“Coming back around now,” the pilot replied. The skimmer swept around in a sharp turn, and Hayabashi grunted as he switched to visual.

“Well, shit,” he muttered a moment later, then grimaced. “Sorry, Ma’am, but you were right. See there?”

The sergeant’s finger tapped his display, and Malcolm craned her neck to look. Her eyes narrowed as she saw the camouflage-netted aircar nose parked just inside what looked like a natural cave opening. She shook her head, and glanced at her thermal and magnetic sensors. There was nothing on them, and she looked up at the pilot.

“Hold us in hover, Jeff. And you get sharp, Truman,” she added, glancing back over her shoulder as she activated her com link to NPA Control. “I don’t really expect any trouble, but remember the lab raid. This looks awfully sus—”

An alarm shrilled on her own console, and she whipped back to it in shock. Magnetic signatures glared suddenly, and with them came heat sources, as well. They blossomed all over her display like heat lightning, almost as if they were springing out of the ground itself—and that, she realized an instant later, was precisely what they were doing. The aircar’s cave was only one entry to what must be an enormous cave system almost directly under her skimmer, and the natives were boiling out of it as if her return to check the aircar had been some sort of signal!

And they were firing. Puffs of smoke sprouted from the moss like toadstools, merging into an incredible carpet of gray-white fog. The skimmer bucked as hundreds of eighteen-millimeter projectiles slammed into its belly, and someone screamed behind Malcolm.

The skimmer wasn’t armored. Its composites were tough and elastic, but they weren’t armor, and more bullets punched through its thin skin. She heard Truman cursing in a high, incredulous falsetto, but his pulser turret was already in action, each barrel spitting fifteen-millimeter explosive darts cased in ceramic frag jackets at a cyclical rate of over a thousand rounds per minute. His fire cut across the ground like a lash of flame, shredding moss and Medusan with equal abandon, yet he could fire in only one direction at a time, and still more armed natives were erupting out of other holes in the ground.

The turbines shrieked as the pilot gave them full throttle, but he was too late. Sergeant Hayabashi jerked in his chair with a hoarse, wracking grunt of explosive agony as a massive slug ripped vertically through his body. It emerged between his shoulders, spraying blood and tissue across the cabin roof, and the sergeant toppled wearily forward over his displays. Malcolm smelled blood and the stench of ruptured organs, and then ragged holes punched themselves through the starboard turbine casing and the engine began to stream the bright, hot flame of burning hydrogen.

None of it was real. Shock and horror yammered at the core of her brain, but her hands moved with a life of their own. Her fingers didn’t even tremble, and her voice was very calm as she pressed her boom mike closer to her lips.