Farrell armed another grenade without lifting it from the satchel. He threw the satchel as far as he could into the jungle before him. Crouching against the coming blast, he aimed his stinger.
Over my dead body, you baby-killing bastards. And not even then.
Meyer rapped Seligman’s shoulder. He was driving the lead bulldozer with her for guard. “Turn us around,” she said. The staffer had a helmet as part of the hard suit: he was on the C41 net and knew what was going on. “Drive right into the wogs. They’ll run when they see this coming, right?”
The lead squad, five strikers under Jonas as senior man in lieu of a noncom, was shouting at the nearby cits to lie down. Jonas and two of his people jogged back down the trail to the expected point of contact.
“Are you out of your mind?” Seligman cried. He put the tractor in neutral. “I’m no soldier, honey! You go fight them yourself!”
Matthew Lock clambered onto the tractor’s deck. He was awkward because he held a stinger and hadn’t rigged the sling over his shoulder to free both hands.
“For God’s sake, Seligman!” Meyer shouted. “They need us back there! I can’t get there wearing armor myself.”
“I’m not going any damn where!” the staffer replied. “You don’t have any right—”
Lock tapped the muzzle of his stinger on the helmet at roughly the position of Seligman’s right ear. “Do as Striker Meyer orders or I’ll kill you,” he said in a clear voice. He rapped the helmet again.
“You can’t—” Seligman said.
Meyer fired one round into the front mesh. The pellet disintegrated with a whack and a red flash that looked brighter because of the cab’s dimness. “Turn this son-of-a-bitch!” she shouted.
Seligman thumbed a roller switch on his left handgrip. The blade rose slowly with a whine that made Meyer’s armor rattle everywhere it touched the tractor. The seat and controls were insulated from vibration but the rest of the vehicle wasn’t; Meyer was familiar with the experience by now. It wasn’t the sort of thing you got used to, any more than you’d get used to being punched in the face.
“Don’t cut a trail!” Lock shouted in the staffer’s ear. He must think the armor deadened hearing; in fact, the receptors were more sensitive than the ears they served, though they clipped loud noises to safe levels with cancellation waves. “Just get us back the fastest way without running anybody over!”
Seligman scissored the left control bar to the rear and the right one forward. The treads ground in opposite directions, turning the bulldozer in its own length. Meyer knew the maneuver stressed the running gear and was likely to throw a track, but it was still the fastest way to change direction. She didn’t complain.
If the staffer hoped to disable the vehicle, he failed. He shifted the bulldozer forward, then swung outward to avoid a giant whose spread of buttress roots he’d skirted on the opposite side a few minutes before. The blade continued to rise. For a moment the solid lower portion blocked most of the frontal vision from the cab.
Grenades went off ahead; Meyer felt the shocks despite the racket the tractor made busting brush. She thought she heard the pop of stingers.
“Striker!” Lock said. He held the stinger up to her. “How do I fire this?”
Meyer looked at the civilian’s earnest face. You couldn’t fault him for lack of balls, anyway. “This is the safety,” she said, pushing the button on the receiver over the trigger. A telltale went from green to red. “Now you pull the trigger. But for God’s sake watch where you point it!”
A fruit the size of a pumpkin hit the roof of the cab and squashed as enthusiastically as a bomb bursting. Green juice sprayed in all directions and began to drip down. Meyer shoved Lock completely beneath the roof overhang. Her hard suit wasn’t affected and the tractor’s nickel steel body merely discolored. Chunks of branch and foliage lying in the path of the spreading juice turned black and began to smolder.
Meyer shifted the tank of the flame gun to her left side, taking the nozzle in that hand. She hated flame guns—even more so since she’d seen hers incinerate Top Daye, but it might be the margin of survival.