More grenades boomed. A treetop whipped through the jungle like a barbed-wire flyswatter. It slammed the dozer blade, now held at a forty-five degree angle over the tractor’s engine compartment, and bounced back with a crackle of despair.
A humanoid native appeared in a thicket. Stems writhed like an anemone’s tentacles but didn’t harm him. He squirted caustic toward the tractor and stepped as gracefully as a bullfighter out of the way of the looming vehicle. The flame gun devoured his pelvis in incandescent fury.
Vegetation withered a yard to either side of the brief flame rod. The white glare touched a tree a foot thick. Gluey, blood-red sap gushed from the point of contact. The tree twisted and collapsed around the wound as though only pneumatic pressure had kept it upright.
Lock shouted to Seligman. Meyer had stepped to the right side of the deck; she couldn’t hear the words over the sound of the vehicle and nearby grenade blasts. She threw a grenade herself. The orange fireball bloomed almost to the treads as it pulped a hundred square feet of foliage and two humanoids.
Seligman touched a control. The land-clearing blade began to whine slowly down again from its running position.
The tree ahead braced itself against wind forces with flat plates running from the ground high up the trunk. The tractor smashed through the flanges. Wood shattered like cork, throwing up clouds of fine gray dust. A caret winked on Meyer’s visor; Lock was already tugging his neck scarf over his nose and mouth before she could warn him.
Meyer wondered how much good the scarf would do, but she had more immediate problems. She lobbed a grenade over the top of the blade. When it exploded, a jug-shaped tree twenty yards ahead burst into blue flame. It was spurting hydrogen from every pore.
Heat shrivelled the foliage as far as the bulldozer itself. The flames were pale but intensely hot. Lock cried out and ducked despite the gratings in the dozer blade and the cab window. Meyer and Seligman in their hard suits were unaffected.
The driver steered sharply to the right to avoid driving through the center of the blaze. Meyer played her stinger across three natives, then a fourth in the circle the fire had stripped of cover. The humanoids might pass through the jungle unhindered by thorns and poisons, but heat was heat and the laws of physics applied to their flesh as well.
The right blade support arm and that side of the cab twinkled, though Meyer couldn’t see the shooter or hear the pellets hitting. Seligman let go of the controls and tried to hunch beneath the level of the window openings. Lock grabbed the staffer’s armored shoulder and batted the stinger muzzle against his helmet.
Seligman straightened just as the blade sheared its way back into the trail it had previously cleared. He’d managed to switch on the intercom; Meyer could hear him blubbering. He pulled back slightly on the left control bar. The bulldozer twitched onto a parallel course instead of grinding through the people screaming as they rose in fear of a monster more terrible than the club-swinging humanoids.
Meyer stepped onto the narrow fender covering the right tread. She was afraid to throw grenades while they were so close to the main trail, and the land-clearing blade was too high to shoot over from any distance back.
The blade hit a tree too thick to smash aside. Meyer lurched forward with the shock. She caught herself on the frame that supported the grated upper portion of the blade. Roots pulled out of the soil, releasing the bulldozer as the trunk toppled to the side.
Meyer saw movement beyond a fringe of compound leaves. She hosed it with her flame gun. Humanoids appeared as screening vegetation wilted. The ravening flame converted flesh and bone to gas. There’d been three of them, maybe more. The blade scraped shrunken corpses aside with the trash of undergrowth and topsoil.
The flame died, its fuel exhausted. The ceramic nozzle glowed white/yellow/red back from the tip. Meyer dropped the weapon and reached for the stinger with her right hand.
The left track rocked over a tree which had twisted behind the blade instead of rolling off the side. Meyer fell sideways, awkward in her armor, and overcompensated. The tractor’s weight abruptly splintered the bole; she toppled to the left.