He locked his visor down to check by technology what his instinct told him. “Gabe,” he said, “there’s something funny just ahead there. You see those three trees, mark?”
“I see the trees,” Gabrilovitch said doubtfully. If he’d completed the thought, it would have been, “But there’s nothing funny about them.”
The trees were fat and grew in a triangle with eight or ten feet between trunks. Their gray bark was smooth except for a single vertical slit running the length of each bole. The triplet was only a dozen yards out in the undamaged forest, but Blohm couldn’t see through the intervening barrier of saplings and shrubs to be sure what the lower twenty feet of the boles looked like.
The tops stood only a hundred feet in the air and should have been shaded by the taller trees. Instead, the luxuriant fronds spread beneath a sky as open as that of an apartment building’s airshaft.
“See how the trunks split?” Blohm said. “The splits line up with a common axis.”
The odd pattern wasn’t what had drawn his attention. Blohm had noticed it after he got the feeling to begin with.
“There ought to be undergrowth between the trees,” he went on. “There’s not, but there’s something below the level we can see because the IR reading’s a fraction higher than it is a few feet either way.”
“Okay, snake,” Gabrilovitch said. “What do you figure?”
“I’m going to take a look,” Blohm said. He held the curtain of moss aside with the barrel of his stinger and slipped past. His knife was in his left hand but he hadn’t switched on the blade.
“Ah, shit, snake,” Gabrilovitch said. He didn’t waste his breath ordering Blohm to return.
The forest murmured. Blohm felt he’d stepped into a dark cave and heard a beast breathing somewhere in the twisted grottos beyond; waiting, considering its options.
Saplings and the boles of full-grown trees were planted more thickly than Blohm had learned to expect in other jungles. Normally, except where streams and clearings permit light to reach the ground, the foliage of the monster trees forms a canopy hundreds of feet in the air and starves lesser growth.
Seeds sprout on stored energy and die as pale wraiths of their hope unless one of the neighboring giants falls during the sapling’s brief window of opportunity. In this forest, chinks in the canopy permitted young trees to continue to grow if not exactly to flourish. They’d be ready to replace their forebears immediately.
Blohm moved without haste, like a shopper moving down a store aisle. His helmet scanned in all directions for sudden movements. Blohm kept not only his eyes but his whole mind open against danger.
Particularly he watched the treetops and higher branches. Moving through this forest was like city fighting: the real dangers lurked in the upper stories.
Fans set up an echoing howl in the clearing behind him. They were flying the expedition’s sole aircar out of the hold. The starship and those around it existed in a world with only peripheral connection to Blohm’s.
He didn’t touch any tree. He always looked before he placed his foot for the next step. And he moved with a ghost’s effortless silence, wrapped in a shroud of total awareness.
The pair of Kalendru soldiers hadn’t been so careful. They’d run through the little clearing bounded by the triplet of trees and now stood in contorted poses.
Sap had sprayed simultaneously from the ruptured bark of the three trees. Blohm judged it had started as an aerosol, but it must have set instantly because the weapons the Spooks dropped in their terror hadn’t reached the ground.
The sap dried clear, though air bubbles and ripples in the surface distorted images in the hardened mass. Blohm thought refraction explained the corpses’ blurred outlines, but when he switched his visor to microwave imaging he realized his mistake.
The sap had been intensely corrosive as well as entombing its victims in mid-stride. The Spooks looked fuzzy because their bodies had started to dissolve in the instant they were caught. Even the metal and plastic of their equipment was pitted.
“C41,” Blohm reported, “mark. The Spooks got here ahead of us, but I don’t think they’re our main problem. The forest doesn’t like them any better than it does us. And people, it doesn’t like us even a little bit.”