“Yeah, sure, snake,” Gabrilovitch said. He pulled the tube-shaped roll of his null sack from its pouch. “The place gets on my nerves, that’s all.”
Blohm shifted his position a step and a half to the left so that another treetrunk separated him from the one in motion. He had no idea what would have happened if he’d remained where he was; just that it would have been fatal.
Plants don’t chase down prey. Neither do web spiders. But spiders grow fat on animals which move without thinking.
Gabe stepped into the mouth of his null sack, pulled the sides over his head, and lay down. There was a faint sigh as he operated the closures; then nothing. Absolutely nothing.
The sack’s outer surface was the black of powdered carbon, not shadow. Shadow has color and shows the outline of the surface on which it lies. The null sack absorbed energy right across the spectrum from heat to microwave. The inner and outer surfaces were of identical material, but the layer between was a high-efficiency heat sink that expanded slightly as it stored energy.
Micropores in the sack passed oxygen molecules through to the interior. The slightly larger carbon dioxide molecules filtered through the inner surface but were trapped in the middle layer until flushed when the sack was serviced after use.
A man inside a null sack could breathe normally for a day and a half without changing the CO2 balance of the air around him. He had no heat signature and active electro-optical sensors would not show his outline. The sack blurred but couldn’t completely defeat sound ranging, but that was almost valueless in a breathable atmosphere to begin with.
The sacks could be operated in either completely buttoned-up mode, or with a one-way RF window that permitted a striker to receive data from an external source. That could be a spy cell clipped to a tree, for example; or in this case, the helmet of a striker who wasn’t in a null sack himself.
Blohm sighed and let the soul of the forest sweep around him like slow green surf. Water reflected the canopy in near perfection. The ripples from Gabe’s stone had died away, but here and there insects skated in dimples of surface tension.
The scouts had come this far without cutting or blowing the jungle out of their way. That was partly standard operating procedure—you didn’t want to leave a trail for enemy patrols to track you by—but Blohm had carried it to an extreme his sergeant found unreasonable. He’d even insisted that they go around the curtain of moss tendrils hanging from a branch instead of shearing through with their knives.
There was a slap and patter in the foliage nearby. A broad leaf had suddenly everted, dumping a pint of water stored from the evening’s rain. The dripping continued almost a minute, from one layer to another and finally to the soil.
None of the drops landed directly on the surface of the pond. It was a pond. It had no current at all. The ends were concealed in forest, the banks only six feet apart—not quite close enough for a burdened striker to leap.
But it had to be a pond; or a moat. A moat only inches deep, because Blohm could see the pebble bottom through the black water. There were no twigs or decaying leaves among the stones, and no animal life.
The broad, round plants floating on the surface looked like water lilies, but flat stems anchored them to the bank. A flying insect buzzed to the miniature pink flowers, then dipped to the pond. Its wings riffled the water as it drank through its proboscis before flying off.
Blohm chuckled softly. There were two ways to deal with this forest. Brute force would work if you had enough force. Perhaps two bulldozers and the firepower of C41 were enough.
The other method was to treat the contest as a chess game. Blohm wasn’t sure he was going to win the game; but he might, he just might.
He walked to a tree five yards from the edge of the pond. Thorns as long as a man’s hand lay flat in recesses along the trunk, almost invisible against the speckled bark. Blohm switched on his powerknife. He advanced the point cautiously and cut off a thorn at the base.