“Thought I’d broke it,” Nessman said, probing the heel of his right foot gingerly with the fingers of both hands. The boot and his armored gauntlets lay beside him, but he wore the rest of his hard suit.
“It’s okay, then?” Meyer said, holding the butt of the plasma cannon against her shoulder so that it wouldn’t slip off the log. She peered at Nessman’s foot by rotating the view on the lower range of her visor. She couldn’t turn her head because her suit was buttoned up. The gorget locked her helmet to the back-and breast-armor.
“Damn thing’s swelling,” Nessman said. “I don’t think it’s broke, though.” He tilted back so that she could see his grin through his open visor. “Beats hell out of hanging in the door till the ship fell over on me, though. Thanks, snake.”
A creature the size of Meyer’s middle finger hopped out of a hole in the log and stared at her with four eyes. It squeaked. The creature was bright green and stood on two legs, though when it hopped down the log it used all four.
“If it’s swelling, you ought to get it looked at,” Meyer said, peering through the plasma cannon’s sight. She wondered if the little animal was poisonous. Most anything here was likely to be, from the quick warning the major had given C41 when he explained where screwed-up navigation had landed them.
Meyer was glad she was wearing a hard suit. She’d been antsy ever since Active Cloak. She was okay, though.
“Aw, the docs have got enough on their plates,” Nessman said as he picked up his boot. “I’ll just get this back on while I still can. Maybe when things settle down.”
“That’ll be a while,” Meyer said.
Civilians trilled and hooted like swarms of birds. There wasn’t a single open space large enough to hold all of 10-1442’s passengers, not that half of them wouldn’t have wandered somewhere else anyway. Deck monitors were trying to organize them, but the forest’s shattered remains broke the landscape into sections as discrete as the partitioned cubicles of a hangar-sized office. The barrier distorted speech, and you couldn’t see twenty feet in any direction.
A lot of civilians had been banged around when the transport skidded. Meyer couldn’t imagine that as many as were shouting for doctors really had anything more wrong with them than bruises; but hell, she didn’t know.
Meyer crouched, lowering the gun butt so that the muzzle pointed above the brush and fallen trees. Unbroken forest filled the projection sight. It was like staring at an oncoming tank, huge and implacable.
Nessman clamped his boot shut and gave a sigh of relief. “Goddam but it hurts when I squeeze it!” he said. “I sprayed it, so I figure I can walk all right till it wears off.”
“Then we find you a doc,” Meyer said.
All the strikers got first aid training and carried a basic medical kit. There were normally two specialist medics with a C-class company. C41 had gone into Active Cloak with only one. He, Hung Sen, was working on the legless sergeant of Gun 1 when a follow-up shell minced him and his patient together.
“Aw, I’m all right,” Nessman said without a lot of emphasis. He reached for his gauntlets.
There wasn’t a good field of fire for a stinger on this landing site, much less a plasma cannon. Any striker wearing a helmet in the line of fire would appear as a caret in the cannon’s sight, but there was no way to tell if some civilians had walked behind a fallen thicket downrange to take a dump in privacy. You’d think people would worry more about having their asses blown away than they did about who might see that ass bare, but it wasn’t true. Wasn’t always true of strikers, either.
“Want me to—” Nessman said, rising to his feet.
“Contact!” the helmet warned. “Contact!”
Meyer pulled back the lever on the side of the guntube and let it go, switching power to the trigger mechanism. Launcher-fired grenades, two and then four more, went off near the perimeter to the northeast. One of them speared a branch skyward on a burp of orange flame.