Odel was attaching a sensor to Hal's scalp. He looked at a palmtop display. "Not yet. Still flatlined."
"Come on," Dennis screamed at the kid. His face was streaked with Hal's blood, which he'd smeared there with the back of his hand.
"Lewis, how long till we get there?" Lawrence shouted.
"Three minutes, Sarge."
"Is he alive?"
"I don't know," Dennis barked.
"Three minutes, Dennis, that's all. The crash team's waiting."
"Crash team?" Dennis's voice was veering toward hysteria. "Crash team? One struck-off doctor and a couple of field medics, and you expect them to perform a fucking heart transplant?"
"It's a biomech heart, Dennis, you just plug it in and switch it on."
Dennis laughed. "Oh, Jesus fucking Christ"
"Dennis! What about Hal?"
"I'm trying, god damn you." There were tears in the corners of his eyes. "I'm trying."
"Hey," Odel cried. "Hey, I've got brainwaves showing here."
Hal's mouth dropped open. His tongue flopped about weakly as he gurgled through the scarlet blood that was foaming out of his throat.
"Hal!" Lawrence shouted. "Hal, you hear me? You hear me, Hal? You hang on for us, kid. We've got you. We won't let you go."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Santa Chico. The original paradise planet.
From orbit its colors were intense—Earth-like, but brighter, more alive. There were no pastels here, no gentle shadings. Vegetation was vivid emerald; fast-growing, all-conquering. That made the few real deserts intolerably bleak: hot as hell and dry as Mars. Barriers between the extremes of rich life and barren desolation were short, making the contrasts ever more striking. The oceans that covered over half of its surface were livid sapphire. Snow-white clouds were magnified by the deep atmosphere as they hurtled through the high, turbulent jetstreams.
The air with its 30 percent oxygen content was poisonous to unmodified humans. But for native life, the abundant gas was raw nuclear power to its biochemical processes. Evolution here had grown thorns on everything.
For some it was a magnificent challenge. A chance to live differently, abandoning the strictures that governed society on Earth.
Just how differently, Corporal Lawrence Newton was only just realizing. Now that the company of eight platoons had arrived at the chemical-processing factory, all he could see was decay. The facility was spread out over several acres. Its design illustrated only too well the new angles with which Santa Chico's inhabitants set about attacking old problems. The closest he could come to describing it was organic gothic. Large sections of the machinery were alive, membranes and nodules blending smoothly into the metal and plastic portions. Or had been alive. Or were still alive but de-evolving, reverting to more primitive forms. He couldn't quite decide. The factory obviously hadn't been in use for some time.
It had been sited in a small valley that was a natural habitat for the gargul plant, a bush of yellow-and-scarlet sponge-like dendrites whose sap contained wondrously complex molecules that could be employed as vaccine bases. Such compounds were a big factor in the original settlement effort. Santa Chico's vegetation was a natural pharmacopoeia, which when harvested properly produced an astonishing array of medical and industrial applications. Now the garguls had returned to the factory, growing over and under the inert machinery. In many cases, Lawrence could see fissures in the pipes and organolytic crackers allowing the bush to take root. Fluffy lichens tarnished the big metal mountings. Pink moniliform fungi spiraled up support struts. Vines and creepers scaled the highest burner towers, forming thick-webbed buttresses.
Jeeps and trucks transporting the platoons fanned out from the narrow, overgrown track and halted beside the fecund equipment. Captain Lyaute ordered a sweep of the area. "I know it looks like a complete waste of time," he told the platoons over the general frequency. "But we have to find out if anything can be salvaged from this crock of shit."
Lawrence took Kibbo, Amersy, Nic and Jones with him. They stuck together as they searched their assigned section of the factory. For an hour they wandered through the tangle of machinery. Green-and-yellow-striped tigergrass had sprouted along the roads between the equipment, reaching their knees, which made it tough to walk even with Skin. Pipes that looked as if they were made out of bark arched overhead, connecting tanks to refinery buildings. Dark, dank fluids dripped down from small splits. They walked around ion exchangers and splitters grafted together out of translucent mushrooms the size of apartment blocks. Metal pumps and valves jutted out of the ground at odd intervals, hopelessly antiquated and out of place amid the slick biomechanical systems. One end of their section had an office block of stacked oblong rooms in a cube of girders: no power, broken windows, dead electronics. When they peered in through the open doors, creatures slithered through the darker recesses, escaping observation. There was nothing of any value anywhere. Nothing left working.
Every time they saw a bird in the distance, Lawrence flinched. Four of the fleet's drop gliders had collided with windshrikes, flying animals larger than pterodactyls. The impacts had killed the windshrikes instantly, but they'd also sent the drop gliders tumbling out of the sky to smash across the landscape.
That was when Lawrence knew they'd made a mistake coming here. From the moment 435KN9's drop glider ashed down in the lake outside Roseport all he wanted to do was get into a spaceplane and fly back up to a starship. If there were any left. He really hadn't wanted to fly down to the surface to begin with.
They'd encountered exo-spheric weapons on their approach. One starship wiped out completely, all hands lost Two more badly damaged. You couldn't keep that sort of news from the platoons in the surviving starships.
Rumor had it that at first the admiral and the captains didn't even know what attacked them. Sensors showed massive storms within the planet's far-flung magnetosphere, where the flux bands compressed and twisted into hundred-kilometer vortices that spat out lethal particle beams. Remote satellites sent into the heart of the magnetic hurricanes revealed huge webs of chain molecule filaments, spinning for stability and manipulating the planetary magnetic field. Santa Chico had discovered how to create ephemeral energy cannon on a titanic scale. They weren't even purpose-built. As the fleet found out later, the webs were simple induction systems to power orbital craft and microgee station facilities. Turning them into weapons was just a matter of reprogramming.
When the starships did reach parking orbit, the satellites couldn't find any major cities on the planet. There were just large towns like Roseport on the existing settlement areas. They did find thousands of smaller towns and villages, all with identical pearl-white buildings. And there didn't seem to be a datapool, at least nothing the fleet could link into. Which meant there was no central government to receive Z-B's legal claim for asset realization. The flipside of that was it left them unable to deliver a warning about the gamma soak threat Not that they knew where to gamma soak to intimidate the locals.