Fallen Fragon

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 u

"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 thuggishly 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 ca

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 sca

"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.

"Where?"

"Two hundred meters southwest."

Lawrence expanded Nic's telemetry grid, meshing the sensor imagery to his own. There was something, a blur that wasn't all heat shimmer.

"I think we have a shadow," Lawrence told Ntoko.

"We've got a couple back here as well," Ntoko said.

Lawrence called up a tactical map. There was a small group of buildings a couple of kilometers ahead and to the east with small homesteads ranged around it, barely large enough to be classed as a village. The satellite sweep had revealed some activity, but that was a day out of date. Lyaute hadn't bothered investigating the place when they'd driven past that morning.

"Close in," Ntoko ordered.

"Easier target for them," Lawrence said over the secure command link.

"I know that. But they're sneaking in anyway, that means they're going to attack. This way we've got a better firepower concentration."

Lawrence's audio sensors picked up a number of warbling calls out amid the tall tigergrass. He was tempted to play one back at them on high volume. The Skin AS couldn't translate them.

A small bronze-colored bird darted above the tigergrass, moving fast toward them. It had three wings, one smaller than the others, and used some kind of spi

"What are you shooting at?" Ntoko asked.

"Nothing, Sarge," Lawrence said. "Just a bird."

"You guys keep calm up there."

"You hear that?" Lawrence asked.

"I don't trust nothing in this place," Nic grunted.

Lawrence's sensors were picking up bursts of motion all around now. New-natives were dashing through the tigergrass, ru