Hansen thought he could see glimmers of light, but perhaps they were merely his optic nerves firing in an attempt to save his sanity from the blackness. “I’ll need weapons!” he said.
“You have your mind, Kommissar,” Walker said dryly.
There was light and warmth and a splash of brown water as Hansen, limbs flailing, plunged feet first into a swamp.
The air was so saturated that the humidity took the edges off the light of the hot sun overhead. Hansen, wearing his coveralls and a dense skullcap sealed in black plastic—all that remained of a battlesuit that could’ve withstood anti-tank weapons—was waist deep in mud.
If he wore the entire suit, he’d still be sinking toward whatever passed for bedrock.
The surface was muddy hillocks and ponds—nowhere dry nor deep. Ferns and spike-branched reeds a meter high grew promiscuously across the terrain, but there was no ground cover. Every twenty meters or so sprouted what looked like low trees—but probably weren’t, since the branches curling from their tops were lacework similar to the ferns.
Something rose from the squelching mud on the next hillock over. It was a four-legged reptile several meters in length, with a great knobbed sail on its back and a mouthful of fern fronds. There was a collar around its neck.
“And who would you be, friend?” muttered Hansen as he stepped out of the pond into which he’d fallen. The creature was obviously an herbivore, but so was a bull.
“It has no personal name,” said a crisp voice in his ears, the AI Walker had said he was leaving; and which Hansen had forgotten, like a damned fool, till the machine intelligence stretched a point and recalled itself to his attention. “It is an edaphosaurus from the herd of the android Strombrand.”
The edaphosaurus chewed with a sideways rotary motion of its jaws. The skull looked small in comparison to the bulk of the chest and belly, but the vast cone of greenery disappeared rapidly enough down the throat. The beast cocked its head at an angle and sliced off the next installment of ferns, keeping one eye focused on the intruder as it did so.
Hansen squinted, trying to pierce the thick atmosphere. He could only see a hundred meters or so, and the steamy air washed out colors at half that distance. Hot sun on open water and a vast expanse of transpiring foliage. . . .
Another edaphosaurus plodded from the gloom, continuing through the pond in which Hansen had landed. Its feet and belly sent water in all directions. Halfway up the bank the beast stopped, bellowed, and began to claw at its collar with a forepaw. The webbing between its toes was brilliant scarlet.
After a moment of scratching which rotated the collar a quarter turn without dislodging it, the beast resumed its clumsy amble. Something hooted angrily in the direction from which the edaphosaur had come.
“What are the col—” Hansen started to say when a lizard-headed biped carrying a staff and a radio handset bounded through the mud on the herbivore’s trail.
“What’s that?” he snapped instead.
The biped saw Hansen, halted in a crouch that splashed rippling semicircles in the pond, and bolted back the way it had come. In addition to the artifacts in its hands, the lizardman wore a short, off-the-shoulder tunic and a collar similar to that of the edaphosaurus.
“That is a Lomeri slave, one of the herdsmen of Strombrand,” replied the artificial intelligence. “There are three herdsmen all told.”
The shapes in the mist had mentioned the Lomeri, the lizardfolk, when they’d interviewed Hansen for this mission . . . or the mission that led to the mission which led to this mission. But those passing references had implied that the Lomeri were a race of the far past who—
“You are thinking of duration again, Commissioner Hansen,” said the voice that was as surely Walker’s as it was surely answering a thought Hansen hadn’t spoken. “Ignore duration, because it no longer applies.”
“Are the Lomeri slaves of the androids here?” Hansen asked. He heard a winding note that could have come from either a living animal or a signal horn. He could run, but the Lomeri obviously knew their way about this swamp better than he ever would.