The Night's Dawn Trilogy (90 page)

Twice in the last three kilometres Jenny Harris had been forced to order a sweep-scorch pattern. The things had been throwing
that eerie white fire of theirs. Once a ball had struck Dean Folan’s arm, burning through the suit’s energy diffusion layer
as if it wasn’t there. The medical nanonic package they’d put on his arm looked like a tube of translucent green exoskeleton.

“Hey!” Dean yelled. “Get back here!”

Jenny Harris looked round. Gerald Skibbow was running into the jungle, both arms pumping wildly. “Shitfire,” she muttered.
He had been zipcuffed a moment ago. Dean was lining up his gaussgun.

“Mine,” she called. Her blue TIP carbine targeting graphic centred on a tree five metres ahead of the running man; the shots
punched straight through the slim trunk, puffs of steam and flame squirted out. Gerald Skibbow swerved frantically as the
tree toppled across his path. Another volley of shots and the jungle around him caught light. One final shot on his knee knocked
his legs from under him.

The three of them trotted over where he lay sprawled in the crushed muddy vines.

“What happened?” Jenny asked. She had assigned Dean to guard the prisoner. Unless a gaussgun was in his back the whole time,
Gerald Skibbow felt free to cause as much trouble as possible.

Dean held up the zipcuff. It was unbroken. “I saw a hostile,” he said. “I only turned away for a second.”

“OK,” Jenny sighed. “I wasn’t blaming you.” She bent over Gerald Skibbow, whose grimed face was grinning up at them, and jerked
his right arm up. There was a narrow red line braceleting the wrist, an old scar. “Very clever,” she told him wearily. “Next
time, I’ll order Dean to slice your legs off below the knee. We’ll see how long it takes you to grow a new pair.”

Gerald Skibbow laughed. “You don’t have that much time available, Madame bitch.”

She straightened up. Her spine creaked and groaned as if she was a hundred and fifty. She felt older. The fire was crackling
loudly in the surrounding bushes, flames inhibited by the green twigs.

It was another four kilometres back to the
Isakore
, and the jungle was becoming progressively thicker. Vines here wrapped the trees like major arteries, creating a solid hurdle
of verdant mesh between the trunks. Visibility was down to less than twenty-five metres, and that was with enhanced senses.

We’re not going to make it, she realized.

They’d been expending gaussgun ammunition at a heavy rate ever since they set off. They had to, nothing else worked against
the hostiles. Even the two TIP carbines were down to forty per cent of their power reserve. “Get him up,” she ordered curtly.

Will clamped an arm round Gerald Skibbow’s shoulder and hauled him to his feet.

White fire burst out of the ground around Jenny’s feet, damp loam tearing open to spit out dazzling globules which spiralled
up her legs like a liquid repelled by gravity. She screamed at the pain as her skin blistered and burned inside the anti-projectile
suit. Her neural nanonics isolated the nerve strands, eliminating the raw impulses with analgesic blocks.

Will and Dean started firing their gaussguns at random into the blank impassive jungle in the vain hope of hitting a hostile.
EE projectiles mashed the nearby trees. Shreds of sappy vegetation whirred through the air, forming a loose curtain behind
which vivid explosions boomed.

The viscid beads of white fire evaporated as they reached Jenny’s hips. She clenched her teeth against the solid ache from
her legs. Frightened by the damage her neural nanonics were shielding her from. Frightened she couldn’t walk. The medical
program was choking up her mind with red symbols, all of them clustered around schematics of her legs like bees round honey.
She felt faint.

“We can help you,” silver voices whispered in chorus.

“What?” she asked, disorientated. She sat on the lumpy ground to take the strain off her legs. Her trembling muscles had been
about to dump her there anyway.

“You all right, Jenny?” Dean asked. He was standing with the gaussgun pointing threateningly into the broken trees.

“Did you say something?”

“Yes, are you OK?”

“I…” I’m hearing things. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“First thing you have to do is get a medical nanonic package on those legs. I think there’s enough,” he said, uncertainty
clouding his voice.

Jenny knew there wasn’t, not to get her patched up for a hike of four kilometres under combat conditions. The neural nanonics
prognosis wasn’t good; the program was activating her endocrine implant, sending a potent stew of chemicals into her bloodstream.
“No,” she said forcefully. “We’re not going to get back to the boat like this.”

“We ain’t going to leave you,” Will said hotly.

She grinned unseen inside her shell-helmet. “Believe me, I wasn’t going to ask you to. Even if the medical nanonics can get
me walking, we don’t have enough ordnance left to blast our way back to the
Isakore
from here.”

“What then?” Will demanded.

Jenny requested a channel to Murphy Hewlett. Static crashed into her neural nanonics, that eerie whistling. “Shitfire. I can’t
get the marines.” She hated the idea of abandoning them.

“I think I can see why,” Dean said. He pointed at the treetops. “Smoke, and plenty of it. South of here. Some distance by
the look of it. They must have laid down a sweep-scorch pattern. They got troubles, too.”

Jenny couldn’t see any smoke. Even the leaves at the top of the trees had turned a barren grey. Her vision was tunnelling.
A physiological-status request showed her en-docrines were barely coping with the flayed legs. “Sling me your medical nanonics,”
she said.

“Right.” Will fired six EE rounds into the jungle then hurriedly detached his backpack and tossed it over. He was back watching
the abused trees before it reached her.

She ordered her communications block to open a channel to Ralph Hiltch, then turned the backpack seal’s catch and fumbled
around inside. Instead of the subliminal digital bleep that signalled the block was interfacing with the geosynchronous platform,
all she heard was a monotonous buzz.

“Will, Dean, open a channel to the geosync platform, maybe a combined broadcast will get through.” She picked up her TIP carbine,
and pointed it at Gerald Skibbow, who was squatting sullenly beside a swath of vines four metres away. “And you, if I think
you are part of the jamming effort, I will start a little experiment to see exactly how much thermal energy you can fight
off. You got me, Mr. Skib-bow? Is this message getting through the electronic warfare barrier?”

The communication block reported the channel to the embassy was open.

“What’s happening?” Ralph Hiltch asked.

“Trouble—” Jenny broke off to hiss loudly. The medical nanonic package was contracting round her left leg, it felt as though
a thousand acid-tipped needles were jabbing into the roasted gouges as the furry inner surface knitted with her flesh. She
had to order the neural nanonics to block all the nerve impulses. Her legs went completely numb, lacking even the heavy vacuum
feeling of chemical anaesthetics. “Boss, I hope that fall-back scheme of yours works. Because we need it pretty badly. Now,
boss.”

“OK, Jenny. I’m putting it in motion. ETA fifteen minutes, can you hang on that long?”

“No problem,” Will said. He sounded indecently cheerful.

“Are you secure where you are?” Ralph asked.

“Our security situation wouldn’t change if we moved,” Jenny told him, marvelling at her own understatement.

“OK, I’ve got your coordinates. Use your TIP carbines to scorch a clearing at least fifty metres across. I’ll need it for
a landing-zone.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m on my way.”

Jenny swapped her TIP carbine for Dean’s gaussgun. By sitting with her back to a tree she could keep it pointed at Gerald
Skibbow. The two G66 troops began slashing at the jungle with their TIP carbines.

The captain of the
Ekwan
was a middle-aged woman in a blue ship-suit, with the kind of robust, lanky figure that suggested she was from a space-adapted
geneered family. The AV projector showed her floating ten centimetres above the acceleration couch in her compact cabin. “How
did you know we were leaving orbit?” she asked. Her voice was slightly distorted by a curious whistle that was coming through
the relay from the LDC’s geosynchronous communication platform.

Graeme Nicholson smiled thinly at her puzzled tone. He diverted his eyes from the projection for a second. On the other side
of Durringham spaceport’s flight control centre Langly Bradburn rolled his eyes and turned back to his monitor console.

“I have a contact in the Kulu Embassy,” Graeme said, returning to the projection.

“This isn’t a commercial flight,” the captain said, a fair amount of resentment bubbling into her voice.

“I know.” Graeme had heard of the Kulu Ambassador throwing his authority around and virtually commandeering the Kulu-registered
colonist-carrier. A situation which became even more interesting when he discovered from Langly that it was Cathal Fitzgerald
who was in orbit making sure the captain did as she was told. Cathal Fitzgerald was one of Ralph Hiltch’s people. And now,
as Graeme looked through the flight control centre’s window, he could see a queue of people standing on the nearby hangar
apron, shoulders angled against the rain as they embarked on a passenger McBoeing BDA-9008. The entire embassy staff and dependants.
“But it is only one memory flek,” he said winningly. “And the Time Universe office will pay a substantial bonus when you hand
it in to them, I can assure you of that.”

“I haven’t been told where we’re going yet.”

“We have offices in every Confederation system. And it would be a personal favour,” Graeme emphasized.

There was a pause as the captain worked out that she would receive the entire carriage fee herself. “Very well, Mr. Nicholson.
Give it to the McBoeing pilot, I’ll meet him when he docks.”

“Thank you, Captain, pleasure doing business with you.”

“I thought you sent a flek out with the
Gemal
this morning?” Langly observed as Graeme switched off the metre-high projection pillar.

“I did, old boy. Just covering my back.”

“Are people really going to be interested in a riot on Lalonde? Nobody even knows this planet even exists.”

“They will. Oh, indeed they will.”

Rain slammed against the little spaceplane’s fuselage as it dived out through the bottom of the clouds. It made a fast rattling
sound against the tough silicolithium-composite skin. Individual drops burst into streaks of steam, vaporized by the friction
heat of the craft’s Mach five velocity.

Looking over the pilot’s shoulder Ralph Hiltch saw the jungle blurring past below. It was grey-green, sprinkled by flexuous
strands of mist. Up ahead was a broad band of brighter grey where the clouds ended, and getting broader.

“Ninety seconds,” Kieron Syson, the pilot, shouted over the noise.

A loud metallic whirring filled the small cabin as the wings began to swing forward. The spaceplane pitched up at a sharp
angle, and the noise of the rain impacts increased until talking was impossible. Deceleration hit three gees, forcing Ralph
back into one of the cabin’s six plastic seats.

Sunlight burst into the cabin with a fast rainbow flash. The sound of the rain vanished. They levelled out as their speed
dropped to subsonic.

“We’ll need a complete structure fatigue check after this,” Kieron Syson complained. “Nobody flies supersonic through rain,
half the leading edges have abraded down to their safety margins.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ralph told him. “It’ll be paid for.” He turned to check with Cathal Fitzgerald. Both of them were
wearing the same model of olive green one-piece anti-projectile suits as Jenny and the two G66 troops. It had been a long
time since Ralph had dressed for combat, a cool tension was compressing his body inside and out.

“Looks like your people have been having themselves a wild time,” Kieron said.

Away in the southern distance a vast column of dense soot-laden smoke was rising high into the pale blue sky, a ring of flames
dancing round its base. Ten kilometres to the east a kilometre-wide ebony crater had been burned out of the trees.

The spaceplane banked sharply, variable-camber wings twisting elastically to circle it round a third, smaller, blackened clearing.
This one was only a hundred metres across. Small licks of flame fluttered from the fallen trees around the perimeter, and
thin blue smoke formed a mushroom dome of haze. There was a small green island of withered vegetation in the exact centre.

“That’s them,” Kieron said as the spaceplane’s guidance systems locked on to the signal from Jenny Harris’s communication
block.

Four people were standing on the crush of vine leaves and grass. As Ralph watched, one of them fired a gaussgun into the jungle.

“Down and grab them,” he told Kieron. “And make it fast.”

Kieron whistled through closed teeth. “Why me, Lord?” he muttered stoically.

Ralph heard the fan nozzles rotate to the vertical, and the undercarriage clunked as it unfolded. They were swinging round
the black scorch zone in decreasing circles. He ordered his communication block to open a local channel to Jenny Harris.

“We’re coming down in fifty seconds,” he told her. “Get ready to run.”

The cabin airlock’s outer hatch hinged open, showing him the fuselage shield sliding back. A blast of hot, moist air hurtled
in, along with the howl of the compressors.

“Faster, boss,” Jenny shouted, her voice raw. “We’ve only got thirty gaussgun rounds left. Once we stop this suppression fire
they’ll hit the spaceplane with everything they’ve got.”

A fine black powder was churning through the cabin like a sable sandstorm. Environment-contamination warnings sounded above
the racket from the compressors, amber lights winked frantically on the forward bulkhead.

“Land us now,” Ralph ordered Kieron. “Cathal, give them some covering fire, scorch that jungle.”