“Hey, don’t get your knickers in a twist,” Abbado said as forcefully as he could in a low voice. He felt like a dog facing a cobra. “I was there, remember? I saw the poor kid with her mom’s arm. If she’s got nightmares and needs somebody to hold her, what the fuck do you expect?”
“Ah, shit, Sarge,” Blohm said, relaxing with a quiver like a released spring. “I forgot you knew. Shit, I thought . . . You know, some of the guys.”
“This was a bitch of a place even before the wogs showed up,” Abbado said calmly, starting to relax a little himself. “Well, maybe they ate the Spooks before they got around to us, you think?”
“I looked at the recordings of the attack,” Blohm said bitterly. He hadn’t listened to Abbado. “Those bastards were killing kids because they wanted to. The one that chopped her mom, he was going for Mirica when Nessman waxed him.”
“Remember to get some sleep yourself, snake,” Abbado said. He moved away, walking slowly. “The major’s got us tapped for your backup tomorrow. I don’t want you stepping in shit cause you’re tired.”
“Roger, Sarge,” Blohm whispered. “Sorry for coming down on you like that.”
Caldwell was twenty yards distant, standing near the roots of a tree toppled by a dozer. Abbado walked toward her, knowing his helmet would caret anything it saw as a danger. A quiet night thus far.
There were strikers in C41 whose sexual tastes were well outside the mainstream. Sometimes that was why they’d enlisted in the Strike Force to begin with. A guy everybody expected to die was cut slack in other ways. Abbado didn’t think that was the case with Blohm, but he’d have kept his mouth shut anyway.
Caius Blohm wasn’t somebody he wanted to fuck with. The chances of surviving Bezant were bad enough already.
Partly it was a day’s experience for himself and the helmet database, but the main reason Blohm could safely cross a mile of jungle in less than an hour was that he didn’t have to nursemaid Sergeant Gabrilovitch. That was a hard way to think of Gabe, but it was the truth.
The shooting tree stood in a grove of tall reeds whose foliage hung down like a fan dancer’s props. The sprays of compound leaves were slightly russet, a hue different enough from that of most vegetation to call attention to itself—
And to conceal what was behind it, Blohm assumed. Exactly like the dancer’s fans.
This was the first shooting tree Blohm had seen since he got beyond the margins of the landing site. As he moved gingerly closer, his helmet located half a dozen more in the immediate vicinity. The AI built swatches of surface or a shape implied by surrounding vegetation into a predicted presence. The largest tree was eight inches in diameter; much smaller than the one that discharged at the landing site, but large enough to be lethal.
Blohm eased a reed stem sideways with his knife. He didn’t switch on the blade. Leaf fans rustled against one another.
It was at least possible that the reeds were harmless in themselves, merely screening for the shooting trees. Using the stinger barrel and the silent knife together like a spreader clip, Blohm opened a narrow window to look beyond.
Bingo.
“Six, this is Six-six-two,” he whispered. “The anomaly is a Spook ship, all right. But it hasn’t landed here, it’s crashed. Six-six-two over.”
The Kalendru vessel was a globe much smaller than 10-1442. It lay on its side; the bottom and outriggers were only a dozen feet from Blohm’s vantage point. Heating in the magnetic eddies of takeoff and landing swirled the plates with color.
The hull maintained its basic shape, but there was some crumpling and a number of seams had started. As Blohm watched, something raised its head from one of the ragged gaps in the metal and looked back at him.
“Why doesn’t he shoot?” Tamara Lundie asked, viewing the relayed image of the creature’s triangular head. The compound eyes had the soft gleam of faceted amber. The beak was saw-edged and long enough to shear through a human with a single bite.