The Demons at Rainbow Bridge

Once the principles of subverting the speed limit of light are discovered, usually by accident and with nobody really believing it, the age of a people’s interstellar expansion and colonization begins and starts moving so rapidly that vast changes take place at lightning speed.

On Earth, it had been a team of scientists from several western nations working on a particle physics project having nothing at all to do with space travel who stumbled on it at a government lab in California. By the time they realized what they had, and the government also realized what it had, part of the cat was already out of the bag. By the time it was funded on even a limited basis, nine other nations had stolen the process. In fact, the only reason it was finally fully funded and supported by the nations that discovered it was because at least three other nations had practical ships built first. In fact, Earth came very close to having the nuclear war it had dreaded over who owned what.

Fortunately, by that point, several international blocs’ initial probes had established a surprising number of interesting and potentially habitable worlds out there. In full egocentric arrogance, a treaty was finally hammered out dividing the galaxy, of all things, into spheres of influence, with all preexisting claims recognized where they were. The fact that once you made the initial horrendous investment to create the machines and materiel that could build the machines and fuels required, interstellar travel proved cheaper per trip than interplanetary travel, also had something to do with it.

Within only a century after the first ships had left Earth, humanity had over a hundred solar systems within its grasp, although, to be sure, most of them were totally worthless and held on to only for pride, speculation, or because they were between two places worth going to. It was an impressive array nonetheless. During that period, the first extraterrestrial life forms were discovered, and whole massive new fields of extraterrestrial study opened up. No other sentient races were discovered in this period, but hope springs eternal, and all sides had no doubt that sooner or later their bloc would be the first to meet a truly alien race and convert it to their way.

One bloc included the United States, Canada, and most of western Europe except the French, who made an ingenious deal with some of the major Latin American nations and a few of the better-off African nations to form their own Latin bloc. The Japanese, refusing to sign on as junior partners in the West’s coalition, formed a full partnership with China that put politics on the back burner and formed another bloc, while the Russians formed an eclectic bloc that included not only their usual worldwide allies and client states but also India, desperate, like China, to find new worlds for an impossibly large population.

All of them competed with each other in the usual historical ways, and all established colonies among the relatively near stars of the spiral arm which Earth was a part of. Certainly there were strains, but there was also a lot of optimism that this was going to go on forever.

It took almost two hundred years of expansion before humanity met its first sentient nonhuman races, and when it did, it had a shock. When a scout for the Exchange first discovered a Western bloc colonial world, it didn’t exactly send greetings.

Instead it claimed the colony as property of the Exchange and gave orders on just what to do next.

The ancient and sophisticated empire that discovered Earth’s colonies had been through this many times before. Reports indicated that the discovered world was a mere colony, and relatively new at that, and that there were a lot of people colonizing worlds out there.

Almost as soon as word spread through the Exchange of this new race, spies from both the Mycohl and Mizlaplan Empires sent the same details and coordinates to their own masters, who quickly tried to guess the origins of this new race and its obvious pattern of colonial spread. A rush was on once more, but this time three old and wily empires were in a race to gobble up as much of humanity as possible.

Even facing a common threat, humanity only reluctantly joined forces, and when they did, they discovered that their foe was massive, at least a few thousand years more practiced at this sort of thing, and that there wasn’t much they could do about it. Later, historians would note that the greatest cost to humanity hadn’t been the loss of its autonomy but the crushing of racial ego. In just a bit over two thousand years humans had gone from feeling themselves the center of and model for creation to accepting the role of relatively insignificant subjects of a universe far more vast and complex than they had allowed themselves to imagine.

The bulk of the Western bloc and also most of its affiliated Latin bloc had gone under the Exchange simply because their world had been discovered by an Exchange scout. The Sino-Japanese bloc had fallen mostly to the Mizlaplan, while the Soviet-led bloc went to the Mycohl. The fall was in some cases nasty but quite swift and absolute. The Exchange had over a hundred and forty "member" races; the Mycohl had almost that many, and the Mizlaplan slightly more. They had been at this a very long time.

In the end, some adjustments were made for the sake of practicality among the three conquering powers, but the basic divisions of humanity remained. In the freewheeling Exchange, the Western bloc and Latin bloc remnants settled in quite well into a system that allowed them to remain very much as they were, although a minority and subject people. The Mycohl and the Mizlaplan probably hated each other more than either one hated the Exchange, but both were united in insisting that new subject peoples were to be "culturally unified" with the rest of their empires. The Exchange conquered territory and live bodies; the Mycohl and the Mizlaplan wanted the minds and souls as well.

Within a very few generations, humanity had. become more divided than it ever was on Earth, groups having more in common with fellow members of their empires who were spawned by different and bizarre evolutionary paths than with those with whom they were racially linked in the other empires.

Still, reduced to minority status, a small group within a huge empire, all three masses of humanity did recognize that there was only one way back to status and power within the terms of their new cultures. As the primitive, junior members of their empires, they bred like rabbits in a trio of multiracial ancient cultures that by this point bred rather slowly and in tightly controlled fashion. This worked best in closed, somewhat unitary cultures, where numbers meant strength and power and influence. The Mizlaplan had gotten the Chinese and the Mycohl had gotten the Indians, both large population groups, and could claim more positions, more room, and more worlds for themselves quickly.

The Exchange had gotten the Latins, and allowed them to maintain local control over the worlds they had colonized. But access to wealth and power came harder in a society where new worlds were not distributed but sold in the marketplace, and where everything you needed had to be paid for with something somebody else wanted to buy. In the capitalist empire of the Exchange, ironically, humanity had fared the worst, and was still very much a junior partner.

The heart of the Empire was the Exchange itself, the great tubular building in the heart of the capital city deep within the Empire. Inside, virtually anything within the basic limitations of the system could be bought or sold.

One great quartzlike structure contained the commodities brokerage, where resources and futures could be bought and sold. Another was strictly a shares exchange, wherein one could buy, sell, and trade bits and pieces of the millions of companies that ran much of the empire’s vast economy. There were other, smaller, more specialized brokerages as well, but the heart of the Exchange and its physical center was the grand Hall of Worlds.

Here, exploration corporations, with vast numbers of scouts always searching the still unexplored reaches of the galaxy, took the findings of their far-flung searchers and placed not companies, not resources, but whole worlds, even whole solar systems, on the block. Buyers ranged from racial groups needing worlds to expand upon, to speculators betting on new finds, to interest groups looking to prove their own ideas of social or political systems by establishing colonies based on their particular values.

The Exchange really didn’t care what you did on your own worlds, or how, or why, so long as you obeyed its few basic rules, recognized its extraterrestrial sovereignty, and had no truck with the Mycohl or the Mizlaplan except through the Exchange itself. But from these simple rules came a surprising level of control. The Exchange alone controlled an independent and mostly cymol and robotic interstellar military system; the Exchange alone settled disputes between companies or worlds that could not be settled between the principals. The Exchange alone controlled the interplanetary purse strings through its banks and trading houses. And the Exchange alone controlled the flow of discovery through its control of export patents and enforcements.

It also maintained a public consular corps on every world in the Empire to provide eyes and ears for the unseen Guardians, and a very private and very secret group known as the Special Corps, whose job it was to watch the watchers, find out what wasn’t very public, and to find out what the Mycohl and Mizlaplan might be up to.

The humans who had attained some wealth and power within the Empire had done so by voluntarily serving in the consular, military, or Special Corps with distinction. They tended to be the best of their people, but, in a cutthroat society, just what they were best at was the subject of some argument.

Modra Stryke was one of the very few people who tended to look back on a nightmarish descent into hell with wistful nostalgia.

It had been a typical Exploiter Team contract: a new world discovered and purchased on speculation by an agricultural combine who wanted to know if their pig in a poke had reasonable potential as a new source of revenue.

The combine was the kind of employer only a Team like Lankur and Stryke would take—one that would only pay off if they found something there and if the usual nasty surprises and cost estimates weren’t outrageous.

Not that the contract didn’t call for an ironclad payment no matter what; it was just that these kinds of jobs came with only enough front money to mount an expedition, and if you didn’t come up with anything of value, you’d find that the corporation that hired you had all the substance of a soap bubble and would vanish just as fast. It was what First Teams always faced, and why only small private companies like theirs did First Team work. Strike it rich for an employer a few times and you’d have enough of a bankroll to establish yourself as a real company, with lots of ships and crews and resources, and forget your worries. The trick was to stay alive, pay the bills, and cover expenses until you did.

Few did.

Modra Stryke was a tall, attractive redhead with a strong face and voice and with too strong a romantic streak at twenty-four to "get into the baby business," as she referred to it. Having inherited a little money from a doting uncle who’d been an Exchange agent and had parlayed those connections into a small commodities trading company, she’d rejected the usual path of getting married and using the family business as a solid basis. It was too dull, too mundane, and too dead-ended for somebody like her, particularly at her age.

Instead she’d sold the business, left her native Caledon, and come to the capital of the Empire with dreams of romantic adventure and untold wealth still buzzing around her head from all the old stories she’d heard.

She hadn’t been in the city three days when the Widowmaker had limped into port, barely functioning, its crew half dead and completely dead broke, a last-gasp First Team that had run out its options. She’d gone down to see the ship just out of curiosity, and the same piece of broken-down junk that the spaceport yard had decided was fit only for scrap looked to her like the most amazing and romantic thing she’d ever seen.

And there was big, burly Tris Lankur, with full beard and curly black hair and flashing eyes, sparring with the dockmaster and threatening to fight off all comers if they tried to take his ship for back fees. He looked and acted exactly the part of the romantic spacefaring adventurer in all those stories and vidplays, and his crew, a motley batch of nonhuman creations with the same kind of madness in them, had been the perfect supporting cast. Modra had money but needed experience and a way in; they had, by the looks of them, plenty of experience but, between them, the crew of the Widowmaker didn’t have cab fare. Lankur had taken one look at the tall, shapely redhead, listened to her offer, balked at the idea of taking her along, and finally made the deal.

She remembered it like it was yesterday, but it was actually nearly five years ago.

In that five years, taking First Team assignments, looking for the big one, she’d had the kinds of adventures that, while not at all the glamorous sort of things the glorified fictional versions promised, were certainly exciting, introducing her all too soon to the wonders of Exchange medical science. She’d repaired just about every sort of damage short of death, giving her all the experience she ever wanted or needed, but still she’d had very few jobs that really paid off, and none that paid off so great that they didn’t have to do it anymore.

And, finally, it had been down to one last mission, pay off or forget it, on a world poetically named 2KBZ465W. A world that almost literally finished their saga . . .

Beautiful worlds were often like beautiful people—all bloody and nasty-looking when you got under their skins.

Modra Stryke always hated to be first in on a new planet; first in often meant the first to die.

This place was so new they didn’t even have a name for it yet, not officially, although already the forward Exploiter Team had a lot of names for it, none suitable for children.

No matter how good they made the environmental suits, they never had been able to get rid of the smell, she thought glumly. It didn’t take many hours inside one, even with all the so-called filtrations and absorptions put into it, before you could smell your own fear-induced sweat and other body odors you never knew you had. The suits hadn’t been developed for humans, necessarily, although this one was designed to her unique personal form and requirements. In spite of the fact that the dark-blue suit looked rubbery and skintight and left nothing of the wearer’s form to the imagination, it was made of the toughest synthetics ever developed, able to withstand enormous ranges of heat and cold, cushion against most projectiles, even basic flash guns, and keep the wearer comfortable and cozy inside. You could even pee in your pants and some kind of suction would remove the waste, convert it to power, and leave you dry. She could attest to its efficiency there; she’d once been stuck in her suit for three days. It neatly got rid of and used everything—but it couldn’t get rid of the smell.

Attached to the suit was a lightweight helmet made out of a more rigid form of the same stuff. You hardly knew you had it on, but it could provide water and something that at least passed for food for several days.

She gave a mental command and instantly the dark, dank swamp she was trudging through changed from a place of darkness and foreboding into a riot of brilliant colors. She looked around but decided that infrared was impractical here, where even the water seemed alive, and switched it off again.

"Tris? Where you at?" she called nervously, hoping her heavy breathing wouldn’t betray her fear. Even now, after all this time, she still felt the amateur of the team, and that she was always under examination to see if she would fail.

"Forty meters to your left," Tris Lankur’s voice came back to her, sounding far more distant than that. "Closing on I.P. Watch those long vines with the thick tendrils. They appear to have minds of their own and are looking for free samples."

She nodded, although she couldn’t see the vines or him. "I’ve already had to teach a few lessons. This place looks like midnight in Hell."

"I think it has a certain charm, myself," came a third voice, hollow-sounding, guttural, almost like someone using belches to speak. "My ancestral world probably looked no different except in the details."

"Yeah, well, that’s why I never accept your invitations to visit your home world," she responded sarcastically.

"And I thought it was because you feared my intentions," the strange voice retorted. Biologically, the pair had about as much in common as they did with these trees.

"Where are you, Durquist? Still in the trees?" she called back.

"About twenty meters up and about fifty to your right," the creature responded. "The ecosystem of this world is fascinating. There is a veritable garden of totally different plants growing off the tops of these giant weeds."

That, in fact, was the trouble. The place looked fairly decent from the air, with a broad, meadowlike matting of light brown moss and lichen providing a surface through which brilliant, bright, and colorful flowers grew. From that vantage point the place was beautiful, which was why somebody had been interested in it.

In truth, it hadn’t taken them long to discover that the world’s beauty was literally skin-deep, its sun-drenched exterior a thin veneer covering this hell beneath, like an animal’s skin covering the ugliness of the body’s interior. The carpet soaked up rain like a sponge and slowly released the bulk of it below, causing a steady mist and drizzle that eventually collected on the swampy real surface, watering the huge internal plants that supported the outer layer. The upper-level plants also appeared to have some form of photosynthesis, but what fed the big plants in such quantity that they could grow tall and thick enough to support an entire outer layer hadn’t yet been discovered. That was one of their jobs.

The only way to start in on a new world, after you’d poked, probed, measured, and sent robots down to see what was there, was to pick a spot that looked interesting, go down, and see for yourself. There was a final question before heavily investing in a place that had to be answered, and bitter experience had shown that ultimately it could only be answered by one method.

The place has some potential. Now, before we go further, you all go on down there and see what tries to kill you.

It was a hell of a way to make a living, but it paid well, if you lived to enjoy it. Leader parties commanded the best short-term high-risk pay in the business, partly because experience had shown that they were the best—and most cost-effective—way to find out the worst quickly. The crew of the Widowmaker didn’t like to take this sort of work—nobody did—but coming off two flat-out busts where the purchasers of worlds had gone bankrupt before paying anybody off, they needed a real infusion of cash or there wasn’t going to be any ship, any team, or any job. Exploiters who lost their ships by going broke weren’t exactly in demand by other teams, either. Everything they had was tied up in their ship and equipment; repossession meant more than ruin, it meant starvation in the harsh domain of the Exchange.

"Only an idiot would think of buying a place like this," Hama Kredner’s high-pitched Derfur voice chimed in. "An idiot or a Durquist, anyway."

"What’s your position, Kredner?" Tris Lankur asked, slowing making his way through the muck and trying to figure out a route between the dense black trunks. They didn’t dare cut through—not with that canopy up there.

"Twenty meters to I.P. north of you. I should be directly opposite you with the I.P. in the middle."

"I’m hung up for a good route forward," Lankur warned. "Don’t go any further in until I reach an equal position. Any visibility?"

"I’ve got the I.P. beacon registering loud and clear but I can’t see a bloody damned thing in this crap. Got fungus hanging all over the place like a curtain. I bet this place stinks to any race known to any civilization."

"Oof!"

"Tris? What happened?" Modra called out, climbing up onto a huge angled trunk. She tried to squeeze through an opening that reason told her was impossibly small, but that the suit’s computer said just might be big enough.

"I’m all right," he responded. "Tripped and fell on my face in the mud is all. This stuff is slimy as hell. Those damned roach-sized amoeboids or whatever they are that live in this crud are all over my suit and trying to burrow their way through. I may need a moment to burn them off."

"Take it easy," Modra cautioned him, and, by extension, everyone. "No need to rush this."

Tris Lankur was covered with the things, which experience had already shown couldn’t be simply washed or brushed off. The only way to get rid of them was to divert power and feed a small charge through the exterior of the suit. It didn’t kill them, but they tended to let go and get away fast from the burning sensation.

Modra looked to her left and saw a faint blue glow, her exterior sensors registering a sharp crackling sound. "I see you. Fry them little bastards!"

"That got ’em!" he announced with a note of triumph. "They’re still splashing and making for the bottom to cool off the hotfoot!" He sighed. "You know, they say that in ancient days the real estate business was very peaceful and relaxing."

"Appraising a planet is a bit more complex than appraising a house," the Durquist noted matter-of-factly, missing the irony.

She let it pass. "Durquist—can you make all our beacons?"

"I have you and Tris in view; Hama I cannot see. Must be something in the way."

"I’m here," the Durfur responded. "I’m stopped, but I wonder if that’s such a good idea. I’m getting something, feeling something real bad. It’s all around me, somehow. Like there’s something here, so close I can almost smell it, but I can’t put my finger on it."

Modra was an empath, able to sense emotions and sometimes manipulate them. The early surveys of this world had found nothing on any of the known telepathic bands beyond the most primitive animal life, but empaths read a different sort of band, one that covered a broader range than telepathy. Modra had insisted that there were intense pockets of emotion on a primal but very nasty level throughout this swamp. Alien life took many forms, and often did not have much in common with the ones they knew. Even thought, if there was any thought, could take unknown forms, although there tended to be a narrow set of bands for carbon-based life and another equally well-defined set for silicon-based, the only two higher forms of life known. But no telepath could tune into an intelligence as low level as a beehive; an empath, however, could read the hive’s agitation and growing rage.

"Uh-oh," the Durquist commented sourly. "Prepare to be defecated upon by rotten fruit."

There was a sudden series of crackling noises high above, and then several small objects fell, caroming off one branch and another, bouncing off spongy moss, on their way to the bottom. The pretty flowering plants that lived on the carpet above bore fruit, and every once in a while that fruit would get too heavy and break off. They had measured the falling fruit from afar but had not been right under it before.

"Almost got me," the Durquist reported. "It isn’t just one that lets loose. When a big one goes, it takes a lot more with it."

"You’re telling me!" Hama exclaimed. "They’re falling all around me! I—by the Three Gods of Sumura! The water! The—ackh!" The last wasn’t just on the radio band but was a panicked telepathic burst so strong that all had the sense of confusion, fear, and outright horror in their heads before they even heard the words. Yet no pictures of what was attacking the telepath came through. Hama had lost control.

"Hama!" Lankur cried out. "Stay there! We’re coming!"

There was a snapping and crackling on the line, and Hama’s voice was broken and strained. "No! No! Stay back! Get out of the water! The water! It’s—"

"Hama!" screamed Modra Stryke.

Modra looked around and saw the water begin to move near her, as if it somehow had congealed into something alive. Damn it, it was alive, no longer frothy but suddenly gelatinous as if something were underneath. She didn’t waste any time; she jumped for the nearest large trunk junction and attempted to climb to the branches, three or four meters above the water.

Behind her the water itself seemed to form into a giant waving column, like some sort of tentacle, and reached out for her. It was translucent, pulpy, yet it had definite structure and form, and—my God—it was huge!

It rose up as if to grab her, to pull her down and into the muck, and she instantly switched suit power to external. The tentacle swiped at her boot, there was a crackling of blue energy, and it recoiled. It tried again, and again, seeming to add whatever mass it needed from the water, and each time it got a shock and withdrew. After a number of times it hesitated, as if finally learning, but it continued to circle around her below. Somehow, although it didn’t seem possible, the organism knew just where she was.

She took advantage of the pause to climb as high as she could, but at about eight meters up the trunks grew together and twisted, and she could go no higher.

She watched, aware that her helmet lamp was slightly dimmed even now, then drew the pistol attached by its cord to her suit, and when the thing tried again she fired straight at it. A beam of blue-white light went out and caught the top of the tentacle, bathing it in an eerie white-hot glow, and when the glow faded, the top meter of the thing was gone with it.

But there was no blood, no oozing of ichor, just an irregular mass at the end of the tentacle where the disintegration had ceased.

And, slowly, as she watched, the gelatinous mass drew more substance, apparently from the surrounding waters. She could see the tentacle bulge, then the injured top began to swell, and she watched as it reformed the tentacle she’d just blown off as if nothing had been done to it!

"Durquist! Tris! Hama! Where the hell are you?" she shouted, forgetting her tough-as-nails act and starting to panic a little.

There was a crackling and popping in the radio, but she heard the Durquist say, "I saw your shot! Hang . . . Coming . . ."

There was a sudden horrible screech and squeal on the intercom that almost blew out her eardrums. She instantly tuned to another frequency, then another, not getting much improvement. The noise was far too loud to bear for more than a moment; she had to will the intercom off.

The sudden blessed silence made her relax for a second, and the thing in the water seemed to sense that and swelled up for another attack. By now there were several other shapes in the water, tentacles growing upward like the first. She barely missed getting grabbed and pulled down, then started sweeping, horizontal motions with the pistol, cutting off rather than disintegrating the tips. There was a lot of splashing as long, curling tendrils dropped into the water, but then her light showed her a sight that froze her blood.

The tendrils seemed to gather themselves up, then swim, snakelike, to the nearest large tentacle and merge with it, followed by the bulging and the slow rise to the top once again.

Son of a bitch! You can’t kill these things! she thought to herself. If the little ones could do that, what was to stop the bigger ones from merging, growing into tentacles forty, fifty, even sixty meters high? Those suckers could reach the surface if they had to!

If, that was, they were smart enough to realize it.

She tried the radio again, but there were still the unbearable screeches and she quickly shut it back off. Somebody’s suit, probably Hama’s, was penetrated; energy was leaking out all over the place and the radio had been open when it happened. She couldn’t keep it on, couldn’t hope to get through that screech, but now the silence seemed at least equally awful and she suddenly felt very, very alone.

Now she knew why the old-timers wouldn’t go out on an appraisal without a telepath.

She looked around in the gloom. The tentacles were holding off for the moment, as if massing for a new attack with more caution—although they couldn’t be killed, the gun obviously stung—but she knew it was only a matter of timer. She looked around, trying to figure out if she could somehow move, force the tentacles to chase her from down there.

They didn’t appear to be very bright, just single-minded, or they would have had her by now. The falling fruit had stirred them up, maybe even fed them, and they wouldn’t go back to rest or whatever state they usually were in until they’d eaten everything in sight that might possibly be edible. They didn’t seem to have muscles, but they sure as hell had some strength. If one got her head and the other her feet and pulled and twisted in opposite directions, she’d be cracked like a nut.

Maybe that was what had happened to Hama. Taken by surprise, grabbed by several of these things, which twisted and broke his suit seals before he had known what was happening. The energy discharge would keep them away from his body for a while, which didn’t help matters much since they were then free to slither over toward her. It was probable that he wasn’t even good to eat.

Another volley, another repeat of the cutting off, the slithering together, the melding, the rising up and rebuilding. Why hadn’t they attacked before? Why had they waited? And why hadn’t Hama been able to detect them long before this? It didn’t make any sense at all.

She wondered again if she should move—and if she could. The Durquist was still high up in the trees and not under immediate attack; the creatures wouldn’t know about him. Trouble was, the last message from the Durquist had reported seeing her shots, so that meant staying here or risk losing the only hope of short-term rescue. On the other hand if the Durquist came down here, they’d go after him too. A Durquist had limited mobility in that suit, but couldn’t breathe this shit any more than the rest of them could.

And what if it wasn’t her shots the Durquist had seen? What if he’d seen the discharges from Hama’s suit or maybe Tris firing?

She checked her energy levels. Fine for now, but this couldn’t go on forever. Get away first; later she could find the others.

Maybe.

If the energy pack lasted, and if the suit beacon wasn’t drowned out by the interference, they might find her.

There wasn’t any clear-cut way out or up from this point, and she didn’t dare go down. Damn! Looked like a hundred of them down there now, and more energy used with each swath she cut. Maybe there was a better use for those shots. . . .

She set her pistol to its thinnest cutting beam and fired to her side, carving out a small and jagged, but possibly useful, series of handholds and footholds in the trunks. They proved pretty damned solid, as she’d guessed; they could hardly be mostly water or pulp and hold up that huge canopy.

Maybe, just maybe, they were enough to get across on.

She let the pistol recharge to full, then gave a particularly low cut to the tentacle forest, knowing she had maybe five or six minutes before they reformed. She eyed her steps, and made for the first cut, then the second. She would have to descend a bit in a few more meters to get around, but by then she’d have a near wall of trunks between her and the main body of tentacles. She had no doubt that they could flow around or under or whatever, but that would take more intelligence than they had so far exhibited. If she could fake them out, get over there quickly, they might lose her. It was worth a try, anyway.

She fired another thin cutting beam and almost at the same time made her move, going down, through, and around, then climbing as quickly as possible wherever the possibility presented itself. Finally she stopped and looked down. The sound of her own hard breathing was the only sound around. There didn’t seem to be any activity at all; in the murky gloom of the canopy, illuminated only by her helmet optics, she saw only peaceful swamp.

She half expected a giant tentacle to suddenly rise up and grab her, but after a little while she realized that, perhaps, at least for this short time, she’d made it.

Yeah, she’d made it—so hip, hip, hooray! Now she was only stuck here in the middle of nowhere without communications, waiting until something set the things off again.

Think, Modra! Think! She forced herself to be calm, got her breathing regular, took a drink of water, and tried to figure out what to do next. Her beacon was on, so maybe the Durquist could home in on her when things settled down. Now, that was a thought. . . . She switched to scan mode and tried to see if there were any other beacons in the area. Yes! For a moment hope soared, but then the small viewer against the helmet began to show more plots, and more—tons and tons of beacons. Damn it! Hama’s all-frequency overload was tromping on the beacons as well, creating hundreds of ghost images. So much for that idea.

There was nothing for it but to try and make her way back to the shuttle. She doubted that the tentacles could do much to it, and it was in one of those holes in the canopy that the life below seemed to avoid. But there were fruit-falls all over this damned place. They’d been lucky, or maybe unlucky, to come in this far without one to trigger that—whatever it was. They’d come in overland, in the swamp, too. Doing it via the trees might not even be possible.

What the hell were those tentacle things, anyway? It was almost as if the water had come alive, yet the water was water—they’d tested that and a lot more.

With a sudden shock she realized that they weren’t creatures at all, or at least not creatures in the standard sense of the word. Those bug-sized slimy slugs—they covered the swamp, living just under the surface. Somehow, she realized, they had to be the creatures—that something, maybe a chemical signal, was triggered in the water when the goodies from above hit. But why did they form new units? Not to eat fruit, surely. To grab things, maybe larger things—now there was a cheery thought!—or, perhaps, simply to move. Maybe they battled each other as colonies for the food, the swamp floor a constant battleground for what was needed to survive.

It didn’t matter. Somebody might do something to this world and make it reasonable, but it would be damned expensive to do, and the ecosystem was odd enough anyway that the university types would probably put some kind of hold on it until they could determine the potential for this kind of life form. This one just wasn’t going to pan out for them, and that meant deep, deep shit.

Of course, not as deep as the immediate problem, which was getting the hell out of here.

Idly she considered making some kind of armor or shield out of the trees. Clearly they couldn’t eat the trees, and if the activation of a colony was chemical, they might not even be aware of her.

No, silly idea. No saws, no woodworking shop handy.

She looked around and saw, not far off, occasional flashes of varicolored energy lighting up the dark swamp like some kind of fancy light show. There was the real problem! If she could make it over there, shoot Hama’s body, disintegrate it, damn it all, no matter how hard that was to do to a comrade and friend, she’d also get that radio. And with the radio gone, the interference would be gone. Her own radio and locator beacon would then work, and, of course, the I.P. was still sounding off as well.

She had no choice. While it was calm, before more fruit rained from above, she had to silence that noise.

She made her way cautiously toward the glow, which was intermittent but more than enough for the suit scanners to detect. Anything powerful enough to overload all radio frequencies and the beacons as well wasn’t going to just vanish.

When she finally made it, it was an ugly sight. The tentacles had ripped the little Durfur almost to shreds, cracking both suit and body in a number of places, then seeping in. The half-eaten corpse was twisted and broken, crawling with those tiny things that could so easily combine to kill.

The sight sickened, enraged, and frightened her. Almost without thinking, she whipped out the pistol, set it to full charge, and began frying the scene. The slug-covered body shivered as the beam hit and enveloped it, and smoke from the burning of remaining hair and flesh as well as frying slugs rose up. She kept at it, steady as a rock, and much of Hama’s remains did go up, but not enough, not enough. The suit material was still protecting the interior, including the equipment. Damn it! The pistol didn’t have enough power at this range!

As the small warning of power drain began flashing and sounding, she suddenly sensed movement near her and whirled, her finger still on the trigger. At the exact moment the beam came to bear on the intruder, it cut off.

Tris Lankur climbed right next to her and touched helmets with her. The helmets were small, almost form-fitting, the visor shielding the eyes and allowing for mental control of the various screen displays. If all else failed, the helmet contact provided a very weak low-power communication.

"Good thing we bought the pistols with the safeties," he noted, his voice sounding distant and tinny but so very welcome. "Otherwise you’d have fried me, too."

Each suit’s code was programmed into the logic of all other suits; that made it impossible to fire on one of your own team, even by accident. The only reason her suit had allowed her to fire at poor Hama’s body was because the suit break and monitors showed that the team member was dead.

She practically fell into Tris’s arms. "My God! I thought I was the only one left alive!"

"I was having my doubts, too," he admitted, sounding his usual calm and strong self. In all these years, she’d known him to be sarcastic, flip, calm, cool, and collected, but never did he seem frightened or out of his element. He was the bedrock of the company, and of her.

"I was trying to fry that damned power supply," she told him.

"It’s under water," he responded. "I had the same idea, but the back of his suit’s obviously intact and shielding the pack. How much power do you have left?"

She checked. "Not much. Ten per cent, no more. I’ve had to use a lot."

"Uh. Okay, I’m reading forty-four per cent, so give me your plug and I’ll transfer some. Then we’ll both hit him full strength at the same time until we’re down to fifteen per cent or that racket stops. Combined, we might have enough power to do it."

She nodded and hooked up, watching her energy gage rise as his fell. When he declined to twenty-seven per cent, he cut it off.

"Okay," he told her, "Don’t miss. Count down from five and then go. Remember to cut off at fifteen per cent. If we haven’t burned through by then, it’s not going to give."

She nodded, took a braced position, aimed, and started only a fraction of a second after he did. In a couple of seconds the two beams converged on the target and stayed on it. Lankur’s presence calmed her, and she made this count. At the fifteen per cent mark they both cut off, then quickly checked the radio. It wasn’t silent, but there was no longer any screech, just hissing and crackling, through which they could hear each other, although not much better than by the helmet touch method.

"Well, we got it, or most of it," he said with satisfaction. He shifted the scan. "Your locator’s on okay, but I don’t get the Durquist at all. Damn! Tran might not be able to pick out the beacon through the canopy." He sighed. "Well, he’d better. Nothing to do now but wait."

The exterior sound monitor suddenly filled with a crackling noise of its own, and her blood ran cold.

"Oh, my God! It’s going to rain fruit again!"

For seven hours they had been trapped high in those giant trees, with declining power, in a world illuminated only by a failing electronic sensor system, intermittently attacked by tentacles rising from the ooze, the rest of the time in silence much more terrible, waiting for that telltale sound of crackling, falling food.

And through it all, Tris Lankur had told dirty jokes and made rude comments about the world and the situation and kept her alive.

Ultimately, though, they had to start shutting down suit systems to the bare minimum and deciding whether or not to waste precious energy taking out a tentacle if it arose. Pretty soon even the air recycling system would give out, and that would be the end of them.

Tris had even been philosophically fatalistic about that.

"I always thought I’d go this way," he told her. "Sorry to have you here as well, but if I have to go, this is better."

"Better?" She looked around at the stinking hellhole. "Better than what?"

"Better than dying in the poverty I was born into. Better than the mud and filth and real emptiness of dying of starvation. Better, or at least more honorable, than being shot by a copper in a getaway after stealing a couple loaves of bread. Better than bein’ just another geek who never even had a chance at this."

The Exchange hadn’t been terribly kind to humanity, just letting it go. Her home world was at least pastoral; few there had much in the way of riches or access to major technology, but nobody starved and you could carve out a decent if simple life. Tris’s home world had been uglier, had gone horribly wrong without the means or contacts to straighten it out, and nobody had cared. She knew that, academically, but she’d never been on any of those kinds of worlds, never really wanted to see starving children with distended bellies and know that her world could produce enough to feed them but didn’t have the cash to transport the food where it was needed.

Sitting there, perched in a tree, all systems failing, her old home, which had seemed so boring and so unromantic, now seemed almost like utopia. She had faced death many times since taking over the Widowmaker company, but never like this, never slow, never in such horror. In all that time they’d had many close calls, but this was the first time they’d ever lost a team member, the first time she’d had to look down upon the body of a friend and comrade and imagine herself there as well. Hama, at least, had gone quickly, not like this.

And for what had he died? For what were they now going to die?

At that moment, any sense of the romance of this job, the thrill and excitement of it, the very appeal of it, died within her. Even if by some miracle they got out of this one, and somehow found the money to keep going, she wasn’t sure now that she could keep going—or even that she wanted to. This one was probably going to get them, but, if not, the next one would, or the next, or the next.

The team, and she along with them, had been crying most of the time about not making the big haul, having rotten luck time after time, but they’d been wrong. They’d been lucky indeed up to now, and now the due bill was at the door. One by one, or all at once, their luck would desert them, they would all wind up just like Hama, just like the vast majority of teams always did. They weren’t different, and they had just about used up their dispensations.

The tentacles were just getting stirred up again, with neither she nor Tris having sufficient energy to shoot them anymore, when suddenly there was a vast, explosive sound above them, followed by a horrible whine, and then, all around them, the darkness fell away and a great shaft of sunlight filled the whole forest region. The light, touching the water and the tentacles, seemed to act like acid on the creatures, who dissolved and writhed and sped away from it.

And then the Widowmaker’s aging, banged-up shuttlecraft descended, going this way and that to avoid the bigger trees, until it hovered very near them.

"I’ve got them! They’re alive, but just barely, from the looks of it," the Durquist’s odd, grumbling, nonhuman voice came to them. The creature, looking somewhat star-shaped in its special suit, emerged from the hatch, jumped to the trees and clung as if born there, then slowly made its way to the two figures. Tris had enough strength left to help the Durquist get Modra in, then allowed himself to be helped inside.

"My apologies for taking so long, although I calculated how much energy reserves you might have had," the creature told them. "We figured that the only place you could be was around Hama’s body, since it gave out a signal that’ll drive instruments crazy for parsecs, but I couldn’t come down and get you until after sunrise. The only way I could deal with those tentacles was to burn them with the sun; otherwise I might just as well have sent you falling into them."

The ride back to the capital was very strange, a mixture of relief and sadness. Tris alone seemed in a relatively good mood, feeling that he’d cheated death yet another time and that this alone was a victory worth drinking to. Modra had been uncharacteristically silent, keeping mostly to herself, and rejecting alcohol or feelgood pills.

"No report until we get paid—cash," Tris told Trannon Kose, the Ybrum who ran the ship and was the theoretical safety backup for the team on the ground. "I don’t want them paying off, reading the report, then stopping payment and going bankrupt before we have ours in our account."

"What we’ll get will cover expenses and repairs and some dock fees," the spindly, trumpet-nosed Ybrum pilot responded, "but with this kind of report we’ll get no more. They’ll pay in specie, or they’ll learn nothing—I’ve been stifled enough by this time to know how the game is played. A few intimations that we get ours now or the report gets left in somebody else’s hopper does wonders. But unless we get another job, it won’t be enough to do more than maintain us."

"How long?"

"A month. Two tops. Depends on what I can sneak out of their offices with."

Tris Lankur sighed. "Okay, we’ve been down this far before. With that much time I can find something to keep us going."

Modra stared at him grimly. "Another one like this? A First Team job? I don’t think I can take another like this."

"Well, unless you have a magic wand for finding us another pot of gold like the one you brought when you signed on," Lankur responded, "we’ll have to. Hey—you know the rules. The only reason the possible payoff’s so good and the only reason it’s a way out for races like ours is because it’s damned dangerous. This one was worse than most, I agree, but we made it!"

"All but Hama," she retorted softly.

He sighed again. "Yeah, well, sooner or later everybody dies. When you grow up knee-deep in bodies, some of them your relatives’, you celebrate the victories. You don’t spend much time mourning your losses, or life wouldn’t be worth living at all."

She smiled at him. "Five years ago talk like that sent a shiver of excitement through me. Now—I—I just don’t know anymore. I do know I need a break. Some time off. Some time to get myself and my head together again."

"I got to admit, when you first joined up none of us thought you would cut it," Tris told her. "You know that. But now you’re tough, Modra. Tough, experienced, and gutsy. It’s in your blood now, and once it’s there, it never lets go."

"Maybe. Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore," she told him truthfully. He still slept soundly; she hadn’t had a single period of more than fitful, nightmare-filled sleep. "I think I want to find out, though. When I get back, I’m going to cable my folks and have them advance me a ticket home. Just for a little while. Just to see if I go nuts back there, stir-crazy from boredom or whatever. Maybe to clear my head and find out just what I do want. I do know I need the trip, though. Even if you’re right, I’m not going to be any good without it."

He shrugged. "Yeah, okay, if that’s what you want—technically, you’re still the boss. What if something comes up while you’re gone, though?"

"Let me know. If I come back, then we’ll both know."

"Fair enough. For me, the last thing I ever want to do is go home."

She had gone home, even though something inside her pulled at her to stay. At the time it seemed the only thing to do.