The colonists were twenty feet behind, watching the big vehicle work. The strikers were doing pretty much the same thing, which was natural but’d get them all killed if something came from the side. “Three-three,” Abbado ordered. “Watch your flanks and watch the canopy. That’s where the trouble’s going to come from, not from the tractor. Over.”
The tree had a ropy, almost braided-looking, surface. The blade’s stinger had started a vertical split which trailed ten or twelve feet up the trunk. As the driver maneuvered to hit the tree again at a slightly different angle, the crack lengthened. A parallel crack opened a few inches to the left and raced upward also.
“Give me the love, the love that you’d deny me . . .”
The lower end of the strip of bark lifted. For an instant Abbado thought the bulldozer had severed it. Several finger-like fibers waggled from the tip as it squirmed over the blade’s grated upper portion and caressed the front of the cab.
“Hey!” Abbado shouted. “Pressley, watch—”
The end fibers tugged at the mesh protecting the cab window, then released and flowed over the top of the cab. More strips, ropes, of bark split away to either side of the first one.
Pressley aimed his flame gun. The jet of white-hot fuel caught the tip and spattered in brilliance over the front of the tractor. Another bark tendril snaked around the side of the cab toward Pressley. Abbado and Horgen ripped it with their stingers as they ran forward. Pellets that missed sparkled from the armored motor housing and the back of the blade.
There were scores of wobbling tendrils now. The tree’s core was the silvery white of a rapier’s blade in sunlight. Pressley jerked to the right. His flame gun slashed a line of radiance across the edge of the cab, momentarily splashing him and the armored driver.
Horgen shouted. The fibers at the tip of a tendril gripped her waist, almost spanning it. She blasted the tentacle point-blank. Though the pellets shredded their target, the bark was a fibrous mat that retained its integrity.
Pressley lifted suddenly into the air. Civilians screamed and ran backward as the flame rod twitched toward them. A snap of the tentacle flung the weapon from the striker’s hand and shut off the flame.
Abbado let his stinger go and drew his powerknife. The tendril that first gripped Horgen was a rag clinging without force, but a second had caught her left arm as she tried to insert a fresh magazine in the stinger.
Abbado clamped the squirming rope with one hand and pulled the powerknife across with all his strength. The bark had a dry, quivering feel to it like the body of a powerful snake. Fibers frayed to either side of Abbado’s cut. It was like trying to shear steel cable.
Horgen’s stinger cracked like a miniature bullwhip, forty times a second. Other strikers were firing. Abbado heard the chunkWHACK! of a grenade launcher.
Something grabbed his right ankle. He kicked. Another something caught the left calf. The tendrils lifted him, pulling in opposite directions.
“Shit!” shouted Sergeant Guilio Abbado. “Shit!”
A part of his mind wished that he’d come up with something better for what were probably his last words.
Like the mouth of a tunnel, Farrell thought as he walked with the project manager toward where the dozer was starting its cut. Colonists made way for them with a mixture of curiosity and concern. Not the hostility Farrell expected from civilians, though. That surprised him, especially after he’d screwed up and gotten so many of them dead or wounded.
The air was smoky with a touch of ozone sharpness, the latter from either the plasma bolts or the tractor’s electric drive. The tree the gunner punted to the left with her first bolt smoldered, but only the shattered portions of the dense green wood could sustain combustion on their own. The dozer had grubbed out or crushed down what remained where the tree stood. Fresh clay clung to roots twisting from the wrack shoved aside by the broad blade.
Like snow melting in the sun, the shooting tree had shrunk to barely twenty percent of its original volume. Unfired spearheads now protruded through what remained of the head. The support fibers were less spongy than most of the plant’s tissues. They stood out like the sinews of a man straining at too great a burden.