“Fuck.” Kylee swallowed hard, her throat working, her shoulders bent under the load. “Well, don’t just stand there like a fart-sucking idiot, Falise! Check your feet.”

When Falise looked down it was to see little tendrils of roots slipping up along her quetzal-hide boots, fingering their way up along the curve of her toes.

“Just get me the hell out of here!” she cried, yanking free.

“Calm down.” Kylee’s voice carried a soothing note as the girl started off across the flat, the IG’s weight draped over her shoulders. “Think, Falise: Panic is stupid. Stupid is dead, and that’s a stand of brown caps off to your left. Keep the last two robots out of it.”

Yes. Think. Don’t be stupid.

Brown caps? That’s right. The knee-high standing tube-like things poking up from the thick root mat. Deadly.

And they were only halfway there?

Chapter 63

  63  

“Forget quiet, forget careful,” Talina ordered as she and the rest leaped and jumped down the back side of the thick web of roots. “Run! Now.”

“What was that?” Valdez practically cried as she turned, heading across the flat at a run.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Dek bellowed as he ran full out at Talina’s side. “You trying to get yourself killed? You knew what that was, didn’t you?”

“Had to be sure.” She was throwing glances over her shoulder, looking up.

“Treetop terror, wasn’t it?” Muldare asked, slowing as they reached the thick netting of roots where the barb tentacle had ambushed them.

“Something like it,” Talina agreed, pulling her knife, trying to balance both of the rifles on her back as she tackled the web-work of fat roots. “Different though. The southern version, I guess.”

“That’s why it didn’t smell the same,” Dek agreed. “This is nothing our quetzals have ever encountered.” He, too, was throwing creep-freaked glances up overhead.

“It didn’t have a spiked tentacle,” Briah added, following in Valdez’s footsteps as she leaped from root to root, her armor whining as the servos powered each step.

“It had two. Blunt-ended,” Dek said. “For that moment after they slammed together, the camouflage dropped. Hell of an adaptation. Sit up there in the tree, wait for scimitars, land tanks, and what have you, to come inspect the carrion down below, and wham. Smash them, lift them up, and drop the leftovers to lure in another victim.”

“Why the hell did you stop me from shooting it?” Valdez asked. “With the boom tubes, we could have blown that shit-licking bastard right out of the trees.”

“Yeah, we could have,” Talina told her. “And maybe . . . maybe Dek and I might have made it back to the pad. You and Briah? Despite your armor? You can’t move fast enough.”

“For what? That thing would be lying on the forest floor with big fucking gaping holes blown in it.”

“Look behind us,” Talina told her. “Back at the roots.”