Redliners by David Drake

She wondered if the aircar was going to hold out long enough to transfer all C41’s equipment to the new site or if the strikers would wind up humping it through the forest. Top Daye’d said something about bringing in another starship with more transport. That’d be nice. Strikers didn’t live very long if they thought the high command was going to make things easy for them, though.

Nessman was seated on the ground, removing the upper sections of his hard suit while a medic looked at his foot. He waved at Meyer. Half a dozen small fires still burned from the recent battle. Ash and bitter smoke drifted through the site.

“Meyer!” Sergeant Daye called. He waved her over.

Top stood with the major, God, and a group of civilians who looked as though they thought they should be in charge of something. A good-looking man was saying to the project manager, “It’s important that Margaret not feel she’s being pressured to leave the compartment. She’ll realize the necessity on her own, but we have to give her time.”

“Councillor Lock,” God replied in a voice that was either coldly hostile or just cold, “the ship is not a safe refuge. I suggest that you convince your wife to leave promptly, because I won’t authorize a search for her body if the vessel collapses and she’s still inside.”

“Meyer,” said Daye, “you haven’t had your neck taped, right?”

“I had my suit on the whole time, Top,” she said. She hadn’t followed what the flap about bugs was, since she and Nessman continued to crew the plasma cannon until they were relieved minutes ago.

“Well you don’t now,” Daye said. “Some of these bugs, they dig through the back of your neck into your brain and you go crazy. Have—”

The aircar lifted again, this time with Lieutenant Kuznetsov and three civilians aboard. It rose twenty feet vertically to keep from sucking in debris its own fans kicked from the ground, then headed north in a gentle climb.

“Have Abbado fit you with tape like this,” Daye resumed as the whine faded. “If he’s turned over the spool to some—”

The aircar made a sound like a double hiccup. It flipped end over end before it crashed into the jungle just beyond the landing site.

Blohm was only a hundred feet farther from the crash, but the car came down just beyond 3-1. Sergeant Bastien shouted, “Come on! There may be somebody alive!” to his squad and pushed into a stand of finger-thick shoots growing from a fallen log.

The shoots bent like strands of putty until the sergeant was halfway through. Then they snapped vertical again, squeezing his waist tighter than that of a nineteenth-century belle wearing stays. He screamed on a rising note.

“Three-one, watch overhead!” Blohm called. He dodged a bush he could have jumped over or plowed through. He just didn’t trust the look of it. As he passed, he saw the woody stem was bent like a bowstaff and quivering with tension.

Two strikers cut the shoots with their knives. The severed ends flew apart like released springs. Bastien fell to the ground and lay moaning. Another striker glanced upward in response to Blohm’s warning, but he didn’t see that a section high on the trunk of the emergent at the clearing’s edge was expanding visibly.

“Mark!” Blohm called desperately. “Three-one, get the fuck out from there! The tree’s going to burst! Over!”

Two strikers bent over their platoon sergeant. The others peered into the foliage overhead, combing through their helmets’ vision options. They still didn’t see any reason for concern.

Blohm slashed a burst from his stinger toward the treetop. A few pellets chipped bark, but the bole continued to swell. It was twice its diameter of a minute before.

Gabrilovitch was running behind Blohm. His grenade launcher chugged five times. The 4-ounce projectiles were easily visible throughout their flight. The first blew the swelling apart with a blue-white flash: Gabe had loaded with electricals.

A mass of thick white liquid slurped from the ruptured bole. The second grenade burst in the middle of it. The syrup ignited in a whuff of smoky orange flame.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *