“No real clouds anywhere above it,” Joshua murmured. Like most of the fleet’s crews he had accessed the datavise from the atmospheric probes. Something had bothered him about that lack; ironically, more than the buoyant red blanket itself. “Amarisk always had clouds.”
Sarha quickly ran a review of the images the fleet had recorded on their approach, watching the cloud formations. “Oh my Lord, they split,” she said disbelievingly. “About a hundred kilometres offshore the clouds split like they’ve hit something.” She ran the time-lapse record for them, letting the tumbling clouds sweep through their neural nanonics’ visualization. Great billowing bands of cumulus and stratocumulus charged across the ocean towards Amarisk’s western shoreline, only to branch and diverge, raging away to the north and south of the Juliffe’s mouth.
“Jesus. What would it take to do that? Not even Kulu tries to manipulate its climate.” Joshua switched back to a real-time view from Lady Mac ’s sensor clusters. A cyclone was being visibly sawed into two unequal sections as it pirouetted against the invisible boundary. He ordered the flight computer to open a channel to the Gemal .
“Yes, we’ve seen it,” Terrance Smith said. “It has to be tied in with the red cloud cover. Obviously the invaders have a highly sophisticated method of energy manipulation.”
“No shit? The point is, what are you going to do about it?”
“Destroy the focal mechanism.”
“Jesus, you can’t mean that. This fleet can’t possibly go into orbit now. With that kind of power available they’ll be able to smash us as soon as we’re within range. Hell, they can probably pull us down from orbit. You’ll have to abort the mission.”
“It’s ground based, Calvert, we’re sure of that. It can’t be anywhere else. The blackhawks can sense the mass of anything larger than a tennis ball in orbit, you can’t disguise mass from their distortion fields. All we have to do is send in the combat scout teams to locate the invader’s bases. That’s what we planned on doing all along. You knew that when you signed on. Once we find the enemy, the starships can bombard them from orbit. That’s what you’re here for, Calvert. Nobody promised you an easy ride. Now hold formation.”
“Oh, Jesus.” He looked round the bridge to make sure everyone shared his dismay. They did. “What do you want to do? At five gees I can get us to a suitable jump coordinate in twelve minutes—mark.”
Melvyn looked thoroughly disgusted. “That bloody Smith. His naval programs must have been written by the most gung-ho admiral in the galaxy. I say jump.”
“Smith has a point,” Warlow rumbled.
Joshua glanced over at the big cosmonik in surprise. Of everyone, Warlow had been the least eager to come.
“There is nothing hostile in orbit,” the bass voice proclaimed.
“It can chop up a bloody cyclone,” Ashly shouted.
“The red cloud is atmospheric. Whatever generates it affects lower atmospheric weather. It is planet based, centred on Amarisk. The blackhawks have not been destroyed. Can we really desert the fleet at this juncture? Suppose Smith and the others do liberate Lalonde? What then?”
Jesus, he’s right, Joshua thought. You knew you were committed after you took the contract. But . . . Instinct. That bloody obstinate, indefinable mental itch he suffered from—and trusted. Instinct told him to run. Run now, and run fast.
“All right,” he said. “We stay with them, for now. But at the first—and I really mean first , Warlow—sign of the shit hitting the fan, then we are out of orbit at ten gees. Commitment or no commitment.”
“Thank God somebody’s got some sense,” Melvyn murmured.
“Sarha, I want a constant monitor of all the observation satellite data from now on. Any other shit-loopy atmospheric happenings pop up and I want to be informed immediately.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Also, Melvyn, set up a real-time review program of the grav-detector satellite’s data. I don’t intend us to be dependent on the Gemal informing us whether we’ve got company.”
“Gotcha, Joshua,” Melvyn sang.
“Dahybi, nodes to be charged to maximum capacity until further notice. I want to be able to jump within thirty seconds.”
“They aren’t designed for long-term readiness—”
“They’ll last for five days in that state. It’ll be settled one way or another by then. And I have the money for maintenance.”
Dahybi shrugged his shoulders against the couch webbing. “Yes, sir.”
Joshua tried to relax his body, but eventually gave up and ordered his neural nanonics to send overrides into his muscles. As they began to slacken he accessed the fleet’s command communication channels again, and started to format a program which would warn him if one of the ships dropped out of the network unexpectedly. It wasn’t much, but it might be worth a couple of seconds.
The atmospheric probes began to lose height, sliding down towards the surface of the red cloud. “Systems are functioning perfectly,” the flight’s controlling officer reported. “There’s no sign of the electronic warfare effect.” She flew them to within five metres of the top, then levelled them out. There was no reaction from the serene red plain. “Air analysis is negative. Whatever holds the boundary together seems to be impermeable. None of it is drifting upwards.”
“Send the probes in,” Terrance ordered.
The first probe eased its way towards the surface, observed by cameras on the second. As it touched the top of the layer a fan of red haze jetted up behind it, arcing with slow smoothness, like powder-fine dust in low gravity.
“It is a solid!” Terrance exclaimed. “I knew it.”
“Nothing registering, sir, no particles. Only water vapour, humidity rising sharply.”
The probe sank deeper, vanishing from its twin’s view. Its data transmission began to fissure.
“High static charge building up over the fuselage,” the control officer reported. “I’m losing it.”
The probe’s datavise dissolved into garbage, then cut off. Terrance Smith ordered the second one down. They didn’t learn anything new. Contact was lost twenty-five seconds after it ploughed into the cloud.
“Static-charged vapour,” Terrance said in confusion. “Is that all?”
Oliver Llewelyn cancelled the datavise from Gemal ’s flight computer. The bridge was dimly lit, every officer lying on an acceleration couch, eyes closed as they helped coordinate the fleet’s approach. “It reminds me of a gas giant’s rings,” the captain said. “Minute charged particles held together with a magnetic flux.”
“The blackhawks say there is no magnetic flux, only the standard planetary magnetic field,” Terrance corrected automatically. “Was there any sign of biological activity?” he asked the flight control officer on the Cyanea.
“No, sir,” she said. “No chemicals present either. Just water.”
“Then why is it glowing?”
“I don’t know, sir. There must be a light-source of some kind deeper inside, where the probes can’t reach.”
“What are you going to do?” Oliver Llewelyn asked.
“It’s a screen, a canopy; they’re covering up whatever they’re doing below. It’s not a weapon.”
“It might only be a screen. But it’s beyond our ability to create. You can’t commit your forces against a total unknown, and certainly not one of that magnitude. Standard military doctrine.”
“There are over twenty million people down there, including my friends. I can’t leave without at least making one attempt to find out what’s going on. Standard military doctrine is to scout first. That’s what we’ll do.” He drew a breath, entering the newly formatted data from the probes into his neural nanonics and letting the tactics program draw up a minimum-risk strategy for physical evaluation of the planetary situation. “The combat scout teams go in as originally planned, although they land well clear of the red cloud. But I’m altering the search emphasis. Three teams into the Quallheim Counties to find the invader’s landing site
and base; that section of the mission hasn’t changed. Then nine teams are to be distributed along the rest of the Juliffe tributaries to appraise the overall status of the population and engage targets of opportunity. And I want the last two teams to investigate Durringham’s spaceport; they now have two objectives. One, find out if the McBoeing spaceplanes are still available to effect a landing for the general troops we’re carrying in the Gemal . Secondly, I want them to access the records in the flight control centre and find out where the starships went. And why.”
“Suppose they didn’t go anywhere?” Oliver Llewelyn said. “Suppose Captain Calvert is right, and your invaders can just reach up and obliterate ships in orbit?”
“Then where is the wreckage? The blackhawks have catalogued every chunk of matter above the planet, there’s nothing incongruous this side of Rennison’s orbit.”
Oliver Llewelyn showed him a morbid grin. “Lying in the jungle below that red cloud.”
Terrance was becoming annoyed with the captain’s constant cavils. “They were unarmed civil ships, we’re not. And that makes a big difference.” He put his head back down on the couch’s cushioning, closed his eyes, and began to datavise the revised landing orders through the secure combat communication channels.
The fleet decelerated into a one-thousand-kilometre orbit, individual ships taking up different inclinations so that Amarisk was always covered by three of them. Repeated sweeps by the swarm of observation satellites had revealed no new information on ground conditions below the red cloud. The six blackhawks rose up from their initial seven-hundred-kilometre orbit to join the rest of the starships, their crews quietly pleased at the extra distance between them and the uncanny aerial portent.
After one final orbit, alert for any attack from the invaders, the mercenary scout teams clambered into the waiting spaceplanes, and Terrance Smith gave the final go ahead to land. As each starship crossed into the umbra its spaceplane undocked and performed a retro-burn which pushed it onto an atmosphere interception trajectory. They reached the mesosphere nine thousand kilometres west of Amarisk and aerobraked over the nightside ocean, sending a multitude of hypersonic booms crashing down over the waves.
Brendon couldn’t keep his attention away from the red cloud. He was piloting the spaceplane from the Villeneuve’s Revenge , taking the six-strong mercenary scout team down to their designated drop zone a hundred kilometres east of Durringham. The cloud had been visible to the forward sensors when they were still six hundred kilometres offshore. From there it hadn’t been so bad, a colossal meteorological marvel. Now though, up close, the sheer size was intimidating him badly. The thought that some entity had constructed it, deliberately built a lightway of water vapour in the sky, was acutely disconcerting. It hung twenty kilometres off the starboard wing, inert and immutable. Far ahead he could just see the first fork as it split to follow one of the tributaries. That more than anything betrayed its artificiality, the fact that it had intent.
As the spaceplane eased down level with it he could see the land underneath. Unbroken jungle, but dark, tinted a deep maroon.
“It’s blocking a lot of light under there,” said Chas Paske, the mercenary team’s leader.
“Oui,” Brendon agreed, without looking round. “The computer estimates it’s about eight metres thick at the edge, getting thicker deeper in, though,” he reported. “Probably three or four hundred metres at the centre, over the river itself.”
“What about the electronic warfare field?”
“It’s there all right, I’m having some trouble with the flight control processors, and the communication channel is suffering from interference, the bit rate is way down.”
“As long as we can transmit the coordinates for the starships to bombard,” Chas Paske said. “That’s all we need.”
“Oui. Landing in three minutes.”
The spaceplane was approaching the natural clearing they had chosen. Brendon checked with the blackhawks, which were still supervising the observation. He was assured there was no human activity within at least two kilometres of the clearing.
Qualtook and baby giganteas ringed their allocated landing site. Inside them, burnt and broken stumps were still visible through the mantle of vines, evidence of the fire which had raged decades ago. The spaceplane nosed its way cautiously over the edge of the trees, as if afraid of what it might find. Birds took to the air in dismay at the huge predator shape and the clarion squealing it emitted. A radar pulse slashed across the ground, slicing straight through the vine leaves to uncover the extent of the stumps. Landing struts unfolded from the fuselage, and after a minute of jostling to avoid the more hazardous protrusions it settled gently on the ground, compressor nozzles blasting dusty fountains of dead leaves and twigs into the air.
Even as silence stole back into the clearing the outer airlock hatch was opening. Chas Paske led his team out. Five disc-shaped aerovettes swooped into the sky, rim-mounted sensors probing the encircling jungle for motion or infrared signatures.
The mercenaries began to unload their equipment from the open belly holds. They were all boosted, their appearance way outside the human norm. Chas Paske was bigger than any cosmonik, his synthetic skin the colour of weather-worn stone. He didn’t bother with clothes other than weapon belts and equipment straps.
“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.”
Reality Dysfunction - Expansion nd-2 Page 33