“Erick, he’s in trouble!”
“We don’t know that!”
“Look at him.”
“Look at Lalonde. They can build rivers of light in the sky. Faking up one injured crewman isn’t going to tax them.”
“For God’s sake.” Bev stared at the holoscreen. Brendon was juddering, one hand holding a grab loop as he vomited. Sallow
globules of fluid burped out of his mouth, splashing and sticking to the dull-silver wall of the tube opposite.
“We don’t even know if he’s alone,” Erick said. “The hatch into the spaceplane isn’t shut. It won’t respond to my orders.
I can’t even shut it, let alone codelock it.”
“Captain,” Bev datavised. “We can’t just leave him in there.”
“Erick is quite right,” AndrÉ replied regretfully. “This whole incident is highly suspicious. It is convenient for somebody
who wants to get inside the ship. Too convenient.”
“He’s dying!”
“You may not enter the airlock while the hatch into the spaceplane remains open.”
Bev looked round the utilitarian lower deck in desperation. “All right. How about this? Erick goes up into the lounge and
codelocks that hatch behind him, leaving me in here. That way I can take a medical nanonic in to Brendon, and I can check
out the spaceplane cabin to make sure there aren’t any xenoc invaders on board.”
“Erick?” AndrÉ asked.
“I’ve no objection.”
“Very well. Do it.”
Erick swam up into the empty lounge, and poised himself on the ladder. Bev’s face was framed by the floor hatch, grinning
up at him. “Good luck,” Erick said. He datavised a codelock at the hatch’s seal processor, then turned the manual fail-safe
handle ninety degrees.
Bev twisted round as soon as the carbotanium square closed. He pulled a medical nanonic package from a first aid case on the
wall. “Hold on, Brendon. I’m coming in.” Red environmental warning lights were flashing on the panel beside the circular airlock
tube hatch. Bev datavised his override authority into the management processor, and the hatch began to swing back.
Erick opened a channel into the lounge’s communication net processor, and accessed the lower deck cameras. He watched Bev
screw up his face as the fumes blew out of the open hatchway. Emerald green light flared out of the spaceplane’s cabin, sending
a thick, blindingly intense beam searing along the airlock tube to wash the lower deck. Caught full square, Bev yelled, his
hands coming up instinctively to cover his eyes. A ragged stream of raw white energy shot along the centre of the green light,
smashing into him.
The camera failed.
“Bev!” Erick shouted. He sent a stream of instructions into the processor. A visualization of the lower deck’s systems materialized,
a ghostly reticulation of coloured lines and blinking symbols.
“Erick, what’s happening?” AndrÉ demanded.
“They’re in! They’re in the fucking ship. Codelock all the hatches now. Now, God damn it!”
The schematic’s coloured lines were vanishing one by one. Erick stared wildly at the floor, as if he could see what was happening
through the metal decking. Then the lounge lights went out.
“Five minutes until we land at our new drop zone, and the tension in the cabin is really starting to bite,” Kelly Tirrel subvocalized
into a neural nanonics memory cell. “We know something has happened to at least five other spaceplanes. What everyone is now
asking themselves is, will the extra distance protect us? Do the invaders only operate below their protective covering of
red cloud?”
She accessed the spaceplane’s sensors to observe the magnificent, monstrous spectacle again. Thousand-kilometre-long bands
of glowing red nothingness suspended in the air. Astounding. This far inland they were slim and complex, interwoven like the
web of a drunken spider above the convoluted tributaries. When she had seen them from orbit, calm and regular, they had intimidated
her; up close and churning like this they were just plain frightening.
Coiling belts were edge-on with the starboard wing, growing larger as they spun through the sky towards the spaceplane. It
was an excellent image, a little bit too realistic for peace of mind. But then the spaceplane’s sensor array was all military-grade.
Long streamlined recesses on both sides of the fuselage belly were now holding tapering cylindrical weapons pods—maser cannons
providing a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree cover, an electronic warfare suite, and a stealth envelope. They weren’t quite
an assault fighter, but neither were they a sitting duck like some of the spaceplanes.
Typical that Joshua would have a multi-role spaceplane. No! Thank God Joshua had a multi-role spaceplane.
Forty minutes into the descent, and already she missed him. You’re so weak, she swore at herself.
Kelly was starting to have serious second thoughts about the whole assignment. Like all war correspondents, she supposed.
Being on the ground was very different to sitting in the office anticipating being on the ground. Especially with the appearance
of that red cloud.
The seven mercenaries had discussed that appearance ad nauseam the whole way in from the emergence point. Reza Malin, the
team’s leader, had seemed almost excited by the prospect of venturing below it. Such adverse circumstances were a challenge,
he said. Something new.
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 plugins—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 matt-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 circle 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.