Redliners by David Drake

Meyer turned her head slightly. Her helmet careted a tree in the middle distance that for the moment was only a sliver of gray trunk and a few sprays of leaves with orange veins. A similar tree had flung branch tips like thirty-pound spears to ring and shatter on the tractor’s armor.

This specimen was probably safely outside the column’s intended course. If not, though, Meyer figured it’d know to choose targets more vulnerable than the bulldozer was. She’d put a rocket into it if God or his aide guided Seligman in that direction.

“The Kalendru are an ancient race,” Matt said. His hair was dark and wavy. It’d grown noticeably since they abandoned the ship. “At the height of their expansion half a million years ago, they inhabited a hundred times as many planets as they do now. We humans were still learning to chip flint. Maybe the Kalendru found records, maybe they deciphered a legend. Whyever they came here, they were right. This is the weapon that will end the war.”

Meyer lowered her arm so that she could turn to face Matt. She could watch him by offsetting her display, but to him it’d seem that she was looking away. “Honey,” she said, afraid she was going to sound insulting. “I know these trees are a bitch when it’s just an understrength company and small arms. But honey, up against the hardware a line battalion deploys—they’re nothing, sweetheart. And a tank wouldn’t even slow down for this jungle, trust me.”

“Not the vegetation, Esther,” Matt said with a quirky smile. “Microorganisms. Disease bacteria and viruses.”

Meyer checked her locator grid. Judging from where the striker guards were, Section 4 had closed up to the tractor in the middle of the column and Section 5 wasn’t far back from 4. Section 6 was still way behind where it needed to be. It would be several minutes before Seligman got the go-ahead.

“Okay,” Meyer said, “that’s bad. I guess a lot of people could be killed before everybody in the Unity got immune boosters. But that’s what’d happen. It’d cost a bundle, but that’s what wars do. They wouldn’t beat us that way, Matt.”

“We could protect people, Esther,” Matt said. He combed the fingers of his left hand through his long, curly hair. “We couldn’t protect all life forms, though. What if every food crop on every planet died? What if all the algae in every ocean died and rotted, instead of producing oxygen? What if all the animals, wild and domesticated, started attacking people the way those Kalendru attacked us where the ship landed?”

“Oh,” said Meyer. “Oh.”

“Tractor One, this is Admin One,” God’s cold voice said. “Start forward in sixty, that is six-zero, seconds, count. Admin One out.”

Meyer took a fuel-air grenade from her equipment belt and armed it. She eyed the giant flowers nodding in the still air.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said as she lobbed the grenade.

Seligman walked around the bulldozer, prodding at the treads to be sure they were locking properly to minimize ground pressure. Abbado moved in front of the vehicle to get a direct view of the terrain. There was no standing water, but his boots squelched with each step.

Horgen sang softly, “Love is the ring that has no—”

She felt Abbado’s eye on her. “Sorry, Sarge,” she said.

Though it wasn’t open to the sky, this was the largest clear stretch Abbado’d seen since their column left the landing site. Fat-trunked trees rose from hummocks above the surrounding soil. They stood like pillars set on stone plinths, their branches arched and interlaced a hundred feet in the air. Brush and reeds of varied species covered the ground to a height of ten or twenty feet, but there was none of the intermediate vegetation that screened the canopy from sight throughout most of this jungle.

The major came around the side of the bulldozer with God. Major Farrell looked rock-hard, the way he always did on an operation. Metal can bend and deform, but a rock just wears a little smoother.

The sun would go cold before the major broke.

“We’re waiting on the tractor, sir,” Abbado explained. “Blohm reported the soil never gets softer than this, but there isn’t a way around for at least a quarter mile either way. Seligman says he can make it if his treads work like they ought.”

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