Redliners(62)

It wasn't worth dumping the gear and then draping herself with it again, though. And she understood Top's idea—you didn't fire a plasma cannon except with a hard suit on. That meant her or Pressley on the other tractor, and she was closer.

"I thought what we'd do," Daye said when she reached him, "was save the lead dozer some work. I want you to blast a hole right through the trees on the vector we'll be taking out of here. Just keep shooting till all the ammo's gone, right? We'll kill two birds with one stone that way."

He looked pleased with himself. Well, he had a right to be. Meyer just wished it hadn't meant her hiking an extra fifty yards, kitted out like a whole weapons locker.

"Okay," she said. She dropped her visor again to get the vector, then checked it against the position of everything that she didn't want bathed in plasma.

Bolts dispersed to a degree in an atmosphere. If one hit a solid object, even something as slight as a finger-thick sapling, the stream flared widely. Meyer didn't want anybody, strikers or civilians, within fifty feet of her sight line.

The main body was behind the gun position, in the area the bulldozers had cleared west of the ship. The colonists' section leaders were sorting them out, trying to anyway. C41 stood on guard around the mass though occasionally a striker got involved helping or explaining something. They were all well clear of the plasma cannon.

Sergeant Abbado had his squad and the leading company of civilians on Meyer's left, well away from the main body. They were in an open area formed by the asteroid's shockwave, large enough for the number involved. Although they were a trifle forward of the cannon's muzzle, they were well to the side and protected by a wall of logs and brush.

"Five, this is Four-four-three," Meyer said formally, using call signs as if C41 was at full strength and she was loader on the fourth squad of heavy weapons platoon. "Request permission to fire. Over."

"C41, this is Five," Top said on the general push. "The plasma cannon will burn off twenty-six rounds. Inform colonists that this is not an emergency. Over."

Top had moved a safe twenty feet back from Meyer's position. He turned to watch strikers talking to the nearest civilians. When he decided that enough of them had gotten the word, he said, "Four-four-three, you are clear to shoot. Over."

Meyer squeezed the trigger. The butt was solid against her armored shoulder, so her whole body rocked back. The hundred feet directly in front of the muzzle was a blackened waste from the fires set during the Kalendru attack, but sprigs of new growth were already probing from it. They shriveled as the plasma flashed a dazzling track above them.

Brush and fallen trees were tangled on the edge of the unbroken forest. The bolt hit a giant tilted against a trio of its upright fellows. A fireball of gas and blazing wood engulfed the base of the dead tree. The trunk lifted on the shockwave and had just started to drop when the second round hit.

Meyer kept the trigger back. The weapon cycled at sixty rounds per minute, an artificially low rate to permit the osmium bore to cool between thermonuclear explosions. All that remained of the target was a pillar of flame gushing through the foliage of the trees with which its branches were twined.

The gun stopped firing when the belt ended. Thunderclaps from the burst continued to echo from the edges of the forest for a second or two more. Meyer opened the lid of the remaining cannister, then lifted the cannon's loading gate. The air around her fluoresced as ions snatched electrons to balance their charge.

She knew everybody in the landing zone was looking at her. The attention made her feel oddly more human. She locked the fresh belt into the gun and settled the butt against her shoulder again.

Though the leading bulldozer would now have the fire to contend with, the plasma bolts were a great morale booster for the cits. Green trees wouldn't burn with anything like the enthusiasm of wood drying for weeks or months, but the moisture in the living cells disintegrated the boles in flashes of steam. That should be at least as spectacular.

Meyer aimed a little right of center of the tree filling the left half of the bulldozer's initial course. She squeezed off a single bolt. The base exploded, lifting and shoving the rest of the trunk into the forest. The tree fell with a rippling crash that seemed remarkably sustained in contrast to the weapon's lightning-like CRACK.

She shifted her aim slightly. A squat tree with a trunk three feet thick grew near the smoldering roots of the monster Meyer's previous round had blown clear. The trunk spread at the top like a mushroom; branches sprouted above it, all of them coming from a common center like the fronds of a palm tree.

Let's see if I can punt this one completely out of sight to the right, Meyer thought as she squeezed the trigger.