The compressor noise changed, becoming strident. Cathal Fitzgerald moved into the airlock, bracing himself against the outer
hatch rim. He began to swing his TIP carbine in long arcs. A sheet of flame lashed the darkening sky around the edge of the
clearing.
“Ten seconds,” Kieron said. “I’ll get as close to them as I can.”
Ash rose up in a cyclonic blizzard as the compressor nozzle efflux splashed against the ground. Visibility was reduced drastically.
An orange glow from the flames fluo-resced dimly on one side of the spaceplane.
Jenny Harris watched the craft touch and bounce, then settle. She could just make out the name
Ekwan
on the narrow, angled tail. Ralph Hiltch and Cathal Fitzgerald were two indistinct figures hanging on to the side of the
open airlock. One of them was waving madly; she guessed it was Ralph.
Will Danza fired the last of his gaussgun rounds, and dropped the big weapon. “Empty,” he muttered in disgust. His TIP carbine
came up, and he started adding to the flames.
“Come on, move!” Ralph’s datavise was tangled with discordant static.
“Get Skibbow in,” Jenny ordered Dean and Will. “I’ll cover our backs.” She brought her TIP carbine to bear on the soot-occluded
jungle, putting her back to the space-plane.
Will and Dean grabbed Gerald Skibbow and started to drag him towards the sleek little craft.
Jenny limped after them, trailing by several metres. The last heavy duty power cell banged against her side, its energy level
down to seven per cent. She reduced the carbine’s rate of fire, and fired off fifteen shots blindly. Grunting and shuffling
sounds were coming down her headset, relayed by the suit’s audio pick-ups. She flicked to her rear optical sensors for a moment
and saw Gerald Skibbow putting up a struggle as four people tried to haul him through the spaceplane’s airlock hatch. Ralph
Hiltch slammed his carbine butt into Gerald’s face. Blood poured out of the colonist’s broken nose, dazing him long enough
for Will to shove his legs through.
Jenny switched her attention back to her forward view. Five figures were solidifying out of the swirl of ash. They were stooped
humanoids; like big apes, she thought. Blue targeting graphics closed like a noose around one. She fired, sending it flailing
backwards.
A ball of white fire raced out of the gloom, too fast to duck. It splashed over her TIP carbine, intensifying. The weapon
casing distorted, buckling as though it was made of soft wax. She couldn’t free her fingers from the grip; it had melted round
them. Her throat voiced a desolate cry as the terrible fire bit hard into her knuckles. The flaming remnants of the carbine
fell to the ground. She held up her hand; there were no fingers or thumb, only the smoking stump of her palm. Her cry turned
to a wail, and she tripped over a root protruding from the loam. The woody strand coiled fluidly round her ankle like a malicious
serpent. Four dark figures loomed closer, a fifth lumbering up behind.
She twisted round on the ground. The spaceplane was twelve metres away. Gerald Skibbow was lying on the floor of the airlock
with two suited figures on top of him pinning him down. He looked straight at Jenny, a gleeful sneer on his blooded lips.
The root tightened its vicelike grip, cutting into her ankle. He was doing it, she knew that then.
“Lift,” she datavised. “Ralph, for God’s sake lift. Get him to Ombey.”
“Jenny!”
“Make it mean something.”
One of the dark figures landed on her. It was a man, strangely corpulent, bulky without being fat; thick matted hair covered
his entire body. Then she couldn’t see anything; his belly was pressed against her shell-helmet.
That quiet chorus spoke to her again. “There is no need for fear,” it said. “Let us help you.”
Another of the man-things gripped her knees, his buttocks squashing her damaged legs into the ground. The front of her anti-projectile
suit was ripped open. It was difficult to breathe now.
“Jenny! Oh Christ, I can’t shoot, they’re on top of her.”
“Lift!” she begged. “Just lift.”
All the neural nanonics analgesic blocks seemed to have collapsed. The pain from her legs and hand was debilitating, crushing
her thoughts. More ripping sounds penetrated her dimming universe. She felt hot, damp air gust across her bared crotch.
“We can stop it,” the chorus told her. “We can save you. Let us in.” There was a pressure against her thoughts, like a warm
dry wind blowing through her skull.
“Go to hell,” she moaned. She sent one final diamond-hard thought needling into her faltering neural nanonics, a kamikaze
code. The order was transferred into the high-density power cell, shorting it out. She wondered if there would be enough energy
left for an explosion big enough to engulf all the man-things.
There was.
The
Ekwan
fell around Lalonde’s equator, six hundred kilometres above the brown and ochre streaks of the deserts which littered the
continent of Sarell. With its five windmill-sail thermo-dump panels extended from its central section, the colonist-carrier
was rotating slowly about its drive axis, completing one revolution every twenty minutes. A passenger McBoeing BDA-9008 was
docked to an airlock tube on its forward hull.
It was a tranquil scene, starship and spaceplane sliding silently over Sarell’s rocky shores and out across the deepening
blues of the ocean. Thousands of kilometres ahead, the terminator cast a black veil over half of Amarisk. Every few minutes
a puff of smoky yellow vapour would flash out of a vernier nozzle between the starship’s thermo-dump panels, gone in an eyeblink.
Such nonchalant technological prowess created an effect which totally belied the spectacle inside the airlock tube, where
children cried and threw up and red-faced parents cursed as they fended off the obnoxious sticky globules. Nobody had been
given time to prepare for the departure; all they had brought with them was clothes and valuable items stuffed hastily into
shoulder-bags. Children hadn’t even been given anti-nausea drugs. The embassy staffers shouted back and forth in angry tones,
disguising both relief at leaving Lalonde and disgust at the flying vomit. But the
Ekwan
’s crew were used to the behaviour of planet dwellers; they floated around with hand-held suction sani-tizers, and cajoled
the reluctant children towards one of the five big zero-tau compartments.
Captain Farrah Montgomery watched the picture projected from an AV pillar on the bridge command console, indifferent to the
suffering. She’d seen it all before, a thousand times over. “Are you going to tell me where we are heading?” she asked the
man strapped into her executive officer’s acceleration couch. “I can start plotting our course vector. Might save some time.”
“Ombey,” said Sir Asquith Parish, Kulu’s Ambassador to Lalonde.
“You’re the boss,” she said acidly.
“I don’t like this any more than you.”
“We’ve got three thousand colonists left in zero-tau. What are you going to tell them when we get to the Principality?”
“I’ve no idea. Though once they hear what’s actually happening down on the surface I doubt they’ll complain.”
Captain Montgomery thought about the flek in her breast pocket with a glimmer of guilt. The reports they’d been receiving
from Durringham over the past week were pretty garbled, too. Maybe they were better off leaving. At least she could transfer
the responsibility to the ambassador when the line company started asking questions.
“How soon before we can leave orbit?” Sir Asquith asked.
“As soon as Kieron gets back. You know, you had no right to send him on a flight like that.”
“We can wait for two more orbits.”
“I’m not leaving without my pilot.”
“If they’re not airborne by then, you don’t have a pilot any more.”
She turned her head to look at him. “Just what is going on down there?”
“I wish I knew, Captain. But I can tell you I’m bloody glad we’re leaving.”
The McBoeing undocked as the
Ekwan
moved into the penumbra. Its pilot fired the orbital manoeuvring rockets, and it dropped away into an elliptical orbit which
would intercept Lalonde’s upper atmosphere.
Ekwan
started her preflight checks, testing the ion thrusters, priming the fusion tubes. The crew scurried through the life-support
capsules, securing loose fittings and general rubbish.
“Got him,” the navigation officer called out.
Captain Montgomery datavised the flight computer, requesting the external sensor images.
A long contrail of blue-white plasma stretched out across Amarisk’s darkened eastern side, its star-head racing over the seaboard
mountains. Already fifty kilometres high and rising. Bright enough to send a backwash of lame phosphorescent light skating
over the snow-capped peaks.
Ekwan
’s flight computer acknowledged a communication channel opening.
Ralph Hiltch watched the hyped-up Kieron Syson start to relax once he could datavise the starship again. It should have been
something for Ralph to be thankful about, too, communications had been impossible in the aftermath of the landing. Instead
he treated it like a non-event, he expected nothing less than the communications block to work. They were owed functional
circuitry.
Environment-contamination warning lights were still winking amber, though the pilot had shut off the cabin’s audio alarm.
The air was dry and calciferous, scratching the back of Ralph’s throat. Gravity was falling off as they soared ever higher
above the ocean, curving up to rendezvous with the big colonist-carrier. The prolonged bass roar of the reaction rockets was
reducing.
The air they breathed was bad enough, but the human atmosphere in the spaceplane’s confined cabin was murderous. Gerald Skibbow
sat at the rear of the cabin, shrunk down into his plastic seat, a zipcuff restraining each wrist against the armrests, his
hands white knuckled as he gripped the cushioning. He had been subdued since the airlock hatch closed. But then Will and Dean
were looking hard for an excuse to rip his head off. Jenny’s death had been fast (thank God) but very, very messy.
Ralph knew he should be reviewing the memory of the ape-analogue creatures, gaining strategically critical information on
the threat they faced, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Let the ESA office on Ombey study the memory sequence,
they wouldn’t be so emotionally involved. Jenny had been a damn good officer, and a friend.
The spaceplane’s reaction drive cut off. Free fall left Ralph’s stomach rising up through his chest. He accessed a nausea-suppression
program and quickly activated it.
Huddled in his chair, Gerald Skibbow began to tremble as the forked strands of his filthy, blood-soaked beard waved about
in front of his still-bleeding nose.
Ekwan
’s hangar was a cylindrical chamber ribbed by metal struts; the walls were composed of shadows and crinkled silver blankets.
The spaceplane, wings fully retracted, eased its squashed-bullet nose through the open doors into the waiting clamp ring.
Actuators slid catches into a circle of load sockets behind the radar dome, and the craft was drawn inside.
Three of
Ekwan
’s security personnel, experts at handling troublesome Ivets in free fall, swam into the cabin, coughing at the ash dust which
filled the air.
Will took the zipcuffs off Gerald Skibbow. “Run, why don’t you,” he said silkily.
Gerald Skibbow gave him a contemptuous glance, which turned to outright alarm as he rose into the air. Hands clawed frantically
for a grip on the cabin ceiling. He wound up clutching a grab loop for dear life.
The grinning security personnel closed in.
“Just tow him the whole way,” Ralph told them. “And you, Skibbow, don’t cause any trouble. We’ll be right behind, and we’re
armed.”
“You can’t use TIP carbines in the ship,” one of the security men protested.
“Oh, really? Try me.”
Gerald Skibbow reluctantly let go of the grab loop, and let the men tug him along by his arms. The eight-strong group drifted
out into the tubular corridor connecting the hangar to one of the life-support capsules.
Sir Asquith Parish was waiting outside the zero-tau compartment, a stikpad holding his feet in place. He gave Gerald Skibbow
a distasteful look. “You lost Jenny Harris for him?”
“Yes, sir,” Will said through clamped teeth.
Sir Asquith recoiled.
“Whatever sequestrated him has several ancillary energy-manipulation functions,” Ralph explained. “He is lethal; one on one,
he’s better than any of us.”
The ambassador gave Gerald Skibbow a fast reappraisal. Light strips circling the corridor outside the zero-tau compartment
hatch flickered and dimmed.
“Stop it,” Dean growled. He jabbed his TIP carbine into the small of Skibbow’s back.
The light strips came up to full strength again.
Gerald Skibbow laughed jauntily at the shaken ambassador as the security men shoved him through the hatch. Ralph Hiltch cocked
an ironic eyebrow, then followed them in.
The zero-tau compartment was a big sphere, sliced into sections by mesh decking that was only three metres apart. It didn’t
look finished; it was poorly lit, with bare metal girders and kilometres of power cable stuck to every surface. The sarcophagus
pods formed long silent ranks, their upper surface a blank void. Most of them were activated, holding the colonists who had
gambled their future on conquering Lalonde.
Gerald Skibbow was manoeuvred to an open pod just inside the hatchway. He glanced around the compartment, his head turning
in fractured movements to take in the compartment. The security men holding him felt his muscles tensing.
“Don’t even think of it,” one said.
He was propelled firmly towards the waiting pod.
“No,” he said.
“Get in,” Ralph told him impatiently.
“No. Not that. Please. I’ll be good, I’ll behave.”
“Get in.”
“No.”
One of the security men anchored himself to the decking grid with a toe clip, and tugged him down.