CHAPTER 8: RACING THE NIGHT

Omega Cygni star system a.k.a. "Naraka" in the Cygnus Star Region
Weyland-Yutani terraforming colony "Threshold," Keller-Bravo canyon at 1 km. from central colony complex
USAAC Combat Airscout: XBGT02 Pursuit Special, now leaving central community district

Turbojets growling, the military air rover coasted down the darkened Keller Canyon, just a few meters above the carpet of giant ferns covering the canyon's wide floor, directly in the middle between the miles-high rock walls. Several six-wheeled crawlers followed along below, their headlamps shining out over the bright green vegetation, and a second aerovehicle, a civilian airskiff, kept pace beside.

Lights from wall platforms and habitats passed by on either side for a time, then the small fleet left the central district behind and the walls were bare and dark. The crawlers were left behind, their headlamps fading into the black as the flyers accelerated away. And then the civilian skiff banked into the branching Dylan Canyon and went its own way, and with its own running lights turned off, the air rover was left alone and in utter darkness.

In seven hours, the sun would be up. A round trip to the community outskirts could take up to two hours, with another 30 to 60 minutes to reach and evacuate at least two homesteads. Three runs, that was about the most that could be done before the sun rose and negated the cover of darkness. One could only hope that it would be enough for all the colonists in the outer reaches.

Within the rover, Nikola Kano was piloting while Mining Foreman Brigid Wulcan had the copilot's seat, and Dameon Aedon was in the smartgun cupola, his gunner's chair lowered into the well so the roof hatch could be closed.

"That's it then, we're out of central," Wulcan was saying. She looked over to the mercenary in the pilot's chair beside her, frowning. "This is too fucking fast, mister. This fancy nightvision is good, sure, but what's the point if you're being reckless?"

Kano didn't reply, in fact didn't seem to be aware of her.

"Don't worry, he knows what he's doing," said Aedon, acting nonchalant and unconcerned to hide his own nervousness. "Mercs like him and me, we know how to handle a stick. We'll be fine."

Wulcan sighed. It was going to be a long night.

Time passed, and tension grew, or at least it did for two of the team. All was dark but for the instrument lights and the green-screen nightvision view of the canyon ahead, and the only sound was the muted howl of the turbojets.

"Kano. Look," said Wulcan eventually, succumbing to curiousity. "Why'd you agree to help us? What's your story?"

There was no reply then, either.

"He's the strong, silent type," said Aedon, grinning.

"Okay, how about you?" Wulcan turned to the young man. "Owan and Sagan say you're alright and I'll go with that, but you have to know you're the spitting image of the bastard who leads the pirates. You talk like him too, and you got his name. What's the deal, you related?"

Dameon chuckled a short humourless laugh. "Technically, I'm the bastard, not he who leads the pirates. Usires Aedon is my father, and I deeply apologize for that."

"Yeah?" said Wulcan, fighting off a wave of hostility. "He's your old man, huh? Why the fuck are you on our side then? Some kinda family feud?"

"You could say that," Dameon said, his voice becoming cold.

"Well? What's your story then?" Wulcan pressed.

Aedon didn't answer for a moment, seeming to grapple with himself. Then he shrugged.

"Oh, my dear father forced himself on my mother, as he no doubt has done to many women," he said, the nonchalance in his voice barely hiding suppressed anger. "He ripped her skin, he broke her bones, and he left her with a bellyful of his get. No living victim could be more ill-used than my poor mum was. That she raised me with love and forgiveness is a testament to the human spirit I cannot aspire to."

"Lady, I promise you this," he said, almost a hiss. "If you were to deliver dear Daddy to me right this instant, I wouldn't ask if he recognized me or remembered my mother or some other trite bullshit. I would put a bullet in his head and another in his black heart, and I'd smile while I did it. Does that answer your questions?"

Wulcan stared. Then she said: "Looking for revenge for your own conception, that's a new one on me."

"I do hope it amuses you," said Aedon, some of the old devil-may-care coming back to his voice.

"Yeah, well your pa took my husband and my three boys from me, so I'm not feeling so fucking amused," said Wulcan, a murderous edge coming to her voice. "All I wanted to do was run my mine and raise my boys. Now all I want is to find your pappy and…"

She paused a second. Then, almost contemplatively: "And put a bullet in his fucking heart. Huh."

"We have something in common, dear lady," Dameon smiled. "Shall we call a truce till our mutual foe is felled?"

"Sure. Deal," said Wulcan. She'd be watching this one like a hawk one way or the other, so what the hell, why not. And once the first Aedon was done, she could decide whether to send the second to join him.

"An eye for an eye, and soon the whole world is blind," Kano said softly.

"What? What did you say?" said the other two in surprise. But the veteran merc said nothing more.

Half an hour passed in relative silence, and tension gradually mounted. A surge of fearful anticipation went through Aedon and Wulcan when they passed the last glowing nav marker and into the unbroken dark of the canyon. This was it, the Wild West. They were past the border now, outside of the colonial cable-comm network, and in pirate territory.

They turned several times, going into different canyons as they met or branched off from the Keller trench. Then they came to the first of the homesteads they were to evacuate.

Here, the chaotic greenery on the floor of the canyon was supplanted by a small farm, orderly rows of water plants fenced off into squares, monitored by various scientific instruments. The homestead itself looked much like any other, a large modern house built on the floor of a huge half-globe cut from the rock wall. The lights were on in the windows, and nothing appeared damaged or out of order.

Kano did a slow pass by the homestead, and predictably, the lights went out inside. Retracting the rover's weapons, he came about and brought the craft to a landing in front of the house.

"This is our cue. Let's go get 'em," said Aedon to Wulcan, unbuckling his harness. "But whatever you do, don't let any of them talk to Kano or he'll scare them back into the house!" He got a brief smile from Wulcan. Kano, as might be expected, remained impassive.

"Hey in the house! Devon, you in there? It's Wulcan," the foreman bellowed at the building as she and Aedon came close. "No pirates, just us. Open the door, we need to talk!"

Kano watched as the house lights came back on and the front door opened, and a nervous-looking woman grabbed Wulcan's arm and ushered her into the house. Aedon followed her in. Now alone, Kano set all cameras and displays to give him a 360-degree view around the rover and took up his watch, implacable discipline keeping him from relaxing in this moment of false security.

Aedon and Wulcan were in there a long time. Kano kept the engines idling and kept watch, and there were no disturbances. The night was cool, still, and eerie. Through the open hatch he heard voices raised in argument several times from within the house, and he began to grow impatient as the team's time inside approached half an hour.

Finally, something started happening. The front door opened, and Aedon came out leading a procession of women and children. Kano watched on with some surprise as more and more people came out, eleven altogether, before Wulcan came bringing up the rear. That would fill the rover to just one short of capacity.

Kano continued to keep watch while his companions secured the colonists and their meagre possessions in the rover's rear bay. Now was an especially important time to be alert, what with the distracting bustle causing noise that could alert a nearby enemy.

"Hey mister," said a small voice by the side of his chair.

Kano did not turn his head from the displays; he could see in his peripheral vision that a child had made his way into the pilot's compartment from the rear bay. He did not reply.

"Are you a bad man, mister?" said the little boy. "Mummy says you're not, but you look scary. Are you a bad man?"

Something about the child's boldness gave the merc pause. He had been like that once. When he was very young, Nik and several other children had been kidnapped, ferried across a desert plain by hoverbarge. Something had forced the barge down, then a man came inside and effortlessly shot four of the five kidnappers before they could mount any effective defense. The fifth had grabbed one of the children and used her as a shield with a gun to her small head, so the man shot the criminal between the eyes and that was that.

"Are you a bad man?" Nik had asked the man, who eventually smiled a little smile and said: "Depends on who asks."

"Are you the best fighter in the galaxy?" Nik had asked. The man said, without ego: "Yes."

"Can I be like you when I grow up?" Nik had asked. And the man said: "Practice until you find the empty calm place inside you, and maybe you will." And then he left, and Kano had never seen him again.

"Mister, are you a bad man?"

Kano smiled a little smile and said to the boy beside him: "Depends on who asks."

Then a harried woman, presumably the mother, came through the hatch and grabbed the child. Kano listened to them retreat, the boy protesting as they did so, and didn't look back.

Aedon soon came in to the pilot's compartment and shut both the hatch to the rear bay and the side hatch.

"Wulcan's staying in the bay with the colonists," he reported, and Kano nodded in approval.

"Quite a large family," the veteran noted.

"Two families," Dameon corrected him. "The neighbours' house got shot up a week ago and they came to camp out here."

"Fortunate for us. A full load in one stop, and we're running early."

"Good stuff," the young man grinned. "Let's get this show on the road."

As he lifted off, Kano touched his wire headset to radio out. The mercs were using a very low band together with encrypted transmissions, making it unlikely that their communications would be intercepted, but they were taking no chances and keeping radio silence as much as possible.

"All units, Kano. First loadout secured, returning to base. No incidents."

There were five hours and twenty minutes left till daybreak.

x x x x x

Weyland-Yutani terraforming colony "Threshold," Dylan-Bravo canyon at 60 km. inside community border
Company personnel aerovehicle: Registry 7A36-OCS1, en route to community outskirts at high speed

"You're from one of the Tellurian stations, aren't you?"

Amon Pistor raised an eyebrow, though his partner wouldn't see it through his nightvision eyepiece. He kept their speeding airskiff on course, mindful of the high speed he was maintaining, and turned his attention to her.

"You're pretty sharp."

"Thought so," Gerhardt smiled. "I saw the wing tattoo on your wrist, I had a military friend from the Tellurians with a tattoo just like it. It also made sense with what your boss said about dark nights and you talking about facing your fears."

Pistor flicked his eyes away from the windscreen a moment to regard his partner. Gerhardt was certainly easy on the eyeballs, statuesque, blonde, tall, curvy. Having spent the better part of a decade in a place with no women to speak of, a man of lesser discipline would have had a hard time keeping focused with her around. Seemed there was a quick mind behind that pretty face as well. Though just at the moment, he might have preferred a ditzy airhead instead.

"You were on one of the stations that got attacked, weren't you," she said, coming straight to the point. "That's why you have trouble with darkness. My friend was like that too, he didn't like the dark. I don't mean to pry, I'll leave it alone if you don't want to talk about it. But I want to help."

The merc's hand gripped the flight stick a little tighter. It all came back for a moment, the explosions in the bio labs, the lights going out as main power was crippled, people screaming in the dark as the gene-engineered dogs hunted the halls, him as a child crawling blindly into a cupboard and trying to stifle his crying as the growls came inexorably closer.

Then it was gone, and he was in control again. He was a grown man now, with guns, flares and nightvision, and it was other men who feared him when he came stalking in the night.

"It's nothing," Pistor said, unemotional in tone, then added: "The only help I need is for you to let me do my job."

"Affirmative, will do," Gerhardt replied, sounding sheepish. After a while, she spoke up again: "I went somewhere I shouldn't have, I'm..."

"Forget it," he said. It didn't matter.

They reached the halfway point, then the colony border, and with a rush of adrenaline and fear, they flew into the dark. They were in no-man's-land now, and the job was just starting.

After several twists and turns they reached the first homestead to be evacuated. The place might have looked fairly idyllic in the daytime, with terraced rows of what looked like rice paddies leading down from the front of the house into a lush forest of faintly phosphorescent giant mushrooms.

The lights went out as they approached, and Pistor cautiously landed the airskiff at the side entrance of the house.

"Go in and talk them out, I'll keep watch," said Pistor as the vehicle came to rest, and Gerhardt nodded and jumped out.

"Hey in there! Mrs. Feingold? It's Gina Gerhardt from central," the colonist called out as she approached the door. "It's safe, we're alone! I just want to talk, can I come in?"

A lady, smiling in relief, soon came out and ushered Gerhardt in. Pistor settled back and took up watch, shivering a little as a chill wind blew through the canyon.

The creepy moan of the wind had him more on edge then he should be, maybe the darkness was getting to him despite the nightvision. The bare rock of the canyons soaked up sunlight during the daytime and let it out as heavy infra-red during the night, giving blazing-bright clear images on any NV device. He could see almost as far with his eyepiece as he would naturally during the day, there was no cause for him to be so keyed up.

Thankfully, Pistor didn't have long to wait. The lights went out and the front door opened, and a flashlight-wielding Gerhardt came out leading a woman, a young man, and two children. The family was moving quickly and carrying few possessions, they seemed eager to get out of here.

As Gerhardt started assisting people into the skiff, the leading woman came up behind Pistor's seat and said a polite "Good morning, sir."

"I'm Lisa Feingold. Are you one of the contractors?" she asked. He nodded, and she proceeded to ask a number of silly questions, such as 'can you fly in the dark,' and 'can you really use a gun,' and 'have you been in a battle before'. Pistor silently nodded each time, keeping watch all the while.

"Sir, I have a request, if you'll hear it," Feingold said suddenly. Pistor raised an eyebrow as she continued: "My friend Rosa Koski lives fairly close to here with her three kids. She has diabetes and I don't know when was the last time she had any insulin from central. Can we pick her up next?"

"The Koski homestead? We were going there anyway," said Pistor, drawing a sigh of relief from the woman. Then he asked: "Mrs. Feingold, why did you agree to come with us so quickly? I was under the impression that you and your neighbours were staying out here because you didn't want to leave."

"If it was just the pirates then yeah, we wouldn't be leaving. We've been harassed by that lot before. It's something else."

"Something else? Like what?"

"I don't know," she said, starting to go rather pale. "But we hear them at night sometimes, moving around. And when it's a bad night, when they're moving around a lot, somebody's family disappears. I don't know if it's a different team of pirates or a gang of slavers or the fucking boogeyman, I just want my family out of here."

Pistor just nodded, staring at her with a troubled frown on his face. Frankly, he found Feingold's story unbelievable, and he wondered at her state of mind. It sounded like something from a paranoid schizophrenic or maybe a practical joker, but he couldn't simply dismiss her out of hand either.

When all the colonists and their modest possessions were loaded and secured, Gerhardt hopped into her seat beside him and he lifted off.

"Nice work," he said, and she answered: "Wasn't anything I did. They wanted out."

"Yes, about that," said Pistor. "Do me a favor and keep an eye on Feingold. She might be a few rounds short of a full clip. I don't want her making trouble."

Gerhardt gave him a surprised look, but didn't argue.

Thirty minutes later, Pistor was pulling up to a homestead almost identical to the one he had just left. But this time, the lights were already out before they approached. He did a slow pass about the house, then set the skiff down. Gerhardt came out and called to the Koskis, going right up to the door. But no one presented themselves or turned on any lights, and she discovered the door unlocked when she tried the knob. Pistor began to get a feeling that something wasn't right.

"Wait! Gerhardt, come back here," the merc radioed to her as she made to enter the house. She obeyed, returning to the skiff, and he clambered out to meet her.

"Get in the skiff and take the stick," Pistor instructed her. "I'll check the house myself. If you lose radio contact with me for more than ten minutes, take off and get these people to safety. Understood?"

"What? Why?" Gerhardt asked, staring at him. "Shouldn't we be going in there together, partner?"

"We don't want to leave these people stranded if there's an ambush waiting in there," said Pistor. "And besides, I work better alone."

Without waiting for her to argue further, he moved off at a jog. He readied his weapons: besides his sidearm, he had brought a carbine submachinegun on a shoulder strap, a handy low-recoil speedshooter that could be wielded with one hand. Holding a finger-sized flashbang grenade in his off-hand, he opened the side door with forefinger and thumb and advanced into the house.

At first, the house seemed pristine. The mini-foyer showed no sign of disturbance, neither did the side hall, an observatory/sitting room, a rec room, or the kitchen. The light switches did not respond; main power was out. He cleared the rooms one by one, methodically and efficiently, memorizing the layout as he went.

The dining room held the first sign of violence; tables and stands shattered, chairs overturned or broken. There was buckshot scarring from a scattergun, someone had tried to fight back.

Pistor found the shotgun in the next room over, lying in two pieces behind the makeshift barricade of an overturned sofa in the corner. He paused, staring at the antique weapon; it was snapped in two at the breech. It was a sturdy piece of solid wood and iron, it would have taken incredible strength to break it like that.

The second half of the house presented in much the same vein: overturned and broken furniture, blunt impact damage on the walls and fixtures, smashed doors, no blood or bodies or survivors. He made his way upstairs, clearing labs and bedrooms and miscellaneous rooms, finding nothing except scattered signs of violence matching what he had already seen.

Pistor was at a loss to explain any of it. The family had fought frenziedly against armoured kidnappers wielding batons and tranqs, and eventually succumbed without any bloodletting on either side? This wasn't like any battle he had seen before.

He radioed Gerhardt with a status update, then he went downstairs and was about to proceed into the basement when he stopped with his foot on the first step. Something was wrong.

Pistor couldn't quite make it out, but there was something at the edge of his hearing, a deep humming, droning sound. He felt slightly dizzy, there were intermittent black spots in his vision, and the green imaging of his eyepiece seemed to be slowly losing its colour and fading to black and white. The air seemed thick; there was some surreal quality to everything he was sensing, something nightmarish.

He shook his head vigorously to clear his vision and orient himself, then against his instincts he continued down the stairs, weapons at the ready and all senses straining with alertness. There was a rec room, a storage room and a lab in the basement, and he relentlessly cleared every one. Then he found the utility room with heating and power fixtures. The lever to the main power box had been pulled down to the off position and then ripped out, again suggesting great physical strength. The enemy had been here too.

Pistor then found another set of stairs going down to a sub-basement. That was where he had to stop. He realized that he was panting, and deathly afraid. The changes to his vision had intensified, and worse, something had started to go wrong with his nightvision eyepiece, causing it to flicker intermittently and send lines of static rolling down the display. The droning sound was distinct and unearthly, and the dreamlike quality to the air made it feel almost as though he was swimming through deep water. What was wrong with him?

The merc shook his head, then shook it again and looked down the stairs. It seemed to be an unassuming storage space down there, but he was seized with a premonition that if he went down there, he wouldn't come back. His instincts were screaming at him. He just couldn't go down there, down into the deepest dark with failing NV.

"Anybody down there? Hello, friendlies up here!" he called down the stairs. He lit a flare and tossed it down the steps, then set himself with his gun ready. No one, friend or foe, came up the stairs. Pistor backed away and moved toward the hall with the staircase up, and it took everything he had not to break into a run. The peculiar disorientation and nightvision malfunctions quickly vanished as he got to the main floor and then outside, but he didn't stop until he had vaulted into the airskiff proper.

"What happened? What's wrong?" asked Gerhardt, concerned to see him breathless, pale and sweating. Pistor took a deep breath and calmed himself.

"Nothing's wrong. There were no colonists nor pirates in there, so there's nothing of interest to us," he said firmly. "Let's head to the next household, we're done wasting time."

"All units, Pistor," the merc radioed out, then he realized he didn't know what to say. What would he warn his colleagues against, scary feelings and nightvision flickering in empty houses? Now that he was out, it felt ridiculous that he had been so afraid in the first place.

"Something strange happening out here. If any of your homesteads turn up empty, proceed with caution," he chose to say.

"Oh, Rosa," said Feingold in the back, and she began to weep softly. "Oh God. They got you too."

Four hours, forty minutes left till daybreak.

x x x x x

Weyland-Yutani terraforming colony "Threshold," Jillian-Alpha canyon at 25 km. outside community border
Company personnel aerovehicle: Registry 7A88-OCS1, en route to Rostov homestead at high speed

"If any homesteads turn up empty…? What the blue bandersnatch is he talking about?" Hans Brinnlitz wondered aloud. His partner, the tough-looking young machine operator Olga, answered: "He's talking about the kidnappings. The pirates have been taking a lot of families wholesale, just the empty houses are left behind."

"But that suggests there would be nothing of further interest in the abandoned houses. Why the need to be cautious around them?" Brinnlitz mused.

"We could call him and ask," Olga suggested as she worked the flight stick, maneuvering their skiff to keep on course in the dark.

"Nah. Not worth breaking radio silence for," the sniper said dismissively, and he tightened his gloves.

"So… what happened after the shootout?" Olga asked.

"Yeah, what happened?" said the teenaged boy behind Brinnlitz's seat, and his mother leaned a little closer so she could hear too.

"Oh, the story, of course," Brinnlitz smiled, and continued: "Well, the silkrunner gang never figured out that I was working both sides, but the wine smugglers were getting suspicious at all the losses. So, they brought in another freelancer, a gunbunny who called himself 'Uno'. I knew Uno, and I knew I was in trouble then, because Uno had both a sharp mind and a wicked fast draw…"

Brinnlitz couldn't stop smiling as he recounted his tale. It was finely perfumed bullshit, and he had them eating out of his hand. The next time they touched down, it would be the easiest thing in the world to bring one of them to a nice private spot, and then…

And then nothing. There would be no playing with the colonists, he had already made his promise. He briefly considered playing the game anyway, doing the hunting and coaxing and just stopping before the finish. But such interrupted intercourse would not do; there would be too much temptation to bring out the knives, and before he knew it his promise would be broken. Best to abandon this line of thinking entirely.

Ah, there was the Rostov homestead. Brinnlitz ceased his storytelling.

"Terribly sorry," he said to his audience. "It's time to get back to work."

As the airskiff neared the house, Brinnlitz saw through his nightvision that a fight had happened here. The house was full of bullet holes, windows shattered, the front door repaired from being smashed in.

"Those look like old wounds," the sniper murmured. "This happened at least two days ago."

"Should I stop?" asked Olga.

"Yes," acknowledged Brinnlitz. "Somebody repaired the front door and some of the windows. That somebody was probably the Rostovs."

Still, something didn't seem right to him. Brinnlitz had razor-sharp senses and a finely tuned intuition, and his instincts were alerting him that all was not as it seemed.

"Stay here, I'll go in this time," he said to Olga, and then to the six colonists and children already collected in the back, he said: "Everyone, please keep your heads down and keep quiet. I'll be right back."

The merc climbed out of the skiff, then circled the damaged house. He looked through the windows he passed and listened for the slightest sound on the way. When he reached the patched-up front door, he called out loudly: "Hello, Mrs. Rostov? My name is Hans Brinnlitz and I'm not a pirate! We're here to evacuate you! I'll put down my weapons if you want. Hello?"

No response was forthcoming, and he heard nothing from within the house. After listening a while, he checked the door handle. The front door was locked, and Brinnlitz gave it an amused glance before putting his hand through one of the holes to open the inside latch. The door swung open; he slung his rifle and took out his sidearm, and moved inside.

His measured steps not making a sound on the floor, Brinnlitz prowled through the house. He didn't need to go far to see that the Rostovs were gone and not by choice: furniture overturned, doors smashed, hiding places torn open. Yet no bodies, no blood. Brinnlitz was hardly an expert on parenthood, but he would have expected parents with their children threatened to fight and claw down to their fingernails. This was decidedly strange, and he was all too aware of Pistor's warning now.

At this point his mission should be to search for survivors, but he sensed that this was all he would find; there would be no leftovers from such a thorough search-and-seizure. The Rostovs had survived the first attack from outside but succumbed to the second. That was all that mattered, he didn't care to play detective. He was done here.

But then his foot caught on something as he began to head out. Something sticky under his boot, clinging as he raised his foot, like glue. But when he went up on one leg and looked at his boot to see what it was, he saw only a faint blotch. Puzzled at this invisible glue, Brinnlitz flicked on the flashlight attachment on his pistol, then touched both of his filament eyepieces to retract them up into his wire headset. Then he took a look with his natural vision.

The stickiness was from a runnel of milky goo, and when his flashlight followed it to its source he saw… The merc was stunned. He saw a pale tube going up the wall to a grotesque patch of clustered root-like structures covering part of the roof and the wall over the nearby entrance to the basement stairs. He rechecked an eyepiece and confirmed that none of the stuff showed up on nightvision at all, save for shadowy blotches that looked much like the usual distortion from imperfect infra-red imaging.

What was this all about? It seemed as though the infestation was spreading across the surface of the wall like mildew, and it was thickest around the door downstairs, which suggested its origin. He moved to the basement door and opened it up, but just as he put his foot inside he froze. His sharp senses were registering a disturbance, a smattering of black spots and colour loss in his vision, a peculiar hum in his ears, a feeling of fluid thickness in the air, a cognitive sense of unrealness, of… fear.

Hans Brinnlitz broke into a wide smile. He did not experience fear as other men did. Fear was a special thing to him, a delicacy to be slowly savoured, for there was very, very little that could frighten a creature such as he. There was something here that was scaring him, putting a little fire in the blood and excitement in the air, and it certainly wasn't a snarl of mutated vines. Now what could it be?

He stepped into the stairwell, silently making his way downward. It was pointless to be stealthy now; he needed his flashlight to see, which would be a dead giveaway to anyone lying in wait. But old habits died hard.

The roof and patches of the walls were similarly befouled, but it was difficult to tell the origin now; the stuff seemed to be popping up everywhere, randomly. He searched the basement methodically, room by room. He only found more infestation, until he reached a spot where the outer wall was unfinished and raw rock was revealed.

There was a pod here, knee high and leathery, obviously some sort of egg or cocoon with a cross-shaped mouth on top. It was set in a nest of the roots, which crawled all over the floor from the pod. The rock wall behind the pod was where the infestation was worst, and to Brinnlitz's eyes, there seemed to be ingrained shapes, bones, figures, symbols, rows of rusty phallic protrusions from petrified organs, all woven fluidly into an organic tapestry. It was madness. It was beautiful.

"Oh dearie-dear, what have we here," Brinnlitz whispered. He crouched on the spot some ten meters away, pistol extended, and gazed at the pod. He stared at it a long while, feeling it out with his sight and his instincts, at one point closing his eyes and just sensing it with his mind's eye.

"A kindred spirit, are we?" he eventually whispered. "Yes, you're lying in wait, a lion crouching in the tall grass. You want me to come and see you up close, and then you'll play with me, won't you. Ah, but I know you. My fellow player, you think I would be so easy? A predator knows his own kind, my little friend. And I know you."

Brinnlitz opened fire, rapidly emptying the clip. His gun was an elegantly vicious sabot pistol with armour-piercing explosive rounds, and the power of the weapon gouged fist-sized holes into the fleshy pod. Copious fluid gushed out and hissed on the floor, sending up plumes of smoke. The top of the pod peeled open, perhaps a last resort attempt to evacuate the contents, but only spouts of ichor came out before the eviscerated egg sagged into its nest.

The sniper stood up, and tsk-tsked. "You lose, my friend," he said sadly.

Then his headset started playing a garbled transmission, and he managed to make out the voice of his partner Olga over the static. Doubtless she was concerned over the sound of weapons fire. But whatever was the matter with the headset?

Tapping the headset repeatedly to try to clear it up, Brinnlitz cautiously made his way out of the basement. There were no other incidents on the way. The feelings of disorientation and fear passed completely once he was back on the main floor, and his radio chose that moment to clear up as well, leaving him wondering if there was a correlation. He left the house and got back to the skiff, assuring Olga and the evacuees that all was well, though the Rostovs were nowhere to be found.

"All units, this is Brinnlitz," he radioed out as the airskiff began to take off. "I've found a biological infestation in the Rostov homestead. It does not show up on nightvision, and its proximity seemed to make me mildly ill. I think it's potentially harmful and may be present in other households, be careful if you encounter it."

A flurry of questions erupted from his colleagues, as was expected. Brinnlitz answered what he could, but did not tell of the pod. That would be his little secret. He didn't want to ruin the surprise should someone else find one of their own, after all. Everyone should have their chance to play.

Four hours, fifteen minutes left till daybreak.

x x x x x

Weyland-Yutani terraforming colony "Threshold," Murphy-Delta canyon at 43 km. outside community border
Company personnel aerovehicle: Registry 3B56-OCS1, approaching Cherenkov homestead

The scientist some knew as 'Jack' leaned close to the control console of the dirtling vehicle, registering and recording every word in detail.

"It could be benign," the O'Hara one was saying over the communicator. "Just a nasty weed that would normally get weeded out by the homeowners but spreads all over when they're gone."

"It changes nothing," the Pops leader said. "It doesn't affect us directly and doesn't impact the mission. It might be important in the long term but we're on the clock people. Avoid it if you find it and proceed with the evacuation, understood?"

Several of the others answered in the affirmative, acknowledging the Pops' leadership. The scientist leaned back and let out a slow hiss of frustration. The 'infestation' could be the spoor of the Unleashed, the first potential sign of a Forerunner presence on this planet. And because of this task that she was forced to do under the dirtling command hierarchy, she could not go anywhere near it.

She was trapped. The objectives of her own mission laid elsewhere, but she didn't want to jeopardize the valuable ranking she had achieved in the dirtling system. She had worked too hard to earn the creatures' trust to just throw it away on a questionable source of data.

"Jack? You're doing that hissing thing again," her partner, the young Shane dirtling, spoke up. "What's up with that? You're creeping me out, man."

The scientist hurriedly ran through her cache of responses with her data sifting tool. In her visor display, streams of symbols ran down on either side of the Shane's bright thermal image. Making her choice, she extended two mandibles to her oral array and made several swift keypresses.

"Here it is. Gas leak," came forth from her vocoder.

"Aww Jack! Why didn't you let that go before we got back in the skiff?" the Shane brayed, fanning the air in front of his face. The scientist stared at him, taking note of the incident. Her idea of blaming a suit leak had not gone as expected, though the outcome was satisfactory enough. She had never had opportunity to observe immature or female dirtlings before; she had to continue gathering data, even if it wasn't from the species she wanted to pursue.

Moments later, several bright specks appeared in the dark landscape of her thermographic vision, out in the distance in front of the vehicle. The scientist looked through the vehicle's plexiglass front-shield and magnified the image, and she observed the bipedal shapes of five dirtlings, three large and two small. Not the ones she was supposed to kill; the aggressor dirtlings wouldn't have immature ones with them. This was the next habitat to be evacuated.

The scientist and her companion had already acquired one habitat's worth of settlers. It had taken some time, as the habitat leader was unwilling to trust a youngster and a clawed giant to be their caretakers. But they had managed it, and would do so again.

"What?" asked the Shane when she pointed, then after a moment: "Oh, the next homestead! Man, your nightvision sure is better than mine!"

They reached the domicile and landed. The scientist and her companion exited, approached the habitat building. The Shane called out to the inhabitants, and as soon as the door started to open, the scientist flopped to the ground in an undignified sprawl, making sure to throw out her limbs in all directions to appear as pathetic as possible.

"Oh! What's the matter with your friend?" asked the dirtling female in the doorway. The sympathy tones in her voice was evident; the scientist's ploy worked as well this time as it had the last.

"He has some kind of arthritis, he falls down a lot," the Shane explained, smiling, as he helped the scientist lurch back to her feet. He had doubtless figured it out by now. "He'll be okay, just give him a second."

"No, it is okay," the scientist broadcast in the Owan's voice, then: "You're going in / I'll stand guard, sir!"

"That means he'll watch for trouble while we talk together," said the Shane. "Can I come inside? Our voices might carry and attract the bad guys if we talk out here." That last was especially true if the habitat leader should become agitated and start shouting, as had happened on their first foray.

The scientist shuffled back to the aerovehicle and reassured her passengers that all was well, then she moved to the edge of the flat plinth of rock before the house and squatted down to take watch.

She thought about the transmission from the Brinnlitz dirtling: he had mentioned the foreign structures did not appear in his nightvision. As she understood it, dirtling nightvision technology was a combination of low-light intensification and infra-red sensitivity. The inference was obvious: the Unleashed were famously invisible to the infra-red spectrum, for reasons her people still could not fathom.

The scientist's visor possessed a vision mode in an electromagnetic spectrum that the Unleashed did appear in, however. On a whim, she switched vision modes to that spectrum now. Her visor displayed an image view where everything was snowy white with glimmering black lines denoting shapes and objects. The Unleashed and their corruption were impervious to this type of light, appearing as solid black objects in this mode, which to the scientist's natural vision was just as sharp and plain as bright colours on black.

She looked around, seeing nothing of interest. Then some instinct pulled her gaze upward and behind her. The scientist jumped to her feet, letting out a low growl of excitement. There was a sinister pattern of black marks in the sheer rock face above the dirtling habitat, delineating what looked to be a shallow cave. What chance find was this?

The scientist sprinted toward the side of the habitat, unconcerned about being seen in the dark. Without pausing, she launched herself into the air in a tremendous jump, landing on a ledge halfway up the side of the house. She jumped again, this time landing on the roof. Then she stopped a moment, crouching to let her legs flex and build up strength, and jumped some seven meters straight upward and right into the mouth of the small cave.

Fear struck her suddenly, hard, like something clawing at her gut. The cave was a featureless pocket of rock, but just under the surface, the macabre skein of Forerunner construction glowed black before her eyes. It was like a giant, deformed skull beneath the rock face, and she was squatting right in the mouthparts, facing the descending tunnel of the throat.

Taken aback, the scientist closed her eyes and waited till her feelings calmed. This was undeniably a Forerunner artifact, the largest she had ever come into contact with, and she hadn't been prepared for the psychic impact it would have on her. The fear eventually receded, but her excitement remained. This was the reason why she had come to this planet. Even now, she had just made an enormously valuable discovery: some (perhaps all) of the works of the Forerunners appeared in the same visor mode as did the Unleashed.

What was this skull thing? What was its purpose? Had it once been alive, or just made to look like it? The scientist began taking readings and recordings, and she dug into the rock with her wrist-knives until she had broken off a piece of the subterranean structure to study. Several times as she was working, she had to pause to calm herself, her excitement and fear warring to destroy her presence of mind.

She found herself staring at the bottom of the cave, the "throat" of the giant skull. Her visor showed the Forerunner structures continuing deeper under the rock, as deep as her vision could penetrate. It seemed almost like a terminus at the end of a passage, a place to receive things and send them in or out. Was this once a part of a travel network? A cargo transportation device? Or perhaps, a weapon?

"Jack? Hey Jack, where are you?"

The scientist snarled in frustration. Already, her time was up. She swiftly prepared a sensor beacon and placed the tiny silver disc on the floor of the cave. This would guide her ship back to the cave, and record all that happened until then. For now, that would have to suffice.

She turned, and hopped back down to the roof of the dirtling habitat. She could see the Shane one below, looking for her on one side of the habitat, and she jumped down on the other side to avoid being seen. It was time to take up the pretense of being a crippled dirtling hunter again.

"There you are!" the Shane cried when he saw her, moving over to her as she lurched forward. "Jack, we got problems man. The Cherenkovs ain't coming, I can't budge 'em. And Pops just radioed about the time, we're taking too long on this run. If you got any ideas, I'd sure appreciate…"

He trailed off as the scientist lurched on past him, toward the main entrance of the habitat. He had noticed the small pronged device raising up from her left shoulder pad.

"Look, I'm sorry," said the female dirtling in the doorway, as the scientist neared. "But we've waited it out this long already, we can…"

The impact of the scientist's plasma bolt threw the dirtling's convulsing body back into the habitat in a shower of blue sparks. Her plasma caster immediately cast again on the old male just inside the doorway, the one armed with the pellet-sprayer weapon, and took him down before he could raise the weapon.

"Jack, no!" the Shane screamed. The scientist ignored him and continued into the house, implacable. Her thermographic vision pinpointed exactly where the other three dirtlings were. An adult female and a small female were in the next room, and two casts dropped them before they could flee. The last, a small fleet-footed male, was rushing away through a side hall, and one final penetrating shot through the flimsy material of the wall felled him in his tracks.

"You bastard," the Shane snarled. Through her thermal vision, the scientist could see her young partner crouching by the door, his pistol raised and tracking her.

"Set phasers to stun," the scientist hastily broadcast. She had previously configured her plasma caster to deliver a harmless but incapacitating electro-neural charge calibrated to dirtling physiology, though she had no easy way to communicate that. She retracted the caster and raised her arms in the dirtling sign of surrender, though the empty-hand gesture was meaningless with a shoulder-mounted weapon. "No, it is okay / Set phasers to stun."

"What? Oh…" said the Shane, finally clueing in to the rapid, laboured breathing of the unconscious female beside him. "You didn't kill them. You tased them."

"You're going to get every last one, I don't care how," the scientist replied, using the recorded words of the Pops leader.

"I guess… yeah, I guess we can't afford to dick around. Hell of a handy stun-gun you got there." He was silent for a time, and he helped the scientist gather up the unconscious dirtling family and bring them back to the skiff.

"Hey Jack. Sorry I doubted you," the Shane muttered as they were finishing up.

"That's it! You don't know Jack!" she answered. Though the dirtling race and her own might be at odds, it would be a long, strange day when she would be forced to kill unarmed younglings of any race, a day no hunter should hope to see.

A sense of excitement lingered with the scientist as their vehicle began the trip back to the base. Against all odds, she had found what she was looking for by sheer chance, and could still continue on her dirtling mission without interruption.

And as to the chunk of bony extrusion in her pouch, she couldn't wait to get it back to her ship and begin its analysis. What secrets would it yield, and what new questions would it pose?

Three hours, thirty-five minutes left till daybreak.

x x x x x

Weyland-Yutani terraforming colony "Threshold," central colony complex
Level 1 South: Main Vehicle Bay, vicinity of aerovehicle docking platform

As Kano piloted the air rover into the wide open compound in front of Nirvana Tower, he noted that the gunship Ranger was parked in front of the vehicle bay ramp. It was unloading a procession of people, having undoubtedly landed just a few minutes before. Kano decided to land beside the ship instead of going straight into the vehicle bay; his passengers would have a few more yards to walk, but would get to intermingle with their fellow colonists on the way.

Aedon bounded out as soon as they landed, and headed back to join Wulcan in escorting the passengers. The evacuees from their second run had included a lot of tired, scared children, and the young man's skillful clowning had done right well to ease the way for them.

Kano stepped out onto the lush greenery and headed for the big gunship beside the rover. He could see the ship's master underneath the vessel, overseeing the people coming down his loading ramp. He also noted Director Sagan amidst the departing passengers, coordinating and supporting, and he saw Eve Owan beside Pappagallo at the loading ramp. She appeared to be arguing with him.

"But you do not understand," she was saying as Kano approached. "Every organism, every microbe on this planet was carefully introduced here as part of an ecological plan. We cultivated every living thing on Sanjiva, and we certainly did not put down any biological growth that eludes nightvision and sickens people!"

"Do you need any help ma'am?" said Pappagallo to an elderly woman who was making her way down the ramp with some difficulty. She quailed a little, intimidated by the tall merc, but she accepted his arm and allowed herself to be helped down the rest of the way. Then he turned his attention partially back to Eve.

"Alright, so it's not yours," he said, keeping an eye on the ramp. "Why is that a problem? Here, this way sir."

"It means that it could be something truly unknown!" exclaimed Owan, who was starting to lose her temper. "It could be a massive mutation of one of our bioforms, or it could be something native to this world, something the surveys missed! Or it could be from space, from some meteor-borne organism! We have no idea what effect it might have on human physiology, it could even harbour a contagious disease!"

The flow of colonists stopped near Eve and Pappagallo. They had heard that last bit.

"Move along, move along," Pappagallo said firmly, ushering the last of the colonists toward the main vehicle bay. Then he turned his attention fully to the Arcturan, his thumb nudging his cap brim further up his brow.

"If you've got a disease problem, then you had it before we showed up. It didn't go epidemic up to now, so it can wait a little longer," he said. "Besides, you hired us to deal with pirates. Ain't nothing we can do about germs."

"We've got problems to work on right now, we shouldn't be looking at new ones down the line," Pappagallo pre-empted Owan before she could protest further. "Everybody's got their eyes open, we'll notice if our weed does anything new. Till then we deal with the imminent threat, and nothing else." His tone of voice brooked no further argument.

Eve pursed her lips, displeased. "Fine."

As she moved off, Pappagallo finally looked to Kano, who had been standing by still and unmoving the whole time. "Status?"

"Nominal. Nothing unexpected yet," answered Kano. "Yours?"

"Running fucking slow," the old merc grumbled, in an uncharacteristic show of bad temper. "Took two bloody hours worth of begging and threatening to get everybody out of that commune, and we still got another to go. I'm gonna start shooting if that happens again, we're running out of time."

"We should get underway then," said Kano, and turned to move off.

"Wait," said Pappagallo, halting him. "You didn't come by to say 'howdy do'. What is it?"

"Owan is right," said Kano without turning to face him. "We're dealing with an unknown here, and the first rule of war is to know your enemy. Something is happening at the border settlements, and we don't know what. And I suspect that infestation has something to do with it."

"Ah Christ, what do you want me to do?" Pappagallo said disgustedly. "Issue weed-whackers? Owan wanted to go out with someone and collect samples, you think I should let her?"

"Of course not," said Kano. The golden-skinned woman had paramedic-level training, which made her as valuable as if she was actually made of gold. She could not be so casually risked.

"Then what?"

"Keep watch," Kano replied. "Watch for anything odd. Watch the borders. Watch the border colonists, who've been the most exposed. Don't let the pirates dominate your situational awareness. Watch."

With that, the master gunman walked away, heading back to the air rover. The old merc didn't stop him, and there was a troubled look on his face as he watched him go.

Two hours, forty minutes left till daybreak.

x x x x x

Weyland-Yutani terraforming colony "Threshold," Charon-Alpha canyon at 53 km. outside community border
Company personnel aerovehicle: Registry 7A36-OCS1, approaching Bohuslava homestead

Pistor swerved his airskiff back on course as he drifted a little too close to the canyon wall, and he swore under his breath.

He had been off-kilter ever since his experience back in the deserted Koski household. His focus was poor, he was edgy and tense, and there was an uncomfortable nagging anxiety somewhere deep in his gut. Something about this mission in the deep darkness was getting to him, and he was bone tired to boot.

Pistor had run other missions in far more dangerous and frightful circumstances than this, he didn't know why this particular job had him all keyed up so. The call from Brinnlitz about "invisible infestations" wasn't making things any easier, either.

"Alright, I see the Bohuslava place," he said to Gerhardt beside him. They were coming to a fork in the canyon, and the homestead was built on a plateau jutting from the center peninsula, some ten meters up. The plateau was fairly expansive, with a flat field of ferns big enough to hold a thrashball game in front of the house, and after a quick perimeter of the area Pistor brought the craft to a landing in the field.

The lights were off in the house and stayed so as Pistor and Gerhardt disembarked. Pistor could see that the front door was wide open, and he was already getting a bad feeling about the place. But there was barely an hour left before dawn now. He didn't have time for bad feelings.

"Let's go," he said to Gerhardt; they hadn't picked up anyone yet on this run, allowing her to come along rather than guard the skiff this time. The two of them moved off side by side, heading quickly toward the house.

"Hold it," said Pistor suddenly, stopping Gerhardt in her tracks. She saw him looking downward and followed his gaze, and she saw what he saw: the ferns were crushed flat in two parallel ruts, right by the porch of the house.

"Landing skids," she whispered in realization. "One of theirs?"

"No way to tell," said Pistor. Stepping forward, he squatted down and picked up something from beside one of the ruts. He held it up for Gerhardt to see: a cigarette butt, with a thin wisp of smoke still rising from the end.

"Whoever it was, they left here only a little while ago," he said.

"Nobody from Threshold drops cigarette stubs into our biome!" Gerhardt exclaimed. "The raiders are in this area, we should call it in!"

"We don't know that for sure," cautioned Pistor. "Could be someone getting careless or… wait. Something over there."

He was looking to the side of the house, at a smaller laboratory building nearby. Gerhardt followed as he jogged to the lab, and then she saw what he had spotted.

"Oh God," she said, feeling sick. It was a body, a fair-haired woman lying in a swath of bloodstained ferns. Her chest was a great ragged, bloody crater amidst the remnants of her blouse, and her face was contorted in agony.

"What… what happened to her?" Gerhardt gasped as Pistor squatted down to examine the remains closely. He might not be a mortician, but he was intimately familiar with injury and corpses, and he could tell the cause of most wounds.

"This is an exit wound, not an entrance," he said, dispassionately. "She must have got hit in the back. Probably an explosive round that discharged through the front of her chest. Strange though, she should be lying on her stomach if…"

"That's it, I'm calling it in. It's a fucking murder," Gerhardt snapped, her voice growing hoarse. She turned away, touched her headset with a shaky hand. "All units, this is Gina Gerhardt from Pistor's team. There's been recent pirate activity at our location! We've found tracks from another skiff and a gun murder victim at the Bohuslava homestead. Please advise!"

"Gina, this is Nomad," Tristan O'Hara's voice immediately responded. "Hang tight, I'm on my way to your quadrant, ETA ten minutes!"

"Gerhardt, Pops," came Pappagallo's voice next. "Take cover until Nomad reaches your area, then continue your mission. There are only a few more homesteads to check and you'll have Harry's protection, you can make it. All other units, stay alert for enemy movement!"

"Copy that," Gerhardt confirmed. She started to move off but then paused and looked back, realizing that Pistor hadn't moved.

"I need help with the stretcher," she said impatiently. "What's the matter?"

"The smoker didn't do this. Blood is dry, this happened a while ago," said Pistor, frowning. "And it looks like she was convulsing when she died, but a wound like that should have killed her instantly. This is all wrong."

"If you're thinking of an autopsy, don't bother. We don't have anybody left who's trained for it," said Gerhardt. Pistor scowled.

"Alright, forget it," he said, standing up. "Don't bother with the stretcher, we need to check the house."

"We're not taking her back?"

"If we can't autopsy her, there's no point," the merc replied, then he caught himself as Gerhardt gave him a pained look.

"Gina, this is war, and we're on a rescue mission," he said gently. "There might be a lot more bodies ahead, and we can't afford to be the meat wagon."

Gerhardt nodded, feeling a chill come over her. She wondered, how many times had this diminutive man been in a situation like this? How many times had he stepped over dead bodies to carry out his mission? How many of those bodies had fallen by his own hand?

"Copy that," she said, turning coldly professional herself. "We need all our space for the homesteaders anyway. Let's go."

One hour, fifteen minutes left till daybreak.

x x x x x

Weyland-Yutani terraforming colony "Threshold," Charon-Alpha canyon at 40 km. outside community border
Bratovich homestead, cliffside edge of property

"…you can make it. All other units, stay alert for enemy movement!" concluded Pappagallo's transmission.

"Well. The game's afoot," murmured Brinnlitz, and a slow smile came across his face. The dear moppets were abroad tonight after all, and he might very possibly be about to meet them.

The sniper's eyes narrowed, one eye covered by his filament eyepiece, trying again to pierce the furthest reaches of the dark canyon. He was standing guard by his airskiff near the edge of a high shelf in the canyon wall, while his partner Olga cajoled the inhabitants of the nearby house. He leaned over the sturdy railing and squinted into the darkness. Had he seen something out there just now?

Brinnlitz stayed unmoving there for a time, indifferent to the howling wind rippling through his clothes. He could dimly hear Olga arguing with the Bratovichs in their house, and wondered how long she was going to take. They were running dangerously late from the long travel times to and between the outermost homesteads, and on their last run, the Bratovich homestead was the first house of three that still had people in it.

Suddenly, Olga burst out the door of the house, swearing angrily, and stomped over to him. Brinnlitz raised an eyebrow.

"I take it negotiations are not going well," he said, unperturbed.

"Of all the wilfully blind, bone-headed fucktards who ever..." the stocky young woman stopped herself, took a deep breath. "I don't think we're moving these ones. They're the furthest away from the colony and they like it that way. I didn't think there were any of us Sanjivans that stupid."

"Ah. Well let me have a try, perhaps I can chat them up a little," said Brinnlitz, stepping back from the railing. And should that fail, there's always the direct approach, he thought to himself, reaching into his jacket to loosen the tranq pistol in his underarm holster.

"If you can talk them out, I'll eat my…" Olga stopped. The sniper had abruptly sprang forward and was leaning over the railing again, staring out into the dark. "What? What is it?"

Brinnlitz hadn't imagined it. It was gone now but he had pegged it, a faint glimmer of light far in the distance down the lightless canyon.

"Pistor, from Brinnlitz," he radioed out, tapping his headset touchpad to increase the gain and volume. "In what canyon did you and Gerhardt find your 'recent activity'?"

"Brinnlitz," came Pistor's reply. "We're in Charon Canyon on the east end." Brinnlitz's eyes widened. He and Pistor were in the same canyon.

"Pistor, are you on the move?"

"Negative on that, we're still clearing our site."

The sniper whirled and grabbed Olga's shoulder, roughly shoving her ahead of him as he hustled to the house.

"We've got company," he answered her protestation, and briefly turned to look as they reached the front door. His suspicion was born through: there were two pinprick lights now, lighting up the floor and vegetation of the distant canyon. Headlamps.

"Everyone, we have a few pirates who might be visiting soon," Brinnlitz announced to the gathered Cherenkov family as he strode into their living room. "I need you all to turn out the lights and head down to the basement, and you should be very quiet. Don't you worry, I'll make sure nobody gets hurt." Excluding their adversaries, of course. He was so hoping they wouldn't just fly by.

"Give me your shotgun, and hide your pistol in your jacket," he instructed Olga. "Stay with the family. Go along if the pirates take them prisoner, and don't start shooting until I do. They'll never see it coming. Got it?"

"Got it," she answered in a growl, sounding quite rough and tough. Brinnlitz smiled at the suppressed fear in her voice, her face, her body language. How delightfully heroic.

He sprinted away, bounding up the stairs and then heading for the forwardmost section of the upper floor. The master bedroom had a sliding window overlooking the front of the house, and he grasped and ripped out the safety bolt that kept the window from fully opening. Brinnlitz readied his rifle, stepping a pace away from the open window so as not to expose the long barrel, and he hummed happily to himself as he quickly ranged the area. The entire front yard of the house was his playground now, he just had to wait and see if the visitors actually stopped to play.

Brinnlitz wasn't disappointed. A large hoversled came into view, a gaudily flame-painted craft with an impressive heavy machinegun tripod in the rear bed and another in a fixed-forward mount at the nose. It decelerated and played its lights over the homestead as it passed by, then it circled back and came to land beside the colonial airskiff.

The enemy vehicle had a retractable top that was folded open, and Brinnlitz suppressed a snicker at the sight of the four exposed men inside. Top open, beers in hand, macho body language. These ones were on a midnight joyride, and were not expecting to need all the guns they were toting along.

Three of the men came out. All were in brutish tough-guy clothes, all leather, jeans, chains and jewelry. They were all scarred, heavily tattooed and laden with guns and knives, looking somewhere between hardened gangsters and bondage fetishists. He could tell they weren't posers though. They were killers, modern-day barbarians as mean as they looked, and every bit of prestige and bling they flaunted was earned in human suffering. In short, his favourite kind of man.

As the pirates went over to Brinnlitz's skiff, and started checking it over, the sniper touched his headset and whispered into the mic.

"All units, Brinnlitz. Hostiles in sight. Targets unaware, I'm preparing to ambush."

"Brinnlitz, Nomad is just two minutes away!" O'Hara answered. "I'm coming in high, should keep it quiet for you."

"Brinnlitz, Pops," came Pappagallo's voice next. "Remember, we don't want them calling home. Attack only if you're spotted, and then take them out fast. And Brinnlitz… don't do this for fun. Don't forget."

"I hear you, old man," Brinnlitz murmured, scowling. Spoilsport.

One of the men let out an unpleasant-sounding laugh: he had the colony skiff's engine section open and had doubtless discovered the pristine fuel cell within. Brinnlitz sighted on him, settled the crosshairs on the man's tattooed brow and followed his movements as he bent and detached the cell.

Another of the men called for attention: he had found the spare cell in the storage compartment. The sniper aimed at him next, then turned his sights to the nearby third man. This would be so easy, they were clustered close together with clear shots on all of them; he could take them all down before any could flee.

But then there was the fourth, sitting at the controls of their own craft and obscured by the windscreen. Brinnlitz didn't have a clear shot on him. Whether any of them had comm units or not, that one would have access to the vehicle's radio for sure. And if he just gunned the engine and took off when his buddies started dropping, then the lurking sniper might get him, or he might not.

The alternative was to take out the pilot first, but that could potentially give his amigos time to take cover behind the skiffs. And then, they would start using their arsenal of weapons and grenades on the house, and the whole scene would turn to a grand clusterfuck.

Brinnlitz ground his teeth as he watched the raiders outside. At his level of skill, he could take them all down before they found their wits, he was sure of it. But he wasn't completely sure. Could he risk it? Did he really care that much about all those previous foolish promises and plans?

Two of the pirates were now standing with one behind the other while they talked, just stopping a while to sip their beer and shoot the shit. The sniper's finger tightened on the trigger; he could take them both with a single penetrating shot. The pilot was standing so as to look down and chat with them too, and was exposed from the waist up. It would be perfect.

Two leather-clad men, falling into each other as they collapse like lovers into each other's arms. The third man nearby stares with his jaw dropped, then the jaw disintegrates in a shower of blood and teeth as another bullet goes through his neck, and he goes down with a gagging, musical gurgle as blood fills his throat. The pilot is similarly stunned but only for a second, and he starts to drop down into his seat. But he doesn't drop fast enough, and the top of his head explodes, spraying a magnificent plume of gore and bone and brains over the rear seats of the skiff…

Brinnlitz's finger slowly loosened on the trigger of his rifle. The pirates were moving to their flyer now, taking the fuel cells but ignoring the house. He followed them with his crosshairs as they clambered back into their vehicle, and his excitement and anticipation ebbed away. They weren't threatening, weren't going to discover him or his civilians, and he wasn't going to play with them. He was letting them pillage his vehicle and sail away, leaving the rescue operation safely undiscovered.

As the enemy skiff lifted off, Brinnlitz tossed his rifle onto the nearby bed and flopped down on the bed himself. He put his hands behind his head and laid back with a long heartfelt sigh.

"Boo-ooring," he groused, drawing out the word in a feigned yawn. Had Piers Pappagallo been present to hear him say that, the old merc would have frozen in horror.

One hour left till daybreak

x x x x x

Weyland-Yutani terraforming colony "Threshold," Keller-Bravo canyon at 45 km. from community border
USAAC Combat Airscout: XBGT02 Pursuit Special, en route to Tadeusz homestead

The military air rover was decelerating for an approaching sharp curve when Kano spotted it: another vehicle, parked on a wide shelf in the curved canyon wall ahead. He pulled up and braked hard, and engaged the rover's hoverjets as it came to a stop in midair.

"Ow! What, what?" exclaimed Aedon from the turret gunner's seat, roughly awakened from his doze and rubbing his tired, watery eyes. Kano wordlessly answered by bringing up a telescopically magnified image on the green-lit main screen: a wingless airskiff, the size of a truck or small yacht. The foreign vehicle's rear tripod and forward mounted machineguns were plainly evident, but there was no one on the open deck of the craft.

"Shit, one of theirs," Wulcan said tersely. "We better blast that motherfucker before the crew gets back."

"Wait," said Kano. "This vehicle has a silent mode, and we are low on heavy munitions. We can go in quietly and take them on foot, and possibly capture that skiff."

"Oh yeah. I like the sound of that," said Dameon, with a menacing smile.

"Well I don't," protested Wulcan, as Kano accelerated toward the shelf. "This is bloody risky Mr. Iceman, and we got a load of people in the back. We should play it safe."

"There is no safe option," replied Kano. "Destroying the skiff leaves the crew alive, who could call in with hand comms. Retreating puts an enemy unit at our backs, and we have one more pickup to make. No, an ambush on the ground is our best chance of neutralizing them all before they can call for help."

"Well I guess you're the fucking boss. Let's do it then," said Wulcan, darkly.

Appropriate notifications were given, warning the passengers not to go outside on this stop and alerting the circling Nomad of a new pirate sighting. And by then, the rover had reached the shelf, choosing a landing site close to the pirate vehicle, behind a rock outcropping that just barely hid it from view.

The jutting shelf was a thing of astonishing, mysterious beauty, swathed with a carpet of lush ferns and flowering vines, and interspersed with a forest of giant mushrooms up to three meters tall whose undersides glowed with a clear blue-white phosphorescent light. In the darkness, each mushroom was like a small island of shining, flowering life, with dozens of these islands following the curve of the shelf like rafts of light in a flowing river.

"Pretty, innit?" smiled Wulcan. Dameon was stunned, whispering "My God" at the sight, and for a flitting instant even the hardened Kano was taken aback. Just for an instant though.

"Wulcan, you man the smart gun while we're gone," said Kano as he detached his harness. "It's easy. The weapon aims itself, just point and shoot. If you lose contact with us and pirates come around that rock, assume the worst and retreat. Understood?"

"Got it."

Kano turned and opened the hatch without another word. He looked over at Aedon, motioned him to follow with a tilt of his head, and headed out.

The two mercs stepped out and made their way around the outcropping to reach the middle of the shelf. Though the carpet of ferns and vines made their footing difficult at times, it also naturally muffled the sound of their footsteps.

"Stay out of the light," Kano whispered into his headset mic, transmitting from his comms to Dameon's. "We're going to their vehicle first. Watch for hostiles hidden inside."

They reached the pirate airskiff. Moving fast, Kano vaulted aboard with Aedon right behind. Once assured there was no one else aboard, the veteran merc made his way to the pilot's chair and immediately noticed the cardkey in its slot. Aedon smiled as Kano took the key and passed it to him. Overconfidence led to carelessness, and these pirates had just lost their ride.

Kano inspected the radio panel next. He took note of the frequency that was last used, then produced a long knife and swiftly pried open the underside of the panel. Reaching inside, he yanked out a small circuit board, and the display went dark. He pocketed the board. No more radio for them either.

Finally, he went over to each of the machineguns in turn, opening them up and confiscating the trigger pin for each. No more guns. The pirate vehicle was now effectively crippled, yet its missing components could be reinstalled quickly and easily.

Moving fast, Kano exited the vehicle with Aedon in tow. The pirates had been gone awhile already, they could be back any second now. The two proceeded down the shelf for a time, taking care to avoid the light of the mushrooms, and after a time Kano came to a halt near a small ridge of rock outcroppings crossing the shelf. There was only one way their enemies could pass this position. They would set their ambush here.

Kano selected a chest-high section of the ridge and sat down cross-legged behind it, and to Aedon's surprise, he seemed to let down his guard. The veteran sat back and relaxed, glancing up momentarily at the brightening sky. Dawn was just minutes away now.

Dameon chose his own ambush spot behind a similar rock outcropping, just a little ways away from Kano. He crouched down in a ready position, but then with a look at the master gunman, he decided to sit in a more relaxed position as well. The young merc gazed over at Kano again and shook his head in befuddlement; the veteran had picked one of the Sanjivan vine-flowers and was gazing at it contemplatively, as if he was composing a poem. Expert as he may be, Dameon's teammate was a hard one to figure out.

Wondering how relaxed he should allow himself to be, Aedon loosened his pistol in its holster, and he unsheathed his katana and leaned it against the rock outcropping. Then he looked over at the utterly relaxed and serene-seeming Kano again, and he changed his mind, instead taking the sword and laying it across his lap. There, casual and still ready for action.

Dameon looked up one more time to check on Kano, and found himself staring down the barrel of the veteran's gun. The pistol's report was like the crack of a whip.

Aedon felt the shot hiss by his ear, and his startled expectation of betrayal was instantly quelled as he heard a solid meaty impact and a gasping grunt behind him. He whirled to see a big leather-clad man slumping to the ground with a hole in his forehead, and just at that moment another imposing, bearded outlaw came around the outcropping and froze as they saw each other.

The pirate let out a yell and reached for his sidearm. Aedon's draw was faster: the lad surged forward on one knee and drove the tip of his katana deep into the man's chest. The outlaw's shout was cut off as his heart was neatly bisected, and he was already dead before his body slumped to the ground.

Lodged in bone, Dameon's sword-tip was pulled to the ground with the body, and the young man snarled in frustration as he struggled to free his blade. He looked back over his shoulder at Kano, gasping a jumble of garbled words as he tried to think of any apology or excuse that could pardon such a shoddy performance.

The veteran looked completely unperturbed, seeming to expect it long ahead of time as a third pirate with a machinegun vaulted over the ridge between the two mercs. Another gunshot rang out, and the chain-swathed goon's legs collapsed under him when he landed, the side of his head shattered.

Snapping back to alertness, Aedon spun to face forward again, just in time to see the fourth member of the pirate team come around the rock on his side. The gaunt tattooed man was whirling one way and the next, searching wild-eyed for the attackers, and didn't notice Dameon at first. The lad yanked desperately at his sword to try to free it from the corpse, then he gave up on it and snatched his pistol instead, just as the thin pirate saw him.

Both men dived for cover, shooting wildly at each other. Neither scored a hit, and Aedon scrambled behind a nearby giant mushroom. He peeked out to see his adversary running headlong up the shelf towards his skiff, and cursing with fury, he emptied his clip ineffectively at the fleeing man. Jumping out, Aedon stumbled a moment over a knot of vines as he made to give chase.

"Let him go," said Kano as he came up beside Aedon. "He has nowhere to run, and I'm uninterested in chasing over this terrain in the dark."

"What about their comms?" the young man panted.

"The other three aren't carrying any. I would assume he has none either."

Then Kano looked up, one eyebrow raised in a faintly displeased expression as the hum of a hover engine broke the silence. "It appears however, that he does have a spare key."

"Ah shit," Dameon swore as he saw the pirate airskiff lift off. "Come on, we gotta chase him now! What are you waiting for?"

The veteran didn't answer, just watched on as the vehicle turned tail and started accelerating away at maximum boost. Raising one of his pistols, he sighted down the barrel and took careful aim at the back of the skiff. Aedon stared at him, and started to snap out an impatient, sarcastic remark. Then Kano fired.

Even at that distance, through his nightvision the lad clearly saw the spray of blood that splashed over the inside of the skiff's windscreen. The pilot slumped in his seat, and his craft wobbled in the air and then went into a nosedive to the canyon floor. A moment after impact the vehicle exploded, lighting up a long stretch of the canyon; the pirates evidently had volatile materials aboard, likely stolen booster fuel or liquid oxygen. The moan of the wind was drowned out for a moment as the thunder of the explosions rolled by.

Aedon slowly pulled his eyes away from the fading fireworks and settled them on Kano, who had lowered his pistol. The lad was so stunned and astounded that he could barely speak.

"That… that was… the most… fucking amazing shot..." he managed to get out.

"The worst," Kano interrupted, his voice a soft growl of disgust. "I was aiming at the skiff."

Had the merc struck the aileron he'd been aiming for, the flyer would have been reduced to either flying in circles or crawling along on its hoverjets. Either way, it would have been left helpless and intact, and he would have had his prisoner and a captured aerovehicle. Now, all he had was a fireball that was going to attract unwelcome attention before long. No, this wasn't Kano's best moment as a master of the gun.

"Get Wulcan over here and strip the bodies," he said to the gawking Dameon, coldly. "We need their guns, and they were carrying power cells of some kind. Move fast, and give Pappagallo an update while you're at it. I'm going to see what they were doing."

Kano moved off at a brisk walk, following the gentle downward slope of the shelf around the inner curve of the canyon, the direction the pirate team had come from. What had brought them to this empty spot in the first place?

Though the sun was not yet up, almost a third of the sky was bright with light. When Kano rounded the curve, he found that reddish-gold light reflected back at him from a small tower, seemingly covered in mirrors. Was this what the pirates had been investigating? There was no other sign of habitation or objects of value anywhere, so that would seem to be the case. He moved in.

The tower was the size of a small lighthouse, built into the canyon wall a ways down from the edge of the shelf. There was a narrow metal bridge with one railing collapsed, going some ten meters out to a sliding door in the side. The door was half-open, and Kano could see electronic monitors and consoles within from the end of the bridge. Was this a solar collector station, perhaps?

Kano's suspicions were confirmed when he crossed the bridge to check the interior. The mirrors were photoelectric cells, the electronics inside the building were made to collect, analyze and monitor Naraka's rays, and the superconductor storage batteries were missing, very likely the canister-like objects the pirates had been carrying. There were no colonists or anything else of interest in the tower, so he headed out. The evacuation was now officially running late; dawn was almost here, and there was no time to lose.

The ghost of fatigue was starting to creep through him again as the stimulant of battle faded, but as he was coming to the halfway mark on the bridge, the fatigue was abruptly gone.

Like many whose lives had oft depended on it, Kano's unconscious mind was capable of gathering sensory information and realizing a threat in nearly an instant, sometimes long before his conscious mind had caught up. He stopped cold on the bridge, one foot before the other. This open and exposed place was the worst possible place to be caught flat-footed. Where was the threat?

If it hadn't been for the rosy light of approaching sunrise, he wouldn't have seen it at all, for there was no trace of it on his nightvision eyepiece. Only his uncovered eye saw it: a massive spider lurking near the foot of the bridge, hairless and fleshy, big as the disk of a docking clamp. He had time to register the thought that this thing did not belong in this place, any more than did kangaroos or little green men. And then it was upon him, flying through the air straight at his face.

Kano had no time to think, only to do. For some reason, his instinct was not to duck or quick-draw his guns; instead his rear foot flashed upward and drove straight out heel-first at eye-level, in a snap kick faster than most human eyes could see. The impact was solid; the creature was not light. What should have happened then was that the jumping spider should have bounced high up into the air, giving him time to leisurely draw and fill the thing with holes before it hit the ground.

Instead, moving with superhuman reflexes of its own, the hideous thing caught and wrapped its legs partway around his boot, grabbing on and scrabbling for purchase with its long multi-jointed limbs. A whipping segmented tail struck his calf, snaking over the knee as it started to wrap around his leg. Revulsion shivered through his body.

Scarcely conscious of what he was doing, Kano threw himself backward in mid-air, his other foot swooping up and overhead in a savage bicycle kick that tore the writhing spider from his leg and punted it soccer-style toward the solar collector tower. The master gunman landed on his hands and twisted in the air to drop to his feet facing the tower, both guns flashing from his holsters. But even his acrobatics and lightning speed barely had him positioned in time for the retaliation.

The spider had struck the side of the tower and latched on, and it was diving at him again just as he saw it. It was so fast, so very fast. He just barely had time to bring his guns to bear, and then he finally took it down, his hail of bullets stopping it dead in the air as though it had hit a wall.

The corpse of the thing plopped wetly at his feet, and he stepped smartly backward as the yellow innards splattered all over, managing to avoid getting the mess on his boots. Kano's eyes widened then as he saw the fuming stuff eating through the metal of the bridge. It looked like hot oil melting its way through an ice sculpture, going clean through the walkway and then through the support latticework underneath that.

The spider corpse drooped and fell through the hole its corrosive juices were melting, and the bridge began to slump alarmingly as its modest support structure was eaten away. Turning to run, Kano paused a moment and looked out to the shelf and the primeval mushroom forest from whence the creature had come. There could be dozens of the things in there, and he'd never see them. Suddenly, the landscape was no longer a thing of beauty, but of hidden menace.

Kano turned back instead and jumped over the hole, bounding gracefully over the wobbling bridge to the tower door. He had been kicking and backflipping on this meter-wide bridge just seconds earlier; this was the designated place for high-risk acrobatics, it seemed.

"Wulcan, Aedon," the merc radioed his team as he looked out from the doorway of the tower. His voice was intense, his normal calmness barely detectable. "Stop and get into the rover right now, and close all the hatches."

"What the fuck is going on?" demanded Wulcan in response.

"Move fast," he said firmly, his eyes scanning up and down the shelf for movement. Were there any more of the creature? And how had the pirates avoided it? Sheer luck? Or did they have some sort of repellant or other method of control?

"Okay, we're in. What's the story?" came Aedon's voice from the comms. Kano hesitated a long moment before he answered.

"Something attacked me, some kind of… animal. Very fast, very aggressive. There could be more of them in the bushes, we have to be cautious."

"Animal? What kind of animal? There ain't no fucking animals on Sanjiva besides fish!" said an incredulous Wulcan.

"There's a solar tower around the bend. Pick me up there," said Kano, ignoring her. "And stay alert."

He calmed himself and waited, and his breathing gradually slipped back into its normal deep rhythm as he found his center. His body and mind stilled as he regained his meditative focus again, but it took a noticeable moment of time now, longer than his discipline would normally need.

Kano had been badly shaken by the encounter. His life had been threatened countless times by humans and environmental hazards, he had even encountered unfriendly wildlife on alien planets before, but he had never seen anything like that spider thing. Had it been just a fraction of an hour earlier, he never would have spotted it in the dawning light, and it would have taken him in the dark.

Then it struck him: it hadn't appeared in his nightvision. Just like the mystery infestation reported by Brinnlitz. That couldn't be a coincidence. And he had never heard of any substance that could even theoretically degrade through plasteel, yet the creature's body had been full of it. This thing was like no animal he had ever heard of, even freaks like the electric eel and giant sandmaw.

Pappagallo's scout rover finally rounded the bend and moved to hover beside the solar collector tower, and Kano jumped aboard.

"It can wait till the debriefing," he said, halting his companions' questions. "Any pirates in the area will be coming to investigate the explosion, and our cover of darkness will be gone in twenty minutes at best. We have one homestead left. We must hurry."

Naraka was dawning. The operation was out of time.

x x x x x

Weyland-Yutani terraforming colony "Threshold," Charon-Bravo canyon at 54 km. outside community border
Polonski homestead, front porch

"Oh God," Gerhardt whispered.

She and Pistor were at the Polonski household, and Pistor had just opened the front door. He had stopped cold, and Gerhardt had moved closer to peer over the small man's shoulder.

There was a dead man laying within, all torn up and still clutching a shotgun, but she noticed him almost as an afterthought. The entire hallway was crawling with growths, skeletal whitish-green things that looked jagged and artificial in some places and sinuously organic in others, covering the roof and plastered over most of the walls. The hallway was transformed to something out of nightmare, the growths blending together in patterns that evoked images of ravaged internal organs, mechanical engineworks, ancient torture devices, disturbing sexual imagery, and decaying corpse-flesh.

Gerhardt had never even conceived of anything like it in all her life. Like her companion, she had one eyepiece down and the other retracted so as to take advantage of both nightvision and her normal vision, and she was all too aware that on NV all she could see was fuzzy, staticky shadow.

"Pistor? Are we going to check for people… in there?" she asked, her voice coming out ragged and hoarse. The sight of the place filled her with awful fear, and she wasn't sure she could go any further.

"No," said the merc, his voice deceptively relaxed. Something in there had killed that man, even armed as he was, and no one could possibly be living in such a place day-to-day. "Fall back. Now."

He closed the door and the two of them backed away. It was quite strange how the house could look so pristine on the outside and yet hold such festering corruption within.

The dawn sun was peeking over the top edge of the closest canyon wall, and the small shelf on which the house was built was bathed in faint orange light. The knee-high ferns covering the front yard glowed in the soft light. The air was still and heavy, and there was a feeling of waiting menace all around, yet it seemed oddly peaceful too.

The two had almost made it to their nearby airskiff when they felt the ground shift under their feet. Gerhardt's instinct was to freeze in place. She felt the firm earth crumbling underfoot, then the ground abruptly sank half a foot underneath her and she wobbled drunkenly, barely staying upright.

"Move!" Her partner shouted, and suddenly he threw himself against her, barreling into her back. Though shorter than her, the small merc was a solid block of compact, heavy muscle, and the impact sent the slender woman flying.

The ground gave way. Cursing and clawing at the dirt, Pistor vanished into the collapsing hole. Gerhardt had been thrown almost clear, and she hastily grabbed the landing skid of their vehicle and pulled her long legs out of the fissure.

Down below, the merc landed on his back with a thud, and he was momentarily stunned. He stared up at the light a long moment, dazed, just watching the dust clouds settle. Then, pulling himself together, he sat up to take in his new surroundings.

Fear settled into his gut like a cold weight. His senses seemed to be swimming, and there was a low, deep, phantasmal droning in his ears. But for the ray of faint dawn light from above, it was utterly dark, and he saw nothing on his NV at all, just static and formless shadowy shapes.

It was utterly dark. He couldn't see anything at all. Fear grew, spiraling into mind-numbing terror. He had to get out of here. What if… what if there were things in the dark?

"Gerhardt? Find the rope and throw it down. Hurry," Pistor called into the crack above, not quite able to shout, but still under control.

"Copy that, give me a second!" he heard his partner yell back down. Her voice was oddly muted, though she only seemed to be seven or eight meters up.

His hands shaking, Pistor pulled a flare from his belt and raised his submachinegun. Dull red light sparked and bloomed. The flare fell from nerveless fingers to land amidst… winding bone-tentacles, slimy patterns on the floor. He knew where he was.

It was a large underground room or cave, he wasn't sure which. The growths were everywhere, infesting all of the floor and the one encrusted wall he could see in the low flare-light. The one place he didn't want to be, and it had to be here.

There was a low, breathy hiss, almost a sigh. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion as he raised his gaze to the sound.

Like a vision from his worst nightmares, he saw a set of fanged teeth grinning in the darkness, just four meters away from his face. So that was what a gene-engineered dog actually looked like, he could only remember glimpses of them as a child. It was big, perhaps bigger than him. Long, sleek body, gleaming slick and black in the low light. It sighed again, jaws opening, and a second pair of jaws opened within them. He felt his mind slipping.

Outside, Gina Gerhardt almost jumped out of her skin as a blood-curdling scream rose from the crack in the ground beside the airskiff. Clutching the rope from the engine toolbox, she rushed to the side of the skiff just in time to hear the hissing rapid-fire report of a silenced submachinegun echo from the fissure.

"Gimmethegoddamnrope!" Pistor shrieked from below. He sounded like he was fighting for his very life. Her mind whirling, Gerhardt raced to tie the micropolymer rope to the safety rail of the vehicle.

Pistor had expected to be playing it sneaky if it came down to a firefight, and had packed a sound/flash suppressor attachment for his weapon. He was regretting it now, wishing for the bright flash of a muzzle flare to light up the crippling darkness.

The dog had jumped sideways and was racing away into the dark. He had scored a few hits but thought he saw sparks off the animal's hide, as though his flechettes were striking an armoured skin. The fucker was fast, dodging and weaving, looking for its opportunity to jump at him. Pistor drew his autopistol with his off-hand and unloaded with alternate bursts, holding the creature back. Microflechettes might be poor against armour, but they packed a lot of them in a clip, and he could keep this up a while without reloading.

But then the dog dodged behind a thick bony pillar, and just like that, it was gone. Pistor searched wildly, swinging one way then the next. He snarled a guttural snarl, born of primal terror and ferocity, and opened up on the column with both guns, shredding the pillar till he could see through it. The dog had plumb vanished into thin air.

From somewhere in the room, there was a soft hiss in the darkness. The beast was still here, and he couldn't see it. It could be anywhere, getting ready to pounce on him from any direction. Pistor's snarl turned into a whimper. He couldn't take much more of this.

"Here!" came a cry from above. A rope fell from the crack above him, a lifeline going up into the light. Pistor dropped his weapons and jumped for it, yanking himself upward one swinging arm at a time.

Gerhardt had never imagined a man could climb a rope so fast. The micropolymer line had barely settled in the hole before Pistor was out, throwing himself backward away from the collapsed pit. His submachinegun was still on its shoulder strap and he whipped it up and sprayed downward into the hole in a long burst. Even while he was shooting, his off-hand was blurring to his belt to fling a finger-sized tube into the fissure, and Gerhardt flinched and ducked away as a thunderous explosion collapsed the hole.

Unsatisfied, Pistor threw another grenade into the pit, and threw his arms over his face as the dirt rained down. After that, all that was left of the hole was a shallow smoking crater.

He sat up and trained his gun on the crater, hyperventilating, and a long moment passed. The sunlight was warm and gentle after the cold of the night, and the field of ferns glimmered with shining dew. A gradual sense of peace came over him. His vision, his hearing, his feelings were all fine, he felt better. In fact, it was as if everything that had happened in that hellish pit had never been.

"All clear," he croaked. Gerhardt holstered her weapon and jumped down, rushed over to him. He was vaguely aware that she was talking to him, asking if he was alright, where was he hurt. He allowed her to run her hands over his body, checking for injury. And then suddenly he wrapped his arms around her, his body acting of its own accord in a childish, regressive, desperate need for comfort.

Gerhardt froze a moment, then melted into the merc's muscled arms before she knew what she was doing. The moment was overwhelmingly cathartic to be sure, but she hadn't been held by a man for years now and it felt damn good. His breath was warm on her neck, his compact body hard against hers. She could get used to this.

"What happened? What happened down there?" she asked when they finally parted. Pistor looked at her, his gaze unreadable, then answered.

"There was something down there… or maybe not," he said. "It was all full of that infestation. That stuff plays with your head… I think I was seeing things, something from my past. I don't know what I saw. But it was fucked up."

"That shit's more dangerous than we thought," Gerhardt murmured. She glanced at the house, not too far distant, and shuddered. The innocuous-looking homestead was full of that strange corruption. Everything seemed deceptively safe now, out here in the light, but there was only the thickness of a door between them and that hideous stuff.

"Time to go," said Pistor, echoing her thought.

"Should we go on to the next house?" she asked, as the two of them moved into the skiff's front seats. "We didn't get anybody this trip."

"The hell with that, we've done all we can," said Pistor curtly. "Sun's up, the mission's overdue. If there's a high-altitude flyer up there, we could be spotted any minute."

"Besides," he muttered. "I've had about all I can take."

"Same here," Gerhardt concurred tiredly, and she revved up the hoverjets. "Let's get the fuck out of here."

x x x x x

Author's Notes:

Again, sorry about the slow update rate. A busy college schedule plus some nagging writer's block can make for some marked lack of story. Anyway, this chapter is a somewhat risky experiment for me: there isn't anything that really corresponds to it in either The Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven. I'm basically going off-script here, making up original material so I can give my secondary characters a chance to shine. Well, I never did say that I was trying to transcribe either movie EXACTLY, did I? I hope this little experiment doesn't detract from the main story, post a comment and let me know what you think, eh?

-SA