“Med—” Farrell said.
Dr. Ciler ran past and knelt. Dr. Weisshampl, eighty if she was a day, arrived literally in the arms of a pair of younger women. Four 2nd Platoon strikers were with her. Glasebrook, Methie, and a moment later Sergeant Abbado appeared behind Farrell. They turned to cover the jungle in all directions.
“Horgen’s got our cits bundled together up the trail, sir,” Abbado muttered without keying his helmet.
“C41,” Farrell ordered. “Hold in place. Ten—twelve humanoids attacked section five with swords and acid sprays. The initial attackers have been eliminated. Echo my display but don’t fucking interrupt unless there’s an attack. Six out.”
Farrell had left Tamara Lundie with the second tractor, fifty yards up the trail. The aide joined him, breathing hard. Her eyes had the open horror of a victim saved from drowning.
“How did it happen?” she asked in a husky whisper.
“Are the rest of the medics—the doctors—are they alerted?” Farrell said. He wasn’t going to release his strikers to carry out first aid until he was damned sure there wasn’t going to be a follow-up attack.
“Yes, they’re coming,” Lundie said. “Jafar has halted the column awaiting your instructions.”
There were two strikers down. Tomaczek was dead. From helmet readouts the other, Meyer, was only stunned, bruised and burned. An edged club had hacked through a bandolier in the middle of her back. Farrell began to regret leaving the body armor behind except for a handful of suits for special purposes. But weight considerations meant it was armor or ammo, and they had to have the ammo . . .
Nessman was putting analgesic and counterirritant onto the backs of Meyer’s hands where the native had squirted her. Farrell squatted to look at the first native he’d shot. Most of the face was missing, but Farrell could see that the acid spray was a hollow channel in the skull rather than being a manufactured weapon like the barbed clubs.
“They came out of the trees,” Farrell said; still squatting, finally answering the aide’s initial question. His hands trembled as he swapped his stinger’s magazine for a full one. “They didn’t make a fucking sound. Jesus, how many did we lose?”
Now that Farrell had the leisure, he heard the screams of the wounded and terrified. A four-year-old gripped her mother’s hand and cried her heart out. The woman’s body lay some distance away. The arm the child held had been hacked off at the shoulder, and the child had never released it.
The other two doctors and a man who’d risen to Director of Nursing but hadn’t forgotten the basics reached the twenty-yard stretch where the slaughter occurred. There were speckles of blood everywhere.
Farrell fingered the weapon of the native with whom he’d grappled. The edge was more like that of a saw than a sword, but the scores of individual points were as sharp as broken glass. The material had a massy, slick feel. Flakes had spalled away in a few places, leaving conchoidal fractures in the surface.
“Seven adults and one child are dead,” Lundie said with a precision Farrell supposed he should have been expecting. “Twelve adults and four children have been injured. I’m not an expert, but it appears to me that three adults and a child may not survive given the present conditions.”
She swallowed and added, “I include your strikers in the two categories.”
Farrell rose and looked at her. “Why didn’t you pick them up?” he asked. “Was there something wrong with the sensors?”
“There was nothing wrong with the helmet sensors,” the aide replied evenly. At this moment her eyes had no more depth than a reflection of the gray sky. “I’ve reanalyzed the data. There were no sound and vibration anomalies. The humanoids’ movements were entirely within the normal parameters of the forest.”
Farrell unhooked the damaged bandolier and removed the magazine that had taken the club stroke. Three teeth had penetrated the dense plastic; pellets dribbled out onto the bulldozed soil. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“Any forest moves,” Lundie said. She was looking at the sprawled bodies, not in fascination but with the rock-jawed rigidity of someone forcing a memory on herself. “Everything living moves. The ground trembles when branches sway and even when roots take up water from the soil. Your sensors can feel that, Major.”