“Yes, sir,” Sjuende muttered.
Forste tapped his thumbnail and turned to Annen, who was glowering silently over by the door. “Well? Get going.”
“Yes, sir.” Annen sent one final glower toward the injured Femte, then turned and left.
Forste looked back at Bob and gave a nod that managed to be curt and reluctant at the same time. “Put him to sleep.”
“But I’m fine, sir,” Femte protested.
“Shut up,” Forste said. “You just concentrate on getting a good night’s sleep. You’ll need it when we play catch-up tomorrow.”
Femte sighed. “Yes, sir.”
Five minutes later he was stretched out on the cot next to his burn-foamed comrade. “I expected the possibility of injuries while neutralizing the Secret Service agents,” Forste muttered under his breath. “Or possibly after the attack, if any of the Marines survived long enough to get into suits and packs. I didn’t expect we’d lose two men while we were just setting up.”
“Space Fort Jefferson isn’t exactly your average work area, of course,” Bob pointed out absently, still trying to figure out what in Sjuende’s voice had caught his attention. “This can be a risky place if you’re not familiar with it.”
“Apparently so.” Forste lifted his thumbnail. “Fjerde? Any progress with the comm system?”
“I’ve got the antenna apart now,” the other reported. “It’s got a lot of rust and dirt embedded in it. I’ll clean it and see if it works any better then.”
Bob felt his stomach suddenly tense. Rust? “Mr. Forste—”
Forste cut him off with a glare. “Consider it break time,” he told the other. “Get down to Launch Center Six and help Annen and Sjuende.”
“Yes, sir.”
Forste tapped the nail and hefted his gun toward Bob. “Don’t you ever interrupt me—”
“Your man Sjuende said he and Attende had a lot of work to do,” Bob cut him off. “Did it involve cleaning off rust?”
Forste eyed him guardedly. “Yes.”
“Are they using our bottles of cleaner?” Bob asked. “And if so, are they wearing breathing masks?”
Forste’s expression was starting to cloud over again. “Why?”
“Because the cleaner is toxic, that’s why,” Bob said. “After a couple of hours, especially in an enclosed space like that—”
Forste snarled a curse, his gun jabbing into Bob’s ribs. “Come on. Bring the kit.”
They found Attende sprawled on the floor in Number Four, his arms and legs twitching as he babbled something incomprehensible. “Damn, damn, damn,” Forste snarled, kneeling down beside him. A spray bottle and rag were still clutched in the man’s hands; gingerly, Forste pushed both of them as far away as he could. “Why the hell isn’t this stuff labeled as dangerous?”
“The main drum is,” Bob said, kneeling on his other side and opening the first-aid kit.
“We have to buy it in bulk—it’s cheaper that way—and put it into our own bottles.
Didn’t you see the masks in the storage locker?”
“The bottles weren’t labeled,” Forste bit out. “Why would they expect to need them?
What’s he babbling about?”
“Probably nothing,” Bob said, finding a wide-spectrum detoxifier hypo in the kit and injecting it into the twitching man’s arm. “On its way to suffocating you, the stuff is also a pretty potent hallucinogen. Who knows what he’s seeing?”
“Can you save him?”
Bob laid the biosensor strip across the side of the man’s neck and watched as the numbers came up. “He’ll be fine,” he assured Forste. “We got to him in time, and this stuff’s great for cleaning all sorts of toxins out the system. Though around here we mostly use it after too much time with the whiskey bottle.”
Forste grunted. “So what now? He just sleeps it off?”
“Basically,” Bob said. “A couple of hours and he’ll be fine. Give me a hand and we’ll get him back to sickbay.”
The corridor, Sjuende decided, had picked up a definite tilt in the past three minutes. Of course, in that same time it had picked up a nice selection of plant life, too. Laid out across the gray metal in front of him were several rows of pink flowers interspersed with green vines sporting giant tomatoes.
He blinked and squinted. Pink and red; the clashing colors hurt his eyes. What was going on, anyway?
And then, in the distance, he heard the sound of footsteps approaching the intersection behind him.
He had his gun out in an instant, the whole thing falling suddenly into place. It was the missing ranger, of course. He’d laid out the plants to slow him down, and now he was trying to sneak up on him from behind.
Well, it wouldn’t work. Sjuende pressed his back against the corridor, afraid to jump over the tomato plants in case they tried to grab him, and turned to face the sound.
They’d be sorry—he was way too smart for them.
Too cool, too. Not to mention too shiny.
The footsteps were nearly to the intersection now. Sjuende leveled his gun at the spot where his attacker would appear. Peripherally, he noticed that his gun was growing grass, and wondered vaguely whether that was within its normal design specs.
And then the figure turned the corner, and Sjuende gasped his admiration. Not only had the ranger come up with this brilliant scheme of planting flowers across the corridor, but he’d even been smart enough to discard his uniform and put on Fjerde’s clothes. And Fjerde’s face.
Smiling genially at the cleverness of it all, he fired.
The boom of the gun echoed back and forth across the corridor, sounding rather vinegary. Dimly through the noise, he heard what sounded like a shout from behind him.
He turned. Annen was standing there, hip-deep in tomatoes; waving his gun and screaming something.
Only they weren’t tomatoes anymore, Sjuende realized with a start. Instead, they’d turned into a ravenous hedge of cactus.
There was only one thing to do, and Sjuende did it without a second’s hesitation.
Lowering the gun toward the attacking plants, he fired. It was a perfect shot. The cactus erupted in a burst of red sap; and suddenly, to his relief, the whole patch vanished.
So did Annen. Sjuende frowned, then realized the other was merely lying on his back on the deck, gripping his thigh as a parade of cherry tomatoes rolled out and collected themselves into a little pile beside him.
But the important part was that the renegade ranger Giff had been dealt with. Smiling, Sjuende lifted his thumb to report the good news to Forste.
He was just wondering why his thumb had turned into an elephant’s trunk when the whole corridor went dark.
“And so we’re down to three,” Forste said softly, his gun pressing hard into the back of Bob’s head as the ranger knelt beside the second of the gunshot victims. “Just three able-bodied men to speak out for the oppressed peoples of the Solar System.”
“It’s not quite that bad,” Bob said carefully as he finished wrapping the leg. It was amazingly hard to breathe with a gun pressed that hard into the base of his skull. “I mean, aside from these two, everyone else should be up and about by tomorrow.”
“Of course,” Forste said. “You sound so reasonable. You always sound so terribly reasonable. And yet, one by one, we keep falling.” .
“But it’s not me doing any of this,” Bob protested. “I’ve been locked up the whole day.”
“Of course it’s not you,” Forste said. “It’s your friend Wimbley. Where is he?”
“But—”
“Shut up,” Forste cut him off. “Call him out. Call him out now, or I’ll—”
He broke off. From somewhere in the distance came the sound of a horrible crunching and clattering, accompanied by a panic-stricken bellow. “What was that?” Forste demanded, shoving the gun even harder into the back of Bob’s head. “What was that?”