Redliners(38)

Civilians poured out of the ship like ants from an overturned hill. Crying and shouting, they stumbled to the ground. Almost all of them came from Hatch D, the only one whose ramp reached the ground. The risk that the ship would fall in that direction didn't seem to affect them if they even noticed it.

"Hey, keep clear!" Nessman shouted. A dozen people, at least three generations of a single family, ran in front of the plasma cannon. They held hands as they headed toward the living forest.

Maybe they thought the starship was going to explode. They could be correct, but Meyer remembered the briefing information on Bezant. If 10-1442's powerplant blew, it couldn't kill those idiots any deader than the local wildlife would.

Strikers shouted at the running civilians. Lieutenant Kuznetsov tried to head them off, but they had a lead and no equipment to weigh them down.

Meyer aimed her stinger and raked the ground ten feet in front of the adult male who was more or less leading the conga line. Ash and wood spurted several feet in the air. Where the pellets hit quartz in the soil, there were satisfactory sparks as well. The civilians threw themselves flat weeping and hugging one another.

Meyer reloaded her weapon. She'd only fired off a hundred or so pellets, but this wasn't a place to trust ninety percent readiness.

She hadn't realized how simple life had been on C41's normal insertions. She could almost wish that the problem on Bezant was Kalendru troops rather than human civilians.

* * *

"Gee but I want to go home," somebody hummed on the squad push as 3-3 advanced toward the unbroken forest wall. "I'm tired and I—"

"Horgen, shut the fuck up!" Abbado said.

Insects were buzzing around them. That was unusual in an environment to which humans hadn't brought their own bugs. Mostly people were different enough chemically that the local insect-equivalents didn't recognize them as possible dinner.

Larger carnivores were generally less picky, of course.

"Sorry, Sarge," Horgen muttered.

They were all jumpy, and not just because the landing was so awful. Abbado and three members of his present squad once had crawled from a boat that spread itself across half a mile of prairie when Spook gunfire had knocked out the braking nozzles on final approach. The problem was that the whole mission had been unfamiliar, and now all the planning was down the tubes besides.

"Sarge, I've got something," Methie said in a whisper. He echoed a pink highlight to the lower, panoramic view on Abbado's visor.

"Methie, switch places with me," Abbado said. He eased to his right.

The squad froze in place. There was ten feet between strikers to give 3-3 a respectable frontage. Abbado wasn't willing to increase the interval any further, though his flank personnel were already a hundred feet from the nearest support.

The major was pushing a squad out to each cardinal point, probing the landing site. C41 didn't have the troops to secure the entire treeline. Matushek and Glasebrook wore hard suits, so Abbado'd put them on the ends of his skirmish line. He didn't know if that was the right decision or not. He didn't have a clue as to what 3-3 was getting into.

Abbado reached Methie's slot, twenty feet to the right of his own. The visor indicated there was an object with straight lines lying at the base of a sapling whose branches were spiked clubs. It was twenty feet beyond the strikers, on the edge of the circle cleansed when flux baked the soil to coarse stone.

How the artificial intelligence knew whatever it was had straight lines was beyond Abbado. Ground cover and leaves that had yellowed and fallen from the tree when its roots were cooked hid everything but a lump so far as the human eye could tell. Well, that was why strikers' helmets had sensors and internal data processing.

"I had a little drink—" A pause. "Sorry, sarge."

"Okay, we're going to move up all together," Abbado said. The squad's helmets were locked on 3-3's separate channel—actually a pattern of frequency hopping rather than a frequency in itself. Abbado wanted to be able to talk normally to his strikers even though they were spread out to shouting range. "Very slow, straight forward, and remember, it could be a mine."

"It could be a rock with a smooth fracture," Foyle said. He must have remoted a close-up of Methie's view to his own visor.

"The AI didn't say it was a rock," Abbado said. "The AI said it was a thing, and the AI doesn't make mistakes like strikers do."

Civilians were leaving the starship the way milk gurgles from a dropped jug. They pooled around the vessel in clothing that they'd doubtless brought because they thought it was suitable for a frontier. The brightly colored garments quivering on Abbado's panorama display struck him as incongruous, but the civilians might be right. It wouldn't take long to get tired of the grays and drabness of the immediate surroundings. Didn't plants on Bezant have flowers?