Dark Planet by Charles W. Sasser Page B

blend in perfectly with it, so that you couldn’t be seen until you moved and then it was like part of the forest moved. There were two drawbacks: their properties of camouflage lasted only a relatively short time, even with an energy source, and they precisely mirrored immediate surroundings so that when you walked next to a particular bush, you became another bush in the exact image of the first. Double vision. Atlas crouching next to Maid in the confined space of the pod powered up his cammies first, and suddenly there were two of Maid side by side. Except Atlas hadn’t donned his battle helmet and mask shield and the image he reflected was of his own blond head attached to Maid’s body. Ferret guffawed.
    “If you had a body like that all the time, big man, I’d give up Naleen for you.”
    “That prolie slut’s already given you up for the home guard, Ferret.”
    Ferret laughed. “Just so they don’t wear it out before I get back.”
    “You can’t wear those things out,” Gorilla put in, joining the banter. “I’ve tried.”
    “Is that right, Gun Maid?” Ferret leered. “What do you get, about a million miles or so out of one?”
    “Pervert.”
    I laughed, the low Zentadon purr that passed as a chuckle among my kind. Maid shot me an astonished look.
    “That’s a wonderful sound!” she exclaimed.
    “He sounds like a tomcat in heat,” Blade rumbled. “Watch out for him, Gun Maid. Next thing you know he’ll be humping your leg and trying to jump your bones. I’ll bet he’s got a tail curled up inside his crotch instead of a set of …”
    “… which I’ll neuter if I catch him sniffing around.” Atlas glowered.
    Gorilla ejected a sensor robot from a hatch in the pod’s side to swim ashore and take a look around before Captain Amalfi committed the team. The bot was an off-the-shelf design that resembled a large pill bug. It was about a foot long with a series of rapid legs that could be remotely adjusted for walking, swimming, or even climbing trees. As soon as it was free of the craft, it popped to the surface and stuck up a thin detector rod for a look-see. Huddled around the monitor inside, DRT-213 took its first close-up look at Aldenia.
    The Dark Planet was appropriately named. The river water was a black coffee color, obviously stained from tannin leeched from the forest. Above its surface, the atmosphere was dark gray and clutching, hovering like a noxious and dangerous cloud, boiling with stabs and flickers of lightning. We had landed in the middle of one of the numerous storms and it was raining. Not so much that it was raining, but that everything
was
rain. The river appeared at flood stage; it was probably always at flood stage.
    The gen-bot swam toward shore on the rain-churned surface, dodging flotsam hammering swiftly on the current toward the nearby sea. The monitor revealed logs and huge floating boulders bearing down upon the bot, so imminent and present on the screen that Ferret actually ducked. He grinned sheepishly.
    The bot reached shore and clambered onto solid, if not exactly dry, land.
    “Pan out for a big view,” Captain Amalfi instructed Gorilla.
    The panorama showed a small grassy clearing — the grass was black — surrounded by a forest thick with spindly, cycad-looking undergrowth and thin, twisted forest giants whose moss-crusted tops disappeared into the cloud cover. Rain and cloud scud swirled. No more forbidding place could be imagined. No wonder the planet spawned an aura of evil, even without the additional ignominy of the taa camps and experimental labs run by the old power-mad Indowy.
    “It’s like Earth before time began,” Maid breathed, staring at the monitor screen.
    “It’s not Earth in any of its stages,” Blade objected. “I was here before. It’s more like Hell.”
    The bot nosed around as it was programmed to do, scouting in a series of expanding concentric circles starting from its initial position. A half-hour passed without incident.