"Major?" the aide said. Farrell turned back to face her. "You and your strikers," slight emphasis on a technical term, "reacted as if you'd planned on the explosion occurring. I was struck by your professionalism."
"We've been ambushed before, ma'am," Farrell said, trying not to smile. "There's an SOP for this sort of thing."
"I understand," Lundie said. "I would have expected a more emotional response nonetheless. Because of the casualties, if nothing else."
Look who's talking about emotions, Farrell thought. Aloud he said, "We've seen dead people before too." He cleared his throat and added, "Tamara."
The "ma'am" of a moment before had been an unintentional insult, the expert sneering at the layperson.
"We've got jobs to do," he said. "When things settle down, we'll, you know, think about Top. I'd known him three years, closer than any of my kin."
He smiled tightly, then went off to brief 3-3 and the strikers in hard suits for the clearing operation.
Farrell knew he'd be seeing Sergeant Daye again soon. Just as soon as he next went to sleep.
Brute Force
Esther Meyer wasn't sure she'd have noticed the tree if her helmet hadn't highlighted it. It was amazing. You wouldn't think something three feet thick and forty feet high could stay hidden when you were almost on top of it. If she'd been trying to watch everything instead of cueing her helmet to shooting trees specifically, the alert would have come from the sheaf of projectiles slashing at her and the column of civilians behind.
She skirted the trunk carefully. They weren't sure what it took to trigger the head. Maybe bumping the tree with an armored elbow would be enough. The spike that hit Meyer the first time hadn't penetrated, but that could have been luck and the extra fifty yards. She planned to get behind something big and lob a grenade to set this one off.
Pressley was somewhere off to Meyer's right, dealing with another tree. The major wanted a wide enough swath cleared of the damned things that if the second tractor had to divert in an emergency, the driver wouldn't set one of the bitches off. God's blonde aide had marked a total of six shooting trees on the helmet displays, though how she knew that was beyond Meyer's guessing.
The forest was huge and dark and as merciless as a Kalendru tank. Meyer didn't like, she really didn't like, being out here twenty feet ahead of her backup, but she didn't dare say anything about it. Besides, it was her job. She didn't need a superior to tell her that.
Branches swung lazily in the canopy a hundred feet above Meyer's head. Patches of unfiltered sunlight flickered across lower foliage like diaphanous butterflies. Anywhere else, Meyer would have guessed the wind was blowing higher up, but not in this jungle.
In her hurry to avoid whatever was being prepared above, Meyer stepped into a thicket of thin, pale leaves growing directly from the soil. The individual strands were a yard long and no more than an inch and a half across. They wound among the trees in a thick line instead of springing from a common center like the terrestrial grasses. She'd brushed against similar stands before, but this was the first time she'd pushed her way through them.
The leaves wrapped around her armored thighs, exuding sticky fluid along the stems. She swore, stamped her bootheel twice and pulled with all her strength. The leaves clung like cargo tape.
Meyer was holding the electrical grenade she'd planned to use to trigger the shooting tree. She shouted, "Fire in the hole!" armed the grenade and hurled it into the forest ahead to clear her hands for her stinger. She had a sudden unreasoning fear that if she'd merely dropped the grenade at her feet, the vegetation would manage to throw the arming switch and blow her legs off.
The icons of strikers from 3-3 converged from behind on her visor overlay. "Stay clear!" Meyer shouted. They didn't have armor and she didn't want to be responsible for them.
She squeezed the stinger's trigger, guiding its fire along the ground like a plowshare. Pellets ripped the roots in a spray of mold and pebbles. The leaves' grip lessened. Meyer tore herself clear and fell backward. The grenade burst with a nearby crack! and a gulp of cell tissue minced by the shrapnel.
A fruit the size of a pumpkin sailed from the tip of a high branch across twenty feet of horizontal distance. It burst like a water balloon on the ground where Meyer had been held a moment before. Everything organic, even the rich layer of topsoil, smoldered as juice from the ruptured fruit splashed over it.
Meyer scrambled to her feet. "Get clear!" she snarled to the pair of strikers with powerknives and stingers ready to cut her loose. "Can't you fucking hear! Get clear!"
She pulled a fuel-air grenade from her belt and armed it. "Fire in the hole!" she repeated as she threw the grenade into the undergrowth