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Blohm stopped at the edge of a creek or elongated pond. The water seemed to be a sheet of black glass. Leaves and what looked like a berry floated on the surface. There was no discernible current.

Gabe picked up a pebble. "Don't," Blohm said, but the pebble was already in the air, flipped from the back of the sergeant's thumb.

It plopped into the water. Ripples spread evenly.

"What was wrong with that?" Gabrilovitch said in a wounded tone. He didn't object to his nominal subordinate being in charge whenever the two of them were alone on a mission, but he didn't like being treated like a half-witted child.

"Maybe nothing," Blohm said. "Look, just . . . I want to sit and look things over, Gabe. I don't want . . . if you touch something, make something happen . . . look, I want to understand this, do you see?"

Gabe didn't understand that there was anything to understand. The trees were dangerous—so far in over fifty different ways only a quarter mile into the forest. There were probably animals—otherwise how explain the berserk vegetation?—and they'd be dangerous too, though large predators weren't likely in the apparent absence of large prey animals. The sergeant didn't believe that there was anything to know, however; as opposed to things to avoid, to destroy and to survive.

"There's something moving on the trunk of that tree across the creek," Gabrilovitch said. "Mark." 

"I got it," Blohm said.

He'd seen the movement already. A creeper was unwinding from the smooth black bark of a tree ten feet in diameter above the buttress roots. As plants move the activity was blindingly fast, but it would still be minutes before the vine had completely straightened from its original helical grip on the tree.

At that point, Blohm guessed the upper end of the vine would come spearing down in his direction like a snake's head. Caius Blohm had no intention of being in the target area long enough for that to happen.

"Look, I got a bad feeling about it," Gabrilovitch said. "I don't think we ought to be standing around waiting for something to whack us. This place is bad news, snake."

"Gabe," Blohm said softly. Frustration at being interrupted was a raging red glow in his mind, but his voice was mild and colorless. "Why don't you get into your null sack for a bit. Leave the RF port open and you can watch everything through my helmet. You'll be as safe as if you were back on Stalleybrass."

"Shitfire, Blohm," the sergeant said. "I just thought you ought to know about that thing across the creek. Who the hell do you think you are?"

"Gabe . . ." Blohm said. "If you don't get into your sack and let me concentrate on this, I'll drop a stitch and the forest'll grease me sure. If that happens, you may as well eat your stinger right now, because I tell you, snake, you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of making it back to the clearing without me."

Blohm's visor was set on panorama with movements highlighted. Twenty yards back in the direction the scouts had come, the upper half of a tree with a coarse, scaly surface was rotating. The entire bole moved. It was visible only through a notch between the interlaced branches of two nearer trees.

"Yeah, sure, snake," Gabrilovitch said. He pulled the tube-shaped roll of his null sack from its pouch. "The place gets on my nerves, that's all."

Blohm shifted his position a step and a half to the left so that another treetrunk separated him from the one in motion. He had no idea what would have happened if he'd remained where he was; just that it would have been fatal.

Plants don't chase down prey. Neither do web spiders. But spiders grow fat on animals which move without thinking.

Gabe stepped into the mouth of his null sack, pulled the sides over his head, and lay down. There was a faint sigh as he operated the closures; then nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The sack's outer surface was the black of powdered carbon, not shadow. Shadow has color and shows the outline of the surface on which it lies. The null sack absorbed energy right across the spectrum from heat to microwave. The inner and outer surfaces were of identical material, but the layer between was a high-efficiency heat sink that expanded slightly as it stored energy.

Micropores in the sack passed oxygen molecules through to the interior. The slightly larger carbon dioxide molecules filtered through the inner surface but were trapped in the middle layer until flushed when the sack was serviced after use.

A man inside a null sack could breathe normally for a day and a half without changing the CO₂ balance of the air around him. He had no heat signature and active electro-optical sensors would not show his outline. The sack blurred but couldn't completely defeat sound ranging, but that was almost valueless in a breathable atmosphere to begin with.

The sacks could be operated in either completely buttoned-up mode, or with a one-way RF window that permitted a striker to receive data from an external source. That could be a spy cell clipped to a tree, for example; or in this case, the helmet of a striker who wasn't in a null sack himself.

Blohm sighed and let the soul of the forest sweep around him like slow green surf. Water reflected the canopy in near perfection. The ripples from Gabe's stone had died away, but here and there insects skated in dimples of surface tension.

The scouts had come this far without cutting or blowing the jungle out of their way. That was partly standard operating procedure—you didn't want to leave a trail for enemy patrols to track you by—but Blohm had carried it to an extreme his sergeant found unreasonable. He'd even insisted that they go around the curtain of moss tendrils hanging from a branch instead of shearing through with their knives.

There was a slap and patter in the foliage nearby. A broad leaf had suddenly everted, dumping a pint of water stored from the evening's rain. The dripping continued almost a minute, from one layer to another and finally to the soil.

None of the drops landed directly on the surface of the pond. It was a pond. It had no current at all. The ends were concealed in forest, the banks only six feet apart—not quite close enough for a burdened striker to leap.

But it had to be a pond; or a moat. A moat only inches deep, because Blohm could see the pebble bottom through the black water. There were no twigs or decaying leaves among the stones, and no animal life.

The broad, round plants floating on the surface looked like water lilies, but flat stems anchored them to the bank. A flying insect buzzed to the miniature pink flowers, then dipped to the pond. Its wings riffled the water as it drank through its proboscis before flying off.

Blohm chuckled softly. There were two ways to deal with this forest. Brute force would work if you had enough force. Perhaps two bulldozers and the firepower of C41 were enough.

The other method was to treat the contest as a chess game. Blohm wasn't sure he was going to win the game; but he might, he just might.

He walked to a tree five yards from the edge of the pond. Thorns as long as a man's hand lay flat in recesses along the trunk, almost invisible against the speckled bark. Blohm switched on his powerknife. He advanced the point cautiously and cut off a thorn at the base.

As the spike dropped away, a hydrostatic mechanism in the wood snapped viciously, rotating the base. Body heat would have released every spike within range to rip like tiger claws if the scouts had brushed the trunk as they passed.

Blohm's left hand was gloved. The garment was part of the body sock worn with a hard suit in extreme temperatures. He carried the thorn with that hand to the edge of the pond where he probed at the bottom, shifting pebbles. There was a stiff surface beneath; perhaps clay, perhaps some rubbery plant excretion.

"Okay, Gabe," Blohm said. "We've got to go around this pond. We'll try the right side. Watch out for the white-barked tree twenty feet on. It's got seeds that look like spears up where the fronds flare, and they weigh a couple pounds each."

Gabrilovitch slipped out of his null sack with itchy speed. "Why don't we just cross?" he asked, not arguing. "Afraid of getting your feet wet?"

"The top inch or two is water," Blohm said, holding up the thorn. The point was black and already shrivelling. "Underneath it's something else heavy enough that the water just floats on it. Concentrated sulfuric acid is my guess, but I don't suppose we need to know for sure."

Gabrilovitch stared at the black water. "God damn," he whispered.

"Come on, Gabe," Blohm said mildly. "That vine you saw across the pond's going to have us for breakfast if we stay much longer. You did a good job to notice it."

The rain had brought out fresh foliage on the young trees growing in place of the giants killed when the asteroid hit. The leaf flushes were of brilliant hues: reds, maroons, and poisonous, metallic greens which seemed to have nothing to do with life or growing things.

A civilian started to cry. He was a middle-aged man whose tight, youthful face had profited from cosmetic shaping and whose pudgy body had not. "They're going to kill us," he whimpered. "They hate us and they're going to kill us all."

Abbado cleared his throat. He'd been about to give the civilians a pep talk before the lead tractor moved past and took a bite out of the jungle, but he thought he ought to do something about the crying man first.

Glasebrook walked over to the fellow and hugged him one-armed against a torso lumpy with crossed bandoliers and a waist belt whose every slot held munitions. Four-pound rockets waggled like tassels, rattling against other gear.

"Don't you worry, Mr. Bledsoe," the Flea said. "We're not going to let them kill you. We're going to kill them first."

"Bedsoe," said the civilian. "My name is Bedsoe." He straightened. "I'm so very sorry," he said with a dip of his head to Abbado.

Abbado cleared his throat again. "The dozer's going to cut us a twenty-foot trail through the woods there," he said in a deliberately cheerful voice to the watching civilians. "That sounds like a lot and it is, but I don't want anybody getting careless. God and his pretty blonde—"

He grinned and thumbed toward the mass of people with Manager al-Ibrahimi at the heart of it.

"—assistant say six feet is as close as you're to get to the sides of the cut. Does everybody hear me?"

There were nods and murmurs, mostly nods. The civilians looked scared, clutching their baggage or family members to them. They watched Abbado with wide eyes.

"Right," said Abbado. "Now, it's important that you stay closed up. Help your neighbors if they aren't keeping up. People are more important than any of the other shit we're carrying. If the column straggles, it'll take us twice as long to get out of these fucking trees and I tell you, people, I don't even a little bit like their company. Understood?"

This time at least a dozen civilians spoke in agreement. Ace Matushek said, "Too fucking right!" from the back of the assembly. He faced outward, bouncing a grenade on his palm, just in case the Spooks or the forest wanted to start something early.

"Now folks, listen," Abbado said. "There's over a hundred of you. I'll have two or three people in front, backing up the dozer, and there'll be two or three on each side of the column. Because we're at the front, that's better protection than most of the other folks are going to get; but it's pretty damn little even so."

He took off his helmet and looked at the outer surface of his visor because it was an excuse to avoid all those frightened, trusting eyes for a moment. He raised his eyes again.

"Folks," he concluded, "you got to be careful, you got to help each other as much as you can. My strikers and me, we'll do our best. But that's all I can promise. That we'll do our best."

The civilians gave a collective sigh. They seemed to be trying to stand straight.

Abbado smiled with wry affection. He eyed the regrown forest beyond the assembly. Some of the young trees looked like misshapen men carrying torches.

And Bedsoe was probably right. They did hate people.

The bulldozer squealed ahead ten feet, just enough to take the strain off the right track. The left track, turning at three times the speed of the other, broke up the thin soil and the harder substrate as it rotated the vehicle in the direction where it was to attack the forest.

Esther Meyer wore a hard suit with her visor locked down. She walked stiffly toward the bulldozer. The cab, a tightish fit for a driver in full armor, had heavy frames and an armored roof. Meyer's position was on the non-skid deck around the cab's sides and open rear.

"Hey Meyer," somebody called. She ignored the voice. The bulldozer was making enough noise that she could pretend not to hear a bomb going off if she wanted to.

Besides the weight of the hard suit, Meyer carried her stinger, a grenade launcher, and a dispenser pouch of hand-thrown grenades of both styles. All that was fine, but Top had insisted she have a flame gun as well. Meyer hated flame guns. She'd never used one except in training, seven years before.

The choice was carry the flame gun or give somebody else the station on the tailboard. Since the strikers on guard with the tractors were the only ones who'd be wearing armor, she'd agreed. The tank of pressurized fuel on her back still gave her the willies.

"Meyer, this is Top," the command channel snapped. "I'm at the plasma cannon. Come here for a moment, I've got a job for you. Over." 

"Top, you gave me a job," Meyer protested. "I'm with the dozer, remember? Over."

"Meyer, first I want you to burn off the ammo, all right?" Daye said. She could see him waving from the log where the gun still rested. "We can't afford the weight, but I don't want to leave the gun and ammo both. The Spooks may not be so tight for transport. Over." 

"Top, I'm coming," Meyer said wearily. "Out."

She raised her visor and clumped to the first sergeant, feeling like a rock trying to roll uphill. Her load was one thing if the tractor was carrying it, another when she had to.

It wasn't worth dumping the gear and then draping herself with it again, though. And she understood Top's idea—you didn't fire a plasma cannon except with a hard suit on. That meant her or Pressley on the other tractor, and she was closer.

"I thought what we'd do," Daye said when she reached him, "was save the lead dozer some work. I want you to blast a hole right through the trees on the vector we'll be taking out of here. Just keep shooting till all the ammo's gone, right? We'll kill two birds with one stone that way."

He looked pleased with himself. Well, he had a right to be. Meyer just wished it hadn't meant her hiking an extra fifty yards, kitted out like a whole weapons locker.

"Okay," she said. She dropped her visor again to get the vector, then checked it against the position of everything that she didn't want bathed in plasma.

Bolts dispersed to a degree in an atmosphere. If one hit a solid object, even something as slight as a finger-thick sapling, the stream flared widely. Meyer didn't want anybody, strikers or civilians, within fifty feet of her sight line.

The main body was behind the gun position, in the area the bulldozers had cleared west of the ship. The colonists' section leaders were sorting them out, trying to anyway. C41 stood on guard around the mass though occasionally a striker got involved helping or explaining something. They were all well clear of the plasma cannon.

Sergeant Abbado had his squad and the leading company of civilians on Meyer's left, well away from the main body. They were in an open area formed by the asteroid's shockwave, large enough for the number involved. Although they were a trifle forward of the cannon's muzzle, they were well to the side and protected by a wall of logs and brush.

"Five, this is Four-four-three," Meyer said formally, using call signs as if C41 was at full strength and she was loader on the fourth squad of heavy weapons platoon. "Request permission to fire. Over."

"C41, this is Five," Top said on the general push. "The plasma cannon will burn off twenty-six rounds. Inform colonists that this is not an emergency. Over." 

Top had moved a safe twenty feet back from Meyer's position. He turned to watch strikers talking to the nearest civilians. When he decided that enough of them had gotten the word, he said, "Four-four-three, you are clear to shoot. Over." 

Meyer squeezed the trigger. The butt was solid against her armored shoulder, so her whole body rocked back. The hundred feet directly in front of the muzzle was a blackened waste from the fires set during the Kalendru attack, but sprigs of new growth were already probing from it. They shriveled as the plasma flashed a dazzling track above them.

Brush and fallen trees were tangled on the edge of the unbroken forest. The bolt hit a giant tilted against a trio of its upright fellows. A fireball of gas and blazing wood engulfed the base of the dead tree. The trunk lifted on the shockwave and had just started to drop when the second round hit.

Meyer kept the trigger back. The weapon cycled at sixty rounds per minute, an artificially low rate to permit the osmium bore to cool between thermonuclear explosions. All that remained of the target was a pillar of flame gushing through the foliage of the trees with which its branches were twined.

The gun stopped firing when the belt ended. Thunderclaps from the burst continued to echo from the edges of the forest for a second or two more. Meyer opened the lid of the remaining cannister, then lifted the cannon's loading gate. The air around her fluoresced as ions snatched electrons to balance their charge.

She knew everybody in the landing zone was looking at her. The attention made her feel oddly more human. She locked the fresh belt into the gun and settled the butt against her shoulder again.

Though the leading bulldozer would now have the fire to contend with, the plasma bolts were a great morale booster for the cits. Green trees wouldn't burn with anything like the enthusiasm of wood drying for weeks or months, but the moisture in the living cells disintegrated the boles in flashes of steam. That should be at least as spectacular.

Meyer aimed a little right of center of the tree filling the left half of the bulldozer's initial course. She squeezed off a single bolt. The base exploded, lifting and shoving the rest of the trunk into the forest. The tree fell with a rippling crash that seemed remarkably sustained in contrast to the weapon's lightning-like CRACK.

She shifted her aim slightly. A squat tree with a trunk three feet thick grew near the smoldering roots of the monster Meyer's previous round had blown clear. The trunk spread at the top like a mushroom; branches sprouted above it, all of them coming from a common center like the fronds of a palm tree.

Let's see if I can punt this one completely out of sight to the right, Meyer thought as she squeezed the trigger.

The jet of plasma hit exactly where she wanted it, a little left of center of the tree's base, destroying it with fiery enthusiasm. The oddly-shaped bulge on top ruptured simultaneously.

An eight-inch spike of wood with enough intracellular silica to scratch porcelain whanged off Meyer's breastplate and flung her backward. Similar spikes drove through the log where the plasma cannon rested, knocked the gun itself away spinning butt over muzzle, and snatched the flame gun from its crossbelt.

Hundreds of people were screaming. Meyer rolled to her feet, gasping for breath. Her armor had saved her life, but the shock nonetheless punched all the air from her lungs.

She looked behind her. A spike had ripped apart the flame gun's tank and sprayed the fuel in a cloud across the landscape. Sergeant Daye was trying to run out of it. He'd almost made it to safety when the plasma cannon took a hop that thrust its white-hot muzzle into the atomized fuel.

The explosion was a whoomp rather than a sharper sound, but the blast hurled Meyer, armor and all, back over the log.

As she somersaulted, Meyer caught her last glimpse of Sergeant Daye: his helmet, at least, spinning a hundred feet in the air.

"There's a band of the same species all around the edge of the clearing," Tamara Lundie said. "I've reviewed recordings made by the helmets of the scouts as they moved out of the area. They show none of the species more than forty yards out."

"Doesn't surprise me," Farrell said. "And the tree shoots back at the shooter only?"

He couldn't logically justify his confidence in Lundie's ability to synthesize information from the helmet sensors. Maybe he trusted her because he didn't have any choice.

"That's correct," Lundie said, raising her voice to be heard clearly. The wounded were either calm or sedated, but children wailed in helpless terror in the background. Some were now orphans. "The head is armed in all directions, but it discharges only in the direction from which the plant's integrity is breached."

"All right," Farrell said. "I'll send the pair in hard suits ahead to blow the trees with grenades from the back sides before the dozer starts." He shook his head and added, "What a bloody damned planet."

The medics—the doctors—had the wounded under control. The project manager was organizing stretcher parties, which meant a number of the civilians would have to leave their personal luggage behind. Al-Ibrahimi didn't seem to be getting near the argument he would have before the tree's projectiles raked the crowd.

Eight dead, twenty-three wounded. Civilians, that was. Sergeant Daye had gone the way most strikers did, quick. Velasquez had a clean through-wound to the right thigh. She claimed she was fit for duty, marching included. As short-handed as Farrell was he didn't intend to argue with her, but he'd make sure Top put Velasquez on the rotation to ride the dozers.

Shit. He'd tell Kristal to put Velasquez on the rotation.

He'd recalled the scouts when the tree ripped the column, figuring at this moment he needed their expertise more than he needed to know about the magnetic source deeper in the forest. He thought about warning them specifically about the shooting trees, then decided against it.

When Farrell figured out what had happened—initially he'd thought the cannon had exploded—he'd radioed a general warning that covered everyone on C41's net, the scouts included. Gabrilovitch stayed alert, and Blohm didn't miss any damned thing that might mean his neck. No point in breaking their concentration again at what might be a bad time.

There weren't any good times on Bezant.

"I said `plant' and `species' rather than tree, Major," Lundie said, "because it appears to be a very fast-growing fungus rather than a woody plant. The band of them sprang up after the asteroid impact."

Farrell looked at her. "Planted by somebody, is that what you mean?" he said. "Do you think the Spooks put them there for a minefield?"

Ordinary mines were of little use against strikers. The helmet sensors sniffed explosives at distances of up to a half mile depending on the breeze. Trees mixed with a million other trees, though . . .

"I don't believe the Kalendru had anything to do with the occurrence," Lundie said. "I can't speculate as to what other directing intelligence might be involved. This particular species fits the pattern of hostility shown by almost all the other life in the crater, do you not think?"

"Yeah, I guess," Farrell said. It wasn't an assessment that particularly pleased him to hear, but it seemed accurate enough. He shifted his left bandolier to prevent it from rubbing. "I'm going to organize the clearance team," he said.

He nodded toward the colonists constructing stretchers of fabric and plastic tubing from the building supplies. "They'll be ready to go in ten minutes or so."

"Major?" the aide said. Farrell turned back to face her. "You and your strikers," slight emphasis on a technical term, "reacted as if you'd planned on the explosion occurring. I was struck by your professionalism."

"We've been ambushed before, ma'am," Farrell said, trying not to smile. "There's an SOP for this sort of thing."

"I understand," Lundie said. "I would have expected a more emotional response nonetheless. Because of the casualties, if nothing else."

Look who's talking about emotions, Farrell thought. Aloud he said, "We've seen dead people before too." He cleared his throat and added, "Tamara."

The "ma'am" of a moment before had been an unintentional insult, the expert sneering at the layperson.

"We've got jobs to do," he said. "When things settle down, we'll, you know, think about Top. I'd known him three years, closer than any of my kin."

He smiled tightly, then went off to brief 3-3 and the strikers in hard suits for the clearing operation.

Farrell knew he'd be seeing Sergeant Daye again soon. Just as soon as he next went to sleep.

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Framed

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Responses

Blohm stopped at the edge of a creek or elongated pond. The water seemed to be a sheet of black glass. Leaves and what looked like a berry floated on the surface. There was no discernible current.

Gabe picked up a pebble. "Don't," Blohm said, but the pebble was already in the air, flipped from the back of the sergeant's thumb.

It plopped into the water. Ripples spread evenly.

"What was wrong with that?" Gabrilovitch said in a wounded tone. He didn't object to his nominal subordinate being in charge whenever the two of them were alone on a mission, but he didn't like being treated like a half-witted child.

"Maybe nothing," Blohm said. "Look, just . . . I want to sit and look things over, Gabe. I don't want . . . if you touch something, make something happen . . . look, I want to understand this, do you see?"

Gabe didn't understand that there was anything to understand. The trees were dangerous—so far in over fifty different ways only a quarter mile into the forest. There were probably animals—otherwise how explain the berserk vegetation?—and they'd be dangerous too, though large predators weren't likely in the apparent absence of large prey animals. The sergeant didn't believe that there was anything to know, however; as opposed to things to avoid, to destroy and to survive.

"There's something moving on the trunk of that tree across the creek," Gabrilovitch said. "Mark." 

"I got it," Blohm said.

He'd seen the movement already. A creeper was unwinding from the smooth black bark of a tree ten feet in diameter above the buttress roots. As plants move the activity was blindingly fast, but it would still be minutes before the vine had completely straightened from its original helical grip on the tree.

At that point, Blohm guessed the upper end of the vine would come spearing down in his direction like a snake's head. Caius Blohm had no intention of being in the target area long enough for that to happen.

"Look, I got a bad feeling about it," Gabrilovitch said. "I don't think we ought to be standing around waiting for something to whack us. This place is bad news, snake."

"Gabe," Blohm said softly. Frustration at being interrupted was a raging red glow in his mind, but his voice was mild and colorless. "Why don't you get into your null sack for a bit. Leave the RF port open and you can watch everything through my helmet. You'll be as safe as if you were back on Stalleybrass."

"Shitfire, Blohm," the sergeant said. "I just thought you ought to know about that thing across the creek. Who the hell do you think you are?"

"Gabe . . ." Blohm said. "If you don't get into your sack and let me concentrate on this, I'll drop a stitch and the forest'll grease me sure. If that happens, you may as well eat your stinger right now, because I tell you, snake, you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of making it back to the clearing without me."

Blohm's visor was set on panorama with movements highlighted. Twenty yards back in the direction the scouts had come, the upper half of a tree with a coarse, scaly surface was rotating. The entire bole moved. It was visible only through a notch between the interlaced branches of two nearer trees.

"Yeah, sure, snake," Gabrilovitch said. He pulled the tube-shaped roll of his null sack from its pouch. "The place gets on my nerves, that's all."

Blohm shifted his position a step and a half to the left so that another treetrunk separated him from the one in motion. He had no idea what would have happened if he'd remained where he was; just that it would have been fatal.

Plants don't chase down prey. Neither do web spiders. But spiders grow fat on animals which move without thinking.

Gabe stepped into the mouth of his null sack, pulled the sides over his head, and lay down. There was a faint sigh as he operated the closures; then nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The sack's outer surface was the black of powdered carbon, not shadow. Shadow has color and shows the outline of the surface on which it lies. The null sack absorbed energy right across the spectrum from heat to microwave. The inner and outer surfaces were of identical material, but the layer between was a high-efficiency heat sink that expanded slightly as it stored energy.

Micropores in the sack passed oxygen molecules through to the interior. The slightly larger carbon dioxide molecules filtered through the inner surface but were trapped in the middle layer until flushed when the sack was serviced after use.

A man inside a null sack could breathe normally for a day and a half without changing the CO₂ balance of the air around him. He had no heat signature and active electro-optical sensors would not show his outline. The sack blurred but couldn't completely defeat sound ranging, but that was almost valueless in a breathable atmosphere to begin with.

The sacks could be operated in either completely buttoned-up mode, or with a one-way RF window that permitted a striker to receive data from an external source. That could be a spy cell clipped to a tree, for example; or in this case, the helmet of a striker who wasn't in a null sack himself.

Blohm sighed and let the soul of the forest sweep around him like slow green surf. Water reflected the canopy in near perfection. The ripples from Gabe's stone had died away, but here and there insects skated in dimples of surface tension.

The scouts had come this far without cutting or blowing the jungle out of their way. That was partly standard operating procedure—you didn't want to leave a trail for enemy patrols to track you by—but Blohm had carried it to an extreme his sergeant found unreasonable. He'd even insisted that they go around the curtain of moss tendrils hanging from a branch instead of shearing through with their knives.

There was a slap and patter in the foliage nearby. A broad leaf had suddenly everted, dumping a pint of water stored from the evening's rain. The dripping continued almost a minute, from one layer to another and finally to the soil.

None of the drops landed directly on the surface of the pond. It was a pond. It had no current at all. The ends were concealed in forest, the banks only six feet apart—not quite close enough for a burdened striker to leap.

But it had to be a pond; or a moat. A moat only inches deep, because Blohm could see the pebble bottom through the black water. There were no twigs or decaying leaves among the stones, and no animal life.

The broad, round plants floating on the surface looked like water lilies, but flat stems anchored them to the bank. A flying insect buzzed to the miniature pink flowers, then dipped to the pond. Its wings riffled the water as it drank through its proboscis before flying off.

Blohm chuckled softly. There were two ways to deal with this forest. Brute force would work if you had enough force. Perhaps two bulldozers and the firepower of C41 were enough.

The other method was to treat the contest as a chess game. Blohm wasn't sure he was going to win the game; but he might, he just might.

He walked to a tree five yards from the edge of the pond. Thorns as long as a man's hand lay flat in recesses along the trunk, almost invisible against the speckled bark. Blohm switched on his powerknife. He advanced the point cautiously and cut off a thorn at the base.

As the spike dropped away, a hydrostatic mechanism in the wood snapped viciously, rotating the base. Body heat would have released every spike within range to rip like tiger claws if the scouts had brushed the trunk as they passed.

Blohm's left hand was gloved. The garment was part of the body sock worn with a hard suit in extreme temperatures. He carried the thorn with that hand to the edge of the pond where he probed at the bottom, shifting pebbles. There was a stiff surface beneath; perhaps clay, perhaps some rubbery plant excretion.

"Okay, Gabe," Blohm said. "We've got to go around this pond. We'll try the right side. Watch out for the white-barked tree twenty feet on. It's got seeds that look like spears up where the fronds flare, and they weigh a couple pounds each."

Gabrilovitch slipped out of his null sack with itchy speed. "Why don't we just cross?" he asked, not arguing. "Afraid of getting your feet wet?"

"The top inch or two is water," Blohm said, holding up the thorn. The point was black and already shrivelling. "Underneath it's something else heavy enough that the water just floats on it. Concentrated sulfuric acid is my guess, but I don't suppose we need to know for sure."

Gabrilovitch stared at the black water. "God damn," he whispered.

"Come on, Gabe," Blohm said mildly. "That vine you saw across the pond's going to have us for breakfast if we stay much longer. You did a good job to notice it."

The rain had brought out fresh foliage on the young trees growing in place of the giants killed when the asteroid hit. The leaf flushes were of brilliant hues: reds, maroons, and poisonous, metallic greens which seemed to have nothing to do with life or growing things.

A civilian started to cry. He was a middle-aged man whose tight, youthful face had profited from cosmetic shaping and whose pudgy body had not. "They're going to kill us," he whimpered. "They hate us and they're going to kill us all."

Abbado cleared his throat. He'd been about to give the civilians a pep talk before the lead tractor moved past and took a bite out of the jungle, but he thought he ought to do something about the crying man first.

Glasebrook walked over to the fellow and hugged him one-armed against a torso lumpy with crossed bandoliers and a waist belt whose every slot held munitions. Four-pound rockets waggled like tassels, rattling against other gear.

"Don't you worry, Mr. Bledsoe," the Flea said. "We're not going to let them kill you. We're going to kill them first."

"Bedsoe," said the civilian. "My name is Bedsoe." He straightened. "I'm so very sorry," he said with a dip of his head to Abbado.

Abbado cleared his throat again. "The dozer's going to cut us a twenty-foot trail through the woods there," he said in a deliberately cheerful voice to the watching civilians. "That sounds like a lot and it is, but I don't want anybody getting careless. God and his pretty blonde—"

He grinned and thumbed toward the mass of people with Manager al-Ibrahimi at the heart of it.

"—assistant say six feet is as close as you're to get to the sides of the cut. Does everybody hear me?"

There were nods and murmurs, mostly nods. The civilians looked scared, clutching their baggage or family members to them. They watched Abbado with wide eyes.

"Right," said Abbado. "Now, it's important that you stay closed up. Help your neighbors if they aren't keeping up. People are more important than any of the other shit we're carrying. If the column straggles, it'll take us twice as long to get out of these fucking trees and I tell you, people, I don't even a little bit like their company. Understood?"

This time at least a dozen civilians spoke in agreement. Ace Matushek said, "Too fucking right!" from the back of the assembly. He faced outward, bouncing a grenade on his palm, just in case the Spooks or the forest wanted to start something early.

"Now folks, listen," Abbado said. "There's over a hundred of you. I'll have two or three people in front, backing up the dozer, and there'll be two or three on each side of the column. Because we're at the front, that's better protection than most of the other folks are going to get; but it's pretty damn little even so."

He took off his helmet and looked at the outer surface of his visor because it was an excuse to avoid all those frightened, trusting eyes for a moment. He raised his eyes again.

"Folks," he concluded, "you got to be careful, you got to help each other as much as you can. My strikers and me, we'll do our best. But that's all I can promise. That we'll do our best."

The civilians gave a collective sigh. They seemed to be trying to stand straight.

Abbado smiled with wry affection. He eyed the regrown forest beyond the assembly. Some of the young trees looked like misshapen men carrying torches.

And Bedsoe was probably right. They did hate people.

The bulldozer squealed ahead ten feet, just enough to take the strain off the right track. The left track, turning at three times the speed of the other, broke up the thin soil and the harder substrate as it rotated the vehicle in the direction where it was to attack the forest.

Esther Meyer wore a hard suit with her visor locked down. She walked stiffly toward the bulldozer. The cab, a tightish fit for a driver in full armor, had heavy frames and an armored roof. Meyer's position was on the non-skid deck around the cab's sides and open rear.

"Hey Meyer," somebody called. She ignored the voice. The bulldozer was making enough noise that she could pretend not to hear a bomb going off if she wanted to.

Besides the weight of the hard suit, Meyer carried her stinger, a grenade launcher, and a dispenser pouch of hand-thrown grenades of both styles. All that was fine, but Top had insisted she have a flame gun as well. Meyer hated flame guns. She'd never used one except in training, seven years before.

The choice was carry the flame gun or give somebody else the station on the tailboard. Since the strikers on guard with the tractors were the only ones who'd be wearing armor, she'd agreed. The tank of pressurized fuel on her back still gave her the willies.

"Meyer, this is Top," the command channel snapped. "I'm at the plasma cannon. Come here for a moment, I've got a job for you. Over." 

"Top, you gave me a job," Meyer protested. "I'm with the dozer, remember? Over."

"Meyer, first I want you to burn off the ammo, all right?" Daye said. She could see him waving from the log where the gun still rested. "We can't afford the weight, but I don't want to leave the gun and ammo both. The Spooks may not be so tight for transport. Over." 

"Top, I'm coming," Meyer said wearily. "Out."

She raised her visor and clumped to the first sergeant, feeling like a rock trying to roll uphill. Her load was one thing if the tractor was carrying it, another when she had to.

It wasn't worth dumping the gear and then draping herself with it again, though. And she understood Top's idea—you didn't fire a plasma cannon except with a hard suit on. That meant her or Pressley on the other tractor, and she was closer.

"I thought what we'd do," Daye said when she reached him, "was save the lead dozer some work. I want you to blast a hole right through the trees on the vector we'll be taking out of here. Just keep shooting till all the ammo's gone, right? We'll kill two birds with one stone that way."

He looked pleased with himself. Well, he had a right to be. Meyer just wished it hadn't meant her hiking an extra fifty yards, kitted out like a whole weapons locker.

"Okay," she said. She dropped her visor again to get the vector, then checked it against the position of everything that she didn't want bathed in plasma.

Bolts dispersed to a degree in an atmosphere. If one hit a solid object, even something as slight as a finger-thick sapling, the stream flared widely. Meyer didn't want anybody, strikers or civilians, within fifty feet of her sight line.

The main body was behind the gun position, in the area the bulldozers had cleared west of the ship. The colonists' section leaders were sorting them out, trying to anyway. C41 stood on guard around the mass though occasionally a striker got involved helping or explaining something. They were all well clear of the plasma cannon.

Sergeant Abbado had his squad and the leading company of civilians on Meyer's left, well away from the main body. They were in an open area formed by the asteroid's shockwave, large enough for the number involved. Although they were a trifle forward of the cannon's muzzle, they were well to the side and protected by a wall of logs and brush.

"Five, this is Four-four-three," Meyer said formally, using call signs as if C41 was at full strength and she was loader on the fourth squad of heavy weapons platoon. "Request permission to fire. Over."

"C41, this is Five," Top said on the general push. "The plasma cannon will burn off twenty-six rounds. Inform colonists that this is not an emergency. Over." 

Top had moved a safe twenty feet back from Meyer's position. He turned to watch strikers talking to the nearest civilians. When he decided that enough of them had gotten the word, he said, "Four-four-three, you are clear to shoot. Over." 

Meyer squeezed the trigger. The butt was solid against her armored shoulder, so her whole body rocked back. The hundred feet directly in front of the muzzle was a blackened waste from the fires set during the Kalendru attack, but sprigs of new growth were already probing from it. They shriveled as the plasma flashed a dazzling track above them.

Brush and fallen trees were tangled on the edge of the unbroken forest. The bolt hit a giant tilted against a trio of its upright fellows. A fireball of gas and blazing wood engulfed the base of the dead tree. The trunk lifted on the shockwave and had just started to drop when the second round hit.

Meyer kept the trigger back. The weapon cycled at sixty rounds per minute, an artificially low rate to permit the osmium bore to cool between thermonuclear explosions. All that remained of the target was a pillar of flame gushing through the foliage of the trees with which its branches were twined.

The gun stopped firing when the belt ended. Thunderclaps from the burst continued to echo from the edges of the forest for a second or two more. Meyer opened the lid of the remaining cannister, then lifted the cannon's loading gate. The air around her fluoresced as ions snatched electrons to balance their charge.

She knew everybody in the landing zone was looking at her. The attention made her feel oddly more human. She locked the fresh belt into the gun and settled the butt against her shoulder again.

Though the leading bulldozer would now have the fire to contend with, the plasma bolts were a great morale booster for the cits. Green trees wouldn't burn with anything like the enthusiasm of wood drying for weeks or months, but the moisture in the living cells disintegrated the boles in flashes of steam. That should be at least as spectacular.

Meyer aimed a little right of center of the tree filling the left half of the bulldozer's initial course. She squeezed off a single bolt. The base exploded, lifting and shoving the rest of the trunk into the forest. The tree fell with a rippling crash that seemed remarkably sustained in contrast to the weapon's lightning-like CRACK.

She shifted her aim slightly. A squat tree with a trunk three feet thick grew near the smoldering roots of the monster Meyer's previous round had blown clear. The trunk spread at the top like a mushroom; branches sprouted above it, all of them coming from a common center like the fronds of a palm tree.

Let's see if I can punt this one completely out of sight to the right, Meyer thought as she squeezed the trigger.

The jet of plasma hit exactly where she wanted it, a little left of center of the tree's base, destroying it with fiery enthusiasm. The oddly-shaped bulge on top ruptured simultaneously.

An eight-inch spike of wood with enough intracellular silica to scratch porcelain whanged off Meyer's breastplate and flung her backward. Similar spikes drove through the log where the plasma cannon rested, knocked the gun itself away spinning butt over muzzle, and snatched the flame gun from its crossbelt.

Hundreds of people were screaming. Meyer rolled to her feet, gasping for breath. Her armor had saved her life, but the shock nonetheless punched all the air from her lungs.

She looked behind her. A spike had ripped apart the flame gun's tank and sprayed the fuel in a cloud across the landscape. Sergeant Daye was trying to run out of it. He'd almost made it to safety when the plasma cannon took a hop that thrust its white-hot muzzle into the atomized fuel.

The explosion was a whoomp rather than a sharper sound, but the blast hurled Meyer, armor and all, back over the log.

As she somersaulted, Meyer caught her last glimpse of Sergeant Daye: his helmet, at least, spinning a hundred feet in the air.

"There's a band of the same species all around the edge of the clearing," Tamara Lundie said. "I've reviewed recordings made by the helmets of the scouts as they moved out of the area. They show none of the species more than forty yards out."

"Doesn't surprise me," Farrell said. "And the tree shoots back at the shooter only?"

He couldn't logically justify his confidence in Lundie's ability to synthesize information from the helmet sensors. Maybe he trusted her because he didn't have any choice.

"That's correct," Lundie said, raising her voice to be heard clearly. The wounded were either calm or sedated, but children wailed in helpless terror in the background. Some were now orphans. "The head is armed in all directions, but it discharges only in the direction from which the plant's integrity is breached."

"All right," Farrell said. "I'll send the pair in hard suits ahead to blow the trees with grenades from the back sides before the dozer starts." He shook his head and added, "What a bloody damned planet."

The medics—the doctors—had the wounded under control. The project manager was organizing stretcher parties, which meant a number of the civilians would have to leave their personal luggage behind. Al-Ibrahimi didn't seem to be getting near the argument he would have before the tree's projectiles raked the crowd.

Eight dead, twenty-three wounded. Civilians, that was. Sergeant Daye had gone the way most strikers did, quick. Velasquez had a clean through-wound to the right thigh. She claimed she was fit for duty, marching included. As short-handed as Farrell was he didn't intend to argue with her, but he'd make sure Top put Velasquez on the rotation to ride the dozers.

Shit. He'd tell Kristal to put Velasquez on the rotation.

He'd recalled the scouts when the tree ripped the column, figuring at this moment he needed their expertise more than he needed to know about the magnetic source deeper in the forest. He thought about warning them specifically about the shooting trees, then decided against it.

When Farrell figured out what had happened—initially he'd thought the cannon had exploded—he'd radioed a general warning that covered everyone on C41's net, the scouts included. Gabrilovitch stayed alert, and Blohm didn't miss any damned thing that might mean his neck. No point in breaking their concentration again at what might be a bad time.

There weren't any good times on Bezant.

"I said `plant' and `species' rather than tree, Major," Lundie said, "because it appears to be a very fast-growing fungus rather than a woody plant. The band of them sprang up after the asteroid impact."

Farrell looked at her. "Planted by somebody, is that what you mean?" he said. "Do you think the Spooks put them there for a minefield?"

Ordinary mines were of little use against strikers. The helmet sensors sniffed explosives at distances of up to a half mile depending on the breeze. Trees mixed with a million other trees, though . . .

"I don't believe the Kalendru had anything to do with the occurrence," Lundie said. "I can't speculate as to what other directing intelligence might be involved. This particular species fits the pattern of hostility shown by almost all the other life in the crater, do you not think?"

"Yeah, I guess," Farrell said. It wasn't an assessment that particularly pleased him to hear, but it seemed accurate enough. He shifted his left bandolier to prevent it from rubbing. "I'm going to organize the clearance team," he said.

He nodded toward the colonists constructing stretchers of fabric and plastic tubing from the building supplies. "They'll be ready to go in ten minutes or so."

"Major?" the aide said. Farrell turned back to face her. "You and your strikers," slight emphasis on a technical term, "reacted as if you'd planned on the explosion occurring. I was struck by your professionalism."

"We've been ambushed before, ma'am," Farrell said, trying not to smile. "There's an SOP for this sort of thing."

"I understand," Lundie said. "I would have expected a more emotional response nonetheless. Because of the casualties, if nothing else."

Look who's talking about emotions, Farrell thought. Aloud he said, "We've seen dead people before too." He cleared his throat and added, "Tamara."

The "ma'am" of a moment before had been an unintentional insult, the expert sneering at the layperson.

"We've got jobs to do," he said. "When things settle down, we'll, you know, think about Top. I'd known him three years, closer than any of my kin."

He smiled tightly, then went off to brief 3-3 and the strikers in hard suits for the clearing operation.

Farrell knew he'd be seeing Sergeant Daye again soon. Just as soon as he next went to sleep.

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