Blue target graphics locked on. He fired an EE round.
Everyone ducked, Kelly jamming her hands over her ears. A dazzling explosion sent a pillar of purple plasma and mashed soil spouting twenty metres into the air. Its vertex flattened out, a ring of soot-choked orange flame rolling across the river. The ululate crack was loud enough to drown out the tattoo of thunder chasing them from the red cloud.
Kelly lifted her head carefully.
“I think you got him,” Theo said drily, as he steered the hovercraft away from the quaking water sloshing round the new crater. A semicircle of grass on the bank was burning.
“They’re vicious bastards,” Jalal protested.
“Not that one, not any more, as anyone within five kilometres will tell you,” Ariadne said.
“And you could have dealt with it better?”
“Forget it,” Reza said. “We’ve got more important things to worry about.”
“You believe what this dickhead has been telling us?” Ariadne asked, jerking a thumb at Shaun Wallace.
“Some of it,” Reza said noncommittally.
“Why thank you, Mr. Malin,” Shaun Wallace said. He watched the burning crater closely as the hovercraft sped past. “Fine shooting there, Mr. Jalal. Those old kroclions, they put the wind up me and no mistake. Old Lucifer was on form the day he made them.”
“Shut up,” Reza said. The one optical sensor he had left focused on the edge of the red cloud showed him a lone tendril starting to swell out, extending along the line of the narrow river behind them. Too slow to catch them, he estimated, but it was a graphically disturbing demonstration that the cloud and the possessed inhabitants were aware of the team’s presence.
He opened a channel to his communication block and datavised a sequence of orders in. It began scanning the sky for communication-satellite beacons. Two of the five satellites the blackhawks had delivered into geosynchronous orbit were above the horizon and still broadcasting. The block aimed a tight beam at one, requesting contact with any of Terrance Smith’s fleet. No ship was left in the command net, the satellite’s computer reported, but there was a message stored in its memory. Reza datavised his personal code.
“This is a restricted access message for Reza’s team,” Joshua Calvert’s voice said from the communication block. “But I have to be sure it is you and only you receiving it. The satellite is programmed to transmit it on a secure directional beam. If there is any hostile within five hundred metres of you who can intercept then do not request access. In order to access the recording, enter the name of the person who came between me and Kelly last year.”
The tip of the cloud tendril was a couple of kilometres away. Reza turned to face Shaun Wallace. “Can any of your friends intercept a radio transmission?”
“Well, now, there’s some of them living in one of the old savannah homesteads. But they’re a few miles from here, yet. Is that more than five hundred metres?”
“Yes. Kelly, the name please.”
She gave him a stonefaced smile. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t leave me behind at Pamiers?”
Jalal laughed. “She got you there, Reza.”
“Yes,” Reza said heavily. “I’m glad we didn’t leave you behind. The name?”
Kelly opened a channel to his communication block and datavised: “Ione Saldana.”
There was a moment’s silence while the satellite’s carrier wave emitted a few electronic bleeps.
“Well remembered, Kelly. OK, this is the bad news: the hijacked starships have started fighting us and the navy. There’s a real vicious battle going on in orbit right now. Lady Mac got clear, but we’ve taken a bit of punishment in the process. Another story for you sometime. I’m about to jump us out to Murora. There’s an Edenist station in orbit there, and we’re hoping to dock with it to make our repairs. We estimate the damage can be patched up in a couple of days, after which we’ll come back for you. Kelly, Reza, the rest of you; we’re only going to make one fly-by. Hopefully you took my earlier advice and are now heading hell for leather away from that bloody cloud. Keep going, and leave your communication block scanning for my transmission. If you want to be picked up then you’ll have to stay away from any hostiles. That’s about it, we’re battening down to jump now. Good luck, I’ll see you in two, maybe three days.”
Kelly rested her head in her hands. Just hearing his voice again was a fantastic tonic. And he was alive, smart enough to elude a battle. And he was going to come back for them. Joshua, you bloody splendid marvel. She wiped tears from her cheeks.
Shaun Wallace patted her shoulder tenderly. “Your young man, is it?”
“Yes. Sort of.” She sniffed, and brushed away the last of the tears in a businesslike manner.
“He sounds like a fine boy to me.”
“He is.”
Reza datavised a summary of events to the second hovercraft. “I’m in complete agreement with Joshua about keeping clear of the cloud and the possessed. As of now our original mission is over. Our priority now is just to stay alive and make sure what information we have gets back to the Confederation authorities. We’ll keep going up this river to the Tyrathca farmers and hope that we can hold out there until the Lady Macbeth comes back for us.”
It was the rygar bush which had brought the Tyrathca farmers to Lalonde.
When they were searching for their initial backing, the LDC sent samples of Lalonde’s aboriginal flora to both of the xenoc members of the Confederation; it was standard practice to try and attract as wide a spectrum of support as possible for such ventures. The Kiint, as always, declined to participate. But the Tyrathca considered the small berries of the rygar bush a superlative delicacy. Ripe berries could be ground up to produce a cold beverage, or mixed with sugar to form a sticky fudge; LDC negotiators claimed it was the Tyrathcan equivalent of chocolate. The normally cloistered xenocs were so enamoured at the prospect of wholesale rygar cultivation they agreed to a joint colony enterprise with their merchant organization taking a four per cent stake in the LDC. It was only the third time since joining the Confederation that they had ever participated in a colony, a fact which lent the hard-pressed LDC considerable badly needed respectability. Even better for the LDC board: to a human palate the rygar berries tasted like oily grapes, so there would never be any conflict of interest arising.
Five years after the dumpers had dropped out of the sky to form the nucleus of Durringham the first batch of Tyrathcan breeder pairs arrived and settled in the foothills of the mountain range which made up the southern border of the Juliffe basin where the rygar bushes flourished. The LDC’s long-range economic plans foresaw both the human and Tyrathcan settlements expanding from their respective centres until they met at the roots of the tributaries. By the time that happened both groups would have risen above their initial subsidence level and be prosperous enough to trade to their mutual enrichment. But that date was still many years in the future. The human villages furthest from Durringham were all as poor as Aberdale and Schuster, while the Tyrathcan plantations had barely cultivated enough rygar to fill the holds of the starships their merchants sent twice a year. Contact had so far been minimal.
It was late afternoon, and the savannah was already giving way to low humpbacked foothills when the mercenary team saw their first Tyrathcan house. There was no mistaking it, a dark cinnamon-coloured tower twenty-five metres high with slightly tapering walls, and circular windows sealed over with ebony blisters. The design had evolved on the abandoned Tyrathcan homeworld, Mastrit-PJ, over seventeen thousand years ago, and was employed on every planet their arkships had colonized right across the galaxy. They never used anything else.