“Did you see that?” Seligman said. He shifted the bulldozer into neutral. “What are they thinking about? Are they out of their goddam minds?”
Meyer sat on the edge of the deck with her legs dangling over, then levered herself off with both hands. She wanted to jump down, but the weight of her equipment was more likely than not to stun her if she got hasty.
The bulldozer backed cautiously. Meyer trotted between the blade and the upturned roots, then into the full glare of the burning trunk. She wished she’d had time to unsling the flame gun before she ran over fiery ground, but there was no time to waste.
If the kid and woman were going to survive more than the next few seconds, Esther Meyer had to get them out of the jungle.
Blohm heard the tree falling—the snap of branches and vines as the trunk tore them away, the sigh of air shoved aside in its passage. Though he knew the tree was so close he could have flipped a pebble against it on an open plain, the only glimpse the scout caught was a wink of bright flame through a gap in the foliage.
It hit. The forest shrugged angrily. Smoke and steam swollen with the odors of life fanned the undergrowth. Blohm opened his mouth to call in his location so that he wasn’t shot as he entered the clearing twenty yards distant.
He felt them coming toward him.
Not strikers, because his visor located every member of C41. Humanoids, the survivors of the attack on the column.
He’d moved under branches sturdy enough to stop or at least slow the falling tree’s impact. The bark of his shelter oozed sap that vaporized and made his bare skin tingle, but he didn’t intend to stay long in its range.
Around the trunk was an open circle three or four feet in diameter; beyond that grew a stand of wire-trunked seedlings that would bind a human. When the attackers came through the screen at him like water through a sieve, Blohm wouldn’t be able to drop more than one of them before the rest got him the way they had Gabrilovitch.
He took the last grenade from his belt and cocked his arm for a throw high enough to clear the screen. The fuel would spray down and envelope everything in the thicket when it went off. Do them before they do you.
Just like Active Cloak.
And because he hadn’t thrown the grenade at the last possible moment by which it would have saved his life from attacking humanoids, Caius Blohm heard Mirica scream his name as the seedlings grabbed her. He wasted the grenade in the forest behind him as he entered the reeds with his powerknife.
The trunks were rubbery and hard to grip, but the blade sliced through their softness like cobwebs. Blohm could have cut them with the shaft of a spoon if he’d had to at this moment.
He took Mirica in his left arm and hugged her to him as he strode on slashing. He didn’t have a plan for how he was going to free Mrs. Suares while holding the child, but in the event he didn’t have to. A striker in an ash-smeared hard suit was already pulling the old woman clear.
They were on the other side of the trap. Beyond was a steam-swathed tree trunk and a bulldozer at the edge of the clearing.
The child called, “Caius!” as she clutched his chest and they all four staggered to safety.
Farrell sat cross-legged with his visor down, clicking through alternative arrangements for deploying his strikers on the march. The helmet AI shifted purple dots and the orange masses of civilians with equanimity, but it couldn’t tell Art Farrell what the next threat was going to be.
It could have told him that he didn’t have enough strikers for the job, but that wouldn’t have been news.
“Striker Blohm is here, sir,” Kristal said, loud enough to cut through Farrell’s concentration.
He raised his visor instead of clearing it. Caius Blohm stood straight, more like a prisoner tied to a stake than as a soldier at attention.