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They carried him away as the mayor and the senior officers went back into the hotel. The cleanup detail emerged after that, to take down the post and remove the sandbags.
There was the blood to be washed away, too. By midmorning, there would be no trace left of the execution.
The burial detail carried the stretcher through the rear corridors of the hotel and out into the small courtyard used by delivery trucks. A van was waiting there to take the body to the crematorium. Its doors were opened quickly, and the stretcher pushed inside. Had anyone managed to see the interior, they would have been surprised to see how much medical equipment was inside. It could almost have been mistaken for an ambulance.
"Go!" Lawrence yelled at Lewis.
The van sped out of the courtyard.
De
"Only three," Lawrence said. He caught sight of the body. "Sweet mother of Fate! Can you do it?"
De
Blood began to squirt out of the jagged wounds, pouring onto the floor of the van. Lawrence took a scalpel and sliced the shirt fabric, pulling the saturated cloth aside, leaving room for De
For the first time he began to have doubts—something he hadn't acknowledged before. He refused to let doubt be part of the equation as he focused himself on accomplishing just one thing: not letting the bastards murder Hal. He wanted a victory over KillBoy as subtle and devious as KillBoy's relentless assault against the platoons on the streets of Memu Bay. But now he could actually see the terrible damage that the bullets had caused....
De
"The brain?" Lawrence demanded. "What about the brain?"
"I don't know." De
"But we superoxygenated his blood," Lawrence said. "You said that would last him."
"It should, it should." De
Odel was attaching a sensor to Hal's scalp. He looked at a palmtop display. "Not yet. Still flatlined."
"Come on," De
"Lewis, how long till we get there?" Lawrence shouted.
"Three minutes, Sarge."
"Is he alive?"
"I don't know," De
"Three minutes, De
"Crash team?" De
"It's a biomech heart, De
De
"De
"I'm trying, god damn you." There were tears in the corners of his eyes. "I'm trying."
"Hey," Odel cried. "Hey, I've got brainwaves showing here."
Hal's mouth dropped open. His tongue flopped about weakly as he gurgled through the scarlet blood that was foaming out of his throat.
"Hal!" Lawrence shouted. "Hal, you hear me? You hear me, Hal? You hang on for us, kid. We've got you. We won't let you go."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Santa Chico. The original paradise planet.
From orbit its colors were intense—Earth-like, but brighter, more alive. There were no pastels here, no gentle shadings. Vegetation was vivid emerald; fast-growing, all-conquering. That made the few real deserts intolerably bleak: hot as hell and dry as Mars. Barriers between the extremes of rich life and barren desolation were short, making the contrasts ever more striking. The oceans that covered over half of its surface were livid sapphire. Snow-white clouds were magnified by the deep atmosphere as they hurtled through the high, turbulent jetstreams.
The air with its 30 percent oxygen content was poisonous to unmodified humans. But for native life, the abundant gas was raw nuclear power to its biochemical processes. Evolution here had grown thorns on everything.
For some it was a magnificent challenge. A chance to live differently, abandoning the strictures that governed society on Earth.
Just how differently, Corporal Lawrence Newton was only just realizing. Now that the company of eight platoons had arrived at the chemical-processing factory, all he could see was decay. The facility was spread out over several acres. Its design illustrated only too well the new angles with which Santa Chico's inhabitants set about attacking old problems. The closest he could come to describing it was organic gothic. Large sections of the machinery were alive, membranes and nodules blending smoothly into the metal and plastic portions. Or had been alive. Or were still alive but de-evolving, reverting to more primitive forms. He couldn't quite decide. The factory obviously hadn't been in use for some time.
It had been sited in a small valley that was a natural habitat for the gargul plant, a bush of yellow-and-scarlet sponge-like dendrites whose sap contained wondrously complex molecules that could be employed as vaccine bases. Such compounds were a big factor in the original settlement effort. Santa Chico's vegetation was a natural pharmacopoeia, which when harvested properly produced an astonishing array of medical and industrial applications. Now the garguls had returned to the factory, growing over and under the inert machinery. In many cases, Lawrence could see fissures in the pipes and organolytic crackers allowing the bush to take root. Fluffy lichens tarnished the big metal mountings. Pink moniliform fungi spiraled up support struts. Vines and creepers scaled the highest burner towers, forming thick-webbed buttresses.
Jeeps and trucks transporting the platoons fa