Meyer wondered how much good the scarf would do, but she had more immediate problems. She lobbed a grenade over the top of the blade. When it exploded, a jug-shaped tree twenty yards ahead burst into blue flame. It was spurting hydrogen from every pore.
Heat shrivelled the foliage as far as the bulldozer itself. The flames were pale but intensely hot. Lock cried out and ducked despite the gratings in the dozer blade and the cab window. Meyer and Seligman in their hard suits were unaffected.
The driver steered sharply to the right to avoid driving through the center of the blaze. Meyer played her stinger across three natives, then a fourth in the circle the fire had stripped of cover. The humanoids might pass through the jungle unhindered by thorns and poisons, but heat was heat and the laws of physics applied to their flesh as well.
The right blade support arm and that side of the cab twinkled, though Meyer couldn't see the shooter or hear the pellets hitting. Seligman let go of the controls and tried to hunch beneath the level of the window openings. Lock grabbed the staffer's armored shoulder and batted the stinger muzzle against his helmet.
Seligman straightened just as the blade sheared its way back into the trail it had previously cleared. He'd managed to switch on the intercom; Meyer could hear him blubbering. He pulled back slightly on the left control bar. The bulldozer twitched onto a parallel course instead of grinding through the people screaming as they rose in fear of a monster more terrible than the club-swinging humanoids.
Meyer stepped onto the narrow fender covering the right tread. She was afraid to throw grenades while they were so close to the main trail, and the land-clearing blade was too high to shoot over from any distance back.
The blade hit a tree too thick to smash aside. Meyer lurched forward with the shock. She caught herself on the frame that supported the grated upper portion of the blade. Roots pulled out of the soil, releasing the bulldozer as the trunk toppled to the side.
Meyer saw movement beyond a fringe of compound leaves. She hosed it with her flame gun. Humanoids appeared as screening vegetation wilted. The ravening flame converted flesh and bone to gas. There'd been three of them, maybe more. The blade scraped shrunken corpses aside with the trash of undergrowth and topsoil.
The flame died, its fuel exhausted. The ceramic nozzle glowed white/yellow/red back from the tip. Meyer dropped the weapon and reached for the stinger with her right hand.
The left track rocked over a tree which had twisted behind the blade instead of rolling off the side. Meyer fell sideways, awkward in her armor, and overcompensated. The tractor's weight abruptly splintered the bole; she toppled to the left.
Meyer flailed with both hands. They missed their grip on the blade. She began to slide beneath the front of the tread.
Roaring. Blackness. Alone.
Something caught and anchored Meyer's right leg.
Meyer pushed herself back on her armored belly before she dared to stand up again. Matthew Lock, kneeling on the fender, let go of her ankle. "I lost the gun," he said. His whole body was trembling. The scarf still covered his face.
"C41, this is Six," Meyer's helmet ordered. "Cease fire. We've got this batch too. Good work, people. Six out."
Strain
There were seven wounded civilians. Four of them had caught grenade fragments; one lost her arm to a stinger pellet because she jumped up screaming when the natives came out of the jungle in front of her. One civilian had died of a stroke.
None of them had been killed by the attack itself. Not one.
Ciler was bent over his diagnostic display. "Doc, I'm getting too damned old for this," Farrell said, his eyes slitted.
Both bulldozers snarled, clearing a campsite. The column hadn't gotten as far as Farrell would have liked, but there were too many injured to treat on the move.
"You're very lucky to be alive," Ciler said. "The spikes on the club passed to either side of a carotid."
He smiled tightly. "Under the present ridiculous circumstances, I have to class the injury as superficial, however."
"I feel like shit," Farrell said as he got to his feet. "That's good, because it reminds me I'm alive."
Massengill took a piece of grenade shrapnel—probably his own grenade—through a femoral artery. What with everything going on at the time, he may not even have realized he was dying before he finished bleeding out. A native chopped Buccolowski in the neck just like Farrell, but Farrell had blown his attacker's chest out while the club was in mid swing. Ski had been a lifetime less quick.
"The one who got me was a tough fucker," Farrell said. "Maybe we ought to recruit here for the Strike Force."
Abdelkader's legs were sprayed with caustic—concentrated potassium hydroxide, not an acid, the brain trust said. If the dickhead had told somebody about it as soon as the shooting stopped so they could flush the goop off him, he'd have been all right. Instead he waited till it really started to hurt.