Pressley aimed his flame gun. The jet of white-hot fuel caught the tip and spattered in brilliance over the front of the tractor. Another bark tendril snaked around the side of the cab toward Pressley. Abbado and Horgen ripped it with their stingers as they ran forward. Pellets that missed sparkled from the armored motor housing and the back of the blade.
There were scores of wobbling tendrils now. The tree's core was the silvery white of a rapier's blade in sunlight. Pressley jerked to the right. His flame gun slashed a line of radiance across the edge of the cab, momentarily splashing him and the armored driver.
Horgen shouted. The fibers at the tip of a tendril gripped her waist, almost spanning it. She blasted the tentacle point-blank. Though the pellets shredded their target, the bark was a fibrous mat that retained its integrity.
Pressley lifted suddenly into the air. Civilians screamed and ran backward as the flame rod twitched toward them. A snap of the tentacle flung the weapon from the striker's hand and shut off the flame.
Abbado let his stinger go and drew his powerknife. The tendril that first gripped Horgen was a rag clinging without force, but a second had caught her left arm as she tried to insert a fresh magazine in the stinger.
Abbado clamped the squirming rope with one hand and pulled the powerknife across with all his strength. The bark had a dry, quivering feel to it like the body of a powerful snake. Fibers frayed to either side of Abbado's cut. It was like trying to shear steel cable.
Horgen's stinger cracked like a miniature bullwhip, forty times a second. Other strikers were firing. Abbado heard the chunkWHACK! of a grenade launcher.
Something grabbed his right ankle. He kicked. Another something caught the left calf. The tendrils lifted him, pulling in opposite directions.
"Shit!" shouted Sergeant Guilio Abbado. "Shit!"
A part of his mind wished that he'd come up with something better for what were probably his last words.
Like the mouth of a tunnel, Farrell thought as he walked with the project manager toward where the dozer was starting its cut. Colonists made way for them with a mixture of curiosity and concern. Not the hostility Farrell expected from civilians, though. That surprised him, especially after he'd screwed up and gotten so many of them dead or wounded.
The air was smoky with a touch of ozone sharpness, the latter from either the plasma bolts or the tractor's electric drive. The tree the gunner punted to the left with her first bolt smoldered, but only the shattered portions of the dense green wood could sustain combustion on their own. The dozer had grubbed out or crushed down what remained where the tree stood. Fresh clay clung to roots twisting from the wrack shoved aside by the broad blade.
Like snow melting in the sun, the shooting tree had shrunk to barely twenty percent of its original volume. Unfired spearheads now protruded through what remained of the head. The support fibers were less spongy than most of the plant's tissues. They stood out like the sinews of a man straining at too great a burden.
The dozer spiked a large tree and started to lug. Farrell eyed the wobbling canopy with concern, but his helmet AI didn't warn him of anything about to drop on the vehicle. Besides the armored striker behind the cab, Sergeant Abbado and one of his people followed the dozer closely. The other five squad members flanked the civilians, a little back of Farrell himself.
"Clearing the road is going to be a slow process," al-Ibrahimi said as he watched the dozer struggling against the forest giant. "Though most of the larger trees can be avoided, I hope."
"Slow is a good thing," Farrell said, though his attention was concentrated on the forest. "The civilians aren't going to be able to move fast, and we don't dare let the dozers get too far out ahead. We can't afford to lose—"
A tentacle of bark detached itself from the bole and trembled across the tractor. White wood gleamed for a hundred and fifty feet up the side of the tree.
The driver was either too busy with his controls to notice or saw so little through his grilled windows that he didn't realize anything more was happening than a piece of debris flying up. He shifted from reverse to neutral, preparing to hit the tree again.
"Get those civilians back before they're fucking killed!" Farrell said, aiming at the tentacles. He wasn't sure himself if he was speaking to his strikers or to al-Ibrahimi, but it was God's truth that he wanted the manager out of the way also.
He fired at the target quivering twenty feet in the air. Things were bad enough without a stray round hitting one of his strikers.
Two more, twelve more, tentacles separated as the first one had. The entire bark sheath squirmed toward the bulldozer. Pressley's flame gun carbonized the end of a tentacle. The portion above the flame's destruction could no longer reach the dozer, but the brown serpent continued to twist and strain like a vicious dog on its chain.