She had taken time to get to know all of them reasonably well. So she knew what Reza said wasn’t simple bravado. He had been a Confederation Navy Marine at one time. An officer, she guessed; he wasn’t very forthcoming about that period of his life, nor subsequent contracts as a marshal on various stage one colony planets. But he must have been good at the second oldest profession, money in large quantities had paid for a considerable number of physical enhancements and alterations. Now he was one of the elite. Like a cosmonik, blurring the line between machine and human. The kind of hyper-boosted composite the mundane troops stored in zero-tau on the Gemal aspired to become.
Reza Malin retained a basic humanoid shape, although he was now two metres tall, and proportionally broad. His skin was artificial, a tough neutral grey-blue impact-resistant composite with a built-in chameleon layer. He didn’t bother with clothes any more, and there were no genitalia (rather, no external genitalia, Kelly recorded faithfully).
Cybernetic six-finger claws replaced his natural hands. Both forearms were wide, with integral small-calibre gaussrifles, his skeleton rigged to absorb recoil. Like Warlow, his face was incapable of expression.
Black glass bubble-shields covered both eyes; the nose was now a flat circular intake which could filter chemical and biological agents. The back and sides of his bald skull were studded with a row of five sensor implants, smooth centimetre-wide ulcerlike bulges.
Despite the lack of expression, she learned a lot from his voice, which was still natural. Reza wasn’t easily flustered. That and a civilized competence, the way the other six followed his orders without question, gave her more confidence than she would otherwise have had in the scouting mission. In the final analysis, she realized, she trusted him with her life.
The spaceplane banked sharply. Kelly was aware of Ashly Hanson focusing the optical sensors on a small river three kilometres below. The silvery water had a curious speckling of white dots.
“What does he think he’s doing?” Pat Halahan asked. The team’s second in command was sitting in the seat next to her. A ranger-scout, as he described himself, slimmer and smaller than Reza, but with the same blue-grey skin, and powerful adipose legs. Each forearm had twin wrists, one for ordinary hands, one a power data socket for plug-ins—weapons or sensors. His senses were all enhanced, with a raised rim of flesh running from the corner of his eyes right around the back of his skull.
“Hey, what’s happening, Ashly?” he called out. Electronic warfare was a thought all the mercenaries were sharing.
“I’m going to land us here,” Ashly said.
“Any particular reason?” Reza Malin asked with quiet authoritativeness.
“The surveyed back-up landing site is another seventy kilometres south-east.”
“Listen, anyone who can create that damn cloud can intercept our communications without even trying. They’ll have every site Terrance Smith ever reviewed marked in a big red circle that says ‘hit this’.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Smart man,” Pat Halahan muttered to Kelly. “I wish we’d had him on the Camelot operation. Lost a lot of good people because the general hired too many virgins.”
“Go ahead,” Reza said.
“Thank you,” Ashly sang back. The spaceplane dived steeply, spiralling at an angle which sent Kelly’s stomach pressing up against her collar bones.
“Are you quite sure you want to land?” the pilot asked. “You ask me, we’re in way over our heads. Terrance Smith couldn’t organize a gang-bang in a brothel.”
“If Smith is going to beat the invaders, the starships have to know where to hit them,” Reza said. “For that you need us. We always go in at the shit end. It’s what we’re good at.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Don’t worry about us. Ultra-tech never works well in jungle terrain, nature is just too damn messy. And I don’t think I’ve seen many jungles worse than this one. They can probably swat us with some energy blast, even lob a baby-nuke on us if they’re feeling particularly bitchy. But they’ve got to find us first. And rooting us out of that forest wilderness is going to be tricky, I’ll make bloody sure of that. You just make sure you and young Joshua stay intact to pick us up afterwards.”
“If I’m alive, I’ll pick you up.”
“Good, I’ll hold you to that.”
The spaceplane’s yaw angle reversed as it performed an abrupt roll. Kelly clung to the armrests with white knuckles as the webbing shifted its hold around her body. This wasn’t a clean aerodynamic dive, it was a death plummet.
“How you doing, Kell?” Sewell shouted, sounding hugely amused. Sewell was one of the team’s three combat-adept types, and looked it. Standing two metres thirty, his leathery skin matte-black, and woven through with a web of energy absorption/dispersal fibres. His head was virtually globular, a glossy shell that protected his sensors, sitting on a short neck.
Trunklike upper arms supported dual elbows; he had attached heavy-calibre gaussrifles to the top joints.
Chuckles went round the cabin. Kelly realized her eyes were tight shut, and forced herself to open them. The spaceplane was shaking.
“You should eat, take your mind off it,” Sewell crowed. “I’ve got some big gooey slices of strawberry creamcake in my pack. Want some?”
“When you were boosted, the doctors wired your neural nanonics to your liver,” she said. “It was one fuck of a lot smarter than your brain, bollockhead.”
Sewell laughed.
A judder ran through the cabin as the wings began to sweep out.
“Irradiate the drop zone, Ashly, please,” Reza said.
“Affirmative.”
“There might be civilians down there,” protested Sal Yong, another of the combat-adepts.
“Doubt it,” Ashly said. “The nearest village is fifty kilometres away.”
“We’re not on a Red Cross mission, Sal,” Reza said.
“Yes, sir.”
The spaceplane twisted again.
Great swaths of maser radiation poured out of the unblemished sky around the small shallow river. Hundreds of birds dropped to the ground or splashed into the water, charred feathers smoking; vennals tumbled from the trees, limbs still twitching; sayce howled briefly as their hides wizened and cracked, then died as their brains broke apart from the intense heat; danderil nibbling at the vegetation collapsed, their long elegant legs buckling as their viscera boiled. The verdant emerald leaves of the trees and vines turned a darker, bruised shade of green. Flowers shrivelled up. Berries and fruit burst open in puffs of steam.
The spaceplane came down fast and level. It actually landed in the river, undercarriage struts crushing the stony bed, nose jutting over the grassy bank. Steam and spray erupted from the water as it was struck by the compressor jets, sending a large circular wave sloshing outwards over the bank.
Sewell and Jalal were first out, the two big combat-adept mercenaries didn’t wait for the aluminium airlock stairs to extend. They jumped down into the lathery water, covering the quiet wilting trees with their gaussrifles, and sprinted ashore. The half-metre depth didn’t even slow them down.
Reza released a couple of aerovettes, ordering them to scan the immediate jungle. The stealthed, disc-shaped aerial combat robots were a metre and a half wide, their central section a curving mesh-grid to protect the wide-cord contra-rotating fans in the middle. Five infrared lasers were mounted around their rim, along with a broad passive-sensor array. They hummed softly and slipped through the air, climbing up to traverse the top of the nearby trees.
Pat Halahan and Theo Connal were second to emerge, following the first two mercenaries ashore. Theo Connal had a short body, one and a half metres tall, boosted for jungle roving. His skin was the same tough chameleon envelope as Reza and Pat, but his legs and arms were disproportionately long. Both feet were equipped with fingers instead of toes. He walked with an apeish stoop. Even his bald head portrayed simian characteristics, with a tiny button nose, squashed cir
cle mouth, and slanted eyes, heavily lidded.
He activated the chameleon circuit when he landed in the water, and scrambled up the shallow incline of the bank. Only a faint mauve optical shimmer betrayed his silhouette. As soon as he reached a tree he seemed to embrace it, then levitated, spiralling round the trunk. At which point the spaceplane sensors lost him, even the infrared.
“My God,” Kelly said. She had wondered why Reza had included someone as basically harmless-looking as Theo on the team. A small buzz of excitement began in her belly. This kind of flawless professionalism was darkly enticing; it was easy to see how combat missions became so narcotic.
Another pair of aerovettes skimmed off over the trees. Sal Yong and Ariadne, the second ranger, came down the airlock steps. Ariadne was the only other female on the team, although her gender was obscured like all the others. There was very little difference between her and Pat, maybe lacking just a few centimetres in height, and her sensor band was broader.
“Now or never, Kelly,” Reza said.
“Oh, now,” she said, and stood up. “Definitely.” The visor of her shell-helmet slid down. Collins had given her carte blanche on selecting her equipment back in Tranquillity, so she had asked for Reza’s advice and bought what he suggested. After all, it was in his own interest not to have a liability tramping through the jungle with the scout team.
“Keep it simple, and make it the best,” he’d said. “You’re not combat trained, so all you have to do is keep up with us and stay undetected.”
“I can load combat programs into my neural nanonics,” she’d offered generously.
Reza simply laughed.
She had wound up with a one-piece suit of rubbery body-armour, produced in the New Californian system, that would protect her from a modest level of attack from both projectile and energy beam weapons. Reza had taken her to an armourer who serviced mercenary equipment, and had a chameleon layer added.
More aerovettes whirred overhead as she hurried down the airlock steps into the river. Steam hung in the air. She was glad of the shell-helmet’s air filters, cremated birds bobbed around her ankles.
Pat Halahan and Jalal were unloading the gear from the forward cargo hold.
“Help them,” Reza ordered Kelly. He was wading through the shallows, carrying some composite containers. A nylon harness held a black metallic sphere about twenty centimetres in diameter to his right side, just above his equipment belt. Kelly wondered what it was, her neural nanonics couldn’t identify it, there were no visible features to assist the search and comparison program. None of the other mercenaries had one. She knew this wasn’t the time to ask.
The spaceplane’s steps were already folding back into the fuselage. She set to, stacking the metal cases and composite containers on the muddy grass of the bank.
Reza and Pat carried a trunk-sized zero-tau pod ashore. The black negating surface evaporated to reveal a white plastic cylinder. It split open, and a mahogany-coloured geneered hound lumbered out. Kelly thought its fangs could probably cut through her armour suit.
Reza knelt down beside the big beast and ruffled its head fondly with his hand. “Hello, Fenton. How are you, boy?”
Fenton yawned, pink tongue hanging limply between his front fangs.
“Go have a look round for me. Go on.”
Reza patted his hindquarters as he rose. Fenton swung his neolithic head round to give his master a slightly maligning look, but trotted off obediently into the undergrowth.
Kelly had been standing perfectly still. “He’s well trained,” she said vaguely.
“He’s well bonded,” Reza replied. “I have affinity neuron symbionts fitted.”
“Ah.”
Pat and Jalal were wading ashore with a second zero-tau pod.
“Adieux,” Ashly datavised.
The spaceplane lifted with a brassy shriek. Vigorous geysers of water sprouted under the compressor nozzles, splashing up against the carbotanium fuselage. Then it was above the trees, undercarriage folding up, and the geysers withering away to white-foam ripples.
Kelly tracked her shell-helmet sensors round the forbidding wall of water-basted jungle. Oh, crap, I’m committed now.
She watched the spaceplane pitch up nearly to the vertical and accelerate away into the eastern sky at high speed. Her neural nanonics said they had landed less than three minutes ago.
The explosion was large enough for the Gemal’s ordinary sensor clusters to pick it up as the starship fell into the planet’s umbra, leaving Amarisk behind. For the vastly more sensitive observation satellites in low orbit it registered as a savage multi-spectrum glare, overloading some scanners.
Terrance Smith’s neural nanonics informed him it was the spaceplane from the blackhawk Cyanea, which had been landing a scout team in the Quallheim Counties. It had been on the ground when the blast happened.
“What the hell did that?” he demanded.
“No idea,” Oliver Llewelyn replied.
“Shit. It was over seventy kilometres from the nearest piece of red cloud. Did the scout team get clear?”
“No response from any of their personal communicator blocks,” one of the bridge’s communication officers reported.
“Bugger.” His neural nanonics’ strategic display showed him the remaining four spaceplanes climbing into orbit. Seven more had already docked with their parent starships. Two were manoeuvring for a rendezvous.
“Do you want to divert a spaceplane for a rescue?” Oliver asked.
“Not without confirmation that someone is alive down there. It was a hell of an explosion. The electron matrices must have shorted out.”
“Neat trick if you can do it,” Oliver said. “They have a lot of safeguards built in.”
“Do you suppose that electronic warfare—”
“Sir, message from the Villeneuve’s Revenge,” the communications officer said. “Captain Duchamp says the invaders have boarded his ship.”
“What?”
“That was one of the spaceplanes we lost contact with,” Oliver said.
“You mean they’re up in orbit?” Terrance asked.
“Looks like it.”
“Christ.” He datavised the processor managing the command communication channels, ready to issue a general alert. But his neural nanonics informed him a couple of starships were leaving their assigned orbital slots. When he requested the strategic display it showed him Datura and Gramine under acceleration, rising out of the thousand-kilometre orbit.
His fist hit the acceleration couch cushioning. “What is happening?”
“The spaceplanes from both the Datura and Gramine experienced communication difficulties,” Oliver said in a strained voice. He glanced over at Terrance Smith. The ordinarily prim bureaucrat looked haunted.
“Cut them out of our communication net,” Terrance ordered. “Now. I don’t want them to access our observation satellite data.”
“They’re running,” Oliver said. “They must be heading for a jump coordinate.”
“Not my problem.”
“The hell it isn’t. If they are xenocs, you’ll be letting them loose in the Confederation.”
“If they have the technology to put together that cloud, they already have bloody starships. My concern and mission is Lalonde. I’m not sending the blackhawks to intercept them, we don’t have the numbers to send ships off on wild-goose chases.”
“Their drives aren’t right,” Oliver said. “They aren’t burning the fuel cleanly. Look at the spectroscopic analysis.”
“Not now, fuck it!” Terrance shouted. He glared at Oliver. “Contribute something positive or shut up.” His neural nanonics linked him in to the communication processor, opening direct channels to the remaining starships. “This is an emergency warning,” he datavised. Even as the painful phrase emerged, he wondered how many listeners were still under his command.
The Lady Macbeth’s bridge was completely silent as Terrance Smith’s voice came out of the AV pillars.
“
Oh, Jesus,” Joshua moaned. “This is all we need.”
“It looks like Datura and Gramine are preparing to jump,” Sarha said.
“Sensor clusters and thermo-dump panels are retracting.” She frowned.
“Most of them, anyway. Their thrust is very erratic. They should be above the five-thousand-kilometre gravity-field boundary in another four minutes.”
“This invasion force is too big, isn’t it,” Joshua said. “We’re not going to save Lalonde, not with what we’ve got.”
“Looks that way,” Dahybi said in a subdued tone.
“Right then.” Joshua’s mind was immediately full of trajectory graphics.
A whole range of possible jump coordinates to nearby inhabited star systems popped up.
You’ll be abandoning Kelly, a voice in his head said.
It’s her choice.
But she didn’t know what was happening.
He instructed the flight computer to retract the thermo-dump panels.
Fully extended, the panels couldn’t withstand high-gee acceleration. And if he was going to run, he wanted to do it fast.
“As soon as Ashly returns we’re leaving,” he announced.
“What about the merc team?” Warlow asked. “They are dependent on us knocking out the invader’s bases.”
“They knew the risks.”
“Kelly is with them.”
Joshua’s mouth tightened into a hard line. The crew were looking at him with a mixture of sympathy and concern.
“I’m thinking of you, too,” he said. “The invaders are coming up here after us. I can’t order you to stay in these circumstances. Jesus, we gave it our best shot. There isn’t going to be any mayope again. That’s all we ever really came for.”
“We can make one attempt to pick them up,” Sarha said. “One more orbit. A hundred minutes isn’t going to make much difference.”
“And who’s going to tell Ashly he has to go down there again? The invaders will know he’s coming down for a pick-up.”
“I’ll pilot the spaceplane down,” Melvyn said. “If Ashly doesn’t want to.”