only got the one, and the others don’t need them.”
“Ah now, don’t you go worrying yourself over me, Miss Kelly,” he said. The jump suit he wore turned a rich indigo, then the fabric became stiffer. He was wearing a cagoule which was identical to the one in her hands, right down to the unobtrusive Collins logo on the left shoulder. “There, see? Old Shaun can look after himself.”
Kelly gave him a flustered nod (thankful her memory cell was still recording), and hurriedly struggled into her own cagoule as the warm drizzle thickened. “What about food?” she asked the Irishman as Theo goaded the hovercraft over the summit of the riverbank and started off towards the Tyrathca village.
“Don’t mind if I do, thanks. Nothing too rich mind, not for me. I likes me pleasures simple.”
She dug round in the bag and found a bar of tarrit-flavoured chocolate. None of the mercenaries had brought any food, with their metabolisms they could graze off the vegetation indefinitely, potent intestinal enzymes breaking up anything with proteins and hydrocarbons.
Shaun Wallace chewed in silence for a minute. “That’s nice,” he said, “reminds me a little of bilberries on a cold morning,” and he grinned.
Kelly found she was smiling back at him.
The hovercraft moved a lot slower over the land than on water. Cairnlike clusters of weather-smoothed stone and sudden pinched gullies made the pilots’ task a demanding one. The rain, which was now a solid downpour of heavy grey water, added to the difficulty.
Pat had sent Octan northward to avoid the worst of the deluge. Back out on the savannah it was still dry and sunny, a buffer zone between nature and supernature. Reza dispatched Fenton and Ryall to survey the ground ahead. Lightning began to spear down.
“I think I preferred the river,” Jalal said glumly.
“Ah, Mr. Jalal, buck up now, this is nothing for Lalonde,” Shaun Wallace said. “A little shower, that’s all. It was much worse than this before we returned from beyond.”
Jalal ignored the casual reference to the power of the possessed; Shaun Wallace, he thought, was playing a subtle war of nerves against them. Sowing the seeds of doubt and despondency.
“Hold it,” Reza datavised to Theo, and Sal Yong, who was piloting the second hovercraft. “Deflate the skirts.”
The hovercraft sank onto their hulls with flagging whines, crushing the sturdy grass tufts, settling at awkward angles. Rain had reduced visibility to less than twenty-five metres even with enhanced sight. Kelly could just make out Ryall up ahead. The hound was shifting about uneasily in front of a big sandy-brown boulder.
Reza took off his magazine belt, and left the TIP carbine he’d been carrying with it. He hopped over the gunwale and started to trudge towards the restive animal. Kelly had to wipe a slick film of water from her face. The rain was worming its way round her cagoule hood to run down her neck. She toyed with the idea of putting on her shell-helmet again—anything to stop this insidious clammy invasion.
Reza stopped five metres short of the brown lump, and slowly opened his arms, rain dripping from his grey-skinned fingers. He shouted something even Kelly’s studio-grade audio-discrimination program couldn’t catch above the wind and rain. She squinted, the rain suddenly chilling inside her T-shirt. The boulder rose up smoothly on four powerful legs. Kelly gasped. Her Confederation generalist didactic memory identified it immediately: a soldier- caste Tyrathca.
“Oh bugger,” Jalal muttered. “They’re clan creatures, it won’t be alone.” He started to scan around. It was hopeless in the rain, even infrared was washed out.
The soldier-caste Tyrathca was about as big as a horse, although the legs weren’t as long. Its head, too, was faintly equine, tilted back at a shallow angle at the end of a thick muscular neck. There were no visible ears, or nostrils; the mouth had a complex double-lip arrangement resembling overlapping clam shells. The sienna hide, which Kelly had thought solid like an exoskeleton, was actually scaled, with a short-cropped chestnut-brown mane running along its entire spine. Two arms extended from behind the base of its neck, ending in nine-fingered circular hands. A pair of slender antennae also protruded from its shoulder joints, swept back along the length of its body.
Although it had a strong animal appearance, it was holding a large very modern-looking rifle. A broad harnesslike belt hung round its neck, with grenades and power magazines clipped on.
It held out a processor block, and a slim AV projection pillar telescoped out. “Turn your vehicles around,” a synthetic voice clanged through the rain. “Humans are no longer permitted here.”
“We need somewhere to shelter for the night,” Reza replied. “We can’t go back north; you must have seen the red cloud.”
“No humans.”
“Why not? We must have somewhere to stay. Tell me, why?”
“Humans have become—” The block gave a melodic cheep. “No direct translation available; similarity to:
“I know about the disturbances in the human villages. I have been sent by the Lalonde Development Corporation to try and restore order.”
“Then do that. Go to your own race’s villages and bring order.”
“We have tried, but the situation was beyond our capability to resolve. There has been a major invasion of an unknown origin.” He just couldn’t bring himself to say possession. The processor block was quiet; he guessed he was talking to a breeder, the soldier caste were only marginally sentient—not that he’d like to go up against one. “I would like to discuss what can be done to protect you from further attack. My team are combat trained and well equipped, we should be able to augment whatever defences you have.”
“Acceptable. You may enter Coastuc-RT by yourself to view the situation. If you believe you are able to increase our defences your team will be allowed to enter and stay.”
“Reza,” Kelly datavised. “Ask if I can come with you, please.”
“I will need to bring two others to assess the area around Coastuc-RT with any degree of accuracy before nightfall,” he said out loud, then datavised: “That makes us quits now.”
“Absolutely,” she replied.
“Two only,” the synthetic voice agreed. “None may carry weapons. Our soldiers will provide protection.”
“As you wish.” He turned and walked back to the first hovercraft, feet sinking up to his ankles in slimy puddles. The processor block AV projection pillar began to emit the reverberative whistles and hoots which were the Tyrathcan speech. Answering calls shrilled through the rain, causing the mercenaries to up their sensor resolution to the maximum in a vain attempt to locate the other soldier castes.
“Ariadne, you come with me and Kelly,” Reza said. “I’ll need someone who can review the area properly. The rest of you wait here. We’ll try and get back before dusk. I’ll leave Fenton and Ryall on picket duty for you.”
Two seemingly tireless soldiers ran alongside the hovercraft all the way to the village, antennae whipping back and forth (they were tail-analogues, helping with balance, according to Kelly’s didactic memory). Kelly wasn’t sure whom they were supposed to be protecting. The guns still appeared incongruous; for creatures that had evolved during the pre-technology tribal era to fight the Tyrathcan version of rough and tumble against enemy tribe soldiers bows and arrows would be more suited.
When she reviewed the entire didactic memory she found that the breeders (the only fully sentient Tyrathca) secreted what amounted to chemical control programs in specialist teats. A breeder would think out a sequence of orders—which plants were edible, how to operate a specific power tool—that would be edited into a chain of molecules by the teat gland. Once instructions were loaded in the brain of a vassal-caste species (there were six types) they could be activated by a simple verbal command whenever required. The chemicals were also used to educate young breeders, making the process a natural equivalent to Adamist didactic imprints and Edenist educational affinity lessons.
The rain was easing off when the hovercraft cleared the crest above Coastuc-RT. Kelly looked down on a broad, gentle valley with extensively cultivated terraces on both sides. An area of nearly twenty square kilometres had been cleared of scrub and grass, rebuilt into irrigated ledges, and planted with young rygar bushes. Coastuc-RT itself sat on the floor of the valley, several hundred identical dark brown towers regimented in concentric rings around a central park space.
