"How did it happen?" she asked in a husky whisper.
"Are the rest of the medics—the doctors—are they alerted?" Farrell said. He wasn't going to release his strikers to carry out first aid until he was damned sure there wasn't going to be a follow-up attack.
"Yes, they're coming," Lundie said. "Jafar has halted the column awaiting your instructions."
There were two strikers down. Tomaczek was dead. From helmet readouts the other, Meyer, was only stunned, bruised and burned. An edged club had hacked through a bandolier in the middle of her back. Farrell began to regret leaving the body armor behind except for a handful of suits for special purposes. But weight considerations meant it was armor or ammo, and they had to have the ammo . . .
Nessman was putting analgesic and counterirritant onto the backs of Meyer's hands where the native had squirted her. Farrell squatted to look at the first native he'd shot. Most of the face was missing, but Farrell could see that the acid spray was a hollow channel in the skull rather than being a manufactured weapon like the barbed clubs.
"They came out of the trees," Farrell said; still squatting, finally answering the aide's initial question. His hands trembled as he swapped his stinger's magazine for a full one. "They didn't make a fucking sound. Jesus, how many did we lose?"
Now that Farrell had the leisure, he heard the screams of the wounded and terrified. A four-year-old gripped her mother's hand and cried her heart out. The woman's body lay some distance away. The arm the child held had been hacked off at the shoulder, and the child had never released it.
The other two doctors and a man who'd risen to Director of Nursing but hadn't forgotten the basics reached the twenty-yard stretch where the slaughter occurred. There were speckles of blood everywhere.
Farrell fingered the weapon of the native with whom he'd grappled. The edge was more like that of a saw than a sword, but the scores of individual points were as sharp as broken glass. The material had a massy, slick feel. Flakes had spalled away in a few places, leaving conchoidal fractures in the surface.
"Seven adults and one child are dead," Lundie said with a precision Farrell supposed he should have been expecting. "Twelve adults and four children have been injured. I'm not an expert, but it appears to me that three adults and a child may not survive given the present conditions."
She swallowed and added, "I include your strikers in the two categories."
Farrell rose and looked at her. "Why didn't you pick them up?" he asked. "Was there something wrong with the sensors?"
"There was nothing wrong with the helmet sensors," the aide replied evenly. At this moment her eyes had no more depth than a reflection of the gray sky. "I've reanalyzed the data. There were no sound and vibration anomalies. The humanoids' movements were entirely within the normal parameters of the forest."
Farrell unhooked the damaged bandolier and removed the magazine that had taken the club stroke. Three teeth had penetrated the dense plastic; pellets dribbled out onto the bulldozed soil. "I don't understand," he said.
"Any forest moves," Lundie said. She was looking at the sprawled bodies, not in fascination but with the rock-jawed rigidity of someone forcing a memory on herself. "Everything living moves. The ground trembles when branches sway and even when roots take up water from the soil. Your sensors can feel that, Major."
Farrell grimaced. It was a joke in the Strike Force that you could hear a gnat fart if you cranked up your helmet high enough. Lundie really meant it, though. More to the point, she meant that she could discriminate among microsounds despite the hugely greater background of human feet, voices, and equipment.
"Why didn't you hear them, then?" he said. There'd been one blessing. The dozer blade raised a four- to eight-foot row of brush and scraped topsoil on the left, the side opposite the direction of the attack. None of the civilians had time to climb off the cleared path. That would have been as quick a death as the natives' weapons.
"Because their movements were within parameters," Lundie repeated. "Major, at any possible level of detail, those humanoids didn't come through the forest. They were the forest."
Meyer sat up, flexing her arms to make sure no ribs had been broken. Her partner Nessman watched anxiously. Councillor Lock knelt nearby. Blood splashed his head and torso, but none of it seemed to be his. Lock cradled a child's head in his lap. The body lay behind him, under that of its mother.
"In the future," Lundie said, "I'll use carbon dioxide levels. The humanoids are animate. They give off CO2 as a waste product. The range isn't as long as vibration sensing should have been, but I'll be able to provide some warning. They won't surprise us the same way again."