Farrell grimaced. It was a joke in the Strike Force that you could hear a gnat fart if you cranked up your helmet high enough. Lundie really meant it, though. More to the point, she meant that she could discriminate among microsounds despite the hugely greater background of human feet, voices, and equipment.
“Why didn’t you hear them, then?” he said. There’d been one blessing. The dozer blade raised a four- to eight-foot row of brush and scraped topsoil on the left, the side opposite the direction of the attack. None of the civilians had time to climb off the cleared path. That would have been as quick a death as the natives’ weapons.
“Because their movements were within parameters,” Lundie repeated. “Major, at any possible level of detail, those humanoids didn’t come through the forest. They were the forest.”
Meyer sat up, flexing her arms to make sure no ribs had been broken. Her partner Nessman watched anxiously. Councillor Lock knelt nearby. Blood splashed his head and torso, but none of it seemed to be his. Lock cradled a child’s head in his lap. The body lay behind him, under that of its mother.
“In the future,” Lundie said, “I’ll use carbon dioxide levels. The humanoids are animate. They give off CO2 as a waste product. The range isn’t as long as vibration sensing should have been, but I’ll be able to provide some warning. They won’t surprise us the same way again.”
Major Arthur Farrell scanned at the jungle. If there were a button he could push to turn this whole crater into a glassy desert, he’d do it in an eyeblink.
Night Sounds
“Mr. Blohm?” Seraphina Suares, leading a train of children, said to Sergeant Gabrilovitch.
“That’s him,” Gabe said, nodding across the minilantern’s circle of light. “What is it you need, ma’am?”
Blohm rolled down the sleeve of his tunic without speaking. There was a line of tiny ulcers across the inside of his elbow, but they’d been shrinking in the past hour. His immune booster was handling the microorganisms.
Blohm’s body temperature had been elevated by about half a degree ever since 10-1442’s hatches opened. His augmented system was fighting off local diseases. The slight fever didn’t seem to affect his judgment dangerously. He hoped the same was true for everybody in the expedition, but that wasn’t something he could do much about.
The woman met Blohm’s eyes. She was too old for any of the six children to be her own. The eldest was probably ten, the youngest no more than two and carried in her arms. She smiled. “Sergeant Kristal said that Mr. Blohm would be responsible for feeding me and the children. She directed us here.”
“Oh,” Blohm said. He’d removed his equipment belt, but the converter was still in its pouch. “Okay, that was the deal. I . . . What is it you want to eat? Not that you’re going to tell much difference.”
“I think it’s best that we try whatever you planned for yourself,” the woman said. “Sit down, children, and be sure to stay on the plastic. Mirica, dear? Won’t you sit down?”
A four-year-old with bangs and short dark hair remained standing. Her eyes had the thousand-yard stare that Blohm had seen often enough before—on redlined veterans. None of the kids looked right.
Gabrilovitch looked over the gathering and rose. “Guess you’ve got it under control, snake,” he said. “I’ll see you after my guard shift.”
Blohm drew on his left-hand glove as he walked to the brush piled at the edge of the clearing the bulldozers had cut for the night. The ground was covered with quarter-inch roofing plastic. It was temperature-stable—bonfires burned in several parts of the camp—and too tough for anything to penetrate overnight, though there was still a danger of shoots or roots coming up between the edges of sheets.
God or the colonist brain trust said that the forest wouldn’t be as active after the sun set. Blohm was willing to believe that; but he didn’t expect to sleep very soundly the first night, even during the hours he didn’t have guard.
“I wasn’t expecting, ah, kids,” Blohm said. He worked loose a four-foot length of root and sawed it off with his knife. Any organic would work so long as it fit the mouth of the converter. He wasn’t sure how much he’d need, but this was a start.