It took them fifty minutes to skirt the village and wind up back at the river. Sewell and Jalal set to activating the hovercraft
at the top of a short slope above the water. Kelly dumped her pack into the locker at the rear of the second craft, and felt
as though she could fly without the extra weight. With equipment stowed, the team fitted their weapons, checked power and
projectile magazines, and set off back towards Pamiers.
Reza found the first corpse two hundred metres short of the village clearing. It was Ryall who smelt it for him, a sharp tang
of dead flesh which even the jungle’s muggy air couldn’t disguise. He sent the hound veering off towards it. Ryall promptly
smelt another corpse, causing Reza to hurriedly damped down his reception of the hound’s olfactory sense.
It was a child, about five or six, he guessed. Ryall had found it sitting huddled up at the foot of a mayope tree. Age was
hard to determine; there wasn’t a lot left, so he had to go by size. Insects and humidity had accelerated the decomposition,
though it was strange no animal had disturbed it. According to his didactic memory, sayce were supposed to be fairly brutal
carnivores.
He led Sewell, Kelly, and Ariadne through the trees to the body, and dispatched Ryall to the second.
“It’s a girl,” Ariadne said after examining the remains. She held up a nondescript length of filthy, dripping-wet fabric.
“This is a skirt.”
Reza wasn’t going to argue. “How did she die?” he asked.
“There are no broken bones, no sign of violence. Judging by the way she’s curled up between the roots I’d say she crawled
here to die. Poisoned? Starving? No way of knowing now.”
“Scared of the invaders,” Reza said thoughtfully. “They probably didn’t bother to sequestrate the children.”
“You mean the adults just ignored her?” Kelly asked in disgust.
“Ignored her, or drove her away. A child like this wouldn’t walk around in the jungle by herself. The village had been established
long enough for her to pick up basic jungle lore.”
Ryall trotted up to the second corpse, emitting a warm feeling of satisfaction as his muzzle touched the putrefying flesh.
Reza picked up the sense of accomplishment and expanded the affinity band allowing himself to see through the hound’s enhanced
retinas. “It’s another kid,” he told them. “A bit older, there’s a baby in its arms.” Ryall could scent more decaying meat
in the humid air, three or four blends, all subtly different. Closer to the river, Fenton had picked up a further series of
traces. “My God,” Reza growled in a dismayed whisper. “They’re everywhere, all around.”
A village like Pamiers would start off with a population of about five hundred. Say two hundred families, and they’ve been
here a couple of years. That would mean about a hundred and fifty children.
He stood, scanning the jungle. Slender yellow target graphics slid up over the black and red image in an uncomplicated, unprogrammed
reflex. He wanted to shoot something dead. His neural nanonics ordered a slight endocrine effusion, stabilizing the sudden
hormonal surge.
“Come on, she can’t help us any more,” he said, and began pushing briskly through the bushes and vines towards the village.
He turned his chameleon circuit off, and after a few paces the others followed suit.
Pamiers followed the standard configuration of settlements along the Juliffe’s tributaries. A semicircular clearing chopped
out of the jungle along the side of the river. Crude single-storey houses clustered together in no particular order at the
centre, along with larger barns, a church, a meeting hall, an Ivet compound. Wooden jetties ventured ten or fifteen metres
into the water, with a few fishing skiffs tied up. Fields and plots ringed the outside, a surfeit of crops pushing out of
rich black loam.
However, Pamiers’ layout was all that remained recognizable as the four of them stepped out of the trees.
“Where is this light coming from?” Kelly asked, looking round in surprised confusion. As Pat had reported, the village bathed
luxuriantly in a bright pool of sunlight, and yellow pollen was thick in the air. She scanned the cloud overhead, but there
was no break. Thunder, muted while they were in the trees, rolled insistently around them once more. Ariadne walked on a few
paces, activating her full implant sensor suite as well as the specialist blocks clipped to her belt. She turned a complete
circle, sampling the environment. “It’s omnidirectional. We’re not even leaving shadows. See?”
“Like an AV projection,” Reza said.
“Yes and no. The spectrum matches Lalonde’s sun.”
“Let’s go see what those new houses are made of,” he said.
Pamiers’ fields had been left untended. Terrestrial plants were fighting a fierce battle for light and height with the vines
that had surged out of the jungle to reclaim their native territory. Fruit was hanging in mouldy white clusters.
Yet inside the ring of fields, the grass around the houses was short and tidy, studded with what looked suspiciously like
terrestrial daisies. When he had studied the sheriff’s satellite images on the flight from Tranquillity Reza had seen the
way the village clearings were worn down and streaked with muddy runnels. Grass and weeds grew in patchy clumps. But this
was an even, verdant carpet that matched Tranquillity’s parkland for vitality.
Stranger still were the houses.
Apart from three burnt-out ruins, the original wooden shacks had been left standing, their planks bleached a pale grey, shuttered
windows open to the weather, bark slates slipping and curling, solar-cell panels flapping loosely. They were uninhabited,
that was obvious at a glance. Mosses, tufts of grass, and green moulds were tucked into corners and flourishing promisingly.
But jammed at random between the creaky cabins were the new structures. None of them was the same, with architectural styles
ranging across centuries—a beautiful two-storey Tudor cottage, an Alpine lodge, a Californian millionaire’s cinderblock ranch,
a circular black landcoral turret, a marble and silverglass pyramid, a marquee which resembled a cross between a Bedouin tent
and a medieval European pavilion, complete with heraldic pennants fluttering on tall poles. “Having some trouble with my blocks,”
Ariadne said. “Several malfunctions. Guido and communications are right out.”
“If it begins to affect the weapons we’ll pull back,” Reza cautioned. “Keep running diagnostic programs.”
They cleared the fields and started to walk over the grass. Ahead of them a woman in a long blue polka-dot dress was pushing
a waist-high gloss-black trolley that had a white parasol above it, and huge spindly wheels with chrome wire spokes. Whatever
it was, it was impossibly primitive. Reza loaded the image’s pixel pattern into his neural nanonics with an order to run a
comparison search program through his encyclopaedia. Three seconds later the program reported it was a European/North American
style pram
circa
1910–50.
He walked over to the woman, who was humming softly. She had a long face that was crudely painted in so much make-up it was
almost a clown’s mask, with dark brown hair worn in a severe bun, encased by a net. She smiled up happily at the four members
of the team, as though their weapons and equipment and boosted form were of no consequence.
That simpleton smile was the last straw for Reza, whose nerves were already stretched painfully thin. Either she was retarded,
or this whole village was an incredibly warped trap. He activated his short-range precision sensors, and scanned her in both
electromagnetic and magnetic spectrums, then linked the return into a fire-command protocol. Any change in her composition
(such as an implant switching on or a neural nanonics transmission) and his forearm rifle would slam five EE rounds into her.
The rest of his sensors were put into a track-while-scan mode, allowing his neural nanonics to keep tabs on the other villagers
he could see walking about among the buildings behind her. He had to use four backup units, several principal sensors had
packed up altogether. The overall resolution was way down on the clarity he was used to. “What the fucking hell’s going on
here?” he demanded.
“I have my baby again,” she said in a lilting tone. “Isn’t he gorgeous?”
“I asked you a question. And you will now answer.”
“Do as he says,” Kelly said hastily. “Please.”
The woman turned to her. “Don’t worry, my dear. You can’t hurt me. Not now, not any more. Would you like to see my baby? I
thought I’d lost him. I lost so many back then. It was horrible, all those dead babies. The midwives tried to stop me seeing
them; but I looked just the same. They were all perfect, so beautiful, my babies. An evil life it was.” She bent forwards
over the pram and lifted out a squirming bundle draped in lacy white cloth. The baby cooed as she held it out.
“Where have you come from?” Reza asked. “Are you the sequestration program?”
“I have my life back. I have my baby back. That’s what I am.”
Ariadne stepped forward. “I’m going to get a sample from one of those buildings.”
“Right,” Reza said. “Sewell, go with her.”
The two of them walked round the woman and started off towards the nearest house, a whitewashed Spanish hacienda.
The baby let out a long gurgle, smiling blithely, feet kicking inside the wrap. “Isn’t he just adorable,” the woman said.
She tickled his face with a finger.
“One more time,” Reza said. “What are you?”
“I am me. What else could I be?”
“And that?” He pointed to the cloud.
“That is part of us. Our will.”
“Us? Who is us?”
“Those who have returned.”
“Returned from where?”
She rocked the baby against her chest, not even looking up. “From hell.”
“She’s either nuts, or she’s lying,” Reza said. “She’s been sequestrated,” Kelly said. “You won’t get anything out of her.”
“So sure of yourselves,” the woman said. She gave Kelly a sly look as she cuddled the baby. “So stupid. Your starships have
been fighting among themselves. Did you know that?”
Reza’s neural nanonics’ optical-monitor program reported more people were appearing from the houses. “What do you know about
it?”
“We know what we feel, the pain and the iron fire. Their souls weeping in the beyond.”
“Can we check?” Kelly asked urgently.
“Not from here.”
The woman laughed, a nervous cackle. “There aren’t many left to check, my dear. You won’t hear from them again. We’re taking
this planet away, right away. Somewhere safe, where the ships can never come to find us. It will become paradise, you know.
And my baby will be with me always.”
Reza regarded her with a chill of foreboding. “Yes, you are a part of this,” he said quietly. The yellow target graphics locked
on to her torso. “What is happening here?”
“We are come, and we are not going to leave. Soon the whole world will be hiding from the sky. From
heaven
. And we shall live on in peace for ever.”
“There will be more of this red cloud?”
The woman slowly tilted her head back until she was staring straight up. Her mouth fell open as though in wonder. “I see no
clouds.” She started to laugh wildly.
Reza saw Ariadne had reached the hacienda. The ranger scout was bending over, scraping at the wall with some kind of tool.
Sewell was standing behind her, the long gaussrifle barrels he had plugged into his lower elbow sockets swivelling from side
to side in an automatic sweep pattern.
“Ariadne,” Reza bellowed. “Get back here. We’re leaving now.” The woman’s laughter chopped off. “No, you’re not.” She dropped
the baby.
It was Reza’s infrared sensors which caught the change. A wave of heat emerged right across her body and started to flow like
a film of liquid, rushing along her arms as she brought them up, becoming denser, hotter.
His left forearm’s gaussgun fired five electron explosive rounds just as a white light ignited around her hands. There was
three metres between them. Impact velocity alone would have been enough to tear her body apart, with the EEs detonating as
well there was nothing left for the last three rounds to hit.
Kelly’s armour hardened protectively as the blast wave slammed into her. Then she screamed as a jet of spumescent gore slopped
across the front of the paralysed fabric.
“Sewell, zero the area!” Reza shouted.
The twin heavy-calibre gaussrifles the big combat-adept mercenary carried began to blaze, squirting out a barrage of EE projectiles.
Emerald-green laser beams emerging from Reza and Ariadne snapped on and off, traversing the clearing in a strobe waltz as
their lighter weapons picked off targets.
Kelly’s armour unlocked. She fell to her knees, centimetres from the baby. Her hand went out instinctively, twitching the
blood-soaked lace aside to see if it was still alive.
There was a vennal inside the wrap. The little xenoc creature had been distorted, its vulpine skull swollen and moulded into
a more globular shape, scales melded together and stretched. They were losing their distinctive blue-green pigmentation, fading
to pale pink. Its forepaws had become chubby, tiny human hands scrabbled feebly at the air. Squeals of terror emerged from
its toothless mouth.
Her neural nanonics were unable to quell her stomach spasm in time. An emergency program triggered the shellhelmet’s quick-release
seal, and the visor sprang open. She vomited onto the neatly mown grass.
Sewell ran backwards across the grass, making almost as much speed as he could travelling forward. An autonomic locomotion
program took care of that, guiding his feet round possible obstacles, leaving his conscious thoughts free to assist with target
selection.
The first fire sequence had ripped into the houses, smashing them apart in plumes of ionic flame and smoke. Even Sewell, who
was aiming for maximum destruction, was surprised by the devastating effect the rifles inflicted. As soon as the first EE
projectile hit the buildings their bright colours switched off, leaving behind a neutral grey. The rifles laid down a comprehensive
fire pattern. Walls and roofs buckled and collapsed, sending out billowing clouds of thick dust, support timbers splintered
then seemed to crumble. Within seconds the whole area had been reduced to pulverized rubble. The old shacks bent and bowed
before the pressure blasts; they were far sturdier than the new houses. Several keeled over, wood twisting and shrieking.
Slate-tile roofs somersaulted, intact walls slewed through the air rippling like giant mantas.