The column moved like an earthworm with arthritis: bunching and spreading at irregular intervals, always moving slowly. Civilians turned and gaped as Farrell ran past, pushing them aside when he had to.
“Down flat!” he shouted. There wasn’t fucking time to explain. There was barely time for a wrung-out major with a heavy load to run the hundred yards forward to where the attack was maybe going to come. “Down flat!”
“Down flat!” Sergeant Kristal shouted to the civilians around her. She’d split her six strikers into two groups. When Farrell sent Abbado off, Kristal’s weak squad had responsibility for three hundred civilians. The weakest defenses, and the point at which Lundie said to expect the attack.
Farrell didn’t assume the natives knew how C41 was deployed. He’d seen enough combat to expect every possible thing to go wrong out of pure cussedness. That’s just how life is for a soldier.
There was nothing to the right—north—side of the bulldozer cut except lowering vegetation. A striker got used to his helmet sensors giving him a hundred yards of warning and targeting under any conditions short of a rock wall. Knowing that the natives might appear at spitting distance from the greenery, unseen until that instant, made Farrell feel as though he’d been sent into a battle with his eyes taped shut.
But a striker does what he can, and you don’t have to see your target with a grenade.
“Lie fucking down!” Farrell roared to the nearest civilians. “Get your kids down, for Chrissake!”
They were reacting, but not quickly enough. Farrell was out of sight of the nearest strikers in either direction. Because of large trees and other special circumstances, the trail kinked every ten or twenty yards. This stretch was one of the longer ones, but it seemed to be Art Farrell’s alone.
Farrell let his stinger go, dropped one of the satchels, and pulled a fuel-air grenade from the other. He armed the bomb and threw it between the trunks of trees on the edge of the cut. He knew it was going to hit something solid before it travelled more than twenty feet into the tangle; he just hoped that it didn’t bounce back among the civilians.
He took the risk because the choice was to leave the initiative with the natives . . . which meant he would die, and that at least the thirty civilians flopping on the ground behind him on his panoramic display would die also.
His own death was one of the things that came with his enlistment oath; theirs wasn’t.
Farrell threw a second grenade, then a third. He had a dozen in each satchel. If nothing happened sooner, he’d throw every fucking one of them and throw the three electricals on his belt after that. In these conditions the electrical grenades’ fragmentation effect made them both more dangerous to friendlies and less useful against hostiles. The fuel spread and mixed with air pretty much unhindered by treetrunks and ground cover.
“Daddy, what are we—”
A parent’s hand clamped hard over the child’s mouth. No need for that, but they didn’t know. They were civilians, they shouldn’t fucking be here.
Whoom! and concussion shoved Farrell back like a medicine ball in the chest. Foliage hid the flash of the explosion. The shockwave had a wet, green smell. He took out another grenade.
Whoom! as Farrell threw the grenade, a little higher than he’d intended. His aim was straight enough for safety because he’d allowed for the blast. He was maybe warning the attackers, he knew that, but he was sure-hell putting them off balance and there was never a bad time to do that.
Whoom! as Farrell reached for the next grenade. The torso of a native rode an orange bubble skyward in a sudden clearing thirty feet into the jungle. His limbs were four separated exclamation points at the margins of the flash.
Another native stepped from the undamaged foliage six feet away, his toothed club rising. Farrell threw the 20-ounce grenade into his face, crushing cheekbones and the beaklike jaw.
The native fell into the undergrowth; the grenade bounced back against Farrell’s boots. The bomb was harmless; he hadn’t thumbed the arming switch.