voice. “You’re really planning to generate a wormhole large enough to enclose the whole of Lalonde? And keep it there?”
Shaun Wallace wagged his finger at her. “Ah, now there you go again, Miss Kelly, putting your fine, elegant words in my mouth. Plans, such a grand term. Generals and admirals and kings, now they have plans. But we don’t, we have instinct. Hiding our new world from this universe God created, that comes as naturally as breathing.” He chuckled. “It means we can go on breathing, too. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to stop me from doing that, would you now? Not a sweet lass like yourself.”
“No. But what about Rai Molvi? Tell me what happens to him afterwards?”
Shaun Wallace scratched his chin, looked round at the savannah, shifted the jump-suit fabric round his shoulders, pulled a sardonic face.
“He stays, doesn’t he?” Kelly said stiffly. “You won’t let him go.”
“I need the body, miss. Real bad. Perhaps there’ll be a priest amongst us I can visit for absolution.”
“If what you’re saying is true,” Reza said charily, focusing an optical sensor on the cloudband behind, “then we really don’t want to be staying here any longer than we have to. Wallace, when is this planetary vanishing act supposed to happen?”
“You have a few days’ grace. But there are none of your starships left to sail away on. Sorry.”
“Is that why you didn’t resist, because we can’t escape?”
“Oh, no, Mr. Malin, you’ve got me all wrong. You see, I don’t want much to do with my fellows. That’s why I live out in the woods, there. I prefer being on my own, I’ve had a bucketful of their company. Seven centuries of it, to be precise.”
“So you’ll help us?”
He gathered himself up and threw a glance over his shoulder at the second hovercraft. “I won’t hinder you,” he announced magnanimously.
“Thank you very much.”
“Not that it will do you much good, mind.”
“How’s that?”
“There’s not going to be many places you can run to, I’m afraid. Quite a few of us have sailed away already.”
“Fucking hell,” Kelly gasped.
Shaun Wallace frowned in disapproval. “To be sure, that’s no word for a lady to be going and using.”
Kelly made sure he was in perfect focus. “Are you telling me that what’s happening on Lalonde is going to happen on other planets as well?”
“Indeed I am. There’s a lot of very anguished souls back there in the beyond. They’re all in dire need of a clean handsome body, every one of them. Something very much like the one you’ve got there.”
“This is occupied, to the hilt.”
His eyes flashed with black amusement. “So was this one, Miss Kelly.”
“And all these worlds the possessed have gone to, are you going to try and imprison them in wormholes?”
“That’s a funny old word you’re using there: wormholes. Little muddy tunnels in the ground, with casts on top to show the fishermen where they are.”
“It means chinks in space, gaps you can fall through.”
“Does it now? Well, then, I suppose that’s what I mean, yes. I like that, a gap in the air which leads you through to the other side of the rainbow.”
Surreal. The word seemed to be caught on some repeater program in Kelly’s neural nanonics, flipping up in hologram violet over the image of a mad, dead Irishman sitting in front of her, grinning in delight at her discomfort. Worlds snatched out of their orbits by armies of the dead. Surreal. Surreal. Surreal.
Fenton rose growling to his feet, fangs barred, hackles sticking up like spikes. Shaun Wallace gave the hound an alarmed look, and Kelly’s retinas caught the minutest white static flames twinkle over his fingertips. But Fenton swung his head round to the prow and barked.
Jalal’s gaussrifle was already coming round. He saw the huge creature crouched down in the long grass at the side of the water thirty-five metres ahead of the hovercraft. The Lalonde generalist didactic memory called it a kroclion, a plains-dwelling carnivore which even the sayce ran from. He wasn’t surprised, the beast must have been nearly four metres long, weighing an easy half-tonne. Its hide was a sandy yellow, well suited to the grass, making visual identification hard (infrared was, thankfully, a furnace flame). The head—like a terrestrial shark— had been grafted on, all teeth and tiny killer-bright eyes.
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.
