Chương 101: 40.Ambush 40-1

Less than seven minutes into our southeast push, the Evaporation Forest politely informed me that those rules from the briefing weren't decorative. There are no paths in a rainforest.

More like layers of bad ideas from different eras, all piled on top of each other: buttress roots arching out of the ground, muddy water pooling in the root gaps, god-knows-what lurking under leaf rot thick as carpet, wet vines hanging overhead bright enough to gleam, and the occasional low shrub crouching nearby looking completely normal—too normal, the deliberate kind of normal. I walked rear, scanning the whole way. Ahead was Harvey, footfalls steady, picking hard ground and root ridges.

Left flank was Jess, who lasted three minutes of silence before the discomfort got to her and started expressing itself through nasal sounds that conveyed her general opinion of this planet's urban planning. Maki Kushima held center-front, head up higher than any of us, watching the things overhead that looked like they'd made a career out of not letting people live too long. Good enough. At least we looked like a functional unit for now, not four people who'd wandered off separately to get lost and die.

"Frost 02, lighter steps," I said, keeping my voice down. Jess came right back.

"I'm already light. Any lighter and I'm levitating."

"You just snapped two twigs and the last of my patience."

"Those weren't twigs, those were this planet's floor spikes trying to murder me—""Shut up and listen." I raised a fist. The whole team stopped. Not because my tone carried any particular authority—because the moment it went quiet out here, a lot of things had a way of becoming very obvious, very fast. Faint water sounds, front-left. A metallic resonance in the canopy above, something big brushing thick leaves—distant, not a swarm. And the ground. The ground was off.

I fixed my eyes on the buttress root section ahead. One massive tree's root base had a cluster of ugly growths along it—grey-brown, surface cracked like rotting wood. First glance, normal. Second glance, still normal. Third glance, not normal, because the spacing on those growths was too regular. The kind of regular that looked deliberate, like something had arranged itself to say don't bother looking at me. Maki had stopped too. She didn't turn around. Just exhaled one quiet line.

"Root nodules are wrong." My jaw tightened. Great. Not paranoia. They were genuinely diseased. Harvey was already half-crouching when Jess's left foot slid. Not a full fall. She was trying to shift to better footing, and her boot edge caught a thin stone buried in the mud—click—weight lurching sideways, and on the way down she knocked the metal panel she'd stripped from her pod against the buttress root. Not a loud sound. But out here, loud enough. The only thought I had time for was: shit.

The next second, the ground opened itself up. Not an exaggeration. Those root nodules detonated from the inside—wood chips, muddy water, and some kind of thick transparent fluid spraying outward, and underneath it all, dark brown articulated limbs and serrated barbed hooks. Two, three—no, at least four—things the approximate size of small motorbikes wrenched themselves free of the root mass. Wings spread, and the humid air exploded with a sound that put my teeth on edge. Lurker Razorwasps.

Finally meeting them in person. Uglier than the illustrations. More committed to killing people too.

"Break right—don't step deep!" I was already shouting, moving forward at the same time.

"Frost 03, pull 02! Frost 04, watch for a second nest! No firing!" Jess was already in trouble. The first Razorwasp to go for her didn't fly straight—it came in on a diagonal from above, the chainsaw-barbed stinger on its abdomen driving straight for her knee joint. Jess wasn't slow; she shoved back a hard step. But her foot was still on rotten mud, and that step dodged the stinger without doing anything about her balance. She went sideways, pack strap catching on a buttress root outcropping.

"Shit shit shit shit—" Harvey was already moving before she finished cursing. He threw himself at her—not the clean, cinematic version, the purely functional version. Left hand grabbing her shoulder strap and hauling her back, right hand pulling the emergency cutter from his hip, not wasting a second deciding whether that strap was worth saving. Snick. Cut through.

The stinger raked across Jess's shin guard, dragging a shriek of metal-on-metal across the surface, and left a line of pale white corrosive foam in its wake. Right. This thing genuinely wanted to open a hole in a living person's leg. I was already at close range. I didn't draw—I swung the drop pod reflector panel I was still holding straight into the Razorwasp's face. Not because I was calm.

Because I wasn't stupid enough to fire a gun in a rainforest on first contact and ring the dinner bell for every needle-barbed steelmidge in the area. The metal plate connected hard. The wasp torqued sideways, wings clipping the buttress root, and the vibration from its shriek hit my eardrums like a spike.

"Frost 04!" I shouted. Maki's voice cut in almost simultaneously. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Second nest, back-left—don't retreat that way!" I turned instinctively. Sure enough, two steps behind and left, another patch of what looked like rotting wood was cracking itself open, one glossy black abdomen already pushing through. Shit. This wasn't a path. This was a roof over a hive.

"New bearing, right-front!" I called the change immediately.

"On the roots—hard ground only!" Maki didn't need telling twice. She was already up on the protruding right-side buttress root, footfalls barely audible, like she'd pre-calculated the route in her head. Moving back, she pulled a canister of high-concentration repellent spray from her hip—not aimed at the wasps, but laid down in a line along the boundary between a low-lying shrub cluster and the mud on our right. I almost asked her why. Then I understood. Not damage. A marked line.

The sprayed zone immediately cut through the damp heat with a sharp chemical smell, slicing clean through the sickly-sweet plant odour. Which meant that when we pulled back, we wouldn't step into another mouth and chalk it up to bad luck. The Razorwasp I'd knocked off course had already righted itself, wings shaking, angling back toward us.

"Frost 03!" I called. Harvey didn't answer—he just moved. Somehow he had a canister of emergency setting gel from the pod in his hand. He sprayed it directly at the half-spread wing joint. White foam hit and immediately encased the wing, throwing off the wasp's stroke angle; the whole body skewed sideways and drove its stinger into a buttress root, sawing through a chunk of bark like it was nothing.

"Now!" Harvey shouted. I didn't think. I stepped in. The cutter was heavy enough at the tip. Both hands, straight down at the joint between head and thorax. One hit wasn't enough. Second hit, and the thing convulsed, wings still twitching, leaking something that wasn't blood—more like a dark brown slurry mixed with mucus. The smell hit me like rotting seafood sealed inside a combat boot for three days. I held back the profanity and pulled back.

"Keep moving—three more!" Jess had been dragged up onto the buttress root by Harvey, posture terrible, legs intact. She was already pulling the remaining metal side panel off her pack.

"They track vibration, right?"

"Yes!" Maki said.

"Then eat this." She flung the whole panel toward a patch of low-lying mud to the front-left. Not a random throw—she picked the junction of hard rock and buttress root. It hit with a sharp, clean crack and skidded a full meter through the mud, sending ripples across a whole pool of standing water. The effect was nearly instant. Two Razorwasps that had been closing on us snapped their heads sideways like a switch had been thrown, redirecting entirely toward the bigger ground vibration.

The third was still hovering undecided, abdomen curled high, searching for the nearest joint that hadn't gotten smart yet.

"Frost 01, right-above!" Maki barked. I looked up on instinct. Not a vine. Another Razorwasp, sliding out from between a higher layer of root systems, dropping in from my upper right. Not from the ground—it had been hanging in the shadow of the upper roots the whole time, waiting for us to walk the formation into range. Shit. I twisted sideways. Half a beat too slow.

The serrated stinger raked across the outer surface of my left forearm guard—didn't punch through, but the surface immediately bubbled up in a line of small white blisters, heat biting all the way up my arm. Pain. Unreasonably rude pain. My foot slipped. I stepped back half a pace, straight onto a patch of mud that looked solid and wasn't, edges crumbling under the pressure. My weight dropped and I had exactly enough time to think fuck before something grabbed the back of my collar. Maki.

Not my hand—my rear pack strap. One pull, and she hauled me back half a step onto the root.

"Watch your feet!" Her voice was still steady, but faster than usual.

"I know!"

"You didn't, just now." Hell of a time to give me notes. But that one pull was what kept me clear of the wasp's second strike. Harvey was already there in the next second, using the cutter not as a tool but as a short-handled hammer, driving it hard into the junction between wing-root and thorax from the side.

"02, second panel!" He barely got the words out before Jess understood. She threw the other stripped pod panel toward the far right-rear—not randomly, but aimed at a spot where hard rock met buttress root. Metal on stone, sharp and resonant, vibration running down into the ground, and the two remaining hesitating Razorwasps both veered off toward it.

"Fall back—now!" I called. Nothing more needed saying. All four of us moved at almost the same moment. Harvey first, on the hardest root ridge. Jess right behind, but this time her steps were visibly tighter, controlled. Maki in the middle, still watching overhead, calling direction as she moved: "Right-front, two steps clear—left side, leaf edges are toothed, stay off." I covered rear, tracking whether any of the Razorwasps were reassessing their targets.

They were still working the two thrown panels for now—stingers shredding mud and rotting wood in every direction, the noise like someone running a rusted chainsaw across bone. We cut to a slightly elevated dry root platform before stopping. Not because it was safe. Because the ground was hard, the sightlines were cleaner than a moment ago, and nothing overhead looked immediately ready to drop something alive on us. First thing I did was count heads.

"Frost 01, standing. 03?"

"Standing." Harvey's breathing was heavy, still controlled.

"02?" Jess dragged a hand across her face, panting like she'd just gone three rounds with an engine.

"Standing, and I'm formally declaring war on every insect that lives underground."

"04?"

"Standing," Maki said.

"No puncture wounds. Your left forearm guard is corroded—02's right shin guard has surface scoring—03 shows no visible injury. Nobody sit down yet." I looked at my forearm. The protective coating on the outer guard had been eaten through in one small patch. Nothing below was broken yet, but given another few seconds, it wouldn't have been a coating problem. Jess looked down at her own shin, mouth pulling sideways.

"Good news, my leg is still mine. Bad news, if that thing had gone in another half-inch, I might've gotten an early preview of the registrar's make-up exam policy." Harvey was already crouching beside her, rinsing the residual venom off her guard surface with clean water, then pressing neutralizing powder against it. Not gentle. Fast.

"Your step was too heavy," he said, not looking up. Jess came right back.

"Oh, the debrief's already started? Do I need to write a formal apology?"

"If you write it fast enough, I'll review it before the next nest comes up," Harvey said. I'd been about to add something, but I glanced at Maki first. She was going through her clipboard, quickly logging the key points from the contact: nodule spacing pattern, second ambush position, sweet-smell source, retreat bearing, effective range of the repellent line. Hand steady. Pen steady. Like what had just happened was a loud, wet, thoroughly obnoxious incident that could still be organized into notes.

"Frost 04," I said.

"Mm."

"That catch. Thanks." She looked up at me, like she spent half a second confirming I was speaking actual human language.

"Are you referring to the right-above call, or pulling your strap?"

"Both."

"Then watch your feet before you watch overhead next time," she said. …Right. This woman could not let a thank-you land clean to save her life. Jess let out a quiet laugh beside us.

"First real combat assist. Very heartwarming."

"Shut up," Maki and I said at the same time. A beat of silence after that. Harvey looked up at both of us, apparently deciding this level of synchronization wasn't worth commenting on, and delivered his verdict in the flattest possible tone.

"At least you actually look like a unit now." That landed heavier than I expected. Because he wasn't trying to make anyone feel better. This bastard never tried to make anyone feel better. He only gave a judgment like that when something was barely functional enough to deserve one. I steadied my breathing and swept the surroundings again. Still hot. Still humid. The Razorwasps were still tearing up something in the distance, which meant the distraction was holding for now—not that they'd forgotten about us.

And here, all four of us were still standing, unpunctured, still arguing. In the Evaporation Forest, that counted as a clean opening. I looked at the three of them, and gave the first real team-leader wrap I'd managed all day.

"All right. Log the following." I said.

"One—any area with regularly-spaced root nodules, we go around. Two—lighter steps, no deep planting. Three—no firing, at least not in the front section of the rainforest. Four—drop pod panels are not garbage, they're survival assets. Five—" I looked at Jess.

"Anyone stomps around like that again, I'm using them to test how fast the shelter door closes." Jess rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

"Copy, Frost 01. Next time I'll step like a well-mannered corpse."

"I'd prefer you learn manners before becoming a corpse," I said. Maki closed her clipboard and offered what was, by her standards, the closest thing to a compliment she'd produced all day.

"That was handled adequately." I made a sound in my throat.

"That standard sounds like you're grading a mid-range quarterly report."

"For me, it's high," she said. …Fine. Coming from her, that beat a straight-out good by a considerable margin. I'd somehow understood that. Harvey collected the used neutralizer pack, stood back up.

"We can move." I nodded, worked my left forearm to confirm nothing inside was compromised, and pulled the formation back together.

"Frost, reform. Same configuration as before." No one asked anything this time. Harvey back to point. Jess moved to left flank automatically, and her footfalls were noticeably quieter than before. Maki back to center-front, but half a step closer to me than earlier—like she'd silently decided that the distance for pulling someone back and covering a gap should be kept as a default.

I walked rear, listening to the rhythm of three sets of feet on hard root and mud, and understood something clearly for the first time— Frost 01 through 04 hadn't just not gotten wiped out. For the first time, four people had actually used all four of themselves to hold together something that could have gone very ugly, very fast.