“God no,” Kalico tilted her head back. “Well, okay, maybe a little, yes. But what’s got me creep-freaked?” She glanced from face to face. “We’re just getting started at Southern Diggings. And now, as we start to move out from the pad, something just took out four of my marines. It’s like I’ve lived this before.”

Kalico took a deep breath, adding, “It felt like this when I was out at the Maritime Unit. We had the technology. We had the sense of invulnerability. Don’t you see? What if Southern Diggings turns into the same kind of disaster that destroyed the Maritime Unit?”

Chapter 55

  55  

As she followed Kylee, Falise got an immediate and overwhelming education; it happened in the first one hundred meters of her descent. Step by step, she got an in-depth introduction to roots, thorncactus, gotcha vine, tentacle bush, blue linda, cutthroat flower, sidewinders, brown caps, purple burst flower, some spiky thing Kylee didn’t have a name for, and balls of colorful invertebrates that Kylee warned her to stay clear of. All the while she was clambering down tumbled basalt, ducking low branches, weaving around vines. Overhead, the garish, turquoise, oddly blue, and viridian-green leaves blocked the midday sun and left the forest floor in a sort of twilight.

The sounds—especially the chime—were almost deafening; but the first time tree clingers hooted just above her head, it almost stopped her heart.

Of it all, the roots might have been creepiest, moving constantly underfoot as Falise kept to Kylee’s tracks. “Clap trapping hell,” Falise whispered as shadows cast patterns on her face, “I’m starting to get it. If I don’t keep moving, the roots start to wind around my boots. What happens if they get a good hold and I can’t pull free?”

“They pull you down and sort of roll you into a cocoon. Then they digest you. I think you suffocate first, which is way better than being jacked up into a tree by a nightmare.”

“Remind me. Why are we on this planet in the first place?”

Kylee sent a deadpan look over her shoulder. “Does a half metric ton of rhodium ring any bells?”

“Right. Gotta keep that in mind.” She paid even more attention to putting her feet where Kylee did, wincing at the rubbery feel beneath the soles of her boots. Then they encountered the first interlaced tangle of roots. A chaotic Gordian knot of them—more than a meter high—where three trees had wound themselves together.

Something white, sinuous, and evil-looking whipped away into the depths of the root ball. “What was that?”

“Never seen the like,” Kylee told her. “Step wide. That’s bite ya bush.”

“Where did these crazy names come from?”