Menace Under Marswood Read online

  Menace Under Marswood

  (1983)**

  Sterling E. Lanier

  Contents

  Chapter 1 – The Fort in the Forest

  Chapter 2 – Post Mortem and Mystery

  Chapter3 – Danna Strom

  Chapter 4 – What's Out There?

  Chapter 5 – The Sea of Dreams

  Chapter 6 – A Menacing Start

  Chapter 7 – The Wayfarers

  Chapter 8 – JayBee's Council

  Chapter 9 – Through the Long Silence

  Chapter 10 – The Abyss of Cimmerium

  Chapter 11 – The Road to Time's Attic

  Chapter 12 – The Dweller and the Lair

  Chapter 13 – The Last of the Attendants

  Chapter 14 – Conflict Throughout Nowhere

  Chapter 15 – Animals, Aliens, and Close Combat

  Chapter 16 – The Last of the Best

  About the Author

  Book information

  Chapter One – The Fort in the Forest

  SLATER WOKE quickly and saw the monster. It was crawling slowly and inexorably onward, straight toward his head, the two terrible claws on the armored limbs waving gently in front of the pointed head, as four stumpy legs urged it on. From somewhere inside the dome-shaped, warty body came a clicking hum, too faint to be heard except in the silence of the small sleeping cubicle. The one great compound eye, centered in a forward turret and colored the dull red of a Martian desert, stared fixedly into the two brown ones of the young officer. Now it was very close indeed. Slater raised himself on his elbows, the sheet spilling down farther, and glared at the creature.

  "How in the name of God you ever get a woman to sleep with you, knowing that horror is wandering around here, beats me," came a voice from the doorway. Fully dressed in battle gear, Lieutenant Helge Nakamura lounged against the lintel, staring with unconcealed dislike at the form on his friend's chest. The giant Norse-Japanese had no use for that particular pet of Slater's.

  Slater extended a lean hand and plucked the two-inch snapper off his bare chest. Its legs waved feebly in the air, the two claws clicked audibly, and its inner noises grew more audible.

  "Grabbit's all right," Slater said equably. "He never hurts anyone I like—do you, boy? He's hungry just now, so he came to Daddy. Must have cleaned out all the roaches and junk in the room. Much better than a cat, you know."

  Holding the snapper by its midsection, he rose, walked naked across the room, and took a strip of tough meat from a tiny wall refrigerator. The snapper, freed on the plasteel of a tabletop, smoothly shredded the meat in its razor-sharp chelae and clicked the bits into the four-cornered mouth under the pointed front of its carapace until the last bit was gone. The two men watched in silence until the six limbs retracted into the body and a shutter fell over the great eye. Asleep Grabbit took on the appearance of a lumpy chestnut burr or an odd-looking brownish rock. Slater placed the tiny creature in a small flat box of impervium. Pressing the lid shut, he laid it on the table and began to dress, talking as he did so. It was time to report for the morning watch, and Nakamura had come to wake him.

  "I know he's dangerous. Damned if I don't think those claws could cut the impervium if he tried. They certainly cut everything else. But he came to me out in the Ruck, and he never tries to leave. Never bothers anything but bugs and mice in the fort either. Perhaps I'm a bit nutty, but I can feel he likes me. Sometimes I even get the feeling he can talk, peculiar as it sounds."

  "You've been in the Ruck too long, Slater. The base psych people will have a field day when you get debriefed. By then you'll probably be talking falsetto as well, if dear old Grabbit feels like a snack and your gonads are handy. He gives me the creeps. You know what happened to the first settlers before the domes were built."

  "Yeah, but most of those snappers were full grown—the size of house cats." Slater buckled on his sidearm, picked up his helmet, and followed Nakamura out of the room. Ten minutes later they were manning the command post on Fort Agnew's wall, just over the main gate.

  "Stinking Teef! Dirty Ruck!" Nakamura spat neatly over a corner of the parapet before continuing. "Why don't they throw the whole bastardly planet away and let the Ruckers have it for themselves?" It was not exactly a new idea but it cropped up frequently. The Ruck depressed some people.

  Despite his last name, Nakamura was a dark-eyed blond, and over six feet two inches tall. Broad nostrils and very full lips were the legacy of his Herero great-grandfather. The Norwegian and Japanese ancestry, indicated by his names, were more recent. He scowled at his friend and slapped angrily at a cloud of stinging gnats that hovered in front of his face.

  It was very quiet under the sun of the Martian summer. A few noisy insects piped and trilled in the haze of the near distance and some larger beast, probably a ferkat, screamed once at the edge of hearing. Fresh scents of growing things, of expanding, burgeoning life, drifted on the air from the surrounding forest. The temperature was a pleasant but moist 20°C. At night, however, it would drop to -20°C.

  Senior Lieutenant Mohammed Slater smiled lazily back at his classmate. "Old buddy, you never stopped screaming for action at the Academy. Where else you going to get it, unless you meant a Girly Camp?"

  Slater's jet eyes turned restlessly back to a sweep of the dark wood's edge. He was nervous for a reason he could not analyze but had learned to trust. An almost full-blooded Gilzai Pathan from the West Himalaya Republik, he had one recent English ancestor, the British grandfather whose name he bore. He pulled the green fibersteel helmet lower over his aquiline nose and wondered how many eyes watched from the Ruck. He saw nothing but knew that meant exactly as much. The UN Service Academy could only teach Mohammed Akbar Slater, six times great-grandnephew of the Faquir of Ipi, weapons technology and grand strategy. Tactics, especially those of frontier survival, had come to him with his mother's milk.

  Fort Agnew was a thirty-foot-high, four-sided, open stone box with walkways and parapets running around all four sides. A small, crenellated tower rose at each corner, and a tall square keep with a platform for copters on top rose in the center of the two-acre area enclosed by the walls. The blue flag of the United Nations drooped from a flagstaff on the keep. Rumor had it that the fort's engineers had copied a plan of King Arthur's castle out of sheer laziness. But the fort simply reflected age-old answers to equally old problems. Beau Geste would have felt at home there.

  The fort sat on an artificial mound. For two hundred yards around the walls, nothing grew but mutated grass and reindeer moss clipped to a height of six inches. Nothing could approach unseen because day and night the walls were patrolled by sentries using every sensing device the UN labs could turn out. For this was Marswood, also called the Teef—for Terraform—or more commonly still, the Ruck, from the Hindi for "Forest". It was commonly—and accurately—called the most dangerous duty in the Solar System, not from the impersonal forces of space and cosmos but due to human endeavor.

  The first effort to Terraform Earth's almost airless, meteor-pocked neighbor had begun with a joint American-Russian enterprise in the late twentieth century. It had commenced with sending specially bred, iron-consuming bacteria to Mars in a huge number of robot probes. These had thrived far beyond expectation, and their waste products were the oxygen and nitrogen compounds they released from the iron-rich, limonite surface of the planet. In only ten years, a hazy, cloud-speckled atmosphere was visible in lunar telescopes. Then cargoes of mutated fungus spores and the gametophytes of hardy mosses were sent, and when those had taken hold, the seeds of arctic grasses and alpine shrubs followed. They too survived. The scientists responsible were deservedly proud. A new Earth was being given to the universe. The great distance from the Sun and at
tendant cold seemed to have been canceled out by two other factors, one being the incredibly rich virgin "soil", the other the benefits of really intense UV light due to the absence of a stratosphere.

  But the third superpower had not been consulted. Communist China had been ignored by her Caucasian rivals. The successors of Chairman Mao, who held his beliefs largely undiluted, were faced with the prospect of seeing their more technologically advanced rivals, the capitalist Americans and the neorevisionist Russians, divide a second planet.

  China soon launched its own cargo-carrying rockets.

  All that was over two hundred Earth years in the past, but the results were before their eyes now. The two young officers, one with fascination, the other with dislike, watched the incredible, seething barrier of swarming plant life that surrounded them.

  Kudzu vines, pale-green leaves ten feet across and stems a yard thick, grew almost as one watched, their tendrils battling with those of poison ivy of equal bulk. Mongolian thorn bush bearing bronze daggers a foot long struggled with twisted manchineel trees and giant saw grass that grew far over a man's head. Twenty-foot, poisonous hogweed, its touch an irritant, sprouted everywhere. Olive mounds of mutated prickly pear and the jade drums of giant barrel cactus elbowed towering euphorbias, whose scarlet blooms hid their spiky branches. Huge Martian thistles, their flowers turned an inexplicable orange, reared over a thousand Earth weeds, most of them now the product of random mutation, all adapted to subarctic cold and all thriving beyond belief. Only lasers or edged steel could penetrate the solid mass of the Ruck. Only the trained, the truly Marsworthy, could survive in the tangled immensity that was Marswood.

  For the Chinese contribution to Martian life did not end with the plant kingdom. Shipments of animal life came too. Flies, fleas, lice, wasps, mosquitoes, poisonous beetles, spiders, centipedes, scorpions and mites; every unpleasant arthropod available was sent, not once but repeatedly. Most succeeded in establishing themselves. Many grew to large size with appetites to match.

  So too did the brown and black rats, the Eurasian rabbit and the house mouse, as well as the Indian mynah bird and the European starling and, eventually, the dwarf goat. They were no longer dwarfs and were doing splendidly. Even certain aquatic imports had made it. When all these creatures were added to the inevitable dogs and cats from the first settlements, it was clear that planned Terraforming was as dead as Kelsey's nuts. The offended Chinese had exacted a mighty revenge from the nations they thought had tried to keep them Earthbound. The smooth colonization of Mars had become an empty dream.

  Slater put down the monocular with which he had been examining the edge of the Ruck and continued the conversation. "We can't give it to anyone, stupid! We need it too badly! And you know it." He liked Nakamura but sometimes grew very tired of his griping. He hoped the big lieutenant would adapt. Still, it was a fact that some never did.

  "Look, Helge. There are almost a million legitimate settlers on Mars now. They have a right to stay. Minerals like the cryolite we're guarding here are desperately needed back on Earth, where they're mostly exhausted. You know all that crap." He raised his monocular again and focused on a distant-splash of color. A giant, chocolate-colored diurnal moth, triple the bulk of any on Earth, no doubt due to the low gravity, soared above the distant trees. As he watched, a dark bird the size of an eagle zipped up out of the growth, seized the huge insect, and dropped back again.

  "Those starlings can be a bloody nuisance," Nakamura said. "Ever been near one of those ball-nest things they call a rookery? They go for your eyes."

  Slater continued to peer through his glass, nagged by an increasing sense of unease. The fort was always under observation, but today it seemed more oppressive somehow, almost a physical weight.

  "I could stand the damn birds, the bugs, the mother-stinging plants, and the cold, but people who live here and like it ..." Slater ignored Nakamura's teasing. One reason that he never got very annoyed at Nakamura's grumbling was that the big blond was a good officer. His muttering never interfered with his watchfulness. Even as he spoke, he was scanning the forest. The two of them commanded the fort's western face for this watch, with Slater as the senior.

  They were not watching for animals, save by strict biological definition. There were people out in the incredible fog-shrouded jungle, men and women. It was for, or rather against, them that Fort Agnew and fifty more like it, large and small, girdled the planet. For they were so savage and inimical that an army in permanent garrison barely sufficed to keep them within bounds.

  The Ruckers, or Teefies, as the men of Earth called them, or the "pseudoindigenous and hostile clans" as one government handbook put it, were the newest subspecies of humanity. They were also a constant threat to the orderly colonization of Mars. In less than two hundred years, a complex barbarian culture of unparalleled ferocity had developed out in the wild, chill lands that still made up five-sixths of the Martian globe. In the beginning compounded of runaway South American miners, Nigerian farmers, and Russian and American military deserters, the Ruckers attracted the worst members of every culture to touch down on the new world. The fit had survived, the unfit had not.

  There the restless misfits of an increasingly planned Terran economy had established a society of their own, one based on a virulent hatred of the off-planet civilization that had given them birth. Brown-skinned, leather-clad, and apparently totally irreconcilable, the Ruckers warred without letup on the people of Earth, their possessions, and their habitations. The Ruckers were as cunning and adept at survival as, for example, the ancient Apaches of the mother planet. More, for they utilized science when it suited them, preserved the arts of reading and writing, and were quite capable of copying advanced weapons or using those captured. Like my own Pathan ancestors north of the Khyber, Slater thought, not for the first time.

  With so much of Mars covered by dense "undergrowth", the Rucker clans were usually invisible until they struck. No one had any real idea of how many there were. They made the forts and their garrisons an absolute necessity if the Martian surface was to be even partially utilized by Earth. So far, the battle was a draw.

  We imported everything, Slater mused, even a vampire culture we spawned. We must need enemies since we breed our own.

  The distant hoot of a bullhorn broke the dreaming hush of noon and caused the two officers to scan the perimeter of the fort with fresh interest. Below them, a crew manhandled two fieldpieces, air pom-poms, into position behind the sliding gate in the center of the wall. Other crews manned lighter compressed-air weapons, one in each of the two end towers and one in the middle of the parapet near where the two lieutenants stood. Nakamura bounced over to take personal command there. Slater adjusted his throat mike and laid his carbine within easy reach on the parapet.

  The horn sounded again. One of the two daily convoys of refined ore was returning from the nearby cryolite mine.

  "Check all weapons; convoy approaching!" Slater's voice boomed from a loudspeaker over the parade ground. Two squads under arms deployed in the square below and behind him, the standing reserve. On the battlements, all the men not attached to gun crews crouched with their air rifles ready. All weapons pointed at the one break in the greenery opposite the gate, the trail to the mines. Hacked clear during the previous watch, already twisting suckers and green fronds of vegetation had half concealed it again.

  The hooter sounded again, this time close. The blunt brown nose of a light tank poked from the opening and the tank scuttled into the open, its twin-gun turret swiveling to cover a sector of forest wall as it did. It halted halfway between the Ruck and the fort and took station to cover the rest of the convoy. Two more followed and took up other positions. With their tracks completely concealed by plates of armor, they looked like great beetles. Sensors of different kinds turned restlessly on the turret domes.

  Now the first big ore carrier, really a giant cargo-carrying tank itself, emerged into the clearing. It had a small turret of its own, but its bulk and armor we
re its main defenses. It headed straight for the fort at a slow pace. Another and another of the clumsy things rolled into the open. Then came a tank, the middle guard. The first ore carrier was now almost at the gate and a fourth was emerging from the green tangle when the attack began. The timing was lovely. Everyone had started, though ever so slightly since they were veterans, to relax.

  Without warning, six rockets flew from stubby handmade bazookas and burst against the sides of the tanks. At the same time, clouds of smoke expanded like dirty balloons under the fort's walls. Through this murk bounded screaming fiends in camouflaged leather, each one with a specific job to do. More explosive charges struck the tanks and two of the towering ore carriers as well. But only two. Rucker techs tore their way into the other two with thermite and prybars, killing the crews in savage in-fighting. In hardly more than sixty seconds the battle was over. As the two captured ore buckets lumbered away, snipers hidden along the forest edge opened up on the wall defenses, which were already half immobilized by the acrid smoke. Nakamura fired his cannon alone, his crew dead or wounded, and caught one wave of the vanishing enemy in a shower of slugs. Slater and his six wall guards picked off a few more. The two tower cannons were rendered harmless by the dense smoke.

  Trying not to overcompensate for the weak gravity, Slater clattered down the tower stairs and found the cannon crews at the gate choking and gagging from the greasy smoke, several bodies adding to the confusion. Curiously, Slater did not find the Rucker smoke too bad; something in it actually exhilarated him, something wild and pungent. Might be a hallucinogen, he thought, while he shouted for the reserves. He led the reserve squads into the clearing where shattered vehicles glowed dull red through the smoke, their crews mercifully incinerated. He turned at the curse and saw Nakamura behind him, one arm limp and bloodstained.

  "The bastards killed Omatuk and Kusinen, my two best gunners!"

  "Go look after your arm, you damn fool!" Slater looked back at the clearing, sick at heart. Four tanks and two ore carriers destroyed, two captured! Captured! Inside one of those reeking, burned-out tanks was a cinder called Lieutenant Wolf, the convoy officer, a good friend. How in the names of God had it happened? He knew only too well who would get the immediate blame. Major van Schouten, temporarily in command, was good at applying blame to others. Slater took a deep breath and coughed as a wave of smoke filled his lungs. Now the stench of cooked meat was uppermost. If only he had listened to his instincts earlier! He did not stop to query what he could have done. The Old Man had warned them never to be afraid of giving a false alarm or two, that in the field instincts were often the best guide.