Reality Dysfunction - Expansion

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 Terrance 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.”