Ciler said they'd likely save the legs, but Abdelkader was going to be gorked out on pain medication for the next month while he regrew a couple square feet of skin.
Al-Ibrahimi and his aide walked around a crew of citizens laying ground sheeting. There weren't enough staffers in the column to do the heavy work. Farrell noticed that the cits were actually better at the job once they'd learned the basics of what was required.
The project manager nodded to Farrell. "Major," he said, "I regret your casualties, but I congratulate you on your victory. I'm amazed that your troops were able to protect the column with such relatively slight damage. There were ninety-six humanoids in this attack."
"The warning was the difference," Farrell said, nodding in turn to Lundie. "It saved us." He grinned briefly. "Saved you too, I guess."
"But you had only a few seconds of warning," al-Ibrahimi said.
A striker fired a 4-pound rocket. Backblast, transition to supersonic flight, and warhead detonation merged into a three-note chord: bam/crack/wham!
The target was a tree a bulldozer was about to attack. Branches split and fell with creaking objections from the blasted peak. Some striker's helmet had given him a target; he'd taken it.
Farrell lifted his hand from the grip of his stinger and said, "Seconds count," he said. "At the muzzle, a pellet from this thing—"
His finger caressed the weapon's receiver like a cat owner rubbing his pet's jaw.
"—is moving at pretty near twelve kay. Twelve thousand feet per second."
Farrell kicked at bulldozer cleat marks in soil where the sheeting wasn't yet laid. "Ten feet doesn't sound like much, but if you've got to run that far across cleared ground to get to one of my people with a stinger—it's far enough, sir. It's plenty far enough."
"The natives have almost no brain," Dr. Ciler volunteered unexpectedly. "I'm surprised they can even manufacture clubs. It's more like dissecting an insect than even a reptile."
"Sir," said Tamara Lundie to her superior. She nodded to Farrell and the doctor, deliberately keeping them in the conversation. "I believe there's a system in the humanoid attacks."
Farrell's visor displayed a pattern of lines branching downward like a scheme of perspective. Al-Ibrahimi must have been seeing something similar, because his eyes changed focus to a point in what seemed to be empty air.
"Yesterday the humanoids attacked over a narrow front at effectively the same time," Lundie said. Twelve lines, too close to separate at the scale on Farrell's visor, glowed purple for an instant. "If the humanoids came from a common point, it would be in this region, approximately point nine three miles from where the attack occurred."
The wobbling line at the bottom of the display was the column's path through the jungle. A circle glowed around the indicated common point because Lundie was allowing for error. Farrell wondered how she controlled the imagery; her hands were empty.
People were lining up to be fed. The scouts and all strikers in the detached squad had their converters with them so feeding took longer than usual, but the process was entirely orderly. Even the hungriest folks weren't going to fight one another for cups of gray sludge.
Dr. Ciler was excluded from the discussion by his inability to see the display. He nodded and walked to where the wounded lay.
"The second attack was spread over a wider front," Lundie continued. The much larger skein of vectors glowed in turn. "There was a noticeable lag between when the humanoids initially attacked just ahead of the column's center and the attacks continuing in sequence forward along the line."
"Or trying to," Farrell remarked with a smile of grim satisfaction. "Meyer did a hell of a job on the w-w . . . the humanoids. With the dozer. I'll make her a sergeant for that. If we ever get to a place I can put in the paperwork."
Nearby, Mrs. Suares talked soothingly to the train of orphans she'd gathered to fill her own loss. The little dark-haired girl was crying; she refused to take the widow's hand.
Farrell shook his head, thinking about the Spook tank exploding on Active Cloak. "Meyer's got quite a talent for heavy equipment," he added.
"The time lag would be explained if the humanoids all left a common point in close sequence," Lundie said, "making a straight line through the forest toward the predicted location of the column. Our progress and the consequently changed angle spread the attack over a slightly greater length of time."
The vectors from the two attacks led back to the same point. Because of what she considered to be sufficient data, Lundie didn't bother to circle it this time.
"A village . . ." Farrell said.