Farrell wasn’t shooting. He was C41’s entire reserve.
Natives mounted the pile as if it was level ground. They didn’t seem organized, but clots of ten or a dozen sometimes converged on a single striker.
Somebody emptied his stinger, then fired his back-up grenade launcher instead of trying to reload. The blast five feet from the muzzle blew the humanoid’s head and arms in three different directions, but it flung the striker backward into screaming civilians. His helmet fell off and he didn’t get up.
Hand grenades went off on both flanks, silhouetting trees against the sullen red glare of fuel-air explosive. Farrell didn’t know if the bombers were being attacked or if they were making sure that they weren’t.
“Targets, mark,” Manager al-Ibrahimi warned on the two-way channel he shared with the major. Four spikes flashed to the rear quadrant of Farrell’s lower, panoramic display. He turned, throwing the targets onto his visor’s upper register.
They were trees, emergents whose blunt peaks stood two hundred feet above the forest floor and well above the general canopy. They were hundreds of feet distant. Farrell—and al-Ibrahimi, using the major’s helmet sensors—wouldn’t have been able to see them at all had he not been standing on top of the trailer. The tops of nearer trees screened the emergents from people on the ground.
The crowns of the four trees were swollen. Farrell dialed up his visor’s magnification by a thousand, focusing on the nearest. The swelling was a gall, an insect nest, rather than part of the tree proper. Crablike creatures the size of a man’s palm crawled on the papery exterior. Others peeped from dozens of entrances to the inside of the nest. Instead of claws, the creatures’ mouth parts twitched like long scissorblades.
The tree was wobbling. If it toppled toward the clearing, the swollen peak would land in the middle of the colonists.
Farrell armed a 4-pound rocket, aimed it, and sent it into the center of the nest. The warhead’s artificial lightning blew the target to tatters. Shreds of the outer fabric drifted away, burning until the downpour quenched them. The shockwave would kill any of the crabs that the shrapnel didn’t get.
Farrell twisted free a second rocket and aimed it. Four rockets, four targets . . . or a lot of people were fucked. Strikers from the rear guard looked back at him. They could echo the major’s visor display, but nobody else could hit those treetops.
He fired. In the humid air the rocket motor left a thick white trail before burn-out, then a diminishing thread for the remainder of its course. The second nest disintegrated.
The third tree was swaying in a figure-8 that moved the peak across ten feet from Farrell’s left to right; he knew that the long axis of oscillation was dipping toward him. He aimed and fired as coldly as if he were on a weapons qualification course.
Backblast seared the right side of his neck below the visor. The target was a flash and a brief fireball.
The last tree was already falling. It was moving at a slight angle to Farrell, so he had to allow for deflection. As the rocket snarled free, he reached for his stinger though he knew it would be next to useless if those creatures got among the defenseless civilians.
The warhead hit the wood just below the nest, severing the upper ten feet of the crown. It rolled backward from the blast. Crown and main trunk continued to fall. Instead of landing in the midst of the clearing, the top spun into a stand of tall reeds which the dozers had skirted on the south edge.
The reeds flexed around the treetop like water sloshing in a bucket. The fall would have killed few if any of the crabs. When they came swarming out of the vegetation they’d be impossible to stop before they got among the colonists.
Farrell pulled a fuel-air grenade from his belt. He was close enough to the reeds to throw with the present combination of height and desperate need.
Farrell’s thumb froze on the arming switch. If he threw the grenade, the flexible reed stems would fling it back into the civilians before it exploded.