Some of the civilians were trying to get away from the falling tree. Because of the storm and the roaring confusion of the attack most of them hadn’t even noticed it.
Flea Glasebrook ran toward the grove holding a fuel-air grenade in either hand. The other strikers at the back of the clearing stopped shooting uselessly into the reeds.
Glasebrook hit with the point of his shoulder as if the grove was a tackling dummy. Mud sprayed as his cleats bit and thrust him through the resistance. Farrell saw the flicker of the precursor charges dispersing the grenade fuel across the interior.
The grenades went off with a huge red flash. The reeds and everything within them disintegrated. The shock wave knocked down people fifty feet away and flung Art Farrell backward from his perch.
If there was a heaven, Glasebrook had just blown his way through the door.
Lessons Learned
A tree twenty feet from Meyer’s bulldozer had been smoldering for the five minutes since a grenade went off nearby. Hair-thin spines covering the bark ignited in a gush of white that enveloped the branches a hundred and fifty feet above. As the initial gout died away, the trunk itself burst into vibrant red flame. It pulsed like the muzzle flashes of an automatic weapon.
Meyer tapped Seligman’s shoulder. “Let’s knock that bastard down,” she said. “Otherwise it’s going to fall in our direction as sure as it’s raining.”
The driver probably swore, but he didn’t switch on the intercom for Meyer to hear it. He lifted the dozer blade from the ground, then began to back and turn the tractor to line up the target.
A stinger cracked out a single pellet. Somebody was making sure a wog knew that dead meant dead.
The bulldozer started forward. Meyer rocked with a motion become familiar.
She was alone with Seligman on the vehicle. Matt had caught fragments of one of his own grenades in his right cheek and arm. He’d insisted they were just scratches, nothing to worry about, but Meyer wasn’t having any of that macho bullshit. He’d been wounded, so he was walking over to the docs and doing whatever they told him to do.
She’d been a long time without him, without anybody. She wasn’t going to lose him now for a stupid reason.
The tree throbbed before them. Seligman lowered the blade to shave the ground, spilling burning brush to the left.
Meyer checked to be sure the tank of the flame gun was beneath the cab overhang, sheltered from the heat radiating from the trunk. The hard suits protected her and the driver from burning wood, at least for as long as it would take to push the tree over. If the tank cooked off, the metallized fuel could be another thing entirely.
She braced herself. The blade’s stinger punched its full length into the fiery tree, just to the right of the trunk’s center. The tracks slowed as the cleats bit but continued to work the tractor laboriously forward.
The tree wasn’t a particularly big one for this jungle, maybe three feet in diameter. It shook its blazing crown; then the whole trunk started to go.
A branch broke off high overhead and spun toward the clearing, showering sparks through the rain. There was nothing anybody below could do but try to judge its course and run like hell.
Seligman couldn’t see the dropping torch; it didn’t matter to his job anyway. The bulldozer ground on as deliberately as sand running through an hourglass.
A little child ran past the left side of the tractor, so blind with fear that the heat of the falling tree didn’t turn her back. She crossed the ground the trunk would smash and incinerate in a matter of seconds. As she fled she screamed, “Caius! Caius!”
A woman ran twenty feet behind the child, gaining only inches with each stride. She ducked beneath the toppling tree.
The trunk hit with an impact that made the soil ripple. Chunks of burning wood flew to both sides. The woman stumbled but managed not quite to fall. She continued to pursue the child into the unbroken jungle, batting furiously at her coveralls. Though the garment didn’t burn, sparks melted into the cloth.