Erika was becoming increasingly alarmed as she watched the sun go down. “Just to point out,” she said to the others, “the vast majority of insects come out at night, not during the day. And many of them are predators.”

“We need to make a bivouac,” Peter said. “We’re going to build a fort.”

Not far away, a hexapod walker vehicle strode rapidly across the forest floor, climbing over pebbles and pushing leaves aside, its six legs working with seemingly boundless energy. Motors on the legs whined.

Johnstone was driving, his hand sunk in a glove-like device, a hand controller, while he watched the readouts. The readouts told him the levels of power the servomotors were delivering to the vehicle’s six legs. Telius sat next to him in the open cockpit, his eyes tracking left and right, up and down. Both men wore full-body armor.

The walker was powered by a nano-laminate micro-lithium power pack. It had a long range and plenty of power. Regular vehicles didn’t work well in the micro-world; they got stuck, the wheels spun uselessly. Wheeled vehicles couldn’t climb over obstacles, either. Instead, the Nanigen engineers had copied the design of an insect. The design worked extremely well.

The walker arrived at a hole in the ground.

“Stop,” Telius said.

Johnstone brought the vehicle to a halt and stared into the hole. “That’s Echo.”

“Was,” Telius corrected him.

Both men leaped out of the vehicle in soaring jumps, their armor clattering. They landed on their feet. They had a lot of practice at physical movement in the micro-world, and they knew how to use their strength. They began circling around the hole, examining moss, crumbs of dirt. The rain earlier in the day had obliterated most traces of the students’ passage across the surface, but Johnstone knew that clues remained. He could track anybody anywhere. A growth of moss on a rock attracted his attention. He went up to it and studied it. The moss stood waist-high. He touched a narrow stalk that came up out of the moss: it was a spore stalk with a broken spore capsule at the end of it. The stalk was bent at a right angle, broken, and spores had spilled out, some of them clinging to the moss. In the sticky fluff of wet spore granules Telius found the imprint of a human hand. Somebody had grabbed the spore stalk, broken it, spilled the pollen, then put their hand in it. Farther on, Telius found a confused set of human footprints, clambering over a lump of dirt, in a spot under a spreading leaf that had protected the ground underneath from rain splashes.

Johnstone knelt and examined the footprints. “There’s five of them-no, six. Walking in a line. He looked off. “Heading southeast.”

“What’s southeast?” Telius said.

“Parking lot.” Johnstone narrowed his eyes and smiled.

Telius looked at him quizzically.

Johnstone picked a mite off his shoulder plate, crushed it, flicked it away. “Fucking mites. Now we know their plan.”

“What plan?”

“They’re looking for a ride back to Nanigen.”

He was right, obviously. Telius nodded and began walking swiftly ahead, following clues. Johnstone jumped back into the hexapod and began driving it, following Telius as he moved swiftly ahead of the walker, often leaping over things, traveling at a pace somewhere between a dogtrot and a flat-out run. Occasionally Telius stopped to examine tracks in the soft soil. The targets hadn’t made any effort to cover their tracks. They didn’t suspect they were being followed.

But it was starting to get dark. Telius and Johnstone knew enough about the micro-world to know they needed to go to ground for the night. You did not move after dark. Not ever.

They stopped the hexapod. Johnstone ran an electric-shock cable in a circle around the vehicle, staking the cable into the ground chest-high, while Telius dug a foxhole directly underneath the vehicle. They energized the power cable from the capacitor-it would deliver a shock to any animal that touched it-and they hunkered down in the foxhole, sitting back to back, holding their. 600 Expresses propped at their sides, loaded and ready for action.

Telius leaned back and put a dip of snuff under his lip. Johnstone took the radio locator with him into the foxhole, so that he could listen for any radio transmissions during the night. Johnstone wasn’t worried. This was his tenth trip into the micro-world, and he knew what he was doing. He turned on the locator and watched the screen, looking for signs of any radio transmissions in the seventy-gigahertz band-the frequency used by the Nanigen headsets. He saw no sign of radio chatter. “They might not even have radios,” he said to Telius.

Telius grunted in response, and spat a jet of tobacco.

They ate packaged meals. They got up to urinate separately, one man going off a few paces while the other man kept his partner covered with a gas rifle, just in case something tried to attack through the electrified wire. Some of those bastards out there could smell you when you took a piss.

Afterward, they traded watches, one man dozing while the other stayed on lookout. The lookout wore infrared goggles, his eyes just above the level of the ground.

Johnstone couldn’t get over how damn lively this world was at night. In his IR goggles he saw constant, ceaseless movements of small creatures, going about their damn business-bugs, a million bugs, crawling everywhere. He didn’t even know what they were. Seen one bug you’ve seen ’em all. As long as they weren’t some kind of predator. He watched for the warm shape of a mouse. He wanted to shoot some big game tonight. Dropping a mouse with a. 600 Express was as good as shooting a cape buffalo, which he’d done a few times in Africa.

“I’d like to blow away a mouse,” Johnstone said. “That would be fun.”

Telius grunted.

“I just don’t want to meet a fucking Scolo,” Johnstone added.

Chapter 22

Near Station Bravo 29 October, 6:00 p.m.

The six surviving students picked a rise of higher ground at the base of a small tree. At this spot they wouldn’t get flooded out if it rained during the night. The tree was an ohia, and it had gone into bloom, shining with red blossoms, which glowed in the evening light.

“We should make a palisade,” Peter said.

They gathered dry twigs and stalks of dead grass. They split the twigs and grasses into long splinters, then jammed the splinters into the ground side by side. This formed a wall of sharpened stakes surrounding their campsite, with the points of the splinters facing outward. They left an opening in the palisade just wide enough for a human to slip through, with a barrier of stakes around the opening in a zigzag, to make the entrance hard to penetrate. They continued to work on strengthening the fort as long as there was any light to see by. They dragged dead leaves inside the palisade, and used the leaves to make a roof over their heads. The roof would give protection against rain, and would also conceal them from the sight of flying predators.

They spread leaves on the ground under the roof, too. The leaf-bed kept them up off the ground, which was a constantly squirming bustle of small worms. They cut the lightweight tent to make a flat tarp out of it, and they spread the tarp on top of the leaf-bed to keep the surface dry and make the bed a little more comfortable for sleeping.

They had made a fort.

Karen brought out her spray bottle. It was nearly empty-she’d used most of it during the fight with the ants. “It’s got benzoquinone in it. If anything attacks us, there’s a couple of shots left.”

“I feel much safer now,” Danny said sarcastically.

Rick Hutter took the harpoon and dipped the point in the jar of curare. He leaned the harpoon against the palisade, ready for action.

“We should stand watches,” Peter reminded them. “We’ll change shifts every two hours.”