THEIR MASTER

"I don't want to be bucking no orders here, but I've been in these woods a lot longer than you have, and one thing I know is that a natural trail is a damn-fool thing to be walking on."

"That's as may be, Renchett, but as of now, and in these woods, we do it my way."

Renchett turned away, spreading his hands in a gesture of helplessness. "You're the boss."

"One more thing, Renchett."

Renchett halted, but he didn't turn. "What's that?"

"Take the point."

"Me?"

"You."

"I don't walk point no more. I did it for too long."

Elmo smiled nastily. "Now you do."

Hark had been watching the exchange. Up until Elmo had smiled, he'd been willing to give the overman any reasonable break. The smile cut it. Elmo shouldn't be enjoying this. Hark wouldn't go against him, but if it came to it, he wouldn't be backing him, either.

They walked slowly along the edge of the fungus. Elmo took up a position back along the line. He seemed to be forever glancing nervously into the jungle. Such behavior was known in the trade as seeing shadows, and it was considered a bad sign in anyone but the most raw recruit. They'd been walking for maybe a half hour, and the single file had started to loosen up. Kemlo fell into step beside Hark. He seemed to be favoring his artificial foot.

"Foot hurting?"

"Yeah, a little. It's the forsaken damp. I ain't as bad as him, though." He jerked his thumb back to where Siryn was having trouble keeping up.

Hark looked back at the new fish. "He looks like he screwed up his lungs back there."

"He ought to be e-vaced out."

"That's Elmo's problem. Nothing we can do about it."

"We ought to say something."

"I don't figure Elmo's interested in anything we got to say. Renchett tried to tell him not to go down a natural trail, and he put him on point."

"So you're taking an attitude, too."

Hark looked sharply at Kemlo. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"You know what it's supposed to mean. Are you going to get with Dyrkin and Renchett and ride him into the ground?"

"I ain't riding no one, but I ain't pretending that he's not a disaster waiting to happen, either. He's the worst. He knows he ain't going to live through this, but he's not quite ready to die. He's likely to take the whole lot of us with him."

Elmo's voice sounded in their helmets. "Cut the gab and get back in line up there."

Hark muttered under his breath. "Fuck you, asshole." "You say something?" "Not me, boss."

Kemlo moved into place in front of Hark, and they walked in silence for a while. When it looked as if Elmo had forgotten about them, Kemlo fell back to rejoin Hark.

"You figure we'll see any chiba action?"

Hark shook his head. "Not yet. Not until we reach the head of the valley. Seems to me that the tower was supposed to slow us in this section."

Kemlo cracked his mask for a couple of seconds.

"If it wasn't for this damn mask, I'd grow a mustache."

JD4-1A had a weird system of night and day. Its natural rotation was 960 standard minutes. It didn't, however, revolve directly around its parent sun. Although everyone referred to it as a planet, it was in fact the largest of the satellite moons of JD4-1, that sun's huge single planet. It took seventy-four of its days to circle the planet, and of those, forty-eight were a sequence of bright sunlit days and a strange half night, illuminated by the light reflected from the giant planet that all but filled the sky on the side that was turned away from the sun. After this cycle was complete, it passed into the sun's shadow and went through twenty-six days of total darkness. The operation on the Ten River was taking place roughly halfway through the light period.

The sun was still high when Renchett called into the communicator. "Looks like we got a trail here, boss."

The twenty halted. Elmo walked up to inspect the opening in the jungle.

"What do you think made that?"

It was Renchett's turn to grin. "It could be a lizard trail, although lizards don't usually come this high, or it could've been cut by the Yal so we could walk down it like a bunch of fucking idiots."

Elmo hesitated, but Renchett offered no further advice. Finally he made up his mind.

"We'll take the trail."

"Do I still walk point?" "Until I say different."

Renchett raised his weapon and gave the overman a hard look. For an instant, it appeared that Renchett was actually considering shooting Elmo, but then he turned and started down the trail.

"Keep a careful watch on your detectors."

Renchett glanced back. His lip curled. "You're telling me?"

Elmo started moving the other men down the trail.

"Keep a good distance between you. Stick to the edges of the trail."

It was the most obvious advice that he could offer to a jungle patrol and totally redundant for men who had been through it before, but he insisted on repeating it to each man as he passed, The troopers largely ignored him. They adjusted their suits to full cover and ducked grimly under the overhang. Only Siryn seemed unwilling to plunge into the fungus. He appeared scarcely able to walk.

"I… don't think I can go much farther." "You got a problem, boy?" "I can't breathe."

"Shouldn't have opened your facemask, should you?" "Couldn't I just stay here? I'll only slow up the others."

"You just keep going, boy. I don't have no cowards in my twenty."

"I'm no coward. It's my lungs; they're screwed."

Elmo gestured with his MEW. "Get walking, boy. I don't want to hear no more out of you."

It was in the jungle that the fear really started. It closed in with the damp heat and the shadows. Very little light penetrated the thick overhead canopy, and heavy moisture dripped constantly from the sweating porous fronds. It was a place of gray monochrome gloom, ide- ally suited to traps, ambush, and surprise attack hi sects, small lizards, and land crustaceans rustled ami scuttled in undergrowth that was festooned with the i cous webs of giant arachnids. The continual small noises stretched the troopers' nerves to the limit. They tried not to look into the shadows-that way led to hallucination and madness. The one thing that they were spared was the smell of fungoid rot. They were protected from that by their masks, but they could still feel its presence They tried to keep their eyes fixed on the green detector displays that were projected in front of their visors and would give them first warning of chiba movement or antiperso

The first leg of the advance down the overgrown hillside was largely uneventful. A replacement almost blasted a large albino butterfly but managed to restrain himself in time. In a small clearing, they stumbled across a dozen of the small, shovel-nosed lizards rooting in the mold. There was a flash of panic as the creatures blundered away into the fungus, but Dyrkin quickly took charge.

"Hold your fire! It's nothing! Nobody fire!"

The company halted. Some were shaking; all could feel sweat ru

"Okay, everybody calm down. It was just a bunch of grunters."

Elmo was moving down the line. For a moment, it looked as if he were going to come down on Dyrkin for taking command, but he must have thought better of it. He simply waved the column forward again.

"Okay, let's keep going."

The trail faded to nothing, and they had to burn their way through virgin jungle. Elmo made no argument when Renchett called up three replacements to do the burning, incinerating the fungus with their MEWs set on low-yield heat ray. Eventually they reached a water course where a tiny stream danced down the hillside in a series of sparkling waterfalls.

As the terrain began to flatten out, the going became more difficult. The ground underfoot, which had previously been dry, turned into semiswamp. The mold now had the consistency of thick, clinging soup, and the men found that they were sinking almost to their knees. Even with the grav in their boots assisting them, progress was exhausting. With each step, swarms of tiny creatures flew up in billowing clouds. They tried to stick to the troopers' suits and helmets. The suits shook them off with spasmodic twitches of their black hides, but the visors had to be constantly wiped, otherwise the displays became distorted and unreadable. There was also another a