Like a striker winding up to throw a grenade, Abbado figured.
“—think—” Caldwell continued.
Abbado raked a burst from his stinger the length of the branch. The pellets had lost some velocity and energy in the hundred feet from the muzzle, but they still chewed wood like the blade of a circle saw.
Bark exploded; the branch shivered like a broken-backed snake. Scores of fist-sized individual pellets, nuts or fruit, flew off the terminal twigs and burst into flame as they fell.
One fireball landed at the edge of the track and splashed clingy droplets across several feet of scraped dirt; the rest smoked and steamed to the jungle floor. None of them did any harm.
The branch dangled from a strand of bark. The stinger pellets hadn’t broken it through, but the limb’s own snapping release smashed its weakened fibers.
“Josie,” Abbado said, “if God hadn’t meant us to use reconnaissance by fire, he wouldn’t have given us stingers. Break. C41, watch this tree as you pass, mark. Some of the other branches may have an idea they want to toss things at us. Out.”
“It might’ve filled you like a pincushion, Sarge,” Ace Matushek said. “Remember what happened to Top.”
“Hey, it was going to throw something so I broke its throwing arm,” Abbado said. “Where’s the down side?”
The lead section of civilians had paused while the strikers dealt with the tree. Now they started moving again. Abbado expected them to skirt the sputtering flame as widely as possible, but instead they pretty much ignored it. They’d already learned that worrying about a danger avoided made you more vulnerable to the one on its way toward you.
“Sergeant,” a thirtyish woman said to Abbado. “Can you tell me why we’ve changed direction?”
“Ma’am?” said Abbado. “We’re going straight, more or less. As the big trees allow, is all.”
“Sergeant,” she said, obviously irritated. “I’m Certified Engineer Schwartzchild. I’ve been mapping the terrain as we proceed. From the point at which we left the landing site we’ve been marching at a course of two hundred thirty-nine degrees. We’ve now shifted to a course of two-sixty-eight—with, as you say, corrections for major obstacles.”
She waggled a small case covered in gray sharkskin, obviously a navigation and cartographic device of some sort. “I asked do you have an explanation.”
“No ma’am,” Abbado said. He decided not to reload his stinger. He’d only fired seventy pellets. He shrugged. “You’re right, but I hadn’t noticed it till you said so. I’m afraid you’ll have to check with the major. Or God. Probably God.”
He nodded and started forward. Abbado liked to stay about forty feet behind the bulldozer, close enough to judge whatever situation the blade might uncover without being in the middle of it.
Schwartzchild fell into step to his left, a little closer than he liked. “But Sergeant?” she said. “Don’t you care? Something must have happened to cause the change, don’t you see?”
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “But I don’t much care, no. Talk to the major about it, why don’t you?”
He turned his head. “Hey Ace?”
“That vine up there?” Matushek said, raising his chest-slung grenade launcher.
“Yeah,” Abbado agreed. “Pop it, will you?”
You didn’t need helmet electronics for communication if you’d worked with people long enough. A vine six inches thick laced through the tops of at least a dozen trees in an arc ahead of the column. It wasn’t doing any obvious harm, but Abbado didn’t like the look of it.
The dozer poked its blade into the bole of one of the trees. Matushek put a single grenade where the vine spanned the gap between that crown and the next tree.
The tree shivered, starting to go over. Ace fired again, blowing the other half loose. As the tree fell, it carried the vine fragment wrapped in its branches. Broken ends writhed like snakes.
“Ma’am,” Abbado said, returning his attention briefly to Schwartzchild. She wasn’t bad-looking, not if you liked your women solid. “I trust the major to do the best he can for us. And I trust God to know what he’s doing, though that’s about all. But even if I didn’t trust them, I know I couldn’t do a better job of planning myself. Best I leave them do what they do so I can get on with my end. Do you see what I mean?”