Gray mud floor and gloomy aisles between monstrous blue tree trunks that was the Gienah jungle.  Only the weakest glimmering of sunlight penetrated to the mud.

Orne's disguised sled, its paragrav units turned off, lurched and skidded around buttress roots.  The headlights swung in wild arcs across the trunks and down to the mud.  Aerial creepers, great looping vines of them, swung down from the towering forest ceiling.  A steady drip of condensation spattered the windshield, forcing Orne to use screen blowers.

In the bucket seat of the sled's cab, Orne fought the controls while trying to watch on all sides for sign of the Gienahn raiding party.  He felt plagued by the vague slow-motion-floating sensations a heavy planet native always experienced in lighter gravity.  It gave him an unhappy stomach.

Things skipped through the air around the lurching vehicle - flitting and darting things, blue, red, green, violet, iridescent and dull things.  Gienahn insects with fuzzy wings came in twin cones, siphoned toward the headlights.  An endless chittering screeching whistling chiming tok-tok-toking sounded in the gloom beyond the sled's lights.

Stetson's voice hissed suddenly through Orne's surgically implanted speaker:  "How's it look?"

"Alien."

"Any sign of that mob?"

"Negative."

"Right.  We're taking off.  Good luck."

From behind Orne, there came the deep rumbling roar of the scout cruiser climbing its jets.  The racket receded.  All other sounds hung suspended in after-silence, then resumed: the strongest first and then the weaker.

A heavy dark object arced through the headlights, swinging on a vine.  It disappeared behind a tree.  Another.  Another.  Ghostly shadows on vine pendulums looped across both sides of the sled.  Something banged down heavily on the hood.

Orne braked to a creaking stop that shifted the load behind him.  He found himself staring through the windshield at a native of Gienah.  The native crouched on the hood, a Mark XX exploding-pellet rifle in his right hand directed at Orne's head.  In the abrupt shock of meeting, Orne recognized the weapon: standard issue to marine guards on all R&R survey ships.

The native appeared the twin, of the one Orne had seen on the translite screen, even to the belt with its pouched artifacts.  The four-fingered hand looked practiced and capable around the stock of the Mark XX.