So what the fuck did I ever leave Amethi for?
When he thought about it these days it was only ever Roselyn and the pain she'd inflicted. Joona hadn't been too far wrong about the companies and their uniculture. Every human world was developing into a bland Xerox of Earth. Except for Santa Chico, of course.
"I got my promotion," Lawrence said. "It was more important at the time. I can transfer over to the starship division whenever I want."
"Not after this," Nic said. "We aren't going to have any starships left."
Lawrence kept expecting Lyaute to order them to slow down and wait. He'd kept up the same pace for over an hour and a half, striding along the track of beaten-down tigergrass. The jeeps were out of sight behind them now. Communications with Lyaute and his two lieutenants was becoming very intermittent. They just kept calling in their position and progress whenever they got a link.
Even in Skin, Lawrence was sure he could feel this planet's thick, heavy atmosphere working against him. There seemed to be a slight resistance to every movement. It wasn't gravity, Santa Chico was .95 Earth standard. It had to be the sluggish air pushing against him. Another damn problem.
Haze from the powerful sun was a further side effect. Anything more than a kilometer away wobbled in the heat radiating off the ground in fast distortion ripples. It played hell with their long-range sensors. Infrared was hopeless, of course. All a new-native had to do was crouch down in the tigergrass, and scrub, and he'd become invisible. Platoon 435NK9 all had their laser radars on, sending out fans of pale-pink light to sweep the sides of the road. So far they'd had a few probable sightings, but nothing they could shoot at.
Ten kilometers out from the factory, the road emerged from the end of a wide valley onto a gently undulating lowland terrain of tigergrass. It made a change to have an open view of the countryside ahead, though when Lawrence scanned his helmet sensors around, the eternal wave motion of tigergrass in the wind swamped the discrimination program.
"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.