"Mark!" Blohm called desperately. "Three-one, get the fuck out from there! The tree's going to burst! Over!"
Two strikers bent over their platoon sergeant. The others peered into the foliage overhead, combing through their helmets' vision options. They still didn't see any reason for concern.
Blohm slashed a burst from his stinger toward the treetop. A few pellets chipped bark, but the bole continued to swell. It was twice its diameter of a minute before.
Gabrilovitch was running behind Blohm. His grenade launcher chugged five times. The 4-ounce projectiles were easily visible throughout their flight. The first blew the swelling apart with a blue-white flash: Gabe had loaded with electricals.
A mass of thick white liquid slurped from the ruptured bole. The second grenade burst in the middle of it. The syrup ignited in a whuff of smoky orange flame.
All of Gabe's well-aimed salvo was in the air before the first grenade hit. The remaining rounds blew fiery bubbles that vanished instantly as traceries of soot.
The flaming mass crawled slowly down the trunk. 3-1 scrambled back, two of them carrying their sergeant, but the immediate danger was past. If the tree had expelled the sticky fluid under pressure, it would have engulfed the whole squad.
Blohm drew his powerknife but he kept the stinger in a one-hand grip. He paused at the forest's edge to slow his breathing, then stepped through the opening cut to free Bastien. Sergeant Gabrilovitch locked a fresh magazine into his grenade launcher's butt-well and glanced up at the gooey flame devouring the tree from which it had come.
Strikers from 3-1 hesitated, then followed the scouts into the forest. "For God's sake, step where I do!" Blohm snarled.
Blohm heard a stinger fire in the wreck as soon as he was past the forest margin. Somebody was alive. Probably the Loot, but one of the civilians conceivably knew how to pull a trigger.
Ahead he saw a swatch of blue plastic, the aircar's hull. The vegetation between looked at first to be a stand of wrist-thick saplings. The "trunks" merged twenty feet in the air and from there spread into dark-leafed branches. They were air roots like those of terrestrial mangroves.
And what do you do to people, tree? Blohm wondered with a slight smile. He stuck the barrel of his stinger between a pair of roots and shot into the spherical mass joining roots and branches in an hourglass shape.
Bark and wood the color of a drowned man's skin flew into the air. Clear sap dripped from the cup-sized wound and evaporated as quickly as methanol on a hotplate. Filters clicked over Blohm's nostrils.
"Three-one, visors down," Blohm said in satisfaction. There was no caret on his display to indicate he was in danger of absorbing the gas through the skin. "Gabe, wait for me to cross."
The tree's poisonous breath would be a danger for civilians, but the strikers were equipped for it. Blohm cut a pair of roots, severing them first at arm's length above him, then flush with the moist ground as the ends wobbled. The gap was eighteen inches wide.
Blohm slid through without touching the supports to either side, crossed the circular clearing beneath the tree, and cut through the arched roots on the other side. Pores in the bark spread like eyelids opening. The air beneath the tree became faintly misty.
The aircar lay tilted to the right. Its underside was toward the rescue party. The stinger had stopped firing, but Blohm heard a powerknife from the passenger bay.
A vine as thick as an anchor cable hung onto the crashed vehicle from a branch of one of the neighboring trees. Ten feet above the ground, the vine's tip flared into scores of tendrils. They moved in the still air. Stinger pellets had chewed the tip nodule, sawing off a number of tendrils but not destroying the spongy nodule itself. Kuznetsov had been forced to fire straight up.
Blohm's stinger tore the vine for half a second before a grenade from Gabrilovitch shredded a two-foot length in a spray of juice and white fibers. The sergeant's shoulder steadied Blohm from the blast.
The severed nodule swung outward. Tendrils twisted like a Gorgon's hair. Blohm let his stinger go and gripped the car's quarter panel with his right hand. He pulled himself halfway onto the vehicle. Gabrilovitch knelt to provide his shoulder as a step. Blohm rotated his legs over the side of the car and slashed through the tendril groping toward his thigh.
The old civilian and the driver had hurtled from the front seats when the aircar hit. Vine tendrils curled around their necks and snaked under their cuffs. The victims' skin was sallow and the tension of their muscles bent the corpses into rigid bows.
The blonde woman hadn't bounced out of the central compartment, probably because the Loot had judged the angle of impact and braced the both of them against it. Now Kuznetsov held the blonde pressed against the tilted car so that what had been the floor of the central compartment protected their backs.