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  "Well," she said, "Looks like we missed it."

  "Oh dear, "Knave said, still with no idea what was going on.

  "I'll show you to your quarters and we can pick this up tomorrow. Early tomorrow."

  She led him back up one level. The original huge dimensions of the Buzzer corridor had been adapted for humans. One single corridor had been turned into accommodation by adding temporary walls down one side to make sleeping cubicles. She took Knave to one and punched in a code to open it.

  "It's the usual base code," she said, "Change it when you get a chance. Bye."

  “But I don't know the usual base code,” Knave said, a moment too late.

  Altia was already walking away down the corridor while Knave took a look at his quarters. They were very spartan. There was a single camp bed, a cupboard, a desk and chair, and some kind of integrated toilet, shower contraption. Knave went in and sat on the bed.

  "So where am I staying?" Jay asked.

  "Don't you have quarters already?" Knave asked.

  "Nope."

  “I'll talk this Altia person into finding you some tomorrow,” Knave said, “You'll have to use your initiative for tonight.”

  Altia came to collect him early the next day, just as she had said she would.

  "You're not wearing your armor," she said.

  "Yeah," he mumbled, still half asleep, "I was issued with it, but nobody has told me that I have to wear it."

  "And where's that robot of yours?"

  "He's looking for somewhere to call home."

  "Oh," Altia said, "I'm sorry, doesn't he have quarters? We weren't expecting him. I'll sort him out with somewhere to stay. I'll assigned him the room next to you."

  "Great," Knave said.

  "Now come with me. We have to get on with this."

  She set off at a gentle pace, allowing him to walk beside her.

  "I'm sorry things were so chaotic yesterday," she said, "You threw a spanner in the works when you didn't turn up on time."

  "Sorry about that."

  "I'm sure you had your reasons," she said, doubtfully, "but today, I want to pick your brains a little bit."

  "What about?" he asked.

  "What a strange question," she said, "About the Buzzer scientist. The one you talked to, before he was killed."

  "Oh," Knave said, "I see."

  It really should have occurred to him sooner, he realized, that they were interested in him because of the Buzzer he had interrogated. It was the only noteworthy thing he had done since arriving on planet, if not the most significant thing he had done in his entire life.

  "And there is another thing," she said, more quietly.

  "Oh?"

  "I'll explain when we get to my lab."

  "All right."

  They walked along some more corridors, descended a couple of levels. Then descended again. It was a few minutes before they finally wound up in a room that Knave recognized.

  "I've been here before," he said.

  "Of course," she confirmed, "This is the room where you met the scientist."

  The room was the same, but different. There were still obvious signs of the damage done to the far wall by mass driver fire, and their were some ugly stains and broken equipment, but there was a lot of new equipment in the room too. Human equipment.

  "Well," Altia said, "Let's get down to it."

  Chapter 12

  ––––––––

  The next delivery of data arrived almost exactly an hour after the first, and both Keen and Punter were in control to see what it contained. Base North had reached the same conclusions as Keen And Punter, that there was no necessity to go looking for any more trouble because trouble was probably on the way for them. They had gone for an even more extreme solution, by slashing and burning back the forest and surrounding the base with drones. It put all their eggs in one basket, but when all your eggs consisted of only two slugs, a bunch of drones and a half a squadron of scramjets it didn't seem like too much of a concentration of assets.

  They had brought their perimeter tightly in around the base. The first video was of dark shapes moving at the edge of the forest. Scramjets fired into the trees, drones unloaded blasters and mass drivers.

  There was more footage of the attacking creatures, including footage of them attacking a drone.

  They opened their mouths from a few meters away and it seemed like they were breathing.

  The drone's surface warped and its legs buckled, but the legs held and it kept firing.

  "Did you see that?" Keen asked, "They warped its structure, with something mounted in their mouths."

  "It wasn't just bad breath."

  "How many were there?"

  "Looks like the drones outnumbered them two to one. Drove them off for the loss of five drones and one engineering drone that got caught out in the forest."

  "That's heavy losses, for fighting what... bipedal ants with bad halitosis."

  The video cut back to the avatar of the base commander speaking directly to them.

  "Hi Keen'" she said, "I'm going to collect some dead hostiles and cut them up, so I can tell you what we're dealing with here. More news at the top of the hour in our next data packet."

  But, the next data transmission didn't come. Instead they had two scramjets coming over the horizon and landing on their pad, the third scramjet from the relay was already well on the way to the outer limits of the atmosphere. All three of them had a copy of the same video taken by the scramjet at the end of the relay run at the Base North site. It was utter destruction. The fence was melted away in three places, the ground torn up and remaining vegetation warped and twisted around the gaps. The buildings were busted open like paper bags and the drones were scattered about like scrap metal. There were carcases of the bipedal hostiles strewn around, too. Lots of them.

  "That's not good," Punter said at last, "Those things must have come back in greater numbers. There are hundreds of bodies here."

  "Is this all we have?" Keen asked, "Just video of destruction, no other useful data."

  ***

  Up on Skydancer, the command crew were watching the same video a short time later.

  "We just lost an entire base," the captain said, "These creatures must be very sophisticated and well armed constructs, and well armored too, to take on so many drones and win."

  Still images were appearing on monitors around the starship bridge, the best shots of downed hostiles and estimates of the amount of damage it had taken to kill each one. This was combined with images showing the estimated destructive power of their mouth weapon.

  "The question is," Skydancer said, "Do we reinforce our positions now, or do we call it a day and go back home."

  "We stay," the captain said.

  "Do we repopulate Base North?" Skydancer asked.

  "Yes," the captain said, "We give it everything we've got."

  "And Base South?"

  "They stay put for now," the captain said, "We need to know if this is a global threat."

  "All right captain."

  The captain left the bridge and went to her private quartets. She sat down and started to make a recording. After she had finished, she transmitted it to the scramjet, station keeping in the upper atmosphere, which then immediately dove back down towards Base South. Keen was watching the recording a short time later.

  "We've now both seen the footage of the remains of Base North," the hologram of the captain said, "We are reinforcing with everything we have. You will be staying where you are until the situation becomes clearer. We both now know that concentrating your forces and awaiting the enemy is not a good strategy. I advise sending out small patrols as widely as possible and reporting any contact immediately. We will divert forces to retrieve you if, and only if, a hostile threat is detected in the southern hemisphere."

  There was a short pause, time enough for Keen to wonder if she would ever get off this tangled forest rock of a planet. Then the captain said goodbye and good luck and the ho
logram dissolved out of existence.

  Keen immediately contacted Punter. His hologram taking the exact same spot as the captain's had, but his face hidden by the visor of combat armor.

  "No pick up, Punter," she said simply.

  "Can't say I'm surprised." Punter said, "They have to know if the ass end of the planet is infected too. Which means they have to wait and see if we get attacked."

  "That may be their plan but we're not staying here."

  "No?'

  "No. These things seem to have short-range weaponry. We are screwed if we stay in the forest. We are going in convoy to the tallest lump of rock with the best firing lines we can find."

  "I like it," Punter said.

  "The scramjets can stay up in the air till we get a chance to build them a new pad. I'll climb into my armor and we'll head out in twenty minutes."

  "What about the buildings and fence?"

  "They're useless against this type of hostile. Each one has one of those strange disruptor guns melded right into their face. Any one of them can just disrupt a path through our static defenses. We need a different kind of defensive perimeter."

  Keen paused to pull up a map.

  "This hill here," she said, highlighting it for Punter with a red circle, “That's gonna be our new home."

  "Looks cozy," he said, "Protuberance K-lat5-7-90H. Hmmm. I'm going to have to give it a more evocative name. Something a human can remember."

  "Permission granted to name that cursed little lump of rock."

  "Cursed lump of rock, huh? I was going to call it after my mother but I think Cursed Rock has more of a ring to it."

  The convoy left about twenty-five minutes later and Keen was happy with its shape. The scramjets were already covering the route to the objective. Fast moving units would be there in half a day, And the slow movers bringing up the rear would arrive the next morning.

  On the swift march to the new location, Punter didn't even slow down for obstacles. He just powered through them in his armor. Unless they were too big and he had to go round, he just kept running, shoulder charging thick vegetation, and then he jumped a fallen tree. As he jumped, he let out a whoop, though he would have been hard pressed to put his finger on exactly what emotion had provoked it. There was the tension that the fast-moving convoy could he attacked at any moment, but it felt great to be running through the alien woods. There were twenty drones up ahead of him, twenty drones to either side and twenty behind. Keen was in another bubble of eighty drones up ahead. The most rearward of her drones were only a few steps ahead of his forward drones.

  They were close enough that they could relay messages through the trees as the intervening drones made fleeting visual contact with each other to flash laser pulses of data. At least there was no way the aliens would he able to mess with that, even if they could knock out radio and satellite communications. The latest message came relaying down the chain of drones.

  "I'm getting no contacts from hostiles, not from drones or scramjets."

  "How are the engineering drones doing?"

  "They've left the compound and are following in our tracks."

  "That shouldn’t be too difficult. We're leaving quite a trail," Punter yelled, and waited the few seconds for the message to go up to his boss and then back.

  "Cutting quite a swath," Keen replied.

  Punter chuckled, but didn't bother transmitting this along to Keen. It did suddenly occur to him that if the engineering drones would have no problems following their trail, then neither would homicidal alien life forms with advanced weaponry built into their faces. He dismissed the thought. There was a boulder ahead, which he climbed with three quick kicks of his mighty armored legs and then jumped.

  His hips were starting to ache, dealing with the constant load of the actuators. The armor suit was power assisted but that didn't mean you could ease up on exercise and training. Operating such a huge chunk of machinery took it out of you, and the plan was to be running, non stop, for the best part of an entire day. Punter let out another whoop as he jumped from the top of another rock into the primordial forest.

  He heard some shooting ahead, and a few moments later Keen's voice was coming from his communications unit.

  "Just frightening off some lashfaces," she said, "Some fireworks to let them know they should run from us instead of dig in their hooves and fight."

  "No worries," Punter yelled, "Do they have hooves?"

  "Not sure," Keen's voice again, "Figure of speech."

  Then more shooting, this time from his left.

  "What was that?" Keen's voice had a hint of concern.

  Punter was already looking to his left. To be more precise, he had pivoted the top half of his suit to the left, his mass driver at his shoulder ready to fire. His hip flexor muscles were really starting to ache now as the suit contorted him into an unnatural position, his legs still pounding away at the ground without any drop in speed.

  The foliage, strange interlocking leaves, more like feathers here than the type of leaves he was used to on his home world, were too dense to glimpse a drone and try to pick up a line-of-sight connection. He ran to his left and a drone loomed out of the forest, running at exactly the same pace in exactly the same direction. An inhumanly tricky military maneuver that only high technology and the tireless mechanical joints of their legs made possible. The drone's laser did a quick handshake and then dumped information. Punter put his suit on auto as he reviewed the data. It was a video, taken through the nose camera of a drone, way out on the left of the formation. It was crashing through the trees with the strange feather foliage. Suddenly a sensor warned of movement in the trees ahead. It was too late for the drone to slow. It burst through the trees, body slamming whatever had been inside. At high speed and the drone weighing the huge amounts that it did, if it had hit an ordinary animal it would have burst like a balloon. It was just impossible to tell from the data the drone had captured what it was that it had hit. At the drone's running speed the impact sensors within the drone's armor were hard pressed to come up with any useful estimate of what size the creature had been. Punter scrubbed backwards and forwards through the video at the moment of impact, but all he could see was leaves.

  "Well?" Keen's voice relayed to him as the foliage thinned.

  "Possible contact," Punter said, and sent her the data. It was a while before he got a reply.

  "Yeah, I'd say that was one of our hostiles," her voice finally said, "But this video clip isn't going to be enough for Skydancer. They are going to need more before they decide it's worth their while to pull us out."

  Punter edged back to the right until he was back in position, running hard again. He was no longer whooping.

  A lot later the convoy broke through the treeline and out onto the rocky outcrop they had selected. It was perfect, better than they had hoped. They even had to slow down to hop from rock to rock as they approached the summit. When Punter got to the top he found Keen with a can of spray paint marking out a scramjet landing pad on an area of flat rock.

  "You made it," she yelled, when she saw him.

  "It was no problem. Just that one bad guy, might not even have been one of the hostiles."

  "You really believe that?" Keen asked, "You think all the action is going to be up in the North hemisphere?"

  "Don't know," he said, and took a look around, "But I fancy our chances a lot more now."

  From the exposed position on top of Cursed Rock they could see across the treetops of the strange alien forest almost all the way back to the base they had just abandoned.

  "Unless they have an air force," Punter suddenly added, "Then we're screwed."

  Keen looked up at the sky. Then back at Punter, and shrugged. He started laughing.

  "So how do you want to do this?" he asked when his chuckles had subsided.

  "Nothing fancy," she said, "Just draw the wagons into a ring and hope our weapons really do have better range."

  "Yes boss."

  Punter turned t
o look after organizing the defenses while Keen turned to a scramjet that was descending to the improvised platform on its secondary gravitic thrusters. Its mighty scramjet engine, easily more than seventy percent of its weight, whining as it powered down. The beast reared up to expose its payload bays, supporting itself on wing hinges and undercarriage like some prehistoric raptor. It was the size of a troop transporter almost, though more graceful and it towered over Keen.

  "Let's make sure you have the absolute deadliest payload of weapons we can put together,” she said.

  The scramjet's drone mind liked the sound of that. It beeped in approval.

  ***

  Nightfall came and so did news. The scramjets accompanying the engineering drones had spotted a disturbance in the woods near where the slow metal behemoths were. They had engaged with mass drivers and the disturbance had evaporated. Flying over the scene, they could not find any bodies.

  "Do you think they know we need evidence and they're dragging their fallen away and hiding them?" Punter asked.

  "No I think the mass drivers turned them to mist and a fine sprinkling of droplets in the trees," Keen replied.

  It was just the first of a series of attacks, each one more determined than the last. By morning they had all the evidence they needed. Relayed up to orbit, and up to Skydancer by scramjet.

  "We'll divert the very next dropship to your location to pick you up," the captain said, "just keep that hilltop you've found free of hostiles."

  Keen stared into the morning sky, greener than any she remembered seeing in all the ground actions of her career. Punter had set up their drone defenses well, she saw, and nodded approvingly.

  She could see circling scramjets in the distance. She increased magnification and saw the tops of the trees shaking and shuddering as mass driver rounds and blaster fire thudded into them.

  "What do you think about how quick they are expending mass driver ammo?" Keen asked Punter.

  "What are you gonna do?" was his response.

  He was right too. The die had been cast, the position chosen. The scramjets knew what they were doing. They wouldn't be firing if there wasn't a good chance of inflicting casualties. They didn't just spray the canopy with fire on the off chance like a human pilot might be tempted to do.