Al-Ibrahimi and his aide picked targets for the rocketeers. Most explosions triggered a result that would have endangered a bulldozer if the warhead hadn’t preceded it. The administrators either had instincts equal to Caius Blohm’s, or their little headsets had more computing power than a Strike Force helmet.
Meyer’s bulldozer started forward. Matthew Lock waddled a minimal twenty feet behind with satchels of grenades. C41 hadn’t brought any directional mines along when they left the colony ship, but grenades thrown from the tractor’s deck would reach a little farther than they could from ground level. Even when a civilian was throwing them.
Meyer couldn’t let herself look back at Lock. If she did that, she might miss a threat that would engulf him. But the movement of the figure at the back of her panoramic display glowed in her mind as if the helmet had careted it.
* * *
A drop of rain, scattered and repeatedly recombined by three layers of canopy, landed on Abbado’s wrist. The storm had broken minutes before, but this was the first of it to reach ground level.
“There it is,” Blohm said.
“That’s a village?” Foley whispered.
“That’s a hole in a tree,” said Abbado, “but it’s where the wogs are coming from, right enough.”
The tree had begun as at least a dozen separate saplings. They merged as they grew. In combined form the monster covered a ragged circle over a hundred feet in diameter, black-barked and covered with air plants. The neighboring jungle had drawn away so that the swath beneath the spreading branches was clear.
Except for recent wear on the bark covering the lintel, the opening could have passed for a deep fold where two of the trunks joined. A human might have missed the signs, but the helmet AI hadn’t.
Abbado scanned for heightened CO2 levels. The concentration was normal. A breeze drew air into the slot, so there must be a vent at a higher level. The tree’s hollow trunk provided a chimney for the humanoids living within.
“Grenades?” said Horgen, taking one in her hand.
“Not till we know what’s inside,” Abbado said. He loosened his bandoliers. The rain was coming harder, dripping from leaf tips and the underside of branches. Even a downpour couldn’t make the air more humid.
“Right,” said Blohm, stepping forward.
Abbado touched the scout’s arm, drew him back. “My job,” he said. “Your job was to get us here.”
Abbado released and reextended his stinger to be sure its sling hadn’t jammed. He jogged across the ten yards of open space to the tree.
His shoulders didn’t quite brush the edges of the hole, but he had to duck his head slightly to clear the top. The opening fitted the humanoid warriors the way the cutter does cookies that come from it. There were two right-angle bends in the passage beyond, a left and a right. The walls were a light trap, dead black and porous.
Abbado stepped around the second bend, expecting darkness and God alone knew what else. He found what else.
The interior was a cavern whose walls glowed like windows of hammered glass. The light baffle was to keep the tree from shining out into the nighted jungle like an advertising sign.
The entire tree was hollow. The floor sloped from the entrance where Abbado stood into a bowl-shaped cavity of even broader dimensions.
He recognized the figures first. Humanoids of slighter build than the warriors crawled over something that looked like a fuel bladder which filled almost half the cavern’s volume. The tenders polished the bladder with wads of gray fabric.
A pair of giants detached themselves from nooks in the sidewall and shambled toward Abbado. They were twelve feet tall and carried edged clubs that must have weighed a hundred pounds. Similar monsters stepped into sight farther from the entrance. They shook off coatings of the amber gelatine which had sealed them into individual cells.
Abbado armed a rocket. The nearest giants raised their clubs.
Man-sized capsules clung to the wall of the cavern. There were hundreds in the highest row, forty feet above the ground. Lower down the light of the surface behind the translucent capsules showed the shadows of developing forms. Those at floor level contained fully-formed warriors.