The Night's Dawn Trilogy (128 page)

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 backups,” 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 pearlwhite 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.

Erick slapped casually at the plastic-coated ladder stretching between floor and ceiling, angling for the floor hatch. His
neural nanonics reported AndrÉ Duchamp opening a direct communication channel.

“He’s docking now,” the captain datavised. “Or attempting to.”

“How is the communication link? Can you get anything from inside?”

“Nothing. It’s still a three per cent bit rate, just enough to correlate docking procedures. The processors must have been
bollocksed up quite badly.”

Erick glanced over his shoulder at Bev, who shrugged. The two of them were armed; Bev with a neural jammer, Erick a laser
pistol he hoped to God he wouldn’t have to use.

The spaceplane had emerged from the upper atmosphere and re-established contact with a weak signal from a malfunctioning reserve
transmitter. Brendon claimed the craft had been subject to a ferocious electronic warfare attack which had decimated the on-board
processors. They only had his word for it, the link had barely enough power to broadcast his message, a full-scale datavise
to assess the internal electronic damage was impossible.

In view of the known sequestration ability of the invaders, AndrÉ Duchamp wasn’t taking any chances.

“That
anglo
Smith should have anticipated this,” AndrÉ grumbled. “We should have had an examination procedure set up.”

“Yes,” Erick agreed. He and Bev traded a grin. “Typical of this bloody bodge-up mission,” AndrÉ chuntered on. “If he wants
proper advice he should have experienced people like me on his general staff, not that arsehole Llewelyn. I could have told
him you need to be careful when it comes to sequestration. Fifty years of experience, that’s what I’ve got, that counts for
a hell of a lot more than any neural nanonics tactics program. I’ve had every smartarse weapon in the Confederation thrown
at me, and I’m still alive. And he goes and chooses a Celt who makes a living from flying the brain dead.
Merde
!”

Bev’s legs cleared the rim of the hatch into the lounge, and he datavised a codelock at it. The carbotanium hatch slid shut,
its seal engaging with a solid clunk.

“Come on, then,” Erick said. He slipped through the floor hatch into the lower deck. His neural nanonics provided him with
an image from the starship’s external sensor clusters. The spaceplane was floundering, just metres away from the hull. Without
a full navigational datalink, Brendon was having a great deal of trouble inserting the spaceplane’s nose into the hangar’s
docking collar. Novice pilots could do better, Erick thought, wincing as reaction-control thrusters fired hard, seconds before
the radar dome tip scraped the hull. “Ye gods. We might not have anything left to inspect at this rate.”

The lower deck was severely cramped, comprising an engineering shop for medium-sized electromechanical components, a smaller
workshop for electronic repairs, two airlocks, one for the spaceplane hangar, one for EVA work, storage bins, and space armour
lockers. Its walls were naked titanium, netted with conduits and pipes.

“Collar engaged,” AndrÉ said. “Madeleine is bringing him in now.”

The whine of actuators carried faintly through the star-ship’s stress structure into the lower deck. Erick accessed a camera
in the hangar, and saw the spaceplane being pulled into the cylindrical chamber. A moth crawling back inside a silver chrysalis.
The retracted wings had a clearance measured in centimetres. He datavised orders into the hangar systems processors. When
the spaceplane came to rest, power lines, coolant hoses, and optical cables plugged into umbilical sockets around its fuselage.

“There’s very little data coming out,” Erick said, scanning the docking operations console holoscreen to see the preliminary
results of the diagnostic checks. “I can’t get any internal sensors to respond.”

“Is that the processors or the sensors themselves which are malfunctioning?” AndrÉ asked.

“Difficult to tell,” Bev said, hanging from a grab hoop behind Erick to look over his shoulder. “Only ten per cent of the
internal databuses are operational, we can’t access the cabin management processors to see where the fault lies. God knows
how Brendon ever piloted that thing up here. He’s missing half of his control systems.”

“Brendon is the best,” Madeleine Collun said.

The console’s AV pillar bleeped, showing a single communication circuit was open from the spaceplane. Audio only.

“Anyone out there?” Brendon asked. “Or have you all buggered off to lunch?”

“We’re here, Brendon,” Erick said. “What’s your situation?”

“The atmosphere is really bad, total life-support failure as far as I can make out…I’m gulping oxygen from an emergency helmet…Get
that airlock connected now…This is killing my lungs…I can smell some kind of plastic burning…Acid gas… ”

“I can’t cycle the cabin atmosphere for him,” Erick datavised to AndrÉ. “Our pumps are working and the hose seals are confirmed,
but the spaceplane pressure valves won’t open, there’s no environmental circuit.”

“Get him into the airlock, then,” AndrÉ said. “But don’t let him into the life-support cabin, not yet.”

“Aye, aye.”

“Come on!” Brendon shouted.

“On our way, Brendon.” Bev ordered the airlock tube to extend. The spaceplane’s fuselage shield panel slid back to reveal
the circular airlock hatch below.

“Lucky that worked,” Erick muttered.

Bev was staring into the AV pillar’s projection, watching the airlock tube seal itself to the hatch rim. “It’s a simple power
circuit. Nothing delicate about that.”

“But there’s still a supervising processor—Hell.” Environment sensors inside the airlock tube were picking up traces of toxic
gases as the spaceplane’s hatch swung open. The console holoscreen switched to a camera inside the metal tube. A curtain of
thin blue smoke was wafting out of the hatch. A flickering green light shone inside the cabin. Brendon appeared, pulling himself
along a line of closely spaced grab hoops. His yellow ship’s one-piece was smeared with dirt and soot. The copper-mirror visor
of the shell-helmet he was wearing covered his face, it was connected to a portable life-support case.

“Why didn’t he put his spacesuit on?” Erick asked.

Brendon waved at the camera. “God, thanks, I couldn’t have lasted much longer. Hey, you haven’t opened the hatch.”

“Brendon, we have to take precautions,” Bev said. “We know the invaders can sequestrate people.”

“Oh, sure, yes. One moment.” He started coughing.

Erick checked the environmental readings again. Fumes were still pouring out of the spaceplane cabin; the airlock tube filters
could barely cope.

Brendon opened his visor. His face was deathly white, sweating heavily. He coughed again, flinching at the pain.

“Christ,” Erick muttered. “Brendon, datavise a physiological reading please.”

“Oh God it hurts.” Brendon coughed again, a hoarse croaking sound.

“We’ve got to get him out,” Bev said.

“I don’t get any response from his neural nanonics,” Erick said. “I’m trying to datavise them through the airlock tube’s processor
but there isn’t even a carrier code acknowledgement.”