A fruit the size of a pumpkin sailed from the tip of a high branch across twenty feet of horizontal distance. It burst like a water balloon on the ground where Meyer had been held a moment before. Everything organic, even the rich layer of topsoil, smoldered as juice from the ruptured fruit splashed over it.
Meyer scrambled to her feet. “Get clear!” she snarled to the pair of strikers with powerknives and stingers ready to cut her loose. “Can’t you fucking hear! Get clear!”
She pulled a fuel-air grenade from her belt and armed it. “Fire in the hole!” she repeated as she threw the grenade into the undergrowth
Meyer crouched. The shockwave rolled her over, but the hard suit protected her against injury from the non-fragmentation blast. A hundred square feet of vegetation, including another stand of grass, vanished in an orange fireball.
Meyer trotted into the middle of the patch she’d just cleared, arming an electrical grenade. She wasn’t going to take any chance of the ground cover grabbing her this time.
Blohm eyed the six lumps on the obvious path. Each was mottled gray and about the size of a soccer ball. Except for their slightly elevated infrared signatures, they might have been stones. “I don’t trust those,” he said.
“I don’t trust any damned thing in this jungle,” Gabrilovitch said sourly. “We go around?”
Blohm scanned a two-hundred-seventy-degree panorama of forest. The scouts were returning by a route that never crossed, much less followed, their original track. It looked to Blohm that despite that precaution the landscape had them neatly blocked unless they wanted to pass the “stones.”
The bushes to the right had sword-shaped leaves that you’d want to avoid on any planet. The emergent whose branches overhung the lesser trees to the left was laden with bulbous fruit which could be anything, but was certainly dangerous.
“Got your nose filters in place, Gabe?” Blohm said as he aimed his stinger. A treetrunk in the middle distance concealed all but his helmet and gun hand from the target.
“Roger,” said Gabrilovitch, turning to face their backtrail.
Blohm fired a single pellet into the most distant of the lumps, thirty feet away. It was a toadstool. The casing ruptured in a geyser of spores.
“We’ll let those settle—” he began.
A blue spark snapped at the base of the toadstool, detonating the spore cloud. The shockwave swept away the other lumps as sheets of pale dust.
“I guess that wouldn’t have killed us if we’d been walking down the trail,” Blohm said softly, “but it sure would have pushed us to one side or the other in no shape for quick thinking.”
“I’d rather be in a tunnel on Case Lion,” Gabrilovitch said. “I swear to God I would, snake. I’m a city boy.”
“Come on, Gabe,” Blohm said. “We’ll be with the company in an hour and you can relax.”
For his own part, Caius Blohm was as relaxed as he’d been since Active Cloak.
Brush and trees eight inches in diameter cascaded off the side of the land-clearing blade as the bulldozer advanced. The driver made a minute adjustment to center the point at the lower left corner of the blade—”stinger” to the operators, though the term made Abbado blink every time he heard it—on a monster five feet in diameter. There were larger trees in the forest, but this one was bigger than Abbado would have tangled with if he’d been driving the vehicle.
Because the tractor’s transmission was a torque converter, the thrumming engine note remained constant though the chink of the treads slowed. Topsoil, clay, and finally crumbling laterite lifted from beneath the tracks as the bulldozer’s mass tried to anchor it to attack the even greater mass of the tree.
“Take back your gold . . .” Horgen sang under her breath, “for gold can never buy me . . .”
Wood cracked like the fire of an automatic cannon. Pressley, riding the platform behind the cab, bobbed as the vehicle jerked and attempted to go forward.
“Horgen, shut the fuck up, will you?” Abbado said gloomily.
Horgen raised her left hand and nodded an apology.
The driver shifted to neutral, then reversed. The treads ground backward over the piles they’d dug. The double trench was six inches deep and layered, black over yellow over deep ochre that would harden to rusty brown in the air and sun.