Art Pact 45

We jumped off the boat at fifteen hundred give or take, scattered like seed pods around the big central bulk of the Ranger - you always boot that out first in case it lands on someone. The boat pilot was a greenie, first live delivery since he'd got here. You can always tell by how they deal with the Ranger drop - he hadn't accounted for the mass of the thing suddenly easing off the boat's repellers, so the boat leapt up about ten meters as the first of us went out the door - an extra ten meters is enough to wipe out the shocks on a man's boots if he's put on a few extra stone, so Tubby One and Tubby Two ended up on the floor rolling around like they'd been shot, grabbing their ankles and whiting out our headphones.

Course, we couldn't just leave them there when there was a boat so close, so the pilot got his punishment: having to wait around for five minutes like a sitting duck, repellers roaring and the heat off the boat's sinks slowly lighting up against the infra-back like a flashlight in a cornfield. It was good for us, though - reassuring to know that there weren't E in harpoon range, or they would have dropped the boat no problem. I guess the captain must have already known that, or he'd have got the boat to set down while it was waiting - he just wanted to give the pilot a bit of a kick for not keeping us steady. Something to learn him for next time.

The doc took a look at the Tubbies and pronounced them fit to walk - sprains at worst, and their boots could take all the weight until the doc thought they were fit to walk on their own. Tubby One started bitching about it, of course, but the captain was having none of it - his own fault for eating while he was on leave, he knew where he was, no excuse for putting on extra mass, certainly not in a place like this, so on. I could see old Tubs was pissed off, but if he ever wanted his name back he was going to have to knuckle under and get back down to fighting condition, so there was nothing to be done about it.

Anyway, the boat shot up like a rocket the minute the doc gave his OK, and the last we saw of it was the nav light on the underside shooting off across the canopy tops. We were at Point A, the hillside overlooking the central valley, and our job was to get to Point B, around the perimeter of the caldera. I say "get" there. Obviously what I mean is "cut through" - we'd been sent out here because no-one else had been in months, so the whole place was likely to be completely solid with plants. If the Es hadn't been here either, there was likely to be ten minutes of grinding from the ranger for ever hundred meters of progress we made, so time to Point B could be anything up to a week (an Earth week, about three local days).

That's exactly how it looked like it was going to be for about the first four hours. The Ranger rolled on ahead, babbling away to itself and its handler while its two long arms scythed through the undergrowth. We walked along behind it on the pressed vegemat walkway it was leaving in its wake, and muttered to ourselves about how it was that they could make a robot that would follow any order except the one to shut up. We stopped once in that time so that the doc could check on the sprained ankles, and Lance-Corporal Bursleigh shot what he thought was a beef-deer but which actually turned out to be a lucky-fucker. When we started having a go at him the captain told us all to stop acting like superstitious children, but we still made Bursleigh walk at the back - well at the back - when we started the column again. That's probably why we didn't notice he was gone for so long. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

At nineteen hundred the Ranger stopped, turned round on the spot using its tracks, and waved the captain to come forward. He told off me and Gunderson to come with him, and the three of us jogged ahead to where the Ranger's handler was standing, staring out silently into a huge opening in the forest.

"E," he said as we reached him. "Thousands of them." I was halfway through hoisting my gun to my shoulder when he stepped back so that I could see. "Dead."

The bodies were scattered over a circle about five hundred meters in diameter. They were clothed, apparently uninjured except for being dead, and all clutching strange metal objects. Gunderson stepped forward and picked one up.

"It's a gun," he said. "A melted gun. What melts a gun?"

"Nothing we have," the captain said grimly. "Gentlemen, I think we may not be alone here."

"We know that," I said. "The E."

"No," he corrected me. "I mean I think there may be more than one war on this planet."