Redliners by David Drake

“It don’t make any damn sense all of us having to hike through the jungle,” he said. “They ought to, well, send a few of you guys to the right place and bring in aircars in another ship. You guys hike a lot, right?”

“Not a lot, no,” Meyer said. “Mostly we ride.”

By assault boat. But Seligman wouldn’t get the point even if she said that.

Seligman knelt and checked code tags with an electronic reader. “Yeah, this is it,” he said. He looked over his shoulder at the striker. “I still think some of you soldiers ought to fetch help. It’s what makes sense to me.”

Right, divide your force when you know there’s a shipload of Kalendru troops in the immediate vicinity. Meyer shrugged. She said, “I just follow orders, buddy. The decisions come from the manager, not me.”

She stepped back into the corridor. “I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said without turning her head. “You can bring the labor crew up when you’re ready to.”

“Hey, I’m coming!” Seligman said. “I tell you, this damned planet isn’t someplace I want to be alone.”

You don’t know what alone is, buddy, the striker thought, but she didn’t say anything aloud.

* * *

Patches of forest still smoldered despite the afternoon downpour. The smoke tended to hang on the nearby foliage the way rival groups at a party refuse to mix. At the edge of the clearing Blohm smelled the damp, chalky odor of clay turned by the tracks of the bulldozer as it dragged the aircar free.

Superintendent Rifkind wasn’t really examining the wreckage. Technical experts had done that while it was still daylight, even carrying pieces back to study in the ship despite the risk. Rifkind ran her gloved hand over the nacelle. It had warped when the fanblades sheared and let the motor spin ungoverned.

The sky was clear and brilliant with stars. Blohm wondered if the colonists would name the constellations to their children, the way adults on Earth had done. He couldn’t guess how many different night skies he’d seen since he enlisted, but he’d never learned what to call those new stars.

“I don’t see how it happened,” Rifkind said. “We tested it, Daniello did. I watched him test it.”

Bonfires burned near the ship. Blohm supposed the fires were for the civilians’ mental comfort. Somebody hoped it would help, anyway.

Rifkind fingered the intake housing. The screen was intended to filter incoming air so that chunks of debris wouldn’t damage the fan blades.

A flashlight bobbed out of the encampment. Blohm increased his visor’s magnification. An older civilian woman was coming up the trail one of the bulldozer’s treads had crushed in the soil. The striker didn’t recognize her, but there were limits to the detail you could expect from even Strike Force optics at night.

The manager and several civilian specialists carried off the aircar’s front screen for examination. A resilient, airtight sheet of cloudy substance filled the meshes.

Their rear intake was the same. When the fans couldn’t pull air through the blockage, the car had dropped like a brick.

“Ma’am?” Blohm called. “You’re not supposed to be here. Go back to the others, please.”

Half the strikers were on watch at intervals all around the perimeter of the clearing. The other half were off-duty unless needed as a reaction force. The major’d ordered that nobody should take his helmet off.

Blohm didn’t know about the Spooks, but the forest at least seemed quiescent since the sun had set. The scout no longer had the feeling that something large and hungry was watching him from behind.

The woman reached them and stood diffidently. “I’m Seraphina Suares,” she said. “My husband was killed in the crash. I came to see him one last time. His grave.”

Suares had kept the flashlight aimed down so that it wouldn’t overload the image intensifier in Blohm’s visor. When she was within ten feet and sure of the track before her, she switched it off entirely.

“Ah,” said Blohm. “They’re on the other side of the car, ma’am.”

“Yes,” said Suares. She added softly, “His real monument was his work, of course. We never had children of our own.”