Free Progeny (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book Three) by Dan Worth Page A

grimly.  If it came to it, this would be his only way out.  Better to die by his own hand than become one of their instruments, that way the secrets he held would die with him.
    There was a roaring sound above him.  An AG transport outlined in winking navigation lights passed over his head, searchlight stabbing down through the jungle canopy below.  He watched it as it paused for a moment to investigate something, and then it moved off to the south.  There was no point in running and hiding.  It was too dark to move and besides, movement would only make him more obvious.  He huddled down further beneath the camo-cloak that he had found in his pack – it would shield his body heat to some extent – and waited for morning.
     
    He awoke with a start and saw sunlight slanting down through the trees.  Some sudden noise had roused him from sleep.  He had dreamt of a piercing cry.  There it was again, a blood curdling shriek that pierced the silence of the early morning forest.  He squinted in the direction that the sound had come from, and saw a long-limbed furry shape gripping the upper branches of a tree to the south west.  The thing gave another cry, and was answered now by other calls from more distant trees.  He saw other shapes, moving swiftly across the underside of the tree canopy in a loosely dispersed group, dappled greenish fur causing them to blend in and out of the background foliage.
    Local wildlife, huh, he thought.  He’d seen enough nature documentaries over the years to recognise the creatures as Orinoco Dryads, a roughly primate symbiont species, but right now his main concern regarding the wildlife was whether any of it was edible.  The ration packs he’d salvaged wouldn’t last forever.  Eventually he’d need to start killing or picking his own food if he was going to survive out here.
    Orinoco was a strange little world, he mused.  There were those who pointed out that the system wasn’t nearly old enough to have developed such complex life and that the entire ecosystem must be artificial and had been imported from elsewhere in the distant past.  From where and by whom, no-one had yet established, though there were rumoured to be one or two moss-covered ruins in the deep jungle that pointed to earlier colonisation by parties unknown.
    As the group of Dryads moved closer to his position, he suddenly saw a flock of bird-like creatures erupt through a hole in the floor of intertwined branches where he sat.  Their iridescent plumage caught the sunlight in a riot of colour as a chorus of shrieks erupted from the Dryads.  They had seen whatever it was on the lower levels of the forest that had scared the flock of avians.
    He shifted his position and leaned forward over the branch in front him so that he could look down through a gap in the foliage to the levels below.  Below was another layer of branches then another below that and another and so on.  It was difficult to see the ground - the successive layers of tree growth eventually blocking out much of the light to the bottom levels.
    He froze.  There was something moving down there.  A couple of layers down, through a succession of gaps he caught a glimpse of movement.  At first he thought it was a swarm of insects hovering under the trees, but as he looked closer he realised that its shape was far too distinctly defined and the concentration of the individuals in the swarm was too great.  As he watched, it moved into a patch of dappled light and the motes that made up the swarm glittered as they reflected the sun.  He saw it clearly then.  It had definite form. It was a dense, upright, ovoid swarm composed of millions of individual creatures.  It moved with a definite purpose, sliding over and around obstacles.  Just looking at it, he felt a sense of crawling horror moving up his spine.  The thing exuded pure terror.  It was like he had knocked open a hornets’ nest and found the hornets rearing up as one sentient