Meyer flailed with both hands. They missed their grip on the blade. She began to slide beneath the front of the tread.
Roaring. Blackness. Alone.
Something caught and anchored Meyer’s right leg.
Meyer pushed herself back on her armored belly before she dared to stand up again. Matthew Lock, kneeling on the fender, let go of her ankle. “I lost the gun,” he said. His whole body was trembling. The scarf still covered his face.
“C41, this is Six,” Meyer’s helmet ordered. “Cease fire. We’ve got this batch too. Good work, people. Six out.”
Strain
There were seven wounded civilians. Four of them had caught grenade fragments; one lost her arm to a stinger pellet because she jumped up screaming when the natives came out of the jungle in front of her. One civilian had died of a stroke.
None of them had been killed by the attack itself. Not one.
Ciler was bent over his diagnostic display. “Doc, I’m getting too damned old for this,” Farrell said, his eyes slitted.
Both bulldozers snarled, clearing a campsite. The column hadn’t gotten as far as Farrell would have liked, but there were too many injured to treat on the move.
“You’re very lucky to be alive,” Ciler said. “The spikes on the club passed to either side of a carotid.”
He smiled tightly. “Under the present ridiculous circumstances, I have to class the injury as superficial, however.”
“I feel like shit,” Farrell said as he got to his feet. “That’s good, because it reminds me I’m alive.”
Massengill took a piece of grenade shrapnel—probably his own grenade—through a femoral artery. What with everything going on at the time, he may not even have realized he was dying before he finished bleeding out. A native chopped Buccolowski in the neck just like Farrell, but Farrell had blown his attacker’s chest out while the club was in mid swing. Ski had been a lifetime less quick.
“The one who got me was a tough fucker,” Farrell said. “Maybe we ought to recruit here for the Strike Force.”
Abdelkader’s legs were sprayed with caustic—concentrated potassium hydroxide, not an acid, the brain trust said. If the dickhead had told somebody about it as soon as the shooting stopped so they could flush the goop off him, he’d have been all right. Instead he waited till it really started to hurt.
Ciler said they’d likely save the legs, but Abdelkader was going to be gorked out on pain medication for the next month while he regrew a couple square feet of skin.
Al-Ibrahimi and his aide walked around a crew of citizens laying ground sheeting. There weren’t enough staffers in the column to do the heavy work. Farrell noticed that the cits were actually better at the job once they’d learned the basics of what was required.
The project manager nodded to Farrell. “Major,” he said, “I regret your casualties, but I congratulate you on your victory. I’m amazed that your troops were able to protect the column with such relatively slight damage. There were ninety-six humanoids in this attack.”
“The warning was the difference,” Farrell said, nodding in turn to Lundie. “It saved us.” He grinned briefly. “Saved you too, I guess.”
“But you had only a few seconds of warning,” al-Ibrahimi said.
A striker fired a 4-pound rocket. Backblast, transition to supersonic flight, and warhead detonation merged into a three-note chord: bam/crack/wham!
The target was a tree a bulldozer was about to attack. Branches split and fell with creaking objections from the blasted peak. Some striker’s helmet had given him a target; he’d taken it.
Farrell lifted his hand from the grip of his stinger and said, “Seconds count,” he said. “At the muzzle, a pellet from this thing—”
His finger caressed the weapon’s receiver like a cat owner rubbing his pet’s jaw.
“—is moving at pretty near twelve kay. Twelve thousand feet per second.”
Farrell kicked at bulldozer cleat marks in soil where the sheeting wasn’t yet laid. “Ten feet doesn’t sound like much, but if you’ve got to run that far across cleared ground to get to one of my people with a stinger—it’s far enough, sir. It’s plenty far enough.”
“The natives have almost no brain,” Dr. Ciler volunteered unexpectedly. “I’m surprised they can even manufacture clubs. It’s more like dissecting an insect than even a reptile.”