Song of Scarabaeus (24 page)

The target ideal was supposed to be a Terran-like ecosystem. It was not supposed to look anything like this.

It seemed like a long time later that Zeke called out, “We're setting up the shield now.”

He and the serfs must have reached ground level. The sphere of protection from the shield would isolate the BRAT, enabling the team to work without it communicating to the other BRATs or to the satellite that it was being interfered with. Edie stopped her descent to perch on a sturdy vine, and pulled a diagnostic rod from her belt. It registered the shield coming online, its edge ten meters below her and about the same distance to her left. The holo displayed a sphere overlaid with a grid—a diagrammatic representation of the shield's structure.

“I'm getting a broken grid,” she reported, using the comm to avoid shouting.

“Looks fine to me.” Zeke sounded out of breath, like he'd been exerting himself down there.

She reinitialized the rod and examined the holo again, switching through different views. “Interference or something. Are you sure about the integrity?”

Finn climbed up to wedge himself behind her so he could take a look for himself. Their e-shields melded and she felt the warmth and pressure of his body along her spine. She shook her head for his benefit. It didn't look like a break in the shield—not quite. But something was wrong.

“Zeke, can you power it down and reboot?” she said.

Above them, Kristos made an impatient sound to get them moving again. Finn swung to one side to let him pass, but when Edie started to follow he held her back.

“Let's wait here till we sort this out.” His hand gripped her belt, holding her there.

“It's just a sensor glitch, Finn.”

“You on your way down?” Zeke bellowed.

“On our way.” Edie glared over her shoulder at Finn. “Let's move.”

“First you clear this glitch.”

She tapped her comm again. “Zeke, power down will you? I need to check something.”

“What would I want to do that for?”

“Just do it.”

She heard his muttered curses, but he complied. The holo flickered out and it took several minutes to reappear as Zeke rebooted, bringing the shield online again. This time the anomaly was obvious.

“There's another shield down there,” she reported.

“There's five other shields, teckie. Five men. Supposed to be seven, so get your ass in gear. Jezus, it's a frickin' swamp down here.” The comm crackled as Zeke moved about. “Come on in,” he sang to himself, “the jungle's fine.”

Edie magnified the distorted area on the grid. The
interference came from the overlap with another shield. Not an e-shield, but a weak sphere similar to the one they were using on the BRAT. Much smaller.

She tensed against Finn's chest. “I think someone got here first.”

The jungle exploded beneath them.

One deafening crack that sent shock waves reverberating in all directions. Edie slipped downward, instinctively grabbing on to the vines to slow her descent, oblivious to the screaming pain in her shoulder and the sharper pain in her eardrums as they threatened to burst. She was deaf and blind and numb, senses caving in swiftly. She didn't fight it.

Consciousness returned in increments, one sense at a time. Pressure against her neck, almost cutting off her windpipe but not quite. The e-shield protected her. She jerked her head clear and was aware of pressure in other places where her limbs were tangled in the vines. Her brain felt hazy and soft, like it was sparking in slow-motion. Time stood still. She heard…silence, then the falling of heavy vegetation and the distant scrambling of unseen creatures. She must have blacked out for only a few seconds.

And other noises—none of them human. Clicks and whistles and moaning. The e-shield permitted a faint tinge of harmless ozone to reach her nostrils.

These thoughts got her brain working again. Zeke. He'd been on the ground. They all had, except—where was Finn? He'd been right here with her, and now he was gone.

She opened her eyes and blinked away the flashes in her vision. There was no longer a tunnel below her. Even as she watched, the vines moved, slithered all around her like a nest of serpents, entwining and matting together again until she was cocooned within their grasp. She stared in disbelief. Everything about the vines told her they were plants, but this behavior was more like that of an animal.

“Well, I'm alive, so I know you're not dead.”

Finn. Somewhere down below, but close. The blast must have knocked him a few meters lower.

She managed to drag in a deep breath. Her first breath. Now she knew she was alive.

It took Finn ten minutes to hack through to reach her, using brute force and a blade from his tool belt to rip the vines aside. She didn't think Zeke had assigned him a shiv—he must have lifted it before they left the skiff.

She worked her limbs loose, and the feeling gradually returned to her hands and fingertips.

“Why am I shaking?” She wasn't cold or afraid. She felt nothing.

“Shock.” Finn pulled himself up in front of her in the small hollow they'd made amid the vines. “Listen, we're gonna have to go down to the ground. No way we can climb back up.”

With great effort, she tilted her head and saw that he was right. The vines had closed in overhead, healing the wound the alien intruders had made. It would take forever to cut through that, and Finn's shiv wasn't going to be enough. And her shoulder would never handle the climb, even if the path was cleared.

He checked the spur on his arm. She watched his deft fingers, then his face. Her mind finally caught up to what her eyes were seeing, and then she tracked back over the moments before the explosion.

“Edie, you have to calm down.” Finn wrapped his hands around her skull. Her misfiring brain was affecting him. She focused on his dark, calm eyes, feeling the pressure of his fingers against her skin. “Only a few more meters. The vines thin out directly below us. You can drop straight through. Follow me.”

She nodded and he released her.

“What happened?” she managed, her voice a whisper.

“Pulsed EM discharge combined with explosives and a shitload of shrapnel. A flash bomb.”

“Hidden in that low-strength shield?”

He nodded. “So low we missed it on the sweep from seventy meters up, but it was enough to mask the signature from the bomb. Probably dropped from the air. They can drill through rock, so this place would've been no problem.”

“That shield…it had the same frequency as our shield for the BRAT. That's why it was barely detectable. They knew which BRAT we were heading for, they knew the shield frequency.”

“Those details were only finalized in the last twelve hours.”

She didn't like where that line of reasoning was going. “Did someone on the
Hoi
betray our location to eco-rads?”

“Or launch a guided flash bomb to the surface when we entered the system. Someone who's not too fussy about who died.”

“Died? Are they all…?”

“Well, they were right on top of it.”

Edie closed her eyes against his indifference.

“That shield they set up around the BRAT saved us,” he said. “The blast was more or less contained within the perimeter. They were inside, we were outside. Hand me that.”

He took the diagnostic rod from her and widened the scan range. As he checked for other shields in the vicinity, she was struck by his calm professionalism. A soldier in a battle zone, immune—at least for now—to the death surrounding him.

“I'm not finding any more.” He handed the rod back. “This thing is bleeding out.”

“What?” The power cell was less than half full—that couldn't be right. She'd fully charged it before they left.

“The EMP's caused the charge to leak. We'll lose everything soon—comms, diagnostics, e-shields.”

Edie's mind suddenly felt sharp as a blade. “We can't lose the shields. We can't survive without them.” She checked hers. The plan had been to recharge at the skiff every twenty hours or so. “I still have fifteen hours. What about you?”

“About the same.” He tried the comm. “This is almost
dry, too. I'm getting a weak signal but unless Cat boosts the power at her end—and fast—we can't contact the skiff.”

He began climbing down. She followed his footholds, and after a few meters the vines thinned out. She dropped beside him onto an uneven bed of roots and broken vines. Briars and a dozen species of reeds and grasses sprung up from the marshy earth. Large stumpy growths protruded from the ground, forming anchors for the stalks of the vines. A spiny plant clutched the edge of one stump, its creamy, enameled petals glistening silvery pale in the dim light. Interspersed with the vegetation were boulders, some twice Edie's height, that had been part of the original landscape. And strewn over everything was a pale gossamer thread woven by some unknown creature.

After the strange behavior she'd observed in the vines, she looked at everything twice, half expecting these plants to start moving. But for now, the vista remained serene.

Too serene—in shock, perhaps.

The only movement came from above, where the vines still churned through meters of canopy. She and Finn would never get out that way.

Finn set up a couple of lamps. The thicket surrounded them, but a natural clearing had formed over this shallow swamp where the vines had grown up and over, twisting together to form a living cave. The air was dank and still.

Edie's knees almost gave way as she pushed through the thicket. The ground was marshy in places, rocky in others. Every step was a struggle.

“We'll have to get out of here at ground level.” He gave the jungle a grim look. “Let's grab what we can from the others and get started.”

The others. The bodies.

They found the first hidden in a bed of fallen vines and splattered with mud. One of the serfs. Finn worked the man's tool belt loose and took what he wanted, then turned the body over carelessly to raid the backpack. Nearby was another serf, his face turned toward Edie, expressionless,
almost peaceful. She dropped to her knees and touched his head. She hadn't given the serfs a second thought, and she knew no one else would, but this man came from somewhere, had a past, maybe had hopes and dreams if the tranqs hadn't knocked it all out of him.

His e-shield generator was damaged beyond repair and the battery pack was leaking. She clipped it onto her belt and pried the water torch out of his clenched fist.

She caught a glimpse of the BRAT through the undergrowth, a towering gray giant, its featureless casing mostly free of growth, since there was nothing for moss or vines to cling to. In the opposite direction, a body had been thrown into the undergrowth by the force of the blast. Only the torso was visible, but she recognized it as Zeke.

His body twitched.

“Zeke's alive!” she yelled at Finn, who was trudging through mud to reach the body of the third serf. Kristos was nowhere to be seen.

Zeke's shield hissed and flickered, its integrity breached. They had to get him out of there, and fast, before the cyphviruses found him and changed him. Even as Edie processed that thought, she knew it was too late. Within minutes his body would be invaded, his genome transmitted to the BRAT. The BRAT would redesign his DNA according to its unknown target parameters and send out the retroviral code to make changes. Even if they got him off the planet quickly, his body would be infected by those viruses and he'd die without the very finest Crib medical attention. Probably even with it.

She was too far away to extend her shield around him. And if he was infected, it was too late anyway. He had to be quarantined.

She made her way toward him, climbing over rocks and dragging aside foliage. Finn finished raiding the body of the last serf and followed her.

“Don't touch him!” he called out, having noticed the spluttering e-shield.

Edie adjusted her shield's frequency slightly so it could not merge with Zeke's once she got close enough. Zeke's limbs were twisted at strange angles, his skin slashed by shrapnel and stones thrown up by the bomb. When she saw the blood soaking through his jacket in patches, she drew a sobbing breath. His e-shield desperately tried to remain online, sparking and cycling. It threw a flickering ghostly aura around his body but his left arm was exposed where the connection had malfunctioned. His head lolled to one side and he wore a huge grin.

Come on in, the jungle's fine.

Edie forced herself step closer, then recoiled in shock. Zeke's fingers were gone. No, not gone…the creeper vines on the ground had latched onto his arm and entered his fingertips with wriggling tentacles. The veins under his skin pulsed with life. Not his life, but the life of the plants. They had merged with him, drawing his flesh into themselves.

Finn came up behind her. “It's happening to one of the others, too.”

Zeke's body twitched again and he opened his eyes. Bloodshot eyes, huge with surprise.

“You're not leaving me here, are you?”

“No, Zeke,” Edie said. “I won't leave you.”

He turned his head to look at his hand. The flesh squirmed with slivers of alien vines that had entered his body.

“Doesn't hurt.” His breath rasped.

“Zeke, it's okay. We'll get you out of here.”

Edie swallowed hard and tried not to look at his arm, his smashed-up chest, his haunted eyes. Whatever it was that had invaded his flesh moved up his forearm and into the muscles of his shoulder, even as she watched. It ate away his hand until the end of the limb was grafted into the surrounding lattice of vines.

“Where's the kid? Where's Kristos?”

She couldn't answer him. Zeke's shield failed for a full second, then flickered back on. Off again. On.

“Turn off the shield, teckie,” he whispered. “No point wasting it.”

“Cat will be here any minute with the skiff,” she lied.

“Cat…”

The breath hissed out of him and he stared at Edie. Unblinking. His arm quivered briefly with new life.

Finn moved to grab the rifle but Edie stopped him.

“Let me.” She couldn't bear to see him treat Zeke's body like he had the others, like a dead animal. She collected the shield pack and rifle and unstrapped Zeke's spur, trying to hold her tears in check. “He was a good man.”

“If you say so.”

Finn had known the serf handler, the drub, the discipline. She remembered Zeke's shiny laughing face and his good-natured irreverence, their shared resentment of the Crib, and how she had liked him from the start—even if she could never quite trust him.

As she stood up and turned away from Zeke, her commlink buzzed and stuttered. It was Cat, trying to get a message through. Edie went to answer it, an automatic reaction, but Finn stayed her hand before it reached her belt.

“If she's responsible for this, or Haller, do we really want to be talking to them now?”

Edie faced him squarely. “She's our only way out of here.”

“Zeke, Zeke, do you copy?” Cat's voice came through clearly now.

Finn put his finger to his lips and Edie hesitated. He hit his own commlink.

“This is Finn.”

“What the hell happened down there? I picked up a massive EM pulse in the vicinity. Did you guys get hit?”

“Yeah, flash bomb, masked by a low-level shield. We have multiple casualties. The serfs are dead, and the op-teck kid, and Edie.”

He looked Edie in the eye—a warning. She stayed quiet.

Cat was silent for several seconds. “What about Zeke?”

“He's alive. Badly wounded.”

“Let me talk to him.”

“He's unconscious.”

Another pause. Then Haller came on the line. The message track indicated he wasn't on the skiff. Cat must have already dropped him and his team of two serfs at the next megabiosis, but he'd been listening in.

“You said Edie's dead?”

“That's right.” Finn's voice was flat.

“Fuck.”

“She was on the ground setting up the BRAT shielding with the serfs.”

“But your lag ass was clear?”

“I was securing the perimeter with Zeke, doing my job,
sir
.” His lip snarled on the word. “Everyone inside the perimeter took the hit.”

“Please forgive my lapse in logic,” Haller said, “but isn't your brain supposed to fry when the cypherteck dies?”

Finn didn't miss a beat. “You underestimated her. She found a way to disable the leash days ago.”

Haller muttered another oath while Finn drew their attention to more immediate problems.

“The EMP did some damage to our equipment. We're losing power on our shields, and the commclips will be dead in twenty minutes or less.”

“How long do you have on the shields?” Cat asked.

“Hard to say. I should be able to cobble together enough power to last the two of us until we get out.”

“You've got a six-kilometer trek through the jungle hauling Zeke…six hours, at least,” Cat estimated.

“Cat, return for my team first,” Haller said. “We're only a few meters into the canopy—we'll climb up and you can winch us out. Then we'll decide on the best approach for retrieving Zeke.”