He turned on heel and toe to the door. It was a parade-ground movement that strikers had little call for, but which al-Ibrahimi's glacial calm seemed to require.
"Major?" al-Ibrahimi said. Farrell glanced back over his shoulder.
"Please recall that I am the project manager, Arthur," al-Ibrahimi said. "You and your strikers are as surely my people as the civilians they guard."
He smiled. The manager's tone and expression were as sad as anything Farrell had seen at a funeral.
"Krishna!" said Caldwell as she watched the projected display. "They're going to put humans here?"
"They're going to put us here, Josie," Ace Matushek said. "I've never been sure we qualified as human."
Bipedal herbivores spread across the holographic landscape, killing everything in sight. "They weigh about forty pounds apiece," Abbado said, quoting the figure from the database. The creatures' forelimbs were modified into either horn-edged cutting blades or bulbous tanks of caustic which the creatures could spray a distance of several yards.
Individually the creatures weren't particularly imposing, but the image taken from a survey ship orbiting Bezant showed tens of thousands in the swarm.
"Like locusts," Foyle said. "Only they suck the plants dry instead of chewing the leaves off."
3-3 had a compartment to itself, so Abbado had the squad view the mission background as a unit. Strikers would repeatedly go over the data as individuals during the voyage, but Abbado knew that mission success depended not only on good personnel but on their ability to work together.
He'd have been more comfortable if the major had been able to brief all C41 together, but the transport wasn't configured to allow that. The major'd given C41 a pep talk in the rotunda of their deck, the only space available that held everybody—barely. The lifts kept opening, and there wasn't a large-scale holographic projector. Projection from a striker's helmet worked for one squad in its compartment, but you couldn't enlarge the image enough for the entire company to see details.
"These things don't fly," Abbado said. "Locusts don't bash farmers over the head if they're in the field when the swarm lands, though."
The creatures spooked an animal from its burrow. The solitary animal was an armored quadruped whose stubby limbs bore long claws. Half a dozen young clung to knobs on the adult's back. The adult bobbed forward awkwardly, handicapped by its rigid carapace.
"What're these bastards called, do we know?" Glasebrook asked.
"Anything you like, Flea," Abbado said. "Or anything the cits like, I suppose. There isn't anybody on Bezant to name them till we get there."
Dozens of bipeds stopped feeding and jogged ahead of the main swarm, moving to either side of the quadruped's track. The quadruped lurched to the right. A biped sprayed a cloud of white vapor over the quadruped's head and forequarters.
The victim rose on its hind legs, clawing furiously with both forelimbs. Two of the young lost their grip and rolled to the ground. Bipeds chopped at them and the adult indiscriminately. The victim's claws raked open several of the attackers and flung the bodies a dozen yards away, but the site crawled with more bipeds joining the fray.
A caustic fog covered the climax. Abbado didn't have any difficulty imagining what was going on.
The viewpoint panned upward. Individual creatures lost definition against the background. A wedge of landscape, broadening as it advanced, showed the ashen gray of vegetation from which all life had been sucked. Another scar, similar but for the moment smaller, appeared hundreds of miles west of the first as the image area expanded still further.
"The analysts figure broods hatch, go on for a while, and die," Abbado said, reading from a sidebar focused for his eyes only. "The critters must die or there wouldn't be anything left but bare rock."
"Can we spray the eggs before they hatch, Sarge?" Foley asked.
"Hell, Analysis doesn't know for sure they come from eggs," Abbado said. "Maybe, but for now we've got to figure on eliminating a swarm when they're looking pretty much the way that one was."
He didn't even try to keep the disgust out of his tone. Everything on Bezant in the database had come from orbital imagery and a few automated probes to sample the microbiota. Nobody'd bothered to put scouts on the ground. C41 had gotten a lot of tough missions, but Abbado had never before been handed one where he'd had so little hard data to go on.
"Do we have electric fencing?" Horgen asked. "Only it'd take a hell of a lot of fence if the whole settlement area's going to be covered."
"That's one problem," said Abbado, "but they don't think fences would stop them—"