The clearing was nearly circular and thirty feet across. Blohm paused. This was the first stretch of forest he'd seen that was naturally open to the sky.
The sky, bright but overcast, wasn't of much interest. The ground cover was something else again. Tawny five-foot swordblades grew as tightly as grass on a putting green.
"I think we better go around," he said. "That stuff's too thick to go through. If the edges aren't sharp, then there's something worse wrong with it."
He didn't have to use intercom or raise his voice. For safety the squad was closed up as much as possible. Abbado's people knew very well that while Blohm's helmet database was copied into theirs, that didn't give them the scout's instinct for aspects of the landscape they glimpsed for the first time.
"Roger," Abbado said. "We're within a hundred yards of the predicted target. I don't see much sign of a village."
Abbado got along better in the forest than Gabrilovitch did. Both sergeants viewed the vegetation as an enemy, but the fact didn't particularly bother Abbado. To him, enemies were something a striker fought or avoided; it didn't matter whether they had bark or pale gray skins.
Gabe found the forest's malevolence unnatural, even supernatural. Imagination made Gabrilovitch a good scout, whereas Abbado's two-valued logic—kill it or run—had struck Blohm as simple-minded during the year and a half he'd known the man.
Close contact under the present circumstances gave Blohm a different view of the line sergeant. Abbado was simple but not stupid. By ignoring questions that couldn't be answered Abbado handled dangerous situations, and he was able to lead strikers with him. Abbado's squad followed not only because of their sergeant's courage but because they accepted his logic.
Blohm checked possible routes around the clearing. He didn't like to be in any one place for longer than five minutes at a time. His rules for surviving in the forest were to touch as little as possible and to keep moving.
"Three-three elements," the helmet warned in the voice of God, the project manager. "Carbon dioxide levels are rising sharply. A large number of humanoids is approaching your location from the north. Out."
"Everybody in your null sacks," Blohm ordered. "Fast!"
"Roger," said Abbado, releasing the stinger he'd started to aim. He drew his sack from its pouch.
A line of humanoids came out of the trees on the other side of the clearing and entered it. They parted the grass like rocks dropping through still water.
Blohm took an instant to tack a remote sensor onto a tree, but he was still covered before the leading humanoid was halfway across the clearing. Abbado was almost as quick. The other strikers were a hair slower but still fast enough. Nobody hesitated to obey after Abbado accepted Blohm's instinct over his own.
From the heart of his null sack, Blohm viewed the oncoming humanoids through the sensor above him. He had the momentary sensation of being a ghost watching his own corpse—which was very likely to be the case if he'd guessed wrong. Sacks twisted enough of the optical range that they looked from the outside like lumpy shadows, but they weren't invisible.
The humanoids tramped purposefully through the forest, returning to a compass course whenever they had to skirt a tree. Lesser vegetation eased aside for them. They didn't run but they moved as swiftly as humans striding across a meadow.
Several of them stepped on Blohm in his null sack. Their feet felt soft and unpleasant, like those of slugs with bones.
The humanoids paid no attention to Blohm or the other members of the patrol who happened to be underfoot. The sacks were visible but they had none of the signatures of a life form.
The procession of armed natives continued for five and a half minutes, fanning minutely westward as more and more of the creatures paced from the far side of the clearing. Hundreds had passed before the sequence ended.
Blohm waited another minute, then opened his sack. If it had been his safety alone, he would have stayed under cover for at least five. "Six-six-two to C41," he reported. The other strikers were getting up also. "Two hundred and sixty-four humanoids are moving toward you. Every sixth one squirts acid. The rest have clubs. There are no other weapons, spears or guns. Over."
"Six-six-two, roger," Major Farrell replied. "We've been echoing your sensor and are reacting accordingly. Break. Three-three, carry on with your mission. Six out."
"No rest for the wicked," Abbado said mildly as he restowed his null sack. He glanced at Blohm and added, "How'd you know they'd leave us alone in our sacks, snake?"
"They don't have any more brains than a spider," Blohm said. "Than a tree. They don't think, they react. A sack doesn't give them anything more to react to than the dirt does, so they treat it the same way."
He hadn't known, but he'd been as sure as he was of sunrise. That's what the Unity paid him for—being sure even when he couldn't be.
"Why'd they come right at us, then?" Foley said. There was a little tension in the striker's voice. His fingers were having difficulty rolling his null sack. "They knew we were here, they must have."
Abbado reached over and anchored a corner of Foley's sack with a finger so that the fold didn't slip again like a transient dream.
"They're going from their village toward the column," Horgen said. "We're going the other way because the Spook ship happened to be in the same line. That's why the major sent us. It isn't planning, it's geometry."
"We'll go around the clearing to the right," Blohm said, back to considerations the procession of humanoids had interrupted. "Don't spend any longer than you have to under the tree with the smooth trunk, mark, I think the branches can come down like a fish trap."
"Shit," said Sergeant Abbado. "I forgot Gabrilovitch."
So had Blohm. The scout opened his mouth to send a warning, but Abbado was already doing that. "We need to move," Blohm said instead.
It took ten minutes for Blohm to lead the patrol around the margin of the clearing, even though he pulled the others faster than they should have gone. He knew they couldn't afford to stay longer where they'd been, and he didn't dare switch to remote viewing from Gabe's helmet until he'd reached a place to rest.
"Hold here," he ordered beside a tree whose fat trunk had the squishy uncertainty of a water balloon. "And for God's sake don't touch anything."
Gabrilovitch had left the crashed starship at the same time the others did, going in the opposite direction. The location plot showed he hadn't moved far. Abbado'd warned him to set a sensor and get into his null sack. If Gabe had done that, his bead of light would have vanished from the overlay.
"God damn you, Gabe," Blohm whispered as he echoed the panorama from his partner's helmet. "Don't panic and buy the farm!"
Gabrilovitch was running. The forest provided aisles of vision at unexpected angles. A pair of humanoids crossed one of them a hundred feet behind the striker, jogging rather than walking as before. They'd certainly spotted him.
"Six-six-one," Blohm said. "Gabe, fucking listen to me. Get in your sack. It's okay. They'll pass you by, I swear it. Gabe, this is Blohm. Trust me for God's sake, trust—"
Gabrilovitch ran into a dangling web of gossamer-fine air roots. He slashed them with his powerknife. The paired blades hummed and stopped, clogged by fluid showering from the underside of the branch above. Drops ran like clear water down the outside of the roots, but they clouded into glue when they touched the warmth of flesh or a machine.
Gabe began to scream. His arms were caught. His legs thrashed for some seconds until they too were gummed into the curtain of roots.
The striker's body swayed in vain desperation. The visor protected his face so he could continue to scream.
Five of the expressionless humanoids reached Gabrilovitch. Three raised their clubs. They hacked with smashing, shearing strokes as regular as the beats of a metronome set slow. The other two turned away and thrust their beaklike mouths into the bark of neighboring trees, sucking sap for nourishment. Several club blows struck Gabe's helmet and knocked it askew, but the electronics still transmitted.
Blohm switched back to direct viewing. "Come on," he said. He paused to steady his voice. "This tree's going to burst in a minute or two and I don't want to be around."
The bulldozer snarled against increasing resistance as the blade bit into a trunk crackling like a machine gun. Meyer swayed, gripping the cab with her left gauntlet.
When the first tractor was about to stall and spin its treads against the soil, the second punched its stinger into the same tree at sixty degrees around the trunk. Meyer was braced against the initial shock, but her vehicle's lurch forward as the trunk started to go nearly threw her off the back of the deck.
Both bulldozers halted. The tree fell at an accelerating rate. The trunk's inertia tore the roots out of the ground, jerking the tracks as the vehicles reversed.
The tree tore in a lengthy crash through neighbors still standing. A lesser giant tilted away. As it did, a root uncoiled toward the other tractor. Strikers on the ground shouted warnings to Velasquez, but Meyer had the clear target. She played two seconds of brilliance from her flame gun, carbonizing the root all the way back to the trunk.
Meyer's driver steered the bulldozer carefully, aiming his blade at the next tree. She waved her flame gun to help cool the nozzle.
A rocket went off in the bole of a tree forty feet farther into the jungle, weakening it for the dozer blades in a minute or two. The major had decided to spend ordnance in order to clear an area quicker, both for a killing zone and to hold the civilians in a concentrated group where C41 could at least hope to surround them.
Al-Ibrahimi and his aide picked targets for the rocketeers. Most explosions triggered a result that would have endangered a bulldozer if the warhead hadn't preceded it. The administrators either had instincts equal to Caius Blohm's, or their little headsets had more computing power than a Strike Force helmet.
Meyer's bulldozer started forward. Matthew Lock waddled a minimal twenty feet behind with satchels of grenades. C41 hadn't brought any directional mines along when they left the colony ship, but grenades thrown from the tractor's deck would reach a little farther than they could from ground level. Even when a civilian was throwing them.
Meyer couldn't let herself look back at Lock. If she did that, she might miss a threat that would engulf him. But the movement of the figure at the back of her panoramic display glowed in her mind as if the helmet had careted it.
A drop of rain, scattered and repeatedly recombined by three layers of canopy, landed on Abbado's wrist. The storm had broken minutes before, but this was the first of it to reach ground level.
"There it is," Blohm said.
"That's a village?" Foley whispered.
"That's a hole in a tree," said Abbado, "but it's where the wogs are coming from, right enough."
The tree had begun as at least a dozen separate saplings. They merged as they grew. In combined form the monster covered a ragged circle over a hundred feet in diameter, black-barked and covered with air plants. The neighboring jungle had drawn away so that the swath beneath the spreading branches was clear.
Except for recent wear on the bark covering the lintel, the opening could have passed for a deep fold where two of the trunks joined. A human might have missed the signs, but the helmet AI hadn't.
Abbado scanned for heightened CO2 levels. The concentration was normal. A breeze drew air into the slot, so there must be a vent at a higher level. The tree's hollow trunk provided a chimney for the humanoids living within.
"Grenades?" said Horgen, taking one in her hand.
"Not till we know what's inside," Abbado said. He loosened his bandoliers. The rain was coming harder, dripping from leaf tips and the underside of branches. Even a downpour couldn't make the air more humid.
"Right," said Blohm, stepping forward.
Abbado touched the scout's arm, drew him back. "My job," he said. "Your job was to get us here."
Abbado released and reextended his stinger to be sure its sling hadn't jammed. He jogged across the ten yards of open space to the tree.
His shoulders didn't quite brush the edges of the hole, but he had to duck his head slightly to clear the top. The opening fitted the humanoid warriors the way the cutter does cookies that come from it. There were two right-angle bends in the passage beyond, a left and a right. The walls were a light trap, dead black and porous.
Abbado stepped around the second bend, expecting darkness and God alone knew what else. He found what else.
The interior was a cavern whose walls glowed like windows of hammered glass. The light baffle was to keep the tree from shining out into the nighted jungle like an advertising sign.
The entire tree was hollow. The floor sloped from the entrance where Abbado stood into a bowl-shaped cavity of even broader dimensions.
He recognized the figures first. Humanoids of slighter build than the warriors crawled over something that looked like a fuel bladder which filled almost half the cavern's volume. The tenders polished the bladder with wads of gray fabric.
A pair of giants detached themselves from nooks in the sidewall and shambled toward Abbado. They were twelve feet tall and carried edged clubs that must have weighed a hundred pounds. Similar monsters stepped into sight farther from the entrance. They shook off coatings of the amber gelatine which had sealed them into individual cells.
Abbado armed a rocket. The nearest giants raised their clubs.
Man-sized capsules clung to the wall of the cavern. There were hundreds in the highest row, forty feet above the ground. Lower down the light of the surface behind the translucent capsules showed the shadows of developing forms. Those at floor level contained fully-formed warriors.
The bladder twitched and deposited another egg high up on the wall. The bladder was alive. Its head and torso were as large as those of the giants but dwarfed by the swollen obscenity of the abdomen to which they attached. Its beak was thrust into the wall of the tree. A line of scarred punctures around the cavern indicated that at intervals the creature changed the point from which it sucked sap.
The mother.
Abbado fired his rocket into the abdomen of the mother in instinctive revulsion instead of killing the right-hand guard as his conscious mind had planned. Backblast reflected from the cavern wall flung him forward. The giants' clubstrokes, scissoring from either side, struck behind him.
The giants stood between Abbado and the entrance. They raised their clubs with the deft ease of elephants lifting their trunks. Abbado dived between them, collided with the first bend in the passage, and pulled a pair of grenades from his belt. He tossed them into the cavern, then tossed two more.
He'd managed to dodge around the second baffle before the bombs went off. The blast spat him like the cork from a champagne bottle instead of smashing him against the dense wood. He sprawled on the bare ground, then rose to all fours with difficulty.
"How many rockets we got?" Abbado asked. His eyes were closed. His back and neck ached, and his calves had a chilly prickle that probably meant they were bleeding. "I want all your rockets."
"Sarge, you can't go back in there," Matushek said.
"We all go back in there," Abbado said. He pushed himself upright and turned around. "The rest of you keep the big fuckers off me. And I take care of that filthy thing, I swear I do. Fast! Give me the rockets now."
They only had six including the motor whose warhead Abbado'd used to pop open the bridge hatch. The patrol was heavy on ammo and grenades; Horgen, Foley, and Matushek carried grenade launchers as well as stingers. 3-3'd prepared for a shipload of Spooks without much in the way of rocket targets.
Well, they'd need the grenades. Maybe the stingers too, though Abbado doubted pellets had enough penetration to bring down one of those guards in time to do him any good.
He armed the six rockets. He carried one in each hand; the other four—three and a half—dangled from his belt. Arming the rockets was about the most dangerous thing Guilio Abbado had done since he enlisted, but it wasn't like there was a lot of choice.
"You all saw what's waiting in there," he said to the other strikers. "Blohm and Caldwell, you go as far as the second turn and each throw two grenades into the chamber. Don't waste time getting back. When they blow, I go in and start doing my job. Grenade launchers follow, then Blohm and Caldwell again. Don't know how much good stingers'll do, but it can't hurt."
Abbado smiled. "Watch how you come," he added. "I don't want you all stuck in the doorway while the folks inside are pulling my legs off."
It didn't occur to Abbado that his strikers wouldn't follow. They had to follow. Otherwise the job wouldn't get done.
"Ace, give me an electrical," Blohm said. Matushek handed him one. The scout carried a pair of fuel-air grenades. Mixing the effects was a good idea.
Blohm thumbed both grenade switches. "Let's do it," Caldwell said as she stepped into the passage.
A thousand one, a thousand two, a thousand three—
Abbado didn't bother to remote the lead team's display. Caldwell wouldn't be going far enough to see anything and Blohm was behind her.
A thousand four—
Blohm reappeared and jumped to the left side of the opening.
A thousand five—
Caldwell, her mouth open to equalize pressure, dodged out and to the right. None of the strikers were in the path of the angled shockwave.
A thousand s—
Red flame belched from the opening. A spurt of acrid black smoke followed.
Abbado stepped into the passage with the grace of a dancer. He held his rockets upright. If he knocked a fuze against passage walls, he'd blow himself and Horgen behind him to hell in little pieces.
Filters clamped his nostrils. The cavern walls glowed through veils of smoke swirling toward the peak of the enormous tree. Three of the giant guards were down near the mouth of the passage. A fourth stood gripping his club, but he'd been blinded by grenade shrapnel. Giants who'd been farther from the entrance lumbered toward the strikers.
Abbado ran ten feet into the cavern and knelt, aiming his rockets at the mother's abdomen again. Green fluid oozed from the previous wound. The creature coiled like a maggot on a spike. Her limbs were too small to touch the ground, but the whole body writhed.
Abbado fired, right and left together. The backblast shoved him like a hot pillow but didn't knock him down this time.
He caught the flicker of a club swinging at him. Five grenades fuzed for point impulse went off in quick succession. The charges shattered the guard's cranial vault just as they would have done body armor or a vehicle's engine. The great arms continued their swing, but the weapon sailed across the cavern instead of driving Abbado into the ground like a tent peg. A bit of grenade casing whacked his helmet.
Launched grenades burst on two other of the shambling guards. The charges were light enough to minimize the risk to the strikers. Using hand grenades in an enclosure, even an enclosure as large as this one, was next to suicidal; though it might come to that.
Abbado sent two more rockets into the mother. He saw the flash of warheads through the creature's skin. Caldwell emptied a stinger magazine into the face of a guard; Blohm raked his across the rows of capsules.
The mother had pulled her beak from the wall. Sap dripped from the tip and from the hole in the wood. Abbado put another rocket into her abdomen. Fluid pooled inches deep on the floor beneath the creature; its bloated flesh sagged like a half-inflated balloon.
Foley dodged a swinging club and slipped. The stroke took his legs off at mid thigh. He was too stunned to scream. He twisted, trying to seat a fresh magazine. The launcher had flown from his other hand when the club hit. Matushek and Horgen fired grenades into the giant's skull. The guard fell forward, crushing Foley beneath it.
Abbado aimed his last rocket at the center of the mother creature's chest. The projectile flew high without the weight of the warhead. The motor was still burning when it punched through the beaked face and into the wall of the cavern.
"Three-three elements disengage!" Abbado shouted through the bedlam as he sighted his stinger. Ten of the troll-like guards were down; one was clubbing the wall thirty feet away and the last kept coming despite what must have been a dozen fatal grenade blasts. "Three-three and scouts, disengage!"
The guard had no more neck than a rhinoceros. Abbado fired at the throat anyway because it was the one part of the creature's kill zone that grenades hadn't cratered. Low flames spread across the fluid leaking from eggs punctured by shrapnel and gunfire. The chamber was becoming noticeably warmer and smokier despite the updraft.
"Get out, for Chrissake!" Abbado said. Using the panoramic display as he backed toward the door, he avoided the guard sprawled behind him.
Three of his strikers were out of the chamber. Horgen reloaded her grenade launcher. Abbado grabbed her by the shoulder and shoved her toward the passage.
The head of the oncoming giant rotated sideways and fell. It continued to roll down the smooth slope toward the burning egg capsules. The body took another step before the weight of the club pulled the decapitated corpse over.
Abbado dodged out of the passage. He dismissed the thought of throwing another grenade behind him. They were likely to need the ordnance on the way back.
And he was so tired. So very tired. The rain-drenched jungle felt unexpectedly cool.
"Good work, people," Abbado whispered. He tried to reload his stinger and found he'd already done that. He couldn't imagine when. "Six, this is Three-three. Mission accomplished. We're heading home. Out."
"Out" rather than "over." That was Abbado's way of saying that nobody was going to task 3-3 for another mission until they'd had time to resupply and recover.
"Three-three, roger," the major's voice replied. "The drinks are on me. Six out."
"Sarge, I'm sorry," said Caius Blohm. "You're going to have to make it back without me. There's just a chance I can get to the column in time to help with the wogs we passed going the other way. The rest of you can't."
"Are you out of your fucking mind?" Matushek said softly. Ace had taken his helmet off and was massaging his temples. His eyes appeared to have sunk into his skull since the beginning of the mission.
"Maybe," Blohm said. "Move slow, don't touch anything if you can help it, and let your helmets guide you. They know everything I do."
The scout turned away. Horgen raised her stinger.
"Let him go," Abbado said. Blohm vanished into the jungle, moving like a ghost.
"Let him go," Abbado repeated. "I've fought everybody I'm going to fight for the next long while."
Art Farrell stood in the pouring rain on top of a trailer-load of plastic sheets. He wished lightning would hit him, but he knew he'd never be that lucky.
"Carbon dioxide levels to the north are rising," warned Tamara Lundie. She stood beside the project manager at the foot of the trailer. Around them lay the injured and unwell who'd been moved to the ground till this was over. "Estimate fifteen seconds."
"C41, advance party, fall back," Farrell ordered. His fingers probed his stinger's rain-slick receiver, but he didn't eject and reinsert the magazine. "Ten seconds, people. Out."
The bulldozers had stripped a swath of jungle three hundred by fifty feet. Clearance debris including the trunks of full-sized trees lay in a row against the long northern side from where the natives were supposed to attack. Twenty-two strikers waited ten yards back. That was as deep a kill zone as Farrell thought he could afford without pushing the civilians too close to the back edge of the clearing.
Christ, he hoped it was the back edge. All it would take to turn this into a massacre was for twenty or thirty natives to circle the clearing before they attacked.
The advance party of five strikers scampered down from the top of the pile to join the main line. Farrell had placed them there because the location gave Lundie a wider reach on CO2 levels.
There'd been six in the advance party. Tasman, who had the sweetest voice Farrell ever heard on a person he'd met face to face, stepped on what looked like a solid log and sank in to his crotch. He screamed for several seconds before his torso rolled to the ground. His legs had dissolved.
War has its own system of accounting. In this case, fifteen seconds cost a striker's life. A soldier knows that "want" isn't the same as "need"; and Farrell had needed the fifteen seconds.
Sorry 'bout that. Wish it'd been me.
The civilians, nearly a thousand of them, were behind the main line and not quite crowded into the jungle. Farrell had placed the bulldozers on the flanks. The total guard force for the sides and rear was four strikers and a few who weren't walking but still could pull a trigger.
Farrell would rather have had the civilians in a tight lump instead of being spread out in a line. He'd decided in a heartbeat that it was more important to open the entire front instead of having natives coming straight out of the jungle on top of his strikers.
It rained like a cow pissing on a flat rock. Civilians without light enhancement and commo helmets couldn't see well or talk, so they were that much likelier to panic. Stinger pellets didn't like rain this heavy either, and even a veteran's fingers could slip while changing magazines.
You play the hand you're dealt. Lightning flashed between clouds.
A stinger fired on the right edge of the line. The charge fluoresced from the muzzle like a yellow tulip. Farrell didn't see that target, but three natives appeared over the pile a little farther down. A dozen more stingers lit the firing line. Pellets ripped wood, dirt and the humanoids.
The natives staggered. One of them kept coming even after stingers chewed his arm off. Forty more appeared, all along the line. The berm protected the attackers rather than the defense, but the clearance debris had to go somewhere. Lethal vegetation made the wrack too dangerous to fight from, the way Farrell would have liked to do.
Farrell wasn't shooting. He was C41's entire reserve.
Natives mounted the pile as if it was level ground. They didn't seem organized, but clots of ten or a dozen sometimes converged on a single striker.
Somebody emptied his stinger, then fired his back-up grenade launcher instead of trying to reload. The blast five feet from the muzzle blew the humanoid's head and arms in three different directions, but it flung the striker backward into screaming civilians. His helmet fell off and he didn't get up.
Hand grenades went off on both flanks, silhouetting trees against the sullen red glare of fuel-air explosive. Farrell didn't know if the bombers were being attacked or if they were making sure that they weren't.
"Targets, mark," Manager al-Ibrahimi warned on the two-way channel he shared with the major. Four spikes flashed to the rear quadrant of Farrell's lower, panoramic display. He turned, throwing the targets onto his visor's upper register.
They were trees, emergents whose blunt peaks stood two hundred feet above the forest floor and well above the general canopy. They were hundreds of feet distant. Farrell—and al-Ibrahimi, using the major's helmet sensors—wouldn't have been able to see them at all had he not been standing on top of the trailer. The tops of nearer trees screened the emergents from people on the ground.
The crowns of the four trees were swollen. Farrell dialed up his visor's magnification by a thousand, focusing on the nearest. The swelling was a gall, an insect nest, rather than part of the tree proper. Crablike creatures the size of a man's palm crawled on the papery exterior. Others peeped from dozens of entrances to the inside of the nest. Instead of claws, the creatures' mouth parts twitched like long scissorblades.
The tree was wobbling. If it toppled toward the clearing, the swollen peak would land in the middle of the colonists.
Farrell armed a 4-pound rocket, aimed it, and sent it into the center of the nest. The warhead's artificial lightning blew the target to tatters. Shreds of the outer fabric drifted away, burning until the downpour quenched them. The shockwave would kill any of the crabs that the shrapnel didn't get.
Farrell twisted free a second rocket and aimed it. Four rockets, four targets . . . or a lot of people were fucked. Strikers from the rear guard looked back at him. They could echo the major's visor display, but nobody else could hit those treetops.
He fired. In the humid air the rocket motor left a thick white trail before burn-out, then a diminishing thread for the remainder of its course. The second nest disintegrated.
The third tree was swaying in a figure-8 that moved the peak across ten feet from Farrell's left to right; he knew that the long axis of oscillation was dipping toward him. He aimed and fired as coldly as if he were on a weapons qualification course.
Backblast seared the right side of his neck below the visor. The target was a flash and a brief fireball.
The last tree was already falling. It was moving at a slight angle to Farrell, so he had to allow for deflection. As the rocket snarled free, he reached for his stinger though he knew it would be next to useless if those creatures got among the defenseless civilians.
The warhead hit the wood just below the nest, severing the upper ten feet of the crown. It rolled backward from the blast. Crown and main trunk continued to fall. Instead of landing in the midst of the clearing, the top spun into a stand of tall reeds which the dozers had skirted on the south edge.
The reeds flexed around the treetop like water sloshing in a bucket. The fall would have killed few if any of the crabs. When they came swarming out of the vegetation they'd be impossible to stop before they got among the colonists.
Farrell pulled a fuel-air grenade from his belt. He was close enough to the reeds to throw with the present combination of height and desperate need.
Farrell's thumb froze on the arming switch. If he threw the grenade, the flexible reed stems would fling it back into the civilians before it exploded.
Some of the civilians were trying to get away from the falling tree. Because of the storm and the roaring confusion of the attack most of them hadn't even noticed it.
Flea Glasebrook ran toward the grove holding a fuel-air grenade in either hand. The other strikers at the back of the clearing stopped shooting uselessly into the reeds.
Glasebrook hit with the point of his shoulder as if the grove was a tackling dummy. Mud sprayed as his cleats bit and thrust him through the resistance. Farrell saw the flicker of the precursor charges dispersing the grenade fuel across the interior.
The grenades went off with a huge red flash. The reeds and everything within them disintegrated. The shock wave knocked down people fifty feet away and flung Art Farrell backward from his perch.
If there was a heaven, Glasebrook had just blown his way through the door.