Redliners by David Drake

The track was marked by grooves parallel to the axis of movement, each of them a few feet long. They had the appearance of the drag marks made by a harrow lifted into travelling mode but not clearing all the bumps.

Judging from the weathering, the track probably had something to do with the Spook expedition. God would have liked to have a piece of ground-clearing equipment that big, Blohm knew. For his own part . . . well, the forest was no friend of Caius Blohm’s, but it played fair. Ramming through it with a blade a hundred yards wide didn’t seem right to him.

Blohm skirted the marked tree as he’d planned. The forest beyond the cleared strip was typical of what he’d seen ever since they landed: variations in the form of danger and hostility, but nothing exceptional and nothing that explained the track. The broad pathway meandered through the forest, utterly destroying everything in its path.

Six winged pods a yard across rotated out of the canopy a hundred feet ahead of Blohm. They slanted through the mid-growth toward him. The seeds were pointed and weighed several pounds apiece, but buoyed by their wings they fell too slowly for their effect to be purely kinetic.

“Now what they expect us to do, honey,” Blohm said, “is dodge behind a tree. What we’re going to do instead is stand right here like we’d froze to the ground. Spinning the way they do, those things can curve around a tree as easy as not and we wouldn’t see them coming. Now, you stick with me. When they get a little closer—run!”

With the nearest of the pods ten feet from him in slant distance Blohm sprinted under the spinning missile. Bristles at the seed’s tip twisted, tracking his body heat. The pod attempted to reverse its angle of descent.

It wasn’t high enough to succeed, though the last of the sheaf of missiles came closer than Blohm had expected. All six hit the ground in close sequence and burst, spraying sticky fluid. The pools self-ignited in yellow-orange pillars which slowly merged in a single inferno.

“Most times running away’s near as bad an idea as sitting with your thumb up your ass,” Blohm explained with satisfaction to his companion. “You can’t run faster than a laser bolt, right? Go toward them and at least you’ve got a chance to react to whatever they try on.”

“Six-six-two, this is Admin Two,” said the voice Blohm had learned to identify as Tamara Lundie. “Initial survey imagery showed a hill or mound in the region you just crossed. Have you noticed any sign of such a feature, over?”

“Admin Two, that’s a negative,” Blohm said. He saw a quivering glow through the undergrowth ahead, like an electrical arc softened by a foot of frosted glass. “The Spooks had one hell of a bulldozer to clear the track back there. Maybe they scraped the hill down too. Over.”

“Six-six-two,” said Lundie’s cool voice. “The Kalendru had no equipment beyond small arms. Admin Two out.”

Blohm used his knife with the power off to very gently pry one of a line of saplings to the side. The sapling’s crown suddenly twisted down around the blade like a elephant’s trunk coiling.

Blohm withdrew the blade. Savage thorns along the inner surface of the coil squeaked, but they couldn’t mark the synthetic diamond. The sapling very slowly began to straighten, recharging the reservoir of hydrostatic energy which it had just emptied. Blohm slipped past while it was still harmless.

He was in a small clearing. A skewed oval door was set in the surface of the ground. Enclosing it, a discontinuity in the air itself like a gigantic soap bubble scintillated across the visual spectrum.

Blohm felt a rhythmic vibration. He wondered if it was an earth tremor. He’d have guessed a starship was landing, except then actinic radiation would have penetrated the layers of foliage above him.

“Six, this is Six-six-two,” he reported. “Major, I’ve found you your door! Over.”

Major Farrell didn’t respond. After waiting ten seconds, Blohm echoed a remote view from the major’s helmet.

He realized why everybody with the column had other things on their mind.

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