Reality Dysfunction - Expansion

blood.

The grass was beaten down all around the cabin. Fences had been broken. Cows wandered about, grazing placidly, paying no attention to him. Goats saw him coming and ran jerkily until they realized he wasn’t chasing them. Chickens escaped from their smashed pen were scratching in the dirt; they scattered squawking when he trotted up to the cabin.

Height. The masterlove thoughts wanted him to have height. Ryall swung his big head from side to side, viewing the back wall of the cabin; then loped over to a pile of composite pods stacked at one corner. He jumped, bounding up the pods, then sprang for the eaves. Paws skated unsteadily on the solar-cell panels nailed to the roof, but he found his footing on the ginger qualtook-bark tiles and scampered his way up to the apex.

His master used his eyes to peer out across the savannah. The line of men carrying pikes were a kilometre away. And almost lost in the gloaming ahead of them the band of knights on horseback galloped after their prey.

Ryall felt a curious mix of excitement and sorrow. But the masterlove thoughts were full of gentle praise. He thumped his tail on the qualtook tiles in response.

Then the masterlove thoughts were guiding his left forepaw to the heavy weight hanging from his neck. He bent his head round and watched attentively as his extended nails caught the edge of a small hinged panel and eased it open. Glowing squares were revealed.

Masterlove adoration flowed through him. Very carefully his nail touched one of the squares. Once. Twice. Thrice—

The spaceplane stopped shaking as it dropped to subsonic velocity. It had been a fast, steep descent, Ashly had made the little craft stand almost on its tail to aerobrake. Now he levelled out and datavised the wings into their forward-sweep position. Nose-mounted sensors showed him the mountains rolling past below; the fringe of the cloud was fifty kilometres to the north. Short puffy fronds extended out from the main bulk, snaking through the air like blind searching insect antennae towards the foothills.

He datavised the flight computer for a channel up to Lady Macbeth . “Any word yet?”

“Nothing,” Joshua replied. “Sarha says the observation satellites recorded that patch of cloud turning grey immediately after the Durringham nuke. We’re not too sure what that means, but then I don’t think normal logic applies here.”

“Too right. I’ve got enough power in the electron matrices for a five-hour flight before I have to come back up and recharge. If you want that extending I could land on one of these peaks, they’re fairly isolated.”

“No. You keep airborne, Ashly. Frankly, if they’re not out of there in five hours I don’t think we’ll see them again. And I’ve already lost one crewman today.”

“You didn’t lose him, Joshua. Silly old fart. Now I’ve got to come back and wander through Aethra’s parkland talking to the trees. Hell, he’ll love that. Kill himself laughing I expect.”

“Thanks, Ashly.”

The pilot loaded a course into the computer, a patrol circuit along the length of the grey cloud section, staying at eight thousand metres. Thermals shooting up off the rocky slopes rocked the wings in agitated rhythms as the spaceplane flew overhead.

Jay thought it was a lightning bolt. Blackness suddenly and silently turned to bright scarlet. She sucked in a breath—it must have been frightfully close. But there was no thunderclap. Not at first.

The redness faded away. She risked opening her eyes. Everything seemed normal, except it was a lot lighter than it had been before. As if the sun was finally rising behind her back. Then the noise started, a dry roar which built and built. She heard some of the children start to whimper. The ground began to tremble, the gully wall vibrating her back. And the brightness behind her kept growing. A sheet of white light sprang across the top of the gully, throwing the floor into deep shadow. It began to tilt downwards, turning the opposite bank unbearably bright. Jay could just hear the lady beside her shouting what sounded like a prayer at the top of her voice. She closed her eyes again, little squeaks of fear escaping from her throat.

Lady Macbeth was passing over Amarisk’s western coast, a hundred kilometres north of Durringham, when Reza detonated the nuke. The sensors caught its initial flash, a concussion of photons turning the grey clouds momentarily translucent.

“Jesus Christ,” Joshua gasped. He datavised the flight computer for a secure communication channel to the spaceplane. “Ashly, did you see that?”

“I saw it, Joshua. The spaceplane sensors registered an emp pulse equivalent to about a kiloton blast.”

“Are your electronics OK?”

“Yes. Couple of processor drop-outs, but the back-ups are on line.”

“It’s them. It has to be.”

“Joshua!” Sarha called. “Look at the cloud.”

He accessed the sensor image again. A four hundred metre circle of the cloud looked as if it was on fire below the surface. As he watched it rose up into a lofty ignescent fleuron. The tip burst open. A ragged beam of rose-gold light shone through.

Lady Mac ’s flight computer datavised a priority signal from one of the communication satellites direct into Joshua’s neural nanonics.

“Joshua?” Kelly called. “This is Reza’s team calling Lady Mac . Joshua, are you up there?”

Tactical graphics immediately overlaid the optical sensor image, pinpointing her communications block to within fifteen centimetres. Close to the blast point, very close. “I’m here, Kelly.”

“Oh, Christ, Joshua! Help us. Now!”

“Spaceplane’s on its way. What’s your situation, have you got the children?”

“Yes, damn it. They’re with us, all of them. But we’re being chased to hell and back by the fucking Knights of the Round Table. You’ve got to get us out of here.”

Vast strips of rank grey cloud were peeling back from the centre of the blast. Joshua could see down onto the savannah. It was a poor angle, but a vivid amber fireball was ascending from the centre of a calcinated wasteland.

“Go,” Joshua datavised to Ashly. “Go go go.”

Reza stood on top of the gully, bracing himself against the baked wind driving out from the blast. A mushroom cloud was roiling upwards from the cemetery of the homestead, alive with gruesome internal energy surges. It had gouged a wide crater, uneven curving sides spouting runnels of capricious magma.

He brought a series of filter programs on-line, and scanned the savannah. A firestorm was raging for two kilometres around the crater. Pixels from the section of ground where the marching pikemen had been were amplified. He studied the resulting matrix of square lenses. There were no remnants, not even pyres; none of them had survived. He tracked back. Knights and horses had been hurled indiscriminately across the smouldering grass two and a half kilometres away. Encased in that metal armour human bodies should have first been triturated by the blast wave then fried by the infrared radiation.

He watched one silver figure struggle to its knees, then use a broadsword shoved into the ground to clamber to its feet.

Ye Gods, what will kill them?

A horse kicked its legs and rolled over, surging upwards. It trotted obediently over to its fallen rider. Slowly but surely the entire band was remounting.

Reza jumped back into the gully. Children were being packed back into the hovercraft.

“Joshua’s here,” Kelly yelled over the trumpeting wind. Her tear-stained face framed a radiant smile. “Lady Mac ’s in orbit. The spaceplane’s on its way. We’re safe, we’re out of here!”

“How long?”

“Ashly says about ten minutes.”