“Yeah,” Meyer said hoarsely. “Help me get these guys to the lifts, will you?”
Councillor Lock put his arms around his wife and stood, helping her up with him. “Alison, come along at once,” he said to his daughter in a breathy voice. “We’ll get the luggage later.”
Lock walked the woman out of the compartment, holding her to hide her face against his chest. He kept his eyes straight ahead. The child caught the slack of her father’s trouser leg and followed. Unlike the adults, she stared at Meyer while leaving, turning her head like an owl.
Nessman stepped into the doorway to separate the parties. “You all right, snake?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Meyer. “We’ll just wait till they’re on the lift, okay?”
Her eyes were aware of the compartment’s normal lighting, but the lonely darkness squeezed tight on her mind.
Responses
Blohm stopped at the edge of a creek or elongated pond. The water seemed to be a sheet of black glass. Leaves and what looked like a berry floated on the surface. There was no discernible current.
Gabe picked up a pebble. “Don’t,” Blohm said, but the pebble was already in the air, flipped from the back of the sergeant’s thumb.
It plopped into the water. Ripples spread evenly.
“What was wrong with that?” Gabrilovitch said in a wounded tone. He didn’t object to his nominal subordinate being in charge whenever the two of them were alone on a mission, but he didn’t like being treated like a half-witted child.
“Maybe nothing,” Blohm said. “Look, just . . . I want to sit and look things over, Gabe. I don’t want . . . if you touch something, make something happen . . . look, I want to understand this, do you see?”
Gabe didn’t understand that there was anything to understand. The trees were dangerous—so far in over fifty different ways only a quarter mile into the forest. There were probably animals—otherwise how explain the berserk vegetation?—and they’d be dangerous too, though large predators weren’t likely in the apparent absence of large prey animals. The sergeant didn’t believe that there was anything to know, however; as opposed to things to avoid, to destroy and to survive.
“There’s something moving on the trunk of that tree across the creek,” Gabrilovitch said. “Mark.”
“I got it,” Blohm said.
He’d seen the movement already. A creeper was unwinding from the smooth black bark of a tree ten feet in diameter above the buttress roots. As plants move the activity was blindingly fast, but it would still be minutes before the vine had completely straightened from its original helical grip on the tree.
At that point, Blohm guessed the upper end of the vine would come spearing down in his direction like a snake’s head. Caius Blohm had no intention of being in the target area long enough for that to happen.
“Look, I got a bad feeling about it,” Gabrilovitch said. “I don’t think we ought to be standing around waiting for something to whack us. This place is bad news, snake.”
“Gabe,” Blohm said softly. Frustration at being interrupted was a raging red glow in his mind, but his voice was mild and colorless. “Why don’t you get into your null sack for a bit. Leave the RF port open and you can watch everything through my helmet. You’ll be as safe as if you were back on Stalleybrass.”
“Shitfire, Blohm,” the sergeant said. “I just thought you ought to know about that thing across the creek. Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Gabe . . .” Blohm said. “If you don’t get into your sack and let me concentrate on this, I’ll drop a stitch and the forest’ll grease me sure. If that happens, you may as well eat your stinger right now, because I tell you, snake, you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it back to the clearing without me.”
Blohm’s visor was set on panorama with movements highlighted. Twenty yards back in the direction the scouts had come, the upper half of a tree with a coarse, scaly surface was rotating. The entire bole moved. It was visible only through a notch between the interlaced branches of two nearer trees.