The plasma bolts kept coming, slashing through the moss curtains and walls of fronds at a steadily flattening angle, raising jets of smoke and mud all around, pinging off John’s Mjolnir in an ever-deepening scale that suggested shell failure was growing likely. Fred and Linda had already checked in at the LZ, but he and Kelly were still three hundred meters out and at least four minutes late, and if the Night Watch was gone, the two of them were done.
	Maybe they shouldn’t have ducked back into the jungle after all. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, stumbling across the crater-pocked terrain on the reverse slope of Sarpesi Ridge with a hundred Drones gaining on them by the second.