FALLEN DRAGON (77 page)

The first rank of the herd caught up with the fleeing Skins. Jaw tusks flashed behind the slowest, puncturing his carapace without even slowing. He was tossed aside, fountaining blood as he cartwheeled through space. A couple more were overtaken, vanishing below the thundering legs. The tusks chomped down again. Screams reverberated along the communication link, cut off with horrifying swiftness. The macrorexes were moving at a phenomenal speed. A cool part of Lawrence's mind knew they'd never be able to keep it up for long, not even with this planet's oxygen feeding them. They must have started the charge just seconds before meeting the company.

The corpulent trees were only fifteen meters ahead of him. His view jounced about wildly as the suspension thrummed over rocks and hidden furrows. He turned the wheel savagely, aiming for a gap that was probably wide enough to take the jeep. To his right, the macrorexes were closing fast amid a debris plume of shattered timber.

That was when he caught sight of something sitting on the neck of one of them. A crouched profile of a man-leopard hybrid, forelimbs windmilling with wild enthusiasm. Mouth flung wide in an insane jubilant laugh.

That Couldn't Be—

"Lawrence!" Amersy shrieked.

Lawrence yanked at the wheel. The front fender of the jeep clipped a spiky, bloated trunk, knocking them violently to the right. Lawrence fought the motion, Skin muscles and power steering forcing the wheels around. Inertia shunted them through the gap at a wide angle. One tire burst as it slammed into a rock. Lawrence kept the accelerator hard down, sending them plunging farther under the trees. Whip branches slapped across the windshield. Then there was a giant tree dead ahead. Lawrence thrust his other heel down on the brake, which made no appreciable difference to the chaotic rush. The jeep's front bumper hit the tree full on, sending everybody tumbling forward. Skin carapaces hardened, protecting the vulnerable bodies from the worst of the impact "Out!" Lawrence ordered. "Move it."

It was as though the crash were still happening. The sound of disintegrating wood grew louder. They could barely balance on the shaking ground.

Lawrence staggered onward, hoping to hell he was heading in the right direction. His orientation was screwed up. The AS display grid was out of focus.

Three meters behind him, a giant leg descended vertically on the jeep, crushing it into the soil. The shock wave sent Lawrence sprawling. Then the pillar of flesh was lifting. He managed to shift his helmet so the sensors showed him the compacted wreck, just before the beast's midlegs streaked down. Lawrence crawled forward as fast as he could. The final set of legs landed, flipping the jeep through ninety degrees. It stood on its ruined tail as the legs disappeared up into the sky, then slowly toppled back. Several shredded whip branches rained down on top of it Lawrence twisted around. His nine-millimeter pistol had deployed from one forearm, while the carbine was sticking out of the other. He swung his arms in fast arcs, covering the trail of devastation the macrorex had left in its wake. Targeting graphics slid around the scene on semiautonomous seeker mode, hunting for any conceivable threat. Now would be a perfect time for ground troops to finish off the Skins. Neither Lawrence nor his AS could find a new-native.

His weapons retracted. He could still hear the herd thundering away, but the loudest noise right now was his yammering heart. The medical grid display showed just how much adrenaline was coursing through his blood. Beneath Ms Skin, his skin was already chilling as the immediate danger faded out.

He called up the telemetry grid, checking on the Skins under his command. Everyone, it seemed, had survived the jeep's madcap dash. Looking around, he could see them picking themselves up. Dust churned through the air, glowing ocher in the bright sunbeams pouring through the broken forest canopy.

"Sarge?" Lawrence asked. "You intact?"

"Holy shit, man," Ntoko spat. "Yeah, I guess so." It was the lead vehicles that had taken the brunt of the macrorex charge. Too close to get out of the way, either they'd raced into the forest like Lawrence, or the Skins had abandoned them to take their chances on foot. The jeeps toward the rear of the column had enough time to turn and drive clear of the rampage, though most of the trucks were too bulky and slow to maneuver like that. In total, four jeeps and one truck had survived. Over twenty Skins had perished, either mauled by tusks or trampled to death. There were a number of other casualties, as well.

One of the macrorexes had been felled, the victim of intense carbine fire from three Skins who made their stand from the edge of the forest. They'd managed to shatter its enormous skull. Even so, raw inertia had kept it slithering forward until it crunched into one of the bulky trees, knocking the trunk almost horizontal. It had plowed up a broad furrow of slick black earth behind it Captain Lyaute set up a field camp on the side of the forest. There were fifty-four survivors, of whom seventeen were injured; another five had damaged Skin. Two platoons were assigned to gather up what weapons and equipment they could find amid the trail of destruction left by the macro-rexes. Communications with the spaceport were patchy. There seemed to be something wrong with the satellite relay. Lyaute's urgent request for airborne evacuation was tamed down flat. Two helicopters were already down. Other scout companies had been attacked. The governor was keeping the remaining helicopters assigned to guarding the spaceport.

A platoon dispatched to find out what had happened to the macrorexes reported that they were now milling about quietly a kilometer down the road. There was no sign of the new-natives who'd been spotted riding them.

Lyaute announced they were going to pile the wounded onto the remaining vehicles and make their way directly back to the spaceport. It was going to be a slow trip: some of the injuries were bad, and everyone else was going to walk escort. It had taken two and a half hours to drive out to the factory, and it was midday now; he estimated they should be able to make it back for nightfall. Lawrence knew that was bullshit.

"We'll take point, sir," Ntoko told the captain. "Scout out any trouble lying ahead of you."

Lyaute agreed quickly enough. None of the other sergeants volunteered their platoons.

Lawrence switched to a secure link and asked the sergeant: "Why? Those dinosaur monsters were only the start; they won't be the last assault today, no way. We'll get hit by whatever it is they've got out there."

Ntoko was walking along the line of salvaged weapons. He picked up a couple of rotary feed grenade launchers and handed one to Lawrence. "Maybe, maybe not" His voice was quiet and intent. "Look at it this way. The captain's just given us the pick of the weapons. We can deploy in a decent formation so nobody takes us by surprise. And we'll be a good distance out in front."

"Big deal."

"Think, man. Right now we're in shit that doesn't get any deeper. Those injured guys we've got, there's some that are in a real bad way. They're going to slow the rest of the company down."

"Yeah, but—"

"You been keeping up on tactical? There's not enough hydrogen to lift everyone off, Lawrence. That's if they even get the spaceplanes down past the windshrikes. Now do you want to be at the front of the line?"

Lawrence looked around the temporary camp. The wounded were being helped onto the jeeps. Field medics had already used a lot of aid kits getting them ready for that first move. A couple of engineers were working on a jeep, replacing bent suspension components with parts cannibalized off a wreck.

He had to admit, the company was hurting. When that happened, you mucked in and made sure everyone got back to base okay. That's what his training and first instinct was, anyway. Ntoko had drilled that into him. Being part of a unit was what it was all about.

Now there was doubt, among other disturbing notions, bubbling around in his thoughts. But selling out the others... Although his loyalty had always been to the platoon itself. What the hell did a simple corporal know about the overall strategy? He couldn't take the whole invasion force into account, much less save them. So where did you draw the line?

"We should never have come here," Ntoko said.

Lawrence took the bulky grenade launcher from the sergeant and slung the ammunition bag over his shoulder. His Skin AS interfaced with the weapon's targeting system. "Yeah, right."

Platoon 435NK9 set off first, walking down the battered track that was the road back to Roseport. Ntoko had put Lawrence and Nic out in front, leaving the rest in single file, spaced about seven meters apart. He brought up the rear himself.

Lyaute's brief was to flush out any possible ambushes. Don't bother too much with investigating potential sightings, just use firepower to eliminate new-natives. The rest of the company would follow a couple of hundred meters behind.

Twenty minutes along the road they'd already built the distance to four hundred meters. Ntoko had dictated the pace to Lawrence. "I'll handle any flak from Lyaute," he'd said. They didn't get any. The electronic interference was relentless. It had to be more than simple powerblock jamming. They were almost reduced to line-of-sight communication.

At the start Lawrence was busy with his AS, pulling in relevant data. They had enough bloodpaks to last twenty hours. He figured if they hadn't reached the spaceport by then they'd be dead anyway, though he found it somewhat unnerving that they couldn't just shed the Skins if they ran out of supplies. They needed some kind of protection from the oxygen. Ntoko had talked about disconnecting the helmet and using it purely as an air filter. It could remain plugged into the neck valves, and the body's organs would be able to sustain it without too much strain. Lawrence also called up tactical scans from the low-orbit observation satellite, trying to predict ambush points. He would have handed over his entire mission bonus (not that he expected to get one) for a realtime infrared scan of the area around them. But the low-orbit satellites had dropped out of the communications network hours ago.

"Surprised you're with us anyway, Corp," Nic said as they splashed through a stream. "What happened to your transfer over to the starship boys?"

Lawrence would like to blame it all on Morteth, Laforth and Kmyre. But it wasn't really their fault. They were the trigger, not the cause. They'd been dismissed from Z-B as soon as the platoon arrived back on Earth, sullen and thug
g
ishly resentful to the end, swearing vengeance. It was the whole way the Arnoon village incident had been dealt with that troubled him. Maybe it was his own background that was the real problem, but he just kept thinking that the three of them should have been prosecuted. That way there would be accountability, responsibility. By agreeing to help out and play it quiet and canny he'd collaborated with the company. It was the kind of deal his father would have made. "The real way the world works," Doug Newton called it.

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.