“Three-three, let’s go,” Abbado said.
There hadn’t been any real point to chopping the tree down: there were hundreds more just like it in the immediate area that the strikers would just have to avoid. It was the only thing Abbado could do to solace the ache in his ribs, though.
Caius Blohm squatted among uprooted trees which lay against their living brethren like strikers flung dying into the arms of their fellows. Blohm touched nothing but the ground. Leaves brushed his shanks and boot tops with the dry sound of snake scales. He ignored them as he merged himself with the forest beyond.
“Do you see anything, snake?” Gabrilovitch asked. He knelt, fidgety, a dozen feet from Blohm. The sergeant wore gloves. He’d cleared his immediate surroundings with his powerknife, but the sight of leaves groping vainly toward him seemed to get on his nerves.
“Shut up, Gabe,” Blohm whispered.
He wasn’t being insubordinate. He didn’t have enough conscious intellect left at the moment to be polite. Blohm was coming to an understanding with the forest.
The forest wanted to kill him. Wanted to kill all humans. Wanted to kill everything alive that wasn’t forest.
Blohm raised his visor so that he could breathe the still air pulled from the trees when the sun’s heat created an updraft from the clearing.
A powerful motor whined to life in the ship’s hold. Treads clattered on the decking: somebody was driving one of the bulldozers out. Blohm couldn’t have seen 10-1442 even if he’d turned around. There were too many small trees, living and dead, in the way.
The noise didn’t break Blohm’s concentration. It was just an element of his surroundings, like the booming call from somewhere to the west. Low frequency sounds travelled for amazing distances through a forest because the sound waves were too long for even tall trees to act as effective baffles.
Though at first glance the forest appeared uniform, Blohm’s AI had differentiated a hundred and thirty-five species of trees. Only three of them were noted in the database, which put survey information about on a par with what strikers learned to expect from military intelligence.
Vines hung from the tallest nearby trees. In some cases Blohm could see the vine’s own leaves flaring in the canopy, seemingly having forced aside the foliage of the host tree.
One species had striations like braided cable. It rooted at the base of the tree it climbed but also sent a tendril toward the landing site with the determination of water sliding down a chute. Surface roots anchored the tendrils, but there were no leaves or other apparent reason for the plant’s expenditure of energy.
Blohm wasn’t trying to make sense of the forest’s individual elements. He was forming a gestalt of the whole. Everything the forest did was hostile to foreign life. Therefore the tendrils were a threat. Eventually Blohm would figure out how—the why didn’t matter—but the method of the threat was less important than knowledge of the threat’s existence.
No decisions to make. No noncombatants. The whole forest was Blohm’s enemy. He felt his lips spreading in a smile.
The second bulldozer clanked out of the ship. The track plates had deep cleats that rang and squealed on the hard surfaces. These tractors were solely for use in wild terrain. They’d tear up any pavement with which they came in contact.
The tracks were of monobelt construction. Miniature clutches in the track pins locked the lower surface of each tread into a single rigid beam, spreading the load to greatest efficiency. The massive vehicles could cross ground too boggy to support a man walking. At the end of the run the pins declutched so that the take-up roller could lift the plates.
Blohm hadn’t been sure they—the others, the civilians—would be able to get the bulldozers clear before 10-1442 fell. The air was almost dead still and the soil had baked to rock when the vegetation was cleared. Maybe the ship would remain upright for centuries.
The others were going to need the bulldozers if they were to survive any time in this place. Caius Blohm thought that he might have been able to come to an accommodation with the forest if he’d been alone.