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Once More into the Breach

The lead bulldozer cut into the berm and shoved a section of the dirt and debris slantwise into the jungle. Farrell watched Blohm and four strikers under Verushnie step through the gap. The scout vanished into the jungle while the others waited for the bulldozer to begin its advance.

The column was still forming, though it was later in the morning than Farrell would have liked. Manager al-Ibrahimi and his monitors were redistributing loads and help for the injured among those still capable of marching on their own.

"The berm isn't really protection," Tamara Lundie said. Her voice had a distant quality that made Farrell look harder at her. Her face was drawn and her arms trembled even though she clasped them firmly to her abdomen.

"It won't keep the jungle out, that's true," Farrell said. "It's useful as a boundary for the civilians, though. Especially kids."

"We've learned fast," Lundie said. "Even the children. All of us who survived know about dangers we'd never before appreciated."

"Are you all right?" Farrell said abruptly. "Do you have a fever?"

Lundie squatted down, hugging herself harder. She closed, then reopened her eyes but they weren't focusing on her present surroundings. "The poison's affecting me," she said. "I'll be all right in a few minutes. I won't have to be carried if I can wait—"

She wobbled. She would have fallen over except that Farrell dropped into a squat beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. The sheeting was rolled in the first trailer; the bulldozed ground, though bare, wasn't safe to sit on.

"Six?" said Kristal's voice. "We're ready. Over." 

"Four, start the march any time God gives the word," Farrell ordered. "Out."

He continued to support Tamara Lundie. Her whole body shuddered as if she was in the last stages of a deadly virus.

Nobody gave them more than a glance. Hundreds of civilians were half crippled or wearied to the edge of collapse even now at the start of the day's march. The strikers focused on the things that were likely to cause them problems: the jungle, the health of the colonists in the section they were responsible for today; injuries and sores where load-bearing equipment had worn through their skin in the humid warmth. Two more huddled figures, whatever their rank, were less important than personal survival.

"You were redlined, you know," Lundie said with her face buried against Farrell's shoulder. She wrapped her arms around his stocky torso, holding on like a sailor to a stanchion as a wave surge drags his body toward the great gray ocean. "The whole of Strike Company C41 was redlined."

"I know that," Farrell said. He'd known it even as the boat lifted the screaming, weeping survivors from Active Cloak. Until he got the new orders, he'd hoped the authorities wouldn't look too closely. "They put us on colony security as a stand-down. They didn't know how dangerous Bezant was."

"No," Lundie said. "He chose BZ 459 because it was dangerous. It was his plan to reintegrate you into society by showing civilians what soldiers did for them. Making them understand how helpless they were except for your lives pledged for them. They would see, and you would know they saw."

"C41," Kristal's voice ordered. "We have clearance from the manager. Lead elements proceed. Remaining personnel follow and keep your sections closed up. Out." 

"Regiment planned this?" Farrell said. The poison was making Lundie hallucinate. 701st Regimental Command was a number of things including uncaring, ponderous and inefficient, but it wasn't crazy; and its power was limited to the Strike Force. This involved civilians. "Can you stand up, Tamara? I see Dr. Ciler over there."

"I'll be all right," she said with a sharpness that meant at least some of her conscious mind was processing data normally. "Just hold me for a minute longer. It wasn't the military that gave the orders, it was us—the Chief Administrator of the Unity and his aide, God and his blonde aide . . . We made a terrible mistake. We didn't know about the Kalendru and we didn't expect the ship to land in the crater. I didn't assemble the necessary information for my chief."

Lundie's body began to shake again. She was crying. "It all went wrong because I didn't do my job."

"You did your job," Farrell said. He patted her shoulder. He felt awkward because his stinger's muzzle prodded Lundie when he leaned. "There's always shit that nobody knew about, always. You did your job just fine."

"I can stand up now," Lundie said in a small voice. She sniffled.

"That's good," Farrell said, rising and helping her up with him. "We're not out of the woods yet."

Lundie turned her back to him. "You're not angry?" she said.

"No, I'm not angry," Farrell said. He looked at the civilians starting another day's journey toward Christ knew what; clinging to one another, dragging the wreck of their possessions. A striker laughed with an old man, then straightened the straps of the almost empty knapsack across the civilian's shoulders. Some of the marchers were even trying to sing. "Maybe those people are, but I'm not even sure of that."

"I'd better see Jafar," Lundie said. She rubbed her cheek with her hand to hide the blush. "He worries about me."

She met Farrell's gaze squarely. Her eyes were a gray purer than anything else in this jungle. "He worries about everyone, you know. Everyone in the Unity. And he came here."

The column filed out of the encampment; worn civilians under the eyes of troops bristling with weapons. The strikers were faceless with their visors locked down, but they were no longer anonymous to those they guarded. Colonists joked nervously; strikers joked back with coarse, grim affection.

"You know, Tamara?" Farrell said. He wasn't sure he'd ever be able to understand what he'd just been told, though he didn't doubt the truth of it. "The hardest thing in the world for strikers to believe is that anybody gives a shit about us. But I guess you've convinced C41, for what that's worth."

"Tractor One," said Esther Meyer's helmet in God's voice, "this is Admin One. Hold up for stragglers at the next suitable location. Sections One, Two and Three, close gaps and halt in place. Sections Four, Five and Six, continue forward until you've regained your proper interval. Out." 

Seligman immediately took his vehicle out of gear and raised his helmet visor. "This looks pretty damn suitable to me," he said. "Got anything to drink, Councillor Lock?"

"Water for you and me," Matt said. "Try this canteen, Esther."

Meyer walked forward on the deck, swigging through her open visor. The contents were flavored with whiskey, probably the best bourbon she'd ever drunk in her life. Just enough for taste, but it meant a lot more than that.

Twenty feet ahead of the dozer blade nodded huge flowers on twelve-foot stalks. They grew among the roots of a forest giant. The perfume that oozed from the magenta blooms was musky, enticing. The AI didn't find anything dangerous to humans in the complex scent, but Meyer didn't believe the flowers' only purpose in this jungle was to attract pollinating insects. Maybe they were poisonous to Spooks.

She'd clear it with a grenade before the dozer started forward again. Just in case.

"We're heading toward the center of this crater," Matt said in a quiet voice from just behind her. "We aren't trying to get out any more. I think I know why al-Ibrahimi—or Major Farrell?—changed course."

Matt hadn't asked Meyer about the new course of the past two days. She'd have told him. There wasn't anything that she wouldn't tell him; but because he was so fucking smart he knew better than to ask her. He was the one to keep, which she'd never be able to do . . .

Meyer put an arm around Matt, careful so that her rigid armor didn't hurt him. "The major doesn't make that kind of decision, love," she said. "Especially now."

"The jungle's artificial," Matt said, lacing his arm over hers. He had a stinger again. He'd never be much good with it, but he was trying. "There's a biological control system here in this crater and it's still operating—look at the way threats have been tailored to human metabolisms since we've been here."

Seligman dumped his hard suit's waste container on the other side of the cab. Privacy for bodily functions had gone out the window since the trek began, though there was an attempt to rig a screen around one or two of the pit latrines each time the column halted in the evening.

"What are we doing here, then?" Meyer said. She grasped the concept but it didn't make any sense. "What are you guys, civilians, doing here anyway? I can see them sending us."

"I don't know," Lock said. "If it weren't for the two Category Fours leading us and the obvious unsuitability of Bezant, any part of Bezant, for colonization, I'd say it was just chance. But the Kalendru were certainly here searching for the biological control, and now we are too."

Meyer turned her head slightly. Her helmet careted a tree in the middle distance that for the moment was only a sliver of gray trunk and a few sprays of leaves with orange veins. A similar tree had flung branch tips like thirty-pound spears to ring and shatter on the tractor's armor.

This specimen was probably safely outside the column's intended course. If not, though, Meyer figured it'd know to choose targets more vulnerable than the bulldozer was. She'd put a rocket into it if God or his aide guided Seligman in that direction.

"The Kalendru are an ancient race," Matt said. His hair was dark and wavy. It'd grown noticeably since they abandoned the ship. "At the height of their expansion half a million years ago, they inhabited a hundred times as many planets as they do now. We humans were still learning to chip flint. Maybe the Kalendru found records, maybe they deciphered a legend. Whyever they came here, they were right. This is the weapon that will end the war."

Meyer lowered her arm so that she could turn to face Matt. She could watch him by offsetting her display, but to him it'd seem that she was looking away. "Honey," she said, afraid she was going to sound insulting. "I know these trees are a bitch when it's just an understrength company and small arms. But honey, up against the hardware a line battalion deploys—they're nothing, sweetheart. And a tank wouldn't even slow down for this jungle, trust me."

"Not the vegetation, Esther," Matt said with a quirky smile. "Microorganisms. Disease bacteria and viruses."

Meyer checked her locator grid. Judging from where the striker guards were, Section 4 had closed up to the tractor in the middle of the column and Section 5 wasn't far back from 4. Section 6 was still way behind where it needed to be. It would be several minutes before Seligman got the go-ahead.

"Okay," Meyer said, "that's bad. I guess a lot of people could be killed before everybody in the Unity got immune boosters. But that's what'd happen. It'd cost a bundle, but that's what wars do. They wouldn't beat us that way, Matt."

"We could protect people, Esther," Matt said. He combed the fingers of his left hand through his long, curly hair. "We couldn't protect all life forms, though. What if every food crop on every planet died? What if all the algae in every ocean died and rotted, instead of producing oxygen? What if all the animals, wild and domesticated, started attacking people the way those Kalendru attacked us where the ship landed?"

"Oh," said Meyer. "Oh."

"Tractor One, this is Admin One," God's cold voice said. "Start forward in sixty, that is six-zero, seconds, count. Admin One out." 

Meyer took a fuel-air grenade from her equipment belt and armed it. She eyed the giant flowers nodding in the still air.

"I hadn't thought of that," she said as she lobbed the grenade.

Seligman walked around the bulldozer, prodding at the treads to be sure they were locking properly to minimize ground pressure. Abbado moved in front of the vehicle to get a direct view of the terrain. There was no standing water, but his boots squelched with each step.

Horgen sang softly, "Love is the ring that has no—" 

She felt Abbado's eye on her. "Sorry, Sarge," she said.

Though it wasn't open to the sky, this was the largest clear stretch Abbado'd seen since their column left the landing site. Fat-trunked trees rose from hummocks above the surrounding soil. They stood like pillars set on stone plinths, their branches arched and interlaced a hundred feet in the air. Brush and reeds of varied species covered the ground to a height of ten or twenty feet, but there was none of the intermediate vegetation that screened the canopy from sight throughout most of this jungle.

The major came around the side of the bulldozer with God. Major Farrell looked rock-hard, the way he always did on an operation. Metal can bend and deform, but a rock just wears a little smoother.

The sun would go cold before the major broke.

"We're waiting on the tractor, sir," Abbado explained. "Blohm reported the soil never gets softer than this, but there isn't a way around for at least a quarter mile either way. Seligman says he can make it if his treads work like they ought."

The major lifted his visor to look over the terrain unenhanced, then closed it again. "How do you intend to proceed?" he asked.

"We'll go around the trunks," Abbado said. "Seligman says he can't push trees over here because he'd lose traction, but we don't need to try. The dozer'll take care of the little stuff—it's all got thorns or edges like a razor, but that's no surprise. We've got branches marked to take down with grenades where we need to."

The major didn't speak for a moment as he compared an overlay of Abbado's action plan with the direct view through his faceshield. "Good," he said. "The big mother there, mark."

He'd careted a trunk with deep vertical grooves like the flutes of Ionic columns.

"Take the whole top off with a rocket when you're ready to start. It looks too much like the one that came apart into tentacles when we were just starting out."

"This one probably hinges out from root level," Manager al-Ibrahimi said. "The tips of the limbs are armed with spikes, so severing the trunk where it branches should do the job nicely."

God didn't look any different from the first time Abbado had seen him. You could just about shave on the bridge of his nose. He continued, "That tree, mark, that tree, mark, and that tree, mark—those three are designed to topple over. I assume they'll do so if the bulldozer comes within range."

"I'll be a son of a bitch," Abbado said. The noted trees didn't have any mutual similarities the sergeant could see. He'd planned to watch the seed pods dangling from the crown of the one whose bole was as straight as the shaft of a walking stick, but that was all.

"We're over a huge construct extending a square mile below ground," al-Ibrahimi added. "It begins twenty feet beneath the surface, but Tamara and I can't tell from echo shadowings just how far down it extends. Because the soil here is backfill, it's settled to a degree. It doesn't drain as well as the remainder of the forest, so the vegetation is adapted to high water levels."

Major Farrell looked at the manager. "Is this what we're looking for?" he said in a grayer, sharper tone than Abbado normally heard when the major talked to superiors. "Should we be digging instead of cutting through these trees?"

The tractor revved and moved forward ten feet before halting. The staff driver, Seligman, was still on the ground. He resumed his methodical inspection now that a new portion of track had been rotated beneath the road wheels. Essie's lawyer friend Lock was at the controls.

"We can't dig with our present equipment because of the swampy ground," God replied calmly. "There'll be an entrance, probably in the center of the tract. We'll find it, and we'll enter. And we'll find the way to turn off this Hell, Arthur, and escape."

"Sorry, sir," the major muttered. "I—strikers get used to the mushroom treatment. Kept in the dark and fed horseshit."

Seligman awkwardly mounted the bulldozer. Essie gripped the cab frame with one hand and helped pull the driver's armored bulk onto the deck with the other.

"Tamara says she talked with you, Arthur," God said. "Is there anything you want to discuss with me directly?"

The major shook his head. "Nothing that affects the mission, sir," he said. "Hell, nothing at all."

"Sarge, we're ready to go," Essie called from the tractor's deck. She wasn't ignoring the major. By directing the information as she had, she let the brass know the situation without formally breaking in on them.

Abbado extended the tube of a rocket. "Horgen, mark," he ordered, "Matushek, mark."

He was assigning rocket targets besides the one he was going to handle.

"At the base, three, two, one, fire!"

Abbado squeezed the bar trigger. Exhaust impulse kicked him as his rocket streaked into the trunk a hundred feet away. The warhead penetrated a yard or so before it detonated. The tree's own mass tamped the explosion and sent the bole toppling away from the line of march.

The three giants fell slowly, twisting and groaning like men clutching with angry desperation at a slope too steep to possibly support them. Clouds of varicolored splinters settled around the ragged stumps. Sap flickered into flame from Horgen's tree.

Abbado aimed his stinger at the nearby branch he'd marked for himself. His grenadiers sighted on more distant targets where pellets wouldn't have sufficient kinetic energy to do enough damage. 3-3 had waited to eliminate threats till the last moment so that the jungle wouldn't grow replacements.

"Tractor One, this is Admin One," God ordered. "Move on!" 

"Now, you see those trees that look like palms there, Mirica?" said Caius Blohm. "The fronds slant up, but look how sharp the tips are. You look at that and you know they'll chop you like a meat-axe if you step in range."

The ground here was marginally higher than that of the previous stretch. Instead of semi-swamp, the soil was firm and the forest again displayed full triple-canopy variety.

Blohm moved with easy caution outside the arc through which the fronds could pivot. Separate entities within the forest tended to observe boundaries so they didn't destroy each other. Often the safest passage was just beyond the reach of a particularly dangerous element.

"Now, a lot of the guys," Blohm explained, "they think the helmet can take care of that. Maybe yes, maybe no. The AI catches details, you bet. But you know, sweetheart, the machine doesn't have any feel for this place. This isn't a bunch of things, trees and suchlike. It's a thing, a forest."

He saw light through the undergrowth. Ribbon-like leaves hung from vines weaving an arbor through the middle canopy. They were translucent, shimmering in shades of indigo and violet because of the brightness beyond them.

Blohm worked his way around the high curtain instead of passing under it. He stepped through the middle of a clump of saplings that leaned outward. He was at the edge of a track cleared down to the clay and a hundred yards wide.

"Six, this is Six-six-two," he reported. "There's a road cut through the forest here. The only difference between it and what your bulldozer does is this is a hell of a lot wider. Over."

The dirt was dry and cracking, well on the way to becoming crumbly laterite. That didn't take long in this climate. The forest was trying to recolonize the track by means of runners from both edges. The scraped soil was poor in nutrients and couldn't hold water. Swatches of moss and vividly colored lichen looked like chemical spills.

"Six-six-two, this is Six," the major replied as quickly as if he'd been standing beside Blohm. "Do you think you can cross it safely? Over." 

Blohm looked at Mirica. She nodded solemnly. "Six, yeah," he said aloud. "It's a couple weeks old judging from the regrowth. Do you want me to see where it goes? Over."

"Six-six-two, negative," the major said sharply. "Get on with your mission. If you find anything that looks like a doorway—anything at all artificial—report ASAP. And Blohm? Watch yourself. I'd say that bare ground was a perfect killing zone if we were any damn place but this jungle where every damn thing is. Six out." 

"Six, this place isn't so bad when you get used to it," Blohm said cheerfully. "Six-six-two out."

He looked at Mirica. "Now, are you ready, sweetie? We don't want to waste any time crossing this stretch, but I don't want you to run so fast you stumble either. See those two trees that the side's been scraped off halfway up the trunk? We're going to go between them and then wait a minute while we get our bearings."

"I'll be all right, Caius," Mirica said. "You be very careful. There's curled bamboo that'll hurt you."

Blohm dialed up his visor's magnification. Damned if the kid wasn't right. What seemed to be foot-high shoots were the tops of reeds twisted like helical springs. The tips were ice-pick sharp. Blohm didn't doubt the shafts would drive to their full twelve-foot height even if they'd had the opportunity to go through his body first the long way.

"I guess we'd better go to the right of the right-hand tree instead," he said. "Understand? Let's go, then."

Blohm jogged across the cleared track with his faceshield raised, pivoting his head in an effort to look in all directions. The panoramic display would have given him a shrunken vision of reality. He trusted it the way he trusted all aspects of the helmet's sensors and processing algorithms—trusted them to do everything a machine could do. Machines didn't have instincts.

The track was marked by grooves parallel to the axis of movement, each of them a few feet long. They had the appearance of the drag marks made by a harrow lifted into travelling mode but not clearing all the bumps.

Judging from the weathering, the track probably had something to do with the Spook expedition. God would have liked to have a piece of ground-clearing equipment that big, Blohm knew. For his own part . . . well, the forest was no friend of Caius Blohm's, but it played fair. Ramming through it with a blade a hundred yards wide didn't seem right to him.

Blohm skirted the marked tree as he'd planned. The forest beyond the cleared strip was typical of what he'd seen ever since they landed: variations in the form of danger and hostility, but nothing exceptional and nothing that explained the track. The broad pathway meandered through the forest, utterly destroying everything in its path.

Six winged pods a yard across rotated out of the canopy a hundred feet ahead of Blohm. They slanted through the mid-growth toward him. The seeds were pointed and weighed several pounds apiece, but buoyed by their wings they fell too slowly for their effect to be purely kinetic.

"Now what they expect us to do, honey," Blohm said, "is dodge behind a tree. What we're going to do instead is stand right here like we'd froze to the ground. Spinning the way they do, those things can curve around a tree as easy as not and we wouldn't see them coming. Now, you stick with me. When they get a little closer—run!"

With the nearest of the pods ten feet from him in slant distance Blohm sprinted under the spinning missile. Bristles at the seed's tip twisted, tracking his body heat. The pod attempted to reverse its angle of descent.

It wasn't high enough to succeed, though the last of the sheaf of missiles came closer than Blohm had expected. All six hit the ground in close sequence and burst, spraying sticky fluid. The pools self-ignited in yellow-orange pillars which slowly merged in a single inferno.

"Most times running away's near as bad an idea as sitting with your thumb up your ass," Blohm explained with satisfaction to his companion. "You can't run faster than a laser bolt, right? Go toward them and at least you've got a chance to react to whatever they try on."

"Six-six-two, this is Admin Two," said the voice Blohm had learned to identify as Tamara Lundie. "Initial survey imagery showed a hill or mound in the region you just crossed. Have you noticed any sign of such a feature, over?" 

"Admin Two, that's a negative," Blohm said. He saw a quivering glow through the undergrowth ahead, like an electrical arc softened by a foot of frosted glass. "The Spooks had one hell of a bulldozer to clear the track back there. Maybe they scraped the hill down too. Over."

"Six-six-two," said Lundie's cool voice. "The Kalendru had no equipment beyond small arms. Admin Two out." 

Blohm used his knife with the power off to very gently pry one of a line of saplings to the side. The sapling's crown suddenly twisted down around the blade like a elephant's trunk coiling.

Blohm withdrew the blade. Savage thorns along the inner surface of the coil squeaked, but they couldn't mark the synthetic diamond. The sapling very slowly began to straighten, recharging the reservoir of hydrostatic energy which it had just emptied. Blohm slipped past while it was still harmless.

He was in a small clearing. A skewed oval door was set in the surface of the ground. Enclosing it, a discontinuity in the air itself like a gigantic soap bubble scintillated across the visual spectrum.

Blohm felt a rhythmic vibration. He wondered if it was an earth tremor. He'd have guessed a starship was landing, except then actinic radiation would have penetrated the layers of foliage above him.

"Six, this is Six-six-two," he reported. "Major, I've found you your door! Over."

Major Farrell didn't respond. After waiting ten seconds, Blohm echoed a remote view from the major's helmet.

He realized why everybody with the column had other things on their mind.

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Framed

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Once More into the Breach

The lead bulldozer cut into the berm and shoved a section of the dirt and debris slantwise into the jungle. Farrell watched Blohm and four strikers under Verushnie step through the gap. The scout vanished into the jungle while the others waited for the bulldozer to begin its advance.

The column was still forming, though it was later in the morning than Farrell would have liked. Manager al-Ibrahimi and his monitors were redistributing loads and help for the injured among those still capable of marching on their own.

"The berm isn't really protection," Tamara Lundie said. Her voice had a distant quality that made Farrell look harder at her. Her face was drawn and her arms trembled even though she clasped them firmly to her abdomen.

"It won't keep the jungle out, that's true," Farrell said. "It's useful as a boundary for the civilians, though. Especially kids."

"We've learned fast," Lundie said. "Even the children. All of us who survived know about dangers we'd never before appreciated."

"Are you all right?" Farrell said abruptly. "Do you have a fever?"

Lundie squatted down, hugging herself harder. She closed, then reopened her eyes but they weren't focusing on her present surroundings. "The poison's affecting me," she said. "I'll be all right in a few minutes. I won't have to be carried if I can wait—"

She wobbled. She would have fallen over except that Farrell dropped into a squat beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. The sheeting was rolled in the first trailer; the bulldozed ground, though bare, wasn't safe to sit on.

"Six?" said Kristal's voice. "We're ready. Over." 

"Four, start the march any time God gives the word," Farrell ordered. "Out."

He continued to support Tamara Lundie. Her whole body shuddered as if she was in the last stages of a deadly virus.

Nobody gave them more than a glance. Hundreds of civilians were half crippled or wearied to the edge of collapse even now at the start of the day's march. The strikers focused on the things that were likely to cause them problems: the jungle, the health of the colonists in the section they were responsible for today; injuries and sores where load-bearing equipment had worn through their skin in the humid warmth. Two more huddled figures, whatever their rank, were less important than personal survival.

"You were redlined, you know," Lundie said with her face buried against Farrell's shoulder. She wrapped her arms around his stocky torso, holding on like a sailor to a stanchion as a wave surge drags his body toward the great gray ocean. "The whole of Strike Company C41 was redlined."

"I know that," Farrell said. He'd known it even as the boat lifted the screaming, weeping survivors from Active Cloak. Until he got the new orders, he'd hoped the authorities wouldn't look too closely. "They put us on colony security as a stand-down. They didn't know how dangerous Bezant was."

"No," Lundie said. "He chose BZ 459 because it was dangerous. It was his plan to reintegrate you into society by showing civilians what soldiers did for them. Making them understand how helpless they were except for your lives pledged for them. They would see, and you would know they saw."

"C41," Kristal's voice ordered. "We have clearance from the manager. Lead elements proceed. Remaining personnel follow and keep your sections closed up. Out." 

"Regiment planned this?" Farrell said. The poison was making Lundie hallucinate. 701st Regimental Command was a number of things including uncaring, ponderous and inefficient, but it wasn't crazy; and its power was limited to the Strike Force. This involved civilians. "Can you stand up, Tamara? I see Dr. Ciler over there."

"I'll be all right," she said with a sharpness that meant at least some of her conscious mind was processing data normally. "Just hold me for a minute longer. It wasn't the military that gave the orders, it was us—the Chief Administrator of the Unity and his aide, God and his blonde aide . . . We made a terrible mistake. We didn't know about the Kalendru and we didn't expect the ship to land in the crater. I didn't assemble the necessary information for my chief."

Lundie's body began to shake again. She was crying. "It all went wrong because I didn't do my job."

"You did your job," Farrell said. He patted her shoulder. He felt awkward because his stinger's muzzle prodded Lundie when he leaned. "There's always shit that nobody knew about, always. You did your job just fine."

"I can stand up now," Lundie said in a small voice. She sniffled.

"That's good," Farrell said, rising and helping her up with him. "We're not out of the woods yet."

Lundie turned her back to him. "You're not angry?" she said.

"No, I'm not angry," Farrell said. He looked at the civilians starting another day's journey toward Christ knew what; clinging to one another, dragging the wreck of their possessions. A striker laughed with an old man, then straightened the straps of the almost empty knapsack across the civilian's shoulders. Some of the marchers were even trying to sing. "Maybe those people are, but I'm not even sure of that."

"I'd better see Jafar," Lundie said. She rubbed her cheek with her hand to hide the blush. "He worries about me."

She met Farrell's gaze squarely. Her eyes were a gray purer than anything else in this jungle. "He worries about everyone, you know. Everyone in the Unity. And he came here."

The column filed out of the encampment; worn civilians under the eyes of troops bristling with weapons. The strikers were faceless with their visors locked down, but they were no longer anonymous to those they guarded. Colonists joked nervously; strikers joked back with coarse, grim affection.

"You know, Tamara?" Farrell said. He wasn't sure he'd ever be able to understand what he'd just been told, though he didn't doubt the truth of it. "The hardest thing in the world for strikers to believe is that anybody gives a shit about us. But I guess you've convinced C41, for what that's worth."

"Tractor One," said Esther Meyer's helmet in God's voice, "this is Admin One. Hold up for stragglers at the next suitable location. Sections One, Two and Three, close gaps and halt in place. Sections Four, Five and Six, continue forward until you've regained your proper interval. Out." 

Seligman immediately took his vehicle out of gear and raised his helmet visor. "This looks pretty damn suitable to me," he said. "Got anything to drink, Councillor Lock?"

"Water for you and me," Matt said. "Try this canteen, Esther."

Meyer walked forward on the deck, swigging through her open visor. The contents were flavored with whiskey, probably the best bourbon she'd ever drunk in her life. Just enough for taste, but it meant a lot more than that.

Twenty feet ahead of the dozer blade nodded huge flowers on twelve-foot stalks. They grew among the roots of a forest giant. The perfume that oozed from the magenta blooms was musky, enticing. The AI didn't find anything dangerous to humans in the complex scent, but Meyer didn't believe the flowers' only purpose in this jungle was to attract pollinating insects. Maybe they were poisonous to Spooks.

She'd clear it with a grenade before the dozer started forward again. Just in case.

"We're heading toward the center of this crater," Matt said in a quiet voice from just behind her. "We aren't trying to get out any more. I think I know why al-Ibrahimi—or Major Farrell?—changed course."

Matt hadn't asked Meyer about the new course of the past two days. She'd have told him. There wasn't anything that she wouldn't tell him; but because he was so fucking smart he knew better than to ask her. He was the one to keep, which she'd never be able to do . . .

Meyer put an arm around Matt, careful so that her rigid armor didn't hurt him. "The major doesn't make that kind of decision, love," she said. "Especially now."

"The jungle's artificial," Matt said, lacing his arm over hers. He had a stinger again. He'd never be much good with it, but he was trying. "There's a biological control system here in this crater and it's still operating—look at the way threats have been tailored to human metabolisms since we've been here."

Seligman dumped his hard suit's waste container on the other side of the cab. Privacy for bodily functions had gone out the window since the trek began, though there was an attempt to rig a screen around one or two of the pit latrines each time the column halted in the evening.

"What are we doing here, then?" Meyer said. She grasped the concept but it didn't make any sense. "What are you guys, civilians, doing here anyway? I can see them sending us."

"I don't know," Lock said. "If it weren't for the two Category Fours leading us and the obvious unsuitability of Bezant, any part of Bezant, for colonization, I'd say it was just chance. But the Kalendru were certainly here searching for the biological control, and now we are too."

Meyer turned her head slightly. Her helmet careted a tree in the middle distance that for the moment was only a sliver of gray trunk and a few sprays of leaves with orange veins. A similar tree had flung branch tips like thirty-pound spears to ring and shatter on the tractor's armor.

This specimen was probably safely outside the column's intended course. If not, though, Meyer figured it'd know to choose targets more vulnerable than the bulldozer was. She'd put a rocket into it if God or his aide guided Seligman in that direction.

"The Kalendru are an ancient race," Matt said. His hair was dark and wavy. It'd grown noticeably since they abandoned the ship. "At the height of their expansion half a million years ago, they inhabited a hundred times as many planets as they do now. We humans were still learning to chip flint. Maybe the Kalendru found records, maybe they deciphered a legend. Whyever they came here, they were right. This is the weapon that will end the war."

Meyer lowered her arm so that she could turn to face Matt. She could watch him by offsetting her display, but to him it'd seem that she was looking away. "Honey," she said, afraid she was going to sound insulting. "I know these trees are a bitch when it's just an understrength company and small arms. But honey, up against the hardware a line battalion deploys—they're nothing, sweetheart. And a tank wouldn't even slow down for this jungle, trust me."

"Not the vegetation, Esther," Matt said with a quirky smile. "Microorganisms. Disease bacteria and viruses."

Meyer checked her locator grid. Judging from where the striker guards were, Section 4 had closed up to the tractor in the middle of the column and Section 5 wasn't far back from 4. Section 6 was still way behind where it needed to be. It would be several minutes before Seligman got the go-ahead.

"Okay," Meyer said, "that's bad. I guess a lot of people could be killed before everybody in the Unity got immune boosters. But that's what'd happen. It'd cost a bundle, but that's what wars do. They wouldn't beat us that way, Matt."

"We could protect people, Esther," Matt said. He combed the fingers of his left hand through his long, curly hair. "We couldn't protect all life forms, though. What if every food crop on every planet died? What if all the algae in every ocean died and rotted, instead of producing oxygen? What if all the animals, wild and domesticated, started attacking people the way those Kalendru attacked us where the ship landed?"

"Oh," said Meyer. "Oh."

"Tractor One, this is Admin One," God's cold voice said. "Start forward in sixty, that is six-zero, seconds, count. Admin One out." 

Meyer took a fuel-air grenade from her equipment belt and armed it. She eyed the giant flowers nodding in the still air.

"I hadn't thought of that," she said as she lobbed the grenade.

Seligman walked around the bulldozer, prodding at the treads to be sure they were locking properly to minimize ground pressure. Abbado moved in front of the vehicle to get a direct view of the terrain. There was no standing water, but his boots squelched with each step.

Horgen sang softly, "Love is the ring that has no—" 

She felt Abbado's eye on her. "Sorry, Sarge," she said.

Though it wasn't open to the sky, this was the largest clear stretch Abbado'd seen since their column left the landing site. Fat-trunked trees rose from hummocks above the surrounding soil. They stood like pillars set on stone plinths, their branches arched and interlaced a hundred feet in the air. Brush and reeds of varied species covered the ground to a height of ten or twenty feet, but there was none of the intermediate vegetation that screened the canopy from sight throughout most of this jungle.

The major came around the side of the bulldozer with God. Major Farrell looked rock-hard, the way he always did on an operation. Metal can bend and deform, but a rock just wears a little smoother.

The sun would go cold before the major broke.

"We're waiting on the tractor, sir," Abbado explained. "Blohm reported the soil never gets softer than this, but there isn't a way around for at least a quarter mile either way. Seligman says he can make it if his treads work like they ought."

The major lifted his visor to look over the terrain unenhanced, then closed it again. "How do you intend to proceed?" he asked.

"We'll go around the trunks," Abbado said. "Seligman says he can't push trees over here because he'd lose traction, but we don't need to try. The dozer'll take care of the little stuff—it's all got thorns or edges like a razor, but that's no surprise. We've got branches marked to take down with grenades where we need to."

The major didn't speak for a moment as he compared an overlay of Abbado's action plan with the direct view through his faceshield. "Good," he said. "The big mother there, mark."

He'd careted a trunk with deep vertical grooves like the flutes of Ionic columns.

"Take the whole top off with a rocket when you're ready to start. It looks too much like the one that came apart into tentacles when we were just starting out."

"This one probably hinges out from root level," Manager al-Ibrahimi said. "The tips of the limbs are armed with spikes, so severing the trunk where it branches should do the job nicely."

God didn't look any different from the first time Abbado had seen him. You could just about shave on the bridge of his nose. He continued, "That tree, mark, that tree, mark, and that tree, mark—those three are designed to topple over. I assume they'll do so if the bulldozer comes within range."

"I'll be a son of a bitch," Abbado said. The noted trees didn't have any mutual similarities the sergeant could see. He'd planned to watch the seed pods dangling from the crown of the one whose bole was as straight as the shaft of a walking stick, but that was all.

"We're over a huge construct extending a square mile below ground," al-Ibrahimi added. "It begins twenty feet beneath the surface, but Tamara and I can't tell from echo shadowings just how far down it extends. Because the soil here is backfill, it's settled to a degree. It doesn't drain as well as the remainder of the forest, so the vegetation is adapted to high water levels."

Major Farrell looked at the manager. "Is this what we're looking for?" he said in a grayer, sharper tone than Abbado normally heard when the major talked to superiors. "Should we be digging instead of cutting through these trees?"

The tractor revved and moved forward ten feet before halting. The staff driver, Seligman, was still on the ground. He resumed his methodical inspection now that a new portion of track had been rotated beneath the road wheels. Essie's lawyer friend Lock was at the controls.

"We can't dig with our present equipment because of the swampy ground," God replied calmly. "There'll be an entrance, probably in the center of the tract. We'll find it, and we'll enter. And we'll find the way to turn off this Hell, Arthur, and escape."

"Sorry, sir," the major muttered. "I—strikers get used to the mushroom treatment. Kept in the dark and fed horseshit."

Seligman awkwardly mounted the bulldozer. Essie gripped the cab frame with one hand and helped pull the driver's armored bulk onto the deck with the other.

"Tamara says she talked with you, Arthur," God said. "Is there anything you want to discuss with me directly?"

The major shook his head. "Nothing that affects the mission, sir," he said. "Hell, nothing at all."

"Sarge, we're ready to go," Essie called from the tractor's deck. She wasn't ignoring the major. By directing the information as she had, she let the brass know the situation without formally breaking in on them.

Abbado extended the tube of a rocket. "Horgen, mark," he ordered, "Matushek, mark."

He was assigning rocket targets besides the one he was going to handle.

"At the base, three, two, one, fire!"

Abbado squeezed the bar trigger. Exhaust impulse kicked him as his rocket streaked into the trunk a hundred feet away. The warhead penetrated a yard or so before it detonated. The tree's own mass tamped the explosion and sent the bole toppling away from the line of march.

The three giants fell slowly, twisting and groaning like men clutching with angry desperation at a slope too steep to possibly support them. Clouds of varicolored splinters settled around the ragged stumps. Sap flickered into flame from Horgen's tree.

Abbado aimed his stinger at the nearby branch he'd marked for himself. His grenadiers sighted on more distant targets where pellets wouldn't have sufficient kinetic energy to do enough damage. 3-3 had waited to eliminate threats till the last moment so that the jungle wouldn't grow replacements.

"Tractor One, this is Admin One," God ordered. "Move on!" 

"Now, you see those trees that look like palms there, Mirica?" said Caius Blohm. "The fronds slant up, but look how sharp the tips are. You look at that and you know they'll chop you like a meat-axe if you step in range."

The ground here was marginally higher than that of the previous stretch. Instead of semi-swamp, the soil was firm and the forest again displayed full triple-canopy variety.

Blohm moved with easy caution outside the arc through which the fronds could pivot. Separate entities within the forest tended to observe boundaries so they didn't destroy each other. Often the safest passage was just beyond the reach of a particularly dangerous element.

"Now, a lot of the guys," Blohm explained, "they think the helmet can take care of that. Maybe yes, maybe no. The AI catches details, you bet. But you know, sweetheart, the machine doesn't have any feel for this place. This isn't a bunch of things, trees and suchlike. It's a thing, a forest."

He saw light through the undergrowth. Ribbon-like leaves hung from vines weaving an arbor through the middle canopy. They were translucent, shimmering in shades of indigo and violet because of the brightness beyond them.

Blohm worked his way around the high curtain instead of passing under it. He stepped through the middle of a clump of saplings that leaned outward. He was at the edge of a track cleared down to the clay and a hundred yards wide.

"Six, this is Six-six-two," he reported. "There's a road cut through the forest here. The only difference between it and what your bulldozer does is this is a hell of a lot wider. Over."

The dirt was dry and cracking, well on the way to becoming crumbly laterite. That didn't take long in this climate. The forest was trying to recolonize the track by means of runners from both edges. The scraped soil was poor in nutrients and couldn't hold water. Swatches of moss and vividly colored lichen looked like chemical spills.

"Six-six-two, this is Six," the major replied as quickly as if he'd been standing beside Blohm. "Do you think you can cross it safely? Over." 

Blohm looked at Mirica. She nodded solemnly. "Six, yeah," he said aloud. "It's a couple weeks old judging from the regrowth. Do you want me to see where it goes? Over."

"Six-six-two, negative," the major said sharply. "Get on with your mission. If you find anything that looks like a doorway—anything at all artificial—report ASAP. And Blohm? Watch yourself. I'd say that bare ground was a perfect killing zone if we were any damn place but this jungle where every damn thing is. Six out." 

"Six, this place isn't so bad when you get used to it," Blohm said cheerfully. "Six-six-two out."

He looked at Mirica. "Now, are you ready, sweetie? We don't want to waste any time crossing this stretch, but I don't want you to run so fast you stumble either. See those two trees that the side's been scraped off halfway up the trunk? We're going to go between them and then wait a minute while we get our bearings."

"I'll be all right, Caius," Mirica said. "You be very careful. There's curled bamboo that'll hurt you."

Blohm dialed up his visor's magnification. Damned if the kid wasn't right. What seemed to be foot-high shoots were the tops of reeds twisted like helical springs. The tips were ice-pick sharp. Blohm didn't doubt the shafts would drive to their full twelve-foot height even if they'd had the opportunity to go through his body first the long way.

"I guess we'd better go to the right of the right-hand tree instead," he said. "Understand? Let's go, then."

Blohm jogged across the cleared track with his faceshield raised, pivoting his head in an effort to look in all directions. The panoramic display would have given him a shrunken vision of reality. He trusted it the way he trusted all aspects of the helmet's sensors and processing algorithms—trusted them to do everything a machine could do. Machines didn't have instincts.

The track was marked by grooves parallel to the axis of movement, each of them a few feet long. They had the appearance of the drag marks made by a harrow lifted into travelling mode but not clearing all the bumps.

Judging from the weathering, the track probably had something to do with the Spook expedition. God would have liked to have a piece of ground-clearing equipment that big, Blohm knew. For his own part . . . well, the forest was no friend of Caius Blohm's, but it played fair. Ramming through it with a blade a hundred yards wide didn't seem right to him.

Blohm skirted the marked tree as he'd planned. The forest beyond the cleared strip was typical of what he'd seen ever since they landed: variations in the form of danger and hostility, but nothing exceptional and nothing that explained the track. The broad pathway meandered through the forest, utterly destroying everything in its path.

Six winged pods a yard across rotated out of the canopy a hundred feet ahead of Blohm. They slanted through the mid-growth toward him. The seeds were pointed and weighed several pounds apiece, but buoyed by their wings they fell too slowly for their effect to be purely kinetic.

"Now what they expect us to do, honey," Blohm said, "is dodge behind a tree. What we're going to do instead is stand right here like we'd froze to the ground. Spinning the way they do, those things can curve around a tree as easy as not and we wouldn't see them coming. Now, you stick with me. When they get a little closer—run!"

With the nearest of the pods ten feet from him in slant distance Blohm sprinted under the spinning missile. Bristles at the seed's tip twisted, tracking his body heat. The pod attempted to reverse its angle of descent.

It wasn't high enough to succeed, though the last of the sheaf of missiles came closer than Blohm had expected. All six hit the ground in close sequence and burst, spraying sticky fluid. The pools self-ignited in yellow-orange pillars which slowly merged in a single inferno.

"Most times running away's near as bad an idea as sitting with your thumb up your ass," Blohm explained with satisfaction to his companion. "You can't run faster than a laser bolt, right? Go toward them and at least you've got a chance to react to whatever they try on."

"Six-six-two, this is Admin Two," said the voice Blohm had learned to identify as Tamara Lundie. "Initial survey imagery showed a hill or mound in the region you just crossed. Have you noticed any sign of such a feature, over?" 

"Admin Two, that's a negative," Blohm said. He saw a quivering glow through the undergrowth ahead, like an electrical arc softened by a foot of frosted glass. "The Spooks had one hell of a bulldozer to clear the track back there. Maybe they scraped the hill down too. Over."

"Six-six-two," said Lundie's cool voice. "The Kalendru had no equipment beyond small arms. Admin Two out." 

Blohm used his knife with the power off to very gently pry one of a line of saplings to the side. The sapling's crown suddenly twisted down around the blade like a elephant's trunk coiling.

Blohm withdrew the blade. Savage thorns along the inner surface of the coil squeaked, but they couldn't mark the synthetic diamond. The sapling very slowly began to straighten, recharging the reservoir of hydrostatic energy which it had just emptied. Blohm slipped past while it was still harmless.

He was in a small clearing. A skewed oval door was set in the surface of the ground. Enclosing it, a discontinuity in the air itself like a gigantic soap bubble scintillated across the visual spectrum.

Blohm felt a rhythmic vibration. He wondered if it was an earth tremor. He'd have guessed a starship was landing, except then actinic radiation would have penetrated the layers of foliage above him.

"Six, this is Six-six-two," he reported. "Major, I've found you your door! Over."

Major Farrell didn't respond. After waiting ten seconds, Blohm echoed a remote view from the major's helmet.

He realized why everybody with the column had other things on their mind.

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