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Teamwork

The civilians straggled more every day, and there were fewer strikers to guard the lengthening column. Farrell eyed the trees; a striker's job, not a commander's. A job he was more comfortable with, though.

It wasn't anybody's fault. The march was just taking a physical toll of civilians who weren't used to it. Anybody who thought you hardened people by pushing them beyond their limits was a damned fool. What you did was break them.

Manager al-Ibrahimi stood at the right margin of the trail, waiting for Farrell. Farrell crossed the column at a gap but continued to stump forward at his regular pace, a little faster than the line of march.

Farrell was coming from the rear of the column to the front. He planned to talk to the noncom with the lead squad, then start back. Like every day in the past, like every day in the future until he died or they all got where they were going.

Which might mean the same thing.

"Two days ought to get us there," Farrell said to al-Ibrahimi's back. "That's an advantage over going to the rim. That would have been another week."

"Yes," the manager said. He shifted slightly so that he and Farrell stood side by side, watching the jungle and from the corners of their eyes the column marching in the center of the track. "We're wearing down the colonists. At the present rate of collapse, in five days there'll be more people being carried than carrying."

It was a joke of sorts.

"These are good folks," Farrell said, feeling oddly defensive about the civilians. "They don't give up. I'd figured . . . they were drafted, you know. They wouldn't try."

"They're intelligent, successful people, Major," al-Ibrahimi said. "They're exactly the sort of people you'd want in any difficult operation. They'd be better for training, of course; but they're getting that, from your strikers and the environment."

A party of five civilians passed, arm in arm. The man in the middle and the young women on the two ends were supporting an aged couple who couldn't otherwise have walked.

"It's a fucking crime to treat people like this," Farrell said in sudden bitterness.

"Not a crime, no," al-Ibrahimi said. "All laws and regulations were complied with. Very likely a sin, though."

He looked more hawk-faced with the diet and labor of each passing day. "Do you believe in Hell, Major?" he asked.

"Not as much as I used to," Farrell said. He laughed wryly. "That's a screwy thing to say, isn't it? But it's the truth."

Nessman marched by cradling a grenade launcher. He was talking to a pair of young women—girls, really. He shut up when he saw Farrell waiting on the trail. The girls didn't understand and continued to chatter merrily.

Farrell turned his head deliberately to follow Nessman with his eyes, though he didn't say anything aloud. The striker muttered to the girls and lengthened his pace. He nodded awkwardly to the grim-faced major as he passed.

"Tamara doesn't believe in Hell," the manager said. "She believes she has logic on her side, though I think she's wrong."

He smiled very tersely. "She's having difficulties with alkaloids from the vine that attacked her," he added. "I may need to help her walk shortly."

"Is she all right?" Farrell asked, more sharply than he'd intended.

"She has as good a chance as any of the rest of us do," al-Ibrahimi said. "The poisons won't kill her themselves. They affect her mental state, but I don't think she'll do anything unacceptably dangerous."

He glanced directly at Farrell again. "I watch her when I think there might be a problem, Major."

Branches creaked. A tree thirty feet high walked into the cleared track on a tripod of air roots.

Limbs groped for a civilian so tired that he continued to slog toward it with his face to the ground. Nessman fired five times, hitting branches with three of the grenades. Jagged splinters blew out from the flashes. Another branch closed the spray of twigs at its tip on Nessman.

"Down!" Farrell shouted. He backed a step to be sure the jet from the rocket he lifted to his shoulder wouldn't fry a civilian.

The tree wobbled on its long roots like a praying mantis. Two more branches, one of them broken by a grenade, swung toward Nessman. The striker's boots were off the ground.

Farrell aimed at the trunk just below the crown and fired. As the rocket cracked away, something grabbed him from behind by both elbows.

Farrell's rockets were fuzed for a quarter-second delay because most of the targets were going to be tree trunks. This warhead penetrated to the heartwood and went off, blowing all the limbs away from the bole. Nessman hit the ground hard and rolled clear of the relaxing grip.

The panoramic display showed Farrell what he couldn't turn his head enough to see: a bush with dark green foliage had leaned onto the track to seize him. He'd backed too close to the forest when he launched. He tried to reach the powerknife in his belt; the supple branches bent, but not enough.

The decapitated tree lurched forward with mad purpose. Farrell didn't suppose the blast had affected the controlling intelligence, but the tree's sensory organs must have been in the branch tips. It zigzagged across the trail, folding one root under the trunk and shifting to the new center of gravity with each stride. It disappeared into the unbroken jungle, leaving behind a faint streamer of smoke from its jagged peak.

Leaves closed over Farrell's helmet and began to draw his head back. Through a gap in them he saw Nessman fumbling with a 4-pound rocket. "Your knife!" Farrell shouted. "Cut me loose or it'll break my neck!"

The striker ignored him and extended the blast tube of the rocket. "For Christ's sake, Nessman—" Farrell said.

Nessman fired the rocket into the ground immediately behind Farrell. The warhead, again on a quarter-second fuze, blew both strikers across the track in a shower of dirt and a flare of unburnt fuel.

Farrell tried to sit up. Manager al-Ibrahimi and several other civilians helped him. The walking tree hadn't left a mark in the walls of vegetation to either side of the trail.

"Christ, Nessman, that was a bit drastic, wasn't it?" Farrell said.

"One good turn deserves another, Major," the striker said with a shaky smile. "There was a spike like a big needle coming out of the middle of that thing. I didn't figure to fuck around hoping I'd get the right spot with my knife."

"Anybody hurt?" Farrell said as he got to his feet. "Are we all okay?"

"Besides," said Nessman, taking the project manager's hand to help stand up. "I never believed there was any such thing as too much force."

"Sarge, my helmet says this branch is moving, mark," Caldwell said. "Do you—" 

Abbado clicked the image onto the left half of his visor. The tree was thirty feet to the right of the track the bulldozer was cutting immediately ahead of 3-3. Abbado had to shift a few steps sideways to see it directly. The motion of the high branch was minute, but the AI said the tip was pulling away from the column.

Like a striker winding up to throw a grenade, Abbado figured.

"—think—" Caldwell continued.

Abbado raked a burst from his stinger the length of the branch. The pellets had lost some velocity and energy in the hundred feet from the muzzle, but they still chewed wood like the blade of a circle saw.

Bark exploded; the branch shivered like a broken-backed snake. Scores of fist-sized individual pellets, nuts or fruit, flew off the terminal twigs and burst into flame as they fell.

One fireball landed at the edge of the track and splashed clingy droplets across several feet of scraped dirt; the rest smoked and steamed to the jungle floor. None of them did any harm.

The branch dangled from a strand of bark. The stinger pellets hadn't broken it through, but the limb's own snapping release smashed its weakened fibers.

"Josie," Abbado said, "if God hadn't meant us to use reconnaissance by fire, he wouldn't have given us stingers. Break. C41, watch this tree as you pass, mark. Some of the other branches may have an idea they want to toss things at us. Out."

"It might've filled you like a pincushion, Sarge," Ace Matushek said. "Remember what happened to Top."

"Hey, it was going to throw something so I broke its throwing arm," Abbado said. "Where's the down side?"

The lead section of civilians had paused while the strikers dealt with the tree. Now they started moving again. Abbado expected them to skirt the sputtering flame as widely as possible, but instead they pretty much ignored it. They'd already learned that worrying about a danger avoided made you more vulnerable to the one on its way toward you.

"Sergeant," a thirtyish woman said to Abbado. "Can you tell me why we've changed direction?"

"Ma'am?" said Abbado. "We're going straight, more or less. As the big trees allow, is all."

"Sergeant," she said, obviously irritated. "I'm Certified Engineer Schwartzchild. I've been mapping the terrain as we proceed. From the point at which we left the landing site we've been marching at a course of two hundred thirty-nine degrees. We've now shifted to a course of two-sixty-eight—with, as you say, corrections for major obstacles."

She waggled a small case covered in gray sharkskin, obviously a navigation and cartographic device of some sort. "I asked do you have an explanation."

"No ma'am," Abbado said. He decided not to reload his stinger. He'd only fired seventy pellets. He shrugged. "You're right, but I hadn't noticed it till you said so. I'm afraid you'll have to check with the major. Or God. Probably God."

He nodded and started forward. Abbado liked to stay about forty feet behind the bulldozer, close enough to judge whatever situation the blade might uncover without being in the middle of it.

Schwartzchild fell into step to his left, a little closer than he liked. "But Sergeant?" she said. "Don't you care? Something must have happened to cause the change, don't you see?"

"Yes ma'am," he said. "But I don't much care, no. Talk to the major about it, why don't you?"

He turned his head. "Hey Ace?"

"That vine up there?" Matushek said, raising his chest-slung grenade launcher.

"Yeah," Abbado agreed. "Pop it, will you?"

You didn't need helmet electronics for communication if you'd worked with people long enough. A vine six inches thick laced through the tops of at least a dozen trees in an arc ahead of the column. It wasn't doing any obvious harm, but Abbado didn't like the look of it.

The dozer poked its blade into the bole of one of the trees. Matushek put a single grenade where the vine spanned the gap between that crown and the next tree.

The tree shivered, starting to go over. Ace fired again, blowing the other half loose. As the tree fell, it carried the vine fragment wrapped in its branches. Broken ends writhed like snakes.

"Ma'am," Abbado said, returning his attention briefly to Schwartzchild. She wasn't bad-looking, not if you liked your women solid. "I trust the major to do the best he can for us. And I trust God to know what he's doing, though that's about all. But even if I didn't trust them, I know I couldn't do a better job of planning myself. Best I leave them do what they do so I can get on with my end. Do you see what I mean?"

The tree hit with the ragged popping of wood fibers stressed beyond their breaking point. The ground gave a hollow boom. The tractor backed slightly to clear the pit the roots had pulled open, then started forward again.

"I don't see how you can live that way," Schwartzchild said. "We could be going into anything and you don't know."

"Ma'am," Abbado said. "Nobody ever tells strikers anything. If they do it's mostly a lie. I'm sorry it's happening to you guys, you don't deserve it. But we're used to it. Go talk to the major, why don't you?"

He noticed a swelling like a giant beehive stuck on the side of a tree ahead. Caldwell was already extending the blast tube of a rocket to deal with it.

"Ma'am," he added to the woman still walking beside him. "You got to keep your mind on your job and hope the people in charge are doing the same."

The bank of clouds to the east was bright with sunlight streaming through a pair of holes in the similar array on the western horizon. The sky above the freshly-cut campsite was as clear as tap water, but it wouldn't be long before the evening rains hit.

Meyer sat leaning back on her hands. Sighing, she reached for the clamps locking her thigh guards onto the torso apron of her hard suit.

"Sit," Lock repeated sharply. "I'll get to them in good time. Just sit."

He lifted away the breastplate. As usual the clearing's humid air felt cool and fresh.

"God damn," Meyer said, closing her eyes. "I think I sweated out ten pounds today. One of these days you're going to open the suit and all that's left of me's going to dribble out onto the ground."

Matt handed her a drinking bottle and started on the leg pieces. "You shouldn't have to wear the suit all day," he said without looking at her. "Another striker could spell you."

"I'm used to the suits," she said. She took a careful swig. She'd drunk some from the condenser in the hard suit, but it was hard to get enough fluid—and food—down while you were on. "We're short. It's better not to have people screwing around with their armor if the shit hits the fan."

A tractor was pulling one trailer slowly across the cleared area. Steve Nessman and a pair of girls who'd lost their puppy fat on the march were manhandling rolls of sheeting off the trailer to the teams of civilians waiting to place them on the bulldozed ground.

The whole group sang the "Prisoners' Chorus" from Verdi's Nabucco. They were surprisingly good. One of the civilians had been a voice coach.

"I'm learning to drive the bulldozers," Lock said. "Using the blade correctly is surprisingly complex. I hadn't realized that it tilts, it doesn't just push straight ahead."

"What is this?" Meyer asked, lowering the bottle. "Is this converter-run water?"

"There's the usual electrolyte fortification from the converter, yes," Lock said. He began to put the pieces of the hard suit away in the carrying bag. "There's a few drops of lemon syrup also. Mrs. Regley provided it. She had a tree of her own on the roof garden of Horizon Towers. Do you like it?"

"It's good," Meyer said. Really, it was odd; she'd thought somebody'd screwed up the converter setting. She took another swig. The slight tartness did have a cleansing feel if you knew it didn't mean something had gone wrong. "I'll have to thank her."

"You saved her life, you know," Matt said. "The first day. When you saved mine."

"We're all saving each others lives in this ratfuck," Meyer said. She leaned forward and kissed him hungrily. "All of us."

Doctors Parelli and Ciler talked briefly as the latter arrived to take his midnight shift with the wounded. Parelli walked off to join her husband; Ciler sat down beside the monitor.

"Hey, Doc," Caius Blohm said. He smoothed Mirica's hair back from her forehead, then gently placed the child on the nest of bedding where she lay while Blohm was on patrol. "Got time to talk?"

"Yes, ah . . ." Ciler said.

Blohm gestured toward the berm. Ciler thought about his duties and decided that for a few minutes the wounded would be all right by themselves. He followed the striker to the darkness and relative privacy.

"I wanted to ask you about Mirica, Doc," the scout said, facing the forest. "Is she going to get better?"

Ciler considered a number of ways to answer the question. He settled on the truth. "No," he said. "I'm terribly sorry, Striker Blohm. The injury she received is total and irreversible. If we were back on Earth, my answer would have to be the same."

"Yeah, pretty much what I figured," Blohm said. His left hand was gloved. He ran the index finger gently over the surface of a log the dozer blade had wedged into the berm; blue sparks popped nervously from its surface.

"You know," he said, "I thought about maybe bringing ears back to her when I caught the Spooks who did it. There's guys who collect Spook ears. I never got into it, but I thought, you know, for Mirica . . ."

Ciler watched him without speaking. Blohm met his gaze, but the scout's eyes were merely glints reflected from the light beside Major Farrell's hunched form.

"She wouldn't have liked that, Doc," Blohm said earnestly. "She was a great kid, you know? Wouldn't hurt a fly."

A hollow clock! clock! clock! rang through the starlit forest, then died away. "I'm glad you came to that decision," Ciler said quietly.

"Yeah," said Blohm. He sounded as though he was discussing a problem with a machine that he couldn't get to run the way it should. "And hell, I couldn't even get pissed at the Spooks. I mean, they didn't mean to shoot her. It was a waste shot, right? They wanted to get me and they fucked up. What am I supposed to do? Hunt down the training cadre that didn't make them better marksmen?"

His gloved hand touched the log three times, each time harder. The last was a full-strength blow with the edge of his fist. Sparks sizzled, outlining his prominent knuckles.

"They just wasted a shot," he repeated. "Everybody does, you know. One time or another, you shoot something you didn't mean to because you didn't have time to think. Everybody does."

"Mirica knew you loved her," Ciler said carefully. "I think the part of her that is with God still knows that."

"She was a good kid," Blohm said. "Wish I could've known her longer. What's wired up to the machine now, that's not her, though. I guess you'd like your machine back?"

"There are . . ." Ciler said. "Patients. For whom the use of the life support system would be the difference between life and death, yes."

"I figured that was it," Blohm said. He looked at the forest. "Well, shit. Look, Doc. There's two things. What's left isn't Mirica. But I don't want it to hurt. I don't want it to, you know, suffocate because it just got unplugged. Even though it's just a lump of meat. You understand?"

Ciler thought about the oath he swore when he became a doctor; and he thought about Hell. "I understand," he said softly.

"The other thing is," Blohm said. "I don't want to know about it. Not ever, not in any way."

"I understand," Ciler said.

Caius Blohm strode away without speaking or looking back.

The bulldozer that would be breaking trail the next morning was parked at what would be the head of the line of march. Blohm walked around it and leaned against the curve of the high steel blade. A veil of phosphorescent moss shimmered on the edge of the forest like a magenta dream.

The blade was cool. Blohm took his helmet off and turned to rest his forehead against the metal.

Seraphina Suares appeared at his side. She put an arm around the striker and began to weep quietly.

Blohm hugged the widow close. "There," he said, holding her. "There."

But he didn't shed a tear of his own.

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Framed

Back | Next
Contents

Teamwork

The civilians straggled more every day, and there were fewer strikers to guard the lengthening column. Farrell eyed the trees; a striker's job, not a commander's. A job he was more comfortable with, though.

It wasn't anybody's fault. The march was just taking a physical toll of civilians who weren't used to it. Anybody who thought you hardened people by pushing them beyond their limits was a damned fool. What you did was break them.

Manager al-Ibrahimi stood at the right margin of the trail, waiting for Farrell. Farrell crossed the column at a gap but continued to stump forward at his regular pace, a little faster than the line of march.

Farrell was coming from the rear of the column to the front. He planned to talk to the noncom with the lead squad, then start back. Like every day in the past, like every day in the future until he died or they all got where they were going.

Which might mean the same thing.

"Two days ought to get us there," Farrell said to al-Ibrahimi's back. "That's an advantage over going to the rim. That would have been another week."

"Yes," the manager said. He shifted slightly so that he and Farrell stood side by side, watching the jungle and from the corners of their eyes the column marching in the center of the track. "We're wearing down the colonists. At the present rate of collapse, in five days there'll be more people being carried than carrying."

It was a joke of sorts.

"These are good folks," Farrell said, feeling oddly defensive about the civilians. "They don't give up. I'd figured . . . they were drafted, you know. They wouldn't try."

"They're intelligent, successful people, Major," al-Ibrahimi said. "They're exactly the sort of people you'd want in any difficult operation. They'd be better for training, of course; but they're getting that, from your strikers and the environment."

A party of five civilians passed, arm in arm. The man in the middle and the young women on the two ends were supporting an aged couple who couldn't otherwise have walked.

"It's a fucking crime to treat people like this," Farrell said in sudden bitterness.

"Not a crime, no," al-Ibrahimi said. "All laws and regulations were complied with. Very likely a sin, though."

He looked more hawk-faced with the diet and labor of each passing day. "Do you believe in Hell, Major?" he asked.

"Not as much as I used to," Farrell said. He laughed wryly. "That's a screwy thing to say, isn't it? But it's the truth."

Nessman marched by cradling a grenade launcher. He was talking to a pair of young women—girls, really. He shut up when he saw Farrell waiting on the trail. The girls didn't understand and continued to chatter merrily.

Farrell turned his head deliberately to follow Nessman with his eyes, though he didn't say anything aloud. The striker muttered to the girls and lengthened his pace. He nodded awkwardly to the grim-faced major as he passed.

"Tamara doesn't believe in Hell," the manager said. "She believes she has logic on her side, though I think she's wrong."

He smiled very tersely. "She's having difficulties with alkaloids from the vine that attacked her," he added. "I may need to help her walk shortly."

"Is she all right?" Farrell asked, more sharply than he'd intended.

"She has as good a chance as any of the rest of us do," al-Ibrahimi said. "The poisons won't kill her themselves. They affect her mental state, but I don't think she'll do anything unacceptably dangerous."

He glanced directly at Farrell again. "I watch her when I think there might be a problem, Major."

Branches creaked. A tree thirty feet high walked into the cleared track on a tripod of air roots.

Limbs groped for a civilian so tired that he continued to slog toward it with his face to the ground. Nessman fired five times, hitting branches with three of the grenades. Jagged splinters blew out from the flashes. Another branch closed the spray of twigs at its tip on Nessman.

"Down!" Farrell shouted. He backed a step to be sure the jet from the rocket he lifted to his shoulder wouldn't fry a civilian.

The tree wobbled on its long roots like a praying mantis. Two more branches, one of them broken by a grenade, swung toward Nessman. The striker's boots were off the ground.

Farrell aimed at the trunk just below the crown and fired. As the rocket cracked away, something grabbed him from behind by both elbows.

Farrell's rockets were fuzed for a quarter-second delay because most of the targets were going to be tree trunks. This warhead penetrated to the heartwood and went off, blowing all the limbs away from the bole. Nessman hit the ground hard and rolled clear of the relaxing grip.

The panoramic display showed Farrell what he couldn't turn his head enough to see: a bush with dark green foliage had leaned onto the track to seize him. He'd backed too close to the forest when he launched. He tried to reach the powerknife in his belt; the supple branches bent, but not enough.

The decapitated tree lurched forward with mad purpose. Farrell didn't suppose the blast had affected the controlling intelligence, but the tree's sensory organs must have been in the branch tips. It zigzagged across the trail, folding one root under the trunk and shifting to the new center of gravity with each stride. It disappeared into the unbroken jungle, leaving behind a faint streamer of smoke from its jagged peak.

Leaves closed over Farrell's helmet and began to draw his head back. Through a gap in them he saw Nessman fumbling with a 4-pound rocket. "Your knife!" Farrell shouted. "Cut me loose or it'll break my neck!"

The striker ignored him and extended the blast tube of the rocket. "For Christ's sake, Nessman—" Farrell said.

Nessman fired the rocket into the ground immediately behind Farrell. The warhead, again on a quarter-second fuze, blew both strikers across the track in a shower of dirt and a flare of unburnt fuel.

Farrell tried to sit up. Manager al-Ibrahimi and several other civilians helped him. The walking tree hadn't left a mark in the walls of vegetation to either side of the trail.

"Christ, Nessman, that was a bit drastic, wasn't it?" Farrell said.

"One good turn deserves another, Major," the striker said with a shaky smile. "There was a spike like a big needle coming out of the middle of that thing. I didn't figure to fuck around hoping I'd get the right spot with my knife."

"Anybody hurt?" Farrell said as he got to his feet. "Are we all okay?"

"Besides," said Nessman, taking the project manager's hand to help stand up. "I never believed there was any such thing as too much force."

"Sarge, my helmet says this branch is moving, mark," Caldwell said. "Do you—" 

Abbado clicked the image onto the left half of his visor. The tree was thirty feet to the right of the track the bulldozer was cutting immediately ahead of 3-3. Abbado had to shift a few steps sideways to see it directly. The motion of the high branch was minute, but the AI said the tip was pulling away from the column.

Like a striker winding up to throw a grenade, Abbado figured.

"—think—" Caldwell continued.

Abbado raked a burst from his stinger the length of the branch. The pellets had lost some velocity and energy in the hundred feet from the muzzle, but they still chewed wood like the blade of a circle saw.

Bark exploded; the branch shivered like a broken-backed snake. Scores of fist-sized individual pellets, nuts or fruit, flew off the terminal twigs and burst into flame as they fell.

One fireball landed at the edge of the track and splashed clingy droplets across several feet of scraped dirt; the rest smoked and steamed to the jungle floor. None of them did any harm.

The branch dangled from a strand of bark. The stinger pellets hadn't broken it through, but the limb's own snapping release smashed its weakened fibers.

"Josie," Abbado said, "if God hadn't meant us to use reconnaissance by fire, he wouldn't have given us stingers. Break. C41, watch this tree as you pass, mark. Some of the other branches may have an idea they want to toss things at us. Out."

"It might've filled you like a pincushion, Sarge," Ace Matushek said. "Remember what happened to Top."

"Hey, it was going to throw something so I broke its throwing arm," Abbado said. "Where's the down side?"

The lead section of civilians had paused while the strikers dealt with the tree. Now they started moving again. Abbado expected them to skirt the sputtering flame as widely as possible, but instead they pretty much ignored it. They'd already learned that worrying about a danger avoided made you more vulnerable to the one on its way toward you.

"Sergeant," a thirtyish woman said to Abbado. "Can you tell me why we've changed direction?"

"Ma'am?" said Abbado. "We're going straight, more or less. As the big trees allow, is all."

"Sergeant," she said, obviously irritated. "I'm Certified Engineer Schwartzchild. I've been mapping the terrain as we proceed. From the point at which we left the landing site we've been marching at a course of two hundred thirty-nine degrees. We've now shifted to a course of two-sixty-eight—with, as you say, corrections for major obstacles."

She waggled a small case covered in gray sharkskin, obviously a navigation and cartographic device of some sort. "I asked do you have an explanation."

"No ma'am," Abbado said. He decided not to reload his stinger. He'd only fired seventy pellets. He shrugged. "You're right, but I hadn't noticed it till you said so. I'm afraid you'll have to check with the major. Or God. Probably God."

He nodded and started forward. Abbado liked to stay about forty feet behind the bulldozer, close enough to judge whatever situation the blade might uncover without being in the middle of it.

Schwartzchild fell into step to his left, a little closer than he liked. "But Sergeant?" she said. "Don't you care? Something must have happened to cause the change, don't you see?"

"Yes ma'am," he said. "But I don't much care, no. Talk to the major about it, why don't you?"

He turned his head. "Hey Ace?"

"That vine up there?" Matushek said, raising his chest-slung grenade launcher.

"Yeah," Abbado agreed. "Pop it, will you?"

You didn't need helmet electronics for communication if you'd worked with people long enough. A vine six inches thick laced through the tops of at least a dozen trees in an arc ahead of the column. It wasn't doing any obvious harm, but Abbado didn't like the look of it.

The dozer poked its blade into the bole of one of the trees. Matushek put a single grenade where the vine spanned the gap between that crown and the next tree.

The tree shivered, starting to go over. Ace fired again, blowing the other half loose. As the tree fell, it carried the vine fragment wrapped in its branches. Broken ends writhed like snakes.

"Ma'am," Abbado said, returning his attention briefly to Schwartzchild. She wasn't bad-looking, not if you liked your women solid. "I trust the major to do the best he can for us. And I trust God to know what he's doing, though that's about all. But even if I didn't trust them, I know I couldn't do a better job of planning myself. Best I leave them do what they do so I can get on with my end. Do you see what I mean?"

The tree hit with the ragged popping of wood fibers stressed beyond their breaking point. The ground gave a hollow boom. The tractor backed slightly to clear the pit the roots had pulled open, then started forward again.

"I don't see how you can live that way," Schwartzchild said. "We could be going into anything and you don't know."

"Ma'am," Abbado said. "Nobody ever tells strikers anything. If they do it's mostly a lie. I'm sorry it's happening to you guys, you don't deserve it. But we're used to it. Go talk to the major, why don't you?"

He noticed a swelling like a giant beehive stuck on the side of a tree ahead. Caldwell was already extending the blast tube of a rocket to deal with it.

"Ma'am," he added to the woman still walking beside him. "You got to keep your mind on your job and hope the people in charge are doing the same."

The bank of clouds to the east was bright with sunlight streaming through a pair of holes in the similar array on the western horizon. The sky above the freshly-cut campsite was as clear as tap water, but it wouldn't be long before the evening rains hit.

Meyer sat leaning back on her hands. Sighing, she reached for the clamps locking her thigh guards onto the torso apron of her hard suit.

"Sit," Lock repeated sharply. "I'll get to them in good time. Just sit."

He lifted away the breastplate. As usual the clearing's humid air felt cool and fresh.

"God damn," Meyer said, closing her eyes. "I think I sweated out ten pounds today. One of these days you're going to open the suit and all that's left of me's going to dribble out onto the ground."

Matt handed her a drinking bottle and started on the leg pieces. "You shouldn't have to wear the suit all day," he said without looking at her. "Another striker could spell you."

"I'm used to the suits," she said. She took a careful swig. She'd drunk some from the condenser in the hard suit, but it was hard to get enough fluid—and food—down while you were on. "We're short. It's better not to have people screwing around with their armor if the shit hits the fan."

A tractor was pulling one trailer slowly across the cleared area. Steve Nessman and a pair of girls who'd lost their puppy fat on the march were manhandling rolls of sheeting off the trailer to the teams of civilians waiting to place them on the bulldozed ground.

The whole group sang the "Prisoners' Chorus" from Verdi's Nabucco. They were surprisingly good. One of the civilians had been a voice coach.

"I'm learning to drive the bulldozers," Lock said. "Using the blade correctly is surprisingly complex. I hadn't realized that it tilts, it doesn't just push straight ahead."

"What is this?" Meyer asked, lowering the bottle. "Is this converter-run water?"

"There's the usual electrolyte fortification from the converter, yes," Lock said. He began to put the pieces of the hard suit away in the carrying bag. "There's a few drops of lemon syrup also. Mrs. Regley provided it. She had a tree of her own on the roof garden of Horizon Towers. Do you like it?"

"It's good," Meyer said. Really, it was odd; she'd thought somebody'd screwed up the converter setting. She took another swig. The slight tartness did have a cleansing feel if you knew it didn't mean something had gone wrong. "I'll have to thank her."

"You saved her life, you know," Matt said. "The first day. When you saved mine."

"We're all saving each others lives in this ratfuck," Meyer said. She leaned forward and kissed him hungrily. "All of us."

Doctors Parelli and Ciler talked briefly as the latter arrived to take his midnight shift with the wounded. Parelli walked off to join her husband; Ciler sat down beside the monitor.

"Hey, Doc," Caius Blohm said. He smoothed Mirica's hair back from her forehead, then gently placed the child on the nest of bedding where she lay while Blohm was on patrol. "Got time to talk?"

"Yes, ah . . ." Ciler said.

Blohm gestured toward the berm. Ciler thought about his duties and decided that for a few minutes the wounded would be all right by themselves. He followed the striker to the darkness and relative privacy.

"I wanted to ask you about Mirica, Doc," the scout said, facing the forest. "Is she going to get better?"

Ciler considered a number of ways to answer the question. He settled on the truth. "No," he said. "I'm terribly sorry, Striker Blohm. The injury she received is total and irreversible. If we were back on Earth, my answer would have to be the same."

"Yeah, pretty much what I figured," Blohm said. His left hand was gloved. He ran the index finger gently over the surface of a log the dozer blade had wedged into the berm; blue sparks popped nervously from its surface.

"You know," he said, "I thought about maybe bringing ears back to her when I caught the Spooks who did it. There's guys who collect Spook ears. I never got into it, but I thought, you know, for Mirica . . ."

Ciler watched him without speaking. Blohm met his gaze, but the scout's eyes were merely glints reflected from the light beside Major Farrell's hunched form.

"She wouldn't have liked that, Doc," Blohm said earnestly. "She was a great kid, you know? Wouldn't hurt a fly."

A hollow clock! clock! clock! rang through the starlit forest, then died away. "I'm glad you came to that decision," Ciler said quietly.

"Yeah," said Blohm. He sounded as though he was discussing a problem with a machine that he couldn't get to run the way it should. "And hell, I couldn't even get pissed at the Spooks. I mean, they didn't mean to shoot her. It was a waste shot, right? They wanted to get me and they fucked up. What am I supposed to do? Hunt down the training cadre that didn't make them better marksmen?"

His gloved hand touched the log three times, each time harder. The last was a full-strength blow with the edge of his fist. Sparks sizzled, outlining his prominent knuckles.

"They just wasted a shot," he repeated. "Everybody does, you know. One time or another, you shoot something you didn't mean to because you didn't have time to think. Everybody does."

"Mirica knew you loved her," Ciler said carefully. "I think the part of her that is with God still knows that."

"She was a good kid," Blohm said. "Wish I could've known her longer. What's wired up to the machine now, that's not her, though. I guess you'd like your machine back?"

"There are . . ." Ciler said. "Patients. For whom the use of the life support system would be the difference between life and death, yes."

"I figured that was it," Blohm said. He looked at the forest. "Well, shit. Look, Doc. There's two things. What's left isn't Mirica. But I don't want it to hurt. I don't want it to, you know, suffocate because it just got unplugged. Even though it's just a lump of meat. You understand?"

Ciler thought about the oath he swore when he became a doctor; and he thought about Hell. "I understand," he said softly.

"The other thing is," Blohm said. "I don't want to know about it. Not ever, not in any way."

"I understand," Ciler said.

Caius Blohm strode away without speaking or looking back.

The bulldozer that would be breaking trail the next morning was parked at what would be the head of the line of march. Blohm walked around it and leaned against the curve of the high steel blade. A veil of phosphorescent moss shimmered on the edge of the forest like a magenta dream.

The blade was cool. Blohm took his helmet off and turned to rest his forehead against the metal.

Seraphina Suares appeared at his side. She put an arm around the striker and began to weep quietly.

Blohm hugged the widow close. "There," he said, holding her. "There."

But he didn't shed a tear of his own.

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