They hustled outward, a few limping noticeably. The steps finally creaked out of their slot below the hatch and dropped into place. The final ten men scrambled down them and got to work on the equipment bay hatches. Jameson was the last man out, looking as unruffled as if he were coming out of chapel after attending a friend’s wedding. Except that his heavy automatic rifle was resting on his right hip, muzzle pointed outward, ready to fire.
Alec strode to the nose of the shuttle to watch the other men swing open the cargo hatches. Abstractedly, he noticed that the ship’s nose and underside were charred slightly and streaked from its burning journey through the atmosphere.
And then it hit him. I’m on Earth! I’m standing, moving, breathing on Earth!
He spun around. The sky was gray, not blue, and the Sun was hidden behind the clouds. It was nowhere as bright as Alec had expected, so he kept his glare visor up inside his helmet. It wasn’t even particularly hot, about the same temperature as the living quarters at the settlement. But there was something else, something strange: air moving across his body, like standing in front of one of the circulation fans. Except that this was gentler, softer, and nowhere near as steady. It stopped and started again, playfully.
The shuttle had landed not on the cracked concrete runway, Alec saw, but on the green grass alongside the runway. The concrete was broken and pocked with holes while the grass was reasonably flat, though bumpy. The shuttle’s manywheeled bogeys looked undamaged; they could get out again.
The whole area around the airport was open and unobstructed. The land seemed to go on forever; the horizon was much further away than it should be. Off in the distance were dark undulating hills, farther away than Alec had ever seen any landscape features before.
“Alec.”
It was Jameson, who had come up beside him.
“Perimeter’s established, and the heavy stuff’s been rolled out of the cargo bay.”
“Good.” Alec glanced at his wristwatch; five minutes since touchdown. “Very good. Get the laser trucks up along the perimeter. A couple dozen men can’t keep this field secure with nothing but hand weapons.”
Jameson grinned tightly. “Sound observation.” He turned and started shouting orders.
A shriek split the sky and Alec looked up to see the second shuttle coming in, trailing a plume of vapor behind it. It circled the field once, then came down on the opposite side of the broken runway, screeching and roaring, blowing out tongues of bluish gas from its retrorockets, tossing clumps of sod and chunks of rock and concrete before it.
Alec hurried to the shuttle as soon as it ground to a halt. Before he could reach it, the ladder came down and men were pouring out to take their assigned positions. Last to emerge was the lanky figure of Martin Kobol, his limp much worse in Earth’s heavy gravity.
“Welcome to Earth,” Alec called to him.
A burst of machine gun fire punctuated his greeting.
Chapter 13
Ferret was checking his traps when the sky seemed to crack open with a terrifying screaming sound. He dropped the dead rabbit he had been holding and instinctively dived into the bushes. Too frightened even to open his eyes, he clawed as deeply as he could into the brush and then froze. He held his breath and tried to stop trembling.
Minutes later, the same roaring, screaming sky shook the world. Birds went silent. The whole forest froze with fright. Ferret pushed his face deeper into the damp earth and tried to become totally blank, nonexistent, so that whatever monster was shaking the woods would not find him.
He stayed there for a long, long time. Or so it seemed to him. Gradually the woods returned to normal. Birds took up their songs again. The breeze made the leafy trees sigh. Something slithered past his bare leg. Slowly, very cautiously, Ferret looked up. He saw nothing unusual, nothing to be afraid of. The monster had apparently gone away.
Still, it might not be far off. On his belly, Ferret slithered through the brush toward the edge of the woods, where the old cement buildings and long empty cement paths lay. If a giant monster was thrashing around through the woods, maybe he could spot the thing from there.
He risked getting up on all fours and scampering the few yards from where he was safely hidden by the brush to the bole of a large tree at the edge of the clearing. When he finally worked up the courage to peer out from behind the tree, he was startled by what he saw. Two weird silvery things, huge, shaped something like bullets, were sitting out on the cement runways that had been empty earlier that morning. They didn’t look like monsters.
Then his eyes went even wider. There were men standing around the silver things! Men just like himself. They were dressed better and they had strange metal pots on their heads, but they were men, sure enough. And they carried guns. And there were wagons, too, that the men climbed onto and drove around on fat, soft-looking wheels.
An invading band of raiders here in our territory, Ferret thought. Billy-Joe’s got to be told about this. But he’ll want to know how many men, and what kind of weapons they have.
Every fiber of Ferret’s wiry little body wanted to get up and run deep into the woods, away from these fearsome strangers. But he could see the expression on Billy-Joe’s face when he reported incompletely. And when Billy-Joe started heating his knife over the camp fire, all other fears fled from Ferret’s mind, even though he had never felt that punishment himself.
Swallowing so hard he nearly choked, Ferret sneaked out from behind the protective tree, crawling slowly, ever so carefully, toward the shelter of one of the big cement buildings, closer to the invaders. It seemed like hours, but the shadows thrown by the Sun had hardly moved at all by the time he reached the corner of the nearest building.
Members of the invading band were spreading out, forming a screen around their strange silvery things. The wagons were trundling here and there. They had incomprehensibly weird contraptions atop them. The men on foot carried guns, heavy, big-bore, long-barrelled guns. Ferret ached to have one for himself. Maybe Billy-Joe would let him take one as a reward for ambushing these strangers.
Ferret licked his lips and remembered that the only weapon he carried was a hunting knife—with a loose, wobbly handle, at that. He had seen enough. Time to get back and make his report.
As he turned and started creeping away from the building, a burst of gunfire crackled behind him. Concrete chips flew off the corner of the building and Ferret flattened himself against the grassy ground.
Kobol looked just as startled as Alec felt. All the men seemed to freeze in place.
“What was that?” Kobol asked, unconsciously taking a step back toward the shuttle.
Alec swung the microphone down from his helmet. “This is Morgan. Who fired and why?”
In his earphone he heard a tinny reply. “Kurowski. I saw something moving beside the buildings here on the west flank.”
“A man? Did you hit him?”
“I don’t know. It was something—I can’t see it now.”
Kobol had one hand up on his helmet, listening to the radio report. “It could have been an animal,” he told Alec. “There are all sorts just wandering around loose, you know.”
Alec grimaced. “Kurowski, what’s your position?”
“As assigned. A hundred meters from the shuttle, on the west flank. Not much cover here, I’m on my belly in some sort of cement-lined rille.”
