Cobra Guardian

  Jody dropped into a low crouch, wincing as her father fired four more laser shots over her head into the wall and ceiling. There were four more thunks, louder ones this time, and she turned to see four freshly killed thumb-sized flycrawlers smoldering on the floor behind her. "I think they're getting bigger," Paul commented.

  "Almost big enough to take on my hamster farm," Jody agreed, her throat tightening. "How in the Worlds are bugs that size getting in?"

  "The boys must have missed a spot," Paul said, crossing the room and peering down at the insects. "Maybe in one of the upper corners or alongside a window where a vine's taken root and started pulling the plaster apart. You let them get a foothold and start a crack, and that's all they need."

  Jody went to her father's side. Already tiny spots of green were starting to appear on the burned insect carcasses as microscopic airborne spores found something to eat and set to work with a vengeance. And once the flycrawlers settled in, she knew, the micewhiskers would be right behind them, and before long it would take a Cobra to clear them all out.

  Luckily for Jody and her two teammates, they had one. "Have I mentioned lately how grateful I am you came along on this trip?" she asked her father.

  "Once or twice," he assured her. "I was just trying to think of that poem. ‘Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em. And little fleas something something.' "

  " ‘And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum,' " Jody quoted. "Except that on Caelian, the whole process seems to work backwards."

  There was a double thunk as the airlock door one room over opened and closed, and Jody turned to see Geoff Boulton and Freylan Sonderby walk into the room. "Okay, the house is all scraped," Geoff announced briskly as he brushed at some dust on his tunic sleeve. "Ready to head out as soon as--" He stopped as he suddenly seemed to notice the odd way Jody and her father were standing. "What is it?" he asked.

  Paul gestured silently to the floor. Geoff threw a look at Freylan, and the two young men crossed to Jody's side.

  For a moment no one said anything, but simply stood in their semicircle staring at the dead insects as if it was some sort of funereal viewing ritual. Then, Freylan stirred. "It's the southeast corner," he said. "There's a flange up there that I've never thought looked quite right."

  "And you didn't do anything about it?" Geoff asked, a dark edge to his voice.

  "I thought it was all right," Freylan said with a sigh. "It looked solid enough, just a little oddly shaped."

  "What did Governor Uy tell us when we first got here?" Geoff demanded. "Odd shapes, odd fittings, and odd colorations are the first signs of trouble. Blast it all, Freylan." He waved a hand in disgust. "Come on--show me where it is."

  "You won't be able to reach it," Freylan said, a sort of kicked-dog look in his eyes as he headed back toward the door. "The step stool isn't tall enough. We'll have to find a ladder we can borrow."

  "I can get up there," Paul volunteered. "Let me finish with my tunic and I'll go with you."

  "Go ahead," Jody said. "I'll finish your tunic."

  "What, go out in my underwear?" Paul asked, sounding vaguely scandalized as he gestured to his silliweave singlet.

  "People in Stronghold go outside in their underwear all the time," Jody growled, warning him with her eyes. This wasn't the time for jokes.

  Fortunately, he got the message. "We'll be back in a minute," he said. He gestured Freylan ahead of him, and the two men left the room.

  "I'll do that," Geoff growled, holding out his hand as Jody picked up her father's tunic. "You've got your own to do."

  "I've got it," Jody said firmly, half turning and bumping his arm aside with her shoulder as he tried to take the tunic from her. "You go make sure the packs are ready."

  "Are you mad at me for telling Freylan he screwed up?" Geoff demanded. "Damn it all, Jody, this is Caelian. You screw up here and you get eaten alive."

  "Yes, I remember the lecture," Jody said as she started scraping the bits of green off the tunic. "I also remember that none of us has exactly been the pride of the litter as far as screw-ups are concerned."

  "We've been here eleven days," Geoff growled. "Screw-up incidence is supposed to be on a downward curve by now."

  "It is," Jody said flatly. "And jumping down Freylan's throat isn't going to flatten the curve any faster."

  Geoff hissed between his teeth. "You're sorry you came along on this fiasco, aren't you?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "But you're thinking it."

  Jody didn't answer, but kept working at the tunic. There wasn't supposed to be anything organic in the material for the little green spores to eat, but as the wind blew the spores themselves through the Caelian air, it also blew along microscopic bits of their food.

  And as her father had pointed out, letting even harmless spores get ahead of them was the first step on the road to disaster.

  "I said you were thinking it," Geoff repeated into the silence, a fresh edge of challenge in his voice.

  Jody took a deep breath. So he was in the mood for a fight, was he? Fine. She was willing to oblige. "I came along because I thought my training might help in figuring out a solution to this place," she said stiffly. "But that wasn't the reason I was invited, was it?"

  A sudden shadow flicked across the anger and frustration in Geoff's face. "What are you talking about?" he asked carefully.

  "I'm talking about the real reason you asked me to join you and Freylan out here," Jody said. "It wasn't my animal training you wanted at all. It was--"

  She broke off at the sound of the double doors opening again, and turned her attention back to the tunic she was supposed to be scraping.

  But before she did, she had the slightly guilty pleasure of seeing a look of shame briefly cross Geoff's face.

  "That was the spot, all right," Paul announced as he and Freylan came into the room. "It should be all right now."

  "At least until the next vine gets a grip," Freylan muttered, still brooding over his failure to catch the chink earlier.

  "When it does, we'll deal with it," Paul said calmly. "How are we doing in here?"

  "Almost ready," Jody said, giving her father's tunic a final inspection. Geoff, she noted, had quietly slipped into the other room where the packs were stacked. "Yes, it's done," she confirmed, handing it over. "I wonder what you do if you're allergic to this stuff."

  "You probably itch a lot," Paul said, giving the tunic a quick once-over of his own and then slipping it on. "Either that, or you get used to walking around naked."

  "Not you personally," Freylan added hastily, his cheeks reddening.

  Jody turned back to her own unfinished tunic, a smile sneaking onto her face despite her grouchy mood. Freylan could be so adorably awkward sometimes. "I know," she said over her shoulder to him. "But at least you'd still have your skin."

  "Speaking of skin," Paul said, stepping smoothly in on top of Freylan's embarrassment, "did you get anything more from that red-tail?"

  "Not really," Freylan said, and Jody could hear the relief in his voice at the return to safer scientific ground. "I'm still ninety percent convinced that odor has something to do with it. But there's too much overlap between the red-tail and the groundsniffer for me to figure out what the key might be."

  "If it's there at all," Paul warned.

  "It's there," Freylan said firmly. "Something's there. Otherwise, the spores and other vegetation would attack all hair and fur, instead of just everything from five or six millimeters out."

  Jody grimaced, running her fingers over the stubble that had once been a lovingly-cared-for head of hair. The very first thing they'd been ordered to do when the Freedom's Fire lifted off Aventine en route for Caelian was to shave their heads and body hair. Of all the unpleasant aspects of their brief time here, that was the one she still couldn't get used to.

  But it wasn't like there was any choice in the matter. Caelian's rich and aggressive plant life attacked anything with even a trace of
organic, carbon-bearing material in it, the skin of living beings the only exception to that rule. And much as she missed her hair Jody had no wish to wake up every morning with her body covered by little green spores.

  In and of themselves, the spores wouldn't have been so bad. They loved to settle on and eat the natural fibers and synthetics that made up most clothing, but that was a slow process and would hardly leave a person running home from the shops clutching rags to her chest, despite the way her father had made it sound.

  The problem was that vigorous Caelian plants attracted voracious Caelian animals. The first to come were always the insects, from buzzics to flycrawlers all the way up to some that Jody hadn't seen yet but was told could be mistaken for small birds. The insects would start eating the plants, inevitably moth-chewing some of the clothing material in the process, and eventually a person would be running home covered in nothing but rags and insects.

  But it got worse. Brushed-off insects attracted carrion eaters, plants and animals both, which attracted larger animals, which attracted still larger animals, which finally attracted the massive, tiger-sized predators who could take on human-sized prey without even blinking.

  It was how all planetary ecologies worked, of course. The problem was that on Caelian it worked faster and more violently than on Aventine or any other world humanity had run into over the centuries.

  Worse yet, even by Caelian's own harsh standards, the ecology seemed to work harder and faster against humans than against its own members. It was as if the planet itself resented the newcomers who had pushed their way into its private biological war and had mustered all its combined forces in an effort to force them off.

  "But at the same time odor can't be the whole story," Freylan went on into Jody's musings, "because artificial odor applications don't do any good, or at least nothing has that's been tried. It has to be some combination of things no one's figured out yet."

  "Well, I hope someone does so soon," Paul said, making a face as he worked his shoulders against his tunic. "I don't mind mineral-based houses and furniture, but this clothing is about as uncomfortable as anything I've ever worn in my life."

  "I've heard there are supposed to be a couple of companies on Aventine that are working on alternatives," Freylan said. "But with a potential customer base of less than five thousand, I doubt they're working very hard."

  Geoff poked his head around the doorway. "We going to talk all morning, or are we going to check on the trap?" he asked crossly. "Come on, come on."

  "We're ready," Paul said, meeting the younger man's irritation with the steadfast calm Jody had found annoying when she was growing up and had only gradually learned to admire.

  "Ready," Jody confirmed, giving her tunic one last sweep of the razor and slipping it on.

  "I'll grab my pack and go get the aircar started," Freylan volunteered, slipping a bit gingerly past Geoff and heading for the door.

  "I'll go with you," Paul said, and followed him out.

  Geoff looked at Jody, and she could see him wondering if she was going to drag them back to the conversation the others' arrival had interrupted. But Jody's anger had cooled to mere annoyance. She simply returned his gaze in silence, and after a moment he nodded. "Okay, then," he said with forced briskness. "Let's go see if we've finally got ourselves a gigger."

  "Yes, let's." Jody gestured toward the door. "After you."

  * * *

  The first colonists on Caelian, knowing from the assessment teams the kind of aggressive ecology they were up against, had envisioned a series of small towns encircled by high walls to protect against the larger predators, with the settlements connected by a network of roads made by clearing, sterilizing, and melt-paving wide pathways through the forest.

  It hadn't worked out that way. The ceramic walls had worked for a few months, but eventually the stubborn airborne spores had managed to get a foothold, and once that happened the rest inevitably followed. Stronghold's replacement wall, this one not of ceramic but stainless steel, worked better, but even with periodic scraping its surface had become badly pitted.

  The roads hadn't worked at all. The effects of standard burning lasted a few days at the most, and even sterilizing burns were only good for a few weeks at a time. The fifty-meter-wide clear zone outside Stronghold's wall, plus the larger rectangle adjoining it to the south that acted as the planet's spaceport landing area, were cleared every two weeks. Ground vehicles were still of some use inside Caelian's six remaining towns, but outside those walls aircars were the only practical means of transportation.

  The forest beyond Stronghold's clear zone was as teeming with life as anywhere else on the planet, and in theory the team could have worked their traps right there. But Geoff and Freylan had wanted to get a little farther from any effects of human civilization, miniscule though those effects might be, and had opted instead for a hillside about five kilometers northwest of the main gate.

  The four of them had spent their first day on Caelian burning off a small section of ground to serve as a landing pad for their rented aircar. Six days later they'd repeated the process. Now, only four days after that, not only had most of the grasses come back, but several small bushes had taken root as well. Jody winced at the teeth-tingling screech of thorns against metal as Geoff set them down on the pad, wondering how much of a bite the fresh scratches were going to take out of the rental's damage deposit.

  But at least they'd finally nailed a gigger. As Geoff shut down the aircar's engine, she could hear the small predator's outraged snarling a dozen meters away.

  "Sounds like we've got one," Freylan said with a mixture of relief and excitement as he started to open his door.

  And stopped as Paul touched his shoulder. "My turn to go out first," the older man said mildly.

  "Right," Freylan said, his voice muffled with embarrassment.

  Mentally, Jody shook her head. Back on Aventine, when she'd first been brought aboard the project, she'd noticed Freylan's tendency to get so focused on some part of his work that he totally forgot where he was.

  In Capitalia, that could be an embarrassment. On Caelian, it could get you killed.

  Paul climbed out of his side of the aircar, closing the door behind him, and for a minute he stood with his back to the vehicle, his head moving slowly back and forth as his enhanced vision and hearing scoped out the section of forest closest to them. Jody held her breath, wondering which variety of Caelian's fauna would decide to check out the intruders this time. The forest had gone quiet, almost as if in anticipation of the drama about to take place . . .

  Abruptly, Paul leaned over, brought his left leg up, and fired a burst from his antiarmor laser into a stand of bushes behind the aircar. There was a piercing scream, and with a crackle of broken branches a screech tiger half leaped, half fell into view between two of the bushes. Paul gave the area another slow sweep, then gestured the all clear.

  "Man, those things are big," Geoff muttered, his eyes on the dead screech tiger as he climbed gingerly out of the car.

  "Amazingly quiet, too," Paul agreed. "Especially considering their size. I didn't even know it was coming toward us until I picked up its infrared signature."

  "I sure hope we find some kind of breakthrough before we have to go that far up the food chain," Freylan said feelingly as he looked at the screech tiger. "I really don't want to have to take blood and tissue samples from a live one of those."

  "A hearty amen to that," Jody agreed, tearing her eyes away from the dead predator and looking around. The usual midmorning lull in the wind was right on schedule, and the still air around her seemed to press in with a sense of watchful foreboding. "Let's grab the gigger and get out of here before the scavengers pick up the scent."

  Their animal trap was simplicity itself, consisting of a rectangular mesh box set up with its floor and sides bunched together and held loosely at ground level beneath a layer of leaves and over a deep hole dug in the ground. The minute an animal put its weight on the mesh, the
floor was designed to collapse, dropping the animal into the newly formed box while a spring-loaded lid swung over from concealment to seal off the top. Jody's contribution to the contraption had been the set of cylindrical free-spinning tubes around each of the mesh's main wires, which were designed to send the captured animal's legs straight through to hang uselessly in midair in the hole instead of leaving them inside the box proper where the animal could make full use of its claws to try to escape.

  The trap had worked perfectly on the team's first two captures, and as Jody reached the hole and peered down through the mesh top she saw that they were now three for three. The gigger was lying on its belly inside the box, rocking back and forth as it tried to get some kind of purchase with its feet, jabbing uselessly at the sides with the pair of hollow mouth tusks it used to impale and then suck the blood from its victims.

  "Ugly little beasts, aren't they?" Geoff commented as he squatted down and started brushing the leaves from the two carrying bars that ran through the top of the cage. "Freylan, you want to get the other end?"

  "Hold it," Paul said sharply. "Everyone be quiet."

  Jody froze, the other two following suit. In the unmoving air the forest around her was alive with quiet sounds, muted chirps and soft buzzings. She strained her ears, wondering anxiously just how big the predator was that her father had heard sneaking up on them.

  And then, somewhere in the distance, she heard a rumbling roar. Not the roar of any of Caelian's predators, but the roar of approaching aircraft. Big aircraft. She turned toward her father, frowning, as the sound rapidly intensified.

  And suddenly, a pair of large ships shot past to the south, their upper sides visible for just an instant above the trees. The roar cut off suddenly--

  "Alert!" Governor Uy's voice crackled abruptly from their aircar's comm. "All Caelians! Troft gunships have landed at Stronghold. We are under--"