Back | Next
Contents

Simple Problems

The woman was in her sixties, though you had to look into her eyes to be sure. A lot of money had been spent to hide the fact. Her hair was a lustrous black which by its very perfection proved that science had augmented nature.

"Now just bend over and throw your hair forward, ma'am," Abbado said. "And hold still. Before we can put the patch on, I got to shave you with this."

He gestured with his 8-inch powerknife. The blade was dull gray except for the wickedly sparkling edges of synthetic diamond. When the knife was switched live, the paired edges sawed their microserrations against one another. The half-millimeter oscillations occurred hundreds of times a second and would slice through just about anything.

"Omigod, no," the woman said, shrinking back against the man standing next in line. She covered her face with her hands.

Abbado opened his mouth to snarl a curse. "Hey, ma'am," Glasebrook said. "Look here at me. It's no sweat, right?"

He lifted his helmet and rotated so that all the nearby civilians could see the patch of cargo tape he, like the rest of the strikers, wore where their spine entered the skull's foramen magnum. The helmets kept the bugs from lighting, but it'd be a bitch having to sleep with your helmet on. The major wasn't taking chances.

"Let the sarge shave you and you can look as pretty as me," Flea added, turning again and giving the woman a smile so broad he looked like a finback whale.

The aircar fifty feet away ran up its fans, lifted, and settled back in place. Abbado didn't try to shout over the induction howl. When it ceased, he said, "We need to shave the hair so the tape seals right, is the thing. You don't want to be like that Spook we caught, believe me."

He was glad he was working with Glasebrook. He'd never seen the Flea lose his temper. Abbado's own disposition—usually balanced enough when he was sober—had gotten pretty frayed since the Spook bit him.

As soon as the strikers near the ship had their brainstems taped, Major Farrell had swapped them with the squads on the perimeter. When all the strikers were protected, the ones now with the ship had been tasked to take care of the civilians. They worked in pairs: one with the knife, the other to hold the civilian's head still during the rough-and-ready barbering. A twitch at the wrong time and a powerknife could take a head off as easy as it did the hair.

The woman moaned softly and obeyed, sweeping her hair in front of her face in a veil of the greatest delicacy. An insect sat like a tiny scab at the base of her skull.

The civilian behind her gasped and felt his own neck again. Abbado held his finger across his lips and scowled to keep the fellow from blurting something. He thumbed the powerknife live. Glasebrook took the woman's head between spread fingers that could crush walnuts.

Abbado sheared the back of the woman's scalp and the bug lurking there in the same swift, smooth motion. Severed hair trailed away as black gossamer. Abbado rubbed the shaven area with the edge of his right hand to smear off any remnants of the insect, then put the prepared square of cargo tape over it.

"There you go, ma'am," Glasebrook said as he raised the woman to meet his bright smile. "When we get where it's safe, you can take the tape off and your hair'll be just as pretty as ever in no time."

"Yeah," said Abbado. "The adhesive dissolves in alcohol and the tape falls off without you feeling it a bit."

And if you believe that, I'll try you on "I won't come in your mouth." 

Aloud he said to the following man, "Next?"

Abbado would have liked to hurry things because the line was still damned long, but he knew that wouldn't work with civilians. He only hoped that the bugs took longer to get dug in than the strikers did to cover the brainstems. He didn't want some pretty girl to nut on him the way that Spook had.

A pair of fuel-air grenades went off fifty yards away. Strikers were blowing a firebreak to keep the plasma-lighted blaze from spreading toward the ship. A pebble thrown from the explosions bounced off Farrell's helmet, sounding like a gunshot. It didn't hurt him, but even Lundie and the manager started at the noise.

"We're going to get a storm," Top said, looking southward past the transport's nose. "Well, maybe it'll cool things down. Not that I'm counting on it."

Kuznetsov stood beside the staffer flying the aircar and called, "Everything checks out. Sir, are we clear to go?"

"When Mr. al-Ibrahimi gives you clearance," Farrell said. Strike Force companies were used to operating as a law unto themselves. Farrell didn't usually have a superior on the ground; but this time he did, and his strikers shouldn't imply that nothing a civilian said mattered.

"Sir, perhaps you should go instead of me," Lundie said. "The danger here probably is greater than—"

"There's more than enough danger for everyone on BZ 459, Tamara," al-Ibrahimi said. The tight-lipped blonde flinched as though al-Ibrahimi had whipped her across the face. It was the first time Farrell had heard him interrupt his aide. "The sooner the expedition removes to the proper site, the better off we'll be. Please proceed with your duties."

"Yes sir," Lundie said. She turned to Suares and added in a louder but still wooden voice, "Councillor, we're going now."

Suares stood hand in hand with a plumpish woman of his own age, shorter than the councillor by ten inches as well as being soft in contrast to his gaunt angularity. They looked as though they belonged together nonetheless.

Councillor Suares bent and pecked a kiss on the woman's cheek. "Be careful while I'm gone, my dear," he said.

She patted the back of his hand. "You be careful, Joao," she said. "Don't forget where you are and go wandering around by yourself."

"Sir?" said Top Daye. "The building superintendent wants to know if we can give her some strikers to manhandle heavy gear out of the ship. She doesn't have the people to do it, not with it tilting like it is."

The super, a stout woman with hairy arms named Rifkind, glared at Farrell in gloomy irritation. Two of her staffers watched from the hatchway.

Al-Ibrahimi heard the exchange. "No," he said. "The colonists will supply the manpower. Major Farrell and his personnel are here for what we can't provide for ourselves, protection."

The aircar lifted into a hover, then turned and headed north in a gradual climb. Lieutenant Kuznetsov waved back to the strikers on the ground.

"Boy, I hope the Loot gets us some support damn quick," Top said. "Not that I'm counting on it."

Lightning flashed in the distant clouds.

Meyer twisted. The second leg piece separated and fell away. Sweat tacked the pants legs to her thighs.

"Bet you're glad to be out of that suit," said Methie. His visor was raised. His partner, another Third Platoon striker named Caldwell, wiped ash and grit from the belt of shells which hung from the cannon's loading port.

"It's okay," Meyer said. She felt more comfortable in a hard suit than not, but if she said that they'd think she was losing her nerve. She was fine, pretty much. "You know how to handle that thing?"

Caldwell was the same size and build as Meyer, but she kept her scalp shaved so the tattoos could be seen clearly when she wasn't wearing a helmet. She looked up and said, "I guess we can manage. We've got the specialty endorsement in our personnel jackets, if that's what you mean."

"Hey, sorry," Meyer said. "It's a hot day, okay?"

She gathered up the pieces of her hard suit. The arms, legs, and connectors seemed to weigh more in her hands than they did a moment before when she was wearing them.

"Hey, snake?" Methie said. "You and Nessman really waxed them bastards. Nice work."

Meyer smiled and walked toward the command group with her gear. The aircar rose in a test run. Meyer closed her eyes so that the trash thrown up by the drive fans wouldn't blind her. With her arms full, she couldn't flip down her visor to cover her face.

She wondered if the aircar was going to hold out long enough to transfer all C41's equipment to the new site or if the strikers would wind up humping it through the forest. Top Daye'd said something about bringing in another starship with more transport. That'd be nice. Strikers didn't live very long if they thought the high command was going to make things easy for them, though.

Nessman was seated on the ground, removing the upper sections of his hard suit while a medic looked at his foot. He waved at Meyer. Half a dozen small fires still burned from the recent battle. Ash and bitter smoke drifted through the site.

"Meyer!" Sergeant Daye called. He waved her over.

Top stood with the major, God, and a group of civilians who looked as though they thought they should be in charge of something. A good-looking man was saying to the project manager, "It's important that Margaret not feel she's being pressured to leave the compartment. She'll realize the necessity on her own, but we have to give her time."

"Councillor Lock," God replied in a voice that was either coldly hostile or just cold, "the ship is not a safe refuge. I suggest that you convince your wife to leave promptly, because I won't authorize a search for her body if the vessel collapses and she's still inside."

"Meyer," said Daye, "you haven't had your neck taped, right?"

"I had my suit on the whole time, Top," she said. She hadn't followed what the flap about bugs was, since she and Nessman continued to crew the plasma cannon until they were relieved minutes ago.

"Well you don't now," Daye said. "Some of these bugs, they dig through the back of your neck into your brain and you go crazy. Have—"

The aircar lifted again, this time with Lieutenant Kuznetsov and three civilians aboard. It rose twenty feet vertically to keep from sucking in debris its own fans kicked from the ground, then headed north in a gentle climb.

"Have Abbado fit you with tape like this," Daye resumed as the whine faded. "If he's turned over the spool to some—"

The aircar made a sound like a double hiccup. It flipped end over end before it crashed into the jungle just beyond the landing site.

Blohm was only a hundred feet farther from the crash, but the car came down just beyond 3-1. Sergeant Bastien shouted, "Come on! There may be somebody alive!" to his squad and pushed into a stand of finger-thick shoots growing from a fallen log.

The shoots bent like strands of putty until the sergeant was halfway through. Then they snapped vertical again, squeezing his waist tighter than that of a nineteenth-century belle wearing stays. He screamed on a rising note.

"Three-one, watch overhead!" Blohm called. He dodged a bush he could have jumped over or plowed through. He just didn't trust the look of it. As he passed, he saw the woody stem was bent like a bowstaff and quivering with tension.

Two strikers cut the shoots with their knives. The severed ends flew apart like released springs. Bastien fell to the ground and lay moaning. Another striker glanced upward in response to Blohm's warning, but he didn't see that a section high on the trunk of the emergent at the clearing's edge was expanding visibly.

"Mark!" Blohm called desperately. "Three-one, get the fuck out from there! The tree's going to burst! Over!"

Two strikers bent over their platoon sergeant. The others peered into the foliage overhead, combing through their helmets' vision options. They still didn't see any reason for concern.

Blohm slashed a burst from his stinger toward the treetop. A few pellets chipped bark, but the bole continued to swell. It was twice its diameter of a minute before.

Gabrilovitch was running behind Blohm. His grenade launcher chugged five times. The 4-ounce projectiles were easily visible throughout their flight. The first blew the swelling apart with a blue-white flash: Gabe had loaded with electricals.

A mass of thick white liquid slurped from the ruptured bole. The second grenade burst in the middle of it. The syrup ignited in a whuff of smoky orange flame.

All of Gabe's well-aimed salvo was in the air before the first grenade hit. The remaining rounds blew fiery bubbles that vanished instantly as traceries of soot.

The flaming mass crawled slowly down the trunk. 3-1 scrambled back, two of them carrying their sergeant, but the immediate danger was past. If the tree had expelled the sticky fluid under pressure, it would have engulfed the whole squad.

Blohm drew his powerknife but he kept the stinger in a one-hand grip. He paused at the forest's edge to slow his breathing, then stepped through the opening cut to free Bastien. Sergeant Gabrilovitch locked a fresh magazine into his grenade launcher's butt-well and glanced up at the gooey flame devouring the tree from which it had come.

Strikers from 3-1 hesitated, then followed the scouts into the forest. "For God's sake, step where I do!" Blohm snarled.

Blohm heard a stinger fire in the wreck as soon as he was past the forest margin. Somebody was alive. Probably the Loot, but one of the civilians conceivably knew how to pull a trigger.

Ahead he saw a swatch of blue plastic, the aircar's hull. The vegetation between looked at first to be a stand of wrist-thick saplings. The "trunks" merged twenty feet in the air and from there spread into dark-leafed branches. They were air roots like those of terrestrial mangroves.

And what do you do to people, tree? Blohm wondered with a slight smile. He stuck the barrel of his stinger between a pair of roots and shot into the spherical mass joining roots and branches in an hourglass shape.

Bark and wood the color of a drowned man's skin flew into the air. Clear sap dripped from the cup-sized wound and evaporated as quickly as methanol on a hotplate. Filters clicked over Blohm's nostrils.

"Three-one, visors down," Blohm said in satisfaction. There was no caret on his display to indicate he was in danger of absorbing the gas through the skin. "Gabe, wait for me to cross."

The tree's poisonous breath would be a danger for civilians, but the strikers were equipped for it. Blohm cut a pair of roots, severing them first at arm's length above him, then flush with the moist ground as the ends wobbled. The gap was eighteen inches wide.

Blohm slid through without touching the supports to either side, crossed the circular clearing beneath the tree, and cut through the arched roots on the other side. Pores in the bark spread like eyelids opening. The air beneath the tree became faintly misty.

The aircar lay tilted to the right. Its underside was toward the rescue party. The stinger had stopped firing, but Blohm heard a powerknife from the passenger bay.

A vine as thick as an anchor cable hung onto the crashed vehicle from a branch of one of the neighboring trees. Ten feet above the ground, the vine's tip flared into scores of tendrils. They moved in the still air. Stinger pellets had chewed the tip nodule, sawing off a number of tendrils but not destroying the spongy nodule itself. Kuznetsov had been forced to fire straight up.

Blohm's stinger tore the vine for half a second before a grenade from Gabrilovitch shredded a two-foot length in a spray of juice and white fibers. The sergeant's shoulder steadied Blohm from the blast.

The severed nodule swung outward. Tendrils twisted like a Gorgon's hair. Blohm let his stinger go and gripped the car's quarter panel with his right hand. He pulled himself halfway onto the vehicle. Gabrilovitch knelt to provide his shoulder as a step. Blohm rotated his legs over the side of the car and slashed through the tendril groping toward his thigh.

The old civilian and the driver had hurtled from the front seats when the aircar hit. Vine tendrils curled around their necks and snaked under their cuffs. The victims' skin was sallow and the tension of their muscles bent the corpses into rigid bows.

The blonde woman hadn't bounced out of the central compartment, probably because the Loot had judged the angle of impact and braced the both of them against it. Now Kuznetsov held the blonde pressed against the tilted car so that what had been the floor of the central compartment protected their backs.

"Get her out of here!" Kuznetsov shouted as her powerknife cut a tendril reaching around her for the blonde. She ignored the tip probing where the cuff of her battle dress bloused into the top of her right boot. The tendrils might have slowed when the strikers' fire severed the supporting vine, but for the time being they retained life and motion.

Blohm gripped the blonde's coveralls at waist level and heaved upward. She had enough presence of mind to grab his shoulder. For an instant Blohm thought they were going to overbalance and land face first in the nodule, but a striker caught his equipment belt from behind and anchored him.

Kuznetsov bent and sawed through the tendril. Its tip had disappeared beneath her boot top. The severed end writhed. It continued to writhe as the lieutenant's body arched backward and her limbs spasmed. The powerknife flew aside, still whirring.

Blohm tried to throw the blonde onto the ground behind him, the fastest way to put a barrier between her and the remaining tendrils. She misunderstood and continued to cling to his arm. The tip of a tendril brushed Blohm's breastplate and curled onto the civilian's bare wrist.

Instead of cutting the plant, Blohm slid his knife between the tendril and the blonde's arm, shaving flesh and the tip of a wrist bone. The blade's vibration spit blood in all directions.

The civilian gasped but didn't scream. Blohm rolled himself backward, taking her with him in a somersault. Gabe ducked aside, dodging Blohm's knife.

Blohm hit on his shoulders and tucked by reflex. He managed not to fall on the blonde, but the breastplate she slammed against was a lot harder than the ground beneath him.

A striker from 3-1 leaned over the tilted aircar, stepping on the laced hands of one of her fellows. "Blast that—" Blohm wheezed.

A gush of dazzling white fire spewed from the muzzle of the striker's weapon. She carried a flame gun using high pressure oxygen to throw a jet of metal-enriched fuel. It carved the vegetation with a ferocity only a plasma bolt could have bettered.

"Striker Blohm, I think you'd better get me to medical help," said the blonde civilian. She'd clamped her right palm over the wound, but blood and serum leaked around the edges. "Or your courage will have been for nothing. Some of the toxins have already entered my system."

The forest gave an angry sigh. Perhaps the sound was air rushing to feed the blaze the flame gun had ignited.

Back | Next
Contents
Framed

Back | Next
Contents

Simple Problems

The woman was in her sixties, though you had to look into her eyes to be sure. A lot of money had been spent to hide the fact. Her hair was a lustrous black which by its very perfection proved that science had augmented nature.

"Now just bend over and throw your hair forward, ma'am," Abbado said. "And hold still. Before we can put the patch on, I got to shave you with this."

He gestured with his 8-inch powerknife. The blade was dull gray except for the wickedly sparkling edges of synthetic diamond. When the knife was switched live, the paired edges sawed their microserrations against one another. The half-millimeter oscillations occurred hundreds of times a second and would slice through just about anything.

"Omigod, no," the woman said, shrinking back against the man standing next in line. She covered her face with her hands.

Abbado opened his mouth to snarl a curse. "Hey, ma'am," Glasebrook said. "Look here at me. It's no sweat, right?"

He lifted his helmet and rotated so that all the nearby civilians could see the patch of cargo tape he, like the rest of the strikers, wore where their spine entered the skull's foramen magnum. The helmets kept the bugs from lighting, but it'd be a bitch having to sleep with your helmet on. The major wasn't taking chances.

"Let the sarge shave you and you can look as pretty as me," Flea added, turning again and giving the woman a smile so broad he looked like a finback whale.

The aircar fifty feet away ran up its fans, lifted, and settled back in place. Abbado didn't try to shout over the induction howl. When it ceased, he said, "We need to shave the hair so the tape seals right, is the thing. You don't want to be like that Spook we caught, believe me."

He was glad he was working with Glasebrook. He'd never seen the Flea lose his temper. Abbado's own disposition—usually balanced enough when he was sober—had gotten pretty frayed since the Spook bit him.

As soon as the strikers near the ship had their brainstems taped, Major Farrell had swapped them with the squads on the perimeter. When all the strikers were protected, the ones now with the ship had been tasked to take care of the civilians. They worked in pairs: one with the knife, the other to hold the civilian's head still during the rough-and-ready barbering. A twitch at the wrong time and a powerknife could take a head off as easy as it did the hair.

The woman moaned softly and obeyed, sweeping her hair in front of her face in a veil of the greatest delicacy. An insect sat like a tiny scab at the base of her skull.

The civilian behind her gasped and felt his own neck again. Abbado held his finger across his lips and scowled to keep the fellow from blurting something. He thumbed the powerknife live. Glasebrook took the woman's head between spread fingers that could crush walnuts.

Abbado sheared the back of the woman's scalp and the bug lurking there in the same swift, smooth motion. Severed hair trailed away as black gossamer. Abbado rubbed the shaven area with the edge of his right hand to smear off any remnants of the insect, then put the prepared square of cargo tape over it.

"There you go, ma'am," Glasebrook said as he raised the woman to meet his bright smile. "When we get where it's safe, you can take the tape off and your hair'll be just as pretty as ever in no time."

"Yeah," said Abbado. "The adhesive dissolves in alcohol and the tape falls off without you feeling it a bit."

And if you believe that, I'll try you on "I won't come in your mouth." 

Aloud he said to the following man, "Next?"

Abbado would have liked to hurry things because the line was still damned long, but he knew that wouldn't work with civilians. He only hoped that the bugs took longer to get dug in than the strikers did to cover the brainstems. He didn't want some pretty girl to nut on him the way that Spook had.

A pair of fuel-air grenades went off fifty yards away. Strikers were blowing a firebreak to keep the plasma-lighted blaze from spreading toward the ship. A pebble thrown from the explosions bounced off Farrell's helmet, sounding like a gunshot. It didn't hurt him, but even Lundie and the manager started at the noise.

"We're going to get a storm," Top said, looking southward past the transport's nose. "Well, maybe it'll cool things down. Not that I'm counting on it."

Kuznetsov stood beside the staffer flying the aircar and called, "Everything checks out. Sir, are we clear to go?"

"When Mr. al-Ibrahimi gives you clearance," Farrell said. Strike Force companies were used to operating as a law unto themselves. Farrell didn't usually have a superior on the ground; but this time he did, and his strikers shouldn't imply that nothing a civilian said mattered.

"Sir, perhaps you should go instead of me," Lundie said. "The danger here probably is greater than—"

"There's more than enough danger for everyone on BZ 459, Tamara," al-Ibrahimi said. The tight-lipped blonde flinched as though al-Ibrahimi had whipped her across the face. It was the first time Farrell had heard him interrupt his aide. "The sooner the expedition removes to the proper site, the better off we'll be. Please proceed with your duties."

"Yes sir," Lundie said. She turned to Suares and added in a louder but still wooden voice, "Councillor, we're going now."

Suares stood hand in hand with a plumpish woman of his own age, shorter than the councillor by ten inches as well as being soft in contrast to his gaunt angularity. They looked as though they belonged together nonetheless.

Councillor Suares bent and pecked a kiss on the woman's cheek. "Be careful while I'm gone, my dear," he said.

She patted the back of his hand. "You be careful, Joao," she said. "Don't forget where you are and go wandering around by yourself."

"Sir?" said Top Daye. "The building superintendent wants to know if we can give her some strikers to manhandle heavy gear out of the ship. She doesn't have the people to do it, not with it tilting like it is."

The super, a stout woman with hairy arms named Rifkind, glared at Farrell in gloomy irritation. Two of her staffers watched from the hatchway.

Al-Ibrahimi heard the exchange. "No," he said. "The colonists will supply the manpower. Major Farrell and his personnel are here for what we can't provide for ourselves, protection."

The aircar lifted into a hover, then turned and headed north in a gradual climb. Lieutenant Kuznetsov waved back to the strikers on the ground.

"Boy, I hope the Loot gets us some support damn quick," Top said. "Not that I'm counting on it."

Lightning flashed in the distant clouds.

Meyer twisted. The second leg piece separated and fell away. Sweat tacked the pants legs to her thighs.

"Bet you're glad to be out of that suit," said Methie. His visor was raised. His partner, another Third Platoon striker named Caldwell, wiped ash and grit from the belt of shells which hung from the cannon's loading port.

"It's okay," Meyer said. She felt more comfortable in a hard suit than not, but if she said that they'd think she was losing her nerve. She was fine, pretty much. "You know how to handle that thing?"

Caldwell was the same size and build as Meyer, but she kept her scalp shaved so the tattoos could be seen clearly when she wasn't wearing a helmet. She looked up and said, "I guess we can manage. We've got the specialty endorsement in our personnel jackets, if that's what you mean."

"Hey, sorry," Meyer said. "It's a hot day, okay?"

She gathered up the pieces of her hard suit. The arms, legs, and connectors seemed to weigh more in her hands than they did a moment before when she was wearing them.

"Hey, snake?" Methie said. "You and Nessman really waxed them bastards. Nice work."

Meyer smiled and walked toward the command group with her gear. The aircar rose in a test run. Meyer closed her eyes so that the trash thrown up by the drive fans wouldn't blind her. With her arms full, she couldn't flip down her visor to cover her face.

She wondered if the aircar was going to hold out long enough to transfer all C41's equipment to the new site or if the strikers would wind up humping it through the forest. Top Daye'd said something about bringing in another starship with more transport. That'd be nice. Strikers didn't live very long if they thought the high command was going to make things easy for them, though.

Nessman was seated on the ground, removing the upper sections of his hard suit while a medic looked at his foot. He waved at Meyer. Half a dozen small fires still burned from the recent battle. Ash and bitter smoke drifted through the site.

"Meyer!" Sergeant Daye called. He waved her over.

Top stood with the major, God, and a group of civilians who looked as though they thought they should be in charge of something. A good-looking man was saying to the project manager, "It's important that Margaret not feel she's being pressured to leave the compartment. She'll realize the necessity on her own, but we have to give her time."

"Councillor Lock," God replied in a voice that was either coldly hostile or just cold, "the ship is not a safe refuge. I suggest that you convince your wife to leave promptly, because I won't authorize a search for her body if the vessel collapses and she's still inside."

"Meyer," said Daye, "you haven't had your neck taped, right?"

"I had my suit on the whole time, Top," she said. She hadn't followed what the flap about bugs was, since she and Nessman continued to crew the plasma cannon until they were relieved minutes ago.

"Well you don't now," Daye said. "Some of these bugs, they dig through the back of your neck into your brain and you go crazy. Have—"

The aircar lifted again, this time with Lieutenant Kuznetsov and three civilians aboard. It rose twenty feet vertically to keep from sucking in debris its own fans kicked from the ground, then headed north in a gentle climb.

"Have Abbado fit you with tape like this," Daye resumed as the whine faded. "If he's turned over the spool to some—"

The aircar made a sound like a double hiccup. It flipped end over end before it crashed into the jungle just beyond the landing site.

Blohm was only a hundred feet farther from the crash, but the car came down just beyond 3-1. Sergeant Bastien shouted, "Come on! There may be somebody alive!" to his squad and pushed into a stand of finger-thick shoots growing from a fallen log.

The shoots bent like strands of putty until the sergeant was halfway through. Then they snapped vertical again, squeezing his waist tighter than that of a nineteenth-century belle wearing stays. He screamed on a rising note.

"Three-one, watch overhead!" Blohm called. He dodged a bush he could have jumped over or plowed through. He just didn't trust the look of it. As he passed, he saw the woody stem was bent like a bowstaff and quivering with tension.

Two strikers cut the shoots with their knives. The severed ends flew apart like released springs. Bastien fell to the ground and lay moaning. Another striker glanced upward in response to Blohm's warning, but he didn't see that a section high on the trunk of the emergent at the clearing's edge was expanding visibly.

"Mark!" Blohm called desperately. "Three-one, get the fuck out from there! The tree's going to burst! Over!"

Two strikers bent over their platoon sergeant. The others peered into the foliage overhead, combing through their helmets' vision options. They still didn't see any reason for concern.

Blohm slashed a burst from his stinger toward the treetop. A few pellets chipped bark, but the bole continued to swell. It was twice its diameter of a minute before.

Gabrilovitch was running behind Blohm. His grenade launcher chugged five times. The 4-ounce projectiles were easily visible throughout their flight. The first blew the swelling apart with a blue-white flash: Gabe had loaded with electricals.

A mass of thick white liquid slurped from the ruptured bole. The second grenade burst in the middle of it. The syrup ignited in a whuff of smoky orange flame.

All of Gabe's well-aimed salvo was in the air before the first grenade hit. The remaining rounds blew fiery bubbles that vanished instantly as traceries of soot.

The flaming mass crawled slowly down the trunk. 3-1 scrambled back, two of them carrying their sergeant, but the immediate danger was past. If the tree had expelled the sticky fluid under pressure, it would have engulfed the whole squad.

Blohm drew his powerknife but he kept the stinger in a one-hand grip. He paused at the forest's edge to slow his breathing, then stepped through the opening cut to free Bastien. Sergeant Gabrilovitch locked a fresh magazine into his grenade launcher's butt-well and glanced up at the gooey flame devouring the tree from which it had come.

Strikers from 3-1 hesitated, then followed the scouts into the forest. "For God's sake, step where I do!" Blohm snarled.

Blohm heard a stinger fire in the wreck as soon as he was past the forest margin. Somebody was alive. Probably the Loot, but one of the civilians conceivably knew how to pull a trigger.

Ahead he saw a swatch of blue plastic, the aircar's hull. The vegetation between looked at first to be a stand of wrist-thick saplings. The "trunks" merged twenty feet in the air and from there spread into dark-leafed branches. They were air roots like those of terrestrial mangroves.

And what do you do to people, tree? Blohm wondered with a slight smile. He stuck the barrel of his stinger between a pair of roots and shot into the spherical mass joining roots and branches in an hourglass shape.

Bark and wood the color of a drowned man's skin flew into the air. Clear sap dripped from the cup-sized wound and evaporated as quickly as methanol on a hotplate. Filters clicked over Blohm's nostrils.

"Three-one, visors down," Blohm said in satisfaction. There was no caret on his display to indicate he was in danger of absorbing the gas through the skin. "Gabe, wait for me to cross."

The tree's poisonous breath would be a danger for civilians, but the strikers were equipped for it. Blohm cut a pair of roots, severing them first at arm's length above him, then flush with the moist ground as the ends wobbled. The gap was eighteen inches wide.

Blohm slid through without touching the supports to either side, crossed the circular clearing beneath the tree, and cut through the arched roots on the other side. Pores in the bark spread like eyelids opening. The air beneath the tree became faintly misty.

The aircar lay tilted to the right. Its underside was toward the rescue party. The stinger had stopped firing, but Blohm heard a powerknife from the passenger bay.

A vine as thick as an anchor cable hung onto the crashed vehicle from a branch of one of the neighboring trees. Ten feet above the ground, the vine's tip flared into scores of tendrils. They moved in the still air. Stinger pellets had chewed the tip nodule, sawing off a number of tendrils but not destroying the spongy nodule itself. Kuznetsov had been forced to fire straight up.

Blohm's stinger tore the vine for half a second before a grenade from Gabrilovitch shredded a two-foot length in a spray of juice and white fibers. The sergeant's shoulder steadied Blohm from the blast.

The severed nodule swung outward. Tendrils twisted like a Gorgon's hair. Blohm let his stinger go and gripped the car's quarter panel with his right hand. He pulled himself halfway onto the vehicle. Gabrilovitch knelt to provide his shoulder as a step. Blohm rotated his legs over the side of the car and slashed through the tendril groping toward his thigh.

The old civilian and the driver had hurtled from the front seats when the aircar hit. Vine tendrils curled around their necks and snaked under their cuffs. The victims' skin was sallow and the tension of their muscles bent the corpses into rigid bows.

The blonde woman hadn't bounced out of the central compartment, probably because the Loot had judged the angle of impact and braced the both of them against it. Now Kuznetsov held the blonde pressed against the tilted car so that what had been the floor of the central compartment protected their backs.

"Get her out of here!" Kuznetsov shouted as her powerknife cut a tendril reaching around her for the blonde. She ignored the tip probing where the cuff of her battle dress bloused into the top of her right boot. The tendrils might have slowed when the strikers' fire severed the supporting vine, but for the time being they retained life and motion.

Blohm gripped the blonde's coveralls at waist level and heaved upward. She had enough presence of mind to grab his shoulder. For an instant Blohm thought they were going to overbalance and land face first in the nodule, but a striker caught his equipment belt from behind and anchored him.

Kuznetsov bent and sawed through the tendril. Its tip had disappeared beneath her boot top. The severed end writhed. It continued to writhe as the lieutenant's body arched backward and her limbs spasmed. The powerknife flew aside, still whirring.

Blohm tried to throw the blonde onto the ground behind him, the fastest way to put a barrier between her and the remaining tendrils. She misunderstood and continued to cling to his arm. The tip of a tendril brushed Blohm's breastplate and curled onto the civilian's bare wrist.

Instead of cutting the plant, Blohm slid his knife between the tendril and the blonde's arm, shaving flesh and the tip of a wrist bone. The blade's vibration spit blood in all directions.

The civilian gasped but didn't scream. Blohm rolled himself backward, taking her with him in a somersault. Gabe ducked aside, dodging Blohm's knife.

Blohm hit on his shoulders and tucked by reflex. He managed not to fall on the blonde, but the breastplate she slammed against was a lot harder than the ground beneath him.

A striker from 3-1 leaned over the tilted aircar, stepping on the laced hands of one of her fellows. "Blast that—" Blohm wheezed.

A gush of dazzling white fire spewed from the muzzle of the striker's weapon. She carried a flame gun using high pressure oxygen to throw a jet of metal-enriched fuel. It carved the vegetation with a ferocity only a plasma bolt could have bettered.

"Striker Blohm, I think you'd better get me to medical help," said the blonde civilian. She'd clamped her right palm over the wound, but blood and serum leaked around the edges. "Or your courage will have been for nothing. Some of the toxins have already entered my system."

The forest gave an angry sigh. Perhaps the sound was air rushing to feed the blaze the flame gun had ignited.

Back | Next
Contents
Framed