Free Deathwing by Neil & Pringle Jones Page B

monkeys and bright sunlight, was as different from greenside as that was from the devil-python-infested swamps below.
    He could well remember his first sight of topside: an endless garden of flowers visible from the armoured aircar’s glassteel windows. He could remember the terror of his first patrol, hunting raiders in the eternal darkness of the humus swamps at the nation-trees’ roots. Even that had held a strange kind of wonder, as they had walked across the rippling surface on pontoon shoes while pale beasts scuttled from the light of their torches.
    But it had been greenside he had loved best. He had marvelled at the way branches of the great trees had intermeshed so tightly that carpet moss could grow between them to form a near solid surface which could, mostly, support a man’s weight. It had seemed miraculous that it was all supported underneath by the steel-hard cablewebs of the weavers.
    It was so perfect that it could almost have been designed by a god. Even now that the initial glamour had faded it still seemed slightly blasphemous to him that it was about to be wiped from orbit.
    He looked up at the cathedral-like arches of the trunks rising above him and shook his head, as if he could shake off his feelings of reverence as easily as a dog shaking off water. He couldn’t. The place dwarfed him, as it dwarfed the straggling line of his companions, even mighty Truk.
    ‘You’re right,’ Sal said from beside him. She was looking up at him with a strange expression on her face, as if seeing him for the first time. ‘We don’t belong here.’
    ‘We don’t fit, do we?’ he said. ‘Everything else here has symmetry, contributes something to the pattern about us. Even the rebels have learned to blend in, in a weird sort of way. That’s why they are beating us.’
    Sal smiled. ‘Symmetry – it’s because this world was designed by bio-adepts during the Dark Age of Technology. That’s what records say. I was in the mind of the clerk who was transcribing the report back at Dropsite.’
    Sal fell silent. Nipper looked down at her. She was pale and drawn. Already lines of pain and fatigue were etched into her face. She stumbled and almost fell but Nipper supported her. She did not ask to rest. Nipper guessed that, like the rest of them, she knew she would be left behind.
    S IX HOURS INTO their march they found the body. It was that of a man. He had been left stretched out in the glistening coils of a dreamspider’s web. His mask had been torn away and fungus emerged through his mouth, nostrils and other orifices. Nipper thought it was a ghastly way to die – lungs filled and insides eaten away by parasitic fungus. Yet the man was smiling. The narcotic strands of the web had done their work. He could see the dreamspider retreating from its decomposing prey as they approached.
    Krask looked at the body, a haunted look on his face.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ Borski asked.
    ‘Look at the man’s clothing, sir. He’s wearing green bark-cloth and carrying a spore-harvesting pouch. He’s one of our loyalist scouts.’
    ‘So?’ Borski said.
    Nipper understood. ‘A man like that knows the forest. He wouldn’t blunder into a dreamspider web.’
    ‘Someone put him there?’ Borski looked thoughtful.
    ‘Rebel woodsrunners. The natives believe that the web of a dreamspider ensnares the soul. It’s the worst form of death in their book. We lost a man up near Spook Mountain last spring. They’d done the same thing.’
    ‘This means rebels had already passed our outpost line before their big push,’ Borski snapped. ‘Weapons at the ready. Be wary of ambush!’
    Without any great enthusiasm the guards began to check their weapons. Gingerly they passed the web.
    For some time afterwards, as he and Sal limped down the trail, Nipper could feel the dead man’s calm, ecstatic eyes staring at his back.
    N IPPER SURVEYED THE surrounding woods fearfully, looking for signs of the rebel woodsrunners. He knew that if they