According to Murphy Hewlett’s inertial-guidance block they had floated about thirty kilometres downriver since the micro-fusion
generator had been taken out. The current had pushed them with dogged tenacity the whole time, taking them away from the landing
site and the burnt antagonistic jungle. Only another eight hundred plus kilometres to go.
Jacqueline Couteur had been no trouble, spending her time sitting up in the prow under the canvas awning. If it hadn’t been
for the ordeal they’d been through, the price they’d paid in their own pain and grief, to capture her, Murphy would have tied
the useless micro-fusion generator round her neck and tossed her overboard. He thought she knew that. But she was their mission.
And they were still alive, and still intact. Until that changed, Lieutenant Murphy Hewlett was going to obey orders and take
her back to Durringham. There was nothing else left, no alternative purpose to life.
Nobody had tried to interfere with them, although their communication channels were definitely being jammed (none of the other
equipment blocks were affected). Even the villages they had sailed past had shown no interest. A couple of rowing dinghies
had ventured close the first morning, but they’d been warned off with shots from one of the Bradfields. After that the
Isakore
had been left alone.
It was almost a peaceful voyage. They’d eaten well, cleaned and reloaded the weapons, done what they could about their wounds.
Niels Regehr swam in and out of lucidity, but the medical nanonic package clamped over his face was keeping him reasonably
stable.
Murphy could just about allow himself to believe they would return to Durringham. The placid river encouraged that kind of
foolish thinking.
As night fell at the end of the second day he sat at the stern, holding on to the tiller they had fixed up, and doing his
best to keep the boat in the centre of the river. At least with this job he didn’t have to use his leg with its achingly stiff
knee, though his left hand was incapable of gripping the tiller pole. The clammy air from the water made his fatigues uncomfortably
sticky.
He saw Louis Beith making his way aft, carrying a flask. A medical nanonic package made a broad bracelet around his arm where
Jacqueline Couteur had broken the bone and it glimmered dimly in the infrared spectrum.
“Brought you some juice,” Louis said. “Straight out the cryo.”
“Thanks.” Murphy took the mug he held out. With his retinal implants switched to infrared, the liquid he poured from the flask
was a blue so deep it was nearly black.
“Niels is talking to his demons again,” Louis said quietly.
“Not much we can do about it, short of loading a somnolence program into his neural nanonics.”
“Yeah, but Lieutenant; what he says, it’s like it’s for real, you know? I thought people hallucinating don’t make any sense.
He’s even got me looking over my shoulder.”
Murphy took a swallow of the juice. It was freezing, numbing the back of his throat. Just perfect. “It bothers you that bad?
I could put him under, I suppose.”
“No, not bad. It’s just kinda spooky, what with everything we saw, and all.”
“I think that electronic warfare gimmick the hostiles have affects our neural nanonics more than we like to admit.”
“Yeah?” Louis brightened. “Maybe you’re right.” He stood with his hands on his hips, staring ahead to the west. “Man, that
is some meteorite shower. I ain’t never seen one that good before.”
Murphy looked up into the cloudless night sky. High above the
Isakore
’s prow the stars were tumbling down from their fixed constellations. There was a long broad
slash of them scintillating and flashing. He actually smiled, they looked so picturesque. And the hazy slash was still growing
as more of them hit the atmosphere, racing eastwards. It must be a prodigious swarm gliding in from interplanetary space,
the remains of some burnt-out comet that had disintegrated centuries ago. The meteorites furthest away were developing huge
contrails as they sizzled their way downwards. They were certainly penetrating the atmosphere a long way, tens of kilometres
at least. Murphy’s smile bled away. “Oh my God,” he said in a tiny dry voice.
“What?” Louis asked happily. “Isn’t that something smooth? Wow! I could look at that all night long.”
“They’re not meteorites.”
“What?”
“They’re not meteorites. Shit!”
Louis looked at him in alarm.
“They’re bloody kinetic harpoons!” Murphy started to run forwards as fast as his knee would allow. “Secure yourself!” he shouted.
“Grab something and hold on. They’re coming down right on top of us.”
The sky was turning to day overhead, blackness flushed away by a spreading stain of azure blue. The contrails to the west
were becoming too bright to look at. They seemed to be lengthening at a terrific rate, cracks of sunlight splitting open across
the wall of night.
Kinetic harpoons were the Confederation Navy’s standard tactical (non-radioactive) planetary surface assault weapon. A solid
splinter of toughened, heat-resistant composite, half a metre long, needle sharp, guided by a cruciform tail, steered by a
processor with preprogrammed flight vector. They carried no explosives, no energy charge; they destroyed their target through
speed alone.
Ilex
accelerated in towards Lalonde at eight gees, following a precise hyperbolic trajectory. The apex was reached twelve hundred
kilometres above Amarisk, two hundred kilometres east of Durringham. Five thousand harpoons were expelled from the voidhawk’s
weapons cradles, hurtling towards the night-masked continent below.
Ilex
inverted the direction of its distortion field’s acceleration wave, fighting Lalonde’s gravity. Stretched out on their couches,
the crew raged impotently against the appalling gee force, nanonic supplement membranes turning rigid to hold soft weak human
bodies together as the void-hawk dived away from the planet.
The harpoon swarm sheered down through the atmosphere, hypervelocity friction ablating away the composite’s outer layer of
molecules to leave a dazzling ionic tail over a hundred kilometres long. From below it resembled a rain of fierce liquid light.
Their silence was terrifying. A display of such potency should sound like the roar of an angry god. Murphy clung to one of
the rails along the side of the wheel-house, squinting through squeezed-up eyelids as the solid sheet of vivid destruction
plummeted towards him. He heard Jacqueline Couteur moaning in fear, and felt a cheap, malicious satisfaction. It was the first
time she had shown the slightest emotion. Impact could only be seconds away now.
The harpoons were directly overhead, an atmospheric river of solar brilliance mirroring the Zamjan’s course. They split down
the centre, two solid planes of light diverging with immaculate symmetry, sliding down to touch the jungle away in the west
then racing past the
Isakore
at a speed too fast even for enhanced human senses to follow. None of them, not one, landed in the water.
Multiple explosions obliterated the jungle. Along both sides of the Zamjan gouts of searing purple flame streaked upwards
as the harpoons struck the earth, releasing their colossal kinetic energy in a single devastating burst of heat. The swath
of devastation extended for a length of seven kilometres along the banks, reaching a kilometre and a half inland. A thick
filthy cloud of loam and stone and wood splinters belched up high into the air, blotting out the heat flashes. The blast-wave
rolled out in both directions, flattening still more of the jungle.
Then the sound broke over the boat. The roar of the explosions overlapped, merging into a single sonic battering-ram which
made every plank on the
Isakore
twang as if it was an overtuned guitar string. After that came the eternal thunderclap of the air being ripped apart by the
harpoons’ plunge; sound waves finally catching up with the weapons.
Murphy jammed his hands across his stinging eardrums. His whole skeleton was shaking, joints resonating painfully.
Debris started to patter down, puckering the already distressed surface of the river. A sprinkling of fires burnt along the
banks where shattered trees lay strewn among deep craters. Pulverized loam and wood hung in the air, an obscure black fog
above the mortally wounded land.
Murphy slowly lowered his hands, staring at the awful vision of destruction. “It was our side,” he said in dazed wonder. “We
did it.”
Garrett Tucci was at his side, jabbering away wildly. Murphy couldn’t hear a thing. His ears were still ringing vociferously.
“Shout! Datavise! My ears have packed up.”
Garrett blinked, he held up his communications block. “It’s working,” he yelled.
Murphy datavised his own block, which reported the channel to the ELINT satellite was open.
A beam of bright white light slid over the
Isakore
, originating from somewhere above. Murphy watched as the beam swung out over the water, then tracked back towards the boat.
He looked up, beyond surprise. It was coming from a small aircraft hovering two hundred metres overhead, outlined by the silver
stars. Green, red, and white strobes flashed on the tips of its wings and canards. His neural nanonics identified the jet-black
planform, a BK133.
Murphy’s communication block bleeped to acknowledge a local channel opening. “Murphy? Are you there, Murphy?”
“Sir? Is that you?” he asked incredulously.
“Expecting someone else?” Kelven Solanki datavised.
The beam found the
Isakore
again, and remained trained on the deck.
“Have you still got your prisoner?”
“Yes, sir.” Murphy glanced at Jacqueline Couteur, who was staring up at the aircraft, shielding her eyes against the spotlight.
“Good man. We’ll take her back with us.”
“Sir, Niels Regehr is injured pretty badly. I don’t think he can climb a rope ladder.”
“No problem.”
The BK133 was descending carefully, wings rocking in the thermal microbursts generated by the harpoons’ impact. Murphy could
feel the compressor jets gusting against his face, a hot dry wind, pleasant after the river’s humidity. He saw a wide hatch
was open on the side of the fuselage. A man in naval fatigues was slowly winching down towards the
Isakore
.
Floodlights on the roof of the navy office showed the grounds around the building were thick with people. All of them seemed
to be looking up into the night sky.
Murphy watched them through the BK133’s open mid-fuselage hatch as Kelven Solanki piloted it down onto the roof pad. A wedge-shaped
spaceplane was sitting on one side of the roof, wings retracted; it only just fitted, tail and nose were overhanging the edges.
It was one of the most welcome sights he had seen in a long long while.
“Who are all those people?” he asked.
“Anyone who saw
Ilex
’s spaceplane taking the staff away earlier,” Vince Burtis said. He was the nineteen-year-old navy rating who had winched
the marine squad to safety. To him the invasion was exactly what he had signed on for, adventure on alien worlds; he was enjoying
himself. Murphy hadn’t the heart to disillusion him. The kid would realize soon enough.
“I guess they want to leave too,” Vince Burtis said soberly.
The BK133 settled on the roof. Kelven datavised the flight computer to power down the internal systems. “Everyone out,” he
said.
“Hurry, please.” Erato’s appeal was relayed through his communication block. “I’m in touch with the sheriffs outside. They
say the crowd is already at the door.”
“They shouldn’t be able to get in,” Kelven datavised.
“I think some of the sheriffs may be with them,” Erato said hesitantly. “They’re only human.”
Kelven released his straps and hurried back into the cabin. Vince Burtis was guiding Niels Regehr’s tentative footsteps, helping
him down through the hatch. Garrett Tucci and Louis Beith were already out, marching Jacqueline Couteur towards the spaceplane
at gunpoint.
Murphy Hewlett gave his superior a tired smile. “Thank you, sir.”
“Nothing to do with me. If the
Ilex
hadn’t shown up you’d still be paddling home.”
“Is everyone else from the office out?”
“Yes, the spaceplane made a couple of flights earlier this evening, we’re the last,” Kelven said.
They both hopped down onto the roof. The noise of the spaceplane’s compressors rose, obscuring the sound of the crowd below.
Kelven did his best to ignore the sensation of guilt. He had made a lot of friends among Lalonde’s civil administration staff.
Candace Elford had turned over the BK133 as soon as he asked, no questions. Surely some people could have been taken up to
the orbiting colonist-carriers.
Who though? And who would choose?
The best—the only—way to help Lalonde now was through the Confederation Navy.
The stairwell door on the other side of the BK133 burst open. People began to spill out onto the roof, shouting frantically.
“Oh, Christ,” Kelven said under his breath. He could see three or four sheriffs among them, armed with cortical jammers, one
had a laser hunting rifle. The rest were civilians. He looked round. Vince Burtis and Niels Regehr were halfway up the stairs
to the airlock. One of the
Ilex
’s crew was leaning out, offering a hand to Niels. Vince was staring over his shoulder in shock.
“Get in,” Kelven datavised, waving his arms.
Two sheriffs were rounding the nose of the BK133, more people were crouched low scuttling under the fuselage. Still more were
running out of the open door. There must have been thirty on the roof.
“Wait for us.”
“You can carry one more.”
“I have money, I can pay.”
Murphy aimed his Bradfield into the air and fired off two shots. The heavy-calibre weapon was startlingly loud. Several people
threw themselves down, the rest froze.
“Don’t even think about it,” Murphy said. The Bradfield lined up on one of the ashen-faced sheriffs. A cortical jammer fell
from the man’s hands.