"Boy, I hope the Loot gets us some support damn quick," Top said. "Not that I'm counting on it."
Lightning flashed in the distant clouds.
Meyer twisted. The second leg piece separated and fell away. Sweat tacked the pants legs to her thighs.
"Bet you're glad to be out of that suit," said Methie. His visor was raised. His partner, another Third Platoon striker named Caldwell, wiped ash and grit from the belt of shells which hung from the cannon's loading port.
"It's okay," Meyer said. She felt more comfortable in a hard suit than not, but if she said that they'd think she was losing her nerve. She was fine, pretty much. "You know how to handle that thing?"
Caldwell was the same size and build as Meyer, but she kept her scalp shaved so the tattoos could be seen clearly when she wasn't wearing a helmet. She looked up and said, "I guess we can manage. We've got the specialty endorsement in our personnel jackets, if that's what you mean."
"Hey, sorry," Meyer said. "It's a hot day, okay?"
She gathered up the pieces of her hard suit. The arms, legs, and connectors seemed to weigh more in her hands than they did a moment before when she was wearing them.
"Hey, snake?" Methie said. "You and Nessman really waxed them bastards. Nice work."
Meyer smiled and walked toward the command group with her gear. The aircar rose in a test run. Meyer closed her eyes so that the trash thrown up by the drive fans wouldn't blind her. With her arms full, she couldn't flip down her visor to cover her face.
She wondered if the aircar was going to hold out long enough to transfer all C41's equipment to the new site or if the strikers would wind up humping it through the forest. Top Daye'd said something about bringing in another starship with more transport. That'd be nice. Strikers didn't live very long if they thought the high command was going to make things easy for them, though.
Nessman was seated on the ground, removing the upper sections of his hard suit while a medic looked at his foot. He waved at Meyer. Half a dozen small fires still burned from the recent battle. Ash and bitter smoke drifted through the site.
"Meyer!" Sergeant Daye called. He waved her over.
Top stood with the major, God, and a group of civilians who looked as though they thought they should be in charge of something. A good-looking man was saying to the project manager, "It's important that Margaret not feel she's being pressured to leave the compartment. She'll realize the necessity on her own, but we have to give her time."
"Councillor Lock," God replied in a voice that was either coldly hostile or just cold, "the ship is not a safe refuge. I suggest that you convince your wife to leave promptly, because I won't authorize a search for her body if the vessel collapses and she's still inside."
"Meyer," said Daye, "you haven't had your neck taped, right?"
"I had my suit on the whole time, Top," she said. She hadn't followed what the flap about bugs was, since she and Nessman continued to crew the plasma cannon until they were relieved minutes ago.
"Well you don't now," Daye said. "Some of these bugs, they dig through the back of your neck into your brain and you go crazy. Have—"
The aircar lifted again, this time with Lieutenant Kuznetsov and three civilians aboard. It rose twenty feet vertically to keep from sucking in debris its own fans kicked from the ground, then headed north in a gentle climb.
"Have Abbado fit you with tape like this," Daye resumed as the whine faded. "If he's turned over the spool to some—"
The aircar made a sound like a double hiccup. It flipped end over end before it crashed into the jungle just beyond the landing site.
Blohm was only a hundred feet farther from the crash, but the car came down just beyond 3-1. Sergeant Bastien shouted, "Come on! There may be somebody alive!" to his squad and pushed into a stand of finger-thick shoots growing from a fallen log.
The shoots bent like strands of putty until the sergeant was halfway through. Then they snapped vertical again, squeezing his waist tighter than that of a nineteenth-century belle wearing stays. He screamed on a rising note.
"Three-one, watch overhead!" Blohm called. He dodged a bush he could have jumped over or plowed through. He just didn't trust the look of it. As he passed, he saw the woody stem was bent like a bowstaff and quivering with tension.
Two strikers cut the shoots with their knives. The severed ends flew apart like released springs. Bastien fell to the ground and lay moaning. Another striker glanced upward in response to Blohm's warning, but he didn't see that a section high on the trunk of the emergent at the clearing's edge was expanding visibly.