Redliners(30)

Nessman was stronger and he'd obviously had experience with this sort of thing before. He wasn't enough stronger that he'd be able to rape her without killing her first, though, and after thirty seconds or so he realized that was the choice. Nessman had banged her head against the floor, but although Meyer was groggy she came close to biting his nose off a moment later.

He'd gotten up then, dabbing at his scratches as he backed out of the storeroom. They hadn't spoken about the incident afterwards, neither between themselves nor to anyone else. In fact, they'd kept as wide a berth from one another as a unit the size of C41 permitted.

Active Cloak gave them a shared bond. The operation had been tough for everybody, sure, but it was damned near suicidal for Heavy Weapons Platoon. Meyer and Nessman hadn't become friends, but they were colleagues for the first time. Meyer hadn't asked to transfer to a different compartment when Kuznetsov automatically billeted her with Nessman and 1-1.

"I dunno, Essie," Nessman said. "There's a fuckup somewhere, and we all know where that leaves strikers. Swinging in the breeze. I don't like it."

"I'm not saying you're wrong, Nessman," Meyer said. "But if you want to know the truth, I'm looking forward to a place that doesn't have Spooks in it. Especially I'm looking forward to a place that doesn't have Spook tanks."

She glanced sharply at the other striker. Nessman was the closest thing Meyer had to a friend in this universe, and even on his best day she couldn't convince herself that she much liked him.

She chuckled at the irony. Nessman raised an eyebrow.

* * *

Blohm and Gabrilovitch watched as the image of a white mass launched itself from the top of a tree, expanding into a sticky sheet as it fell. It splashed onto one of a herd of small quadrupeds rooting for nuts among the tree roots. A thin umbilicus still tethered the sheet to the high branch.

The victim thrashed wildly. The net grew tighter, constricting as it congealed. The umbilicus began to retract.

"Hell, the animals are bad and the plants are worse," Gabrilovitch muttered. "This is going to be a bitch for you and me, snake."

The projected scene was a computer creation based on vertical imaging. You could never be sure how accurate a construct like this was. It was extremely dangerous because it looked perfectly real even though it wasn't. The virtual run-throughs of Active Cloak had all three floors of the garrison barracks occupied by Kalendru soldiers, for example.

"I don't see what's so bad about it," Blohm said. "Watch what trees you walk under, sure. But they'll have cleared a hundred square miles to prep for the colony, won't they? We won't see anything green till the crops start coming in."

Blohm liked the sergeant better than anybody else who'd commanded a scout section Blohm was in. Gabe knew that Blohm was quicker and had better instincts than he did. He didn't let it bother him. Gabrilovitch let Blohm set the agenda for the scouts and used his rank to put that agenda across in command group meetings.

Besides that, Gabe was as good a choice to cover Blohm's back as Blohm figured he'd find until they cloned Blohm himself.

"Negative on the site prep," Gabrilovitch said, shaking his head. "The only thing they did was plant a couple of message capsules and a landing grid for us to put down on. There's a pair of bulldozers with land-clearing blades on Deck One, but nothing in the way of herbicide like you'd figure. It's going to be a lot of work, and a lot of hand work, to open the settlement."

On the display the umbilicus continued to shorten, dragging the captured browser toward the treetop. The victim had ceased to struggle. It looked like a gigantic cocoon. Its body would feed the tree for the next several weeks.

"They going to expect us to do it, you mean?" Blohm said. "Hell, Gabe, before I transferred to the Strike Force, they had me burning shit on Christophe where the water table at the base was too high for septic tanks. I guess I can handle a saw if that's what it comes to."

"No way C41's going to be doing the labor, snake," Gabrilovitch said. "The cits are going to have to handle that while the strikers guard them. Look at how dangerous this place is! The work's going to have to be done, and the cits are going to be lucky if half of them don't get eaten by things like that—"

He gestured at the holographic image, by now no more than a normal-looking tree with a white lump perhaps of fungus among the leaves of its peak.

"—for all C41 can do to save them."

The display blacked out and segued into the next potential danger. For the moment the image looked like an ordinary bramble bush, but Blohm knew that would change shortly.

"Well," he said thoughtfully, "I don't know it's going to be that hard. We've got the database loaded in our helmets. The visor'll cue us if we come on one of these. Or whatever."