"The girls look like they just stepped off a holoscreen," Leaf whispered.
The familiar barroom had a glow over it now. Everything blurred except for the woman at whom he stared. She faced the audience again. Her left hand was behind her back; her right was in front of her. She was manipulating herself with her index fingers.
The woman's pupils were dilated so wide that the color of her irises was indeterminable.
"They've been on the holos, often enough," Jessamyn murmurred. "And at the very best parties, they have. Ashley, there, she's a Callahan from Wyoming Keep, she is. That's one of the best families there."
"Who'll be man enough to give little Ashley what she needs?" Lieutenant Congreve asked in a cajoling tone. "You can see how she's looking forward to meeting a real man."
Jessamyn put a big, gentle hand on Leaf's shoulder. "I can see you're a hard one, lad," the mercenary said. "She likes that, I can tell you. All her sort like that."
There was a tinge of bitter sadness in Jessamyn's voice. Leaf heard the tone, but it didn't matter any more.
He got up. His legs propelled him toward the woman in the center of a rosy haze.
6
May 17, 382 AS. 1628 hours.
"Let's go, let's go!" Brainard ordered. "Newton, carry your pack, don't try to sling it. You'll be taking off your suit in a hundred feet and you can put the pack on then."
The coxswain blinked at him. He made one last, half-hearted attempt to thrust his arms, doubled in size by the baggy fabric of his environmental suit, through straps which could not possibly hold them.
The walnut tree blazed in the center of the area its poison had cleared. The ferns and bamboo in the warhead's direct line had vanished; those on the edges now smoldered and struggled to pump life into the shrivelled foliage before undamaged neighbors strangled them.
Bright green shoots speared up from the devastated swath.
Footlockers, like bunks and air-conditioned quarters, were for the crews of major fleet elements. The personal gear of a crewman aboard a hovercraft was limited to the contents of a .8-cubic foot backpack which could be hung, slung, or stuffed into what little space the flitterboats offered.
Now the packs were stuffed with dried food, ammunition, and wads of doughy barakite scooped from the warhead of the second torpedo. Brainard didn't know how much good the explosive was going to be, but he knew they needed something.
"These black balls on the soil," Wilding called. He pointed to a sphere the size of a snooker ball. There were dozens of them, obvious against soil from which all the cover had been burned away. "Leave them alone. Don't for any reason touch them!"
Wilding ought to be in charge. He was educated, so he knew the environment. To Brainard, it was all a lethal blur. He was afraid to focus on anything except the peak that was his goal . . . and the peak was invisible, merely something taken on faith from the charts.
K67 hadn't been equipped to support her crew on an overland trek. The rifles and Caffrey's slightly heavier machine-gun were the security blankets with which men convinced themselves that they wouldn't be helpless against enemy gunboats if the twin seventy-fives were put out of action.
OT Wilding had only a pistol. Wilding claimed he couldn't hit anything with it, but Brainard had seen the aristocrat nail the slug while he was running to save Leaf.
As for Leaf. . . .
"Leaf, do you want my pistol?" Brainard said aloud. The handgun was part of an officer's insignia of rank, but Brainard also brought a rifle and bandolier of magazines aboard K67.
The motorman carried his pack at arm's length in one hand and his multitool in the other. He looked at the ensign. Leaf's complexion was sallow beneath its tan. "Naw, I got this," he said and waved the multitool.
"All right, but you're welcome to something that'll shoot," Brainard said.
Leaf resumed his trudge forward. "This'll do for me," he muttered.
Brainard brought up the rear while OT Wilding led the crew through the flame-cleared corridor. They hadn't discussed the arrangements, it just happened that way. Wilding knew what he was doing . . . and he was a born leader, never mind rank.
Brainard remembered to step around one of the black spheres in the path. A shoot which had broken through the baked surface nearby nuzzled the sphere, preparing to rip through the husk and suck whatever nourishment was within.
The sphere exploded with a puff of steam. Barbed rootlets lashed in all directions. Some of them pierced the earth; others seized the shoot that had triggered the sphere's opening.
"Everything all right?" Wilding called from the front of the line.
"A couple plants trying to eat each other," Brainard shouted back.
He tried to look behind him while he still watched where he put his feet. There were too many things he had to see. Even though he'd taken off his environmental suit, his backpack and the laser communicator strapped to his chest restricted his movements.