shot it with his nine-millimeter pistol. It burst apart in a mist of blood.
"What are you shooting at?" Ntoko asked.
"Nothing, Sarge," Lawrence said. "Just a bird."
"You guys keep calm up there."
"You hear that?" Lawrence asked.
"I don't trust nothing in this place," Nic grunted.
Lawrence's sensors were picking up bursts of motion all around now. New-natives were dashing through the tigergrass, running for a few meters, then ducking down. None of them were closer than 150 meters. More of the bronze birds were being flushed out of the clumps of tigergrass by their antics. Lawrence watched them flitter about. He wasn't quite as suspicious as Nic, but he had his doubts. There were a lot of them. When he asked his AS to run a check through its files on indigenous life, there was no reference. But then the information was limited to a few dozen prominent species like the windshrikes and macrorexes.
The birds were clumping together in small flocks of six or seven, swooping and curving just above the tips of the tiger-grass. The more Lawrence watched them the more he was convinced that they were being driven in toward the platoon.
"Sarge?"
"Yeah, man, I got them. But I can't see us shooting every one—we don't have enough ammo for that, even if we could hit them."
One of the telemetry grids on Lawrence's display flashed red.
"Shit!" Kibbo yelled.
"What is it?" Lawrence could see from Kibbo's telemetry that his Skin suit had been struck by something.
"Took a hit. Ahh, shit."
Lawrence turned to see Kibbo fifty meters away, stumbling badly. He fell to his knees, clutching an arm. Skins were running toward him.
The telemetry grid was scrolling down weird data. Lawrence had never seen anything like it. Something had penetrated the carapace, but it was small, barely a couple of millimeters wide. If a bullet had split the surface, the tissue underneath should have absorbed it and clotted immediately. But the synthetic muscle around the puncture was starting to overheat. Its nerve fibers were failing.
Kibbo started screaming. His medical readouts were going wild.
"Down," Ntoko ordered. "Keep down, people."
Lawrence arrived just as Kibbo fell flat on his face. His arms and legs started thrashing, hammering into the ground.
"Some kind of convulsion."
"What's his medical program doing, for fuck's sake?"
"It's his Skin, it's spasming."
Ntoko hurried up, so Lawrence was looking right at him when the dart struck. It slammed into the grenade-launcher ammunition bag he was wearing on his back, nearly knocking him off his feet. He dropped to all fours, grunting hard at the impact Lawrence scrambled over and pushed his sensor focus on the little crater in the bag.
"What the hell was it?" Ntoko demanded.
"Don't know." Lawrence shifted to infrared. The small hole was damp. Spectrographic analysis revealed an unknown type of hydrocarbon fluid. "Shit. Could be some kind of bio weapon." His Skin deployed its aerosol nozzle and sprayed the area with a multispectrum neutralizing agent. The fluid fizzed a livid saffron.
Kibbo screamed again, his bucking lifting him off the ground. The rest of the platoon circled around, not knowing what to do. The Skin's AS and medical systems couldn't even stabilize him. The wild motions stopped suddenly. His helmet's emergency disposal valves opened. Blood poured out.
"Jesus!"
The Skins lurched back, fearful that any of the crimson fluid should splash against them.
"Was that the birds?" Nic asked. "Did they do that?"
"No way, man," Amersy said. "How could they?"
Lawrence risked a quick look around. The air was full of hundreds of fast-spinning birds, a sparkling river that hurtled through the sky. They'd formed a complete ring around the platoon.
"These are the people whose granddaddies invented Skin," Nic said. "If anyone knows how to shut us down, it's them."
"Shoot them," Ntoko ordered. "Carbines out; give me a circular formation, ten-degree overlap. Move."
They were firing as they rose to their feet hosing the bullets at the thick dazzling stipple gyrating around them. The birds broke apart, soaring higher in a scintillating plume. Targeting individual birds was impossible at that distance.
Foster screamed at the same time his telemetry grid flashed its alert. He toppled over, limbs jerking about. The rest of them automatically dived for cover.
"They're killing us," Jones cried. "We're fucking dead. Dead!"
Foster's agonized gurgling was filling the general communication link.
"Lawrence, incendiary grenades," Ntoko said. "We're going to start using this goddamn environment to our advantage. Range two hundred and fifty meters, semicircular pattern. You take north."
"Got it, Sarge." He rolled onto his back and angled the grenade launcher toward north, moving the muzzle until the targeting graphics confirmed he'd ranged ground zero. He began firing. The dull thud of the grenades was audible through his Skin helmet. Ntoko was firing in the opposite direction. Faint smoke trails appeared in the air, forming wide arches that radiated out from the huddled-up platoon.