"God damn you, Gabe," Blohm whispered as he echoed the panorama from his partner's helmet. "Don't panic and buy the farm!"
Gabrilovitch was running. The forest provided aisles of vision at unexpected angles. A pair of humanoids crossed one of them a hundred feet behind the striker, jogging rather than walking as before. They'd certainly spotted him.
"Six-six-one," Blohm said. "Gabe, fucking listen to me. Get in your sack. It's okay. They'll pass you by, I swear it. Gabe, this is Blohm. Trust me for God's sake, trust—"
Gabrilovitch ran into a dangling web of gossamer-fine air roots. He slashed them with his powerknife. The paired blades hummed and stopped, clogged by fluid showering from the underside of the branch above. Drops ran like clear water down the outside of the roots, but they clouded into glue when they touched the warmth of flesh or a machine.
Gabe began to scream. His arms were caught. His legs thrashed for some seconds until they too were gummed into the curtain of roots.
The striker's body swayed in vain desperation. The visor protected his face so he could continue to scream.
Five of the expressionless humanoids reached Gabrilovitch. Three raised their clubs. They hacked with smashing, shearing strokes as regular as the beats of a metronome set slow. The other two turned away and thrust their beaklike mouths into the bark of neighboring trees, sucking sap for nourishment. Several club blows struck Gabe's helmet and knocked it askew, but the electronics still transmitted.
Blohm switched back to direct viewing. "Come on," he said. He paused to steady his voice. "This tree's going to burst in a minute or two and I don't want to be around."
The bulldozer snarled against increasing resistance as the blade bit into a trunk crackling like a machine gun. Meyer swayed, gripping the cab with her left gauntlet.
When the first tractor was about to stall and spin its treads against the soil, the second punched its stinger into the same tree at sixty degrees around the trunk. Meyer was braced against the initial shock, but her vehicle's lurch forward as the trunk started to go nearly threw her off the back of the deck.
Both bulldozers halted. The tree fell at an accelerating rate. The trunk's inertia tore the roots out of the ground, jerking the tracks as the vehicles reversed.
The tree tore in a lengthy crash through neighbors still standing. A lesser giant tilted away. As it did, a root uncoiled toward the other tractor. Strikers on the ground shouted warnings to Velasquez, but Meyer had the clear target. She played two seconds of brilliance from her flame gun, carbonizing the root all the way back to the trunk.
Meyer's driver steered the bulldozer carefully, aiming his blade at the next tree. She waved her flame gun to help cool the nozzle.
A rocket went off in the bole of a tree forty feet farther into the jungle, weakening it for the dozer blades in a minute or two. The major had decided to spend ordnance in order to clear an area quicker, both for a killing zone and to hold the civilians in a concentrated group where C41 could at least hope to surround them.
Al-Ibrahimi and his aide picked targets for the rocketeers. Most explosions triggered a result that would have endangered a bulldozer if the warhead hadn't preceded it. The administrators either had instincts equal to Caius Blohm's, or their little headsets had more computing power than a Strike Force helmet.
Meyer's bulldozer started forward. Matthew Lock waddled a minimal twenty feet behind with satchels of grenades. C41 hadn't brought any directional mines along when they left the colony ship, but grenades thrown from the tractor's deck would reach a little farther than they could from ground level. Even when a civilian was throwing them.
Meyer couldn't let herself look back at Lock. If she did that, she might miss a threat that would engulf him. But the movement of the figure at the back of her panoramic display glowed in her mind as if the helmet had careted it.
* * *
A drop of rain, scattered and repeatedly recombined by three layers of canopy, landed on Abbado's wrist. The storm had broken minutes before, but this was the first of it to reach ground level.
"There it is," Blohm said.
"That's a village?" Foley whispered.
"That's a hole in a tree," said Abbado, "but it's where the wogs are coming from, right enough."
The tree had begun as at least a dozen separate saplings. They merged as they grew. In combined form the monster covered a ragged circle over a hundred feet in diameter, black-barked and covered with air plants. The neighboring jungle had drawn away so that the swath beneath the spreading branches was clear.
Except for recent wear on the bark covering the lintel, the opening could have passed for a deep fold where two of the trunks joined. A human might have missed the signs, but the helmet AI hadn't.