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.
This one stood like a border sentry castle overlooking the river. Octan glided round it a couple of times, seeing the vague outlines of fields and gardens reclaimed by grass and small scrub bushes. Moss and weeds were growing around the inside of the roof’s turret wall where soil and dust had drifted.
“Nothing moving,” Pat reported to Rez
a. “I’d say it was deserted three or four years ago.”
They had gathered together on the riverbank just downstream from the tower house, hovercraft drawn up on the grass. The river was getting narrower, little more than a stream, down to about eight metres wide, and littered with boulders which made it virtually unnavigable. For the first time since they had landed that morning there were no snowlilies in sight, only the broken tips of their stems trailing limply.
“The Tyrathca do that,” Sal Yong said. “A house is only ever used once. When the breeders die it’s sealed up as their tomb.”
Reza consulted his guidance block. “There’s a plantation village called Coastuc-RT six kilometres south-east of here. The other side of that ridge,” he pointed, datavising the map image to them. “Ariadne, can the hovercraft take it?”
She focused her optical sensors on the rolling land which skirted the mountains. “Shouldn’t be a problem, the grass is a lot shorter here than the savannah and there isn’t much stone about.” When she looked west she could see another three of the dark towers sticking out of the bleak countryside. They were all in shadow; thick black rain-clouds were surging towards them along the side of the mountains. The wind had freshened appreciably since they had left the jungle. Looking back to the north she could see the red cloud over the Quallheim forging the entire northern horizon; it was almost edge on, they had climbed steadily since leaving it behind. The sky above it was a perfect unblemished blue.
Kelly felt the first smattering of the drizzle on her bare arms as she clambered back into the hovercraft. She dug into her cylindrical kitbag for a cagoule, her burnt armour-suit jacket had been left behind in the jungle—in that state it wouldn’t have been any use anyway. “I’m sorry,” she told Shaun Wallace as he sat beside her. “I’ve only got the one, and the others don’t need them.”
“Ah now, don’t you go worrying yourself over me, Miss Kelly,” he said. The jump suit he wore turned a rich indigo, then the fabric became stiffer. He was wearing a cagoule which was identical to the one in her hands, right down to the unobtrusive Collins logo on the left shoulder. “There, see? Old Shaun can look after himself.”
Kelly gave him a flustered nod (thankful her memory cell was still recording), and hurriedly struggled into her own cagoule as the warm drizzle thickened. “What about food?” she asked the Irishman as Theo goaded the hovercraft over the summit of the riverbank and started off towards the Tyrathca village.
“Don’t mind if I do, thanks. Nothing too rich mind, not for me. I likes me pleasures simple.”
She dug round in the bag and found a bar of tarrit-flavoured chocolate. None of the mercenaries had brought any food, with their metabolisms they could graze off the vegetation indefinitely, potent intestinal enzymes breaking up anything with proteins and hydrocarbons.
Shaun Wallace chewed in silence for a minute. “That’s nice,” he said, “reminds me a little of bilberries on a cold morning,” and he grinned.
Kelly found she was smiling back at him.
The hovercraft moved a lot slower over the land than on water. Cairnlike clusters of weather-smoothed stone and sudden pinched gullies made the pilots’ task a demanding one. The rain, which was now a solid downpour of heavy grey water, added to the difficulty.
Pat had sent Octan northward to avoid the worst of the deluge. Back out on the savannah it was still dry and sunny, a buffer zone between nature and supernature. Reza dispatched Fenton and Ryall to survey the ground ahead. Lightning began to spear down.
“I think I preferred the river,” Jalal said glumly.
“Ah, Mr. Jalal, buck up now, this is nothing for Lalonde,” Shaun Wallace said. “A little shower, that’s all. It was much worse than this before we returned from beyond.”
Jalal ignored the casual reference to the power of the possessed; Shaun Wallace, he thought, was playing a subtle war of nerves against them. Sowing the seeds of doubt and despondency.
“Hold it,” Reza datavised to Theo, and Sal Yong, who was piloting the second hovercraft. “Deflate the skirts.”
The hovercraft sank onto their hulls with flagging whines, crushing the sturdy grass tufts, settling at awkward angles. Rain had reduced visibility to less than twenty-five metres even with enhanced sight. Kelly could just make out Ryall up ahead. The hound was shifting about uneasily in front of a big sandy-brown boulder.
Reza took off his magazine belt, and left the TIP carbine he’d been carrying with it. He hopped over the gunwale and started to trudge towards the restive animal. Kelly had to wipe a slick film of water from her face. The rain was worming its way round her cagoule hood to run down her neck. She toyed with the idea of putting on her shell-helmet again—anything to stop this insidious clammy invasion.
Reza stopped five metres short of the brown lump, and slowly opened his arms, rain dripping from his grey-skinned fingers. He shouted something even Kelly’s studio-grade audio-discrimination program couldn’t catch above the wind and rain. She squinted, the rain suddenly chilling inside her T-shirt. The boulder rose up smoothly on four powerful legs. Kelly gasped. Her Confederation generalist didactic memory identified it immediately: a soldier-caste Tyrathca.
“Oh bugger,” Jalal muttered. “They’re clan creatures, it won’t be alone.” He started to scan around. It was hopeless in the rain, even infrared was washed out.
The soldier-caste Tyrathca was about as big as a horse, although the legs weren’t as long. Its head, too, was faintly equine, tilted back at a shallow angle at the end of a thick muscular neck. There were no visible ears, or nostrils; the mouth had a complex double-lip arrangement resembling overlapping clam shells. The sienna hide, which Kelly had thought solid like an exoskeleton, was actually scaled, with a short-cropped chestnut-brown mane running along its entire spine. Two arms extended from behind the base of its neck, ending in nine-fingered circular hands. A pair of slender antennae also protruded from its shoulder joints, swept back along the length of its body.
Although it had a strong animal appearance, it was holding a large very modern-looking rifle. A broad harnesslike belt hung round its neck, with grenades and power magazines clipped on.
It held out a processor block, and a slim AV projection pillar telescoped out. “Turn your vehicles around,” a synthetic voice clanged through the rain. “Humans are no longer permitted here.”
“We need somewhere to shelter for the night,” Reza replied. “We can’t go back north; you must have seen the red cloud.”
“No humans.”
“Why not? We must have somewhere to stay. Tell me, why?”
“Humans have become—” The block gave a melodic cheep. “No direct translation available; similarity to: elemental . Coastuc-RT has suffered damage, merchant spaceplane has been stolen. Breeders and other castes have been killed by amok humans. You are not permitted entry.”
“I know about the disturbances in the human villages. I have been sent by the Lalonde Development Corporation to try and restore order.”
“Then do that. Go to your own race’s villages and bring order.”
“We have tried, but the situation was beyond our capability to resolve. There has been a major invasion of an unknown origin.” He just couldn’t bring himself to say possession. The processor block was quiet; he guessed he was talking to a breeder, the soldier caste were only marginally sentient—not that he’d like to go up against one. “I would like to discuss what can be done to protect you from further attack. My team are combat trained and well equipped, we should be able to augment whatever defences you have.”
“Acceptable. You may enter Coastuc-RT by yourself to view the situation. If you believe you are able to increase our defences your team will be allowed to enter and stay.”
“Reza,” Kelly datavised. “Ask if I can come with you, please.”
“I will need to bring two others to assess the area around Coastuc-RT with any degree of accuracy before nightfall,” he said out loud, then datavised: “That makes us quits now.”
>
“Absolutely,” she replied.
“Two only,” the synthetic voice agreed. “None may carry weapons. Our soldiers will provide protection.”
“As you wish.” He turned and walked back to the first hovercraft, feet sinking up to his ankles in slimy puddles. The processor block AV projection pillar began to emit the reverberative whistles and hoots which were the Tyrathcan speech. Answering calls shrilled through the rain, causing the mercenaries to up their sensor resolution to the maximum in a vain attempt to locate the other soldier castes.
“Ariadne, you come with me and Kelly,” Reza said. “I’ll need someone who can review the area properly. The rest of you wait here. We’ll try and get back before dusk. I’ll leave Fenton and Ryall on picket duty for you.”
Two seemingly tireless soldiers ran alongside the hovercraft all the way to the village, antennae whipping back and forth (they were tail-analogues, helping with balance, according to Kelly’s didactic memory). Kelly wasn’t sure whom they were supposed to be protecting. The guns still appeared incongruous; for creatures that had evolved during the pre-technology tribal era to fight the Tyrathcan version of rough and tumble against enemy tribe soldiers bows and arrows would be more suited.
When she reviewed the entire didactic memory she found that the breeders (the only fully sentient Tyrathca) secreted what amounted to chemical control programs in specialist teats. A breeder would think out a sequence of orders—which plants were edible, how to operate a specific power tool—that would be edited into a chain of molecules by the teat gland. Once instructions were loaded in the brain of a vassal-caste species (there were six types) they could be activated by a simple verbal command whenever required. The chemicals were also used to educate young breeders, making the process a natural equivalent to Adamist didactic imprints and Edenist educational affinity lessons.
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