with the vines that had surged out of the jungle to reclaim their native territory. Fruit was hanging in mouldy white clusters.
Yet inside the ring of fields, the grass around the houses was short and tidy, studded with what looked suspiciously like terrestrial daisies. When he had studied the sheriff’s satellite images on the flight from Tranquillity Reza had seen the way the village clearings were worn down and streaked with muddy runnels. Grass and weeds grew in patchy clumps. But this was an even, verdant carpet that matched Tranquillity’s parkland for vitality.
Stranger still were the houses.
Apart from three burnt-out ruins, the original wooden shacks had been left standing, their planks bleached a pale grey, shuttered windows open to the weather, bark slates slipping and curling, solar-cell panels flapping loosely. They were uninhabited, that was obvious at a glance. Mosses, tufts of grass, and green moulds were tucked into corners and flourishing promisingly. But jammed at random between the creaky cabins were the new structures. None of them was the same, with architectural styles ranging across centuries—a beautiful two-storey Tudor cottage, an Alpine lodge, a Californian millionaire’s cinderblock ranch, a circular black landcoral turret, a marble and silverglass pyramid, a marquee which resembled a cross between a Bedouin tent and a medieval European pavilion, complete with heraldic pennants fluttering on tall poles.
“Having some trouble with my blocks,” Ariadne said. “Several malfunctions. Guido and communications are right out.”
“If it begins to affect the weapons we’ll pull back,” Reza cautioned. “Keep running diagnostic programs.”
They cleared the fields and started to walk over the grass. Ahead of them a woman in a long blue polka-dot dress was pushing a waist-high gloss-black trolley that had a white parasol above it, and huge spindly wheels with chrome wire spokes. Whatever it was, it was impossibly primitive. Reza loaded the image’s pixel pattern into his neural nanonics with an order to run a comparison search program through his encyclopaedia. Three seconds later the program reported it was a European/North American style pram
He walked over to the woman, who was humming softly. She had a long face that was crudely painted in so much make-up it was almost a clown’s mask, with dark brown hair worn in a severe bun, encased by a net. She smiled up happily at the four members of the team, as though their weapons and equipment and boosted form were of no consequence.
That simpleton smile was the last straw for Reza, whose nerves were already stretched painfully thin. Either she was retarded, or this whole village was an incredibly warped trap. He activated his short-range precision sensors, and scanned her in both electromagnetic and magnetic spectrums, then linked the return into a fire-command protocol. Any change in her composition (such as an implant switching on or a neural nanonics transmission) and his forearm rifle would slam five EE rounds into her. The rest of his sensors were put into a track-while-scan mode, allowing his neural nanonics to keep tabs on the other villagers he could see walking about among the buildings behind her. He had to use four backup units, several principal sensors had packed up altogether. The overall resolution was way down on the clarity he was used to.
“What the fucking hell’s going on here?” he demanded.
“I have my baby again,” she said in a lilting tone. “Isn’t he gorgeous?”
“I asked you a question. And you will now answer.”
“Do as he says,” Kelly said hastily. “Please.”
The woman turned to her. “Don’t worry, my dear. You can’t hurt me. Not now, not any more. Would you like to see my baby? I thought I’d lost him. I lost so many back then. It was horrible, all those dead babies. The midwives tried to stop me seeing them; but I looked just the same. They were all perfect, so beautiful, my babies. An evil life it was.” She bent forwards over the pram and lifted out a squirming bundle draped in lacy white cloth. The baby cooed as she held it out.
“Where have you come from?” Reza asked. “Are you the sequestration program?”
“I have my life back. I have my baby back. That’s what I am.”
Ariadne stepped forward. “I’m going to get a sample from one of those buildings.”
“Right,” Reza said. “Sewell, go with her.”
The two of them walked round the woman and started off towards the nearest house, a whitewashed Spanish hacienda.
The baby let out a long gurgle, smiling blithely, feet kicking inside the wrap. “Isn’t he just adorable,” the woman said. She tickled his face with a finger.
“One more time,” Reza said. “What are you?”
“I am me. What else could I be?”
“And that?” He pointed to the cloud.
“That is part of us. Our will.”
“Us? Who is us?”
“Those who have returned.”
“Returned from where?”
She rocked the baby against her chest, not even looking up. “From hell.”
“She’s either nuts, or she’s lying,” Reza said.
“She’s been sequestrated,” Kelly said. “You won’t get anything out of her.”
“So sure of yourselves,” the woman said. She gave Kelly a sly look as she cuddled the baby. “So stupid. Your starships have been fighting among themselves. Did you know that?”
Reza’s neural nanonics’ optical-monitor program reported more people were appearing from the houses. “What do you know about it?”
“We know what we feel, the pain and the iron fire. Their souls weeping in the beyond.”
“Can we check?” Kelly asked urgently.
“Not from here.”
The woman laughed, a nervous cackle. “There aren’t many left to check, my dear. You won’t hear from them again. We’re taking this planet away, right away. Somewhere safe, where the ships can never come to find us. It will become paradise, you know. And my baby will be with me always.”
Reza regarded her with a chill of foreboding. “Yes, you are a part of this,” he said quietly. The yellow target graphics locked on to her torso. “What is happening here?”
“We are come, and we are not going to leave. Soon the whole world will be hiding from the sky. From
“There will be more of this red cloud?”
The woman slowly tilted her head back until she was staring straight up. Her mouth fell open as though in wonder. “I see no clouds.” She started to laugh wildly.
Reza saw Ariadne had reached the hacienda. The ranger scout was bending over, scraping at the wall with some kind of tool. Sewell was standing behind her, the long gaussrifle barrels he had plugged into his lower elbow sockets swivelling from side to side in an automatic sweep pattern.
“Ariadne,” Reza bellowed. “Get back here. We’re leaving now.”
The woman’s laughter chopped off. “No, you’re not.” She dropped the baby.
It was Reza’s infrared sensors which caught the change. A wave of heat emerged right across her body and started to flow like a film of liquid, rushing along her arms as she brought them up, becoming denser, hotter.
His left forearm’s gaussgun fired five electron explosive rounds just as a white light ignited around her hands. There was three metres between them. Impact velocity alone would have been enough to tear her body apart, with the EEs detonating as well there was nothing left for the last three rounds to hit.
Kelly’s armour hardened protectively as the blast wave slammed into her. Then she screamed as a jet of spumescent gore slopped across the front of the paralysed fabric.
“Sewell, zero the area!” Reza shouted.
The twin heavy-calibre gaussrifles the big combat-adept mercenary carried began to blaze, squirting out a barrage of EE projectiles. Emerald-green laser beams emerging from Reza and Ariadne snapped on and off, traversing the clearing in a strobe waltz as their lighter weapons picked off targets.
Kelly’s armour unlocked. She fell to her knees, centimetres from the baby. Her hand went out instinctively,
