The Night's Dawn Trilogy (130 page)

Sal Yong and Ariadne, the second ranger, came down the airlock steps. Ariadne was the only other female on the team, although
her gender was obscured like all the others. There was very little difference between her and Pat, maybe lacking just a few
centimetres in height, and her sensor band was broader.

“Now or never, Kelly,” Reza said.

“Oh, now,” she said, and stood up. “Definitely.” The visor of her shell-helmet slid down. Collins had given her carte blanche
on selecting her equipment back in Tranquillity, so she had asked for Reza’s advice and bought what he suggested. After all,
it was in his own interest not to have a liability tramping through the jungle with the scout team. “Keep it simple, and make
it the best,” he’d said. “You’re not combat trained, so all you have to do is keep up with us and stay undetected.”

“I can load combat programs into my neural nanonics,” she’d offered generously.

Reza simply laughed.

She had wound up with a one-piece suit of rubbery body-armour, produced in the New Californian system, that would protect
her from a modest level of attack from both projectile and energy beam weapons. Reza had taken her to an armourer who serviced
mercenary equipment, and had a chameleon layer added.

More aerovettes whirred overhead as she hurried down the airlock steps into the river. Steam hung in the air. She was glad
of the shell-helmet’s air filters, cremated birds bobbed around her ankles.

Pat Halahan and Jalal were unloading the gear from the forward cargo hold.

“Help them,” Reza ordered Kelly. He was wading through the shallows, carrying some composite containers. A nylon harness held
a black metallic sphere about twenty centimetres in diameter to his right side, just above his equipment belt. Kelly wondered
what it was, her neural nanonics couldn’t identify it, there were no visible features to assist the search and comparison
program. None of the other mercenaries had one. She knew this wasn’t the time to ask.

The spaceplane’s steps were already folding back into the fuselage. She set to, stacking the metal cases and composite containers
on the muddy grass of the bank.

Reza and Pat carried a trunk-sized zero-tau pod ashore. The black negating surface evaporated to reveal a white plastic cylinder.
It split open, and a mahogany-coloured geneered hound lumbered out. Kelly thought its fangs could probably cut through her
armour suit.

Reza knelt down beside the big beast and ruffled its head fondly with his hand. “Hello, Fenton. How are you, boy?”

Fenton yawned, pink tongue hanging limply between his front fangs.

“Go have a look round for me. Go on.”

Reza patted his hindquarters as he rose. Fenton swung his neolithic head round to give his master a slightly maligning look,
but trotted off obediently into the undergrowth. Kelly had been standing perfectly still. “He’s well trained,” she said vaguely.

“He’s well bonded,” Reza replied. “I have affinity neuron symbionts fitted.”

“Ah.”

Pat and Jalal were wading ashore with a second zero-tau pod.

“
Adieux
,” Ashly datavised.

The spaceplane lifted with a brassy shriek. Vigorous geysers of water sprouted under the compressor nozzles, splashing up
against the carbotanium fuselage. Then it was above the trees, undercarriage folding up, and the geysers withering away to
white-foam ripples.

Kelly tracked her shell-helmet sensors round the forbidding wall of water-basted jungle. Oh, crap, I’m committed now.

She watched the spaceplane pitch up nearly to the vertical and accelerate away into the eastern sky at high speed. Her neural
nanonics said they had landed less than three minutes ago.

The explosion was large enough for the
Gemal
’s ordinary sensor clusters to pick it up as the starship fell into the planet’s umbra, leaving Amarisk behind. For the vastly
more sensitive observation satellites in low orbit it registered as a savage multi-spectrum glare, overloading some scanners.

Terrance Smith’s neural nanonics informed him it was the spaceplane from the blackhawk
Cyanea
, which had been landing a scout team in the Quallheim Counties. It had been on the ground when the blast happened. “What
the hell did that?” he demanded.

“No idea,” Oliver Llewelyn replied.

“Shit. It was over seventy kilometres from the nearest piece of red cloud. Did the scout team get clear?”

“No response from any of their personal communicator blocks,” one of the bridge’s communication officers reported.

“Bugger.” His neural nanonics’ strategic display showed him the remaining four spaceplanes climbing into orbit. Seven more
had already docked with their parent starships. Two were manoeuvring for a rendezvous.

“Do you want to divert a spaceplane for a rescue?” Oliver asked.

“Not without confirmation that someone is alive down there. It was a hell of an explosion. The electron matrices must have
shorted out.”

“Neat trick if you can do it,” Oliver said. “They have a lot of safeguards built in.”

“Do you suppose that electronic warfare—”

“Sir, message from the
Villeneuve’s Revenge
,” the communications officer said. “Captain Duchamp says the invaders have boarded his ship.”

“What?”

“That was one of the spaceplanes we lost contact with,” Oliver said.

“You mean they’re up in orbit?” Terrance asked.

“Looks like it.”

“Christ.” He datavised the processor managing the command communication channels, ready to issue a general alert. But his
neural nanonics informed him a couple of starships were leaving their assigned orbital slots. When he requested the strategic
display it showed him
Datura
and
Gramine
under acceleration, rising out of the thousand-kilometre orbit. His fist hit the acceleration couch cushioning. “What is
happening?”

“The spaceplanes from both the
Datura
and
Gramine
experienced communication difficulties,” Oliver said in a strained voice. He glanced over at Terrance Smith. The ordinarily
prim bureaucrat looked haunted.

“Cut them out of our communication net,” Terrance ordered. “Now. I don’t want them to access our observation satellite data.”

“They’re running,” Oliver said. “They must be heading for a jump coordinate.”

“Not my problem.” “The hell it isn’t. If they are xenocs, you’ll be letting them loose in the Confederation.”

“If they have the technology to put together that cloud, they already have bloody starships. My concern and mission is Lalonde.
I’m not sending the blackhawks to intercept them, we don’t have the numbers to send ships off on wild-goose chases.”

“Their drives aren’t right,” Oliver said. “They aren’t burning the fuel cleanly. Look at the spectroscopic analysis.”

“Not now, fuck it!” Terrance shouted. He glared at Oliver. “Contribute something positive or shut up.” His neural nanonics
linked him in to the communication processor, opening direct channels to the remaining starships. “This is an emergency warning,”
he datavised. Even as the painful phrase emerged, he wondered how many listeners were still under his command.

The
Lady Macbeth
’s bridge was completely silent as Ter-rance Smith’s voice came out of the AV pillars.

“Oh, Jesus,” Joshua moaned. “This is all we need.”

“It looks like
Datura
and
Gramine
are preparing to jump,” Sarha said. “Sensor clusters and thermo-dump panels are retracting.” She frowned. “Most of them,
anyway. Their thrust is very erratic. They should be above the five-thousand-kilometre gravity-field boundary in another four
minutes.”

“This invasion force is too big, isn’t it,” Joshua said. “We’re not going to save Lalonde, not with what we’ve got.”

“Looks that way,” Dahybi said in a subdued tone.

“Right then.” Joshua’s mind was immediately full of trajectory graphics. A whole range of possible jump coordinates to nearby
inhabited star systems popped up.

You’ll be abandoning Kelly, a voice in his head said.

It’s her choice.

But she didn’t know what was happening.

He instructed the flight computer to retract the thermo dump panels. Fully extended, the panels couldn’t withstand high-gee
acceleration. And if he was going to run, he wanted to do it fast.

“As soon as Ashly returns we’re leaving,” he announced.

“What about the merc team?” Warlow asked. “They are dependent on us knocking out the invader’s bases.”

“They knew the risks.”

“Kelly is with them.”

Joshua’s mouth tightened into a hard line. The crew were looking at him with a mixture of sympathy and concern.

“I’m thinking of you, too,” he said. “The invaders are coming up here after us. I can’t order you to stay in these circumstances.
Jesus, we gave it our best shot. There isn’t going to be any mayope again. That’s all we ever really came for.”

“We can make one attempt to pick them up,” Sarha said. “One more orbit. A hundred minutes isn’t going to make much difference.”

“And who’s going to tell Ashly he has to go down there again? The invaders will know he’s coming down for a pick-up.”

“I’ll pilot the spaceplane down,” Melvyn said. “If Ashly doesn’t want to.”

“She’s my friend,” Joshua said. “And it’s my space-plane.”

“If there’s any trouble in orbit, then we’ll need you, Joshua,” Dahybi said. The slightly built node specialist was uncharacteristically
firm. “You’re the best captain I’ve ever known.”

“This is both melodramatic and unnecessary,” Warlow said. “You all know that Ashly will pilot it.”

“Yes,” Joshua said.

“Joshua!” Melvyn shouted.

But Joshua’s neural nanonics were already feeding him an alarm. The gravitonic distortion warning satellites were recording
nine large gaps in space being forcibly opened. Thirty-five thousand kilometres above Lalonde, the voidhawks from Meredith
Saldana’s 7th Fleet squadron had arrived.

An electronic warfare technique that can knock out power circuits as well as processors? What the hell have we come up against?

A single gleam of bright pale green light shone up into the lounge through the inspection window in the middle of the floor
hatch. There was movement below.

“Erick, what’s happening?” AndrÉ Duchamp datavised.

The channel to the lounge’s net processor was thick with interference. Erick’s neural nanonics had to run a discriminator
program to make any sense of the captain’s signal.

“We’re getting power drop-outs all over the ship!” Madeleine called.

Erick pushed off from the ladder, and grasped the floor hatch’s handle to steady himself. Very gingerly he edged his face
over the fifteen centimetre diameter window and directly into the beam of light. A second later he was airborne, arms and
legs cycling madly as a twisted shout burst from his lips. He hit the ceiling. Bounced. Grabbed at the ladder as his body
spasmed in reaction.

Erick had looked into hell. It was occupied by goblinesque figures with hideous bone faces, long, reedy limbs, large arthritis-knobbed
hands. They dressed in leather harnesses sewn together with gold rings. A dozen at least, boiling out of the airlock tube.
Grinning with tiny pointed teeth.

Three of them had clung to Bev, yellow talon fingers slashing rents in his ship-suit. His head had been flung back, mouth
open in black horror as the abdominal gashes spewed entrail strands of translucent turquoise jelly. And suicide-terror shone
in his eyes.

“Did you see that?” Erick wailed.

“See what?
Merde
! The net is screwed, our databuses are glitched. I’m losing all control.”

“Dear God, they’re xenocs. They’re fucking xenocs!” “Erick,
enfant
, dear child, calm down.”

“They’re killing him! They love it!”

“Calm! You are an officer on my ship. Now calm. Report!”

“There’s twelve—fifteen of them. Humanoid. They’ve got Bev. Oh, God, they’re chopping him to pieces.” Erick shifted a stored
sedative program into primary mode, and immediately felt his breathing regularize. It seemed heartless, callous even, wrapping
Bev’s suffering away behind an artificial cliff of binary digits. But he needed to be calm. Bev would understand.

“Are they heavily armed?” AndrÉ asked.

“No. No visible weapons. But they must have something in the spaceplane, that light I saw—”

All six electronically operated bolts on the floor hatch thudded back together. The metallic bang rang clear across the lounge.

“God…AndrÉ, they just cracked the hatch’s codelock.” He stared at it, expecting the manual bolts to slide open.

“But none of the systems processors are working in that capsule!”

“I know that! But they cracked it!”

“Can you get out of the lounge?”

Erick turned to the ceiling hatch and datavised the code at it. The bolts remained stubbornly in place. “The hatch won’t respond.”

“Yet they can open it,” AndrÉ said.

“We can cut through it,” Desmond Lafoe suggested.

“Our hatches and the capsule decking have a monobonded carbon layer sandwiched in,” Erick replied. “You’d never get a fission
blade through that stuff.”

“I can use a laser.”

“That will allow them into the other capsules, and the bridge,” AndrÉ said. “I cannot permit that.”

“Erick’s trapped in there.”

“They will not take my ship.”

“AndrÉ—” Madeleine said.

“
Non
. Madeleine, Desmond, both of you into the lifeboats. I will stay. Erick, I am so sorry. But you understand. This is my ship.”

Erick thumped the ladder, grazing his knuckles. This life-support capsule’s lifeboats were accessed from the lower deck. “Sure.”
You murdering pirate bastard. What the fuck do you know about honour?

Someone started hammering on the floor hatch.

They’ll be through soon, Erick thought, monobonded carbon or not. Count on it.

“Call Smith for help,” Desmond said. “Hell, he’s got five thousand troops on the
Gemal
, armed and itching to kill.”