I finally reached the clearing and saw Hector over at the trailer he used for his command post. I keyed the radio. “The road sucks, Hector. If Rusty told you he graded it, he’s lying something serious.”

“Good morning to you, too, Sam.” Hector’s tone was a bit testy, but I could see a smile on his face, so I just listened. “Rusty’s driving Black Betty today. Boris is down in Kokushima getting his nose set.”

“He should have them make it smaller. That way the next time he sneezes his brain won’t fall out.”

“What brain?”

“Good point. So, where is it you want me waging war on trees this fine morning?”

He punched a couple of buttons on a datapad and beamed the coordinates to me. “Gonna have you plunge in, cut a swath due west, then down to the south, isolating a patch for us to clean up later.”

“Great. Trailblazing. Thanks.”

He shrugged. “Orders come from above my pay grade.”

“What did our masters say about the chances of GGF taking out their own restraining order?”

“Same as always: no damage to personnel or equipment.” Hector scratched at his cheek. “You thinking on what Keira-san said last night about GGF doing some pay-back for you decking that girl?”

“Maybe. Keira-san isn’t right often, but when he is…” I shrugged. Maria didn’t. I raised the chainsaw up and then brought it down again. “Those of us about to die salute you.”

“Go and die if you want to, Sam, just don’t dent the metal.”

“You’re all heart, Hector.”

“You know better than that: I’m management.”

I laughed and started Maria trudging off to the place where we were supposed to start working. As the sun came up I was figuring it was going to be a pretty uneventful day. Despite PADSU’s rhetoric, the forest we were cutting in had been harvested fifty years earlier, so this wasn’t old-growth forest in any true sense. ARU might well have been cheap in terms of the equipment they bought, but Pep spent as much time hauling reseeders and seedlings up the mountain as she did dragging logs back down, and nary a splinter went unused. Unlike most corporations, ARU did better than abide by The Republic’s rather stringent land-use regulations.

I got to where I was meant to be and sized up the job. It was pretty much notch and cut. When looking at a ForestryMech a lot of folks think we hold on to the tree with the grabber and cut it, sort of the way one might trim a sunflower. The problem is that the trees can mass more than my ’Mech, and even when that’s not the case, a falling tree will rip the claw right off. The claw’s useful for lifting and shifting or leverage, but not much more than that.

The chainsaw does make pretty quick work of harvesting trees, however. I notched on the east side, then cut from the west, which dropped the trees to the east as pretty as you please. Kind of mindless work, but you get into a rhythm and pretty soon you’ve cut a swath twenty-five meters wide and a hundred meters deep, with a river of trees pointing back the way you came.

Pretty soon, in this case, meant nine in the morning. My stomach, having once more survived ARU coffee, was rumbling. I turned the ’Mech back around toward the base camp and radioed in. “Hector, you sending me out some trimmers, or do I have to come back there and get my own breakfast?”

“Sam, just hang there. The mud is slowing everything down. Rusty couldn’t get Betty rolling, so he’s grading the road now. Pep’s stuck behind him. Be about an hour.”

I frowned on behalf of my stomach, which couldn’t. “Geez, Hector, I thought our mid-morning repasts truly meant something to you.”

“You only love me for the sweet rolls. I’ll have Pep bring you extra.”

“Deal. I’m so easy.” I turned Maria back around to continue my cutting, and that’s when I caught the glimpse of the guy. He had just flitted behind a tree and had been coming at my six. Someone had been reading old Gray Death Legion adventures, because he was hauling one huge old satchel charge and I was pretty sure he’d planned to sneak up on me and tag Maria’s heel as I trudged off to breakfast.

I pointed the chainsaw toward the tree he’d used for shelter, then flicked on the external sound gear. Before I could say anything to him, voices boomed, this time coming from the north. Men in black combat fatigues, carrying sub-machine guns and looking very lethal, moved forward toward my quarry.

“Halt! This is Commander Reis of the Overton Constabulary’s Civil Defense Reaction Force! Don’t make us do something we don’t want to do.”

I really do require another digression here. Commander Reis thinks he’s the next coming of Morgan Hasek-Davion and might be, save that he’s too short, too fat, too arrogant, too ignorant and, despite his girth, utterly gutless. The people in his CDRF were dedicated, but were trained on a shoestring budget while being given all sorts of gadgets and other stuff they never really learned how to use. The CDRF were all heart and brave, but in combat that means you don’t really know when you are outgunned and need to retreat.

The situation was pretty simple. The GGF had come to blow up a ’Mech. They knew that the ’Mech might not be crippled by their attack and that the pilot, being me, might take it poorly that I had been attacked. For that reason they’d brought their commando troops up on a couple of hovertrucks that were mounted with heavy machine guns. Reis’ warning alerted the gunners. Had he said nothing, his people might have been able to take the bomber quietly.

The GGF gunners opened up. I could only see little flickers of light deeper in the woods, then watched bullets track up and through one CDRF trooper. She spun down into rusty pine needles that stuck to her bloody uniform. The other CDRF folks dove to dirt, but one more got tagged before the whole of the squad took cover in a bowl-shaped depression.

The machine guns let up and the CDRF thought that was their chance to counterattack. They didn’t realize why the gunners had stopped shooting, but I did. As the bomber came out from behind the tree to loft his satchel charge into their haven, I crisped him with the laser. The charge still flew, but not very far. When it hit the ground it exploded, killing the first of the CDRF guys who had come up over the berm, and stunning the rest of them.

I charged Maria forward and the gunners started shooting at me. Unless they were going to keep a constant stream up against the cockpit, I didn’t really think they could stop me. I knew they’d figure that out after a moment’s reflection, and they’d also realize that I couldn’t get to them without a lot of time-consuming cutting.

They weren’t wrong, but neither were they completely right. I got to the tree that had sheltered their smoking friend, notched and dropped it, but this time sent it crashing west.

There’s a reason logging is a dangerous operation. Trees are big and heavy, and even though a branch seems pretty light, when it’s falling fast and connected to a tree, getting hit with it is like being swatted by a broom driven by a hurricane. In addition, when trees are dropped hastily, they tend to collide with other trees in a chain reaction that can make a terrible tangle of things. Cracking trees, splinters flying everywhere, needles, dust, dirt; it can be an unholy mess.

One you’d not want to be caught in, especially if your only shelter is a hovertruck. The tree I chopped caromed into another one and another, dropping even more heavy lumber. One tree smashed a hovertruck flat. The other hovertruck backed out of a lot of branches and jolted away without even checking on survivors.

The whole thing took a minute, maybe two, and would have been over save for one little detail. When his people had been pinned down, Reis ordered his command vehicle into the fray. His driver was coming on hard, so when a tree dropped across his path, he juiced the hover-louvers to get maximum lift. That turned out to be about two centimeters short, so the hovercar skipped off the log like a rock on a lake, then drilled the rootball of another tumbled giant. Reis catapulted from the back seat and somersaulted unceremoniously into a lot of tigerberry bushes—which, contrary to common opinion, are not named for the striped berries, but for the two-inch thorns on the branches.