He took off his helmet and looked at the outer surface of his visor because it was an excuse to avoid all those frightened, trusting eyes for a moment. He raised his eyes again.
“Folks,” he concluded, “you got to be careful, you got to help each other as much as you can. My strikers and me, we’ll do our best. But that’s all I can promise. That we’ll do our best.”
The civilians gave a collective sigh. They seemed to be trying to stand straight.
Abbado smiled with wry affection. He eyed the regrown forest beyond the assembly. Some of the young trees looked like misshapen men carrying torches.
And Bedsoe was probably right. They did hate people.
The bulldozer squealed ahead ten feet, just enough to take the strain off the right track. The left track, turning at three times the speed of the other, broke up the thin soil and the harder substrate as it rotated the vehicle in the direction where it was to attack the forest.
Esther Meyer wore a hard suit with her visor locked down. She walked stiffly toward the bulldozer. The cab, a tightish fit for a driver in full armor, had heavy frames and an armored roof. Meyer’s position was on the non-skid deck around the cab’s sides and open rear.
“Hey Meyer,” somebody called. She ignored the voice. The bulldozer was making enough noise that she could pretend not to hear a bomb going off if she wanted to.
Besides the weight of the hard suit, Meyer carried her stinger, a grenade launcher, and a dispenser pouch of hand-thrown grenades of both styles. All that was fine, but Top had insisted she have a flame gun as well. Meyer hated flame guns. She’d never used one except in training, seven years before.
The choice was carry the flame gun or give somebody else the station on the tailboard. Since the strikers on guard with the tractors were the only ones who’d be wearing armor, she’d agreed. The tank of pressurized fuel on her back still gave her the willies.
“Meyer, this is Top,” the command channel snapped. “I’m at the plasma cannon. Come here for a moment, I’ve got a job for you. Over.”
“Top, you gave me a job,” Meyer protested. “I’m with the dozer, remember? Over.”
“Meyer, first I want you to burn off the ammo, all right?” Daye said. She could see him waving from the log where the gun still rested. “We can’t afford the weight, but I don’t want to leave the gun and ammo both. The Spooks may not be so tight for transport. Over.”
“Top, I’m coming,” Meyer said wearily. “Out.”
She raised her visor and clumped to the first sergeant, feeling like a rock trying to roll uphill. Her load was one thing if the tractor was carrying it, another when she had to.
It wasn’t worth dumping the gear and then draping herself with it again, though. And she understood Top’s idea—you didn’t fire a plasma cannon except with a hard suit on. That meant her or Pressley on the other tractor, and she was closer.
“I thought what we’d do,” Daye said when she reached him, “was save the lead dozer some work. I want you to blast a hole right through the trees on the vector we’ll be taking out of here. Just keep shooting till all the ammo’s gone, right? We’ll kill two birds with one stone that way.”
He looked pleased with himself. Well, he had a right to be. Meyer just wished it hadn’t meant her hiking an extra fifty yards, kitted out like a whole weapons locker.
“Okay,” she said. She dropped her visor again to get the vector, then checked it against the position of everything that she didn’t want bathed in plasma.
Bolts dispersed to a degree in an atmosphere. If one hit a solid object, even something as slight as a finger-thick sapling, the stream flared widely. Meyer didn’t want anybody, strikers or civilians, within fifty feet of her sight line.
The main body was behind the gun position, in the area the bulldozers had cleared west of the ship. The colonists’ section leaders were sorting them out, trying to anyway. C41 stood on guard around the mass though occasionally a striker got involved helping or explaining something. They were all well clear of the plasma cannon.