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  “Fuel…” I said, seeing the forest in a new light. Now that I knew what to look for… Yes, the ivy was tapping the fuel bulbs of every host tree.

  “Oh, drent!” I reached for my gun, but never made it. Instead I was lifted up by the massive killer ivy I’d pulled to the ground in what I now realized was one of the dumbest things I’d done in a very long while.

  Vines became whip-like tendrils sneaking around my limbs – the main stems the coils of a constrictor. They snaked out around my torso but that was only to grip me. It was my legs that this thing was moving. Moving them apart. The killer ivy was going to snap me like a wishbone.

  What was I doing while all this was going on?

  Actually, very little. As hard as I tried to throw my bulk around to wriggle free, it was hopeless. I was pushing against hydraulic rams, and I had no doubt they could tear me apart with ease.

  “Silky!” I screamed. “Get away!”

  That’s what I tried to shout anyway, but I had a face full of foliage and a body full of agony. Even if she couldn’t hear my voice, I prayed she had heard the sentiment in my mind through the empathetic tentacles on her pretty, alien head.

  The pain was so intense that actinic flares kept popping in my vision.

  Rustling…

  The plant seemed to be shaking its leaves at me.

  What was that? The plant taunting me?

  The rustling mixed with snapping sounds.

  Incredibly, my struggles began to bear fruit. The pressure lessened… and began to give way. I started to move my legs back together, inch by tortured inch.

  Sharpened metal sliced past my ear, missing it by half a hair’s breadth, followed swiftly by the most beautiful sound in the universe… an axe chopping wood.

  It was Chikune.

  The ivy suddenly lost its strength and I fell headfirst into the soft bower of sappy branches. Within seconds I’d freed myself and grabbed my gun, although a severed band of branches still ringed my chest like an oversized bangle.

  “Did you consider that bringing an axe might be useful?” Chikune asked.

  “No, but I did bring this.” I reached into the pouch at my waist and slotted two grenades into the launcher beneath my carbine’s railgun barrel, setting the ordnance to voice priming.

  “Type 14-B,” I shouted as we ran for the armored bubbles at the center of the clearing, where Nolog was firing bursts of bullets into the pursuing forest.

  The grenades acknowledged the priming order, just before I reached the firing line the others had formed. I turned to face my enemy, taking a knee and readying to fire.

  The bullets and darts everyone else were shooting did little good against the trees and none at all against their riders.

  Yes, riders. The trees had uprooted themselves and were charging us. The ivy plants… they were tree riders, riding their steeds as if they were woody dragons. Slow, arthritic dragons perhaps – charging at a fast walking pace – but there was a frakkload of momentum in that advance.

  I held my fire.

  I could say that I was calm, keeping my powder dry until I saw the whites of their… leaves. But that wasn’t true. I was temporarily paralyzed with fear, and that didn’t happen often to me.

  The trees had a wide but shallow root structure that they walked upon like a sea of gnarly knuckles, their trunks bent in our direction. Each tree had a long taproot that they curled up and lifted behind like a pig’s tail. It didn’t seem real. The jerky movement… the nightmare plants… it felt like I was watching some really inept animated video.

  Then I glanced at the detritus of human and alien flesh, which was all that was left of the logging team. That was real.

  I fired a pair of grenades into the advancing trees. “Go. Go! Get away!” I shouted to everyone else as I set my carbine to laser mode, and prepared to give covering fire for their retreat.

  The incendiary grenades exploded.

  And wreaked fiery destruction.

  It’s relatively easy to ignite explosive munitions that burn hotter than a star. Which is great for incinerating an enemy trying to shoot you, but starting a fire is very different. You need to set your target alight, not atomize it.

  Type 14-B was a cluster bomblet mode that produced hot, persistent sparks, throwing out scores over a wide area.

  I backed away as the flames took hold, and when I say ‘took hold’, the flames were soon leaping fifty feet into the air, and lashing me with enough heat to soon turn my skin to crackling.

  The tree riders abandoned their pursuit and turned back, riding headlong into the fire, which allowed me to relax just enough to start worrying about more mundane matters – such as what the logging company would say if I’d just burned down the entire forest.

  But I needn’t have worried. I peered into the intense heat and watched with jaw dropped as the trees moved with purpose… not the blind panic I expected. They were… I don’t know why I found this difficult to believe after what I’d just witnessed, but the trees nearest to the blaze were moving away – forming a firebreak. I could see the tree riders through the smoke and flames flinging out tendrils across as much as forty feet from one host to another, and then leaping across the gap to change steed. Abandoned trees drilled their roots back into the soil, while their newly activated comrades lifted up their roots and moved to their riders’ commands.

  The plant creatures were in a race to contain the fire before it spread out of control. I urged them to succeed, and I rapidly grew convinced that they would. Which meant they would soon turn their attention back to me.

  I was out of grenades, and although my carbine had a powerful laser, I didn’t think it would be enough.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder, and a cool mind caress mine. “You need to live,” Silky told me. “Rearguards can withdraw with honor once they have fulfilled their duty. I do not understand the deathwish that persuades you to stay.”

  My head was a complex space, filled with traps, wreckage, ghosts and bleak swathes of devastation. I didn’t understand it either.

  “Time to run away,” I replied. “Understood, boss.”

  I left the fire to the tree riders, and we ran all the way back to Unity Ascent Base.

  — 3 —

  Back at the main base of operations, several miles away at Golden Bay, Silky ordered Chikune and César to rest, while Shahdi, Sel-en-Sek and Nolog kept watch on the camp perimeter in case of pursuing vegetation. The boss and I had our own battle to fight, in the rapid-assembly hut that was home to the co-owners of Zhang-Unison Forestry Corporation.

  The two corporate bosses had claimed opposite ends of the hut. One end comprised a shallow paddling pool with thick towels spread over inflatable bags stitched together; a battered metal desk dominated the other. It wasn’t tough to figure out which belonged to the human, and which to the Littorane, a member of an amphibious race that resembled seven-feet long newts.

  I left the arguing to Silky and the corporate bosses while I busied myself looking out the window.

  It wasn’t entirely because I was happy to leave the grown-up stuff to Silky; I was also assessing the site as a potential battlezone. If we really did face semi-intelligent trees who wanted to drive the loggers from their islands, then surely their highest value target would be here, at what resembled a Legion forward operating base.

  From the same armored bubble tents we’d left behind at Brintz, to the latrine block, from the lighting poles to the seats and perches, a lot of this had been taken from the Legion’s cupboard marked surplus. Not everything, though. Metal cargo shipping containers had been repurposed as equipment stores and fuel storage. The last segments of a chain-link fence were being erected along the perimeter, and that looked a civilian model too, because it looked like it was designed to keep people out without also killing them in the process. I didn’t think that fence would prove much of a barrier to a shrub with enough power to tear a Marine’s body into pieces, and then chop them up into chunks small enough to add to a stewp
ot.

  Zhang-Unison Forestry was a joint human–Littorane operation, and the fishier half of the workforce almost acted as if on vacation, their thick tails splashing happily in the shallow waters of the gently sloping beach that led away from the base. The entire site had a sense of suppressed happiness. When the workers momentarily forgot the horror that had claimed their friends out at Charlie and Brintz sites, cheerfulness broke out like the sun shining between showers.

  I guessed some people liked the idea of getting back to nature. I got that. The islands of the Naddox Archipelago had clean open air, warm seas, and plenty of growing things that hadn’t been blighted by chemical warheads and artillery bombardments.

  It was a shame that those same growing things were about to kill everybody here. Unless we found a weakness in the killer ivy, the best defense I could think of was to evacuate everyone out to sea. Those trees had looked top-heavy and knuckle-walking on roots did a great job of spreading weight across uneven ground, but I reckoned they lacked grip. The sea was gentle, but it wouldn’t take much current to topple them.

  “You want us to kill the trees?” said Silky incredulously. “Seriously?”

  I glanced over at her and briefly considered whether she would welcome me standing beside her as she squared off against the co-owners.

  I compromised. I glared at the bosses from my position at the window.

  “The solution to your problems is obvious,” Silky concluded. “We must firebomb the forest.”

  “We are in the timber business,” said the human, a short and serious Earther with the name of Frederick Zhang. “I hope your suggestion to destroy the forest upon which this business depends is not a serious one.”

  “My team is here because the revenge clause in your contract triggered,” said Silky. “It is the forest itself that killed your workers, and therefore it is the forest we are required to take revenge upon. If you prevent us from doing so, then you release us from the terms of the revenge clause.”

  The Littorane, who gloried under the name Gishleene To’as-Kan, agitated its considerable bulk – which the floor amplified into a hollow thump – before adding his own objection. “The revenge clause also states that the means of your revenge must not significantly impede our ability to conduct our business. As my colleague Mr. Zhang said, you cannot destroy the forest.”

  Silky tilted her head, the delicate ends of her head tentacles draping over one slender shoulder like scaly dreadlocks. I couldn’t see her face, but by the anxiety creeping across Zhang’s, I guessed her black eyes sunk into those deep black pits were fixing him with a helluva stare. “Well that is a positive beginning,” she said, my heart swelling with pride at the way she’d tipped her words with caustic contempt. I’d taught her to speak that way. “Now that we have ruled out one course of lunacy, perhaps we can rule out another. It is not the forest as such that we face, so much as the symbionts who tap into the same energy blisters you’re trying to convert to fuel. To remove them you need a biowarfare team. You want something along the lines of a tailored virus delivered by genetically altered insects. However you do it, you have to eradicate this species on the islands where you operate, or your workers will never be safe. You need to commit xenocide. Revenge Squad deters criminal activity and wrongdoing by kicking the hell out of anyone who dares to harm our clients. It is not in our corporate mission statement to wipe out species native to this planet, especially those that appear to possess sentience.”

  She is onto something, said Sanaa.

  Ah, yes, Sanaa. It’s true the office hut contained only three humanoids and one talking alligator, but I hadn’t come alone.

  I’d brought my ghosts.

  An exceedingly long time ago, on the eve of shipping out to war for the first time, my squad decided to go one better than acquire the tattoos, near-death experiences, and embarrassing sexual adventures that our less intoxicated comrades considered a standard rite of passage. We woke in the back yard of an unlicensed data shack to find we’d added cerebral access ports along our spines, and video evidence of us taking a solemn oath that when any of us died, the others would cut the AI out of our fallen comrade’s flesh and one of us would mount it in our spine.

  Other branches of humankind called Marines cyborgs, and they had a point. Since novice school, we had lived, loved, and fought with our AIs plugged into our brains, the two of us merging until the boundary between Marine and AI first blurred and then became unimportant.

  The upshot is that I had the half-AI, half-human ghosts of former squadmates plugged into my spinal column with a direct channel into my brain.

  Mostly, they were just annoying. Increasingly, they resided within me contentedly – watchful, helpful but silent. Sometimes, though, they made me appear a lot smarter than I really was, and Sanaa was the smartest of the bunch. Which was why I had married the flesh and blood version.

  The loggers want you to fail, Sanaa explained. Revenge Squad hasn’t the capability to wipe out the so-called ‘killer ivy’ even if you wanted to. Whether we refuse to act or admit defeat, the failure clause will payout. And that’s a substantial indemnity, because Revenge Squad very rarely fails to deliver revenge. It’s the money that they want. It will be enough to pay for a biowarfare team. Enough to buy xenocide.

  I growled. I know it was unprofessional, and by the way the three other people in the room looked up at me in surprise, I wasn’t the only one to think so. Frakk it! I couldn’t help it. Ever since I’d signed up with Revenge Squad I’d always known that one day I would find myself on the wrong side of a dispute, that I’d take revenge on behalf of the bad guys. I never thought that would happen with my rookie mission. Or that the good guys would be plants.

  “I think what my colleague has just realized,” Silky told the loggers, “is that you wish us to fail.”

  Did I mention that Silky is pretty smart too?

  “It’s nothing personal,” said the Littorane. “It is regrettable, but we are in business, just starting up with a huge debt to service and the hopes and aspirations of our workers to meet. We will not let our people down.”

  “And to make a human-Littorane joint operation successful is essential,” added Zhang. I’d assessed him as a sociopathic credit pincher, but he spoke with obvious passion. “Our two peoples are warring back on the mainland,” he continued. “We have to show the world that we can succeed together.”

  “We are Revenge Squad,” I said, walking over to stand beside Silky. “We don’t give up easily.”

  “I don’t want anyone else to get hurt,” said To’as-Kan. “There’s been enough violence. Fail now. Please. Trigger your non-completion payout and go home. We will deal with the problem. No one else needs to die.”

  “Except the tree things,” I said firmly.

  “The plants,” said Zhang. “They’re drenting plants, you dumbwad drellocks. Exotic specimens – yes. Unusual behavior – yes. But plants. For frakk’s sake, they aren’t intelligent beings with their own civilization. Even if they were, they have no legal status, and they are not your frakking concern.”

  The Littorane rolled the tip of his tail in a lazy circle. I had lived with one of the amphibians briefly, long enough to know this was a sign of agitation, of stress. It appeared that the Littorane was being forced into a position it was struggling to justify. I studied Zhang’s face, but found no room for compromise in that stony exterior.

  Revenge Squad and its clients glared at each other.

  Only one thing failed to make sense to me. It wasn’t much, but I’d been taught from an early age that if you see an opportunity, you seize it with everything you’ve got.

  I looked out the window at the Littoranes enjoying themselves in the water. Despite all the horror of recent days, the word I could best find to describe them was frolicking.

  “Honored Gishleene To’as-Kan,” I addressed the Littorane formally. “Your workers seem remarkably relaxed in the circumstances. Can you explain that to me?”

  “They
lie secure behind the fence and your warriors who are keeping watch.” The Littorane’s body language relaxed, and I realized he was conflict avoiding. “The location of Unity Ascent is perfect. Warm shallow seas, gentle currents, and corals filled with an abundance of colorful fish. It is remarkably like our homeworld. The wildlife here is poisonous, of course, but we can hunt, chase, and play with the fish through the coral arches. It’s a beautiful location.”

  “You mean, it’s a great spot to relax. A place of purity where the song of the Goddess resonates so strongly that even with the tragedy that has visited this island, your people out there can feel it from the top of their heads to the tips of their tails.”

  The Littorane reared up, pivoting halfway along its torso to take on an appearance that now resembled a crocodile-centaur hybrid, a stance that they preferred in combat. “I see you know a little of my people’s culture. I thank you for making the effort to do so.”

  “I don’t know much,” I replied, “but I do know those waters won’t seem so pure when they’re stained forever by the dishonor of xenocide.”

  The Littorane crashed down to the floor, settling its body into a crouch, its tail – which happened to be a highly effective melee weapon – held aloft and ready. I was highly adept at pissing off aliens.

  “The sooner you accept reality,” said Zhang, “the sooner you go home safe. Is your professional pride worth risking your lives?”

  Silky and I looked at each other. “Yes,” we said in unison.

  “My recommendation, boss,” I said to Silky. “Let’s go do some forest recon.”

  She looked up at me and smiled, which made this already odd-looking alien look even weirder. With her scaly skin the pallid gray of perished rubber, Silky looked like something dredged out of a dried-up river bed, and the human smile I was teaching her didn’t yet touch her eyes. But once in a while came moments like this when she looked impossibly cute. Whether that was cute like a puppy or rip-your-clothes-off cute was something I still hadn’t figured.