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Brute Force

Esther Meyer wasn't sure she'd have noticed the tree if her helmet hadn't highlighted it. It was amazing. You wouldn't think something three feet thick and forty feet high could stay hidden when you were almost on top of it. If she'd been trying to watch everything instead of cueing her helmet to shooting trees specifically, the alert would have come from the sheaf of projectiles slashing at her and the column of civilians behind.

She skirted the trunk carefully. They weren't sure what it took to trigger the head. Maybe bumping the tree with an armored elbow would be enough. The spike that hit Meyer the first time hadn't penetrated, but that could have been luck and the extra fifty yards. She planned to get behind something big and lob a grenade to set this one off.

Pressley was somewhere off to Meyer's right, dealing with another tree. The major wanted a wide enough swath cleared of the damned things that if the second tractor had to divert in an emergency, the driver wouldn't set one of the bitches off. God's blonde aide had marked a total of six shooting trees on the helmet displays, though how she knew that was beyond Meyer's guessing.

The forest was huge and dark and as merciless as a Kalendru tank. Meyer didn't like, she really didn't like, being out here twenty feet ahead of her backup, but she didn't dare say anything about it. Besides, it was her job. She didn't need a superior to tell her that.

Branches swung lazily in the canopy a hundred feet above Meyer's head. Patches of unfiltered sunlight flickered across lower foliage like diaphanous butterflies. Anywhere else, Meyer would have guessed the wind was blowing higher up, but not in this jungle.

In her hurry to avoid whatever was being prepared above, Meyer stepped into a thicket of thin, pale leaves growing directly from the soil. The individual strands were a yard long and no more than an inch and a half across. They wound among the trees in a thick line instead of springing from a common center like the terrestrial grasses. She'd brushed against similar stands before, but this was the first time she'd pushed her way through them.

The leaves wrapped around her armored thighs, exuding sticky fluid along the stems. She swore, stamped her bootheel twice and pulled with all her strength. The leaves clung like cargo tape.

Meyer was holding the electrical grenade she'd planned to use to trigger the shooting tree. She shouted, "Fire in the hole!" armed the grenade and hurled it into the forest ahead to clear her hands for her stinger. She had a sudden unreasoning fear that if she'd merely dropped the grenade at her feet, the vegetation would manage to throw the arming switch and blow her legs off.

The icons of strikers from 3-3 converged from behind on her visor overlay. "Stay clear!" Meyer shouted. They didn't have armor and she didn't want to be responsible for them.

She squeezed the stinger's trigger, guiding its fire along the ground like a plowshare. Pellets ripped the roots in a spray of mold and pebbles. The leaves' grip lessened. Meyer tore herself clear and fell backward. The grenade burst with a nearby crack! and a gulp of cell tissue minced by the shrapnel.

A fruit the size of a pumpkin sailed from the tip of a high branch across twenty feet of horizontal distance. It burst like a water balloon on the ground where Meyer had been held a moment before. Everything organic, even the rich layer of topsoil, smoldered as juice from the ruptured fruit splashed over it.

Meyer scrambled to her feet. "Get clear!" she snarled to the pair of strikers with powerknives and stingers ready to cut her loose. "Can't you fucking hear! Get clear!"

She pulled a fuel-air grenade from her belt and armed it. "Fire in the hole!" she repeated as she threw the grenade into the undergrowth

Meyer crouched. The shockwave rolled her over, but the hard suit protected her against injury from the non-fragmentation blast. A hundred square feet of vegetation, including another stand of grass, vanished in an orange fireball.

Meyer trotted into the middle of the patch she'd just cleared, arming an electrical grenade. She wasn't going to take any chance of the ground cover grabbing her this time.

Blohm eyed the six lumps on the obvious path. Each was mottled gray and about the size of a soccer ball. Except for their slightly elevated infrared signatures, they might have been stones. "I don't trust those," he said.

"I don't trust any damned thing in this jungle," Gabrilovitch said sourly. "We go around?"

Blohm scanned a two-hundred-seventy-degree panorama of forest. The scouts were returning by a route that never crossed, much less followed, their original track. It looked to Blohm that despite that precaution the landscape had them neatly blocked unless they wanted to pass the "stones."

The bushes to the right had sword-shaped leaves that you'd want to avoid on any planet. The emergent whose branches overhung the lesser trees to the left was laden with bulbous fruit which could be anything, but was certainly dangerous.

"Got your nose filters in place, Gabe?" Blohm said as he aimed his stinger. A treetrunk in the middle distance concealed all but his helmet and gun hand from the target.

"Roger," said Gabrilovitch, turning to face their backtrail.

Blohm fired a single pellet into the most distant of the lumps, thirty feet away. It was a toadstool. The casing ruptured in a geyser of spores.

"We'll let those settle—" he began.

A blue spark snapped at the base of the toadstool, detonating the spore cloud. The shockwave swept away the other lumps as sheets of pale dust.

"I guess that wouldn't have killed us if we'd been walking down the trail," Blohm said softly, "but it sure would have pushed us to one side or the other in no shape for quick thinking."

"I'd rather be in a tunnel on Case Lion," Gabrilovitch said. "I swear to God I would, snake. I'm a city boy."

"Come on, Gabe," Blohm said. "We'll be with the company in an hour and you can relax."

For his own part, Caius Blohm was as relaxed as he'd been since Active Cloak.

Brush and trees eight inches in diameter cascaded off the side of the land-clearing blade as the bulldozer advanced. The driver made a minute adjustment to center the point at the lower left corner of the blade—"stinger" to the operators, though the term made Abbado blink every time he heard it—on a monster five feet in diameter. There were larger trees in the forest, but this one was bigger than Abbado would have tangled with if he'd been driving the vehicle.

Because the tractor's transmission was a torque converter, the thrumming engine note remained constant though the chink of the treads slowed. Topsoil, clay, and finally crumbling laterite lifted from beneath the tracks as the bulldozer's mass tried to anchor it to attack the even greater mass of the tree.

"Take back your gold . . ." Horgen sang under her breath, "for gold can never buy me . . ." 

Wood cracked like the fire of an automatic cannon. Pressley, riding the platform behind the cab, bobbed as the vehicle jerked and attempted to go forward.

"Horgen, shut the fuck up, will you?" Abbado said gloomily.

Horgen raised her left hand and nodded an apology.

The driver shifted to neutral, then reversed. The treads ground backward over the piles they'd dug. The double trench was six inches deep and layered, black over yellow over deep ochre that would harden to rusty brown in the air and sun.

The colonists were twenty feet behind, watching the big vehicle work. The strikers were doing pretty much the same thing, which was natural but'd get them all killed if something came from the side. "Three-three," Abbado ordered. "Watch your flanks and watch the canopy. That's where the trouble's going to come from, not from the tractor. Over."

The tree had a ropy, almost braided-looking, surface. The blade's stinger had started a vertical split which trailed ten or twelve feet up the trunk. As the driver maneuvered to hit the tree again at a slightly different angle, the crack lengthened. A parallel crack opened a few inches to the left and raced upward also.

"Give me the love, the love that you'd deny me . . ." 

The lower end of the strip of bark lifted. For an instant Abbado thought the bulldozer had severed it. Several finger-like fibers waggled from the tip as it squirmed over the blade's grated upper portion and caressed the front of the cab.

"Hey!" Abbado shouted. "Pressley, watch—"

The end fibers tugged at the mesh protecting the cab window, then released and flowed over the top of the cab. More strips, ropes, of bark split away to either side of the first one.

Pressley aimed his flame gun. The jet of white-hot fuel caught the tip and spattered in brilliance over the front of the tractor. Another bark tendril snaked around the side of the cab toward Pressley. Abbado and Horgen ripped it with their stingers as they ran forward. Pellets that missed sparkled from the armored motor housing and the back of the blade.

There were scores of wobbling tendrils now. The tree's core was the silvery white of a rapier's blade in sunlight. Pressley jerked to the right. His flame gun slashed a line of radiance across the edge of the cab, momentarily splashing him and the armored driver.

Horgen shouted. The fibers at the tip of a tendril gripped her waist, almost spanning it. She blasted the tentacle point-blank. Though the pellets shredded their target, the bark was a fibrous mat that retained its integrity.

Pressley lifted suddenly into the air. Civilians screamed and ran backward as the flame rod twitched toward them. A snap of the tentacle flung the weapon from the striker's hand and shut off the flame.

Abbado let his stinger go and drew his powerknife. The tendril that first gripped Horgen was a rag clinging without force, but a second had caught her left arm as she tried to insert a fresh magazine in the stinger.

Abbado clamped the squirming rope with one hand and pulled the powerknife across with all his strength. The bark had a dry, quivering feel to it like the body of a powerful snake. Fibers frayed to either side of Abbado's cut. It was like trying to shear steel cable.

Horgen's stinger cracked like a miniature bullwhip, forty times a second. Other strikers were firing. Abbado heard the chunkWHACK! of a grenade launcher.

Something grabbed his right ankle. He kicked. Another something caught the left calf. The tendrils lifted him, pulling in opposite directions.

"Shit!" shouted Sergeant Guilio Abbado. "Shit!"

A part of his mind wished that he'd come up with something better for what were probably his last words.

Like the mouth of a tunnel, Farrell thought as he walked with the project manager toward where the dozer was starting its cut. Colonists made way for them with a mixture of curiosity and concern. Not the hostility Farrell expected from civilians, though. That surprised him, especially after he'd screwed up and gotten so many of them dead or wounded.

The air was smoky with a touch of ozone sharpness, the latter from either the plasma bolts or the tractor's electric drive. The tree the gunner punted to the left with her first bolt smoldered, but only the shattered portions of the dense green wood could sustain combustion on their own. The dozer had grubbed out or crushed down what remained where the tree stood. Fresh clay clung to roots twisting from the wrack shoved aside by the broad blade.

Like snow melting in the sun, the shooting tree had shrunk to barely twenty percent of its original volume. Unfired spearheads now protruded through what remained of the head. The support fibers were less spongy than most of the plant's tissues. They stood out like the sinews of a man straining at too great a burden.

The dozer spiked a large tree and started to lug. Farrell eyed the wobbling canopy with concern, but his helmet AI didn't warn him of anything about to drop on the vehicle. Besides the armored striker behind the cab, Sergeant Abbado and one of his people followed the dozer closely. The other five squad members flanked the civilians, a little back of Farrell himself.

"Clearing the road is going to be a slow process," al-Ibrahimi said as he watched the dozer struggling against the forest giant. "Though most of the larger trees can be avoided, I hope."

"Slow is a good thing," Farrell said, though his attention was concentrated on the forest. "The civilians aren't going to be able to move fast, and we don't dare let the dozers get too far out ahead. We can't afford to lose—"

A tentacle of bark detached itself from the bole and trembled across the tractor. White wood gleamed for a hundred and fifty feet up the side of the tree.

The driver was either too busy with his controls to notice or saw so little through his grilled windows that he didn't realize anything more was happening than a piece of debris flying up. He shifted from reverse to neutral, preparing to hit the tree again.

"Get those civilians back before they're fucking killed!" Farrell said, aiming at the tentacles. He wasn't sure himself if he was speaking to his strikers or to al-Ibrahimi, but it was God's truth that he wanted the manager out of the way also.

He fired at the target quivering twenty feet in the air. Things were bad enough without a stray round hitting one of his strikers.

Two more, twelve more, tentacles separated as the first one had. The entire bark sheath squirmed toward the bulldozer. Pressley's flame gun carbonized the end of a tentacle. The portion above the flame's destruction could no longer reach the dozer, but the brown serpent continued to twist and strain like a vicious dog on its chain.

The driver realized his danger and shifted into reverse. Tendrils gripped the blade and clogged the drive gears. The tree swayed like a fishpole bound to its catch by a score of cable-thick lines.

Pressley's armored body flew in a parabola that ended when he slammed the trunk of another tree, fifty feet in the air. The tentacle released him. The striker fell, tumbling like a mannequin. The hard suit was undamaged, but the body within had been crushed despite the padding.

Farrell unhooked a 4-pound rocket and armed it by twisting open the launch tube. He checked behind him, turning his head rather than trusting the panorama display. Civilians were still too close though they surged backward under the lash of fear. Manager al-Ibrahimi shouted orders in a voice like dry thunder.

Farrell stepped to the side so that the backblast would singe forest, not the colonists his life was pledged to protect. Something nuzzled his left leg. He ignored the touch and squeezed the bar trigger.

The rocket snarled away, the motor a white glare in the half second before burnout. The last of the exhaust gases batted Farrell like a huge, hot cotton swab. Thrust against the sides of the tube rocked him back a step. The tentacle closed around Farrell's ankle, two ropy tendrils to either side of his boot.

Farrell's rocket hit the central pole of the tree a hundred feet in the air and blew it to toothpicks in a thunderclap. The peak and all the bark tentacles tumbled down like the head of Medusa.

The grip on Farrell's ankle tightened, then relaxed. He'd been straining against the tree's pull and fell backward when the tension released.

Flaccid tentacles slid from the bulldozer's cab and blade. The vehicle began moving. Other ropes still clogged the tracks and drive gears, but vegetable fibers flattened beneath density-enhanced metal.

The tracks accelerated slowly. The driver struggled with the lifeless tentacles choking his cab, oblivious of the fact that he was clanking backward toward the mob of civilians.

Farrell staggered to his feet. Sergeant Abbado was already trotting alongside the cab with Horgen. Abbado gave her a lift onto the platform. Brown fragments of a tentacle still dangled from Horgen's waist. Whatever she said to the driver was sufficient, because the bulldozer immediately shuddered to a stop.

Farrell looked around. The colonists had halted a hundred feet back. Strikers from the lead squad were in position nearby, reloading weapons. Some of them had raised their visors. They looked shaken. Farrell damned well felt shaken.

His visor overlay showed that C41 had held position pretty well, though there'd been a little easing forward. Fighting drew the strikers even though they knew there was more risk of an attack from the sides or rear than there was of the tree pulling up its roots and charging down the column.

Not that Farrell was ready to count that possibility out completely.

One of the bark tentacles slowly uncoiled on the ground. That was gravity, not malevolence. The tree was dead, waiting to be uprooted and flung to the side as soon as the bulldozer got moving again.

"C41, all clear," Farrell ordered. "We'll hold five minutes to get reorganized. Tell your civilians. They're not on the net, so they won't know what's happening. Over."

Manager al-Ibrahimi walked toward him. His aide came from where she'd been in the center of the column, her concern for al-Ibrahimi obvious even though her face was without expression.

Farrell rubbed his right wrist where the backblast had seared him. The manager would probably have to replace the bulldozer's driver until the original staffer had a chance to settle down.

Farrell needed to pick another striker to ride the deck.

He'd been thinking of the march in terms of miles and days. Now he started wondering how long it would be before he ran out of strikers.

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Framed

Back | Next
Contents

Brute Force

Esther Meyer wasn't sure she'd have noticed the tree if her helmet hadn't highlighted it. It was amazing. You wouldn't think something three feet thick and forty feet high could stay hidden when you were almost on top of it. If she'd been trying to watch everything instead of cueing her helmet to shooting trees specifically, the alert would have come from the sheaf of projectiles slashing at her and the column of civilians behind.

She skirted the trunk carefully. They weren't sure what it took to trigger the head. Maybe bumping the tree with an armored elbow would be enough. The spike that hit Meyer the first time hadn't penetrated, but that could have been luck and the extra fifty yards. She planned to get behind something big and lob a grenade to set this one off.

Pressley was somewhere off to Meyer's right, dealing with another tree. The major wanted a wide enough swath cleared of the damned things that if the second tractor had to divert in an emergency, the driver wouldn't set one of the bitches off. God's blonde aide had marked a total of six shooting trees on the helmet displays, though how she knew that was beyond Meyer's guessing.

The forest was huge and dark and as merciless as a Kalendru tank. Meyer didn't like, she really didn't like, being out here twenty feet ahead of her backup, but she didn't dare say anything about it. Besides, it was her job. She didn't need a superior to tell her that.

Branches swung lazily in the canopy a hundred feet above Meyer's head. Patches of unfiltered sunlight flickered across lower foliage like diaphanous butterflies. Anywhere else, Meyer would have guessed the wind was blowing higher up, but not in this jungle.

In her hurry to avoid whatever was being prepared above, Meyer stepped into a thicket of thin, pale leaves growing directly from the soil. The individual strands were a yard long and no more than an inch and a half across. They wound among the trees in a thick line instead of springing from a common center like the terrestrial grasses. She'd brushed against similar stands before, but this was the first time she'd pushed her way through them.

The leaves wrapped around her armored thighs, exuding sticky fluid along the stems. She swore, stamped her bootheel twice and pulled with all her strength. The leaves clung like cargo tape.

Meyer was holding the electrical grenade she'd planned to use to trigger the shooting tree. She shouted, "Fire in the hole!" armed the grenade and hurled it into the forest ahead to clear her hands for her stinger. She had a sudden unreasoning fear that if she'd merely dropped the grenade at her feet, the vegetation would manage to throw the arming switch and blow her legs off.

The icons of strikers from 3-3 converged from behind on her visor overlay. "Stay clear!" Meyer shouted. They didn't have armor and she didn't want to be responsible for them.

She squeezed the stinger's trigger, guiding its fire along the ground like a plowshare. Pellets ripped the roots in a spray of mold and pebbles. The leaves' grip lessened. Meyer tore herself clear and fell backward. The grenade burst with a nearby crack! and a gulp of cell tissue minced by the shrapnel.

A fruit the size of a pumpkin sailed from the tip of a high branch across twenty feet of horizontal distance. It burst like a water balloon on the ground where Meyer had been held a moment before. Everything organic, even the rich layer of topsoil, smoldered as juice from the ruptured fruit splashed over it.

Meyer scrambled to her feet. "Get clear!" she snarled to the pair of strikers with powerknives and stingers ready to cut her loose. "Can't you fucking hear! Get clear!"

She pulled a fuel-air grenade from her belt and armed it. "Fire in the hole!" she repeated as she threw the grenade into the undergrowth

Meyer crouched. The shockwave rolled her over, but the hard suit protected her against injury from the non-fragmentation blast. A hundred square feet of vegetation, including another stand of grass, vanished in an orange fireball.

Meyer trotted into the middle of the patch she'd just cleared, arming an electrical grenade. She wasn't going to take any chance of the ground cover grabbing her this time.

Blohm eyed the six lumps on the obvious path. Each was mottled gray and about the size of a soccer ball. Except for their slightly elevated infrared signatures, they might have been stones. "I don't trust those," he said.

"I don't trust any damned thing in this jungle," Gabrilovitch said sourly. "We go around?"

Blohm scanned a two-hundred-seventy-degree panorama of forest. The scouts were returning by a route that never crossed, much less followed, their original track. It looked to Blohm that despite that precaution the landscape had them neatly blocked unless they wanted to pass the "stones."

The bushes to the right had sword-shaped leaves that you'd want to avoid on any planet. The emergent whose branches overhung the lesser trees to the left was laden with bulbous fruit which could be anything, but was certainly dangerous.

"Got your nose filters in place, Gabe?" Blohm said as he aimed his stinger. A treetrunk in the middle distance concealed all but his helmet and gun hand from the target.

"Roger," said Gabrilovitch, turning to face their backtrail.

Blohm fired a single pellet into the most distant of the lumps, thirty feet away. It was a toadstool. The casing ruptured in a geyser of spores.

"We'll let those settle—" he began.

A blue spark snapped at the base of the toadstool, detonating the spore cloud. The shockwave swept away the other lumps as sheets of pale dust.

"I guess that wouldn't have killed us if we'd been walking down the trail," Blohm said softly, "but it sure would have pushed us to one side or the other in no shape for quick thinking."

"I'd rather be in a tunnel on Case Lion," Gabrilovitch said. "I swear to God I would, snake. I'm a city boy."

"Come on, Gabe," Blohm said. "We'll be with the company in an hour and you can relax."

For his own part, Caius Blohm was as relaxed as he'd been since Active Cloak.

Brush and trees eight inches in diameter cascaded off the side of the land-clearing blade as the bulldozer advanced. The driver made a minute adjustment to center the point at the lower left corner of the blade—"stinger" to the operators, though the term made Abbado blink every time he heard it—on a monster five feet in diameter. There were larger trees in the forest, but this one was bigger than Abbado would have tangled with if he'd been driving the vehicle.

Because the tractor's transmission was a torque converter, the thrumming engine note remained constant though the chink of the treads slowed. Topsoil, clay, and finally crumbling laterite lifted from beneath the tracks as the bulldozer's mass tried to anchor it to attack the even greater mass of the tree.

"Take back your gold . . ." Horgen sang under her breath, "for gold can never buy me . . ." 

Wood cracked like the fire of an automatic cannon. Pressley, riding the platform behind the cab, bobbed as the vehicle jerked and attempted to go forward.

"Horgen, shut the fuck up, will you?" Abbado said gloomily.

Horgen raised her left hand and nodded an apology.

The driver shifted to neutral, then reversed. The treads ground backward over the piles they'd dug. The double trench was six inches deep and layered, black over yellow over deep ochre that would harden to rusty brown in the air and sun.

The colonists were twenty feet behind, watching the big vehicle work. The strikers were doing pretty much the same thing, which was natural but'd get them all killed if something came from the side. "Three-three," Abbado ordered. "Watch your flanks and watch the canopy. That's where the trouble's going to come from, not from the tractor. Over."

The tree had a ropy, almost braided-looking, surface. The blade's stinger had started a vertical split which trailed ten or twelve feet up the trunk. As the driver maneuvered to hit the tree again at a slightly different angle, the crack lengthened. A parallel crack opened a few inches to the left and raced upward also.

"Give me the love, the love that you'd deny me . . ." 

The lower end of the strip of bark lifted. For an instant Abbado thought the bulldozer had severed it. Several finger-like fibers waggled from the tip as it squirmed over the blade's grated upper portion and caressed the front of the cab.

"Hey!" Abbado shouted. "Pressley, watch—"

The end fibers tugged at the mesh protecting the cab window, then released and flowed over the top of the cab. More strips, ropes, of bark split away to either side of the first one.

Pressley aimed his flame gun. The jet of white-hot fuel caught the tip and spattered in brilliance over the front of the tractor. Another bark tendril snaked around the side of the cab toward Pressley. Abbado and Horgen ripped it with their stingers as they ran forward. Pellets that missed sparkled from the armored motor housing and the back of the blade.

There were scores of wobbling tendrils now. The tree's core was the silvery white of a rapier's blade in sunlight. Pressley jerked to the right. His flame gun slashed a line of radiance across the edge of the cab, momentarily splashing him and the armored driver.

Horgen shouted. The fibers at the tip of a tendril gripped her waist, almost spanning it. She blasted the tentacle point-blank. Though the pellets shredded their target, the bark was a fibrous mat that retained its integrity.

Pressley lifted suddenly into the air. Civilians screamed and ran backward as the flame rod twitched toward them. A snap of the tentacle flung the weapon from the striker's hand and shut off the flame.

Abbado let his stinger go and drew his powerknife. The tendril that first gripped Horgen was a rag clinging without force, but a second had caught her left arm as she tried to insert a fresh magazine in the stinger.

Abbado clamped the squirming rope with one hand and pulled the powerknife across with all his strength. The bark had a dry, quivering feel to it like the body of a powerful snake. Fibers frayed to either side of Abbado's cut. It was like trying to shear steel cable.

Horgen's stinger cracked like a miniature bullwhip, forty times a second. Other strikers were firing. Abbado heard the chunkWHACK! of a grenade launcher.

Something grabbed his right ankle. He kicked. Another something caught the left calf. The tendrils lifted him, pulling in opposite directions.

"Shit!" shouted Sergeant Guilio Abbado. "Shit!"

A part of his mind wished that he'd come up with something better for what were probably his last words.

Like the mouth of a tunnel, Farrell thought as he walked with the project manager toward where the dozer was starting its cut. Colonists made way for them with a mixture of curiosity and concern. Not the hostility Farrell expected from civilians, though. That surprised him, especially after he'd screwed up and gotten so many of them dead or wounded.

The air was smoky with a touch of ozone sharpness, the latter from either the plasma bolts or the tractor's electric drive. The tree the gunner punted to the left with her first bolt smoldered, but only the shattered portions of the dense green wood could sustain combustion on their own. The dozer had grubbed out or crushed down what remained where the tree stood. Fresh clay clung to roots twisting from the wrack shoved aside by the broad blade.

Like snow melting in the sun, the shooting tree had shrunk to barely twenty percent of its original volume. Unfired spearheads now protruded through what remained of the head. The support fibers were less spongy than most of the plant's tissues. They stood out like the sinews of a man straining at too great a burden.

The dozer spiked a large tree and started to lug. Farrell eyed the wobbling canopy with concern, but his helmet AI didn't warn him of anything about to drop on the vehicle. Besides the armored striker behind the cab, Sergeant Abbado and one of his people followed the dozer closely. The other five squad members flanked the civilians, a little back of Farrell himself.

"Clearing the road is going to be a slow process," al-Ibrahimi said as he watched the dozer struggling against the forest giant. "Though most of the larger trees can be avoided, I hope."

"Slow is a good thing," Farrell said, though his attention was concentrated on the forest. "The civilians aren't going to be able to move fast, and we don't dare let the dozers get too far out ahead. We can't afford to lose—"

A tentacle of bark detached itself from the bole and trembled across the tractor. White wood gleamed for a hundred and fifty feet up the side of the tree.

The driver was either too busy with his controls to notice or saw so little through his grilled windows that he didn't realize anything more was happening than a piece of debris flying up. He shifted from reverse to neutral, preparing to hit the tree again.

"Get those civilians back before they're fucking killed!" Farrell said, aiming at the tentacles. He wasn't sure himself if he was speaking to his strikers or to al-Ibrahimi, but it was God's truth that he wanted the manager out of the way also.

He fired at the target quivering twenty feet in the air. Things were bad enough without a stray round hitting one of his strikers.

Two more, twelve more, tentacles separated as the first one had. The entire bark sheath squirmed toward the bulldozer. Pressley's flame gun carbonized the end of a tentacle. The portion above the flame's destruction could no longer reach the dozer, but the brown serpent continued to twist and strain like a vicious dog on its chain.

The driver realized his danger and shifted into reverse. Tendrils gripped the blade and clogged the drive gears. The tree swayed like a fishpole bound to its catch by a score of cable-thick lines.

Pressley's armored body flew in a parabola that ended when he slammed the trunk of another tree, fifty feet in the air. The tentacle released him. The striker fell, tumbling like a mannequin. The hard suit was undamaged, but the body within had been crushed despite the padding.

Farrell unhooked a 4-pound rocket and armed it by twisting open the launch tube. He checked behind him, turning his head rather than trusting the panorama display. Civilians were still too close though they surged backward under the lash of fear. Manager al-Ibrahimi shouted orders in a voice like dry thunder.

Farrell stepped to the side so that the backblast would singe forest, not the colonists his life was pledged to protect. Something nuzzled his left leg. He ignored the touch and squeezed the bar trigger.

The rocket snarled away, the motor a white glare in the half second before burnout. The last of the exhaust gases batted Farrell like a huge, hot cotton swab. Thrust against the sides of the tube rocked him back a step. The tentacle closed around Farrell's ankle, two ropy tendrils to either side of his boot.

Farrell's rocket hit the central pole of the tree a hundred feet in the air and blew it to toothpicks in a thunderclap. The peak and all the bark tentacles tumbled down like the head of Medusa.

The grip on Farrell's ankle tightened, then relaxed. He'd been straining against the tree's pull and fell backward when the tension released.

Flaccid tentacles slid from the bulldozer's cab and blade. The vehicle began moving. Other ropes still clogged the tracks and drive gears, but vegetable fibers flattened beneath density-enhanced metal.

The tracks accelerated slowly. The driver struggled with the lifeless tentacles choking his cab, oblivious of the fact that he was clanking backward toward the mob of civilians.

Farrell staggered to his feet. Sergeant Abbado was already trotting alongside the cab with Horgen. Abbado gave her a lift onto the platform. Brown fragments of a tentacle still dangled from Horgen's waist. Whatever she said to the driver was sufficient, because the bulldozer immediately shuddered to a stop.

Farrell looked around. The colonists had halted a hundred feet back. Strikers from the lead squad were in position nearby, reloading weapons. Some of them had raised their visors. They looked shaken. Farrell damned well felt shaken.

His visor overlay showed that C41 had held position pretty well, though there'd been a little easing forward. Fighting drew the strikers even though they knew there was more risk of an attack from the sides or rear than there was of the tree pulling up its roots and charging down the column.

Not that Farrell was ready to count that possibility out completely.

One of the bark tentacles slowly uncoiled on the ground. That was gravity, not malevolence. The tree was dead, waiting to be uprooted and flung to the side as soon as the bulldozer got moving again.

"C41, all clear," Farrell ordered. "We'll hold five minutes to get reorganized. Tell your civilians. They're not on the net, so they won't know what's happening. Over."

Manager al-Ibrahimi walked toward him. His aide came from where she'd been in the center of the column, her concern for al-Ibrahimi obvious even though her face was without expression.

Farrell rubbed his right wrist where the backblast had seared him. The manager would probably have to replace the bulldozer's driver until the original staffer had a chance to settle down.

Farrell needed to pick another striker to ride the deck.

He'd been thinking of the march in terms of miles and days. Now he started wondering how long it would be before he ran out of strikers.

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Framed