They never expected this conversion to be carried out in one clean switch. Various avenues would be explored over generations. Mistakes abandoned. Successes built upon. But slowly and surely the divergence from terrestrial humanity would grow until the final generation could walk naked under an alien sun and breathe the air without technological support.

Z-B's briefing had explained all this to the platoons. The emphasis had been on cellular adaptation, giving the impression of ordinary-looking people with slightly different lungs. It had never mentioned just how great the physiological changes would be.

Looking at the inhabitants of Roseport, Lawrence knew the briefing had barely touched the history of Santa Chico. Whatever had happened here since settlement began, it wasn't going to act in the platoon's favor.

In the beginning, Santa Chico had been the one exception to interstellar trade being a nonprofit activity. Among other things, the planet churned out a panoply of high-grade vaccines, biologicals, antivirals, vector treatments and biotronics, products that were unique, cutting-edge, and hard to duplicate. With an entire planetary ecology of potent vegetation and aquatic plants as raw materials, every new batch was an improvement on the last: more sophisticated, more effective. New settlers would travel outbound from Earth, and the completed biologicals would return, paying for starship maintenance and any technological and industrial equipment the inhabitants had requested. But over the last few years the starships had been returning with less and less cargo. As fewer settlers were heading out, the Earth-based portion of the Santa Chico development corporation became heavily debt-laden. Zantiu-Braun had performed a leveraged buyout and sent its Third Fleet to realize all those highly profitable biological assets.

The platoons lining the shore were ordered to advance up into Roseport. Their audience moved aside, filling the air with a loud, high-pitched cluttering sound, as if a whole jungle full of chimpanzees were screaming at once. Later, the AS up in the starship would decipher the cluttering as a very-high-speed hybrid of Spanish and Valley English. Captains ordered snatch squads forward to fix collateral necklaces. Skin amplifiers boomed out instructions, telling the new-natives not to resist, that they were being held responsible for...

The fight started immediately. New-natives swarmed down the rocky slope into the line of Skins. They didn't seem to have any weapons, but they were strong and extremely fast, easily a physical match for Skin. There were so many of them, and the platoons were so closely bunched still, that using darts and other nonlethal weapons was difficult What appeared to be a hairless ape leaped on Lawrence, carrying him to the ground. Huge clawed hands were either trying to remove his Skin helmet, or more likely just rip his entire head off. Lawrence gripped the thing's wrists and tried to prize them off. His Skin wasn't strong enough. Sheer surprise made him freeze for a second. Nothing in training had dealt with a situation like this. Skin always gave squaddies the advantage.

He pushed down with his right leg, shifting the pair of them over. Then he punched the thing on its sternum. It grunted in pain but kept twisting its claws round Lawrence's neck. Lawrence punched it again, feeling the tough amber hide give fractionally. After a few more seconds of futile wrestling, Lawrence ordered the Skin to fire its electrical pulse. The ape-thing screamed, its limbs locked as the charge ripped through it, then resumed its attempted decapitation. Something like a baby elephant joined in, kicking Lawrence in the ribs. He was left with no choice. His Skin's nine-millimeter pistol deployed through the carapace, and he shot the ape-thing at point-blank range. The first bullet simply enraged it further. Lawrence had to pump half a dozen shots into the demented creature before it finally lay motionless on the tigergrass. Vivid scarlet blood spilled out from the bullet holes in its torso and neck.

Lawrence staggered away from the thing, his ribs aching from the kicking administered by the baby elephant. He ignored that. Nausea and giddiness threatened to knock his legs from under him. He'd never killed anyone before. Not another human. And that's what this was, however distorted. Those clever Skin weapons had always absolved him, turned it into a nonissue.

Now the air around him crackled with weapons being discharged. The agonized screams of mortally injured new-natives cut through it all. Something approximating a Neanderthal ran straight into Lawrence, sending both of them tumbling to the ground. Lawrence brought his pistol arm around automatically. Targeting graphics centered on the prehistoric throwback's head. It had a tall, scalloped ridge running from the top of its nose over the crown of its skull, with a lacework of blue veins throbbing prominently. Very Homo sapiens eyes stared wildly at him, allowing him to read the new-native's fright and anger.

"Fuck off," Lawrence bellowed. He jerked the pistol nozzle up and fired three shots into the air. The new-native rolled aside and scrambled to its feet, sprinting away. Lawrence slowly clambered up as his Skin's peristaltic muscles pushed fresh ammunition along a feed tube into the pistol's magazine.

There was movement on every side of him, with a hundred voices shouting into his communication link. It took Lawrence a long moment to realize what was happening. The fight was breaking up. New-natives were fleeing back up the slope into the streets and buildings of Roseport, running, galloping, limping, even hopping. Dozens of bodies lay behind them, draped over the pale rocks; some were drifting through the shallows, blood spreading out of their wounds to stain the water a dense crimson. Hundreds of little ripples were expanding as aquatic creatures began to feed on the unexpected bounty. It was carnage on a scale Lawrence had never envisaged. Nor was it exclusively new-natives sprawled on the ground. Several Skins were tangled among them, their carapaces pulped and buckled, oozing gore.

Shots were still being fired into the backs of the retreating new-natives. Sergeants and captains yelled to cease fire.

"Sweet Fate," Lawrence whispered. Skins were on their knees around him, helmet valves open, allowing them to vomit. Lawrence's Skin AS reported it was infusing a cocktail of narcotics to help him cope with the shock its medical monitors had revealed. He felt light-headed, as if everything he'd just witnessed were part of some terrible i-drama. He didn't want to move, to take part, help his injured comrades. Just wanted someone to switch the whole image off and wipe the memory clean.

"Hey, look," Nic shouted. "Look up there. Jesus God, what is the deal here?"

Lawrence pushed his sensor focus into the cloudless sky above. He almost laughed; the numbing drugs made it seem funny. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse ... The cargo pods were hitting the lower atmosphere, their madcap descent slowing to subsonic speed. White-and-yellow parachutes bloomed high overhead, lowering them gently. A flock of windshrikes glided among them with fast grace. Massive crocodile-contoured jaws snapped and champed at the domes of fabric. Teeth the size of human hands tore easily through the nylon. With their chute panels ripped apart the pods began to plummet downward. They hit the ground at terminal velocity and burst apart in silent explosions of shattered crates and mangled equipment.