“Three-three, roger,” the major’s voice replied. “The drinks are on me. Six out.”
“Sarge, I’m sorry,” said Caius Blohm. “You’re going to have to make it back without me. There’s just a chance I can get to the column in time to help with the wogs we passed going the other way. The rest of you can’t.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Matushek said softly. Ace had taken his helmet off and was massaging his temples. His eyes appeared to have sunk into his skull since the beginning of the mission.
“Maybe,” Blohm said. “Move slow, don’t touch anything if you can help it, and let your helmets guide you. They know everything I do.”
The scout turned away. Horgen raised her stinger.
“Let him go,” Abbado said. Blohm vanished into the jungle, moving like a ghost.
“Let him go,” Abbado repeated. “I’ve fought everybody I’m going to fight for the next long while.”
Art Farrell stood in the pouring rain on top of a trailer-load of plastic sheets. He wished lightning would hit him, but he knew he’d never be that lucky.
“Carbon dioxide levels to the north are rising,” warned Tamara Lundie. She stood beside the project manager at the foot of the trailer. Around them lay the injured and unwell who’d been moved to the ground till this was over. “Estimate fifteen seconds.”
“C41, advance party, fall back,” Farrell ordered. His fingers probed his stinger’s rain-slick receiver, but he didn’t eject and reinsert the magazine. “Ten seconds, people. Out.”
The bulldozers had stripped a swath of jungle three hundred by fifty feet. Clearance debris including the trunks of full-sized trees lay in a row against the long northern side from where the natives were supposed to attack. Twenty-two strikers waited ten yards back. That was as deep a kill zone as Farrell thought he could afford without pushing the civilians too close to the back edge of the clearing.
Christ, he hoped it was the back edge. All it would take to turn this into a massacre was for twenty or thirty natives to circle the clearing before they attacked.
The advance party of five strikers scampered down from the top of the pile to join the main line. Farrell had placed them there because the location gave Lundie a wider reach on CO2 levels.
There’d been six in the advance party. Tasman, who had the sweetest voice Farrell ever heard on a person he’d met face to face, stepped on what looked like a solid log and sank in to his crotch. He screamed for several seconds before his torso rolled to the ground. His legs had dissolved.
War has its own system of accounting. In this case, fifteen seconds cost a striker’s life. A soldier knows that “want” isn’t the same as “need”; and Farrell had needed the fifteen seconds.
Sorry ’bout that. Wish it’d been me.
The civilians, nearly a thousand of them, were behind the main line and not quite crowded into the jungle. Farrell had placed the bulldozers on the flanks. The total guard force for the sides and rear was four strikers and a few who weren’t walking but still could pull a trigger.
Farrell would rather have had the civilians in a tight lump instead of being spread out in a line. He’d decided in a heartbeat that it was more important to open the entire front instead of having natives coming straight out of the jungle on top of his strikers.
It rained like a cow pissing on a flat rock. Civilians without light enhancement and commo helmets couldn’t see well or talk, so they were that much likelier to panic. Stinger pellets didn’t like rain this heavy either, and even a veteran’s fingers could slip while changing magazines.
You play the hand you’re dealt. Lightning flashed between clouds.
A stinger fired on the right edge of the line. The charge fluoresced from the muzzle like a yellow tulip. Farrell didn’t see that target, but three natives appeared over the pile a little farther down. A dozen more stingers lit the firing line. Pellets ripped wood, dirt and the humanoids.
The natives staggered. One of them kept coming even after stingers chewed his arm off. Forty more appeared, all along the line. The berm protected the attackers rather than the defense, but the clearance debris had to go somewhere. Lethal vegetation made the wrack too dangerous to fight from, the way Farrell would have liked to do.