Meyer sat a little to one side of the track, taking off her hard suit. She looked drawn. Since she was already suited up, she’d moved to the lead dozer when Pressley bought the farm. Meyer kept the slot after 3-3 rotated back in the line. Abbado figured the vibration as the dozer chewed its way forward would have wrung him out in a lot less than four hours.
“Hey, Essie,” he said. “Get tired of the scenery up front?”
The sound of a tree falling started and went on for a long time, too loud for conversation in a reasonable tone of voice even this far back in the column. Abbado motioned to the civilians nearest to him. “Take five,” he shouted. They were getting too close to the staggering tail of the previous section. Mixing the groups was a worse danger than stringing the whole line out a trifle longer.
Meyer sucked water from her canteen. She shook her head. “The major took me off,” she said. “I’m lazy. I’d ride the whole way if he’d let me.”
The utter exhaustion in her eyes belied her words. There was no doubt in Abbado’s mind that whoever was guarding the lead tractor was an even-money bet to be the next casualty.
After the initial disaster, the dozer hadn’t run into anything that posed a danger to the vehicle itself. A stand of jointed, thirty-foot high reeds had bent suddenly from either side of the blade cut and lifted Meyer off the platform not long after she took over the job, though. Glasebrook’s flame gun and the stingers of the rest of 3-3 had scythed the gripping reeds down before they proceeded to whatever was next on their agenda.
It had been real close. Meyer’s hard suit was scarred by pellets Abbado had fired directly at her because there wasn’t any choice.
The major put the scouts out in front when they rejoined. The route had been a lot less straight since then, but there hadn’t been any more real problems.
The last civilians had meandered out of sight. Meyer released the catches of her back and breast, then started working on the leg armor. White-cored speckles with black rims marked where flame had spattered her right thigh piece.
“Well, hang in, snake,” Abbado said. He saw the purple dot that marked the major moving rearward in the overlay miniaturized on the upper left corner of his visor. He’d already walked the length of the column, checking on how things were going. He seemed to be making another round. One tough mother, Six was.
Abbado turned and called to his weary civilians, “Mount up, people. We want to get to the barracks before the others use up all the hot water in the showers, right?”
Carrying seventy pounds of weapons and munitions, Sergeant Guilio Abbado started forward. He glanced back to make sure the colonists were following him. They were, many of them doing what they could to help others.
They were a damned good group of people, they were. He was proud of them.
Blohm focused on a tree twenty feet in diameter and said, “Mark!” The trunk was as smooth as a lamppost to the peak a hundred and fifty feet in the air. From there branches flared like the leaves of a root vegetable.
Instead of shading out lesser vegetation, the emergent’s foliage was almost hidden above the main canopy. Only infrared and the AI’s processing capability enabled Blohm to trace the limbs’ course over the surrounding jungle.
“What’s the problem with it, snake?” Sergeant Gabrilovitch asked. The scouts stood within arm’s length of one another, but Gabe’s visor echoed his partner’s display. The sergeant didn’t see anything exceptional about the tree except its size, and even that wasn’t unique.
“The branches are hollow,” Blohm explained. “See how thick they are? The AI says they couldn’t be that thick if they were solid.”
Gabe’s expression didn’t change as his eyes calculated that the two of them were well within the branches’ seventy-five foot radius. The only reason he could imagine for the limbs to be hollow was that something poured out of them like beer from a spigot.