Cobra

Jo

"Not much more than we had yesterday," Kier admitted, leading them toward an open car parked at the edge of the field. "The experts are still studying it up at Niparin, but haven't come to any conclusions yet."

"You're the one who found it, right?"

Kier nodded. "I was out doing a water survey when I spotted the carcass lying in a small hollow."

"Water survey?" Halloran put in. "You were hauling a sounder around by yourself?"

"Here you just measure the diameters of the gluevines that climb around some of the trees," Jo

"The ground was pretty badly torn up," Kier said as they got into the car. "I spotted some marks nearby that looked like gantua tracks, but if they were the thing was either huge or ru

"From the tapes I've seen I can't see any reason a gantua should ever bother to run," Halloran commented.

Jo

"No," Kier said as he turned the car and headed west. His tone sounded more than a little defensive. "I thought my immediate duty lay in sounding the alarm... and in not leaving Paleen defenseless."

Jo

They left the car at a section of reasonably dense forest at village's edge and headed into the trees on foot. The forest gave way barely a hundred meters later into a tree-dotted grassland which was the norm for the Kaskia Valley as a whole. Jo

"Uh... over there, I think. It's near a—"

"Shh!" Halloran hissed suddenly. All three men went instantly rigid... and in the silence, Jo

The twenty-meter reco

"Gantua," Kier said as he hit the ground, knee servos taking the impact. "Looked sort of sick—"

And with a crash of breaking blussa, the brown-gray monster appeared across the plain... and charged.

"Scatter!" Jo

Veering like a hill on legs, the creature shifted to an intercept course.

Jo

And lost his grip completely as the tree swayed violently in time with the thunderous crash from below.

The programmed Cobra reflexes included a catlike maneuver for righting oneself in midair, but Jo

For several seconds he just lay there, fighting to clear away the spots twinkling in front of his eyes. By the time he was able to force himself to his knees, the gantua had managed to halt its charge and was wheeling around for a second try. From behind Jo

And abruptly he was hurled in a flat dive to the side. Rolling back to his feet, he turned just in time to see Halloran and Kier launch their attack.

For something that spur-of-the-moment, it was as tight a maneuver as Jo

Pulling his phone from his belt, Jo

"What the hell is that thing made of?" Halloran asked tightly. "That blast would've taken out a Troft APC."

"Gantua plates are highly ablative," Kier told him. "The cloud of vaporized material scatters all but the first couple of milliseconds of beam—and the damn things are thick, too. Jo

"Even if they did, it'd take too long to get it here," Jo

"We go for head shots, then?" Halloran asked.

"Take a long time to kill it that way," Kier said doubtfully. "Gantua central nervous systems are a lot more decentralized than anything you're probably used to. Underbelly and heart-lung would be a better target."

"Only if we can get it to roll over," Jo

Moving carefully, attention on the gantua, Kier glided toward the tree. "Cally," Jo