“Hurry it up,” Brendon said. “The jamming is getting worse, I can hardly get a signal through to the satellites.”
Pods and cases began to accumulate on the battered carpet of vines. Chas was hauling down a portable zero-tau pod containing an affinity-bonded eagle when an aerovette datavised him that there was a movement among the trees. He picked up a gaussrifle. The aerovette was hovering a metre over the trees, providing him an image of heads bobbing about through the undergrowth. Nine of them, making no attempt to hide.
“Hey,” a woman’s voice shouted.
The mercenaries were fanning out, positioning the aerovettes to provide maximum coverage.
“The blackhawks said there was no one here,” Chas Paske said. “For Christ’s sake.”
“It’s the optical distortion,” Brendon replied. “It’s worse than we thought.”
The woman emerged into the clearing. She shouted again and waved. More people came out of the trees behind her, women and a couple of boys in their early teens. All of them in dirty clothes.
“Thank God you’re here,” she said as she hurried over to Chas. “We waited and waited. It’s terrible back there.”
“Hold it,” Chas said.
She didn’t hear him, or ignored him. Looking down to pick her way over thick tangles of vines. “Take us away. Up to the starships, anywhere. But get us off this planet.”
“Who the hell are you? Where do you come from?” At the back of his mind Chas thought how odd it was that his appearance didn’t affect her. People normally showed at least some doubt when they saw his size and shape. This woman didn’t.
His neural nanonics cautioned him that the gaussrifle’s targeting processor was malfunctioning. “Stop,” he bellowed when she was six metres away. “We can’t take any chances; you may have been sequestrated. Now, where are you from?”
She jerked to a halt at the volume he poured into his voice. “We’re from the village,” she said, slightly breathless. “There’s a whole group of them devils back there.”
“Where?”
The woman took another pace forward and pointed over her shoulder. “There.” Another step. “Please, you must help us.” Her haggard face was imploring.
All five aerovettes fell out of the sky. The ground below Chas Paske’s feet began to split open with a wet tearing sound, revealing a long fissure from which bright white light shone upwards. Neural nanonics overrode all natural human feelings of panic, enforcing a smooth threat response from his body. He jumped aside, landing beside the smiling woman. She hit him.
Terrance Smith had lost contact with three of the eleven spaceplanes which had landed, and the remaining three in the air were approaching the Quallheim Counties. The observation satellites were unable to provide much information on the fate of those that had been silenced, the images they produced of the drop zones were decaying by the minute. None of them had crashed, though, the blackout had come after they landed. Encouraged by his tactics program, which estimated forty per cent losses at the first landing attempt, Terrance assumed the worst, and contacted the last three spaceplanes.
“Change your principal drop zone to one of the back-ups,” he ordered. “I want you to land at least a hundred and fifty kilometres from the red cloud.”
“It’s moving!” Oliver Llewelyn shouted as Terrance was receiving acknowledgements from the pilots.
“What is?”
“The red cloud.”
Terrance opened a channel to the processor array which was correlating the observation satellite images. Whorls and curlicues were rippling along the edges of the red bands, flat streamers, kilometres long, were shooting out horizontally, like solar prominences. The eerie symmetry of the velvet-textured clouds was rupturing, their albedo fluctuating as vast serpentine shadows skated erratically from side to side.
“It knows we’re here,” Oliver Llewelyn said. “We’ve agitated it.”
For one brutally nasty second Terrance Smith had the idea that the massive formation of forking cloud bands was alive, a gas-giant entity that had migrated across interplanetary space from Murora. Damn it, the thing did resemble the kind of convoluted storm braids which curled and clashed in week-long hostilities among the hydrogen and frozen ammonia crystals of gas-giant atmospheres. “Don’t be absurd,” he said. “Something is deliberately causing those disturbances. This may be our best chance yet to discover how they shape that thing. Get onto the blackhawk captains, I want every sensor we have available focused on it. There has to be some kind of energy modulation going on down there. Something has to register on some spectrum we’re covering.”
“Want to bet?” Oliver Llewelyn muttered under his breath. He was beginning to wish he had never agreed to fly the Gemal for Smith, and to hell with the legalities of refusing. Some things were more important than money, starting with his life. He grudgingly began datavising instructions round the blackhawks.
The communication links with another two spaceplanes dropped out. But three had landed their mercenary teams without incident and were already back in the air.
It is possible, Terrance told himself fiercely as the pearl-white specks soared to safety above the tangled tributary basin. We can find out what’s happening down there.
He observed the red cloud sending huge pseudostorm streamers boiling ferociously out across the jungle. A navigational graphics overlay revealed the position of the spaceplanes still on the ground. The largest swellings were heading for the landing zones with unerring accuracy.
“Come on,” he urged them through clenched teeth. “Get up. Get out of there.”
“Sensors report no energy perturbation of any kind,” Oliver Llewelyn said.
“Impossible. It’s being directed. What about the sensors the invaders used to track our spaceplanes, have we detected those?”
“No.”
Five more spaceplanes were back in the air, streaking away from the grasping claws of red cloud. Two of them were ones they had lost contact with earlier. Terrance heard a cheer go round the Gemal ’s bridge, and added his own whoop of exhilaration.
Now the mission was starting to come together. With the combat scout teams on the ground they would have targets soon. They could start hitting back.
The last three spaceplanes landed in the Quallheim Counties. One of them was from the Lady Macbeth .
The Villeneuve’s Revenge had the standard pyramid structure of four life-support capsules at its core. They were spherical, divided into three decks, with enough volume to make life for the crew of six very agreeable. Fifteen passengers could be accommodated with only a modest reduction in comfort. None of the six mercenaries they had brought to Lalonde had complained. The fittings, like the rest of the ship’s systems, could be classed as passable with plenty of room for improvement, upgrading, or preferably complete replacement.
Erick Thakrar and Bev Lennon sailed headfirst through the ceiling hatch of the lounge deck above the spaceplane hangar. The compartment’s surfaces were coated in a thin grey-green foam with stikpads at regular intervals, though most of them had lost their cohesiveness. Furniture was all lightweight composite that had been folded back neatly into alcoves, producing a floor made up of labelled squares, hexagons, and circles like some mismatched mosaic. Walls were principally storage lockers, broken by hatchways into personal cabins, the red panels of emergency equipment cubicles, and inbuilt AV player blocks with their projector pillars. There was a watery vegetable smell in the air. Only two of the lightstrips were on. Several purple foil food wrappers were drifting through the air like lost aquatic creatures, with a couple more clamped against the roof grilles by the gentle air flow. A black flek was spinning idly. It all added up to lend the lounge a discarded appearance.