Farrell looked around. The colonists had halted a hundred feet back. Strikers from the lead squad were in position nearby, reloading weapons. Some of them had raised their visors. They looked shaken. Farrell damned well felt shaken.
His visor overlay showed that C41 had held position pretty well, though there’d been a little easing forward. Fighting drew the strikers even though they knew there was more risk of an attack from the sides or rear than there was of the tree pulling up its roots and charging down the column.
Not that Farrell was ready to count that possibility out completely.
One of the bark tentacles slowly uncoiled on the ground. That was gravity, not malevolence. The tree was dead, waiting to be uprooted and flung to the side as soon as the bulldozer got moving again.
“C41, all clear,” Farrell ordered. “We’ll hold five minutes to get reorganized. Tell your civilians. They’re not on the net, so they won’t know what’s happening. Over.”
Manager al-Ibrahimi walked toward him. His aide came from where she’d been in the center of the column, her concern for al-Ibrahimi obvious even though her face was without expression.
Farrell rubbed his right wrist where the backblast had seared him. The manager would probably have to replace the bulldozer’s driver until the original staffer had a chance to settle down.
Farrell needed to pick another striker to ride the deck.
He’d been thinking of the march in terms of miles and days. Now he started wondering how long it would be before he ran out of strikers.
Local Visitors
The air was hot and still and humid, but at least the trees towering to either side of the cut shaded the column from direct sun. Abbado noticed Dr. Ciler nearby, helping a woman with a cane. She was tramping along determinedly instead of riding on top of a trailer.
“Hey Doc?” he called. “How long do you think it’s going to be before the leaves all go transparent so the sun can shine on us full strength?”
The old woman turned in horror. “Oh, dear heaven,” she said. “Is that going to happen next?”
“The sergeant was joking, Mrs. Trescher,” Ciler said. “Certainly I would applaud if I thought I’d have nothing worse to treat than sunburns, though.”
A stinger fired from the front of the column, just a short burst. When a squad from First Platoon took the lead after four hours, 3-3 and the civilians they guarded let the front half of the column move past them. It didn’t seem to Abbado that any location was more dangerous than another, but a lot of people were going to be convinced that wherever they were was the hot seat. God or the major kept the level of bitching down by rotating the order of march.
It had taken the new team about an hour to stop blasting the hell out of anything that looked weird. This whole fucking jungle looked weird. You had to learn to use stingers sparingly, a few pellets here and there to recon by fire. Otherwise you were likely to have half the squad reloading when the shit really hit the fan.
Abbado was responsible for over two hundred colonists in this position. The major’d given his squad leaders the choice of how they deployed their strikers. Abbado split his in pairs at intervals among the civilians. He didn’t trust a lone striker when these damned trees were likely to come at you from both sides at once.
Abbado was alone at the head of the section, but what the fuck. That was the sort of decision you made when you let them give you the promotion.
There were still stretches of thirty or forty yards between pairs. The way the trail zigzagged meant sometimes civilians were out of sight of the nearest guards. You couldn’t expect people hauling stretchers and too much of the wrong kind of luggage to stay in parade-ground formation. Abbado hadn’t thought much about civilians since he enlisted, and what he did think hadn’t been very positive. These folks were okay, the most of them.
Mrs. Florescu, the woman wearing Caldwell’s extra boots, took the old lady’s arm from Dr. Ciler. Florescu was carrying a soft bag in her left hand, dragging the bottom along the bulldozed ground. Abbado wouldn’t have bet that either the bag or the woman would last out the day, but he’d sure give her credit for trying.