“Contact!” Farrell’s helmet warned. “Contact!”
Flashes and explosions in series wracked the northern treeline.
“Don’t touch that,” Blohm warned. “It’s sticky and I think the sap’ll burn you.”
Gabrilovitch turned with a sour expression toward the tree an inch or two from his elbow. The bark had the sheen of wet rubber. Now that the sergeant looked carefully, he noticed that bits of leaves and other detritus of the sort that falls from the canopy stuck out of the bole here and there. Not only were pieces being absorbed into the tree, the visible portions had a seared, shrivelled texture.
“Shit,” he muttered. “Let’s get back into the clearing. Those guys—”
He nodded toward the pair of Kalendru frozen in their death throes.
“—aren’t going to tell us much.”
“Yeah, all right,” Blohm said. “You’re the boss.”
He hadn’t called Gabe through the forest wall in the first place. Having the sergeant present was one more thing for Blohm to worry about in an environment that had plenty along those lines to begin with. Gabe wasn’t careless, but he didn’t understand yet that this forest was as dangerous as the jaws of a shark.
The major had attached Blohm and Gabrilovitch to Squad 2-1 to watch the northern perimeter, but Sergeant Kristal hadn’t expected them to stick close. Her squad was used to working as a unit, just as the scouts were used to working with each other or alone. It made sense for Gabe to position himself and Blohm a hundred feet east of the nearest member of 2-1. That way the intervening vegetation would stop anything which reflex aimed before the shooter’s consciousness worried about who else might be standing in that direction.
Gabrilovitch started under a sapling. Since he’d passed by it to join Blohm, the slender bole had kinked. Sprays of leaves now dangled where they would inevitably brush his helmet and back.
“Wait,” said Blohm. He reached past the sergeant and severed the sapling near the ground with his powerknife. The foliage writhed as it fell.
“Fuck this fucking place!” Gabrilovitch whispered.
“Look, why don’t I lead?” Blohm said. He stepped around the sergeant, choosing a course at an angle to the one he’d taken on the way in. Gabe nodded agreement, but he ground his boot heel onto the sapling before he followed.
Blohm wasn’t echoing information from the helmet of any other striker. He needed to concentrate entirely on what he was doing. The hell with what was happening to somebody else.
The scouts would pass near the bole of a tree large even in this forest of giants, an emergent whose peak lifted a good fifty feet above the canopy. There was movement in the topmost branches. The helmet AI thought it was caused by a breeze that didn’t reach the forest floor, but Blohm shifted his line on instinct. The tension squeezing his ribs eased, though nothing he could have pointed to had changed.
Blohm made two quick cuts with his knife. Branches twisted toward the incisions on their upper surfaces. The scouts stepped through the sudden gap in the forest wall, back to the area devastated by shock.
“I’m glad—” Gabrilovitch said.
Blohm signaled silence with his left hand. He flipped up his visor again and drew in a deep, slow breath. “Spooks,” he said, his lips barely moving. “I smell them.”
Gabe switched his visor display with his tongue, then said, “Breeze is at three-thirty degrees to your heading. Are you sure?”
He released his stinger. It clocked against the take-up reel under his arm. In its stead Gabe aimed the grenade launcher he carried clipped to his breastplate.
“I’m sure,” Blohm said.
Gabrilovitch aimed the grenade launcher up at a sixty-degree angle so that its projectile would clear the saplings and windwrack. He fired twice. At the second choonk, brush crashed as if a herd of cattle just out of sight was charging the starship.
“Contact!” the sergeant cried. He emptied his magazine with four quick triggerpulls, turning as he fired so that by the time the high-trajectory projectiles fell they would intersect the invisible running figures. “Contact!”
Caius Blohm knelt, saying nothing. When a wraithlike Kalender suddenly rose behind a fallen tree only ten feet from Gabe struggling to reload, Blohm’s stinger cut the Spook in half.