Redliners(98)

Blohm was down but unharmed, raking the jungle with aimed bursts from his stinger. "Medic!" he cried. He hunched to his feet and sprinted for the open south side of the clearing.

Abbado sent his second rocket into a Spook in the direction Blohm was heading. Abbado didn't know what the scout had in mind, but one target was as good at the next in an ambush.

The kid lay twitching on the ground where Blohm had dropped. Her hair smoked. A laser bolt had burned through it and the skull beneath.



The pulsing laser sheared wires from the protective grate on the side window of the bulldozer's cab. "Get down, Matt!" Meyer said as she stepped back and grabbed the grenade launcher slung across her breastplate.

The laser hit the heavy support member at the rear of the cage. A large collop of metal vaporized, then combined with atmospheric oxygen in a secondary flash and a shockwave that flung Lock off the deck.

"Get the kid to a medic!" Meyer said, firing around the cab. She aimed a few feet above the bolts snapping from the jungle. Launched grenades weren't heavy enough to do a lot of damage with tree bursts, but the shrapnel spread over a wide area and suppressed Spook fire better than just killing a couple would do.

Seligman tried to get up from his seat. Meyer pushed him back down. He couldn't get past her out of the cab. "Drive!" she said. "Right into those fuckers in front! Keep the blade up and they can't touch you!"

Not really true, since once the tractor got close the Spooks could shoot from the sides. Either Seligman didn't see that or he figured the bad guys were less likely to kill him than the striker on his deck was. He lifted the blade six inches from the ground and put the tractor in gear.

The land-clearing blade rang as lasers struck it a series of quick hammerblows, marking the surface but doing no appreciable harm. Meyer knew what it felt like to have an unstoppable machine bearing down on you. The Kalendru shooters wouldn't stand long if all they had was anti-personnel weapons.

Meyer switched on the flame gun's pump and pointed the nozzle at the treeline eighty feet away. Her visor was cloudy where redeposited metal vapor plated the outside. The AI corrected, but trees and undergrowth looked as though they were plastic and had been extruded from simplified molds.

She swept her flame rod across the brush to the south a little faster than the tractor's own westward motion would have taken it. The treeline was barely within range. The white glare arched high and started to break up as it fell, spattering rather than sledging the beaten zone.

Light vegetation withered. The bark of giants puffed red and orange fire, but a brief touch of flame didn't ignite the wood itself.

Kalendru ran hooting, then spun and fell in a storm of stinger pellets.

When her thirty seconds of fuel were exhausted, Meyer dropped the flame gun and plucked a grenade from the satchel at her waist. She hadn't attached the hard suit's left thigh piece before the shooting started, so she hoped like hell the hot nozzle didn't twist around that way.

She hoped Matt was okay. The docs probably couldn't do much for a kid who'd been head shot, but if Matt carried her to them they'd take care of his burns.

Meyer threw the grenade over the bulldozer's blade. Rockets and bombs were saturating the jungle from which the Spooks had fired. They'd figured on surprise, but a strike company reacts with no more hesitation than a mousetrap. After the first volley it was a two-way fight and C41 had the firepower.

Meyer hoped a lot of things, but right now what she particularly hoped was that she'd kill the Spook who'd missed Matthew Lock's head by under a centimeter.



The forest was by now Caius Blohm's closest acquaintance. Not a friend, never a friend; but they knew one another. The scout moved as water does on a rough, gently-sloping surface: without haste or certain direction, but inexorably.

Blohm was going to capture a prisoner. They needed a prisoner. And he was going to kill all the other Kalendru he found.

He'd switched off his helmet and stinger. Spook sensors were so discriminating that they could identify even the slight leakage from a stinger's electronics at a hundred yards. It would take thirty seconds to cool the weapon's coils, but Blohm wouldn't need a stinger for what he had in mind.

He didn't think he'd need his helmet sensors, and he didn't want the communications. This was his business alone.

Blohm paused. The roots of forest giants spread as broadly as the branches above, bracing the trunk and sucking nourishment from a wide circuit of the thin soil. A six-foot band of leaf litter lay flat with no striations from surface roots.

He jumped over instead of going around because he was in a hurry. The ground on the other side was firm. If he'd stepped on the open space, a trap would have sprung as sure as the sun rose above the canopy. Blohm neither knew nor cared whether it would have been a pit, a gummy surface, root tentacles or some possibility unguessed.