Bridgehead (20 page)

Now with a clear field, Astor snapped a shot at the Vrage's weapon to silence it. There was a pop and a green flash like that of an arc across tungsten—nothing very impressive, certainly nothing to suggest that the limb holding the weapon and most of that side of the alien would disappear. A sphere a yard in diameter had been directly ionized by the uncontrolled release of energy.

“They've got a transport unit here!” Selve screamed as if the Vrage weapon still keened ravenously across all normal sounds. Selve's face was distorted by indecision and fear.

“You've got to recall us,” Astor said forcefully but with no undertones save those of command. “Nobody could do that but you. Get a few yards away, lie low, and—”

The snout of a Vrage antigravity vehicle brushed around the tree which had briefly sheltered the party. It was a light transporter closed against the hostile environment, not a weapons platform. For all that, the vehicle was heavily armored against just such chance as this.

Astor turned while her lips were still forming words. She notched a two-second burst across the center of the vehicle's frontal slope. The black portion was not a matter of aesthetics. Though the driver received all sensory impressions indirectly, a large portion of the frontal surface was made porous for such reception and transfer of data. This was, after all, a utility vehicle with armor, not a fighting vehicle per se. The black sheathing was resistant, but Astor's point-blank, full intensity burst carved the material like the skin of a sausage.

The red streak from the Traveler's weapon left spluttering fibers curling away from either side of the cut. There was a dazzling flash from within the vehicle. It was so intense that the car's body panels glowed like the flesh of fingers held over a powerful light. The car staggered a few centimeters to the ground over which it had been floating.

“Get going!” Astor shouted to complete her thought. “I'll keep them busy!”

Chlorine was drifting from the wrecked vehicle like smoke from a fire.

Selve plunged out of sight and out of the area targeted for the Vrages by the fighting. As his colleague had said, Selve and the chance of recall were the only chance they had of survival. They: the transport party, and the world.

*   *   *

There was nothing Henry Layberg could do for Keyliss, but he was a doctor and he was going to try. The Traveler had fallen on her right side, hiding the extent of the injuries there. The severed portion lay beside the body. The cut surface rose from the point of Keyliss's hip to the middle of her shoulder joint. Blood and cellular fluids slimed the flesh now. Where the bone was dense, however, its ends gleamed in the light. The damage had been done without physical contact. The weapon cut like a microtome and polished objects smoother than jeweler's rouge could have done.

The damage to blood vessels was surely fatal, even though the beam had not sliced the internal organs. The greatest shock of Layberg's first human dissection had been the amount of the body's mass given over simply to transportation and support: bone and muscle, nothing more. The body cavity seemed absurdly small when emptied. Most of even that volume held intestines and the later stages of food processing. The brain had been yellow gray with death and embalming. It was a double handful, a liter and a half of the total body, but all that was required for the portion of life which was wholly human.

The brain and the life it embodied were dependent on the support system, and Layberg knew as he rolled Keyliss off her glistening wound that her support system was damaged beyond any but the most sophisticated repair—and that if the help were received at once.

Among the things that made Layberg gape with surprise was the way Keyliss's clothing—the severely professional charcoal-gray suit coat—was growing across the bloody wound. Tendrils were extending swiftly enough to be seen as moving.… The cut edge of the fabric was still as razor sharp as the Vrage weapon had left it, but the margin was now hemmed by a band of what looked like the silk of a spider's egg case. It was gauzy and cream-colored with a hint of yellow in it. Blood oozed across the new material from thousands of minor vessels severed when the Traveler's side was planed away. There was a vivid spurt from the brachial artery, although the attached tags of shoulder muscle were fully retracted as if to squeeze shut the tube through which life gouted. The gore soaked and darkened the coat itself, but none of it clung to the gauzy extension. Drops sparkled and beaded and slid away like mercury from a drumhead.

Layberg reached out to clamp the end of the brachial artery between his left thumb and forefinger. His other hand was thrusting frantically into his pocket to find something, anything with which to tie off the vessel. Something twitched beneath his clamping fingers. He squeezed harder, very hard indeed, and the cut end squirmed away from him anyway.

Layberg looked from his pocket to the wound. The center of the area—the original raw surface had totaled more than a square foot—was still slimy and dripping. The edges were being swept clear by the gauze, however, and that insubstantial fabric had just crawled fluidly between fingers pressed together with all Layberg's considerable power. The doctor more or less expected to see the surface beneath the transparent gauze distending with blood which Keyliss's heart continued to ram out the severed artery. Instead, the sheathing which had slipped over the artery like a liquid itself was sealing the vessel as completely as could a haemostat.

And the result was achieved without pressure on the wound. The artery was still clearly visible. Layberg probed it in a spirit of scientific fascination which he knew was better suited to nonhuman subjects. The surface gave at his touch like meat, like muscle prodded through a layer of skin. The fabric that now was sealing itself along the center of the plane of the injury was not acting as a pressure bandage and compressing the injury to rigid impermeability.

The ribs were quite evident. Their stub ends were sectioned as cleanly as slides waiting for the microscope. The extrusion from the cloth was no longer visible now that it formed a sheet without the raw wound for contrast. The gauze was a texture rather than a color, a matte finish which had stripped twigs and loam from the flesh as effortlessly as it had mooted Layberg's well-meant efforts.

Henry Layberg swore in wonder, and swore again even more softly. His index finger moved again. This time it did not quite touch the diaphanous layer holding in what remained of Keyliss's life.

Vrage weapons howled nearby. There were shouts in muffled and distorted English, always the same, “Halt! If you move, I'll blow you away.…” A brief hiss that might have been Astor's gun and a racking discharge which recapitulated the sound of the first alien vehicle being smashed.

And then there was something subliminal, too faint to be a sound and yet perceived by the doctor hunched over what should by now have been a corpse. Layberg cocked his head back over his right shoulder. A second Vrage car was floating past the wreckage of the first. The vehicle stopped gently as a thought the moment Layberg moved. The black viewscreen lifted silently.

The alien behind it was already pointing his weapon through the opening.

*   *   *

Even if the forest were as thick with Vrages as with its native herbivores, Astor knew that by freezing in concealment she could be almost certain of avoiding them. Any Vrage who stumbled over her would have made the worst of luck for himself. The Traveler's formal clothing was ideal camouflage in the current environment, while the atmosphere suits and enclosed vehicles which the Vrages required were a serious impediment to their own perceptions.

The problem with that tactic was that it would work for Astor, but for no other member of the party. The big female was too goal-directed to hesitate about sacrificing even Selve; and as for the locals, that decision had been made. Selve was necessary to the project's success. Selve would be struggling with the emergency controls, making calculations with apparatus which would be as useless to Astor as to any of the locals. If a Vrage found him concentrated on his task, Selve was dead despite the weapon beside him. It was therefore Astor's duty to focus Vrage attention away from the area in which Selve hid.

And that was just fine, because Astor had chosen to call attention to herself very simply: smash her way noisily through the undergrowth and depend on reflexes to blast anything colored magenta. That would be some slight recompense for Keyliss.

The Vrages could not have been more cooperative. Three of their utility vehicles in line ahead met her squarely as they raced toward the initial gunfire. The cars were moving at almost twenty miles an hour, too fast for conditions and their mechanically flimsy construction. Astor shot and dodged, a black shadow in a world of black shadows. The lead vehicle sprayed sparks and chlorine out its punctured windscreen. It lost speed, touched the ground, and exploded as the second car rearended the wreckage before Astor could snap her next burst into that planned target. Foliage curled and yellowed along the track of her first shot and where the Vrage vehicles were scattering molten remnants of themselves.

The driver of the third car was very good. If he was as handicapped as his fellows by the conditions which the environment forced upon him, then he at least knew how to buy himself some time. His vehicle spun on its axis, short of the joined wreck of his leaders. Astor fired, but she had only the brilliantly armored flank for a target. Her stream of focused energy was an orange-white line till it struck the vehicle. Then the line diffracted into a garnet spray. It wilted vegetation for a hundred feet and stung the shooter's own eyes, but it did not scar the surface at which it was aimed.

Either the Vrage knew he had a single opponent, or he was operating as if that fact were true because he had no chance at all in a crossfire. By reversing he protected himself against that opponent and sent the vehicle back toward cover until more weight could be brought to bear.

The car dodged behind one of the giant trees. Astor rose and sawed through the bole.

It required a four-second burst, which meant the woman had to override all her training to accomplish what was necessary. She was no trembling neophyte to freeze on the trigger and chance cooking her gun when she needed it most.

But right now she needed the tree. Its rigid cells were blasted away a handsbreadth to either side of the beam. The trunk was hollow, though here near the base something close to a third of the diameter was wood rather than weight-reducing void. Astor's gun could slice steel armor, given the time. It tore sideways through the wood at a walking pace.

Smoke and sparks spewed from the line of impact. They were virtually smothered by the steam into which thirty gallons of cellular fluid were flash-heated. Astor was aiming down at a slant. The earth spattered beyond the tree and blazed where it was mixed with enough organic material.

There was no certainty as to how the tree would fall. A light breeze with the spike's hundred feet of leverage could have toppled the whole mass back toward Astor. Worse, if it slipped sideways, the top could threaten Selve more imminently than did the Vrage soldiers who were searching for all of them. War is not a business which can be conducted without risk; and, in the event, the tree crashed down onto the low side of the cut, away from the Traveler.

*   *   *

The Vrage had equated “unseen” with “unthreatened.” He was broadcasting a call for support. This was not the magnetic anomaly the Vrage troop had been sent to investigate. The location signal from his car was the beacon to which his fellows were being summoned. The Vrage popped up his viewscreen and began to clamber out of the grounded vehicle with his weapon in his hand. The destruction of the two leading cars had shocked him. He knew that his opponent could even now be shifting for a clear field and the end of what the crackling ruin had started. At least on foot there was some chance to get off the first shot if he glimpsed a target through the curtains of foliage, through the play of wrong-colored light over and around his viewslit—

The speed at which the tree was falling was understated because of the object's size. The Vrage crouched in his vehicle's shelter and scanned the undergrowth for lurking gunmen. When the tree became a motion rather than a barrier in the Vrage's restricted vision, it was already far too late for him.

If the bole's speed had been in doubt, then its inertia was not. The ground hollowed, then rose as the tree bounced upward. Nervous ripples in the soil succeeded one another half a step ahead of the sky-filling crash. The undergrowth did not affect the giant as it seesawed back and forth on its ends to find equilibrium. The car did not affect it, either, except that chlorine from the flattened vehicle bleached a broad swatch of the outer bark.

The Vrage's death had even less effect on his environment: his suit lost all semblance of shape, like a squashed foil wrapper. The fluid which leaked through every flattened joint was a saturated copper-sulphate blue that pooled and darkened on the magenta armor.

*   *   *

Astor sprinted twenty feet. Then she flopped on her belly, half curled around the multiple stems of a clump of the prevalent undergrowth. She found she had fair visibility through the curtains of compound leaves brushing the forest floor. Good enough to see and respond to a flash of purple-red suit, at any rate.

By staying low, Astor could avoid the wild blasts with which Vrage soldiers were even now slicing the vegetation—and likely one another, as the only sentients erect in the forest. They would come to seek her and seek an answer at this place where their fellow had summoned them and died.

Astor hoped that Selve would not finish his business before she herself had the opportunity to greet the Vrages again.

*   *   *

The alien who confronted Arlene Myaschensky paused a yard from her. It looked uncannily like a huge spider in a posture of defense: four legs planted firmly on the ground, the other four lifted with the thorax toward a perceived threat.