"Well, they have grenades," Telisa said.

"Out of the question," Magnus replied.

"Okay, then, scratch the flamethrowers. It"s time to deploy crowbars to your advanced alien robot fleet!" Telisa said. She suppressed a giggle. Magnus shot her a look.

"Well, we need to come up with something, or it"s going to take weeks to move through the city," Cilreth said.

"The Clacker can fabricate a wide range of tools. Or perhaps the scouts just need a tweak to their methods. I"ll figure it out," Magnus said.

Chapter 4.

Captain Jamie Arakaki knelt to the rocky ground, allowing her to see farther. The native plants obstructed her view less in their lowest meter where they were mostly naked stalks. More importantly, the kneeling position allowed her to spot the cleargliders from a distance, because the transparent creatures always waited with their tails hanging to the ground. They liked to tease the smaller critters out of the plant wells with their opaque red tails, then drop to attack.

Arakaki didn"t spot any cleargliders in the patch. She came back to full standing position. Her dark hair had been tied back to keep it out of her eyes. She periodically chopped off the growing tail of hair with a machete to keep it from getting tangled in anything. She was a compact 1.7 meters of wiry muscle. She wore a combat suit. Its surface changed colors slowly. At the moment it displayed a moody maroon that matched the rocks underfoot.

She walked through the patch of vegetation with a small personal a.s.sault weapon in her hands, its empty holster at her hip. A laser dangled at her other hip.

Her destination, a long tent, became visible just ahead. It was a remote tent, placed to gather together small items from the nearby tunnels and evaluate their worth before bringing them back to the a.s.sault ships. Arakaki was one of the few people who would make the trip out to the farthest tent alone. No one else actually wanted to be attacked by an alien monster.

She heard sounds of movement inside. The PAW she held detected a target signature within. She listened to verify it was a human. The occasional swear word or a clearing of a throat would do it. She froze to listen. Even the sliver of tough plastic she chewed on stopped its idle trip between her teeth, sticking straight out from her thin lips under a canine. After a half minute she heard a long sigh followed by the smack of skin on skin, as of someone slapping away a local bug. Then Arakaki padded up to the entrance, giving the area a last look-over. Her feet didn"t make a sound on the jagged rock. She glanced inside, seeing a lone UED soldier at work at a low folding table. Then she slid gracefully inside.

"What"ve you got for me, Ace?"

The man froze, then smiled. "Nice to finally be apprised of your presence," he said mildly. He looked at the pistol sitting on the table next to him as if to say, A lotta help that did me.

"I don"t know what they are, but there"s four of them, identical, all Trilisk for sure," he continued, pointing at a black pack.

Arakaki pounced on the bag, then hefted it up to her shoulder energetically. She tipped to one side under the weight. Ace caught sight of the move from the corner of his eye.

"d.a.m.n, Arakaki, you"re nothing but guns and gristle," he said, not turning to look straight on.

"If something"s gonna eat me, it"s going to have to chew a long time," she said.

The soldier laughed. "I"ll chew on you a while," he offered.

"Next time for sure. Right now, I gotta go," she said, leaving the tent without looking back.

Within twenty paces of the tent, she checked the probes for the latest scans on the Konuan.

Three hits last night around three a.m. It probably won"t show until late afternoon, she thought.

The creature that hunted them liked to take a crack at the UED soldiers every single day, though it was often turned back. It seldom returned twice in one day and typically separated its hunts by at least ten or twelve hours. Arakaki wondered if it slept or simply had other tasks on its plate.

But the biggest secret about the Konuan was simply how it had survived at all, when as far as she could tell, every other Konuan had died decades ago at least. Holtzclaw kept saying there could be a handful left, but Arakaki felt it in her gut: there was just one. And it loved to hunt them. To toy with them.

The weight of the pack bit into her shoulders. It would be a long walk back. Holtzclaw"s surviving techies would gush over the new pieces, she felt sure.

If you told them a Trilisk p.i.s.sed on it, they"d rush to examine it.

Not that she knew if Trilisks urinated or not. But she felt that she would probably never find out, and it was just as well, since the aliens had died out and left the galaxy to the Terrans.

It may have found the best Trilisk stuff for itself. That could explain it, she realized. She hadn"t considered the possibility before. But if anything could explain a single long-lived Konuan that could sneak in and out of their perimeter and hunt down heavily armed men and women, it was Trilisk technology in its possession.

G.o.dd.a.m.n thing. I"m gonna blow it to bits.

Her hand found the smooth black grenade dangling around her throat on a tough nylon line.

Or if it gets me first, I"m taking it with me.

Arakaki had rigged the grenade to a pH sensor so it would detonate if covered in a strong acid. She believed the victims were dissolved by acid secreted by the creature, and the strong ammonia smell was due to bases it used to neutralize the acid once the victim was incapacitated. Whether the ammonia neutralized acid in the victim as potential food or simply kept the creature from dissolving itself from the inside out, she did not know, but every dead soldier had been found with his or her head half gone. If the Konuan got past her eternal vigilance and pounced on her head, it was in for a surprise.

Arakaki moved through the now-familiar old buildings of the original sentient inhabitants of Chigran Callnir Four. Though she had found the empty silence of the ruins unsettling at first, she felt at home among them now, even knowing she could be hunted down and killed. She had made friends with the danger. She bit down on the sliver in her mouth. In fact, she was a bit too eager for danger now, since she had lost him. Some days, she wanted it to end so she didn"t have to think about it even one more time.

An hour later it was early afternoon. She had made steady progress through the empty city. Still probably too early for the Konuan to show.

Probably.

She approached the danger zone of the UED perimeter. Arakaki took up a position beside a Konuan building, facing a distant hillside overlooking the ruins. She sent her code from her link to a directional transmitter in her combat suit.

The probe on the distant hillside received her safe entrance request. Somewhere up ahead, a Guardian machine verified her target signature on its no-shoot list.

Arakaki continued. She was still cautious; a clearglider could have wandered into the zone, but more importantly, she wasn"t sure enough of the Konuan"s habits to risk her life by being careless now.

She came across the Guardian less than a kilometer from the outside of the zone. The machine didn"t move. It towered above her on metal spider legs, about twice her height. It had four arms to match its four legs. The arms were weapon mounts. Each arm of number four, or Scorn as the mechanics called it, held a long cannon barrel counterbalanced by an ammunition magazine.

"Welcome back, Captain," Scorn said.

"Any kills today, Scorn?" Arakaki asked, though she could just as easily have checked its fire record directly with her link.

"No kills today, Captain," it told her.

"Me neither," she said, and continued into the camp.

Chapter 5.

Magnus awakened to an alert in his PV. At first he thought he had misconfigured his scout leverage a.n.a.lysis to send an important alert when it completed. But it was not related to his project to enable the scouts to pry open the Konuan grilles. It was a warning that one of the machines had been disabled or destroyed.

He opened his eyes. Everything appeared calm within the tent. Their equipment boxes formed parallel walls supporting the tough fabric ceiling. Underneath, a level foam floor protected them from the jagged rocks. Telisa and Cilreth looked asleep, but Telisa sent him a message with her link.

"Something wrong?"

"We"ve lost a scout," Magnus reported. "It"s not near here. Probably nothing to worry about. The machine may have just fallen into a hole or gotten itself into a dumb spot."

Telisa opened her eyes and sat up. She dialed up a cold lantern with her link, bathing the s.p.a.ce in more light. "Are we in danger?"

"I don"t think so," Magnus said. "The scout we lost was a kilometer out. We still have several local."

The group had discussed sleeping back in the Clacker, in the tent amidst their equipment containers, or in the Konuan buildings. Magnus didn"t trust the Konuan buildings. Cilreth feared predators and made the case for a trek back to the Clacker. In the end, no one had strong objections to setting up inside a ring of equipment and cargo cases for some light shelter.

Magnus"s mention of the local scouts was verified by the sounds of tapping coming from the nearest Konuan building. They had left two scouts inside to clear more grilles as they slept. Magnus looked over a few images of the inside.

"Or maybe something nasty got a hold of it," Cilreth said, joining the conversation late.

"Sorry to wake you. It"s probably nothing."

"We lost a scout. I"m on a strange alien planet sleeping in a flimsy tent about a kilometer from something nasty. It"s not nothing."

Magnus shrugged. "We"ll have to investigate at first light. Why don"t you stay here and expand our camp? Deploy the rest of our equipment."

Cilreth gave him an inscrutable look. "Okay," she said.

It will be good for her to get used to working out here alone, Telisa said to Magnus over a private channel.

Alone? he replied. I thought you would stay with her.

No way.

The three played with sleep for another hour and a half, but everyone simply tossed and turned, waiting for daybreak. At the first sign of the Chigran Callnir star above the horizon, Magnus and Telisa eagerly threw together some equipment. Magnus told the tent walls to retract with his link. The morning air was cool but not cold in his Veer skinsuit.

"We"ll be back. You"ve got half a dozen scouts are in this area; call on them if you encounter any more of those transparent snakes, or anything else."

"Got it," Cilreth said. "You guys be careful. If something can kill one of those robots..."

Then it can kill us.

Magnus pulled his rifle off his back and checked it manually and electronically. He loved the old weapon and considered it rock solid. He understood it well enough to obtain more parts and ammunition back at the base through supplication to the Trilisk AI.

Telisa locked on to the destroyed scout herself. She led the way. Magnus followed along while asking two more scouts to converge with them at the site of the attack.

She"s eager. Still very cautious, though. A woman after my own heart.

"When are you going to give up that old relic and go for some advanced Vovokan technology?" Telisa asked him over her link.

"I already have. The attendant spheres."

One of his two spheres...o...b..ted by on cue.

"Kind of. I meant more in the way of an offensive weapon like your rifle."

"I can work in that direction. I"d prefer to understand it fully. We don"t want to be any more dependent on Shiny than we already are." He glanced at the alien weapon on her back, then added, "And we want to be able to use our weapons safely."

"Is that a stab at my chain lightning gun?"

"Well, honestly, we don"t know enough about it. Like, how does it target things? You can"t safely shoot it in the direction of any friendlies because you don"t know how to select your target signature, if the thing even has that functionality."

"Yeah. The gun is a bit crude. But effective."

"Anyway, what I was originally saying is, I can make parts myself without Shiny having to do the prayers for me."

"You can *make parts yourself" by praying to an alien G.o.d machine? Ha. Priceless. If Shiny takes off now, can we even get off the planet?"

"Depends on whether or not he takes the Clacker with him."

"We need another team member so we can split up and still operate in pairs," Telisa said, changing the subject.

"Agreed. I"m working on it."

"I want in. We can"t have you simply hiring a bunch of beautiful young women!" she joked.

"Can I have at least one more?"

Telisa snorted. Magnus smiled.

They came to the end of an open area of rough rock. Straight ahead, a thick stand of native plants rose from fractures in the ground. Magnus looked for other living things but didn"t spot any dangers.

Telisa slowed. She obviously didn"t like the idea of reducing their line of sight any more than he did. He remembered the clear snake creature and how hard it had been to spot.

Magnus interfaced with a guardian sphere and sent it ahead into the stand of plants. Telisa noticed it fly by, then did the same with one of her spheres.

"It looks like bamboo as it comes up from the breaches in the rocks, but those ridiculous...pom-poms of green stuff are almost comical," Telisa said.

"Yes, but I"m getting used to it slowly. And it"s less comical now that I"ve seen the green worms they"re made of."

The guardian spheres reached the robot remains ahead without incident. Telisa and Magnus recalled the spheres and waded into the stalks. They advanced another twenty meters.

"We"re here," she said, looking every which way. "Ah, there it is."

The machine had been smashed. Its legs were splayed at an angle resembling a spider crushed under a boot. The red rock had been singed black in a couple of spots.

"Looks like it burned out after taking a big hit," Telisa said.

"This took a considerable amount of force. The scouts are made of durable stuff."

"Something added a bit of wear and tear," Telisa said. She looked around nervously. "What"s that smell?"

Magnus knelt before the remains of the scout. The smell was strong. "It"s the scout. Maybe that"s some chemical from the Gorgalan parts." He retreated. "It could be toxic."