"Yessir," said Leaf. He touched the back of Caffey's hand on the machine-gun grip. Both noncoms shuffled past the roots of the fallen log in whose shelter the remainder of the crew waited.
Brainard disappeared into the sucking undergrowth.
K67's commanding officer was the only reason most of the hovercraft's crew was still alive. Brainard's absolute courage—and his coldly reasoned certainty when anyone else would have been in a blind panic—kept them all going.
"Jeez, I hope this works," Wheelwright muttered.
His hands squeezed the grip and fore-end of his rifle so fiercely that his knuckles were blotched. A grub poked its three-inch head through the bark of the fallen tree and rotated toward the young sailor. "I want to get outa here so bad."
Barakite was extremely stable under most conditions. A bullet impact would only splash a crater in the doughy explosive. Flame would ignite it; but a fire, although intense, would not topple the giant cypress.
To do that, they needed to detonate the barakite—and K67 hadn't carried blasting caps. A grenade placed directly against the explosive might provide the necessary combination of heat and shock to set off the daisy-chain.
The part of Wilding's mind which was not dissociated by pain and fever prayed that it would.
Caffey crushed the grub with the butt of his machine-gun as he slid in beside his striker. "Hell, we got this far, didn't we?" he said. "Now we just sit for an hour or two and let somebody else do all the work."
The log had been the trunk of an ebony ten feet in diameter—a large tree by any standards short of those which included the dominant cypress. Branches of the ebony and cypress had battled for sunlight. Slowly but inexorably, the cypress levered its rival sideways. Finally, aided by a squall, the giant ripped the ebony's roots from the soil and toppled it in splendid ruin.
The dense log was fresh enough to cover the humans as they avenged the ebony's murder.
"Fire in the hole!" Brainard shouted. Foliage muffled his voice and the crashing progress of his run for cover.
Wilding drifted again through pallid filters. Images of Brainard with the grenade merged with his memories of the Board of Review. Then Brainard was an officer-trainee like Wilding, younger by a few years and with only few more months of service in the Herd.
Wilding watched in awe. Brainard never boasted, never grew defensive. He answered questions with such simple precision that it was only in the words of his crewmen that Brainard's icy heroism became apparent.
Wilding had never met a man like that in twenty-five years of living as a prince in Wyoming Keep. As clearly as an epiphany, Wilding knew that he must beg or bribe his way into the executive officer slot aboard Brainard's vessel. That way even Prince Hal might be able to learn the traits of manhood. . . .
A flatworm, mottled and a yard long, rose from the leaf mold as Brainard dodged past the ebony's root ball. The worm fastened momentarily to the laser communicator strapped to the ensign's chest.
Leaf shouted in fury. Brainard crushed the creature against him with a swipe of his rifle butt. It fell writhing. Brainard flung himself down beside the others.
White light flashed across the underside of the leaves. An instant later, the sharp crash of the explosion shocked the jungle to silence.
"Thank God . . ." Caffey murmured.
The blast was over in the split second of a lightning bolt. The following roar seemed to take forever. Over a hundred thousand tons of wood toppled down the island's north slope, carrying all before it.
"Yippee!" cried Newton. He jumped to his feet. Brainard grabbed the coxswain's belt. Newton was too strong for one man to bring down, but Brainard clung for a moment until Leaf and Caffey added their weight.
Newton slammed to the ground with a curse. Dirt, rocks, and chunks of vegetation kicked skyward by the explosion broke like a storm over the humans.
The sudden destruction drove the jungle berserk. Images printed across Wilding's fever in a surreal montage:
A phalanx of three-yard-long katydids crashed through the undergrowth. The flightless insects ran on four legs and scraped the middle pair deafeningly against their modified wing cases.
Caustic green liquid slurped from the hollow core of a cottonwood, then siphoned back into its hiding place. It left smoldering scars across the bark as it withdrew.
A thirty-foot serpent with eyes like fire opals plunged from high in the canopy. As the snake fell, it twisted to strike repeatedly at its own red-banded body.
A hundred other tragedies glimpsed simultaneously. Thousands more hidden in the massive chaos.
The rain of debris pattered to a halt. The noise of the falling tree continued. Ensign Brainard got to his feet and shambled forward. The able-bodied members of the crew followed . . . and Officer-Trainee Wilding rose as well.