Balance Point (28 page)

MOLE HUNT

In the pre-dawn alien twilight, Roald Otman knelt in the mud, and groped until his blood-slick fingers found Rodric’s carotid artery. Cold, even in the equatorial heat. First Sergeant Rodric’s body lay tangled in death with another bipedal corpse, man-sized and reptilian.

The line wrangler who knelt alongside Otman stared across the ring of cleared ground that separated the two of them from the rain forest. The minefields in that ground protected Downgraded Earthlike 476’s human settlement from the rest of this hostile world.

The wrangler shook his head. “Never seen these little ones cross the minefield before.”

Otman narrowed his eyes. “But this one did. My cameraman’s dead. Why?”

The wrangler pushed his broad-brimmed hat back on his forehead and shrugged. “Bigger pred chasin’ after this one probably flushed it across. Coincidence.”

Otman frowned. After twelve years as a covert ops mercenary, he disbelieved in coincidence.

The wrangler pointed at the hilt of Rodric’s bush knife protruding from the dead beast’s throat. It was his turn to narrow his eyes and frown. “For a nature photographer, your friend was good with a knife.”

After twelve years in covert ops, Otman also lied easily. He cast his eyes down and pressed his hands to them. The pose was only partly for show. Since his team had hit dirt two days before, he had experienced sharp, momentary headaches. Alien pollen and spores, probably. “It’s ironic. My crew and I came to film this uniquely savage ecosystem, and already it has consumed one of us.”

The wrangler laid a hand on Otman’s shoulder. “Mr. Otman, you seem like a nice fella. Want some advice?”

Otman managed the nicest smile a mercenary killer could, and nodded.

The wrangler, a Trueborn Earthman like the rest of the colonists, rested his hand on the gunpowder revolver holstered at his waist. “Here on Dead End, every man’s business is his own.”

Otman stifled an eye roll at the prospect of a terracentric rant about liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“And here every man’s business is dangerous.” The wrangler pointed into the mist that clung to the distant trees. “But making a movie out there? Call this a preview, a bad omen. Whatever. But Dead End’s waiting to eat you alive. The spiders are as big as supper plates. Even the plant eaters are carnivores. They only eat the plants to get the parasites inside. The mid-level predators are like six-legged tyrannosaurs. And on top of the pyramid, the grezzen are eleven tons of speed, guile and meanness. Natural history’s not worth what your documentary’s gonna cost.”

Otman nodded. On that, he agreed with this cowboy. Otman’s recon team came here not to film natural history, but to change human history. The prize they sought could win Cold War II for Yavet and lose it for the Trueborns. And that was worth any cost to a Yavi, even one for hire.

Otman said, “Bad omen or not, it’s a risk we’re prepared to take.”

The wrangler looked up at the lightening overcast of his adopted world and sighed. “Well, then, safest time for you all to cross the line is dawn. The nocturnal predators are bedding down. But the day shift’s still yawnin’ and peein’.” He paused. “Sir, I know you’re upset. But if you’re bound to continue, an early start is safer. I can have the body buried for you.”

This civilian had no idea how abhorrent it was to leave a man behind. But Otman the “filmmaker” just swallowed. “That’s very kind. But I would prefer that we return the remains home to Yavet with us. Would it be possible for you to just have Mr. Rodric’s remains held at the local morgue until we return in ten days?”

The wrangler raised his eyebrows, just as something huge bellowed from the distant trees. “Sure. Just never thought about the possibility that you’d be returning.”

Then, without further discussion or emotion, the man walked back down the trail toward his line cabin. Otman watched him go and felt a strange kinship. This wild outpost and Otman’s overpopulated home world shared an indifference to death, though for very different reasons.

Otman stared, arms crossed, at the rainforest’s billion billion trees until the Earth man disappeared. Then Otman permitted himself a tear. Rodric had been Otman’s non-commissioned right hand for six years. But then Otman blinked, breathed and ground his teeth.

Not at the wrangler’s indifference, nor even at Rodric’s death, but at his own failure.

As the team’s commanding officer, Otman had sent Rodric ahead to recon the vehicle path through the minefield before their “film crew” zigzagged its three vehicles out beyond the perimeter. It was a routine precaution that Otman had delegated a hundred other times in a hundred other places. But this time, Otman had actually wondered, fleetingly, whether predators ever got flushed in across the minefield.

Otman could have—obviously, should have—ordered Rodric to carry a rifle. Otman could have sent two men, not one. But Otman had done neither, because, as the wrangler had just confirmed, this attack was unprecedented.

Coincidence. Bad luck. Bad omens. Otman believed in none of those.

Otman believed in focus on the mission, in discipline and in steel well maintained and accurately aimed.

He zipped Rodric’s death into a mental body bag and thumbed his hand talk. No names, no ranks. These Trueborns were frontiersmen, not counterespionage wizards, but a cover worth doing was worth doing to excess. “Bring the vehicles forward. But please don’t jolt the editing equipment.”

“Yes . . . Mr. Producer. Uh . . . that Trueborn cowboy just passed by on the way back to the settlement. He said Rodric—”

”It’s true. But Mr. Rodric went down swinging.” Otman looked over his shoulder as three headlight pairs lurched toward him up the trail from the outpost.

He thumbed his hand talk again. “Let’s make sure he died for something.”

Otman knew that his team, to a man, felt gut-shot at the news of Rodric’s death. But he also knew that each man would now seal that loss into his own mental body bag. They would grieve together, but only after the job was done.

Nine hours and fifty miles later, Dead End’s hot, humid gray dawn had yielded to its hotter, humider gray afternoon.

Otman peered through the windscreen as he swayed alongside his driver, aboard the second vehicle in a convoy of three. The locally rented, six-wheeled bush cats snaked around tree boles so thick that the biggest arterial uptube in the biggest stack city on Yavet could have easily fit inside one.

Otman drew a breath of local air that went down as thick and hot as breakfast syrup, and smiled. Heat. Humidity. Allergies provoked by a billion billion trees’ pollen. Otman loved it all.

Yavi grew up in stacked cities with ceilings for sky. Diagnosed agoraphiles like Otman, who enjoyed open spaces, were aberrant outcasts among Yavi. Fit to fight their society’s battles, but ill-suited to more genteel intel assignments.

The feeling was mutual. Otman had despised every moment of his last assignment, a desk job back home on Yavet, combing files to root out deep-cover Trueborn spies within Intelligence Branch. Otman had come to hate the mole hunts, hate the distrust in comrades that they bespoke. In fact, the one and only Trueborn thing that he had uncovered during his year of mole hunting was the expression’s origin. Moles were Earth rodents, probably mythical, that burrowed undetected through darkness and eroded structures from within.

The Bush cat bounced, and he grimaced and smiled simultaneously. Here in the fetid jungle, intangible moles were replaced by palpable discomfort and danger, and men he trusted to share those dangers equally. And here his quarry, although also Trueborn, was real.

Otman gazed up through the Bush cat’s open roof hatch. Silhouetted against low clouds, man-sized, fork-tailed dragons glided, wheeled and screeched.

Otman shrugged mentally. The wrangler had advised them not to worry, at least not about the gorts. The flying monsters nested and hunted among the treetops, never venturing lower than fifty feet above the ground. Gorts kept their distance because Dead End’s top predators, the grezzen, could bound fifty feet into the sky, swat a flying dragon dead with one paw, then swallow the gort whole before touching the ground again. So the suicidally voracious gorts didn’t threaten ground-bound humans.

But, in the early colonial days, strikes by attacking gorts had routinely downed human aircraft. For decades now, nothing mechanical had flown above Dead End. Except the impregnably huge chemical-fuel orbital shuttles, like the one that had shuttled Otman’s team, posing as a “film crew,” down from the interstellar Trueborn cruiser that had borne them out here.

Otman smiled and silently thanked the flying dragons. The Trueborns’ inability to fly Dead End’s skies, or rather the Trueborns’ smug attempt to prove that they could, had created the opportunity that had brought Otman’s team here, to the jagged edge of the known universe.

Otman’s handtalk crackled with a transmission from Desmond, who was operating the magnetometer in the lead Bush cat. “Captain, I got metal. Big metal.”

The film-crew pretense had been dropped as soon as the team passed out beyond Trueborn listening range. The men now wore jungle fatigues and had broken out the team’s normal tactical weapons from “photographic equipment” crates, supplementing the “film crew’s” Trueborn gunpowder weapons. Recon Scout Team Eight was again full-on field tactical. Bogerd’s chest swelled, even as another headache pricked behind his sinuses. Everything out here, even the pollen, was their enemy, but that was the challenge they lived for.

Big metal. Desmond’s words raised hair, even on Otman’s recently shaved neck. The only metal out here would be a manmade object, and a manmade object was the prize they sought.

“Range?” Otman leaned forward.

“I make it forty-six hundred yards, Captain.”

“How big?”

“Sir, the supply weenies disguised this mag as a photo image previewer. But they porked the mass calibration doin’ it. Five tons, wild-ass guess.”

It would be a dead-on guess. Senior Tech Sergeant Desmond had served with Otman longer even than First Sergeant Rodric had. Desmond’s courage and loyalty had saved Otman’s missions, and his life, often. Desmond, as the team’s sensor wizzo, wasn’t cleared to know what their quarry was, much less what it should weigh.

But Otman knew, and the guess worried him. Few Yavi had ever touched a Trueborn Scorpion’s hull, much less put one on a scale, but the briefers had predicted thirty-five tons.

Desmond asked, “Sir, should we make for the anomaly?”

Had the crash broken up the Trueborn ship? One bit of debris could lead to another.

Otman thumbed his handtalk. “Is the anomaly moving?”

“Like a rock, Skipper.”

Otman rubbed his forehead as the allergy headache spiked, then receded. “Make for it, Sergeant. But maintain present speed.” Racing to catch something that wasn’t trying to get away was reckless. And if this object was, or led to, their quarry, they were early.

Desmond’s voice rasped, “Skipper, that heading’s gonna take us past a flat-topped hill a thousand yards short of the anomaly. The hilltop’s bald granite, so it should be clear of local bugs.”

Desmond, like every soldier in the teams, wore multiple hats. He had just changed hats from sensor specialist to senior non-commissioned officer. Therefore, he was commenting on the enemy situation. Though on Dead End, the enemy was no army, it was the world itself.

Otman traced a finger across his vehicle’s flat-screen map display, tapped an oval of enclosed contour lines. “Top elevation six twenty-six?”

“That’s it, Sir.”

Otman eyed the flat-screen map again, then peered at the darkening sky. Why blunder up onto this unknown object at dark? Desmond, like any good senior non-commissioned officer, was suggesting to his commissioned commanding officer, without suggesting, that they halt short of the anomaly. That would place them on a defensible terrain feature, with daylight left to emplace perimeter sensors and point-defense weapons. It would create a night defensive position impenetrable by Dead End’s predators.

Otman nodded and thumbed his handtalk. “Nice catch, Sarge. We’ll laager up there for the night.”

Four hours later, Otman stood behind his team while they sat, backs to him, in a semicircle on the bald granite summit. The laager position they occupied provided unobstructed fields of observation and fire. Better, three of its sides were hundred-foot cliffs that Otman doubted even the local monsters could scale. The summit was clean of vegetation and the dangerous local pests that sheltered in it. A nice catch by Desmond, indeed.

The team sat cross-legged, eating chow and cleaning weapons. Desmond stood at the semicircle’s center point, facing Otman and the men, displaying images on a flatscreen. For this hastily assembled mission, the ‘puter to which the screen was hardwired carried virtually all the mission-specific information about this world. Desmond was now transferring the dope to the team on the fly.

Otman himself had known so little about DE 476 that he had purchased a paper local guide when they arrived at the landing strip that passed for a spaceport. He had yet to open the book.

Desmond scratched his gray-fuzzed temple as a bright yellow, fanged spider filled the screen. “The locals call this here a lemon bug. Twelve inches across. Habitat you-
bick
-wit-us. They look mean, but for this ecosystem, they’re pussies.”

Cassel, the Medic and Grenadier, raised a hand. “Poisonous?”

Desmond shook his head. “This thing’s bite’ll kill a six-ton local grazing animal in thirty seconds. But our biochemistry’s different. Humans just swell up and puke for two days.”

Cassel, who was also the team newbie, cocked his head at Desmond, half smiled. “All the bugs here that friendly, Sarge?”

“Nope.” Desmond popped a new image. This showed a black bug the length and diameter of a flaccid penis. “Local name, dick bug. These aren’t passive.”

“Neither’s mine.” An anonymous comedian.

Laughter.

Desmond waited, stone-faced, for quiet. After Rodric, he had been the team’s most senior, and avuncular, noncom. Now he was the acting top kick. “This is the only bug on Dead End that’ll kill a human. The sting feels like injected fire, and you die screamin’ in ninety seconds. There’s no known antidote.”