Several kilometers to the south, lightning flashed. After a long time, the sound of its thunder rumbled up the river valley… but between the flash and the rumble, rain had begun to fall.
The tree-height ferns did little to shut out rain. Most had vertical fronds, running directly up from the ground like festooned flagpoles. Flagpoles don’t make adequate umbrellas. A few ferns had long stems that curved into horizontal fronds resembling roofs over my head… but either the fronds were made up of many thin leaves and therefore leaked prodigiously, or they were solid enough to act as drainpipes, funneling every drop of rain toward some central point, then dumping it straight down the back of my neck.
The Unity uniform I wore was only partly waterproof, in that maddening way of all nanomesh. The nanites in the fabric were supposed to keep rain out while simultaneously drawing off sweat from my skin so I wouldn’t stew in my own juices. (Pushing through untamed wilderness is hard hot work.) Most nanomeshes keep you comfortably dry for fifteen minutes of downpour, after which the mathematics of chaos begins to take its toll. Some random excess of moisture accumulates in the crook of your elbow, or your armpit, or under your breasts, surpassing manageable tolerances. You feel a brief hot wetness, disturbingly reminiscent of bleeding; then the fabric dispatches reinforcement nanites to correct the problem, and the wetness goes away. (Just as disturbingly.) But shifting nanites to the trouble spot thins out nanite concentrations everywhere else… so soon there’s another ooze of moisture in some other area where rain and sweat abound. More nanite emergency crews are dispatched; more thinning occurs elsewhere; and the vicious circle spirals upward. Soon, transient seepage ambushes you every few steps, always somewhere new and unexpected; most of the time with the warmth of sweat but occasionally with the unkindly chill of a late-autumn torrent… and all the erratic "now you’re wet/now you’re not" water torture would be enough to drive you frantic if not for a more overwhelming concern: the uniform doesn’t cover your head, leaving your hair, face, and neck so utterly soaked that gushes of dampness elsewhere seem like trivial annoyances.
The other people in our spread-out expedition were all similarly drenched. Festina ignored the wetness, plowing doggedly forward, her aura ablaze with determination. Tut, still clad only in masks, danced and sang whatever songs came into his head… a medley of smutty folk ditties, gospel spirituals, and Myriapod throat chants (the kind fashionably used for background music in VR shoot-’em-ups). Li, wet and sulking, occasionally yelled at Ubatu to make Tut keep quiet. Ubatu pretended not to hear Li over the rush of the rain and secretly hummed along with Tut on many of the tunes. Especially the dirty ones.
Over and over, lightning lit the sky, and thunder banged in answer. An extraordinary amount of lightning activity. Perhaps this was simply normal weather on Muta… but I wondered if the pretas, creatures capable of electrical pulses, might somehow be spurring the storm to loose bolts down on our heads. If so, the ghosts couldn’t aim the attacks or overcome the basic laws of physics. Since we traveled low on the Grindstone’s floodplain, none of the lightning strikes came close to us. Either they connected with buildings in the city (and passed harmlessly through lightning rods) or they blasted unfortunate ferns on the heights of land bordering the Grindstone valley.
If the lightning made me uneasy, it downright terrified the local wildlife. As I pushed my way forward, I felt nearby insects and lizards cringe every time thunder cracked in the heavens. Most animals had found shelter from the rain and hunkered down to wait out the weather: some grudgingly so (especially nocturnal creatures who’d woken up hungry at sunset and wanted to forage for food), others miserable at being cold and wet, still others simply putting their tiny brains on idle as they numbly endured whatever came their way… but all of them jumped or shivered at every flash-crash from on high.
A few animals stayed on the move: fish, of course, and aquatic amphibians… insects too stupid to realize it was raining… and six Rexies coming toward us at top speed.
Three of the Rexies approached from the south. They’d reach Festina first; and because each was traveling from a different distance, they’d arrive one by one. If she saw them coming, she could knock them out harmlessly with her stun-pistol… and she would see them coming because she’d programmed her Bumbler’s proximity alarms to tell her when Rexies got close. Overall, she didn’t seem in danger.
Tut, Li, and Ubatu, however, would meet the other three Rexies en masse in about half an hour.
Tut’s party had no stun-pistol. Nor did they have a Bumbler to warn them of attack. Worst of all, my sixth sense told me at least two of the Rexies would reach them simultaneously… possibly all three. In this storm, Rexies moved much faster than humans — the pretas pushed the animals mercilessly, driving them to thrash through jungle vegetation without regard to safety. Their scaly skins showed numerous gashes, cut by encounters with thorns and sharp stones. Occasionally, the animals tripped on vines or slipped on slicks of wet mud, falling heavily enough to knock out teeth or fracture ribs and the delicate bones in their spindly arms. But the clouds in the Rexies’ skulls didn’t care about such minor injuries. All they wanted was the kill; and the sooner the better.
Thus the ruinous speed. By contrast, Tut and company moved with much more caution, plus the slowdown that always accompanies dampened spirits. There was no chance they’d outrun the predators heading for them.
As time went on, I saw one more thing: the Rexies adjusted their routes to set up a pincer operation. Two aimed for a position ahead of Tut et al.; the third would come in behind. I expected the two in front, bred by evolution to be pouncers rather than chasers, would find a place to lie in wait while the one at the rear drove the humans into the trap. On Earth, packs of wolves used the same tactic, but I doubted the Rexies had enough brains to devise such a plan. The pretas were the guiding intelligence, coordinating efforts over a distance of several kilometers as they brought the Rexies converging on their intended victims. Obviously, the EMP clouds could communicate with each other as well as share emotions. The ones riding the storm overhead might be acting as high observers, conveying directions to the clouds who’d got inside the Rexies’ heads.
Considering the pretas’ coordinated assault, I wondered why they’d never attacked the Unity in the same way. Team Esteem had recorded no unusual EMPs, no pseudosuchian ambushes, no odd clouds of smoke hovering in the distance. Why not? Why had the Unity been left alone for years, while our own rescue party was EMP’d before we landed and harried ever since?
Perhaps it could be explained by the knee-jerk enmity between the Unity and the Technocracy… and by the raw pain Team Esteem must have felt in their newly disembodied condition. The Fuentes clouds had suffered in Stage One for thousands of years; when the Unity survey teams landed, the clouds knew that the newcomers would soon turn to harmless smoke. Even as pretas, the Fuentes had learned some patience and restraint.
But the Unity pretas had no such control. When we sent reconnaissance probes into their camp, Team Esteem’s ghosts must have whipped themselves into fury at the thought of hated Technocracy rivals "invading" Unity territory. The smoky Team Esteem had EMP’d our probe in outrage. When we showed up in person, they’d EMP’d us again… and even if the Fuentes pretas might have preferred to avoid direct action — or if the newly transformed Var-Lann told the others we were a rescue party, not opportunistic usurpers — hostilities had already commenced.