A platter appeared. It was laden with dried water skimmers, spiced flit fish, and recently harvested grot roots. A fine feast indeed. The Clan Mother dug in. The eggs were hungry. Words emerged between bites of food. Some of it landed on her stomach, tumbled off, and fell to the floor. Minute scavengers moved in to harvest the crumbs. “Who lurks in the darkness? What do you want?”
Drik, who had been waiting patiently toward the back wall, took three steps forward. He had fertilized the Clan Mother for the first time that year and felt certain it was his strong sperm that had so efficiently quickened her eggs. “I come bearing news.”
“So?” the Clan Mother said imperiously, “out with it!”
But Drik, who had long fantasized about such a moment, refused to be hurried. He chose his words with care. “Five of the offworld intruders left their metal island, crossed the food lake, and entered the jungle.”
The Clan Mother paused in midbite. Food dribbled down onto her well-rounded belly. “How many of them were hiding in machines?”
“None,” Drik replied, “although two looked strange, like weed dreams come to life.”
The Clan Mother chewed thoughtfully. There was very little point in attacking the machines, or offworlders protected by the machines, due to the heavy casualties that her warriors were certain to sustain. But this was something different. This was an opportunity to capture weapons and punish the sky people at the same time. “Wait for them in the swamp. Kill them there.”
Drik bowed. “Yes, Clan Mother... It shall be as you say.”
It rained like hell about two in the afternoon, a downpour that drenched the treetops and sent water cascading from leaf to leaf, to soak those down below. Hebo seemed even happier, MorlaKa barely noticed, and the humans were miserable. The water found its way under their collars, seeped over their shoulders, and entered their boots.
The ground turned soft, sucked at their boots, and drained their energy. The branches that brushed their shoulders, the vines they slashed in two, and the knee-high foliage all conspired to deliver even more water to their moisture- laden clothing. And, as though that weren’t bad enough, many of the local life forms seemed energized by the afternoon soaking. The hopped, slithered, and swung from branch to branch.
Hebo knew the point position was dangerous, knew he was showing off, but couldn’t help himself. Drang was so pleasant, so much like Hive, that he felt at home. Maybe that’s why he missed the vine viper, mistook the reptile for one of the green runners that dangled from the canopy, and whacked at it with his machete. Not edge on, which might have killed the creature, but with the flat of the blade, which served to make it angry.
The snake, which hung head down, released its grip on a branch twenty feet over the Ramanthian’s head, allowed the full weight of its long sinuous body to fall on the officer’s torso, and struck for the alien’s neck.
The lactic would have worked on a frog, or on a human, but not on a jungle-evolved Ramanthian. Fangs grated on dark brown chitin, tool arms grabbed a section of the viper’s body, and a razor-sharp beak slashed through skin and muscle.
The reptile reacted with understandable violence. It whipped coils of rockhard flesh around the Ramanthian’s thorax and started to squeeze.
Seebo, true to the DNA for which his ancestor had been chosen, took immediate action. Not because he had developed a sudden fondness for geeks, but because he was who he was, and couldn’t stand idly by.
The human’s assault weapon was useless, not unless he wanted to kill Hebo as well, so the clone drew his combat knife, threw himself into the fray, and grabbed a thigh-thick section of the viper’s muscular body. The blade had two edges, one straight, the other equipped with sawtike teeth. It was the second that proved most effective as Seebo sawed through the red-tinged white meat. Hebo made a note of the human’s attack, felt the snake shudder in response, and knew it was distracted. That being the case, the Ramanthian felt for the short sword that projected up over his right shoulder, pressed a button on the hilt, and felt the weapon come to life. The force blade made a sizzling sound as it burned through the reptile’s flesh. The viper’s head bounced off the jungle floor, the body gave one last convulsion and finally lay still. Mondulo stepped over a section of the long serpentine body and said, “Good thing it was only half grown,” and took the point.
Seebo started to laugh, Hebo made strange popping sounds, and Booly shook his head in wonder. It wasn’t the kind of bonding he had envisioned—but something was better than nothing. Dinner looked a lot like lunch, hell, it was exactly like lunch, which suited Mondulo just fine. The jungle offered enough variety, and it was nice to deal with something you could count on. The noncom stirred the stroganoff with the dp of his combat knife and watched his charges prepare for the night. The Ramanthian turned out to be one heck of a tree climber, which came as something of a surprise and made the noncom just a little uneasy. The bugs were allies today—but how ‘bout tomorrow? Fighting an army of Hebos in a triple-canopy jungle would be a nasty business. Still, a rough and ready sort of teamwork had emerged, which was the point of the exercise.
MorlaKa whacked trees down with five or six blows of his machete, Seebo cut the resulting poles into sections, and Hebo carried them aloft. That’s where Booly took the raw materials, made some modifications, and added them to the steadily growing platform. He used a timber hitch to get started, followed by square lashings to secure the basic framework.
Then, when that task was complete, he tied a series of forty man-harness hitches into a doubled piece of rope, passed sturdy sticks through the matching loops, and pulled them tight. The result was a crude but serviceable ladder. Not a necessity where he, Seebo, and Mondulo were concerned, and useless for a body like Hebo’s, but a
