Reality Dysfunction - Expansion nd-2

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The section of jungle in the central blue square sparkled with orange motes as the induction pulses stabbed against the wood and foliage. It lasted for two seconds.

  “Down!” Will datavised. “Hostiles four o’clock.”

  He was already slithering off the horse, feet landing solidly on the broad triangular creeper leaves. Dean and Jenny obeyed automatically, rolling from their saddles to land crouched, thermal induction pulse carbines held ready. The three of them turned smoothly, each covering a different section of jungle.

  “What was it?” Jenny asked.

  “Two of them, I think.” Will quickly replayed the memory. It was like a dense black shadow dashing out from behind one of the trees, then it split into two. That was when he fired, and the image jolted. But the black shapes refused to clarify, no matter how many discrimination programs he ran. Definitely too big for sayce, though. And they were moving towards him, using the shaggy treebases for cover.

  He felt a glow of admiration, they were good.

  “What now?” he datavised. Nobody responded. “What now?” he asked loudly.

  “Reconnaissance and evaluation,” said Jenny, who had just realized even short-range datavises were being disrupted. “We’re still not out of that jamming effect.”

  There was a silent orange flash above her. The top third of the tree ten metres to her left began to topple over, hinging on a section of trunk that was mostly charred splinters. Just as it reached the horizontal, the rich green plumes at the top caught on fire. They spluttered briefly, belching out a ring of blue-grey smoke, then the fire really caught. Two vennals leapt out, squeaking in pain, their hides badly scorched. Before the whole length of wood crashed down, the plumes were burning with a ferocity which matched the sun.

  The horses reared up, whinnying alarm. They were pulled down by boosted muscles.

  Jenny realized the animals were rapidly becoming a liability as she clung on to hers. Her neural nanonics reported the suit sensors had detected a maser beam striking the tree, which was what snapped it. But there was no detectable follow-up energy strike to account for the ignition.

  Dean’s sensors had also detected the maser beam. He fired a fifty-shot barrage back along the line.

  The fallen tree’s tip fizzled out. All that was left was a tapering core of wood and a heap of ash. Blackened ground creepers smouldered in a wide circle around it.

  “What the hell did that?” Dean asked.

  “No data,” Jenny answered. “But it isn’t going to be healthy.”

  Globules of vivid white fire raced up the trunks of several nearby trees like some bizarre astral liquid. Bark shrivelled and peeled off in long strips behind them, the naked wood below roaring like a blast furnace as it caught alight. The flames redoubled in vehemence. Jenny, Will, and Dean were surrounded by twelve huge torches of brilliant fire.

  Jenny’s retinal implants struggled to cope with the vast photon flood. Her horse reared up again, fighting her, neck sweeping from side to side in an effort to make her let go, forelegs cycling dangerously close to her head. She could see the terror in its eyes. Foam sprayed out of its mouth to splatter her suit.

  “Save the equipment,” she shouted. “We can’t hang on to the horses in this.”

  Will heard the order as his horse began bucking, its hind legs kicking imaginary foes. He drove his fist into its head, catching it between the eyes, and it froze for a second in stunned surprise, then slowly buckled, collapsing onto the ground. One of the blazing trees gave a single creak of warning and keeled over. It slammed down on the horse’s back, breaking ribs and legs, searing its way into the flesh. Oily smoke billowed up. Will darted forward, and tugged at the saddle straps. His suit datavised an amber alert to his neural nanonics as the heat impact of the flames gusted against the outer layer.

  Balls of orange flame were hurtling through the air above him, spitting greasy black liquids: vennals, fleeing and dying as their roosts were incinerated. Small withered bodies hit the ground all around, some of them moving feebly.

  Dean and Jenny were still struggling with their horses, filling the air with confused curses. Will’s suit sounded a preliminary caution that thermal input was reaching the limit of the handling capacity. He felt the saddle strap give, and jumped backwards, hugging the equipment packs. The suit’s outer dissipator layer glowed cherry red as it radiated away the excess heat, and wisps of smoke rose from around his feet.

  More trees were falling as the flame consumed the wood at a fantastic rate. For one nasty moment they were completely penned in by a rippling fence made up from solid sheets of that strange lethal white flame.

  Jenny salvaged her equipment packs from her horse and let go of the bridle. It raced away blindly, only to veer to one side as another burning tree fell in its path. One of the fiery vennals landed on its back, and it charged straight into the flames, screaming piteously. She watched it tumble over. It twitched a couple of times, trying to regain its feet, then flopped down limply.

  By now a ring of ground a hundred metres in diameter was burning, leaving just a small patch at the centre untouched. The three of them grouped together at the middle as the last two trees went down. Now there was only the ground creepers burning, sending up forked yellow flames and heavy blue smoke.

  Jenny pulled her packs towards her and ran a systems status check. Not good. The guidance block was putting out erratic data, and the suit’s laser rangefinder return was dubious. The hostiles’ electronic warfare field was growing stronger. And according to her external temperature sensors, if they hadn’t been wearing suits with a thermal-dispersal layer they would have been roasted alive by now.

  She gripped the TIP carbine tighter. “As soon as the flames die down I want a sweep-scorch pattern laid down out to four hundred metres. Fight fire with fire. They’ve shown us what they can do, now it’s our turn.”

  “All right,” Will muttered happily.

  Rummaging round in her packs for one of the spherical heavy duty power cells she was carrying, she plugged its coiled cable into the butt of her carbine. The other two were doing the same thing.

  “Ready?” she asked. The flames were only a couple of metres high now, the air above them swarmed with ash flakes, blotting out the sun. “Go.”

  They stood, shoulders together, forming a triangle. The TIP carbines blazed, sending out two hundred and fifty invisible deadly shots every second. Targeting processors coordinated the sweep parameters, overlapping their fields of fire. Neural nanonics ordered their muscles to move in precise increments, controlling the direction of the energy blitz.

  A ripple of destruction roared out across the already cremated land, then started to chew its way into the vegetation beyond. Dazzling orange stars scintillated on tree trunks and creepers, desiccating then igniting the wood and tangled cords of vine. The initial ripple became a fully-fledged hurricane firestorm, exacerbated by the relentless push of the carbines.

  “Burn, you mothers,” Will yelled jubilantly. “Burn!” The entire jungle was on fire around them, an avalanche of flames racing outward. One again the vennals were dying in their hundreds, plunging out of their igneous trees right into the conflagration.

  Dean’s neural nanonics reported that his carbine was stuttering whenever he wiped the barrel across a certain coordinate. He brought it back and held it. The shot rate declined to five a second.

  “Shit. Jenny, they’re locking their electronic warfare into my carbine targeting processor.”

  “Let me have the section,” she said.

  He datavised the coordinates over—no problem with communication any more. When she aimed her own TIP carbine along the line its output dropped off almost immediately, but her suit blocks were coming back on-line. “Jeeze, that electronic warfare of theirs is the weirdest.”

  “Want me to try?” Will asked.

  “No. Finish the sweep-scorch first, we’ll deal with them in a minute.” She turned back to her section. Watching the invincible rampart of flame ca
scade over the jungle had sent her heart racing wildly. The awe that she could command such fearsome power was soaring through her veins, taking her to a dangerous high. She had to load a suppression order into her neural nanonics, which restricted the release of natural adrenalin sharply. The sweep pattern was completed, and her flesh cooled. But she still felt supreme.

  A holocaust of flame raged a hundred and twenty metres away.

  “OK, they’ve given their position away,” she said. “Dean, Will: gaussguns, please. Fragmentation and electron-explosive rounds, forty–sixty ratio.”

  Will grinned inside his shell-helmet as he bent down to retrieve the heavy-duty weapon. The gaussgun barrel was dark grey in colour, a metre and a half long. It weighed thirty kilograms. He picked it up as if it was made from polystyrene, checked the feed tube was connected to the bulky magazine box at his feet, datavised in the ratio, and aimed it out through the shimmering flames. Dean deployed its twin beside him.

  Jenny had been probing through the flames, using her TIP carbine to determine the extent and location of the dead zone simply by recording where it cut out. She datavised the coordinates over to Dean and Will: an oval area fifty metres long, roughly three hundred metres away.

  “One hundred and fifty per cent coverage,” she said. “Fire.” Even she had to marvel at how the two men handled the weapons. The gaussguns hurled ten rounds a second, leaving the muzzle at five times the speed of sound. Yet they hardly moved as the recoil hammered at them, swaying gently from side to side. She doubted her boosted muscles could cope.

  Away beyond the first rank of flames, a wide island of intact jungle erupted in violent pyrotechnics. Explosions five metres above the ground slammed out hundreds of thousands of slender crystallized carbon shrapnel blades. They scythed through the air at supersonic velocity, sharp as scalpels, stronger than diamond. Those trees which had survived the firestorm disintegrated, shredded instantly by the rabid aerial swarm. Confetti fragments blew apart like a dandelion cloud in a tornado.

  The rest of the shrapnel impacted on the ground, slicing through the tangled mat of creepers, blades stabbing themselves thirty to forty centimetres down into the loose moist loam. They never had a chance to settle. EE projectiles rained down, detonating in hard vicious gouts of ionic flame. Plumes of black loam jetted up high into the ash-dimmed sky. The whole area was ruptured by steep-walled two-metre craters, undulating like a sea swell.

  Looking down on the desolation, it was hard to believe even an insect could have survived, let alone any large animal.

  The three ESA agents stared through the ebbing flames at the dark cyclone of loam particles and wood splinters obscuring the sun.

  Jenny’s neural nanonics ran a series of diagnostic programs through her suit equipment blocks. “That electronic warfare field has shut down,” she said. There was a faint quaver to her voice as she contemplated the destructive forces she had unleashed. “Looks like we got them.”

  “And everybody knows it,” Dean said flatly. “They must be able to see this fire halfway back to Durringham. The hostiles are going to come swarming to investigate.”

  “You’re right,” she said.

  “They’re still there,” Will pronounced.

  “What?!” Dean said. “You’ve cracked. Nothing could survive that kind of barrage, not even an army assault mechanoid. We blasted those bastards to hell.”

  “I’m telling you; they’re still out there,” Will insisted. He sounded nervous. Not like him at all.

  His edginess crept in through the comfortable insulation of Jenny’s suit. Listening to him she was half convinced herself. “If someone survived, that’s good,” she said. “I still want that captive for Hiltch. Let’s move out. We’d have to investigate anyway. And we can’t stay here waiting for them to regroup.”

  They quickly distributed the remaining ammunition and power cells from their packs, along with basic survival gear. Each of them kept their TIP carbine; Will and Dean shouldered the gaussguns without a word of protest.

  Jenny led off at a fast trot across the smouldering remnants of jungle, towards the area they had bombarded with the gaussguns. She felt terribly exposed. The fire had died down, it had nothing left to burn. Away in the distance they could see a few sporadic flames licking at bushes and knots of creeper. They were in the middle of a clearing nearly a kilometre across, the only segment of colour. Everything was black, the remnants of creepers underfoot, tapering ten-metre spikes of trees devoured by natural flames (as opposed to the white stuff the hostiles threw at them), cooked vennals that lay scattered everywhere, other smaller animals, a savagely contorted corpse of one of the horses, even the air was leaden with a seam of fine dusky motes.

  She datavised her communication block to open a scrambled channel to Murphy Hewlett. To her surprise, he responded straight away.

  “God, Jenny, what’s happened? We couldn’t raise you, then we saw that bloody great fire-fight. Are you all OK?”

  “We’re in one piece, but we lost the horses. I think we did some damage to the hostiles.”

  “Some damage?”

  “Yeah. Murphy, watch out for a kind of white fire. So far they’ve only used it to set the vegetation alight, but our sensors can’t pick up how they direct the bloody stuff. It just comes at you out of nowhere. But they hit you with an electronic warfare field first. My advice is that if your electronics start to go, then lay down a scorch pattern immediately. Flush them away.”

  “Christ. What the hell are we up against? First that paddle-boat illusion, now undetectable weapons.”

  “I don’t know. Not yet, but I’m going to find out.” She was surprised at her own determination.

  “Do you need assistance? It’s a long walk back to the boat.”

  “Negative. I don’t think we should join up. Two groups still have a better chance to achieve our objective than one, nothing has changed that.”

  “OK, but we’re here if it gets too tough.”

  “Thanks. Listen, Murphy, I’m not aiming to stay in this jungle after dark. Hell, we can’t even see them coming at us in the daytime.”

  “Now that sounds like the first piece of sensible advice you’ve given today.”

  She referred to her neural nanonics. “There are another seven hours of daylight left. I suggest we try and rendezvous back at the Isakore in six hours from now. If we haven’t captured a hostile, or found out what the hell is going down around here, we can review the situation then.”

  “I concur.”

  “Jenny,” Dean called with soft urgency.

  “Call you back,” she told Murphy.

  They had reached the edge of the barrage zone. Not even the tree stumps had survived here. Craters overlapped, producing a crumpled landscape of unstable cones and holes; crooked brown roots poked up into the sky from most of the denuded soil slopes. Long strands of steam, like airborne worms, wound slowly around the crumbling protrusions, sliding into the holes to pool at the bottom.

  Over on the far side she watched three men emerging from the craters, scrambling sluggishly for solid ground. They helped each other along, wriggling on their bellies when the slippery loam proved impossible to stand on.

  Jenny watched their progress in the same kind of bewildered daze which had engulfed her as the fantastical paddle-steamer sailed down the river.

  The men reached level ground sixty metres away from the ESA team, and stood up. Two were recognizable colonist types: dungarees, thick cotton work shirts, and woolly beards. The third was dressed in some kind of antique khaki uniform: baggy trousers, calves bound up by strips of yellowish cloth; a brown leather belt round his waist sporting a polished pistol holster; a hemispherical metal hat with a five-centimetre rim.

  They couldn’t possibly have survived, Jenny found herself thinking, yet here they were. For one wild second she wondered if the electronic warfare field had won, and was feeding the hallucination directly into her neural nanonics.

  The two groups stared at each other
for over half a minute.

  Jenny’s electronic warfare block reported a build-up of static in the short-range datavise band. It broke the spell. “OK, let’s go get them,” she said.

  They started to circle round the edge of the barrage zone. The three men watched them silently.

  “Do you want all three?” Will asked.

  “No, just one. The soldier must be equipped with the most powerful systems if he can create that kind of chameleon effect. I’d like him if we can manage it.”

  “I thought chameleon suits were supposed to blend in,” Dean muttered.

  “I’m not even sure we’re seeing men,” Will added. “Maybe the xenocs are disguising themselves. Remember the paddle-steamer.”

  Jenny ordered her suit’s laser rangefinder to scan the soldier; its return should reveal the true outline to an accuracy of less than half a millimetre. The blue beam stabbed out from the side of her shell-helmet. But instead of sweeping the soldier, it broke apart a couple of metres in front of him, forming a turquoise haze. After a second the rangefinder module shut down. Her neural nanonics reported the whole unit was inoperative.

  “Did you see that?” she asked. They had covered about a third of the distance round the barrage zone.

  “I saw it,” Will said brusquely. “It’s a xenoc. Why else would it want to hide its shape?”

  The distortion in the datavise band began to increase. Jenny saw the soldier start to unbuckle his holster.

  “Stop!” she commanded, her voice booming out of the communication block’s external speaker. “The three of you are under arrest. Put your hands on your head, and don’t move.”

  All three men turned fractionally, focusing on her. Her neural nanonics began to report malfunctions in half of her suit’s electronics.

  “Screw it! We must break them up, even three of them are too powerful. Will, one round EE, five metres in front of them.”

  “That’s too close,” Dean said tensely as Will brought the gaussgun to bear. “You’ll kill them.”

  “They survived the first barrage,” Jenny said tonelessly. Will fired. A fountain of loam spurted up into the air, accompanied by a bright blue-white sphere of flame. The blast-wave flattened some of the nearby piles of soil.