They carried him away as the mayor and the senior officers went back into the hotel. The cleanup detail emerged after that, to take down the post and remove the sandbags.

There was the blood to be washed away, too. By midmorning, there would be no trace left of the execution.

The burial detail carried the stretcher through the rear corridors of the hotel and out into the small courtyard used by delivery trucks. A van was waiting there to take the body to the crematorium. Its doors were opened quickly, and the stretcher pushed inside. Had anyone managed to see the interior, they would have been surprised to see how much medical equipment was inside. It could almost have been mistaken for an ambulance.

"Go!" Lawrence yelled at Lewis.

The van sped out of the courtyard.

Dennis was already ripping the bodybag open. "Oh hell," the medic grunted when he saw the mess of gore that was Hal's chest. "How many bullets?"

"Only three," Lawrence said. He caught sight of the body. "Sweet mother of Fate! Can you do it?"

Dennis was already activating Hal's Skin suit, which lay crumpled in the corner of the van. He brought the extension tubes out and began plugging them into the kid's valves. "Cut the shirt off."

Blood began to squirt out of the jagged wounds, pouring onto the floor of the van. Lawrence took a scalpel and sliced the shirt fabric, pulling the saturated cloth aside, leaving room for Dennis to work. When he brought his hands away, they were dripping blood.

For the first time he began to have doubts—something he hadn't acknowledged before. He refused to let doubt be part of the equation as he focused himself on accomplishing just one thing: not letting the bastards murder Hal. He wanted a victory over KillBoy as subtle and devious as KillBoy's relentless assault against the platoons on the streets of Memu Bay. But now he could actually see the terrible damage that the bullets had caused....

Dennis was trying to clamp off the torn arteries in the chest cavity. "His heart's so much raw meat. We'll have to drain and reinflate the lungs."

"The brain?" Lawrence demanded. "What about the brain?"

"I don't know." Dennis gave him an anguished look. "It was seven minutes." His optronic membranes were scrolling medical data almost too quickly for him to follow; Hal's Skin was using up its drug capsules at a dangerous rate as it tried to minimize cellular trauma.

"But we superoxygenated his blood," Lawrence said. "You said that would last him."

"It should, it should." Dennis finished clamping one artery and went for the next. "Odel, anything?"

Odel was attaching a sensor to Hal's scalp. He looked at a palmtop display. "Not yet. Still flatlined."

"Come on," Dennis screamed at the kid. His face was streaked with Hal's blood, which he'd smeared there with the back of his hand.

"Lewis, how long till we get there?" Lawrence shouted.

"Three minutes, Sarge."

"Is he alive?"

"I don't know," Dennis barked.

"Three minutes, Dennis, that's all. The crash team's waiting."

"Crash team?" Dennis's voice was veering toward hysteria. "Crash team? One struck-off doctor and a couple of field medics, and you expect them to perform a fucking heart transplant?"

"It's a biomech heart, Dennis, you just plug it in and switch it on."

Dennis laughed. "Oh, Jesus fucking Christ"

"Dennis! What about Hal?"

"I'm trying, god damn you." There were tears in the corners of his eyes. "I'm trying."

"Hey," Odel cried. "Hey, I've got brainwaves showing here."

Hal's mouth dropped open. His tongue flopped about weakly as he gurgled through the scarlet blood that was foaming out of his throat.

"Hal!" Lawrence shouted. "Hal, you hear me? You hear me, Hal? You hang on for us, kid. We've got you. We won't let you go."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Santa Chico. The original paradise planet.

From orbit its colors were intense—Earth-like, but brighter, more alive. There were no pastels here, no gentle shadings. Vegetation was vivid emerald; fast-growing, all-conquering. That made the few real deserts intolerably bleak: hot as hell and dry as Mars. Barriers between the extremes of rich life and barren desolation were short, making the contrasts ever more striking. The oceans that covered over half of its surface were livid sapphire. Snow-white clouds were magnified by the deep atmosphere as they hurtled through the high, turbulent jetstreams.

The air with its 30 percent oxygen content was poisonous to unmodified humans. But for native life, the abundant gas was raw nuclear power to its biochemical processes. Evolution here had grown thorns on everything.

For some it was a magnificent challenge. A chance to live differently, abandoning the strictures that governed society on Earth.

Just how differently, Corporal Lawrence Newton was only just realizing. Now that the company of eight platoons had arrived at the chemical-processing factory, all he could see was decay. The facility was spread out over several acres. Its design illustrated only too well the new angles with which Santa Chico's inhabitants set about attacking old problems. The closest he could come to describing it was organic gothic. Large sections of the machinery were alive, membranes and nodules blending smoothly into the metal and plastic portions. Or had been alive. Or were still alive but de-evolving, reverting to more primitive forms. He couldn't quite decide. The factory obviously hadn't been in use for some time.

It had been sited in a small valley that was a natural habitat for the gargul plant, a bush of yellow-and-scarlet sponge-like dendrites whose sap contained wondrously complex molecules that could be employed as vaccine bases. Such compounds were a big factor in the original settlement effort. Santa Chico's vegetation was a natural pharmacopoeia, which when harvested properly produced an astonishing array of medical and industrial applications. Now the garguls had returned to the factory, growing over and under the inert machinery. In many cases, Lawrence could see fissures in the pipes and organolytic crackers allowing the bush to take root. Fluffy lichens tarnished the big metal mountings. Pink moniliform fungi spiraled up support struts. Vines and creepers scaled the highest burner towers, forming thick-webbed buttresses.

Jeeps and trucks transporting the platoons fanned out from the narrow, overgrown track and halted beside the fecund equipment. Captain Lyaute ordered a sweep of the area. "I know it looks like a complete waste of time," he told the platoons over the general frequency. "But we have to find out if anything can be salvaged from this crock of shit."