Battlefield Earth

Chapter 5

Jo

For three soaking wet days they had been following a power line, the only sign of civilization. They had landed at the power dam well enough. It was automatic and self-maintaining, and

Psychlo machinery had been superimposed upon the ancient man-works. They had no actual clue as to the position of the minesite beyond its existence, but Jo

Usually power lines had trees and brush cleared out, but not this one.

There for countless years, the power line provided no more open sky than any other part of this vast forest.

The old man-maps said this had been a country called "Haut-Zaire" and that this portion of the extinct nation was the “Ituri Forest.”

Here the equatorial sun never reached the ground. It was umbrellaed first by cloud cover and then by the crowns of mighty trees that locked together in a canopy a hundred feet above the ground. Great vines a foot or more in diameter wrapped like gorged serpents around the trunks. Underfoot the thick humus squished at every step.

And the rain came down! It dripped, it rivuleted down the trunks and vines, it poured through slight openings until one felt he was trying to progress through a constant warm waterfall of varying thickness.

It was all twilight.

The game blended in deceptively with the gloom, a dangerous fact. They had seen elephants and forest buffalo and gorillas. A giraffe-like animal, an antelope, and two kinds of cat were routinely started up by them. The snarl of leopards, the roar of crocodiles, the chatter of monkeys and the screech of peacocks– sounds muted by the rain– made Jo

inhabited.

The old man-maps said there were around twenty thousand square miles of this forest, and that even at the height of man-civilization it had never been completely explored. No wonder a minesite could go overlooked here!

The Ituri Forest was no place for buckskin and moccasins and a limp.

Trying to progress through it was made difficult by the uselessness of trying to overfly it and the need for some secrecy. They dared not use radios. Dropped lines from planes could foul power cables if they reached them at all. Streams infested with crocodiles made the crossings dangerous.

Well, a small party of them were here. Only twenty of their force, scattered out among the trees and ready to call in reserves or the planes if needed.

The compound looked deserted, but then Psychlos never wandered around in the open. It had been built so long ago that it too was overshadowed by the streaming canopy of trees. What had an employee had to do to be assigned to this dismal, gloomy, saturated outpost, Jo

He was looking to the left of the compound for signs of truck passageways. There would be no road of tires, but ore truck floating drives would have crushed and killed vegetation. Yes, there was a road over there, headed east through the gloom. Ah, yes, more lights beyond an opening through the trees for the landing of freighters. Did the road go to that? No. Another road. One exit road through the forest and the other to the field.

“Never was there a more unpla

Now, Jo

He was reaching to his belt to unfasten the miniature mine radio-to be used first in the hope that they had one on in that compound– when his infrareds strayed over to the right of the compound. There was a defined path and at its end what appeared to be the wreck of a flatbed truck, ages old and mostly overgrown. Hard to see in this twilight at noonday. The rain made it so hard to pick out details even with infrared.

Jo

Robert the Fox squirmed over into a new position, his cloak as wet as a soaking sock. “Something under a tarpaulin. A new tarpaulin...a barrel? Two barrels?...a package?”

Suddenly Jo

“Oh, yes. Yes. They put people there for the Psychlos to see and then withdrew, and the Psychlos would come out and leave some trinkets. You mean the Brigantes, don't you?”

“I think I’m looking at an incomplete trade,” said Jo

Scot, “Pass the word for Colonel Ivan!"

Ivan's English was improving remarkably fast under the interested tutelage of Bittie MacLeod, who “thought it a shame for the grand man not to be able to talk a human language.” This was giving Colonel Ivan a thick accent but nevertheless he needed the Russian language Coordinator less and less. Jo

“Scout way over to the right,” whispered Jo

“What's this new maneuver on this unpla

“I don't like losing men,” said Jo

“Are we going to just charge that place?” asked Robert the Fox. “You can't get plane cover through these trees. I think I see an air-cooled housing for a breathe-gas circulator over there. I could hit it from here, I think.”

“Well, have we got any plain bullets?” said Jo

“Aye, but it surely is a no-plan operation!”

They waited in the dismal drip and cascade of the rain. Somewhere off to the left a leopard snarled and it set off a wave of bird sounds and monkey chitters.

There was an abrupt thud about twenty feet behind them. They snaked back. Ivan was standing back of a tree. On the ground at his feet lay a strange human. He was out cold.

He might have been any nationality, or any color for that matter. He was dressed in monkey skins cut in such a way that they looked oddly like a uniform. A strapped bag had fallen open under him and a clay-pot grenade had rolled out.

Ivan was pointing to an arrow in his canteen. He pulled it out and gave it to Jo

Jo

Ivan detached the man's bow from his belt and offered it. But Jo

As soon as he had Jo

“He watch us,” said Ivan. “He talk.” He pointed at the radio.

Abruptly alert, Jo

He passed orders swiftly through Robert the Fox, who whipped off to get their small force faced both ways.

Brigantes! The man at his feet had wide, hide crossbelts and spare arrows were arranged, points into flaps along the leather. He had an odd pair of crudely made, strapped boots reminding Jo