Redliners(105)

He glanced directly at Farrell again. "I watch her when I think there might be a problem, Major."

Branches creaked. A tree thirty feet high walked into the cleared track on a tripod of air roots.

Limbs groped for a civilian so tired that he continued to slog toward it with his face to the ground. Nessman fired five times, hitting branches with three of the grenades. Jagged splinters blew out from the flashes. Another branch closed the spray of twigs at its tip on Nessman.

"Down!" Farrell shouted. He backed a step to be sure the jet from the rocket he lifted to his shoulder wouldn't fry a civilian.

The tree wobbled on its long roots like a praying mantis. Two more branches, one of them broken by a grenade, swung toward Nessman. The striker's boots were off the ground.

Farrell aimed at the trunk just below the crown and fired. As the rocket cracked away, something grabbed him from behind by both elbows.

Farrell's rockets were fuzed for a quarter-second delay because most of the targets were going to be tree trunks. This warhead penetrated to the heartwood and went off, blowing all the limbs away from the bole. Nessman hit the ground hard and rolled clear of the relaxing grip.

The panoramic display showed Farrell what he couldn't turn his head enough to see: a bush with dark green foliage had leaned onto the track to seize him. He'd backed too close to the forest when he launched. He tried to reach the powerknife in his belt; the supple branches bent, but not enough.

The decapitated tree lurched forward with mad purpose. Farrell didn't suppose the blast had affected the controlling intelligence, but the tree's sensory organs must have been in the branch tips. It zigzagged across the trail, folding one root under the trunk and shifting to the new center of gravity with each stride. It disappeared into the unbroken jungle, leaving behind a faint streamer of smoke from its jagged peak.

Leaves closed over Farrell's helmet and began to draw his head back. Through a gap in them he saw Nessman fumbling with a 4-pound rocket. "Your knife!" Farrell shouted. "Cut me loose or it'll break my neck!"

The striker ignored him and extended the blast tube of the rocket. "For Christ's sake, Nessman—" Farrell said.

Nessman fired the rocket into the ground immediately behind Farrell. The warhead, again on a quarter-second fuze, blew both strikers across the track in a shower of dirt and a flare of unburnt fuel.

Farrell tried to sit up. Manager al-Ibrahimi and several other civilians helped him. The walking tree hadn't left a mark in the walls of vegetation to either side of the trail.

"Christ, Nessman, that was a bit drastic, wasn't it?" Farrell said.

"One good turn deserves another, Major," the striker said with a shaky smile. "There was a spike like a big needle coming out of the middle of that thing. I didn't figure to fuck around hoping I'd get the right spot with my knife."

"Anybody hurt?" Farrell said as he got to his feet. "Are we all okay?"

"Besides," said Nessman, taking the project manager's hand to help stand up. "I never believed there was any such thing as too much force."



"Sarge, my helmet says this branch is moving, mark," Caldwell said. "Do you—"

Abbado clicked the image onto the left half of his visor. The tree was thirty feet to the right of the track the bulldozer was cutting immediately ahead of 3-3. Abbado had to shift a few steps sideways to see it directly. The motion of the high branch was minute, but the AI said the tip was pulling away from the column.

Like a striker winding up to throw a grenade, Abbado figured.

"—think—" Caldwell continued.

Abbado raked a burst from his stinger the length of the branch. The pellets had lost some velocity and energy in the hundred feet from the muzzle, but they still chewed wood like the blade of a circle saw.

Bark exploded; the branch shivered like a broken-backed snake. Scores of fist-sized individual pellets, nuts or fruit, flew off the terminal twigs and burst into flame as they fell.

One fireball landed at the edge of the track and splashed clingy droplets across several feet of scraped dirt; the rest smoked and steamed to the jungle floor. None of them did any harm.

The branch dangled from a strand of bark. The stinger pellets hadn't broken it through, but the limb's own snapping release smashed its weakened fibers.

"Josie," Abbado said, "if God hadn't meant us to use reconnaissance by fire, he wouldn't have given us stingers. Break. C41, watch this tree as you pass, mark. Some of the other branches may have an idea they want to toss things at us. Out."

"It might've filled you like a pincushion, Sarge," Ace Matushek said. "Remember what happened to Top."

"Hey, it was going to throw something so I broke its throwing arm," Abbado said. "Where's the down side?"