There were nods and grunts as weapons were adjusted, then the slogging continued.
Another couple of hours passed uninterrupted before Gorilla said, “Hold.”
Ferret stopped, halfway forward in a crawl. It was a trained reflex, and he didn’t flatten from that position until Gorilla said, “Secure,” indicating they could get comfortable but not move from their positions.
He fed a video to them, which he was getting from two of the bots.
“Captain, check this out,” he said on the open channel, so everyone could follow it.
The scene was something from a horror show. A pack of small predators were attacking a larger herbivore, like carnivorous roaches atop a giant ladybug. The roan-colored domed plant eater was big enough to fill a small bedroom. The gray roachlike predators swarming it with angry, twitching antennae were the size of German Shepherds. Whatever their mandibles were made of was tough enough to shear chunks from the bulletproof shell of their victim.
The team watched, still as dormant reptiles with fingers ready on triggers in case they were attacked next. The large creature galloped in a circle, knocking down saplings up to fifteen centimeters thick, and shaking the ground. One of the attackers tumbled underneath and was stepped on, convulsing into a ball around its middle. Fronds were torn loose from the trees, and the weeds and ground cover were plowed into confused furrows by kicking feet. The animal had insectoid legs that ended in what were effectively hooves of the same insane super-chitin, sharp as boar’s tusks and with a sheen under the mud coating them.
Even from more than a hundred meters away, the trees could be seen to whip back and forth from the melee, as the now wounded megabeetle bucked and kicked. Those hooves were vicious, but not really placed to help much.
It was hobbling now, as one of the attackers had sheared off a leg. Then another leg on the same side was crippled and started to give. As its motions slowed, the slender killers concentrated on that side, snipping off an antenna, then another leg, a protruding piece of flank and the last leg on that side.
“Gorilla, let’s see that,” Bell Toll ordered. The attackers were on the far side from them.
“On it,” Gorilla agreed, and the view shifted as the ambulating intel bots crept in a circle, scanners focused on the grisly scene.
As the view shifted past the still alive and twitching bulk, Ferret said, “Oh, yuk.”
“Yeah,” agreed Gun Doll. The rest were silent but agreed with the sentiment.
The six surviving carnivores had sliced holes between the top and bottom shells, and were rapidly eating their way inside. As the team watched, one of them disappeared with a kick of legs, like a rat down a burrow. Only this burrow was into the tender flesh of the dappled, pretty and still squirming body of the beetle. The others followed suit.
“I take back what I said about not being scared of bugs,” Gorilla said. “If one of those gets me, shoot me decently.”
“Or just frag me quick,” Dagger said. Even Dagger.
“Right,” Bell Toll said. “Gorilla, Ferret, let’s detour way around there. And if those… things… come close, shoot first and tell me afterwards. Don’t wait to ask permission.”
“Yes, sir,” echoed gladly through the earpieces.
Chapter 7
They bivouacked again before dawn, and rose at sunset to keep moving. The local day was a little over nineteen hours, and at this latitude and season they moved for thirteen of it. That odd schedule also had a tiring effect. They went to sleep more easily, but it was neither comfortable nor resting sleep, merely a change of routine for the body.
“Man, this sucks,” Thor bitched softly as he leaned against a tree and tore at a rat pack. “Bites, stings, aches, scratches. You’d think they’d give us armored combat suits for something this long.”
“Good luck, Thor,” Doll replied, also quietly. “We’re lucky we’ve got chameleons. You know how rare the good stuff is.”
“Yeah,” Thor said, darkly. “Too cheap to spend the money.”
“That’s not it at all. Didn’t you know?” Shiva said.
“Know what?”
“Ah,” Shiva replied, settling into a squat over a stump of tree, after he’d poked it with a stick to ensure it didn’t contain any squirming biters. “Listen, young student, to the history of our kind.”
There were snickers, but Thor and Doll paid attention. Gorilla finished messing with his controller and took two long, low steps over. From his outward perch behind a boulder, Dagger cocked an ear in, too. Bell Toll nodded assent to Shiva, and Tirdal sat carefully near Ferret.
“First of all, all this technology is GalTech,” Shiva began. “Some of it is Indowy, some Tchpth, some Darhel… and a hell of a lot of it Aldenata, acquired from caches and not understood. We can build this commo gear, but we still have no idea how it works, a thousand odd years after we first ran into it. Some we reverse engineered from what the Darhel sold us, because they won’t tell us how it works. No offense, Tirdal.”
“None taken,” he replied with a nod practiced to look human. “That’s not my field, and they don’t tell me about such things either. Our people are… castes? Sects? Regarding specialties. We do not do the communications gear that you speak of anyway. Darhel technology relates almost entirely to what you would call ‘information technology.’ ”
“I guess I knew that but had never put it in words,” Bell Toll said. “Go on, Shiva.”
“So it’s limited to start with,” Shiva continued. “Then, things like the suits especially have to be grown in a tank with psi control. It takes a lot of mind power, which is where the Michia Mentat got their position.” He paused for a moment, then said, “I suppose we’re developing castes, too.” He looked faintly disturbed.
“Anyway, at the time of the Rebellion, we, meaning the Islendian Federation, before we became a republic, had settled a bunch of planets, mostly Posleen blight worlds, and were between the SSA and the Tular. Not an enviable position. Earth started this long-term disarmament, expecting us to follow suit. We didn’t, because we still have Posleen to worry about. And now the Blobs, too.
“So we had most of the military installations, a share of the GalTech weapons, and almost all of the weapons humans built. We were the perimeter, still are. Earth has the money and the politicians. And it’s a good thing it worked out that way, or we wouldn’t be here.”
“I could handle not being here,” Thor joked, though he knew what Shiva meant.
Ferret said, “Shut up, Thor, I want to hear this.”
“We had skirmishes for almost a hundred years, with the SSA on one side, the terrorists all over and the feral Posleen and some last holdout oolts along the border,” Shiva continued. It was obvious that history was his specialty and passion.
“The terrorist groups were mostly Fringer Freedom groups, people who wanted to separate off from the Core worlds with a smattering of local ethnic separatists. They didn’t have a lot of general support, either group, but they scared a lot of people and made a lot of noise. And they forced more and more military to be diverted into the Fringe.
“Finally, Earth began to realize it couldn’t dictate terms to us; that was the time they were trying to impose martial law. Most of their ground combat forces were from Fringe planets. Virtually all of their officers were from Fringe worlds. A good bit of their heavy industry was in Fringe worlds. Damned near every single base was in the Fringe. We had the training, but they had the stranglehold on GalTech. The Michia kept neutral, of course, which is likely good, or we’d have human blight worlds, too. They would have been a powerful enough ally that Earth would have had to waste systems to stop them. And they would have scorched their own share.