As they emerged from the jungle, there was something disorienting about the light and space. The sun was dropping to the horizon, and very soon the huge parent planet would fill the sky. The black charred area was a crowded chaos of activity. Everything was converging on the same point at once. Gunsaucers were coming in to land, throwing up huge clouds of dust like miniature thunderheads. Nohans and human sappers were digging foxholes and bunkers, creating their own dust clouds. Others were rigging the perimeter, the traps and the wire and the disintegration fields. The wounded were being loaded onto e-vacs, and the dead were being incinerated in one huge pit. Above it, smoke mixed with the black dust. The sunlight filtering through was turned a bloody red. The three towering dynes were attempting to raise their fallen comrade, droning at each other in their deep, resonant language. While the twenty had been in among the fungus, amphibious armored crawlers had come upriver, bringing supplies and replacement troops. They had clawed their way up the bank and were now being unloaded. In the middle of it all, two red spheres floated close to the ground, right beside the ruins of the Yal tower. It was just as if they were observing the whole operation.
The combat twenties coming in from the bush seemed somehow out of place amid all these flurries of preparation. They had yet to be told what to do. They crunched aimlessly across the fused earth and black flake ash hoping for a topman to assign them to a bivouac area. Their mood was rapidly deteriorating. The field kitchens, always an obvious goal, were being set up but had not yet opened for business. The nohans seemed to have been quicker off the mark. Lines of the armored aliens were already forming in front of the tall tubular devices that prepared their nourishment. This caused a certain noisy resentment among the troopers. The nohans never actually fought except in the most dire emergency, and the men saw it as a positive injustice that they should get to eat, or whatever they did that passed for eating, before the human fighting men. Elmo tried to stop these complaints in his twenty, but the troopers simply ignored him. Dacker was the first one to lose patience with this purposeless tramping across the assembly area. He threw down his MEW and faced Elmo.
"If you can't find us a place to set up camp, why don't you go look for someone who can?"
Renchett joined in. "Yeah, Elmo, why don't you go find Rance? A report's got to be put in on those bodies. Do something useful for a change instead of busting our chops."
Elmo turned on them. "You two watch your mouths. You're back in the world of discipline now," he snarled.
Dacker waved a dismissive hand at the milling men and machinery. "It looks like it, don't it?"
Renchett shook his head. "One little nuke could take out all of this lot."
"Lucky they don't have any, ain't it?"
"You never know; they might come up with one."
"At least it'd be quick."
"Cut that out!" Elmo tried again.
"Quit trying to prove it, Elmo. We've had enough of your dickhead blustering."
"You bastards…" Elmo's voice was shaking.
Renchett pushed his helmet close to Elmo's visor. "What are you going to do, Elmo? Threaten to burn us down again? How are you going to explain it in the middle of all this?"
"Damn you."
There was a familiar roar in their helmets. "Something going on here?" It was Rance.
"Tempers getting a little frayed here, Topman," Renchett answered. "It's been a long day."
Rance halted and fell into a parade rest. He looked Renchett up and down.
"A trooper's temper doesn't get frayed with his overman, Renchett. A trooper doesn't have a temper as far as an overman is concerned."
Renchett snapped to an ironic half attention. "No, Topman Rance. You'll have to put it down to combat fatigue."
"Combat fatigue, my ass."
"Yes, Topman Rance."
Rance turned on Elmo. "Do you want to press formal charges against this man?"
"No, I'll deal with him."
"Then let's get the men bedded down."
He faced the twenty and indicated five freshly dug foxholes over on their right.
"Four men to each hole. There'll be an inspection in thirty minutes. Dyrkin, organize a guard rota. Three of you will rotate on the perimeter, and there'll be one area watch. Now, get going."
"There are three dead."
"Then some of you will have more room to roll around in your sleep."
"We'll look forward to it." "I'm sure you will, Dyrkin."
Dyrkin led the twenty away. Rance indicated that Elmo should walk with him in the other direction. As soon as the men had gone, his whole attitude changed. There was no more grim banter. He became cold and businesslike, a man who no longer had the tune to be angry.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?"
Elmo was taken by complete surprise.
"What are you talking about?"
"I told you to lay back on the longtimers and let Dyrkin and Renchett take care of things. They can handle it. It may be news to you, but I want to keep my longtimers alive. We can't clear this forsaken planet with replacements."
Elmo was too tightly wrapped to accept the advice. His jaw set, and he started straight ahead. "I can run my own twenty."
"The hell you can. They're starting to look like walking corpses."
"It was a bad day."
"It's always a bad day in the jungle." "This was different."
"Damn it, man, you only lost three men. Whole twenties were wiped out in the center section. What hit you?" "Miggies." "How many?" "A group of twelve." Rance's voice was like ice. "Twelve?" "Right."
"A dozen miggies don't make a bad day." "There was something else." "What?"
'There were these bodies."
As far as Rance was concerned, Elmo was hanging himself out to dry.
"There are always bodies."
"These were different. They'd been mutilated. Deliberately."
"Mutilated? How?"
"The skin had been flayed off them, and their dicks had been stuffed in their mouths. It was disgusting." "You're kidding."
"I've never seen anything like it. The men took it bad. They've started telling each other that it's some new psych program."
Rance didn't like the sound of this at all.
"Where was this?"
"Back in the jungle, not too far beyond the perimeter. I fixed the spot."
"I'll call it in. Hopefully they'll send out a data team." Rance touched a stud on the side of his helmet. "Open a command channel." He waited.
"Patch me through to Line Officer Berref." He waited again.
"What do you mean he's returned to the cluster? Yeah… okay."
He glanced at Elmo. "You get a dataspot or just a fix?"
"I took a spot."
"The brain wants you to shoot it in." "On D-four?" "Code three."
Elmo touched a similar stud on his helmet, activating a direct link facility that wasn't shared by the ordinary troopers. He waited a few seconds and removed his finger.
"It's in."
Rance was briskly final. "So that's it."
Elmo shook his head. "I don't know."
"Whatever they do with the information, you can be assured that you won't hear anything about it."
"That shit was so weird."
Rance nodded curtly. "It's out of our hands."
Elmo looked back at where the twenty were breaking out their environ bubbles. "What do I do?"