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

thing.  A voice whispered inside his head, the words indistinct and just beyond hearing.  He gazed at the creature, transfixed in horror, unable to move or take his eyes off it. Then it moved out of the sunlight and disappeared from his view.
    His heart was thudding in his chest.  What the hell was that thing?  Was it what he thought it was, one of them ?  He’d seen reports, unverified, on what they were supposed to look like.  There was other movement below now:  troopers in the uniform of the Marine Corps moving in loose formation, guns held slackly in their hands.  There was something very wrong about the way that they moved.  Their movements were slow, almost as if they were sleepwalking.  As one marine without a helmet moved into the patch of light that illuminated the swarm, he saw the glint of machinery protruding from the man’s skull. 
    So, they were hunting him then.
    Carefully, he moved back from the lip of the hole in the branches and sat back down in the cubby hole where he had spent the night, covering himself once more with the camo-cloak.  As he took a mouthful of water from the bottle in his pack and grimaced at the taste of plastic and sterilisation tablets, he realised that he was shaking with fear.
     
    He huddled there for what seemed like hours, watching the beams of sunlight track across the cavernous space, too wary of moving in case he gave himself away, but all the while fighting the urge to run - run the hell away from here.  The Dryads had hung from the branches and watched as the haunting figures departed.  He was relying on them to alert him to any other intruders into their territory.  AG vehicles sped across the jungle a few times but they appeared not to be looking for him. 
    Eventually he concluded that it was safe.  How had the enemy missed him, with all their technology and resources?  Why were they looking for him at the wrong level within the forest?  Maybe they were following another one of the survivors from a different escape pod and had simply passed this way?  In any case, he figured that he had been extremely lucky not to be detected. 
    Carefully and quietly he gathered his things and then moved off across the layer of branches, keeping the camo-cloak about him to shield his body heat from anyone watching from the air.  He needed to find somewhere fairly remote from any enemy activity from which to use the emergency hypercom beacon he was still lugging around with him.  Doubtless its use would attract their attention and he needed time to make a getaway before they managed to ascertain his location and investigate.
    The Dryads were a new factor, and a mixed blessing.  Their calls would stand a chance of alerting him to anything he might need to be careful of; trouble was, he wondered if they might start calling out to announce his presence also, something he could do without.  In any case, he made a mental note to be observant of the local wildlife and whether any of it reacted to his presence, or that of anyone, or any thing else. His aged body was still stiff from the night spent sleeping in the trees.  It protested with twinges in his joints as he hefted his gear and made his way onwards into the jungle.
     
    He plodded onwards for several hours, the uneven and unsteady surface combined with the heat of the day making the going difficult.  As the sun climbed higher into the sky the humidity rose considerably as the moisture that had collected on the jungle’s vegetation during the night evaporated back into the atmosphere.  His forehead ran with sweat and he was forced to stop ever more frequently both to recuperate and to collect more water from where it had pooled among the bromeliad like growths attached to the trunks and branches of the endless trees.  He grimaced as he picked dirt and dead creatures from the water, before siphoning it into his water bottle and adding sterilising tablets to hopefully kill off anything unpleasant.
    Dropping his