“Ma’am?” Abbado said. He reached out but he was afraid to touch her. He looked desperately at the nearest civilians.
A father took the hand of a six-year-old so that his wife could put her arms around the crying woman. “It’s all right, Mrs. Florescu,” the mother said. “I’ve got an extra pair that I don’t want to carry. What size are you?”
“One-sixty-five,” Florescu said, trying to control her sobbing. “I’d just moved in. A new life after the divorce. And then this. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t get anything ready, I just couldn’t!”
“I’m one-fifty-five,” the other woman said. She looked at Abbado with a worried expression. “Do you think that’s too small, captain?”
“Shit, I’m a one-sixty-five and I’ve got a pair in my hold baggage that was just going to feed mice,” Caldwell said. “Cover for me while I get them, Sarge? They’re up on Deck 24.”
Abbado nodded. “Don’t let Top see you going back aboard,” he said. “And don’t waste time.”
Caldwell put a bulldozed line of brush between her and the command group as she trotted toward the ship.
“You’re going to be the envy of all your friends, Mrs. Florescu,” Abbado said. “Genuine Strike Force boots, guaranteed to outlast the wearer. Now, let’s take a look at your bag, here.”
He knelt and turned over a suitcase that probably weighed pretty close to what the owner herself did. It had a built-in air cushion lift similar to that of a Heavy Weapons dolly—and here as useless as tits on a boar.
One of the bulldozers squealed as it raised its blade from resting position on the ground. Whining and clanking, the massive vehicle started toward the edge of the forest.
These poor bastard civilians.
The second bulldozer backed slowly toward the trailer’s tow-bar. The drive started out at a high-pitched whine, but the sound lowered as torque overcame the vehicle’s initial static resistance.
“There are still ten adults and two children on the transport,” Tamara Lundie said—ostensibly to the project manager but loud enough that Farrell would be sure to hear over the tractor’s squeals and clangor. “Councillor Lock’s wife and child are among them. I believe the councillor has gone back aboard also.”
“That’s under control,” Farrell said wearily. He hadn’t slept worth a damn. Dreaming about the extraction from Active Cloak, and he’d have thought his subconscious could have found more pressing concerns. “I’ve got four strikers chivying people out.”
Farrell tried to visualize the column stretching through the jungle. Half a mile long, and that was if the civilians kept together better than he had any expectation that they would. How the hell was C41 going to protect them?
“I’ve placed the second tractor in the center of the column as you requested, Major,” al-Ibrahimi said. “Because it’s as large as the path the leading vehicle cuts, it divides the column . . . which it would not do if it were at the rear or front.”
The tractor backed over the tow-bar. The two staffers holding the bar ready had to jump aside, shouting curses at the driver.
The driver lifted her helmet visor. “It’s this fucking spacesuit!” she shouted back. “You try to do better wearing one, Biggs!”
She closed the visor. The bulldozer whined forward a foot and a half and halted while the other staffers gingerly returned to lift the bar.
“I want resupply in the middle of the column,” Farrell said. “My people are carrying double their usual ammo loads—”
Which were about double what Logistics thought a striker’s basic load should be to begin with.
“—but we don’t know what we’re going to run into. The only way we’ve got to cover the civilians is to lay down enough fire to chew this jungle to a golf green at the first sign of trouble. The dozer can cut its own way off the path if we need to get by it.”
Susannah Reitz broke from a group of floor monitors and strode toward the project manager. “Manager al-Ibrahimi,” she said in a voice with a shrill edge, “I’ve taken a look at some of the citizens you claim are fit to march. We have a woman from Three West who’s eight and a half months pregnant! We have fourteen residents over seventy years old, and we have an asthmatic for whom a walk of as much as half a block in this heat and humidity will mean a life-threatening attack.”