FALLEN DRAGON (76 page)

"Sweet Fate," Lawrence whispered. Skins were on their knees around him, helmet valves open, allowing them to vomit. Lawrence's Skin AS reported it was infusing a cocktail of narcotics to help him cope with the shock its medical monitors had revealed. He felt light-headed, as if everything he'd just witnessed were part of some terrible i-drama. He didn't want to move, to take part, help his injured comrades. Just wanted someone to switch the whole image off and wipe the memory clean.

"Hey, look," Nic shouted. "Look up there. Jesus God, what is the deal here?"

Lawrence pushed his sensor focus into the cloudless sky above. He almost laughed; the numbing drugs made it seem funny. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse ... The cargo pods were hitting the lower atmosphere, their madcap descent slowing to subsonic speed. White-and-yellow parachutes bloomed high overhead, lowering them gently. A
f
lock of windshrikes glided among them with fast grace. Massive crocodile-contoured jaws snapped and champed at the domes of fabric. Teeth the size of human hands tore easily through the nylon. With their chute panels ripped apart the pods began to plummet downward. They hit the ground at terminal velocity and burst apart in silent explosions of shattered crates and mangled equipment.

After the injured Skins had been treated as best their limited medical supplies would allow them, the erstwhile governor of Roseport gathered his officers for an emergency conference. They had been down for ninety minutes and hadn't even entered the city yet, let alone established collateral. Nearly a third of their equipment pods had been wrecked. The local inhabitants were nothing like they'd been led to expect. And the starship captains were reporting continued attempts to sabotage and attack the big vessels in orbit: subversive software was contaminating every datalink, while kinetic spears in retrograde orbits were probing their physical defenses. The admiral's orders were to establish a dominant presence among the new-natives, then draw up an inventory of possible assets.

Roseport's governor went along with that, but put securing the local spaceport at the top of his priority list. Lawrence was in the company assigned to retrieve the pods that had survived. He just counted himself lucky 435NK9 wasn't one of the platoons ordered into Roseport itself. As he and the others tramped through the clinging tigergrass, they heard a near-constant barrage of small-arms fire and grenade explosions. They could see very little movement amid the peaceful sprawl of squat white towers that formed the majority of the little city's buildings. But the communications link gave them a continuing story of ambushes and booby traps.

Even out on the lush plain skirting the city they weren't immune. Infrared sensors were all but useless in the rolling expanse of tall tigergrass. New-natives lay in wait, hunched down among the roots, bulky creatures capable of damaging Skin carapaces with a couple of swift blows and often making a clean escape after they'd battered a squaddie to the ground. Communications became difficult as interference and jamming increased throughout the day. Somebody here was operating sophisticated electronics.

By nightfall the company had gathered enough equipment to set up a camp with a heavily guarded perimeter. Jeeps and trucks transported the whole lot over to the spaceport, a single runway that had been set out to the north of town. With their escape route secure and a large-caliber arsenal at hand, the squaddies relaxed slightly.

Lights shone in the city that night, lemon-yellow windows radiant against the deep night. Strange shadows moved along the walls in jerky motions. Sounds echoed through the still air, helping to fuel the invaders' imagination, making them wonder what the new-natives were busy building.

On the second day, the governor divided up his forces. Several platoons would attempt to establish a foothold in the city again, while other companies were dispatched to known industrial sites. Satellite observation had revealed the factory structures were still intact, though most were apparently deserted. Best of all, a squadron of twelve TVL88 tactical support helicopters had survived, and the engineers had spent the night assembling them. The companies could call on a full aerial assault if they got into any trouble. When Lawrence's company drove out that morning, the pilots were taking odds on how many windshrikes they were going to bag apiece.

Lawrence called in the empty factory offices to Ntoko, and they turned around to walk back to the company's vehicles. After the first few reports, Captain Lyaute had decided the factory was never going to work again. He was recalling all the scouting parties.

"I don't get it," Kibbo said. "Why did they let this place fall apart in the first place?"

"Fate knows," Lawrence said. "But at least we know why they stopped exporting all that fancy expensive biological junk. They just don't produce it anymore."

"That's not a reason, Corp," Jones said. "Why did they abandon factories like this? We know they worked better than anything on Earth."

"They're animals, man, that's why," Kibbo said. "What are you, blind? Didn't you guys see those things that attacked us yesterday? They ain't human anymore; they're freaks. This is a fucking great planet full of freaks. No animal can run a factory. And they don't need human medicines anymore."

"They're not animals," Lawrence said. "They're people; they just look different, that's all."

"No way, man, they're filthy animals. They don't even talk, all they do is scream all funny. They attacked us for no reason."

"It was territorial," Amersy said.

"What?"

"Territorial; you said they were animals."

"The corp said they weren't."

"In which case we're in deep shit," Jones said. "If they fight like that and they're smart with it there's no telling what they'll throw at us next."

"You think I don't know that?" Amersy grumbled.

"So why did they dump this place?" Kibbo said.

"Who knows?" Amersy said. "They still use machinery. You saw the lights in Roseport last night. Our communications links are being screwed by their jamming. And the spaceport runway was intact. One of the engineers I talked to this morning said the spaceplanes they found in the hangar were still flightworthy. Somebody's been maintaining them."

"So there's some real people left? So what? That doesn't mean there's anything here for us."

Lawrence agreed with Kibbo, though not for the same reasons. He didn't think the new-natives were animals. They might not have quite the same behavior pattern as humans, but they were certainly sentient. Exactly where that put them on the evolutionary scale he wasn't sure.

Captain Lyaute got everybody into the vehicles and ordered them back to Roseport's spaceport. When he called in their return to the governor, he was informed that all the similar exploratory missions had found the same thing. The cities were occupied by extremely hostile new-natives, while the factories were abandoned and decaying. No real dialogue with the new-natives had been established. The admiral and Simon Roderick didn't know what to do next. They were considering sending a starship to rendezvous with the big captured asteroid that was in a two-thousand-kilometer polar orbit. Sections of the planet's space-based industry were obviously still functioning, although a lot of the stations and microgee modules had been destroyed when the induction webs were eliminated. If nothing else, the starships could take the surviving orbital industrial facilities back to Earth; that would show some kind of gain on the balance sheet.

In the meantime, the governor advised, they were probably going to boost the platoons straight back up to orbit, although there were worries about the availability of hydrogen at the spaceports that had already been secured. Roseport spaceport did have several storage tanks full, but the refinery itself had been switched off. The engineers were going over it now to see if they could restart production.

Lawrence drove one of the jeeps, with half of 435NK9 as his passengers. They were eighth in the long convoy as it wound back along the route it had taken to the factory. It was slow going; the road was thoroughly overgrown with tiger-grass and creepers, although there was evidence that some kind of vehicles still used it occasionally. Lawrence remembered the Great Loop Highway back on Thallspring and quietly wished for something that clear and level again.

The terrain they were driving through was hilly, a landscape of crumpled valleys and short, awkward slopes. Tall trees thrived along the upper slopes of the ridges, projecting impossibly slim spires above the forest roof. Topped with fluffy violet leaf plumes, they looked like the battle pennants of some medieval army marching to war. Down in the valley floors the trees were fat bruisers, nearly spherical, their gray-silver bark bristling with hard, venomous thorns to repel wood-drillers and acidlice. The upper half of their swollen boles sprouted concentric circles of whip branches, shaking small leathery leaves in the breeze to produce a continuous discordant clattering. They grew together in an almost solid fence, pushing and straining at each other as decades-long battles were fought for ground and light. Those that lost and died were riddled with holes as animals burrowed their nests into the rotting wood. Swarms of fungus leeched to the crumbling bark, producing a glistening rampage of color as they wept glutinous fluids saturated with spores. Ferns and tuber leaves dominated the dim floor of the forest, banishing tiger-grass and bushes, while carnivorous coilwraiths hung from forks in the overhead branches to catch insects amid their wriggling fronds.

The road reached the first swath of forest a couple of kilometers from the factory. Its builders had tried to avoid the trees where possible, curving it around along valley walls or letting it run beside the fast-flowing streams. As a consequence, the lead vehicle could rarely see more than two or three hundred meters ahead.

Lawrence frowned as they began to slow. He couldn't see any reason for it. The road was a mess, sure, but it didn't pose too much of a problem for their vehicles. They weren't even in the forest yet; it was running along the side of them fifty meters away. Up ahead there was a sharp curve around the base of a small hill. But there was no barrier, nothing blocking the track.

"What's happening?" he asked over the command link. They were almost stationary now.

"Something up ahead. The ground's moving."

"Moving?" Lawrence didn't understand.

"Can you hear that?" Nic asked.

Lawrence braked to a halt. "Hear what?" He ordered his AS to turn up the Skin's audio sensitivity. That was when he realized the jeep was shaking slightly.

"That!" Nic insisted.

The Skin's receptors were picking up a bass rumbling.

"Six-nine-three and Seven-six-two, deploy forward with carbines," Captain Lyaute ordered. "Five-four-one, watch our tail."

Skins were jumping down from the jeeps, moving forward in a double buddy formation. Squat muzzles had emerged from their arm carapaces.

Lawrence didn't like the situation at all. None of his briefings had mentioned this being an earthquake zone.

The herd of macrorexes lumbered around the side of the mountain, a wall of beasts over eight meters high, with the smallest weighing in at ten tons. Unlike Earth's dinosaurs, they didn't have long necks and tails. Their bodies were husky cylinders fifteen meters in length, with three sets of legs. It was an arrangement that allowed them to move in a sequence of synchronized jumps, arching their spine so that a wave motion rippled down their dorsal column, each set of legs bounding forward in unison. A flattened heart-shaped head rose and fell as the body undulated, swinging occasionally from side to side as far as the stumpy neck permitted. The end of the jaw was caged by three curving tusks longer than a man's arm, two pointing up, one down; they opened and closed in a steady rhythm. The sides of the head swept together in a series of bladelike triangular fins that looked as if they could cut through steel. Their eyes were invisible somewhere among the sharply crinkled bone ridges of the upper skull.

Now that the macrorexes were in full view, their trumpeting cries split the air. Shrubs and bushes simply detonated under the pounding impact of their legs.

Lawrence thought yesterday's drugs must still be kicking through his blood cells. He remembered the giant beasts from his briefing files, but couldn't really grasp that forty or fifty of the monsters were coming at him in a motion that resembled a perpetual skidding crash.

"You've got to be fucking kidding," Nic groaned. There was real fear in his voice.

The Skins out in front of the jeeps opened fire. Lawrence couldn't even tell if the bullets were penetrating the filthy ash-gray hides. They certainly weren't having any effect The trumpeting rose to a crescendo, and Lawrence realized the macrorexes were only 150 meters away. Nothing was going to stop them.

Captain Lyaute was yelling incoherently in the command communication link. Someone else was calling desperately for helicopter support. Skins were running hard, ripping through the cloying tigergrass as the macrorexes pounded toward them. Lawrence jammed down hard on the accelerator and pulled the wheel over. Tires spun wildly in the greasy soil. There was absolutely no way he was going to be able to loop around a full 180 degrees before the front rank of macrorexes reached them. "Hold on," he shouted, and sent the jeep skidding and bouncing toward the edge of the forest Out of the corner of his eye he could see a couple of macrorexes charging along the treeline. Smaller trunks were pulverized into a cascade of splinters as their huge armored legs plowed into them. Long whip branches were severed cleanly by the fin-blades on the edges of the beasts' heads, twirling away through the air.