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Waiting for the Axe

In theory Sergeant Guilio Abbado was still in command of 3-3, but none of his strikers had paid the least attention to his wheezing demands to be the first through the opening. The only reason Foley lifted him at all was that Abbado was so obviously incapable of giving Foley a boost instead.

The headless creature thrashing inside weighed at least five tons. The fuel-air explosions hadn't disintegrated or even dismembered the corpse, but they had burned every square inch of its hide.

The stench of blackened flesh was overpowering. Abbado switched to his helmet's small air bottle as much for that reason as because the grenades had used a lot of the available oxygen.

He'd set his visor on infrared instead of enhancement, the low-light default setting. Hot gas from the bombs swirled in confusing veils but the figures of the strikers ahead of him were sufficiently sharp. The split seam let a fair amount of light into this compartment, but that wouldn't be true of those further toward the bow.

The vines that entered the ship terminated in bunches of fruit the size of soccer balls, hundreds of them. Grenade blasts had crushed them to reeking pulp against the bulkheads.

The fruit could be of no benefit to the plant, but they'd served as food for the creature. It must have entered through the same opening as the strikers, then grown to its final monstrous size on the diet.

The remains of at least twenty Spooks lay in a fetid mass at the bottom of the compartment. Each body had been bitten in half but not devoured. The creature was a killer without being a carnivore.

The four companionways to the deck above were horizontal tunnels. The interdeck hatches had buckled and couldn't close. Abbado scrambled after Caldwell in the lowest passageway. The steep, narrow treads were vertical obstacles.

The leading strikers hurled half a dozen electrical grenades to clear the third and highest deck. Abbado, panting and dizzy, entered a moment later. There were Kalendru bodies among jumbled gear. The Spooks had been killed in the crash a week or so earlier.

"Nobody left, sarge," Horgen said in faint disappointment. 3-3'd hoped for a fight with something the strikers understood, not leaves and vines. Learning there were no Spooks alive in the ship was like being bilked of a steak dinner after a week of living on lettuce.

The compartment and the one below showed no indication of occupancy following the crash. If Spooks had initially survived, the creature had seen them off. The length of its neck and tongue would have permitted it to scour both levels even though its swollen body couldn't fit through the companionway. There were lasers among the other debris, but ordinary Kalendru troops didn't carry weapons heavy enough to deal with a monster the size of that one.

"You know . . ." Flea said. "I could almost feel sorry for the poor bastard Spooks."

"All right, let's get back," Abbado said. "They'll need us at the column."

The crash had thrown loose personal gear which covered the compartment's lower side like plant debris in a forest swale. It was within the realm of possibility that a Spook was hiding deep enough in it that IR didn't spot him, but it wasn't worth 3-3's time to check out.

"Three-three, this is Administrator Tamara Lundie," said an unfamiliar voice. Because the helmet AIs had to fill gaps caused by signal attenuation through the ship's metal hull, the words were almost toneless. "Kalendru vessels of this class have a separate control room reached through a hatch here—" 

A deck schematic with a pulsing caret appeared briefly on one quadrant of Abbado's visor.

"—which is at the moment concealed by litter from the crash. Out." 

"Who the hell was that?" Caldwell asked.

"The blonde with the broomstick up her ass," Abbado said, straddle-walking forward to keep his balance on the shifting surface. He tossed aside a pile of torn containers, Spook dufflebags or bedrolls, to expose the hatch where Lundie said it would be.

It was locked from the other side, but cloth pinched on the lower side of the hatch showed it'd been open at some point after the crash. Judging from tears and blast patterns, 3-3's grenades had flung the gear that hid it.

Abbado unscrewed the warhead of a rocket, set it for point effect/five second delay, and struck it hard enough against the lock plate to trip the fuze. "Fire in the hole!" he called as he scrambled away.

The blue flash of the electrical warhead lit the compartment. The shock wave clanged into the hatch like the tip of a three-ton ice-pick, shearing the bolt and flinging the panel open in reaction. Tattered debris flew up in a cloud like dirt tamped around a charge set in an excavation.

"I've got him!" Horgen cried even as she dived through the hatchway. "I've got him and he's alive!"

Caius Blohm watched the foliage react to the single, sharp blast that made the wreck's hull ring. Leaves quivered, pods turned; the whole forest was listening, waiting.

"I've got him! I've got him and he's alive!" 

Foley looked at the opening above him, desperate to join the rest of his squad. Sergeant Gabrilovitch nodded to Blohm and muttered, "Great. Now we've got a prisoner to nursemaid back to the column."

"He won't be any more problem than Abbado's lot," Blohm said. And not much more problem than you, Gabe, he thought, but he didn't say.

"C41," broke in the voice that this time didn't bother to identify itself as Tamara Lundie. "Increased carbon dioxide levels suggest that another party of native humanoids coming from the north is now within a few seconds or minutes of the column. The region between the first and second tractor appears the most likely point of contact. Out." 

Blohm felt his body prickle. He had a vision of Mirica in the grip of a humanoid with a face as remote and remorseless as a storm cloud; of Mirica dead, not on a jungle track but on the threshold of a room filled with the grenade-blasted bodies of other children. He began to shiver.

Gabrilovitch swore softly. "How long do you figure it'll take us to get back to the column, snake?" he asked.

"Too long," Blohm said. Too long, or I'd be headed back right now even if they hang me for desertion when I get there.

There was less than an hour to sunset. It would arrive like a curtain falling in these latitudes. Besides, even if he tried to make the last of the distance at night—and maybe he could, just maybe—the attack would be over by a few minutes from now.

"Those kid-killing bastards," Blohm said, his lips barely moving. "Those bastards."

Sergeant Abbado stuck his head out of the opening in the ship's hull. A moment later he and Matushek thrust a Spook through, dangling him by arms that looked so pale that they were almost transparent. The prisoner was humming loudly, a Kalendru sign of misery and despair.

Foley took the Spook by one leg and reached up to grip him under the arm to lower him to the ground. The Spook seemed catatonic. He was thin even by Kalendru standards; Blohm wondered if there'd been any food in the compartment where he was hiding.

Gabe started forward to give Foley a hand. Matushek boosted Abbado to where he could climb out in turn. Blohm eyed a tree on the other side of the crashed vessel. Its branches were drawing up by minute increments.

Nobody expected a problem: Kalendru stopped fighting as soon as they were captured. Maybe Foley should've been paying more attention to the Spook and less to his sergeant, but any experienced striker was likely to have done the same thing.

The Spook twisted out of Foley's grip with the Kalendru equivalent of hysterical strength and ran toward the jungle, humming even louder. His eyes were open but Blohm didn't think they were focusing.

Gabe shouted and ran to block the prisoner's escape. Foley stumbled as he tried to follow. Blohm knew he couldn't help unless the Spook changed direction, but he sprinted anyway out of the reflex to chase whatever runs away.

The Spook took a gazelle-like leap toward the unbroken forest. Gabe waved his arms, still shouting. Blohm saw what was about to happen and called, "Let him go! Gabe—"

The Spook leaped again. Gabrilovitch dived after him, grabbing the Spook around the shoulders in a high tackle. Together they smashed into a shooting tree about a dozen feet high.

The head of the young tree burst with a vicious crack. Gabe cried out. He and the Spook hit the ground and bounced apart, concerned now with their own wounds rather than each other. The prisoner was clutching his thigh while Gabrilovitch had a hand on his left shoulder. Because they'd been in motion when they touched the trunk, the blast of spikes hadn't caught them squarely.

Blohm reached the victims first. He pried his partner's hand away. There were three closely-spaced puncture wounds; the points of the spikes poked through the back of Gabe's battledress, just below the collarbone. A tree this small didn't fire missiles as heavy and powerful as the adult whose spikes had raked the humans at the crash site.

Blohm took a first aid patch from his medikit and slapped it over the entrance wounds. It closed the holes and leached pain killers through the skin at a rate metered by needs. In a few seconds a color-coded display on the back of the patch would provide a rough diagnosis of the injuries and prognosis.

Foley and Sergeant Abbado joined them. The sergeant looked as grim as a war hammer. He took the Spook by the wrists to anchor him and pull his hands away to expose his wounds. There was only one, a neat hole in the right thigh with no exit.

"Doesn't look too bad," Abbado said. "Guess we got lucky. But this means we've got to carry the sonofabitch back to the column for interro—"

The Kalender's body stiffened. The edges of the wound had darkened. A purple discoloration continued to spread across the gray skin even though the Spook's heart and circulatory system had obviously quit for good. His mouth opened and the tongue thrust out, pink and as stiff as a dog's dong.

"Poison!" Gabrilovitch said. "Oh, Christ, I've been poisoned."

"No," Blohm said, looking at the readout on Gabe's patch: everything well in the green. "You haven't, but the Spook sure as hell was. Their chemistry's different and the trees here aren't targeted for us. Yet."

"I think," said Sergeant Abbado, "that we'll stick here with the ship until daylight instead of starting back right now."

He looked at the sky and the jungle, then added, "God damn this place."

"Tell your civilians to lie flat next to the berm!" Farrell ordered as he ran forward. The two satchels of grenades he'd grabbed from the lead trailer swung in his left hand, pulling him off balance with every stride. The stinger wasn't heavy enough to compensate, even though he held it out for leverage. "Squad Two-two come forward, the rest of you hold in place. All civilians down, down flat! Over!"

The column moved like an earthworm with arthritis: bunching and spreading at irregular intervals, always moving slowly. Civilians turned and gaped as Farrell ran past, pushing them aside when he had to.

"Down flat!" he shouted. There wasn't fucking time to explain. There was barely time for a wrung-out major with a heavy load to run the hundred yards forward to where the attack was maybe going to come. "Down flat!"

"Down flat!" Sergeant Kristal shouted to the civilians around her. She'd split her six strikers into two groups. When Farrell sent Abbado off, Kristal's weak squad had responsibility for three hundred civilians. The weakest defenses, and the point at which Lundie said to expect the attack.

Farrell didn't assume the natives knew how C41 was deployed. He'd seen enough combat to expect every possible thing to go wrong out of pure cussedness. That's just how life is for a soldier.

There was nothing to the right—north—side of the bulldozer cut except lowering vegetation. A striker got used to his helmet sensors giving him a hundred yards of warning and targeting under any conditions short of a rock wall. Knowing that the natives might appear at spitting distance from the greenery, unseen until that instant, made Farrell feel as though he'd been sent into a battle with his eyes taped shut.

But a striker does what he can, and you don't have to see your target with a grenade.

"Lie fucking down!" Farrell roared to the nearest civilians. "Get your kids down, for Chrissake!"

They were reacting, but not quickly enough. Farrell was out of sight of the nearest strikers in either direction. Because of large trees and other special circumstances, the trail kinked every ten or twenty yards. This stretch was one of the longer ones, but it seemed to be Art Farrell's alone.

Farrell let his stinger go, dropped one of the satchels, and pulled a fuel-air grenade from the other. He armed the bomb and threw it between the trunks of trees on the edge of the cut. He knew it was going to hit something solid before it travelled more than twenty feet into the tangle; he just hoped that it didn't bounce back among the civilians.

He took the risk because the choice was to leave the initiative with the natives . . . which meant he would die, and that at least the thirty civilians flopping on the ground behind him on his panoramic display would die also.

His own death was one of the things that came with his enlistment oath; theirs wasn't.

Farrell threw a second grenade, then a third. He had a dozen in each satchel. If nothing happened sooner, he'd throw every fucking one of them and throw the three electricals on his belt after that. In these conditions the electrical grenades' fragmentation effect made them both more dangerous to friendlies and less useful against hostiles. The fuel spread and mixed with air pretty much unhindered by treetrunks and ground cover.

"Daddy, what are we—"

A parent's hand clamped hard over the child's mouth. No need for that, but they didn't know. They were civilians, they shouldn't fucking be here.

Whoom! and concussion shoved Farrell back like a medicine ball in the chest. Foliage hid the flash of the explosion. The shockwave had a wet, green smell. He took out another grenade.

Whoom! as Farrell threw the grenade, a little higher than he'd intended. His aim was straight enough for safety because he'd allowed for the blast. He was maybe warning the attackers, he knew that, but he was sure-hell putting them off balance and there was never a bad time to do that.

Whoom! as Farrell reached for the next grenade. The torso of a native rode an orange bubble skyward in a sudden clearing thirty feet into the jungle. His limbs were four separated exclamation points at the margins of the flash.

Another native stepped from the undamaged foliage six feet away, his toothed club rising. Farrell threw the 20-ounce grenade into his face, crushing cheekbones and the beaklike jaw.

The native fell into the undergrowth; the grenade bounced back against Farrell's boots. The bomb was harmless; he hadn't thumbed the arming switch.

Farrell armed another grenade without lifting it from the satchel. He threw the satchel as far as he could into the jungle before him. Crouching against the coming blast, he aimed his stinger.

Over my dead body, you baby-killing bastards. And not even then.

Meyer rapped Seligman's shoulder. He was driving the lead bulldozer with her for guard. "Turn us around," she said. The staffer had a helmet as part of the hard suit: he was on the C41 net and knew what was going on. "Drive right into the wogs. They'll run when they see this coming, right?"

The lead squad, five strikers under Jonas as senior man in lieu of a noncom, was shouting at the nearby cits to lie down. Jonas and two of his people jogged back down the trail to the expected point of contact.

"Are you out of your mind?" Seligman cried. He put the tractor in neutral. "I'm no soldier, honey! You go fight them yourself!"

Matthew Lock clambered onto the tractor's deck. He was awkward because he held a stinger and hadn't rigged the sling over his shoulder to free both hands.

"For God's sake, Seligman!" Meyer shouted. "They need us back there! I can't get there wearing armor myself."

"I'm not going any damn where!" the staffer replied. "You don't have any right—"

Lock tapped the muzzle of his stinger on the helmet at roughly the position of Seligman's right ear. "Do as Striker Meyer orders or I'll kill you," he said in a clear voice. He rapped the helmet again.

"You can't—" Seligman said.

Meyer fired one round into the front mesh. The pellet disintegrated with a whack and a red flash that looked brighter because of the cab's dimness. "Turn this son-of-a-bitch!" she shouted.

Seligman thumbed a roller switch on his left handgrip. The blade rose slowly with a whine that made Meyer's armor rattle everywhere it touched the tractor. The seat and controls were insulated from vibration but the rest of the vehicle wasn't; Meyer was familiar with the experience by now. It wasn't the sort of thing you got used to, any more than you'd get used to being punched in the face.

"Don't cut a trail!" Lock shouted in the staffer's ear. He must think the armor deadened hearing; in fact, the receptors were more sensitive than the ears they served, though they clipped loud noises to safe levels with cancellation waves. "Just get us back the fastest way without running anybody over!"

Seligman scissored the left control bar to the rear and the right one forward. The treads ground in opposite directions, turning the bulldozer in its own length. Meyer knew the maneuver stressed the running gear and was likely to throw a track, but it was still the fastest way to change direction. She didn't complain.

If the staffer hoped to disable the vehicle, he failed. He shifted the bulldozer forward, then swung outward to avoid a giant whose spread of buttress roots he'd skirted on the opposite side a few minutes before. The blade continued to rise. For a moment the solid lower portion blocked most of the frontal vision from the cab.

Grenades went off ahead; Meyer felt the shocks despite the racket the tractor made busting brush. She thought she heard the pop of stingers.

"Striker!" Lock said. He held the stinger up to her. "How do I fire this?"

Meyer looked at the civilian's earnest face. You couldn't fault him for lack of balls, anyway. "This is the safety," she said, pushing the button on the receiver over the trigger. A telltale went from green to red. "Now you pull the trigger. But for God's sake watch where you point it!"

A fruit the size of a pumpkin hit the roof of the cab and squashed as enthusiastically as a bomb bursting. Green juice sprayed in all directions and began to drip down. Meyer shoved Lock completely beneath the roof overhang. Her hard suit wasn't affected and the tractor's nickel steel body merely discolored. Chunks of branch and foliage lying in the path of the spreading juice turned black and began to smolder.

Meyer shifted the tank of the flame gun to her left side, taking the nozzle in that hand. She hated flame guns—even more so since she'd seen hers incinerate Top Daye, but it might be the margin of survival.

More grenades boomed. A treetop whipped through the jungle like a barbed-wire flyswatter. It slammed the dozer blade, now held at a forty-five degree angle over the tractor's engine compartment, and bounced back with a crackle of despair.

A humanoid native appeared in a thicket. Stems writhed like an anemone's tentacles but didn't harm him. He squirted caustic toward the tractor and stepped as gracefully as a bullfighter out of the way of the looming vehicle. The flame gun devoured his pelvis in incandescent fury.

Vegetation withered a yard to either side of the brief flame rod. The white glare touched a tree a foot thick. Gluey, blood-red sap gushed from the point of contact. The tree twisted and collapsed around the wound as though only pneumatic pressure had kept it upright.

Lock shouted to Seligman. Meyer had stepped to the right side of the deck; she couldn't hear the words over the sound of the vehicle and nearby grenade blasts. She threw a grenade herself. The orange fireball bloomed almost to the treads as it pulped a hundred square feet of foliage and two humanoids.

Seligman touched a control. The land-clearing blade began to whine slowly down again from its running position.

The tree ahead braced itself against wind forces with flat plates running from the ground high up the trunk. The tractor smashed through the flanges. Wood shattered like cork, throwing up clouds of fine gray dust. A caret winked on Meyer's visor; Lock was already tugging his neck scarf over his nose and mouth before she could warn him.

Meyer wondered how much good the scarf would do, but she had more immediate problems. She lobbed a grenade over the top of the blade. When it exploded, a jug-shaped tree twenty yards ahead burst into blue flame. It was spurting hydrogen from every pore.

Heat shrivelled the foliage as far as the bulldozer itself. The flames were pale but intensely hot. Lock cried out and ducked despite the gratings in the dozer blade and the cab window. Meyer and Seligman in their hard suits were unaffected.

The driver steered sharply to the right to avoid driving through the center of the blaze. Meyer played her stinger across three natives, then a fourth in the circle the fire had stripped of cover. The humanoids might pass through the jungle unhindered by thorns and poisons, but heat was heat and the laws of physics applied to their flesh as well.

The right blade support arm and that side of the cab twinkled, though Meyer couldn't see the shooter or hear the pellets hitting. Seligman let go of the controls and tried to hunch beneath the level of the window openings. Lock grabbed the staffer's armored shoulder and batted the stinger muzzle against his helmet.

Seligman straightened just as the blade sheared its way back into the trail it had previously cleared. He'd managed to switch on the intercom; Meyer could hear him blubbering. He pulled back slightly on the left control bar. The bulldozer twitched onto a parallel course instead of grinding through the people screaming as they rose in fear of a monster more terrible than the club-swinging humanoids.

Meyer stepped onto the narrow fender covering the right tread. She was afraid to throw grenades while they were so close to the main trail, and the land-clearing blade was too high to shoot over from any distance back.

The blade hit a tree too thick to smash aside. Meyer lurched forward with the shock. She caught herself on the frame that supported the grated upper portion of the blade. Roots pulled out of the soil, releasing the bulldozer as the trunk toppled to the side.

Meyer saw movement beyond a fringe of compound leaves. She hosed it with her flame gun. Humanoids appeared as screening vegetation wilted. The ravening flame converted flesh and bone to gas. There'd been three of them, maybe more. The blade scraped shrunken corpses aside with the trash of undergrowth and topsoil.

The flame died, its fuel exhausted. The ceramic nozzle glowed white/yellow/red back from the tip. Meyer dropped the weapon and reached for the stinger with her right hand.

The left track rocked over a tree which had twisted behind the blade instead of rolling off the side. Meyer fell sideways, awkward in her armor, and overcompensated. The tractor's weight abruptly splintered the bole; she toppled to the left.

Meyer flailed with both hands. They missed their grip on the blade. She began to slide beneath the front of the tread.

Roaring. Blackness. Alone. 

Something caught and anchored Meyer's right leg.

Meyer pushed herself back on her armored belly before she dared to stand up again. Matthew Lock, kneeling on the fender, let go of her ankle. "I lost the gun," he said. His whole body was trembling. The scarf still covered his face.

"C41, this is Six," Meyer's helmet ordered. "Cease fire. We've got this batch too. Good work, people. Six out." 

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Framed

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Waiting for the Axe

In theory Sergeant Guilio Abbado was still in command of 3-3, but none of his strikers had paid the least attention to his wheezing demands to be the first through the opening. The only reason Foley lifted him at all was that Abbado was so obviously incapable of giving Foley a boost instead.

The headless creature thrashing inside weighed at least five tons. The fuel-air explosions hadn't disintegrated or even dismembered the corpse, but they had burned every square inch of its hide.

The stench of blackened flesh was overpowering. Abbado switched to his helmet's small air bottle as much for that reason as because the grenades had used a lot of the available oxygen.

He'd set his visor on infrared instead of enhancement, the low-light default setting. Hot gas from the bombs swirled in confusing veils but the figures of the strikers ahead of him were sufficiently sharp. The split seam let a fair amount of light into this compartment, but that wouldn't be true of those further toward the bow.

The vines that entered the ship terminated in bunches of fruit the size of soccer balls, hundreds of them. Grenade blasts had crushed them to reeking pulp against the bulkheads.

The fruit could be of no benefit to the plant, but they'd served as food for the creature. It must have entered through the same opening as the strikers, then grown to its final monstrous size on the diet.

The remains of at least twenty Spooks lay in a fetid mass at the bottom of the compartment. Each body had been bitten in half but not devoured. The creature was a killer without being a carnivore.

The four companionways to the deck above were horizontal tunnels. The interdeck hatches had buckled and couldn't close. Abbado scrambled after Caldwell in the lowest passageway. The steep, narrow treads were vertical obstacles.

The leading strikers hurled half a dozen electrical grenades to clear the third and highest deck. Abbado, panting and dizzy, entered a moment later. There were Kalendru bodies among jumbled gear. The Spooks had been killed in the crash a week or so earlier.

"Nobody left, sarge," Horgen said in faint disappointment. 3-3'd hoped for a fight with something the strikers understood, not leaves and vines. Learning there were no Spooks alive in the ship was like being bilked of a steak dinner after a week of living on lettuce.

The compartment and the one below showed no indication of occupancy following the crash. If Spooks had initially survived, the creature had seen them off. The length of its neck and tongue would have permitted it to scour both levels even though its swollen body couldn't fit through the companionway. There were lasers among the other debris, but ordinary Kalendru troops didn't carry weapons heavy enough to deal with a monster the size of that one.

"You know . . ." Flea said. "I could almost feel sorry for the poor bastard Spooks."

"All right, let's get back," Abbado said. "They'll need us at the column."

The crash had thrown loose personal gear which covered the compartment's lower side like plant debris in a forest swale. It was within the realm of possibility that a Spook was hiding deep enough in it that IR didn't spot him, but it wasn't worth 3-3's time to check out.

"Three-three, this is Administrator Tamara Lundie," said an unfamiliar voice. Because the helmet AIs had to fill gaps caused by signal attenuation through the ship's metal hull, the words were almost toneless. "Kalendru vessels of this class have a separate control room reached through a hatch here—" 

A deck schematic with a pulsing caret appeared briefly on one quadrant of Abbado's visor.

"—which is at the moment concealed by litter from the crash. Out." 

"Who the hell was that?" Caldwell asked.

"The blonde with the broomstick up her ass," Abbado said, straddle-walking forward to keep his balance on the shifting surface. He tossed aside a pile of torn containers, Spook dufflebags or bedrolls, to expose the hatch where Lundie said it would be.

It was locked from the other side, but cloth pinched on the lower side of the hatch showed it'd been open at some point after the crash. Judging from tears and blast patterns, 3-3's grenades had flung the gear that hid it.

Abbado unscrewed the warhead of a rocket, set it for point effect/five second delay, and struck it hard enough against the lock plate to trip the fuze. "Fire in the hole!" he called as he scrambled away.

The blue flash of the electrical warhead lit the compartment. The shock wave clanged into the hatch like the tip of a three-ton ice-pick, shearing the bolt and flinging the panel open in reaction. Tattered debris flew up in a cloud like dirt tamped around a charge set in an excavation.

"I've got him!" Horgen cried even as she dived through the hatchway. "I've got him and he's alive!"

Caius Blohm watched the foliage react to the single, sharp blast that made the wreck's hull ring. Leaves quivered, pods turned; the whole forest was listening, waiting.

"I've got him! I've got him and he's alive!" 

Foley looked at the opening above him, desperate to join the rest of his squad. Sergeant Gabrilovitch nodded to Blohm and muttered, "Great. Now we've got a prisoner to nursemaid back to the column."

"He won't be any more problem than Abbado's lot," Blohm said. And not much more problem than you, Gabe, he thought, but he didn't say.

"C41," broke in the voice that this time didn't bother to identify itself as Tamara Lundie. "Increased carbon dioxide levels suggest that another party of native humanoids coming from the north is now within a few seconds or minutes of the column. The region between the first and second tractor appears the most likely point of contact. Out." 

Blohm felt his body prickle. He had a vision of Mirica in the grip of a humanoid with a face as remote and remorseless as a storm cloud; of Mirica dead, not on a jungle track but on the threshold of a room filled with the grenade-blasted bodies of other children. He began to shiver.

Gabrilovitch swore softly. "How long do you figure it'll take us to get back to the column, snake?" he asked.

"Too long," Blohm said. Too long, or I'd be headed back right now even if they hang me for desertion when I get there.

There was less than an hour to sunset. It would arrive like a curtain falling in these latitudes. Besides, even if he tried to make the last of the distance at night—and maybe he could, just maybe—the attack would be over by a few minutes from now.

"Those kid-killing bastards," Blohm said, his lips barely moving. "Those bastards."

Sergeant Abbado stuck his head out of the opening in the ship's hull. A moment later he and Matushek thrust a Spook through, dangling him by arms that looked so pale that they were almost transparent. The prisoner was humming loudly, a Kalendru sign of misery and despair.

Foley took the Spook by one leg and reached up to grip him under the arm to lower him to the ground. The Spook seemed catatonic. He was thin even by Kalendru standards; Blohm wondered if there'd been any food in the compartment where he was hiding.

Gabe started forward to give Foley a hand. Matushek boosted Abbado to where he could climb out in turn. Blohm eyed a tree on the other side of the crashed vessel. Its branches were drawing up by minute increments.

Nobody expected a problem: Kalendru stopped fighting as soon as they were captured. Maybe Foley should've been paying more attention to the Spook and less to his sergeant, but any experienced striker was likely to have done the same thing.

The Spook twisted out of Foley's grip with the Kalendru equivalent of hysterical strength and ran toward the jungle, humming even louder. His eyes were open but Blohm didn't think they were focusing.

Gabe shouted and ran to block the prisoner's escape. Foley stumbled as he tried to follow. Blohm knew he couldn't help unless the Spook changed direction, but he sprinted anyway out of the reflex to chase whatever runs away.

The Spook took a gazelle-like leap toward the unbroken forest. Gabe waved his arms, still shouting. Blohm saw what was about to happen and called, "Let him go! Gabe—"

The Spook leaped again. Gabrilovitch dived after him, grabbing the Spook around the shoulders in a high tackle. Together they smashed into a shooting tree about a dozen feet high.

The head of the young tree burst with a vicious crack. Gabe cried out. He and the Spook hit the ground and bounced apart, concerned now with their own wounds rather than each other. The prisoner was clutching his thigh while Gabrilovitch had a hand on his left shoulder. Because they'd been in motion when they touched the trunk, the blast of spikes hadn't caught them squarely.

Blohm reached the victims first. He pried his partner's hand away. There were three closely-spaced puncture wounds; the points of the spikes poked through the back of Gabe's battledress, just below the collarbone. A tree this small didn't fire missiles as heavy and powerful as the adult whose spikes had raked the humans at the crash site.

Blohm took a first aid patch from his medikit and slapped it over the entrance wounds. It closed the holes and leached pain killers through the skin at a rate metered by needs. In a few seconds a color-coded display on the back of the patch would provide a rough diagnosis of the injuries and prognosis.

Foley and Sergeant Abbado joined them. The sergeant looked as grim as a war hammer. He took the Spook by the wrists to anchor him and pull his hands away to expose his wounds. There was only one, a neat hole in the right thigh with no exit.

"Doesn't look too bad," Abbado said. "Guess we got lucky. But this means we've got to carry the sonofabitch back to the column for interro—"

The Kalender's body stiffened. The edges of the wound had darkened. A purple discoloration continued to spread across the gray skin even though the Spook's heart and circulatory system had obviously quit for good. His mouth opened and the tongue thrust out, pink and as stiff as a dog's dong.

"Poison!" Gabrilovitch said. "Oh, Christ, I've been poisoned."

"No," Blohm said, looking at the readout on Gabe's patch: everything well in the green. "You haven't, but the Spook sure as hell was. Their chemistry's different and the trees here aren't targeted for us. Yet."

"I think," said Sergeant Abbado, "that we'll stick here with the ship until daylight instead of starting back right now."

He looked at the sky and the jungle, then added, "God damn this place."

"Tell your civilians to lie flat next to the berm!" Farrell ordered as he ran forward. The two satchels of grenades he'd grabbed from the lead trailer swung in his left hand, pulling him off balance with every stride. The stinger wasn't heavy enough to compensate, even though he held it out for leverage. "Squad Two-two come forward, the rest of you hold in place. All civilians down, down flat! Over!"

The column moved like an earthworm with arthritis: bunching and spreading at irregular intervals, always moving slowly. Civilians turned and gaped as Farrell ran past, pushing them aside when he had to.

"Down flat!" he shouted. There wasn't fucking time to explain. There was barely time for a wrung-out major with a heavy load to run the hundred yards forward to where the attack was maybe going to come. "Down flat!"

"Down flat!" Sergeant Kristal shouted to the civilians around her. She'd split her six strikers into two groups. When Farrell sent Abbado off, Kristal's weak squad had responsibility for three hundred civilians. The weakest defenses, and the point at which Lundie said to expect the attack.

Farrell didn't assume the natives knew how C41 was deployed. He'd seen enough combat to expect every possible thing to go wrong out of pure cussedness. That's just how life is for a soldier.

There was nothing to the right—north—side of the bulldozer cut except lowering vegetation. A striker got used to his helmet sensors giving him a hundred yards of warning and targeting under any conditions short of a rock wall. Knowing that the natives might appear at spitting distance from the greenery, unseen until that instant, made Farrell feel as though he'd been sent into a battle with his eyes taped shut.

But a striker does what he can, and you don't have to see your target with a grenade.

"Lie fucking down!" Farrell roared to the nearest civilians. "Get your kids down, for Chrissake!"

They were reacting, but not quickly enough. Farrell was out of sight of the nearest strikers in either direction. Because of large trees and other special circumstances, the trail kinked every ten or twenty yards. This stretch was one of the longer ones, but it seemed to be Art Farrell's alone.

Farrell let his stinger go, dropped one of the satchels, and pulled a fuel-air grenade from the other. He armed the bomb and threw it between the trunks of trees on the edge of the cut. He knew it was going to hit something solid before it travelled more than twenty feet into the tangle; he just hoped that it didn't bounce back among the civilians.

He took the risk because the choice was to leave the initiative with the natives . . . which meant he would die, and that at least the thirty civilians flopping on the ground behind him on his panoramic display would die also.

His own death was one of the things that came with his enlistment oath; theirs wasn't.

Farrell threw a second grenade, then a third. He had a dozen in each satchel. If nothing happened sooner, he'd throw every fucking one of them and throw the three electricals on his belt after that. In these conditions the electrical grenades' fragmentation effect made them both more dangerous to friendlies and less useful against hostiles. The fuel spread and mixed with air pretty much unhindered by treetrunks and ground cover.

"Daddy, what are we—"

A parent's hand clamped hard over the child's mouth. No need for that, but they didn't know. They were civilians, they shouldn't fucking be here.

Whoom! and concussion shoved Farrell back like a medicine ball in the chest. Foliage hid the flash of the explosion. The shockwave had a wet, green smell. He took out another grenade.

Whoom! as Farrell threw the grenade, a little higher than he'd intended. His aim was straight enough for safety because he'd allowed for the blast. He was maybe warning the attackers, he knew that, but he was sure-hell putting them off balance and there was never a bad time to do that.

Whoom! as Farrell reached for the next grenade. The torso of a native rode an orange bubble skyward in a sudden clearing thirty feet into the jungle. His limbs were four separated exclamation points at the margins of the flash.

Another native stepped from the undamaged foliage six feet away, his toothed club rising. Farrell threw the 20-ounce grenade into his face, crushing cheekbones and the beaklike jaw.

The native fell into the undergrowth; the grenade bounced back against Farrell's boots. The bomb was harmless; he hadn't thumbed the arming switch.

Farrell armed another grenade without lifting it from the satchel. He threw the satchel as far as he could into the jungle before him. Crouching against the coming blast, he aimed his stinger.

Over my dead body, you baby-killing bastards. And not even then.

Meyer rapped Seligman's shoulder. He was driving the lead bulldozer with her for guard. "Turn us around," she said. The staffer had a helmet as part of the hard suit: he was on the C41 net and knew what was going on. "Drive right into the wogs. They'll run when they see this coming, right?"

The lead squad, five strikers under Jonas as senior man in lieu of a noncom, was shouting at the nearby cits to lie down. Jonas and two of his people jogged back down the trail to the expected point of contact.

"Are you out of your mind?" Seligman cried. He put the tractor in neutral. "I'm no soldier, honey! You go fight them yourself!"

Matthew Lock clambered onto the tractor's deck. He was awkward because he held a stinger and hadn't rigged the sling over his shoulder to free both hands.

"For God's sake, Seligman!" Meyer shouted. "They need us back there! I can't get there wearing armor myself."

"I'm not going any damn where!" the staffer replied. "You don't have any right—"

Lock tapped the muzzle of his stinger on the helmet at roughly the position of Seligman's right ear. "Do as Striker Meyer orders or I'll kill you," he said in a clear voice. He rapped the helmet again.

"You can't—" Seligman said.

Meyer fired one round into the front mesh. The pellet disintegrated with a whack and a red flash that looked brighter because of the cab's dimness. "Turn this son-of-a-bitch!" she shouted.

Seligman thumbed a roller switch on his left handgrip. The blade rose slowly with a whine that made Meyer's armor rattle everywhere it touched the tractor. The seat and controls were insulated from vibration but the rest of the vehicle wasn't; Meyer was familiar with the experience by now. It wasn't the sort of thing you got used to, any more than you'd get used to being punched in the face.

"Don't cut a trail!" Lock shouted in the staffer's ear. He must think the armor deadened hearing; in fact, the receptors were more sensitive than the ears they served, though they clipped loud noises to safe levels with cancellation waves. "Just get us back the fastest way without running anybody over!"

Seligman scissored the left control bar to the rear and the right one forward. The treads ground in opposite directions, turning the bulldozer in its own length. Meyer knew the maneuver stressed the running gear and was likely to throw a track, but it was still the fastest way to change direction. She didn't complain.

If the staffer hoped to disable the vehicle, he failed. He shifted the bulldozer forward, then swung outward to avoid a giant whose spread of buttress roots he'd skirted on the opposite side a few minutes before. The blade continued to rise. For a moment the solid lower portion blocked most of the frontal vision from the cab.

Grenades went off ahead; Meyer felt the shocks despite the racket the tractor made busting brush. She thought she heard the pop of stingers.

"Striker!" Lock said. He held the stinger up to her. "How do I fire this?"

Meyer looked at the civilian's earnest face. You couldn't fault him for lack of balls, anyway. "This is the safety," she said, pushing the button on the receiver over the trigger. A telltale went from green to red. "Now you pull the trigger. But for God's sake watch where you point it!"

A fruit the size of a pumpkin hit the roof of the cab and squashed as enthusiastically as a bomb bursting. Green juice sprayed in all directions and began to drip down. Meyer shoved Lock completely beneath the roof overhang. Her hard suit wasn't affected and the tractor's nickel steel body merely discolored. Chunks of branch and foliage lying in the path of the spreading juice turned black and began to smolder.

Meyer shifted the tank of the flame gun to her left side, taking the nozzle in that hand. She hated flame guns—even more so since she'd seen hers incinerate Top Daye, but it might be the margin of survival.

More grenades boomed. A treetop whipped through the jungle like a barbed-wire flyswatter. It slammed the dozer blade, now held at a forty-five degree angle over the tractor's engine compartment, and bounced back with a crackle of despair.

A humanoid native appeared in a thicket. Stems writhed like an anemone's tentacles but didn't harm him. He squirted caustic toward the tractor and stepped as gracefully as a bullfighter out of the way of the looming vehicle. The flame gun devoured his pelvis in incandescent fury.

Vegetation withered a yard to either side of the brief flame rod. The white glare touched a tree a foot thick. Gluey, blood-red sap gushed from the point of contact. The tree twisted and collapsed around the wound as though only pneumatic pressure had kept it upright.

Lock shouted to Seligman. Meyer had stepped to the right side of the deck; she couldn't hear the words over the sound of the vehicle and nearby grenade blasts. She threw a grenade herself. The orange fireball bloomed almost to the treads as it pulped a hundred square feet of foliage and two humanoids.

Seligman touched a control. The land-clearing blade began to whine slowly down again from its running position.

The tree ahead braced itself against wind forces with flat plates running from the ground high up the trunk. The tractor smashed through the flanges. Wood shattered like cork, throwing up clouds of fine gray dust. A caret winked on Meyer's visor; Lock was already tugging his neck scarf over his nose and mouth before she could warn him.

Meyer wondered how much good the scarf would do, but she had more immediate problems. She lobbed a grenade over the top of the blade. When it exploded, a jug-shaped tree twenty yards ahead burst into blue flame. It was spurting hydrogen from every pore.

Heat shrivelled the foliage as far as the bulldozer itself. The flames were pale but intensely hot. Lock cried out and ducked despite the gratings in the dozer blade and the cab window. Meyer and Seligman in their hard suits were unaffected.

The driver steered sharply to the right to avoid driving through the center of the blaze. Meyer played her stinger across three natives, then a fourth in the circle the fire had stripped of cover. The humanoids might pass through the jungle unhindered by thorns and poisons, but heat was heat and the laws of physics applied to their flesh as well.

The right blade support arm and that side of the cab twinkled, though Meyer couldn't see the shooter or hear the pellets hitting. Seligman let go of the controls and tried to hunch beneath the level of the window openings. Lock grabbed the staffer's armored shoulder and batted the stinger muzzle against his helmet.

Seligman straightened just as the blade sheared its way back into the trail it had previously cleared. He'd managed to switch on the intercom; Meyer could hear him blubbering. He pulled back slightly on the left control bar. The bulldozer twitched onto a parallel course instead of grinding through the people screaming as they rose in fear of a monster more terrible than the club-swinging humanoids.

Meyer stepped onto the narrow fender covering the right tread. She was afraid to throw grenades while they were so close to the main trail, and the land-clearing blade was too high to shoot over from any distance back.

The blade hit a tree too thick to smash aside. Meyer lurched forward with the shock. She caught herself on the frame that supported the grated upper portion of the blade. Roots pulled out of the soil, releasing the bulldozer as the trunk toppled to the side.

Meyer saw movement beyond a fringe of compound leaves. She hosed it with her flame gun. Humanoids appeared as screening vegetation wilted. The ravening flame converted flesh and bone to gas. There'd been three of them, maybe more. The blade scraped shrunken corpses aside with the trash of undergrowth and topsoil.

The flame died, its fuel exhausted. The ceramic nozzle glowed white/yellow/red back from the tip. Meyer dropped the weapon and reached for the stinger with her right hand.

The left track rocked over a tree which had twisted behind the blade instead of rolling off the side. Meyer fell sideways, awkward in her armor, and overcompensated. The tractor's weight abruptly splintered the bole; she toppled to the left.

Meyer flailed with both hands. They missed their grip on the blade. She began to slide beneath the front of the tread.

Roaring. Blackness. Alone. 

Something caught and anchored Meyer's right leg.

Meyer pushed herself back on her armored belly before she dared to stand up again. Matthew Lock, kneeling on the fender, let go of her ankle. "I lost the gun," he said. His whole body was trembling. The scarf still covered his face.

"C41, this is Six," Meyer's helmet ordered. "Cease fire. We've got this batch too. Good work, people. Six out." 

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